Embracing Divine Revelation: Humility and God's Sovereignty

The only correct answer we can give to the question why you’re a believer and your friend isn’t is there but for the grace of God go I. We are not believers based on any merit of our own but purely by the grace of God. Those friends that you may be thinking of or relatives who are presently unbelievers, may still become believers before they pass away, and we hope that that will be the case. [00:04:58]

What we’re looking at here is in the very practical sense, the doctrine of election, that doctrine that produces so much controversy. Just this week, I got a lengthy letter from a dear brother from our Armenia who made his way to Australia and then to the United States and came to study the doctrines of grace and became convinced of the truth of the solas of the Reformation. [00:05:36]

In that hour Jesus rejoiced in the Spirit. In fact if you look at this brief passage you will see that it is Trinitarian through and through. It has reference to the Father, reference to the incarnate Son, and here reference to the Holy Spirit by which Jesus is moved on this occasion to a profound sense of joy. [00:08:17]

Thank you Father, Lord of heaven and earth that you have hidden these things from the wise and the prudent and revealed them to babes. Now, when I became a Christian, it took me five years kicking and screaming to embrace the doctrines of grace. I told you at other times that when I was in seminary, I had a little note that I had written and I put on my desk and it said, “You are required to believe to preach and to teach what the Bible says is true not what you want the Bible to say is true.” [00:11:02]

At first, I was halfway converted to the Reformed faith until I began, I read through the Scriptures to see the beauty and the sweetness of the tender mercy of God’s grace, which left me with the most penetrating theological question I’ve ever had to deal with and still have not been able to answer adequately which is— why me? Why I have received this wonderful gift of being able to know the greatness of our Lord Jesus Christ. [00:12:34]

Instead to our apparent astonishment, Jesus thanks the Father, not only for not opening the eyes of the unbeliever but He thanks the Father for concealing the truth from them. I’ve had people say, “Oh I believe in predestination but not double predestination.” I believe that, “Yes God does from all eternity elect some people unto salvation, but he leaves the rest to themselves and gives them the opportunity to come. [00:14:19]

What I’m saying here is God for His eternal purposes looks at a fallen humanity what Augustine called a mass of perdition, and He chooses to give justice to some and mercy to others. He chooses to give the grace of salvation to some and to withhold it from others; and of course the protest that you hear all the time about that is the exclamation, “That’s not fair!” But God is not an entitlement deity. [00:16:37]

He knows that no sinner deserves salvation. No sinner even deserves the opportunity for salvation. The only thing that we've deserved from God dear friends is eternal damnation because by nature, we are in revolt and in rebellion against his authority and his sovereignty. He owes us nothing. That’s the essence of grace is that it’s undeserved and that it is unmerited all together. [00:17:25]

If you see the loveliness of Jesus this morning, I ask you where did that sight come from? Like Paul on the road to Damascus, he saw the light not because he was looking for Christ. He was looking to destroy Christ. He had no interest in the kingdom of Christ other than to extinguish it, but God in his sovereign mercy threw him to the ground and revealed to him who Jesus is. [00:19:27]

Here’s one I want us to get this morning if you don’t get anything else. Jesus praised God and thanked God not only for revealing it to some but for concealing it from others. How could he do that? Other than the incarnate Son of God’s sheer delight in the perfection of His Father and of his Father’s plan for which the second person in the trinity and the third were in full agreement with the Father from all eternity and even in His incarnation and witnessing and feeling and receiving the fury of the rejection of people against him even then Jesus knew that the Father’s will was being accomplished and He could delight in it. [00:20:56]

When we asked the question of the Scriptures why is it that God chooses to save some but not all, the answer that the scripture gives is for the good pleasure of His will. Now I believe that every word of the sacred Scripture is inspired by the Holy Ghost. I also know that sometimes the Holy Ghost has to condescend to our weakness of understating and stoop to our frailty of mind and sometimes even give Himself for our benefit over to redundancy. [00:24:42]

Then he turned to his disciples and said privately, “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that you see. Do you realize how blessed you are John, Peter, James, Thaddeus? Let me tell you how blessed you are. That prophets and kings in the Old Testament desired to see what you see and they have not seen it and to hear what you hear and haven’t heard it.” [00:28:32]