Lux Lucet

“What practical difference,” asked my friend across the breakfast table, “does Calvinism make in your life?” In truth that really wasn’t the question that I wanted to hear that morning. The fellow I was sitting with was an Arminian and tended to be a bit of argumentative. What was more, it was Saturday morning after a long work week. I would have preferred to talk about baseball, or even yard work for that matter, rather than get involved in a heavy theological discussion. On the other hand, it was a good question. And we don’t always get to pick and choose our opportunities to witness, so I made my case. And as I’ve thought more about our discussion over the past week, it seemed good to me to set down in writing some of what I said.

Clarity of Thought

I was raised as an Arminian. More specifically, I grew up attending the Church of Christ, which had its roots in the Campbellite Restoration movement of the 19th century. For those who aren’t familiar with the Campbellite movement, its most notable founders were Thomas and Alexander Campbell, father and son preachers from Ireland. Although both had been Presbyterians, the church they founded practiced credo-baptism, was congregational in its government, and Arminian in its teaching.

It’s been pointed out by others that Arminians don’t sing like Arminians, they sing like Calvinists. This was certainly true in my church. We’d sing all the standard Calvinist hymns, but the preaching was all Arminian. It always seemed to me that I met two different Gods on Sunday morning. There was the sovereign God of the hymnal, whose counsel stood and who did whatever he pleased. And then there was the weak god of the pulpit, who had to respect human will. Jesus was knocking, but you had to open the door.

We were told that the way to salvation was through faith in Christ, and that our works were not meritorious. But for all that, our church practiced a form of baptismal regeneration. To be saved, one had to do the following: repent, confess one’s sins, believe the Gospel, be baptized, and then obey the commands of God. This was profoundly confusing to me. How, I would wonder, were all these things – repentance, confession, belief, baptism, and obedience – not works? After all, my church taught one was not regenerated until baptism. This meant that an unregenerate person had to repent confess and believe all on his own. How is it that we could say we believed in salvation by works, when salvation start to finish was all about what we did?

It wasn’t until I was about the age of 30, when I had begun to seriously read the Bible and study Reformed writers, that I came to understand why faith is not a meritorious work. Faith is not, as I was taught, something that one works up within himself. Faith is a gift of God. It is God who regenerates the sinner dead in his trespasses and sins. It is God who causes the spiritually dead to live and to understand and assent to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This one idea, that regeneration precedes faith, blew away a lifetime of confusion about the relationship of faith and works. In place of muddled thinking, I now had a clear understanding of the biblical doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Confidence

During the course of our discussion, my Arminian friend brought up a well-known Arminian illustration of God’s foreknowledge. God, he told me, was like a man standing on a tall building and looking down on the streets below. He sees two cars approaching an intersection. Due to their speed and distance from the intersection, he knows they will collide. The observer does not cause the ensuing crash, but merely knows it’s going to happen based upon the choices made by the drivers. In like manner, God looks down through history and sees who will believe and who will not. He does not cause their salvation or damnation, he merely observes the choices that individuals make. This god is a heavenly observer.

But the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob speaks in this way,

For I am God, and there is no other,

I am God, and there is none like Me,

Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done,

Saying, ‘My counsel shall stand,

and I will do all My pleasure’ (Isaiah 46:9, 10)

The God of the Bible is not some weak God. He is not a God who is bound to respect the sovereignty of man’s will. He causes men to will and to do according to his good pleasure. Those among Gods elect can face the world knowing that the Lord has purposed all things. There is no problem of evil, for the Calvinist understands that God brings about evil, yet he is not responsible for it. For God answer to no one.

There is not so much as a random molecule, not so much as a random particle, in all creation. The God of the Bible is a God whom we can trust. His eternal decrees are immutable. We can have full confidence that he will bring to pass all that he has decreed. The Calvinist can face the world knowing that all things – the evil and the good – have been decreed and brought to pass by the hand of God. The Lord is not a passive observer, he is the first cause of all things.

Comfort

For the believer, this fact is also a great comfort. For as Paul tells us, “All things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). Those chosen in Christ cannot lose. Those outside of him cannot win. When reading thought the account of the conquest of Canaan, God declared time and again to Joshua that he had delivered the Canaanites into the hand of Israel. What an amazing feeling it must have been to go into battle and not fear the outcome. But then, this is the privilege of every Christian called by God.

We live in a world hostile to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. From the appalling murders of Christian students in Kenya by the Muslims, to the persecution of Christian business owners in the US who choose not to serve homosexual weddings, Christians can find themselves on the receiving end of the worst the world has to offer. Not to mention all the other difficulties and disappointments that attend this life. The loss of our health, the death of loved ones, professional and personal failures. It is the Calvinist, the man who understands that, not only is God in control of all things, but that he works all those things for the good of his people, who has a sound basis for hope even in the most difficult of struggles.

Compassion

When God called me, it was not on the basis of anything I was or had done. There was nothing in me that was loveable. It was only by his grace that I was saved. I didn’t always understand it this way. I recall reading as a twelve-year old Arminian that Calvinists believed God had chosen them for eternal life. “How arrogant,” I thought, “that the Calvinists believe they are chosen by God. I’m glad I’m not one of those people.” It was until years later that I came to realize that the arrogance lies not with those who believe God chose them out of the mere good pleasure of his will apart from any merit in them, but with those who think they can, by their own efforts, make themselves acceptable to an all-holy God.

Knowing that it is God who elects, that he is the potter and I am the clay, makes it much easier to have compassion on a fellow sinner than if I believed I was saved because some superior wisdom, intelligence or goodness inherent in me. For then I would have something in which I could boast before God. It is the Calvinist who can say with Paul, “But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14). To God alone be the glory.