Seeking a Revival Culture. Allen M. Baker
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Mary Stuart set foot on Scottish soil in August 1561 to become the Queen of Scotland. She was a young, beautiful, and seductive woman who was accustomed to getting her way. She was incensed that Scotland had forsaken Roman Catholicism for the Reformation led by John Knox. Her first order of business, on the first Sunday she was in Edinburgh, was to have the Mass at Holyrood Castle. Just up the street at the St. Giles Presbyterian Church, Knox railed against her in his sermon, calling her a whore and warning of the catastrophe of going back to Roman Catholicism. The Reformation by 1561 was firmly entrenched in Scotland, and the people were enjoying their liberty and increased economic empowerment. Queen Mary knew, in order to win back Scotland to her cause, she must neutralize Knox.9 She summoned him to her castle and sought to flatter him. Many a man had wilted under her charm, but Knox was an old man by this time, and had suffered far too much to be seduced by her. He had spent nineteen months as a galley slave on a French ship in his mid forties. He stood resolute against her flattery, and when that did not work she sought to intimidate him. Bad idea! Knox was bold beyond comprehension, and there was no way he would be intimidated by any human being. If Knox had given in to her seduction, then the Reformation would have been lost to Scotland. Hundreds would have died, and the Scottish Enlightenment that brought so much to our modern world would have stalled and finally died.10
What, you may ask, has this history to do with the doctrine of election? It illustrates a powerful application of the doctrine. First, what does Paul mean, “just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world”? Here and also in Deuteronomy 7 and 10, John 6, and Romans 8 and 9 we are told that the sovereign God of grace, for His own praise and glory and not for anything He finds in us, chose a specific number of people out of all those in the world to be His. Furthermore, He did this before time, in eternity past. The Greek word translated “chosen” literally means called out of. This election is unconditional, meaning God did not look down the corridors of time to see if we would choose Him or if we would be faithful to Him. He chose us not based at all on anything we could offer Him. We are told on three occasions in Ephesians 1:4–14 that God’s mighty work of election, predestination, adoption, and redemption is to the praise of the glory of His grace, according to the kind intention of His will.
Here’s a practical application you can make to the doctrine of election—why are you a Christian? Why are your neighbors, your friends, or other family members not Christians while you are? Is it because you are smarter than they, more inclined toward faith, more moral? Not hardly. You are a Christian simply because God chose you to be one. He decided to bestow mercy upon you in eternity past. To put it another way, God in His foreknowledge has known you and loved you as long as He has existed, forever. Here’s another application, drawn from my story of Knox and Queen Mary. I often tell the people in our church that due to these great doctrines of grace—the fact that God chose you in Christ, that He predestined you, that He adopted you into His family, that the Lord Jesus shed His blood for you—you can and should learn to argue from the greater down to the lesser. In other words, if God has done this mighty work in you, and if this is the most important issue in your life (and surely it is), then does it not naturally follow that God can and will take care of your lesser needs?
Perhaps the most vital and important reason that John Knox could be so bold, and so courageous was that he knew he belonged to Christ, that God had chosen him, that God had a purpose for his life, and that no matter what happened to him, he knew Christ was his and he was Christ’s. When you know the love of the Father, when you know He has always loved you, when you know that He is sovereign in absolutely everything, that nothing escapes His notice, that He foreordains whatsoever comes to pass, and that no one can thwart His plans, then you can and should live with absolute calmness and peace: fearing no one, and falling to no one’s intimidation or flattery. Knox did. By God’s grace he cultivated a revival culture in Scotland, and we can too in our day. Do you believe this? Are you ready to seek God for it? This is the revival life the western church so desperately needs.
9. John Knox, The Reformation in Scotland, 271.
10. For a fascinating study you may wish to read How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman.
Predestination
He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will.
Ephesians 1:5
James Arminius studied in Geneva under John Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza, and returned to his native Holland in 1581. The Belgic Confession, a confession of faith based on the Reformation doctrines then sweeping through Europe, was written in 1561 by Reformers in Belgium. It was quickly embraced by people in the Netherlands. It was written amidst atrocities committed by King Phillip II of Spain when anywhere from two thousand to one hundred thousand (depending on who one reads) were murdered. In 1581 the Reformed Church in the Netherlands embraced the Heidelberg Catechism, the most devotional of all the Reformed confessions of faith. It is in this context that Arminius was teaching and preaching, and many were suspect of his doctrine. When he was interviewed in 1601 to become a professor he was directly asked if his doctrine was consistent with the Belgic Confession and Heidelberg Catechism. He concurred, saying that he had not and would not teach anything contrary to both. Publicly he honored his word, but privately he was teaching a number of young men spurious doctrine. By 1609 the Reformed Church in the Netherlands brought charges against Arminius, but before he could be brought to trial, he died, probably of tuberculosis. A group of his disciples, called Remonstrants, took up his cause, and focused on five areas of disagreement. They denied (1) unconditional election, (2) the doctrine of original sin and consequent inability to choose to believe in Christ, (3) the atonement of Christ applied to the elect only, (4) the wooing of the Holy Spirit drawing people to Christ, and (5) the eternal security of the true believer. In 1619 a Synod in Dordrecht was called, summoning Reformed theologians from all over Europe to decide the case of the Remonstrants. They came down on the side of heresy. We have had debate between Calvinism and Arminianism ever since.11
What does this controversy have to do with you and the doctrine of predestination? Paul builds on his statement in Ephesians 1:4 where he says that we were chosen by God before the foundation of the world. The ground of our election is the predestinating work of God, the foreordination of all things, meaning that God developed an overarching plan in eternity past. The center of that plan is the salvation of a specific number of people. He predestined the elect to adoption as His own sons and daughters. The idea of adoption as we know it today (that adopted children have the same rights, privileges, and obligations as natural children) was a concept foreign to the Hebrew mind of Paul’s day. However it was quite common in the Roman world. Thus a true believer in Jesus Christ, as an adopted son or daughter of God, has an inheritance waiting for him in heaven that is far more glorious in its scope and magnitude than we can fathom.
Theologians have long debated how this doctrine plays itself out in people. What follows is not referring to chronology but more to the logic of order, how salvation works itself out in the mind of God. Arminianism believes in creation, and a partial fall (man is able to believe on Christ), but denies election, saying that people make a decision on their own free will to believe on Christ. Amyraldus, a Dutch theologian of the late seventeenth century, who believed in election, could not get past various passages that seem to teach that Jesus died for everyone. Consequently Amyraldus gave rise to what some call four point Calvinism. He denied particular redemption, that Jesus died only for the elect. The problem with Amyraldianism is that it pits the persons of the Godhead against each other—the Father chose a specific number of people, but Jesus died for everyone. Then there is Infralapsarianism (infra means after and lapse means fall, after the fall) that teaches creation, fall into sin, election, and then people becoming Christians at a specific time and place through the work of the Holy Spirit. The problem with this view is that it cannot explain fallen angels, like Lucifer, who must have