ELECTION EXPLAINED-- MERCY VS. JUSTICE


Probably the strongest statement that we find anywhere in the Scriptures that deals directly with the question of predestination is found in the ninth chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans. In that particular text he deals with the election of Jacob rather than Esau, and not only does this text speak heavily to the matter of predestination in general, but it also has significance for the controversial question  of whether or not predestination is double. So let's look at the ninth chapter of Romans and give attention to what the Apostle says in it.

 I will begin in verse 9 of chapter 9.

"For this is the word of promise: 'At this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son.' And not only this, but there was Rebecca also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac; for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, in order that God's purpose according to His choice might stand, not because of works, but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, 'The older will serve the younger.' Just as it is written, 'Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.'" Now here when Paul seeks to illustrate his understanding of divine election, he uses for purposes of illustration an example of two men. And I think that it's significant that the two that He chooses are brothers, and not only are they brothers, but they are twin brothers. That is they have the same family, the same background, the same geographical location. Everything that could possibly be the same is the same. They are in fact, "womb mates.”

 And in his consideration of these two men, he labors the point that one is preferred over the other before either is born. Now that statement, "before they were born," raises the question of God's foreknowledge. The most popular view of predestination that rejects the Augustinian view is that view we call the foreknowledge view of election,

which basic thesis is this: that predestination simply means that God, from all eternity looks down through time and knows in advance what people will do, and on the basis of that foreknowledge, then chooses them. Now we notice that chapter nine of Romans speaks very sharply to this question. We read that, "For though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad" Let's just look at that phrase. Paul does not say here that they - that God had not known what they were going to do, or that He had known what they were going to do. He simply declares that the twins hadn't been born yet, and they hadn't done anything. So all the text explicitly teaches is that God's choice of Jacob over Esau was made before they were born.

 Now the Foreknowledge view would agree that God's predestinating choice is done at the foundation of the earth before anybody's born. Everybody agrees that predestination is accomplished in the mind of God before people are born, but the Foreknowledge view says that the choice is made before people are born but in light of what God knows they will do after they are born. Now we have silence in this passage with respect to that question specifically, but if ever in biblical content there was an awkward silence, here it is. What I'm getting at is this: That if the Apostle had any desire to make clear that the electing, predestinating actions of God are done with a view to the future actions of man, this would have been the place to say it. In other words, if the biblical view is what the foreknowledge view seeks to hold, namely that God always chooses in light of His knowledge of future decisions, first of all, why doesn't the Bible ever say that? It never says it. And if it ever had the opportunity to say it, here it is. But not only is it not said here, but Paul takes the time to say that though the choice was made before they were born, before they had done any good or evil, we have to ask the question why does he include that? If his purpose was to communicate a foreknowledge view of election, the addition of these words would certainly confuse the people of God, wouldn't it?

But let's go on further. "Though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad" Now what's Paul's concern here? "In order that God's purpose according to His choice might stand." The emphasis again in the passage is on God's purpose, and what Paul is saying is that the reason why the decision is made before they're born, before they've done anything good or evil, is so that it's God's purpose that will stand. Do you see that the flavor of this passage is totally opposed to the concept of a foreknowledge view of predestination? Do you see that? I mean why, what other reason could we give for the Apostle's emphasizing this fact that they had not done any good or evil? Not even had they not done it in space and time, but by implication, even in the mind of God.

That is, from God's perspective, there is no good or evil that is taken into consideration here because the conclusion is, the reason why he states that, the reason that the Apostle gives for having said it this way, is that the purpose of God might stand according to His choice, not because of works, but because of Him who calls.

The foreknowledge view says that God looks down into the future and He sees that some people will make the correct choice and others will make the incorrect choice. And what the foreknowledge view suffers from is that election in that view is based upon a good work, believing this is the work of God, to believe in the one whom He has sent. The supreme good work is to place one's trust in Jesus Christ, in one sense of considering the biblical concept of the good work. But Paul is saying here that it is clearly not because of human works, but because of Him who calls.

The Arminian view - it has very, various styles, and shapes, and forms - bottom line makes the final decision for our salvation rest upon a human choice, not upon a divine action. And I think Paul is annihilating that position here, as strongly as he could possibly do it, by emphasizing the fact that it is not because of works, but because of the one who calls. That the accent and the credit for your redemption is to be given to God. To God alone is the glory.

Now in order that this purpose might stand, and that it not be because of works but because of Him who calls, it was said to her, "The older will serve the younger." That is, the reason why God made this choice was to demonstrate the supremacy of Him and His purpose.

"As it is written, 'Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.'" I'll come back to that phrase in a moment because I know that that provokes all kinds of problems with the idea of hatred. But look at verse 14. Verse 14 is a rhetorical question. "What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there?" How does Paul answer his own question? Does he simply say, "No, there's no injustice with God"? No, he uses the most powerful form of emphasis that he can. Some translator’s read, "May it never be!" or other ones, "God forbid!" The answer to his question - does this indicate injustice in God - the answer to the question is, absolutely not! That's unthinkable.

 Now I want to speculate for a second, and I want to ask you to think about this. Why do you suppose the Apostle asks this rhetorical question? Paul's a teacher, and when teachers teach, they know going into their lessons, that sometimes there will be difficulty with the students understanding what the teacher is communicating. A good teacher anticipates his opposition and where the problems will arise. Now Paul is obviously here as a teacher anticipating a protest from his hearers, when he says, "What shall we say then?" And what particular thing does he expect people to say when they hear this? "It's not fair!" There's not righteousness - is there injustice in God?

Now my question is why does he anticipate that objection? Well, there are two possible reasons really. He could be anticipating this objection because he may be thinking, "There may actually be some people listening to me, or reading this letter, who are muddleheaded enough to be of an Augustinian persuasion and find in my words an Augustinian view of election, which would obviously be unjust, and so all I have to do to keep that from ever happening is to say, 'Is there injustice in God? Well, obviously not!' And so much then for Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and Luther and so on." Maybe that's what he's anticipating. Or maybe Paul himself is Augustinian and he's had experience with teaching the doctrine of predestination, where every time the subject is mentioned, the initial response of people is, "That's not fair!" I have a sneaking suspicion that that is the reason why the Apostle raises this rhetorical question, because the thing I want you to understand is that nobody ever raises that question about the Arminian view.

In fact, the Arminian view is designed in such a way that that isn't a problem. I take comfort in the fact that the same questions that are raised about my view of predestination are the ones that the Apostle Paul had to deal with. "Is there unrighteousness in God?" Because on the surface, it sounds like it. When you talk about a divine sovereign choice before anybody has done good or evil, without a view into their future actions, that strictly according the sovereign purpose of God, that God's purposes may be seen of grace, not of human works, then the obvious question we're going to ask is, "Well how can that be fair?"

Well Paul says, "Is there unrighteousness in God?" And he answers his own question with an emphatic, "No!

 May it never be! For He says to Moses, 'I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion upon whom I will have compassion.'" Again, if I can speculate, if I were the Apostle, and I were teaching a foreknowledge view of election, and I had these objections to deal with, what would I fall back on? If I were going to pull the plug once and for all, of any charge of God's being unfair, I would say, "Well, wait a minute. God's not unfair. God's not unjust because even though this decision is made before anyone's done any good or evil, it's with a view to their future choices, so the bed you make is the bed you sleep in." And that would pull the plug forever.

But He doesn't do that. Instead, he falls back on what? On the divine prerogative to exercise mercy upon whom He will exercise mercy. The whole point of the passage is that some people receive a measure of mercy that others do not. Again, no one receives injustice at the hands of God. Esau is not selected as an object of divine mercy, but that is not an injustice against Esau, because Esau, even before he is born, is known by God as a fallen person because when God does do His electing, He always does it in light of the fall.

God only chooses fallen sinners for salvation. All of God's choices about salvation presuppose the need for salvation;otherwise there'd never be any such thing as election. It would be a waste of time for God to elect unto salvation people who don't need salvation, and so the whole process of election is with a view to a fallen, lost human race. And God considers the whole world, He knows that the whole world is fallen, and He knows that if He just gave justice, what would happen?

If God only exercised justice to a fallen race, everyone would perish. But God chooses to grant mercy to some.Jacob receives mercy. Esau receives justice.Now is there anything wrong with that? Well, we say it's not fair. What we mean by that is it's not equal, and what lurks in our minds is this problem: Well, if God is going to be gracious - If we have two men who are judged guilty and they're under the sentence of death - and God is gracious to this one, shouldn't He also be gracious to the other one? Well, it certainly isn't equal. But again, this person receives grace; this person receives justice. He has nothing of which he has any right to complain. There's nothing unjust about it. And God reminds us, again and again, that it is His right to grant His mercy upon whom He will grant His mercy. And if He grants mercy to one, He is not obligated to give it to the other. Again, if we think that God is ever obligated to be merciful, what does that mean? We're not thinking about mercy anymore because mercy by definition is not obligated. Mercy is something that God does voluntarily. He's not bound to do it. He doesn't have to do it. He's not required to do it. He does it out of the sheer goodness of His heart.  

And we can never say to a merciful God - and this is the thing that scares me. I hope you will never say to a merciful God, "God, you are not merciful enough."

That is blasphemous, to charge God with not being merciful enough because that charge implies that there is sin in God, that God has not done what He should have done - He should have been more merciful. And who are you to say to your Creator, by whose mercy you draw every breath that you breathe, that He has been lacking in mercy.

"For He says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.'" Now the coup de grace, the verse that I think should, in all honesty, end Arminianism forever.

"So then" Here's the conclusion. "It does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but upon God who shows mercy." Now the Arminian view does not say that it depends all on man and not on God, but the Arminian view says that without God's mercy, there'd be no salvation. That's true. But it also depends on our choice.

It depends both on God's grace and upon our choice, that we must exercise our wills apart from divine activity, in order to be saved. So the election depends upon human choices in the foreknowledge view. And Paul says, "No it doesn't." How could he say it any more clearly? This is not based upon the one who wills or upon the one who runs, but upon God. There's where the dependency is. Who has the mercy? Then he goes on to say, "For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, 'For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.' So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires."

Now that is a hard saying. Let's take a look at that for a moment. I mentioned earlier this problem of, "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated." What does it mean that God hates Esau? When we use the English term "hate," we think of an attitude that comes from a posture of malice, and we are forbidden to hate people. We are called to love even our enemies. But is there any way that the Bible uses the term "hatred" that does not carry that sinister connotation to it? Well, yes. There's the hatred of sin. But remember David, in the Old Testament, when he says,

"I hate my enemies with a perfect hatred?"

There is such a thing as a holy hatred. A hatred of wickedness, yes, but it doesn't just say here - you know, we have that thing "Hate the sin but not the sinner?" But God doesn't say here, "Jacob have I loved, Esau's sin have I hated." It's, "Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated." Here you have antithetical parallelism going on in a Hebrew mode.

And all that "hatred" means in this passage is the absence of this special divine favor, where God is giving a special divine favor, a gracious action, a loving action to one, He withholds from the other. It does not mean that God has these terrible inward feelings of malice toward Esau. But God does withhold this particular divine favor from Esau.

Jacob is given a gift that Esau does not receive. That's all the Jew means by that. But this raises the question of whether or not predestination is double.

 I've heard many, many people say, "I believe in predestination, but I can't stand double predestination!" There are two different views of double predestination that have been presented throughout church history and have been vying for acceptance. The first is the view that we will call "equal ultimacy," or sometimes called the "symmetrical" view of predestination, meaning that predestination has two sides to it: election and reprobation, salvation and damnation.

And that the way that God works on both sides is in a symmetrical way, that God works in the life of Jacob and He works in the life of Esau. Now, we also speak in terms of what we call "positive positive" decrees. Now the positive positive schema looks like this: It would say, that in the case of the elect, God so predestines certain people, like Jacob, to be saved, that God ensures their salvation by unilaterally intruding into their lives and creating faith in their hearts; and in the case of the reprobate, God also so predestines their damnation that He intrudes into their lives by creating evil or unbelief in their hearts. So that there's a positive action in the lives of both people, creating faith in the life of one man and unbelief in the heart of the other. See what we mean now by "symmetrical" view?

That view has been overwhelmingly rejected by Augustinians and Calvinists. That is not the Augustinian view.

The Augustinian view is that predestination is certainly double because not everybody is saved, that there are two sides to it. Some people are elect and some are not. So, we have two sides of the coin, and we have to deal with both sides of the problem. However, the schema is "positive negative." Now what that means is that in the case of the elect, God does in fact intrude into their lives and sovereignly creates faith in their hearts. But in the case of the rest of mankind, He lets them to themselves. He does not come in and create evil in their hearts, or create unbelief in their hearts, He passes over them, letting them to themselves, so that God's activity here is negative, or passive, rather than active. Do you see the difference? In this one, in the case of the reprobate, the reprobate do what they want to do on their own steam.

God is not creating fresh evil in their hearts, or anything like that. God is not coercing them to damnation. He is simply passing them over, leaving them to their own devices. But the immediate question that comes up here, is "Well then why does Paul say here in Romans 9 that God gives mercy to some and to others He hardens?" And the classical example of God hardening is the hardening of Pharaoh's heart in the Old Testament. But even when we speak of hardening, we have to distinguish between active hardening and passive hardening, or what we would call direct hardening or indirect hardening.

There are two ways that God can harden the heart of Pharaoh. One is, that He could come down, intrude into Pharaoh's life,and create evil in the heart of Pharaoh. In order for God to accomplish His purposes He could make Pharaoh sin. But if He does that, then what? How could God, if He's just and righteous, force Pharaoh to sin and then punish him for that sin? That would make God the author of sin, which is an absolute no-no, biblically. But there's another way Pharaoh could have his heart hardened. Remember that Pharaoh is a sinner, and all of us are sinners. But all of us have our sin to some degree checked and restrained by certain opposition around us that keeps us from being utterly depraved. When men achieve levels of power where they become outside the bounds of normal restraints, their ability to sin freely increases. I mean, the only thing that's keeping Pharaoh from being utterly wicked is the restraining power of God. It certainly wasn't the government of Egypt that was keeping him in check. Only God's restraints were keeping Pharaoh from being more wicked than he actually was. If God wants to harden Pharaoh's heart, does God have to create fresh evil there? All He has to do is remove His hands and give Pharaoh all the space he needs. And that's how Pharaoh's heart is hardened, which is itself an act of divine judgment - a just act of divine judgment upon him. And the gospel does the same thing in the lives of the reprobate.

The more people hear the gospel and freely reject it, the more their hearts become hardened. And so that you see that in this drama, Pharaoh hardens his own heart. All God does is remove the restraints, and so Pharaoh is responsible for the hardening of his heart. And so, again we see that in this scheme, in the concept of election, all men are fallen,all men are wicked. God gives mercy to some, as in the case of Jacob, and the others He leaves to themselves. They receive justice.