Commentary on First Peter (7)
Then, there is the objection that says if the doctrine of election is true, there would be no point in evangelism. Those who raise this objection might present themselves as champions for gospel preaching, but what I hear is that, unless their disobedience will send people straight to everlasting hellfire, God's command means nothing to them and they see no reason to preach the gospel. That is, unless they are so important that other people's very souls depend on them instead of on God's sovereign decree, then they would find evangelism pointless. Their motivation for preaching the gospel rests on how important they are to the salvation of souls and not on God's command. With an evil attitude like this, perhaps we are all better off if they would stay home and let us preach the gospel instead.
Those objections claiming that divine sovereignty eliminates moral responsibility and renders our actions meaningless do not logically follow from the doctrine of election, but they come from depraved minds that are constantly disposed to sin, wretched souls that are motivated solely by a sense of self-importance, and from the anti-biblical assumption that God's grace entails mere pardon without transforming the people that it saves.
Peter writes that God's people are chosen, and they are chosen to live under the "sanctifying work of the Spirit." God the Father issues the eternal decree, and the Holy Spirit carries out this decree as he works in the lives and the hearts of those whom God has chosen. He works powerfully upon each chosen individual even from the beginning of their Christian life.
It is he who resurrects and awakens the spirits of those who would believe. He convicts them of their sins, and calls them to come forth from their unbelief and wickedness into a life of faith and obedience. This call overcomes all resistance, not by forcing the human will, but much more powerfully than that, by directly changing the will so that it eagerly repents and believes.
This corrects a misunderstanding that is common on both sides of the issue. Those who oppose the biblical doctrine protest that God does not force the will, and those who claim to affirm the biblical doctrine tend to offer unbiblical, incoherent, and misleading explanations on how the elect still somehow come "freely" without being forced. But the answer is not to say that God never forces the will, as if not to be forced is to be free, nor is it to say that man comes freely, as if not to be free is to be forced.
In our context, for someone to be forced implies that the person being forced exhibits a reluctance to comply. However, this in turn implies that God is calling the individual without exercising a direct control over the person's very willingness, but God never needs to "force" that which he directly controls. Man is not forced not because he has some freedom, but he is not forced because he has none at all, so that "to force" does not even apply. He is so totally controlled by divine power that any reluctance is turned on and off at God's will, so that there is nothing left to be forced.
If a little turtle is heading toward one direction and I want it to head toward the opposite direction, I have at least two options. If for any reason I wish to experience a little resistance, I can push against its head with my finger so that it slides backward. Or, I can just pick it up and turn it around. But it is too slow, so I follow this up by pushing it from behind. Now it is heading full speed and face first toward the direction that I want it to go. Am I forcing it? No, there is no forcing to speak of because there is no resistance at all. But the turtle is far from having any freedom.
Of course, this is an analogy about two creatures (man and turtle), and so it has its flaws even at its beginning. God's control over his creatures is infinitely greater than the limited control that a man can exercise over a turtle. In the analogy, I have not created the turtle and I do not sustain its life. I do not control and energize even its smallest motions. Although I can move it by pushing it or picking it up, it still possesses a relative freedom from me, and it can move by itself apart from my control when left alone. Like me, its power and motion come from God.
So I cannot play God even in an analogy, but it is sufficient to show that when I am not forcing the turtle against its original direction, I am in fact exercising greater control over the turtle. This happens when, instead of pushing against it, I pick up the entire turtle and turn it around. The more power I use to control it, the less it is forced; the more power I exercise, the less opportunity it has to exhibit any resistance. Likewise, God does not force the will – he exercises far greater control over the creature than this. He directly changes the will, and no resistance remains. This being the case, the creature is hardly free in any meaningful sense.
The Spirit's role is not limited to conversion, but he must constantly sustain and nurture the faith of the elect. In fact, Peter's language indicates that God's election of the people is his decree to place them under the permanent influence of the Spirit, that is, "in the sanctification of the Spirit." Paul writes, "He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus" (Philippians 1:6). Christian life and growth is initiated and sustained by the constant sanctifying work of the Spirit.
The Spirit sets apart those whom God has chosen, spiritually separating them from the rest of the world, "for obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ" (NKJV). Again, God's election entails more than simple pardon for the chosen ones, but he places them under the Spirit's work of sanctification, leading to obedience and the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ. They are chosen not just to receive forgiveness, but to live a new kind of life.
In the Old Testament, the sprinkling of blood upon the people can refer to initiation, ordination, or purification. Whether or not Peter has any one specific application in this verse, we can affirm that all three are involved in the Christian life. By the power of the Spirit and the blood of Jesus Christ, we are introduced into the covenant of God, separated to obey and to serve, and continually cleansed and purified from our sins.
The blood, of course, refers to the atoning work performed by Christ as the mediator between God and the elect, the chosen ones, in which Christ bore the guilt and the punishment of their sins as their head and substitute. There is no pardon without the shedding of blood, and thus a genuine work of the Spirit will always bring the sinner to both the belief of Christ's blood atonement for the elect, and the reality of cleansing and purification by this atoning blood. Anything that alleges to be a work of the Spirit but does not acknowledge and honor the blood atonement is a counterfeit.
Commentary on First Peter (6)
Returning to foreknowledge, the objection is raised that if this term means something similar to "foreloved," then a verse like Romans 8:29 would not make sense. The reasoning is that since the verse says, "For those God foreknew he also predestined," then if "foreknew" is practically synonymous with "predestined," this would make the usage redundant. On the other hand, as the objection goes, the verse would make good sense if we will take foreknowledge to mean prescience, so that God predestines to salvation those whom he knows will believe in Christ according to his passive foresight.
In response, first, we have already established that to make foreknowledge into mere prescience or foresight does not serve our opponents unless they also establish that faith is a purely human product and not a gift from God. Unless they can establish this, then to equate foreknowledge with prescience would only mean that God knows what he will cause in the future before he causes it, so that it is still entirely up to him as to whom he will save and whom he will damn.
Second, the verse itself makes it impossible to understand foreknowledge as mere prescience, or the object of foreknowledge as foreseen faith, since it does not say that God foreknows the faith, but that he foreknows the people whom he predestines. So if foreknowledge is taken as prescience, then since the verse refers to God's foreknowledge of people, and since he knows all things pertaining to the future, this would necessarily mean that he "foreknows" all people, that is, all of humanity. And if he "foreknows" all people, then this same verse indicates that he has also predestined all of them, and it follows that the next verse concludes that all people would be glorified.
In other words, to suppose that the foreknowledge here refers to God's passive knowledge of the future, instead of a deliberate and loving relational knowledge that does not apply to all people, would necessarily produce the doctrine of universal salvation. However, since the testimony of the entire Bible as well as Paul's letter to the Romans itself (where this verse is found) condemn universal salvation, foreknowledge cannot mean prescience in this verse.
Third, the objection is answered if we would just finish reading the verse! The entire statement says, "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers." It is obvious that foreknowledge and predestination here do not refer to the same stage of God's work in his chosen ones, regardless of how much or how little they overlap elsewhere.
Foreknowledge refers to God's advanced loving disposition toward these people, and predestination refers to his advanced decision concerning what he will do with them. The former refers to relationship, and the latter refers to destiny. To paraphrase, "Concerning those whom God has sovereignly loved and chosen in advance (foreknew), he has also decreed their destiny in advance (predestined), and this destiny is to become like his Son, Jesus Christ."
This is consistent with how the doctrine of election is spoken of in other places. For example, in John 15:16, which we have already cited in part earlier, Jesus says, "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit – fruit that will last." The word "appointed" here is not redundant, because it refers to something in addition to the fact that these people have been chosen. The people are chosen to have a saving relationship with God, and then these chosen people are appointed to go and bear fruit.
One objection from those who oppose the biblical doctrine of election is that it encourages licentiousness. This poses no threat to the doctrine, but it does tell us something about how they think. It never occurred to some of us that we would sin without restraint even if the doctrine of election implies that we can sin with impunity. Why would we want to? Once converted by his grace, do we not love God and wish to obey him?
But it is as if these people think that if salvation is entirely up to God's sovereign choice, then they would sin without restraint. They seem to think that only if it is entirely up to the human individual to both attain and retain salvation by his own effort would he then want to live a pure and holy life before God. Thus even when we are referring to believers, a sincere love for God is a myth to these people. They speak as if there could never be obedience without the constant threat of damnation, and assurance of salvation is also the enemy of sanctification.
Likewise, there is something sinister in the common objection, "If God has predetermined everything, then why should I pray?" I am suspicious of a person who would even ask such a question. Is this the way he thinks? He implies that unless he has a determinative role in the outcome, and that unless what God does is dictated by this person's prayer, he can find no reason to pray, no reason at all.
It is insufficient for this person that God has commanded him to pray, and to express his needs and desires through humble petitions. His position is that unless his prayer makes a decisive difference, even to the point of directing the divine agenda, he sees no reason to petition God. Surely this is the height of arrogance and wickedness. The very question reeks of defiance and self-importance.
We should despise all such objections, and be suspicious of all those who raise them. On the other hand, for those of us who have even a little reverence for God, the bare permission to approach the throne of grace so that we may address the Father is itself something that we are eager to thank him about in prayer, and certainly not something that we want to complain about.