R.C. Sproul (0:00)

You didn't have faith so that you could be reborn, because without rebirth you never would have had faith. Rebirth has to come first. It's something that God does. It's the divine initiative. God is the one who changes you and gives you faith and brings you to Himself.

Nathan W. Bingham (0:23)

Christians debate the doctrine of election, the doctrine of predestination. Even RC Sproul, as you'll hear today, came to this conviction, kicking it screaming against his will. But not so the Apostle Paul. He praises God for this doctrine, for the glorious truth that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. Welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing youg Mind, where each week we feature the preaching and teaching ministry of RC Sproul. We'll spend the next several weeks in Paul's Letter to the Church at Ephesus, and you'll hear messages that Dr. Sproul gave to the congregation of St. Andrew's Chapel in Sanford, Florida. This series will lift up the sovereignty of God in salvation as the Apostle Paul does in the early portion of his letter. Ephesians is a New Testament favorite of mine, and if you'd like to study it line by line, we'll send you Dr. Sproul's pastoral commentary on Ephesians when you give a donation of any amount@renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. Here's R.C. sproul on the Christian Spiritual Blessings in the Heavenly Places.

R.C. Sproul (1:32)

Paul, an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God to the saints who are in Ephesus and faithful in Christ Jesus, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, by which he made us accepted in the beloved. Before I look at this text itself, let me just say that we have a custom in America, and probably throughout the world, that on the occasion of funeral services, someone is usually invited to give a eulogy for the one who has passed on. And a eulogy is a word that comes to us directly from the Greek, and its etymology means good word. The Latin equivalent to a eulogy is the word benediction, and we hear that good word pronounced at the end of our worship services every Sunday. Well, in biblical terms, the verses that we will read from verse 3 through 13, which we'll look at the next time, contains what I think is one of the most magnificent, if not the most magnificent, eulogy in all of sacred Scripture. So beginning at verse 3, the apostle gives us a eulogy. And it's a eulogy for God, not because God has died. The occasion here is not the funeral of God. We know that God won't ever die because he cannot ever die. And the reason it is impossible for him to die is because he is a self existent, eternal being. And there's nothing in heaven, on earth, or under the earth that could ever take away from his power of being. And so when we talk about a eulogy with respect to God, we're not talking about a funeral oration, we're talking about a good word or a word of profound praise to Him. I said this may be the most magnificent eulogy in all of Scripture, but if you consider Mary's Magnificat and Zacharias Benedictus as eulogies as well, it would be pretty hard to push those two off of center stage. But apart from those songs that the Spirit records for us in the early chapters of Luke's Gospel, in terms of the epistles, this eulogy is without peer, I believe. Now what the eulogy does is not only gives us a profound word of praise for God, but it also serves as a summary statement of the entire epistle, in which he gives us not only the point of the epistle, but he gives us the point of the Christian faith. Or if I can use a more technical term, what the apostle provides for us here in these verses that I've just read, is the telos of the Christian faith. Now, teleology, which comes from the Greek word telos, is the study of purpose and of design. Paul is setting forth the goal, the purpose, the aim, not only of this epistle, but of the substance of the whole Christian faith. So if you want the gospel in a nutshell, you have it right here in the beginning of Ephesians. So now let's look at this purpose statement that is set forth in the form of a eulogy. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the Greek, here eulogized be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has eulogized us with many spiritual eulogies or benedictions in the heavenly places in Christ. Now, I don't think that Christianity is primarily a mystical religion like you find in Eastern religions, but I think that there's a sense in which you cannot totally eliminate the mystical elements from the Christian faith. You wonder what Paul was doing up in the third Heaven and the kinds of experiences that he had. And one of the things that has just gripped my mind and my soul over the years about this first chapter of Ephesians is Paul's talking about these spiritual blessings that God has given us in the heavenlies. What's that about? The first blessing is election. John Calvin once said that the doctrine of election and the doctrine of predestination are so difficult matters and create so much consternation and argumentation that they're best to be treated very carefully, very slowly and very clearly. You don't meet somebody for the first time who's just become a Christian and say, well, what's your doctrine of predestination? Or what's your doctrine of elections? Calvin was sensitive to how people struggle mightily with some of these ideas and thought that that might be extremely difficult for a new Christian to deal with. Paul, on the other hand, has no hesitation in writing his letter to the Ephesians to bringing it up front and center. Now, of course, we can say he had already pastored these people in Ephesians, and I'm sure they were well schooled in Paul's doctrine of elections and in predestination. So they weren't babes with respect to these concepts when he writes this marvelous epistle. But at least for the watching world who have the opportunity to eavesdrop on his personal letter to the Church in Ephesus, we're getting it right between the eyes. In the opening salvo of his Epistle, the very first blessing of the Christian life, the summary here of the telos of Christianity is spelled out in terms of election. Now, for many Christians, that's the last thing that they see as a blessing. They want to talk about the curse of the doctrine of election or find a way to get rid of the doctrine of elections. But here, right out of the box, the Apostle Paul speaks about election. That is something that is done by God and is something that is a supreme blessing, a heavenly blessing for which Paul is uttering extravagant praise. So election, whatever that is, if I follow the apostle, here is something that we should love. There are two basic doctrines or views of predestination that compete with each other perennially for acceptance within the Christian church. One view of predestination is called conditional predestination or conditional election, and the other one is called unconditional election or unconditional predestination Arminianism and Semipelagianism teach that conditional election, conditional predestination means this, that God in His omniscience looks down the quarter of time. He knows in advance what people will say yes to the offer of the Gospel and what people will say no. And those whom he know will choose Christ on the basis of that knowledge of that prescient knowledge of that foreknowledge God from all eternity. He knows what's going to happen in history. And on the basis of his knowledge of what he knows, some will do, he knows those who will say yes to Jesus. So on that basis, having met that condition, those people are elected and predestined. All right, that's conditional election. Now, I hope we can see when we get to chapter two that that can't possibly be Paul's understanding of election and predestination. And if that won't suffice, then you go to Romans 8 and 9, where if there's any point that the apostle labors, it is that it's not conditional predestination. It's unconditional. That God is the one who sovereignly determines whom he will choose to redeem and whom he will predestine to salvation. It's God's action, not ours. Indeed, if God, using His omniscience, would foresee throughout history what person would say yes to the Gospel and what person would say no. I think we will see in chapter two that God and His omniscience would know that no person would say yes to the gospel unless they were first regenerated by the Holy Spirit. But that comes later. But for now he speaks of predestination. And what is the purpose of predestination? We're elected unto holiness and to blamelessness. And we are predestined, he says, to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself. You see these blessings, these spiritual blessings. The first blessing is we've been elected. The second blessing is we've been predestined. And the third thing is that what we're elected and blessed to adoption from the foundation of the world. God chooses people for Himself and for His Son. The Gospel of John is full of this. Where the Gospel keeps talking about those whom the Father gives to the Son. Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, but the Father gives all of the elect to Jesus for Jesus as adopted brothers and sisters in the family of God. That's what predestination is about. Predestination is God's eternal plan to have a company of redeemed in the Beloved, in Jesus Christ. Now Paul's response to that is not hostility, it's doxology. It's a eulogy. Paul doesn't see this as bad news, some dark and hideous doctrine. He sees it as the sweetest, most lovely thing. That is the very summary of what the Christian faith is about. You know, people ask me all the time when we talk about Reformed theology and the doctrines of grace. This is what we're talking about here. And people were saying, well, aren't those things that divide us from other Christians? Isn't this a secondary matter? Is it? Paul sees that as part of the master plan. This is the essence of the blessing in the heavenly place that we've been elected, predestined and adopted into the family of God. How dare we put that at a secondary level? There's nothing secondary about that. That's at the very core, what Luther called the Cor ecclesia, the heart of the Church, is the doctrine of election. Now here, according to the good pleasure of his will, on what basis does God predestine some for adoption into his family according to the foreseeing choices of your will? God forbid. It's according to his sovereign good pleasure. The very heart of the biblical doctrine of election is the thesis that salvation is of the Lord. He does it sovereignly according to his pleasure. Now I find it hard sometimes when the Holy Spirit, in supervising and superintending and inspiring the word of God, reduces himself to redundancy because it would seem to be beneath the Spirit's dignity to do that. But the only reason I can imagine why the Spirit would ever stoop to redundancy is because of our hard heartedness and hard headedness and our denseness to grasp things that should be obvious. So why does the Holy Spirit speak ever of the good pleasure of his will? Is that not a redundancy? If it's according to the pleasure of his will, can it be anything else but the good pleasure of his will? Does God ever have anything wicked that pleases Him? Of course not. And so when God predestines the elect to adoption in Christ and through Christ, it is according to that which pleases him. And what pleases him is altogether good. And here's where we need to be careful. You know, in our struggle with trying to understand election and predestination and all that and all the things that we struggle with, does this make God unjust? Does this make us robots? And does it destroy our humanity? And all those questions that come up about it it's one thing to ask those questions, it's another thing to turn those questions into accusations against the goodness of God. Sometimes, you know, in the heat of the discussion about these things, I have to say to some of my semi pelagic friends, be careful, be careful here. Your animus against this doctrine is so strong, where you should be praising God, you're cursing Him. And if you need to struggle with the questions, let the Scriptures speak to you. But don't set up a wall of defiance because you just don't like the doctrine that may speak volumes about the state of your soul. In any case, this adoption of sons by Jesus Christ to himself according to the good pleasure of his will. Two more things. To the praise of the glory of his grace. That's a purpose clause. Again, to the praise of the glory of his grace, not to the praise of the accomplishments of human flesh or the will of the flesh. This is according to the glorious praise of his grace. That's why one of the solas of the solas of the Reformation is sola Deo gloria. To God alone, the glory. And rather than an election and predestination functioning in our thinking and in our study as a barrier to our love of God, we should see not only the graciousness of grace, dear friends, which is what is at stake here. That's one of the other solas of the Reformation, sola gratia. By grace alone are you saved. Totally gracious. And that that grace is glorious. The grace of God is a glorious thing. Not something that we're supposed to despise or fight and argue about, but we should be glorying in the grace of election and then the grace of predestination. I know when I first came against this kicking and screaming against my will, fighting it for five years after my conversion, finally. You know, I've told you this before. I had a little sign on my desk when I was in seminary, you're required to believe in the teach and to preach what the Bible says is true, not what you want it to say. It's true. And after reading Jonathan Edwards freedom of the will and having it coarsened and had my nose rubbed in it day in and day out, I finally couldn't escape Edwards and I couldn't escape Paul in chapter nine of Romans. And I finally surrendered. I said, okay, I'll accept it. I believe it. But I don't have to like it. Yeah, you got to like it. The more you see it, the more glorious it becomes. You move from faith to faith, from life to Life from grace to grace. And you begin to sing the same doxology as the apostle. And you begin to profess and proclaim the same eulogy of these marvelous blessings, all these spiritual blessings in the heavenlies that we have received. Finally, the glory of his grace by which he made us accepted in the Beloved. See election, predestination, adoption, sanctification, glorification. Now justification. How did you ever get justified? He made us acceptable. We are his workmanship. That's why you have sola fide along with sola grazia and sola dea gloria and solus Christus. It's by faith alone, through grace alone, through Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. We are his workmanship. If you are a Christian today, it didn't happen by your bootstraps. It happened by the hound of heaven who came and made you over again. The One who created you, recreated you, the One who generated you, regenerated you. You didn't have faith so that you could be reborn, because without rebirth you never would have had faith. Rebirth has to come first. It's something that God does. It's the divine initiative. God is the one who changes you and gives you faith and brings you to Himself. As Paul will elaborate further in chapter two. But you see how just in this first few verses, we haven't even got through that first sentence in the Greek. All these spiritual blessings in the heavenlies, and Paul's just now starting to get warmed up.