As I spent time today reading my Piper devotional and reading an old email that my dad sent me with some wisdom about God's love, I came across the same verse twice. Romans 9:16 says, "It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy." What is the 'it' that that verse speaks about? My salvation. Going back a little further in Romans chapter 9, we read: "...in order that God's purpose in election might stand, not by works but by Him who calls...What then shall we say? Is God unjust? Not at all! For He says to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.' It [God's election of who will be saved] does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy. For the scripture says...'I raised you up for this very purpose, that I might display My power in you and that My name might be proclaimed in all the earth."
I gather from these verses that it is God who saves. It is He who chooses who will end up in Heaven and who will end up in hell. I do not want to spend time here arguing election versus free will. That's not my intent with this post, and I pray that those of you who read this and do not believe in election will forgive me and continue reading. Just hear me out; see what the Lord has revealed to me as I've read this afternoon, and then you can determine for yourself the validity of my opinions.
Ephesians 2:8-9 says, "For it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast." By GRACE, through FAITH. NOT by works. So that WE CANNOT BOAST in anything that we ourselves have done. We are saved only by His grace and mercy. The scripture tells us that! We cannot earn our salvation. We cannot choose to love God above all else without His help. Otherwise, we'd be able to boast in our own abilities to love Him as we ought.
Ok, so why then, if I cannot keep God's commands and I will fail miserably every time I try to keep the law perfectly, does the law exist? Why didn't God just choose to save us and call it a day? Why give us the law and His commandments if I cannot possibly hope to keep them all perfectly? Martin Luther writes that the law "is a mirror that shows us ourselves as sinners, guilty of death and worthy of God's everlasting wrath and indignation. What is the purpose of this humbling, bruising and beating down? It serves to bring us to grace. So the law is a minister that prepares the way for grace. Not that pernicious and pestilent opinion of our own righteousness, which does not want to submit to being a sinner, unclean, miserable and damnable, but righteous and holy, will not let God do His own special work. Therefore, God must take the hammer of that law and beat to pieces this vain confidence, wisdom, righteousness and power, so that we may learn at last that we are utterly forlorn, lost and damned. Then, when our conscious is made afraid by the law, the doctrine of the gospel and grace comes to raise us up and comfort us again, telling us that Christ came into the world not to break the bruised reed, nor to quench the smoldering flax, but to preach the gospel of good news to the poor, to heal the broken and contrite heart, to preach forgiveness of sins to the captives, and so on....Thus, the law helps to justify in that it drives us to the promise of grace and makes it sweet to us."
"The rhythm of the New Testament is to walk in love as a response to how deeply you are loved in Christ," Dane Ortland, pastor from Wheaton College. Amen! I have no hope to keep the law apart from Christ's strength working in me! How then shall I live? With a thankful heart, walking through this life full of joy and thanksgiving because of how much I am loved by God simply by my faith in Jesus Christ! I am saved simply by my faith in Jesus. That's it; that's all it takes. My salvation is not based on anything that I myself can do - otherwise, as I said before, I'd be able to boast in myself and my own choices. But Scripture tells me that I'm saved by my faith in order that I might have nothing to boast about other than the cross and what Jesus accomplished while hanging on it!
Saint Augustine wrote a long time ago: "When anyone knows that he is nothing in himself, and has no help from himself, the weapons within himself are broken and the war is ended." Nothing in myself; I have no help from myself. My hope and help comes from the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and earth. I can only love Him because He first loved me. My own efforts at keeping the law and loving Him above all else are paltry excuses and pitiful, futile tries. My heart is sinful; I desire to be God. I want things my way, in my timing, on my terms, 24/7. That's just the way I am, if I'm painfully honest with myself. And yet, amazingly, God sees none of this filth when He gazes on me because I stand before Him, clothed in Christ's righteousness. I am justified by my faith in Jesus; justified- "just as if I've never sinned." All that I'm able to do to earn this standing with our Holy God is to stand at the foot of the cross and confess that I cannot keep His commandments. All I need to do is to repent of my self-righteousness and my pride and my arrogance and to accept the free gift of grace and mercy and forgiveness that God holds out to me in form of His Son! "Then, having repented, God bids us rest as sinners at the foot of the cross, where sin is cleansed away, and so be at peace," Roy Hession wrote in We Would See Jesus.
In the email that my dad sent me, he wrote that we either live at Mount Sinai or we live at Calvary. At Sinai, we believe that our efforts to keep the law are part of our justification; that our spotlessness in Jesus depends in part upon some of our own works. At Calvary, however, we recognize that we cannot keep the law and that our justification comes ONLY by grace, through faith, in Jesus Christ -- "For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast," Ephesians 2:8-9. I choose to live at Calvary because that is what Scripture has taught me.
Now I will agree that by choosing to live at Calvary and recognize that my salvation is not earned by anything that I can do, this means that I believe that God allows some to spend eternity in hell. If it is He who chooses us and turns our hearts to Him, and yet there are still some who never come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior and so do not spend eternity in Heaven, then by deductive reasoning God chooses not to save some... This is a truth that I have wrestled much with and continue to wrestle with, even as I read in the bible that it is indeed Him who chooses. To deal with that truth, I turn to something that John Piper wrote in his book Taste and See:
"There's a great deal of trust in the love of God, and a great deal of love in the trust of God.
He is of such a kind that what He reveals will always be in part awesome, in part threatening,
in part winsome, in part tender, in part severe, and we will find ourselves
pulled in many directions as we try to get our heart around Him. And then we cannot begin to stretch that far without breaking, yet trusting still. He has revealed
enough of Himself in Christ, and especially in the glorious Pauline sentence, "I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me" in Galatians 2:20, that we can cast ourselves on Him. We can do this even when the awesome realities of election and
definite atonement scratch at our finite and limited sense of what infinite wisdom and infinite goodness and infinite justice must really look like... Every time you think of God's reprobation [rather, that He allows some to die never having come to know His Son], you also should think of the infinite, true sinfulness that those who perish are guilty of and the judgment that is really deserved...And then let us tremble that we, for absolutely no cause in ourselves, have been plucked from this horrid condition and have been made to trust Him and have been covered by His infinitely valuable blood so that we will render to Him praise for His mercy forever and ever."
God has provided another answer to my question of why He allows some not to come to Christ in faith. He gives it in Romans 9:19-21: "One of you will say to me: 'Then why does God still blame us? For who resists His will?' But who are you, o man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to Him who formed it, 'Why did You make me like this?' Does the Potter not have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?" Who am I to question how the God of the cosmos works? Who am I to question His wisdom and judgment? Who am I that He would even care to know my name? Instead of questioning, I pray that my heart would just rest in the character of God; that is, that my heart would trust in His ultimate goodness and be still and know that He is God and I am not.
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