faith for faith

I am not a worrier. When it comes to sinful deficiencies, an anxious heart is not one of my natural vices. I do not claim this boastfully, for I know that my lack an anxiety comes more from my natural disposition toward apathy than it does from my faith in God. For in my life thus far, I have lived my life with little care about the particulars of my future and have self-righteously chalked my lack of planning to my trust in the sovereignty of God. And while it is indeed true that “The heart of a man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps” (Prov. 16:9), God, in a demonstration of the greatness of his power, has chosen to allow men to plan their steps and yet sovereignly ordains and orchestrates all things pertaining to humanity through the wills of men.

Yet the Scripture’s unabashed proclamation of God’s meticulous sovereignty and his great power are never presented as justification for a “que sera, sera” attitude toward life. Proverbs 16 exists as a demonstration of this, holding together that which cannot be comprehended by the human mind, namely that a godly man plans and commits his steps to the Lord, yet the Lord has already established his steps. The apostle Paul puts it this way: “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12, 13). Therefore we are to work, for God is working in us.

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Before I begin, allow me to preface this post by stating that I believe quite wholeheartedly that all things, both good and evil, minute and grand, work together for good for those who love God, which is the riches of his glory accomplished for them (cf. Rm. 8:28; 9:23). Therefore, in spite of our constant failings and in spite of our doctrinal fallacies, God will be glorified, and he will be glorified to the high degree which he has decreed. For whether or not we attribute credit to God appropriately with our petty minds on the matter of our salvation and its accomplishment, God will be glorified fully, be it through our unrighteousness which serves to show his righteousness (cf. Rm. 3:6) or through our obedience which demonstrates our being driven by his Spirit (cf. Rm. 8:13,14).

In spite of the great certainty with which we can be assured that God’s ultimate manifestation of his glory will be accomplished without regard to the fickleness of our wills, we are nevertheless clearly commanded to be holy as he is holy, to be transformed by the renewal of our minds, and to not be carried away by the doctrines of men (cf.1Pt. 1:16; Rm. 12:2; Eph. 4:14). In other words, we are never given warrant to be content in our ill-founded doctrines or in our disobedience knowing that God is and will be glorified in our mishaps. Quite the contrary, we are encouraged not to think as those fools who slanderously charged Paul with “doing evil that good may come” (Rm. 3:8), but we are rather charged to patiently seek for glory and honor and immortality or be met with the full wrath and fury of God (cf. Rm. 2:7,8).

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So to keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited. Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:7-9).

When Haley and I were on our honeymoon in St. Lucia, we decided to try out a free snorkeling trip. Whilst we were snorkeling, I decided (for some reason) to touch a rock that was underwater in the reef, and I found myself reflexively withdrawing my hand just as quickly as I had placed it upon the rock. I swam to the surface, looked at my left hand, and saw that one of my fingers was bleeding and had on it what appeared to be three black specks. Those specks were in fact imbedded splinters from whatever was on the rock that I touched. Being away from home and away from my “home surgery kit,” I had to deal with the splinters for the rest of our honeymoon, and they were quite painful.

After getting back to the States, one of the first things that I did when I got home was attempt to remove the splinters from my aching finger. I successfully removed the first two, pulling out the entire splinter with a pin, a knife, and a set a tweezers. The last splinter proved to be more difficult, and it broke while I was trying to remove it. The small piece that remained in my finger imbedded itself further and finally proved itself impossible to remove. Two years later and after several bloody attempts to remove it, my honeymoon splinter is still with me. Since then the constant pain has subsided, and most times I forget that it is there. But every so often, I will grip something in particular way or push against something at the just the right angle, and I will feel an unbearably sharp pain travel from the tip of that finger and up my left arm, reminding me that my splinter friend is still with me after all this time.

For this reason, when I read Paul’s account of his thorn in his flesh in 2 Corinthians 12, I, either rightly or wrongly, think it comparable with the splinter in my own finger. In light of the context and my experience, I do not think Paul’s thorn was something that struck him with pain constantly, but that it was something that struck him with pain when he needed it. According to the text, the thorn was given to him solely to prevent him from becoming proud and conceited, and I can imagine Paul finding himself in torment, seemingly out of the blue, as with my splinter, at precisely the time that he thought more highly of himself than he ought to have had.

This symbolic thorn in Paul’s flesh is not reserved to Paul’s experience alone, for I believe that many Christians are given thorns like Paul’s to humble them. From the context, I believe Paul’s thorn was a particular, nagging sin that Paul could not completely overcome, and this I believe because of God’s response to Paul’s petition to remove it: “My grace is sufficient for you.” God’s grace was sufficient for Paul’s thorn. Then I asked myself this question, “What is the best way to humble a man who thinks himself righteous and holy on his own accord?” The answer: Let him fall into the sin that he believes that he has conquered.

Have you not found this to be the case in your own life? You find that you are living righteously before God and are loving him and obeying his commandments, and then, all of sudden and out of nowhere, your focus shifts off of God and his glory to you and your glory. You think to yourself that you have somehow arrived spiritually, that you get what others do not, and then a small, pride-filled grin smirks across the side of your face. And just as quickly as you found yourself boasting in yourself, you find yourself sinning in a way that did not even occur to you prior to your boasting. You immediately realize the folly of your thinking and remember quite clearly that without God you are nothing.

For this reason, the thorns of sin that torment us throughout our lives are sweet Providences in disguise. Yes, they cause us to groan for the redemption of our bodies and to yearn for that day when the jewels of sin will appear to be dung in the sight of God, but they are at present working together for God’s glory and our good. We, like Paul, will pray in our ignorance and weakness that these things would be removed from us, and the Spirit will be there interceding for us with inexpressible groanings according to perfect will of our Father (cf. Romans 8:26, 27). Rest well, child of God, knowing that God will discipline you and that his grace is more than sufficient to cover your failings.

And if my feet would go astray,
They cannot, for I know
That Jesus guides my falt’ring steps,
As joyfully I go (E. S. Hall, His Love Can Never Fail).

When we spoke yesterday on the fixed will of the unregenerate, we spoke nothing on their destination. This is partly due to the fact that their destination will be addressed in detail in Romans 9, and also it is assumed to be common knowledge that the wages of sin is death and this death is the final destination of unregenerate. The destination of the wicked could be much more complicated than this (if you wished to engage in the infralapsarian / supralapsarian debate), but it needs not be. Regardless of the timing of God’s decree of their damnation, the wicked will be judged for their deeds and condemned justly.

When we speak of the regenerate, however, we cannot speak of their destination apart from God’s decree, for we find that the two are intimately bound in Scripture. We find this truth most explicitly in the word predestine–a word that attempts to capture both the beginning and end of time in its parts. And when we speak of the predestination of the saints, there is no debate on its timing (as there is in the unregenerate), for Scripture makes it clear that God chose the saints in him before he created the world (cf. Eph. 1:4).

Also, when we speak of the predestination of the regenerate, we cannot speak of it rightly apart from the love of God. In the great chain of the sovereign works of God in the regenerate in Romans 8:29, 30, we see this at the beginning, “Those whom he foreknew, he predestined.” This foreknowledge of which the Apostle speaks is simply put, to know beforehand. This knowledge is not some mental assent to a creature’s eventual existence nor is it some feigned Arminian notion of God’s seeing a person’s faith before time began, but it is God’s choosing to set his love upon particular persons before the foundation of the world. This knowing is the same act of knowing that is seen in God’s declaration to Israel in Amos 3:2, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth.” This is made more clear in the declaration of Ephesians 1:5: “In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.” In other words, the saint’s existence is preceded by the love of God and his destination is in the love of God.

Not only is the saint preceded and ended by the love of God, his present life is commanded by the love of God. This portion of the saint’s life brings us back to our topic of yesterday, namely the bondage of the human will. Just as the wills of the wicked are bound to evil deeds and thus their souls to destruction, the wills of the saints are bound to righteousness and their souls to life. And though Scripture is full of exhortations to the Christian to live according the Spirit, to live not according to flesh, to mortify the deeds of the body, etc., these exhortations do not negate the sovereign and providential hand of God in the life of the saint. The Apostle reveals this truth in Philippians 2:12, writing, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. The exhortation to work out one’s salvation or to do good deeds is never apart from the sovereign working of God in the saint.

The objections to this doctrine (as are most objections to orthodoxy) are derived from the experiences of certain individuals rather than from Scripture. The chief objection is found in the so-called “fleshly” or “carnal Christian.” These carnal Christians are those who have made professions of faith in the past, or, more likely, grew up in the Church, and now live lives that make no demonstration of the power of the Spirit. They might have lives that are characterized by drunkenness, sexual immorality, or even apathy to the Gospel, but these are saved by some concocted doctrine of eternal security. Those who profess such a doctrine pay no heed to the Apostle’s warning in Romans 8, “If you live according to the flesh you will die,” or to the declaration of James in his letter, “Faith without works is dead.” Those who believe in the existence of carnal Christians make light of the transformation wrought by God in the regenerate and of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Righteousness in the Christian life to them is a free will choice, just as their belief in the Gospel was, which explains its lack of Power.

However, the necessity of righteousness in the life of the saint is such that the Apostle writes in Romans 6:18, “Having been set free from sin, you are now slaves of righteousness.” He writes this reluctantly (as seen in the phrase “I am speaking in human terms” of v. 6:19) for he knows that he will be writing on the sonship of the saints and their freedom in Christ in Romans 8. Though reluctant, he writes of the saints in this way to make it clear that there are only two types of people in the world–those who present their members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness and those who present their members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification (cf. 6:19). For the freedom afforded by Christ is not freedom of the will to neutrality, but it is the freedom of the will from sin and death so that it might be bound to Another (cf. 8:2-4).

Therefore, as saints, our steps our bound to Christ and his righteousness and are directed by the Father’s loving and sovereign hand. Just as he predestined us in love to be glorified into the image of his Son, so now he works and wills his good pleasure in us and leads us through the good works that he has prepared for us beforehand (cf. Phil. 2:12, Eph. 2:10). All these things are a part of God’s glorious plan to accomplish for us our greatest good by making known the riches of his glory to us, his vessels of mercy.

There are few doctrines that are as glorious as the Providence of God. The fact that every particle of the smallest atom is vivified, governed, and ordained by a benevolent God has massive implications in all spheres of existence. In the context of the Church, its teleological implications are summarized gloriously in Romans 8:28: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” As the children of God–as those who have been adopted by the Father through the merit of his Son, we know that every struggle with sin, every confrontation by the Adversary, every stop light, and every spilt cup of coffee are working harmoniously together for our ultimate good. We cannot even pretend to begin to grasp this or what the culmination of all things will look like at the end of days, but we do know this–God will be fully glorified, and we will fully delight in his glory.

Such a glorious doctrine demands an appropriate response. Unfortunately, the doctrine of the Providence of God has more often than not has been met with inappropriate responses from the Church than appropriate ones, ranging from intellectual arrogance to radical passivity. What is an appropriate response to God’s Providence?

1. Cultivate Humility in Our Hearts
The absolute and teleological governance of God over all things leaves little room for what is affectionately know as “free will.” Scripture says this particularly with regards to the salvation of souls in Romans 8:29-30:

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn of many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

The appropriate response to such a weighty truth, namely God’s Providence over the salvation of souls is absolute humility. For this reason, the Apostle writes earlier in the letter, “What then becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. By what kind of law? By a law of works? No, but by the law of faith (v. 3:27). And again he writes in Ephesians 2:8, 9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

But what about boasting in our deeds after our salvation? Of this Apostle writes in following verse–Ephesians 2:10, “For we are [God's] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. God’s Providential hand, as we said before, encompasses all spheres of existence, even the salvation of sinners and the works of saints. Therefore, we who understand and believe this truth should be the humblest of people.

2. Take Comfort
The chief objective of Romans 8:28 in its context is to give comfort to saints who are suffering. Indeed, we should take great comfort knowing that the loving hand of God is directing every event in our lives in such a way that it ends with our greatest good. As the Apostle so excellently writes:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or danger, or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:35-39).

Regardless of the trials that come our way, the enemies that seek our death, or the demons who plot our fall, we can take comfort knowing that the love of Christ has conquered all these things and that lets us partake in their conquering.

3. Be Bold in Life
Because of these things, we should live bold lives. We should love Christ boldly, we should love each other boldly, and we should love the world boldly. We should pursue our holiness boldly, and we should pursue the holiness of the church boldly. We should sacrifice our lives boldly, and we should give boldly. We should do all these things boldly knowing that no obstacle or persecution comes our way apart from the benevolent ordinance of God and that in all things we are more than conquerors through the power and love of Christ Jesus.