Bible Difficulties (88 page)

(vv. 30-31, NASB).

From the line of teaching in this chapter, we may draw the following answer concerning the ultimate culpability of Pharaoh (who was probably Amenhotep II). From the standpoint of God, Pharaoh's negative response to Moses' plea was completely foreknown by God (Exod. 3:19 contains God's prediction to Moses while still at the burning bush: "But I know that the king of Egypt will not permit you to go, except under compulsion"). Furthermore, in view of that foreseen refusal by Pharaoh, God will

"harden his heart" so that he will forbid the Hebrew nation to leave Egypt even for a religious festival out in the wilderness (Exod. 4:21). The apparent purpose of the heart-400

hardening is to cancel out any obligation on the part of the Israelites to return to Egypt after their festival of worship is over. After the king has broken his word nine times, there will be no moral obligations whatever for them to come back. But then, on the tenth or last of the plagues to be launched against Egypt, God will take the life of Pharaoh's firstborn son.

One important observation remains to be made concerning Pharaoh: the king's heart was not actually hardened by God until after he had hardened his own heart by his first refusal of Moses' petition. "Who is Yahweh that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know Yahweh, and besides, I will not let Israel go!" (Exod. 5:2). Once he had of his own free will rejected the request of Moses and Aaron, then God began the process of hardening his heart (Exodus 7:3, 13, 22; 8:19, etc.), to such an extreme that Pharaoh became almost irrational. Again and again the king besmirched his honor by refusing to keep his word to Moses, as each plague came and went. The sequence of causation here is about the same as that described in Romans 1:19-26. First, mankind received by general revelation a basic knowledge of God's eternal power and divine nature; yet they failed to honor Him as supreme, nor were they grateful to Him (v.21), but became proud of their own wisdom and thus fell into spiritual stupidity (v.22). "Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity...they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator" (vv. 24-25, NASB).

The same hardening befell the heart of the human race in general as is described of Pharaoh in particular.

Returning, then, to Romans 9:17 ("For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you" [NASB]), we come to God's overriding master plan, by which He not only copes with man's rebellion but turns it into an occasion for the Lord to display both His righteousness and His grace. Pharaoh refused all concessions to the enslaved Hebrews, despite all the promises he made concerning their release. But this intransigence only served to justify a clean-cut break with Egypt; the Egyptian government had no longer any claim on them, and the Israelites were under no moral obligation to return to their bondage after concluding their period of worship out in the wilderness (which was all they originally requested, according to Exod. 5:1). Now they were free to leave for good, with Egypt mourning the loss of their crops, their cattle, and their firstborn sons under the impact of the Ten Plagues. By these dreadful visitations, of which all the surrounding nations received tidings, the dread of the almighty Yahweh was instilled into their hearts; and they took notice of the special status of Israel as a nation in covenant with the one true God--as He revealed Himself to be.

We turn now from this particular example of Pharaoh to the larger questions pertaining to the tension between predestination and free will, between sovereign grace and human responsibility for sin. Divine sovereignty raises an apparent difficulty in regard to the ultimate responsibility for evil. Romans 9:19 puts it quite pointedly: "You will say to me then, `Why does He still fine fault? For who resists His will?'" (NASB). If it is true that God has mercy on whom He wills and hardens whom He wills, must it not follow that man is relieved of final responsibility for his sin? If God chooses to create two kinds of people, the elect and the reprobate, and so programs them that they are free only to 401

respond to the nature with which they have been created--a nature that has been predetermined without any independent choice on their own part--does not the ultimate responsibility for their later sinfulness and failure to repent amount to God's own decision, and therefore His own responsibility? Does this not mean then that God Himself is the author of sin?

Yet this runs counter to the clear teaching of Scripture that asserts: "Thou art not a God that has pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee" (Ps. 5:4). "Thine eyes are too pure to approve evil, and Thou canst not look on wickedness with favor" (Hab.

1:13, NASB). "Let no one say when he is tempted, Ì am tempted of God'; for God cannot be tempted with evil, nor does He tempt any man. But every one is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed" (James 1:13-14). The often-quoted verse in Isaiah 45:7 (which KJV misleadingly renders as "I make peace, and create evil") teaches that God has constructed a moral universe in which punishment follows wrong. The key word here is
rà
, which covers the whole range of badness, all the way from distressing trials to calamities and disasters that overtake the good and the evil alike, to moral evil as such. But in this context, where there is a preceding pair of antithetical ideas ("light" and

"darkness"), it is exegetically certain that
rà
here is intended as the opposite, not of goodness or virtue, but of
salom
("peace" or "welfare"). Therefore RSV does better in rendering this line "I make weal and create woe"; NASB has "causing well-being and creating calamity"; NIV has "I bring prosperity and create disaster." Hence Isaiah 45:7

furnishes no indication whatever that God is the ultimate author of evil.

Perhaps it should be added here that as the framer of a moral universe, God has created the "possibility" of moral evil. There can be no such thing as moral goodness unless there is also the possibility of moral evil. Without a voluntary choice of what is right, there can be no such thing as virtue; but a freedom to choose good necessarily implies a freedom to choose evil--with all the terrible consequences that ensue from that choice. There can be no possibility of real love without a possibility of rejection and hate. Therefore if God created angels and men for the purpose of loving them and having fellowship with them, they had to have the prerogative of responding to Him in love by their own choice. But unless there is a possibility of refusing love, there is no possibility of affirming love.

Without that freedom of choice, there is no morality and no love but only automated, mechanical response. Let this insight serve to answer the oft-repeated questions, Why did God allow there to be such a person as Satan? Why did God allow him to approach Eve through his agent the serpent? Why did not God make Adam and Eve completely good so that they would never yield to temptation? The answer to all of these is, without the possibility of evil, there would be no possibility of good.

There is another important distinctive about man that should not be overlooked. Genesis 1:27 states that God made man in His own image. This means that in his moral and mental construction man was to resemble God--to the extent that the finite can resemble the Infinite. Admittedly God is good, devoid of all evil or deceit. Is He that way because some outside force has so conditioned Him that He could not be anything but good? Or is God good because He chooses to be good and wills to reject evil? One may raise a real question as to whether there could be any moral yardstick outside of God by which His 402

goodness could be measured or evaluated. But surely God's will is unfettered and undetermined by any outside authority or power. May it not be, then, that man too, created in the image of God, has an analogous capacity of original choice--by virtue of which he can be held morally responsible for choosing to put self above God, as all Adam's race have done (except, of course, for Jesus, whose Father was the Holy Spirit)?

We conclude, therefore, that man is totally and ultimately responsible for his own sin, and God bears no responsibility for it in any degree whatever. When God issues a summons to the entire human race that they should repent and turn to Him in faith and total submission (Acts 17:30-31: "Now he commands all people everywhere to repent.

For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed" [NIV]), this is to be considered a sincere offer of forgiveness and new life to all men everywhere--an offer for which they will be fully culpable if they refuse to accept it.

On the other hand, the principle of sovereign grace involves a total rejection of human effort to win salvation or to earn the favor of God. "Grace" means that God does it all, without any help from man. Salvation must come as a free, totally undeserved gift, since man has forfeited all claim to self-justifying merit. "By grace you have been saved, through faith--and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God--not of works, so that no one can boast" (Eph. 2:8-9, NIV). "He saved us, not by works of righteousness that we have done, but according to his mercy" (Titus 3:5). This means that nothing we can offer God in the way of character, service, or deeds of righteousness contributes any basis whatever for our salvation. Those who are truly saved received Christ Himself (John 1:12) as Savior and Lord (Rom. 10:9-10); and from the dynamic of His indwelling Spirit (Col. 3:1-4), we will produce works of righteousness and goodness that will manifest the life of Christ within us. ("As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also" [James 2:26].)

However, the work of sanctification carried on in the life of the born-again believer is basically the gracious operation of God Himself (Rom. 8:10-11, 14). This transformed life will continually produce the ninefold fruit of the Spirit of God (Gal. 5:22-23), if indeed the surrender of faith is no mere counterfeit or self-deception, and if the true child of God will constantly present his body as a living sacrifice to the God who redeemed him (Rom. 12:1). Thus no longer conforming to this world, he is being transformed by the renewing of his mind through the operation of the indwelling Spirit of Christ (v.2).

Nevertheless it remains true that man contributes nothing substantive toward his salvation--if he is saved at all. Even saving faith is the gift of God, and God receives all the glory for the sinner's conversion (Eph. 2:9). All the unsaved man can do is face up to the claims of Christ and assent to the proffer of His grace. This response of assent bears no resemblance of a work to merit; it is simply the act of a beggar who reaches up his empty hand to receive a gift from his benefactor. Such an act has nothing to do with merit; it does nothing to make the beggar more deserving than another beggar who keeps his hands folded in his lap. The gift is bestowed out of pity and grace. "God, having out of His mere good pleasure, from all eternity, elected some to everlasting life, did enter into a covenant of grace, to deliver them out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring 403

them into a state of salvation by a Redeemer" (
Westminster Shorter Confession
20, as derived from John 17:6; Eph. 1:4; Titus 1:2; 3:7). This statement can hardly be improved on as a classic formulation of the doctrine of grace.

According to these verses God has chosen His redeemed from all eternity, "before the foundation of the world" (Eph. 1:4). This means that He did not have to wait and see; for He who knows all things from beginning to end, knows what each man's response will be to the call of Christ. These true believers, then, who make up Christ's spiritual temple, His mystical body and His beloved bride, are regarded as a love-gift from the Father to the Son (John 17:6: "I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me").

On what basis has God chosen His elect? It was not on the basis of any merit in them (Eph. 2:8-9), whether their character, their works, or their faith (as a work of merit), but

"according as He has chosen us in Him" (Eph. 1:4). This seems to imply that God the Father only chooses those who are
in
the Son, Jesus Christ. Yet there is a mystery about the response of sinners to Christ's call. Obviously we cannot be
in
Christ unless we are united with Him by faith. But what is it that determines that faith? Why is it that when two persons at the same gospel meeting hear the same message from the same preacher, one responds to the invitation and goes forward to receive Christ, while the other remains stubbornly in his seat, clinging faithfully to his sin and self-will? Jesus said in John 6:37,

"All that the Father gives Me shall come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out" (NASB). This means that there is nothing in the principle of election or predestination that will keep any repentant sinners from coming to Christ and receiving salvation.

In John 6:44, however, Jesus also said, "No one can come to me, unless the Father who sent Me draws him" (NASB). Those who come to Christ do so as a result of the gracious working of God in their hearts; it is God the Father who draws them to God the Son as their Savior and Lord. This teaches us that we must give to God all the credit and all glory for the impulse in our heart to respond to Christ's call when the gospel is presented to us. Otherwise we might say to ourselves, "Well, in a way I deserved God's grace, because I responded when He called me--unlike that unrepentant man who sat in the seat next to mine and would not go forward when the invitation was given." No, there is no room for personal merit in the matter of our election. It is all a matter of God's "mere good pleasure," and He receives all the glory when a sinner is saved. Whoever rejects the Lord Jesus must bear all the blame for remaining condemned and lost, but whoever is saved must give to God all the glory and honor for his salvation and his new life in Christ.

To sum up, then, God chooses from all eternity those who will be saved; and the sole basis of His choice is His mere good pleasure, even as the sole basis of acquittal and justification is the merit of Christ's atoning death. Yet God never chooses those who do not and will not believe in Christ; only those that do will He bring to Christ for salvation.