2Pe 1:21 For no prophecy was ever produced by the will
of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
One thing I have learned in 37 years of preparing Bible
lessons and sermons is that most doctrines relate in some way to the attributes
of God. If we get the doctrines of the
person and nature of God wrongly we many times will develop shortcomings in
other areas of the Bible. Most notably
when we see the Lord as anything other than absolutely sovereign in all things or
that he hasn’t ordained every detail of history to work out exactly as he has
determined before the world began. If instead one assumes that man or Satan or
nature can act independently of his decrees so that at times things happen that
he does not want to happen but was unable to control, we find ourselves unable
to deal biblically with his providence because we don’t see trials as
providence but bad things overcoming the providence of a loving but weak God.
When we deny God’s sovereignty in every detail we also set
ourselves up for weakness in another area; the infallible, inspiration of the
Bible. To be fair there are plenty of
people who deny God is sovereign in all things that do believe that the Bible
is the infallible Word of God, but their doctrine of God makes them inconsistent. Many more, because they don’t really believe God
can do what the Bible says he can do assume that the Bible is merely a few men’s
attempt to write down some things they experienced but we should not think that
God actually led them to write down only what he wanted them to, no more and no
less. This second group is consistent,
the first group is not. Let me try to
explain.
While the Calvinist states that all men are dependent on the
Lord initiating and effectually calling, saving and justifying them and that
left to their own devises no man can be saved, the Arminian argues that all men
have a morally free will that can tell God no or choose to believe but that it
is the individual and not God that makes the final determination. This is an old debate and I will not address
it in this article but let me say that this position causes another problem.
If man can resist the sovereign leading of God then who is
to say that the writers of the Bible didn’t add a few of their own thoughts
while writing their books? If they didn’t
add words how do we know that they didn’t delete a few ideas that they didn’t
like? Once you take a position that God
cannot force anyone to do his will, even by making him willing, you undermine
the infallible, inspiration of the entire Bible. You can’t have it both ways; we can resist
the Holy Spirit’s sovereign role in saving the elect one moment but that God
can absolutely make sure we do just what he wants us to do the next moment.
It is a little like the atheist who wants to live with a
moral worldview that he owes to the God of the Bible while he denies the very
God who has given us our sense of morality.
So the Arminian wants to believe that God is sovereign to move men to
write down his infallible words and make it to Heaven someday but refuses to
believe that he is powerful enough to overrule the affairs of men and
angels. But the fact of the matter is
that the only way God can know how the history of man was going to end
thousands of years into the future is if he is in total control of every
detail, at all times and in all things.
This is the God we worship when we gather at church and I don’t think
worship that robs him of his power and glory is worship worthy of our Lord.
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