Clough Divine institutions Lesson 2

Divine Institution #1 – Difference of man and the difference it makes

We are working with the divine institutions; there are four divine institutions. These four are absolutely essential for you to understand the mechanics of the Christian life, they’re absolutely essential for you to understand various issues that come up occasionally from time to time in out struggle in our society at this point. These four divine institutions are respectively: volition, marriage, family, and nation or national government to be more precise. Last time we gave a definition of a divine institution. It is a designed feature of creation that is unique to man and has an essential spiritual function or functions to perform. It is a designed feature in creation that is absolutely unique to man and it has an essential spiritual function. We said that by this we mean that it’s not confined to believers. The divine institutions are designed for Christian and non-Christian alike. We will see that no matter how hard the non-Christian tries to rebel against the Word of God, no matter how far he tries to bury God, he winds up in the end acting out these same divine institutions.

When we get in the area of marriage we will cover the great experiment of the 1930s that Russia tried in which she tried to prove that marriage and the divine institution of marriage was not essential to the preservation of Russian society, and yet in the end she was forced to acknowledge the fact because the matter of the fact was that it is essential. And so we find case after case of the unbeliever testifying to the absolute necessity for these divine institutions.

Last time we introduced the first of these, volition, which we defined as the responsibility before God to choose both ends and means in life…the responsibility before God to choose different ends and means in life. Now it’s important that all areas of that definition are included or you will have problems that you shouldn’t have because you didn’t pay attention to that definition. It is a responsibility before God, otherwise you’ll come up and say don’t animals have a range of choice and so on, not in the sense before God to choose different ends and means in life, and we include the means as well as the ends because by volition you not only are held responsible for what you want but the means you use to get there.

Example: spiritual life, God tells you certain things that He wants you to do as a believer in Him. Let’s make that the goal; you have two ways of getting to that goal, utilizing the filling of the Holy Spirit, spirituality or energy of the flesh human good, and you can produce the fruit of the Spirit or you can produce human good on your way to that goal. The result of course is that you’ll never get to the goal with human good, but there are many means open to you in the area of volition.

We decided to treat volition, defining it carefully, going through many of the Scriptures, and then we decided what we do is to treat volition from the standpoint of the attacks being made upon it in the school system, in our society at large, and study each one of these divine institutions in the middle of the controversy in which we find ourselves. You, as a believer and representative of Jesus Christ should know where the issues are. You wouldn’t expect the President to send some knucklehead over to Moscow to represent us; sometimes it’s happened, but you would expect an ambassador that it’s his job to represent the United States to at least know what some of the issues are, and so similarly God expects you to know some of the issues, some of the problems that He has. When an ambassador goes to Moscow he should have an outline of communism; that’s his mission field. It means he has to know capitalism, he has to know American history, he has to know his own position, but in order to represent his own position in a foreign land what does he have to know? He has to know the culture of a foreign land. An ambassador going to another nation has to speak, or should, we’ve had ambassadors who can’t even speak the language of the country they’re sent to, another one the glorious accomplishments, but we are supposed to have ambassadors that can speak the language of the nation to wherever they’re sent. We should have an ambassador that knows the culture of the place where he’s sent. And so if Jesus Christ has personally sent you to this spot and location in time and history, He expects you to know not only your position as a Christian, not only the Bible doctrine’s but know where the culture in which you are trying to represent Christ is attacking the Word of God. You should know where it’s slugging away, trying to tear away at the foundations, exactly where.

And so studying these divine institutions we are studying the places that our society is assaulting these very basic doctrines. Once we understand the concepts of the Word of God, the next step for you to understand is how to interact with your environment. There are three basic attacks against volition or the concept of personal responsibility. One of these we covered last week and that belief is the concept of determinism, and we said that today everyone is infected, you are infected this way; I’m infected this way. Now you don’t know it by that fancy word; that fancy word is just a label for the idea but determinism says that all of nature is a machine and this means that man is trapped in the machine and can do nothing about it.

Now if you want some objective evidence that Christians are being brainwashed by determinism, do you know what one of the objective evidences is? Lack of prayer; someone said why do we have the problem of prayer. Well, we have many reasons why we have problems in prayer but one of them is the fact that Christians by the carload have bought determinism, the idea that nature is a machine that can’t be changed by prayer and by God. You see, prayer is a petition addressed to God as the Lord and the master of the machine, so to speak. He built it; in the first place, it doesn’t have all of the characteristics of a machine, but He built it. And we find in James 5, James uses that very example, he says look, don’t you remember Elijah? What did Elijah do? He prayed and then it was affected in the meteorology of the climate at that particular point on the eastern end of the Mediterranean an actual physical change in response to a petition and a prayer request. Therefore, many Christians today, because they re influenced and don’t even know it, they don’t even know they’re being influenced but it works out in their everyday life, and they’ll say well, what’s the use to pray, nothing’s going to happen. Well, the reason why the say that is because they have bought this concept of determinism. That’s the real reason

And so this has affectively sliced off prayer. Now this is the way Satan always works. People expects Satan to come riding in on a horse or something with a fork in one hand and his horns in the other and say hey, I’m Satan, you wanna sin? Or something like that, being real obvious about the whole thing and make a big joke out of it and so on. Now Satan never works that way. If you study the concepts of Satan he always works through ideas, and one of the great ideas he has worked with is determinism; every divine institution, whether it’s volition, marriage, family, or national government today is under an attack of Satan. We have determinists attacking volition, we have various people trying to destroy marriage and I will show you why when we move into the area of divine institution number two, marriage, why it is today that our society is basically anti-sex, and this is a strange comment because most of you say that this is exactly where we have the problem. Oh no, it’s completely reversed because today the trend and the assault against marriage is to cause the women to behave like men and the men to behave like women, and if you study our society this goes all the way from the clothing styles that are coming out all the way on to various organizations that are operating behind the scenes to bring this about and it’s all part of a satanic attack against this divine institution.

We have attacks against the third divine institution, family. We have children being exposed to apostate academic concepts and ideas, apostate biology, apostate psychology, apostate sociology, apostate history, and after schooling eight hours a day in all of this apostate system of ideas, it doesn’t mean all of it’s wrong, it just means the overall framework is basically anti-Christian. Then Christian parents wonder, what’s happening to the young people. If you feed someone a poor diet they’re not going to be healthy, that’s the problem.

And then we find the fourth divine institution, the concept of national government under attack by those who would try to do away with war, by those who say a Christian young man cannot be involved in the military, by those who would say that we must sell our national sovereignty to the United Nations and form one-world government and all the rest of it. All these things represent attacks on basic divine institutions. And of course the young men that enter the service from Lubbock Bible Church are instructed by me that when you go in the service you learn how to kill and you learn how to kill effectively because when you’re involved in a military situation part of your job as unto the Lord is to kill and if you don’t like it just forget it right now and don’t go in the military and make a jackass out of yourself and out of Christ representing Him; I’m a Christian and I’m a conscientious objector and all the rest of the malarkey. You learn you job and if it’s at the end of an M-16 then learn it; if it’s behind the cockpit of an F-4 and you have to come in and drop napalm on 200-300 troops, you learn how to do it. That’s it, and there’s no ifs, ands or buts; this is divine institution four in action. We have sloppy Christians who don’t know anything siding with all the anti war stuff and so on. It’s just simply ignorance of Bible doctrine.

Now we come back to work on some of the attacks against divine institution number one, that’s volition. One attack, we said, was determinism. The second attack that we’re going to deal with today is the attack of evolution, the attack of evolution upon this divine institution. Now here is where a lot of Christians do not see the issue. Evolution attacks the first divine institution; let’s look at why it attacks this divine institution.

First, let’s define exactly what the attack is. Evolution is basically saying that man is part and parcel of the same natural laws that work with animals and indeed all of the so-called living part of the universe, animals in particular. In other words, here’s the argument. If we could know all of the chemical, all of the biological, all of the physical laws that operate in an animal’s body, all of the nerve systems, all of the nerve nets, all of the reactions, all of the response, if we could study animal herds and instincts and the interrelation of the various groups, and the environment, studies in ecology and so on, if we could know all of these things then basically after we had finished we would also then be able to describe man. In other words, man can be described within the framework of the same set of laws that govern the animal kingdom. Now you say I never heard that before. Have you ever taken a course in psychology? Have you ever taken a course in sociology? Have you ever taken a course in biophysics, something like this? They all, all those fields today are basically founded on this assumption.

It’s a hidden one and often not stated in the introduction of the course but it’s there all along, namely that if we could define animal behavior then we could also define man behavior. And how this comes out is through various sneaky ways. For example, in text books you’ll see this phrase in the text: man and other animals. You watch that phrase; repeat that phrase 35 times in an hour lecture and what have you done? You’ve brainwashed the whole room, because even when the questions are answered you’ll hear it by the people that have asked the question. In other words, if we get up here and bombarded you with phrases like this the concept would get in your mind unless you consciously spotted it and turned it off; man and other animals, man and other animals, man and other animals, man and other animals and suppose we said this one hundred times, man and other animals, man and other animals, you raise your hand and ask say what about man and other animals. Whoops, you’ve absorbed the idea. Why? Because it had been repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated and you weren’t careful and you just got sold a parcel because you weren’t careful when these ideas were coming your way to screen them, to judge them in the light of the Word of God.

So then we have this problem, is man essentially the same or different from the animals. And that’s why we’ve entitled the talk tonight the difference of man and the difference it makes because it does make a lot of difference which way you side. Is man different from the animals? Let’s first look at the concept of difference. Things can be different from one another in two different ways. We’re going to get into the Scriptural position in a moment but first I want to define “difference.” Let’s think about difference for a minute. How can two objects be different one from the other; there is only two ways in which objects can be different one from another. One way is they can be different in degree; what do I mean by this. You have something hot, something cold, they’re different aren’t they but they’re different only relatively; they’re different only in degree. So you have this kind of a difference.

Then things can differ in kinds; illustration, a square and a triangle. We have a square and a triangle and there’s no possible intermediate, you don’t have a triangle square and you can’t make the square into a triangle no matter how hard you try. The two are always different. In other words, there is a difference here, an absolute difference. There’s a categorical difference, a difference in kind versus a difference in degree. But to be a little sneaky about it let’s take this illustration and ask yourself how does this differ? Ice and water, is that a difference in kind or is that a difference in degree. The answer is it’s a difference in degree. Why? Because ice basically is the same thing as water, it’s a change of state but the molecular structure inside the molecules is basically the same. So here you have an apparent difference in kind but it’s really sneaky, it’s a difference in degree. In other words it’s a difference in degree but it looks like, if you look at it quickly and don’t think for a minute, it looks like a difference in kind.

Let’s look at these three positions. Who says what about man? Let’s look, man and an ape; is man different in degree from an ape, difference in kind from an ape, or does the difference look like difference in kind but it’s not really a difference in kind it’s just a difference in degree. Let’s look at it. First, is man basically different from an ape only in degree? A lot of people would say yes, but most people would say this today; most evolutionists would say this, namely that yes, it’s obvious that man is different in kind from an ape but that difference is only superficial; deep down in his very being man doesn’t differ from the ape except in degree.

Let’s make this more specific. One of the things that man has that an ape doesn’t have is the power of speech, of conceptual thinking; ape doesn’t have this. So they say well, that set man’s off but then they would spoil it by saying the reason why man has the power of speech and the power of conceptual thinking is simply because he has a little more sophisticated neurons in his brain. In other words, his brain is a little bit better than the ape, so basically, although it looks on the surface that man is different from the ape if you really go down to the explanation these people would tell you no, man is different only in degree, he’s just got some extra nerve endings in his brain and those extra nerve endings taken together set of this conceptual thinking and propositional speech and so on. So therefore man is really different in degree, not kind; basically down under he’s different in degree not kind.

However, we as Christians must take this second position, that man is different in kind, not in degree. There’s an absolute difference that sets man off from the animals. First, turn to Ecclesiastes 3. We have said that the evolutionist must take the third position, that man is different in degree even though on the surface it looks like he’s really different in kind. Now Solomon came up with the same position the modern evolutionists come to. It’s very significant that he does this because we know Solomon is an out of fellowship believer who has denied revelation; it’s very highly significant that the end result of denying the Word of God is this position. It’s very significant! When you examine the life of Charles Darwin personally and see what happened in his life you begin to see there’s more here than meets the eye.

Ecclesiastes 3:21, “Who knows the spirit of man,” and as we went through this, “that it is the one that goes upward, and who knows the spirit of the beast, that it is the spirit that goes downward.” In other words, Solomon is saying who knows if there’s really a qualitative difference between man and the beast; who can really be sure that this difference isn’t like the third position, a difference of degree only. Who can really be sure that man really is different in kind from the ape?

Before we develop the biblical position some of you would think, well isn’t this kind of silly to be arguing the point? Some would say well look, as a Christian what does it really matter whether man differs in degree or whether he differs in kind; certainly that isn’t going to make any difference in my spiritually life, certainly I can go through life and live just as well whether I am different only in degree or different in kind from the ape. And many Christians would say this but you’re absolutely wrong. Let’s look at it.

Let’s draw a little chart, and in the upper right we have man; here we have an ape, maybe he’s eating a banana and we’ll have a dog here. Now let’s draw the line like this, arrows pointing from the dog to the ape to man. Now this is not saying that dogs turn into apes in the evolutionary scale; this is just a representation, a schematic of the thing. Now if man differs only in degree from the ape, and watch the argument, we’re going to deal with the degree problem, this is what you’d learn in school, this is what all the biology teachers tell you, oh, this doesn’t bother your religion any, just relax and take it in, poison yourself…quietly. So here’s the degree. If man differs only in degree watch what happens when you start looking at this picture.

First, if there’s only a degree of difference between man and an ape, then there’s only a degree of difference between the ape and the dog and then there’s only a degree of difference between you and the dog. If that’s the case, then why do you treat your dog differently than you do other people? Maybe you don’t but most people do. Why do you treat your dog differently than people? You have no right to do so on the basis of evolution, none whatever because if you say well, he’s different from me’, he’s different, he’s different degree. Then I can turn right around and say yeah, but I know different people that differ in degree from you. I know people that differ in degree from you, they have different colored skin, they have different physical characteristics. Do you treat them differently? You know, Hitler treated the Jews differently in Germany; he was justified, then, on the basis of this because you say it’s all right to treat two things different because they differ in degree only. I treat my dog differently from me because he differs in degree and I say very good.

Now let’s apply the principle to Adolph Hitler. Hitler said the Aryan German race differs in degree from the Jews; therefore on your principle it’s all right to treat the Jews differently from the Germans. Do you see the dilemma you wind up with? It has tremendous bearing; this isn’t just a trivial problem. If these things differ only in degree then I can treat anybody I want to that differs from me any way I want to. You’ve given me the license. If you treat your dog differently then I can treat another person differently because it is only a matter of degree, there’s no difference in kind. So you open the door here to tremendous things.

Now let’s turn the question around this way and say look; you’ll say no what I have to do is treat everything the same. We’ll treat everything the same, I see the point, it’s wrong, we have to treat all men equally. So here is a Jew and here is a German. Now we have to treat them the same even though they differ in degree. Now you’ve got to treat your dog the same way you treat the Jew and the German, because they differ in degree. What right do you have to arbitrarily draw the line down here? You don’t have any real solid scientific reason for drawing the line down here, none whatever. And you’re trapped, and so therefore you can go out and you say that we should treat all things the same. If that’s the case then how come you can hunt animals and not murder? Why is it that you can go out and shoot an animal and you’re not arrested for murder but you go out and shoot a man and you’re arrested for murder? Why is that? If we only differ in degree what is the difference? So therefore this really, taken to the logical conclusion, is a very unsatisfactory way and yet most people never realize this is where evolution logically leads.

As I’ve said before, I’m facetiously suggested to some of our young people that in the biology class it would be a neat skit to pull of sometime, on having a big group sit in a class, one of the toughest guys you could get in the school and then pick out some little petite girl and set it up before hand and have this little girl sitting in the front seat and have this big guy walk into the class at the beginning, knock her on the floor and say “survival of the fittest” and sit down. And if the biology teacher would say that’s wrong—no, I’m just following out the logical conclusions of your position. You’ve just taught me that there’s no difference between man and animal, no difference in degree and therefore we can treat anything any way we want to, basically. That’s the logical conclusion. But it’s so funny, people don’t see this. Isn’t it strange that we can get this sort of… it comes to us in a sugar and it tastes so nice when you first get into and you never see where it leads. And so we have Christian teachers in the Lubbock school system who have told some of our young people don’t bother with this, this isn’t going to bother your faith, just relax, take it in, poison yourself quietly. Christians! Why do they do this? Because they haven’t got the guts to take it to the logical conclusion but I say what we ought to do is make our own waves and it’s time some of the Christian students made waves in the classroom and said okay, let’s take it to the logical conclusion. If you say that man is nothing more than an improved animal, then basically why doesn’t he act like an animal, and you have no right to accuse me that I can’t act like an animal. See, that’s where it logically leads.

Let’s go to the Bible and look at what the Bible says. The Bible says that man differs in kind, not just in degree. Genesis 2:16, here’s the classic statement that man differs in kind, not just in degree. He differs in degree but he also differs in kind and the thing that sets you off from the animals is volition, divine institution number one. “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat; [17] But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, and in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die.” Now if you were to tell someone that isn’t the logical conclusion that they had the right to choose. Now wouldn’t this look hilarious, to set up a Garden of Eden and God comes along and says hey dog, don’t eat of this tree or something like that, addressing Himself to an animal and if you eat it you’re going to be judged. It’s nonsense; it’s addressed to man because man is the one held responsible before God. And so this dimension sets man quantitatively and qualitatively off from animal kingdom. For example, if I were in class I would challenge the statement that man could be totally included in the animal kingdom; that’s a false statement. Man has certain common characteristics of the animal kingdom but you can’t say man is in the animal kingdom, he’s partly in the animal kingdom, partly in the animal kingdom, not wholly and so therefore any statement that says man is in the animal kingdom is basically an anti-Biblical statement.

Now we have man different from animals the Bible says because of volition. Let’s immediately, before we go any further, draw a practical conclusion. Let’s draw one practical conclusion from Genesis 2:16-17. The practical conclusion is this: you are never totally determined by your environment or your physical makeup or something else. You are never totally determined, you’re influenced, yes, but you are never, never swamped out. You can never come to the Great White Throne judgment and say God, I’m sorry, but you know those genes that I got from my great-grandfather, they really screwed me up. You never can say that, absolutely cannot. So therefore God holds you responsible because He has given you divine institution number one, volition and you can choose. Now you don’t like to, I don’t like to face some decisions, but you can choose. If you couldn’t there’d be no judgment. Hell is a monument do divine institution number one.

Hell says these people did have the right to choose and they choose. So hell is necessary; some people say why do we have hell. For all eternity we have hell, now isn’t that kind of stupid; why doesn’t God annihilate these people in hell? Why does God make the people who reject Christ suffer for all eternity in hell? Because of His glorification. God wants to prove for all eternity I gave you a choice and you freely chose. I gave you a choice and you freely choose, in spite of your genetic inheritance from your father, from your mother, from your grandparents, you still had the right to choose. In spite of the culture, the sociological factors that were brought to bear in your life you still had the right to choose. No man can ever plead no choice.

Now I’d like to deal with three problems that the Bible has and the Bible answers with respect to volition. There are a number of problems but three prominent ones to this doctrine of divine institution number one. The first one is an obvious one, what do you do about babies who die before they can hear the gospel? What do you do about idiots who are born with brain damage who can never exercise their volition? What do you do in general with any case where a man, because of physical damage, cannot exercise his volition? What then? Does God hold a baby responsible, a baby that could never hear the gospel?

Turn to 2 Samuel 12:18; we’re dealing with the objection to the doctrine; the objection is what about the physically damaged? What about men who are physically damaged and cannot choose? 2 Samuel 12:18 is the classic passage to answer this objection. In this particular case David has raped a woman by the name of Bathsheba and out of this union came a son. In verse 18, “And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died. And the servants of David feared to tell him that the child was dead.” Now before you read any further notice that he died on the seventh day. That’s not an accident either; what happened on the eighth day? On the eighth day the son would have been circumcised which would have brought him into the covenant position and there’s no accident here that that child died before he could be legally brought in under the covenant so one can’t come back and say well, this child was considered part of the covenant or something. No-no, he couldn’t have because he didn’t live until the eighth day. So the child died on the seventh day, and the servants of David didn’t want to tell him, “Behold, while the child was yet alive, we spoke unto him, and he would not hearken unto our voice;” what will he do now? They said David was sad, he was miserable, he was miserable, he was horrible while his baby son was dying, now what’s going to happen when we go tell him the bad news that the son is dead.

2 Samuel 12:19, “But when David saw that his servants whispered, David perceived that the child was dead.” Then David did a strange thing. “David said unto his servants, Is the child dead? And they said, He is dead. [20] Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the LORD and worshiped. Then he came to his own house; and when he required, they set bread before him and he did eat.” And this caused a little discussion among the servants. So in verse 21 the servants say what’s going on? “What thing is this that thou hast done? You did fast and weep for the child while it was alive; but when the child was dead, you did rise and eat bread.” This would be an obvious thing if you think the way a lot of believers think, go to a funeral and so on…of course they never realize, you know what a funeral is for? A funeral is for the living, not for the dead. I could say 30,000 words at a funeral and you know something; the person who is dead would never hear them. A funeral is not for the dead person, the funeral is for the living. And so David relaxed, the child is dead, no use crying over spilt milk, so he just rises up and in verse 22 he explains himself.

2 Samuel 12:22, “While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, Who can tell whether God will be gracious to me, that the child may live. [23] But now he is dead, why should I fast? Can I bring him back again?” And now the statement at the end of verse 23, “I shall to go him, but he shall not return to me.” Do you know what David is saying there? Where did David go when he died? Paradise! What does this mean? It means the child went to Paradise; a child who could never have lived to make a decision for or against Jesus Christ, a child who never had the chance to exercise his volition went to Paradise. And this theologians explain by the doctrine of the unlimited atonement. When Jesus Christ died on the cross, 1 John 1:1-2; 2 Corinthians 5 and passages in Romans 3, passages in Romans 4 teach that Jesus Christ bore the sin of the entire world, not just those who would believe, but He bore the sins of the entire world and so if all sins have been borne on the cross of Jesus Christ, what does that mean? It means that this infant, who could never exercise his volition plus or minus, evidently in some way God credits Christ’s finished work on the cross to that infant. That is the answer to the first objection to the doctrine of volition: what about those that are physically damaged and can’t exercise their volition? They are under the atonement of the cross of Jesus Christ; they have never had an opportunity to reject, they have never had an opportunity to accept, they are included in the doctrine of the unlimited atonement of Jesus Christ. That is the answer. That would stand for people with congenital brain damage and so on.

But there’s a second objection and the second objection says yes, we’re not going to be so extreme and say here’s a person who’s physically damaged to the point where he can’t use his volition, but here is a problem: what about a person who’s physically damaged and it hinders the operation of his volition, in other words, there’s a hindering going on. So here we have again physical damage but the physical damage doesn’t result in the annihilation of volition, it results in the restriction of volition. So here we have restriction; what about such a person in this kind of situation? Again the Bible has the answer. Turn to John 9 and the healing of the blind man.

John 9:1-7, “And Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from his birth.” Here you have a congenital physical defect; this person has been born deformed. Incidentally, at this point we might remark, why are people born deformed? The general reason why people are born deformed is the same reason as you have suffering of any degree in the world, it’s the fall of man of Genesis 3, the literal physical fall of Adam resulted in a shockwave that went through the biological, physical, chemical kingdom of both animal, plant and man. Death, physical death, resulted from sin, not just spiritual death, spiritual death. This is why evolution is wrong, it says there is death without sin but the Bible says there’s only death after sin. Somebody had to be responsible to bring about death. So in John 9 we have this problem with a man born with a congenital defect. We know basically why it happened, it happened because of the fallout from the fall. But why did it happen to this specific man?

John 9:2, “And His disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” And this is a cruel thing, for oftentimes people have this idea, because there’s a family that has a child that’s born and that child is defective in some way, there’s all sort of these sneaky innuendos that oh, his parents must have sinned and they brought this on. And Jesus gives the answer here in verse 3. “Neither has this man sinned, nor his parents, but that the work do God should be manifest in him.” He’s a giving a specific answer to that specific man. In other words Jesus says from all eternity God planned for that blind beggar to be at that position at that moment in history so that Jesus Christ could use him as a platform to manifest the works of God.

John 9:4, “I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day; the night comes, when no man can work.” And with verse 4 Jesus announces that there are going to be times when these physical defects can’t be healed; there are going to be times when God does not do what He’s going to do in verses 1-7. There are times when He does, but this is not habitual, it is not God’s will that all congenital defects be healed; Jesus says I’m doing it while I’m in the world and there’s a night coming when no man can work. And so He warns us that what He’s going to do here in the next few verses is not to be considered the cure all for all congenital defects; it’s only for this one at this time at this point. And then He says, [5] “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world. [6] And when He had thus spoken,” He does a very interesting thing in verse 6 that tightens up your appreciation for volition. “And when He had thus spoken, He spat on the ground,” “spit on the ground” would be a better way, “and made clay of the spit, and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. [7] And said unto him, Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (which is by interpretation, Sent). He went his way, therefore, and washed, and came seeing.”

Now please notice the action of Jesus Christ in verse 6; Jesus Christ did not short out that man’s volition. What did He do? He made up for that congenital blindness, in other words, look, suppose this is the man’s volition, the man wants to see. That volition is encircled with a physical defect, and that physical defect keeps that volition from operating. The volition can operate in a limited circle but when it comes to seeing volition can’t…he can desire to see but he doesn’t have the capacity to let his volition flow out into action. And so Jesus Christ in verse 6 takes care of the lack of capacity to perform the will of the volition. But, He doesn’t make up for volition, because then he says in 7, with an imperative mood, “Go,” that’s addressed to the volition. In other words, what Jesus does, He breaks the shackles of the physical defect and then in that freed human volition He says “Go,” exercise your volition. So Jesus Christ is not in the business of turning people into automatons and robots. Jesus Christ in His redemption is interested in increasing your capacity but He does not affect your volition. [Tape turns]

Jesus Christ breaks down the barriers to do God’s will, but He does not make up for your volition; in the end He always says you go, it’s an imperative mood addressed to the volition. All verbs in the imperative mood are addressed to the volition of man. So we have here a clear statement that Jesus Christ recognizes there will be times when you want to do things for the Lord and you can’t do things for the Lord. Last time we gave 1 Corinthians 8:12, when it says, “If there first be a willing mind it is accepted, according to that which a man has, and not according to that which he has not.” What is he saying there, Paul, in 2 Corinthians? He’s saying look, there might come a time when you want to give money to a person who desperately needs it, who’s in the Lord’s will and you know that by giving this money to that person you can help them, and you’ve prayed about it this is God’s will. There’s only one problem, there’s no money to give, nothing. So therefore God says that in that situation, where your volition is cramped by physical circumstance God credits you anyway. It’s exciting, He credits your volition anyway, even though it does not have the capacity to act out it’s credited.

2 Corinthians 8:12 says whether you have it or not it’s credited, positive volition. This is why the Christian life centers on the volition, why I always draw these “V’s”, plus or minus signs and so on, because that is where the Christian life starts. Do you want to do God’s will? Don’t worry about whether you can or not, just do you want to do it? And that, incidentally, is the key to divine guidance. We say, how can you determine God’s will for your life? Very simple and one general principle: do you want to? Do you really want to? Are you willing to say I want God’s will whatever that will may be? Now immediately when you say it, do you know what’s going to happen? I’d better not say that because God might send me off to Africa. Or, I’d better not say that because it might be God’s will that I do some other gruesome thing that I can’t stand. Or it might be God’s will that I go through life single, for those of you who are single, and for those of you who are married, good Lord, it might be God’s will for me to stay married the rest of my life.

So the problem is that do you want to do God’s will, whatever it may be? In other words, the whole problem in divine guidance isn’t the Lord’s will; the whole problem in divine guidance is your volition. That’s where the problem is, not the will. God will make the will known; it’s the volition that’s the problem.

So therefore this is the Biblical answer to objection number two, namely, what do you do about physical defects and damages that hinder volition? God says this is no problem; I credit your positive volition, whether you can actually outwork this or not, I credit your desire, your willingness to do it.

Now there’s a third problem with volition, maybe you haven’t thought of this one but it’s registered in the pages of the Word of God. What about this: spiritual damage to volition. What about spiritual damage? What do you do when the Bible says “God hardens” a man’s heart? What do you do about those passages, where it seems that God locks the volition and the man can’t decide. What do you do about those things? So we have now a third problem to deal with, the problem of volition, what about the cases when volition is destroyed or is affected by spiritual factors, what do we do then?

We have one thing, the fall of man. Turn back to Genesis 3:8; the Lord Jesus Christ in His preincarnate form walks in the Garden of Eden; there’s a problem, Adam and Eve have fallen and they are hiding in the bushes, and they’re not having a Bible study. What’s happening in verse 8? “And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.” This is operation fig leaf again, running away from the presence of God. Their volition had been affected in the sense that now they just wanted to be out, they wanted out from God. And you might say the fall hardened their volition in a negative sense, and this has been the classical doctrine of total depravity, in that every member of the human race since, if left to their own, would result in a negative volition. But, the key word is “if left to their own.” What does God do? Verse 9, “And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said to him, Where are you?” So God overcomes the effect of the fall here by calling to the man.

So we have a man who is fallen and his volition begins to harden on the negative side and he doesn’t want the presence of God, he runs from the presence of God. This, by the way, is sin and please notice there’s nothing here about drinking and smoking and all the rest of the things that may truly be issues. But that’s not the primary issue; nothing. Adam wasn’t having a stogie in the bushes here in verse 8; smoking wasn’t even mentioned in the Garden of Eden, they didn’t have smoke pollution, they just wanted out from the presence of God, that’s all. And that’s the heart and it’s really the center of sin.

So we have in verse 9 God calling Adam and saying some to Me, and here you have love expressed. Love in the Word of God means I initiate action toward one who does not deserve that action and here you have God expressing His love toward Adam. Of course God was omniscient, and Christ could have walked by the bush and said well, tra la la, we’ll see you around; we’ll make some more tomorrow. And what would have happened? Nothing, Adam and Eve would still be sitting there some place, but what did God do? He stopped and He called to them. Now God didn’t have to say this; this is sheer grace because God loved Adam. This is grace. Now Adam didn’t deserve it and Eve didn’t deserve it but God did it anyway, that’s the doctrine of grace. God loved them and so He called to them.

So we come now to the doctrine of common grace for the call of God. To see the problem again turn to Deuteronomy 5. This again exposes the natural inclination of men to go on negative volition. Remember after the commandments were spoken in verse 22, and please remember now Moses didn’t just trot up there and dream these things up and take his jackknife up out and cut on some slab and come walking down, hey folks, I just thought of a plan. That’s not how it happened. Moses went up there and he heard words. And by the way, not only did Moses hear words but a million people heard words too, the Ten Words as the Hebrew says or what we call the Ten Commandments were a public address by God. If you had been there with a tape recorder you could have taped God’s voice; imagine what a recording that would be. You could have taped and heard God’s voice.

So in Deuteronomy 5:22, “These words,” see, “the LORD spoke in all your assembly,” they heard the words of God, it wasn’t just Moses coming off the hill; he did come off the hill later with the rest of the Law, but these Ten Commandments were a public address before all of Israel, and God spoke these words “out of the midst of the midst of the fire, and of the cloud, and out of the thick darkness, with a great voice; and He stopped,” that’s what it means, “and He added no more.” “And He stopped. And He wrote them in two tables of stone,” now look at the reaction of the people in verse 23, “And it came to pass, when ye heard the voice … that ye came near unto Me, all the heads of your tribes, and your elders. [24] And ye said, Behold, the LORD our God has shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard His voice out of the midst of the fire; we have seen this day that God does talk with man, and He lives. [25] Now therefore, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the LORD our God any more then we shall die.”

Now here is the natural sin nature of man coming out. If God were to speak to you you’d all climb under the pews. That’s the natural inclination, to get away from the presence of God in the view of our guilt before Him. People always say I don’t believe in original sin, I’d like to see God and talk to Him one time. They’d hit the deck and it would be a physical objective evidence of original sin because that’s exactly how they’d react, they’d run from the presence of God. And this, by the way, is why before you pray you have to have 1 John 1:9, because if you don’t have 1 John 1:9 you have no way of solving the guilt problem in the presence of God and you can’t stand with confidence in the presence of God when your conscience says you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong. You have to use 1 John 1:9.

So here we have a second illustration of man’s natural inclination to run away from God. Now if it were true that God said all right, I’ve just had it with you all, forget it, if you want to run, run, take off, the globe is five thousand mile radius and you’ll have quite a run before you come back here again, just run. Now God could have done that but God is a God of love and He calls, just like Jesus Christ in the preincarnate form in the Garden called to Adam and Eve in the bushes and said why are you there. There’s a calling. We describe this calling, technically, by the doctrine of common grace, and it’s this calling where God speaks to people who are naturally inclined to negative volition, and He speaks in three spheres and so we’re going to draw three concentric circles, because common grace has these three spheres.

The first and outer sphere is all men. What are some examples of God speaking to men? You find it in Matthew 5:45; He speaks again in Acts 14:17, and by these references we refer to the doctrine that God in His grace blesses believer and unbeliever. Paul uses this is an evangelistic context in Acts 14:17, where he says to people, listen, God loves you and the proof of His love is that He’s calling to you in the circumstances of life. Many of you have had this experience, before you became a Christian you had some pretty close calls; before you became a Christian maybe you were doing something and you got yourself into a jam and somehow you just got out of the jam, and you had a sneaky feeling, you know, I think God kind of worked around this thing and got me out of this jam. And oftentimes this has been instrumental in leading people to Jesus Christ. That’s how it was with me, I looked upon my life and I kept getting blessing, blessing, blessing and there was a hollow feeling about it all so I knew this wasn’t really the blessing, but there was just some action going there that it was beyond my explanation and some of you have had this.

This is the doctrine of common grace, that God is calling to you through the circumstances and situations in your life and there may be jams, it may be with other people, it may be your relation with your parents, it may be a relation with boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, but in some area God works this way. It may be a business reversal, you may be involved in so many activities that you’re coming unglued and then finally God gives you a heart attack or God lowers the boom on you and all of a sudden business goes back, school goes bad or something and you get yourself head over heels in debt or something happens along the line and everything seems like it’s going to crash in. And then it crashes, and then it drives you to a closer relationship with the Lord or it drives you to the gospel if you haven’t received Christ yet.

And then you’ll turn back years later and you’ll say thank You God for letting the ceiling fall in on my head because if You hadn’t I’d still be an unbeliever today. And when you can look back in your life and say thank You God for hitting me over the head and knocking some sense in…it’s the old saying, you know sometimes God, in order to get a man to look up has to put him flat on his back, stiff-necked. So therefore this has the idea that common grace, God will do these things and He’ll bring disasters into your life, in love…in love, to turn your eyes toward Him. So this is the outer sphere and this is common to all men.

Another sphere out here is the doctrine of unlimited atonement and this means Jesus Christ has died for all of your sins. You didn’t ask Him to do it, did you? Did you write a letter when you were born and say look, would You please die for my sins, I’ve got a problem. No, you didn’t do that at all; Jesus Christ died for your sins before you were born.

So now we contract to the smaller circles, God in some areas at some times in history in addition to this general calling has an even more intense form. This more intense form is spelled out in such passages as Genesis 6:3; Romans 13:1 and here is where God restrains sin through government, or through some other means. God acts to restrain people who will naturally revolt.

Now we have seen this operate in our country. You couldn’t be a knowledgeable citizen of this nation without honestly admitting that God has put a ceiling or a lid over a lot of the hanky-panky that’s going on in our country. We have had criminals and have at high places men who should have been hung for treason and they’ve gotten away with all sorts of activities and yet God has continued to restrain their action, giving us more time. If God had not been doing this to our country we would have fallen by now. No country in history has made the mistakes America has made in the last 30 years; none. We have made one foolish decision after another foolish decision and followed one idiot with another idiot and we have led ourselves into very serious times and if God had left the natural flow of cause and effect we would have gone down years ago. But the matter of the fact is, we still have an enviable position in the history of the world. Why is that? Because God in His grace has restrained the outworking of sin.

Now we come to an even smaller circle of this calling. First we have the general calling where God where God is calling to men. Then we have an inner circle where God is restraining in some areas. Sometimes He doesn’t restrain, and we have seen this in history. Now we come down to John 16:8-11, that’s the center of the circle and that’s the calling of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Some men at some points in history get called through the gospel itself to consider God and the whole great problems. In other words, they never even thought of the problem until suddenly someone told them about the specific gospel of Jesus Christ and that was used by God to call them to Himself.

So we make these circles, one each smaller than the other, indicating that less and less men receive this type of calling. There were millions and millions of men who have died who have not heard the gospel. And there were millions of men who haven’t lived in a society where God graciously restrains sin. You stop and think of the blessings that you have in this country. You have all three of the calls of God on you, and I don’t think there’s an American citizen in this land from one border to another that hasn’t had call by God in at least three different ways: God has blessed in the general sense that He blesses the world; God has blessed in restraining the sin and putting the lid on outworking of evil in our society, and God in particular has ministered the Word of God in this country. So the judgment is all the greater on those who have the greater opportunity.

Well, that’s the fall of man, but what would you say about those people who have volition, who have the calling, but who habitually reject? Is there ever a time when God begins to take action? Yes there is. Genesis 15:16, here we have volition, let’s recall what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the problem, is it possible to spiritually damage the volition? Is it possible to spiritually damage the volition? We’ve said that the fall of man damaged volition and it would have been a disaster had it not been for common grace, for the fact of God graciously calling through these three means that we’ve outlined. But is there another way, even after all this is said and done, is it possible? Yes it is.

Genesis 15:16 gives you a case in point, the Amorites or the Canaanites. He’s predicting something to Abraham and He says in verse 16, “But in the fourth generation they shall come here again; for the iniquity” or “the outworking of evil of the Amorites,” and included in the Amorites are the Canaanites and all these, “is not yet full.” In other words, what God is saying, that these people I have called to, just like I called to Adam and Eve in the bushes; they are fallen men but I have made up for the fall in the sense that I’ve called them. I’ve called them through nature, I’ve called them through various other agencies and they said no, no, no, no, and so He says to Abraham, I want you Abraham to wait down here. Abraham is down in Egypt, Abraham is taking a little vacation down here near Cairo and he’s left the Amorites in charge up here, and God says just clear out, take a vacation until I tell you to come back. And He says this vacation is going to last through your life, your son’s life, his son’s life, and four generations.

And later they’re going to come back, that’s under Moses, and they’re going to conquer this land and when they conquer this land, do you know what’s going to happen? There’s going to be an order given to the Jews; an order that has been misunderstood down through history, especially by amateurs who teach Bible on religious campuses, and it is that Moses was commanded to annihilate the Canaanites, destroy them He said, men, women and children…destroy! And people say ooh, how could God possibly do this. Here is why God did it, because He said these people went on negative volition and the social structure became so imbedded with evil God said I am going to take my hands off. This common grace that I have graciously used to restrain evil in this society, it’s off. And you know what happens if you boil water under pressure; just before you get it to the boiling point you pull the lid off what happens? That water immediately starts to boil. Why? Because you’ve decreased the air pressure over the surface of the water and that’s exactly what God is saying here, I will work with a society, I will work with an individual, but when I see they have rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, what I’m going to do is I take My hands off and I let that negative volition work its way out until it hardens solid.

So this is what He did with the Canaanites and this is why God could authorize four generations later, wipe them out, every one of them, kill them. Now that wasn’t just a bloodthirsty order; God removed these people, or tried to through the Jews, He never was successful because of Israel’s volition, but God ordered the extermination of people whose volition had been damaged beyond repair. These people had so sinned against the Lord that God removed common grace, and when God removed the common grace these people went negative, negative, negative, negative, negative, negative to the point where they had damaged their own volition. They had committed spiritual suicide. And to a race that has committed spiritual suicide God says there’s only one thing left, I will destroy you physically from history. You have no meaning left.

Look, why wouldn’t God remove them from history. Here’s your life, from birth to death. Suppose you were a Canaanite and from early childhood you learned all this garbage that they taught their kids and probably had some public school system in Canaan, and they taught them evolution and all the rest of it, and they on until they got so negative later on in life that God said I am going to remove this great restraining ministry of grace, and when I do that, no contest any more; can’t hear the gospel. They could have gone in here and evangelized, evangelized, evangelized, evangelized, it would have been a waste of time. God says listen, it’s a waste of time for you to be around, you’ve just tubed your whole existence and there’s no reason for you to be around because your volition has been destroyed, spiritually you are incapable of a decision for or against Jesus Christ, you’ve made it, you’ve gone negative, so forget it and I’ll eliminate you from history. And that’s what God did from that case.

There are several other example of this in history when God does this. He did it with Pharaoh; do you remember how Pharaoh, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, how He did it. Why did He do that? Let’s look at this example, Exodus 3:19; God says, “I am sure that the king of Egypt will not let you go, no, not by a mighty hand.” God in His omniscience knows how Pharaohs was going to decide, and yet doesn’t God do a funny thing? He tells Moses I want you to go there anyway. I know that Pharaoh’s going to go negative, I know Pharaoh’s going to say no, I’m not going to let you go, and yet God says to Moses you keep at it, keep after them, badger him, badger him, badger him, hammer away, hammer away, hammer away because when you take a person who’s gone on negative volition and you keep hammering and hammering and hammering and hammering you harden that volition, harden the person, and the person damns himself. That’s what God did to Pharaoh and that’s what it means by God hardening the heart of Pharaoh. God let Pharaoh damn himself and that was through this process of destroying gradually Pharaoh’s volition.

Now Revelation 13:8 for the final example. One other time in history this occurs, it occurs several times but one other time in great magnitude and that’s during the time of the Great Tribulation. Here we have the Church Age beginning at the cross, the resurrection, and the descending of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, down to the rapture of the Church, and the seven years of the Tribulation, Second Advent of Christ. During these last seven years of this time of the Tribulation there are going to be people on the earth who are going to be used by the great beast or the antichrist to gather together his ecumenical system of religion and politics, and they are going to do so because of spiritual reasons.

Revelation 13:8, “All that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life, of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” In other words, during this time period there are going to be millions and millions and millions of people on the face of the globe who are going to worship the beast, and they are going to worship him because in time past they have gone on negative volition and God says all right, you people have rejected… first of all, you rejected the preaching of the gospel during the Church Age and therefore you survived into the Tribulation, you have rejected the testimony of the rapture. The rapture itself will be a testimony t God’s work and they’ve rejected that. So they’ve gone negative here with the Church Age, they’ve gone negative on the rapture, they’ve gone negative on the preaching during the Tribulation, they’ve gone negative, negative, negative, and so God says fine, do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to send a guy to you and he’s going to deliberately deceive you. Now you say well, that’s being unfair. Oh no it isn’t; these people have gone negative, negative, negative and so God says I’m going to send you a man who is the henchman of Satan and he’s not going to have horns either, he is going to be very handsome, he is going to have tremendous leadership ability, and everybody is going to vote for him because he parts his hair on the right side, and he’s going to have all the usual attractions of a politician except he is going to have the ability to bring world-wide peace and God says with that I’m going to deceive you. You people were always anti war, anti war, anti war, anti war, who swallowed human viewpoint by the carload, you’re getting your day because I’m going to bring a man who’s going to offer you just exactly what you want and you’re going to fall for him by the millions. And so here we have this beast.

And this beast is able to get the people to rebel to such a degree that in Revelation 6:16, you have a remarkable observation of these people. Here are people with their volition spiritually damaged reacting to a crisis situation. You want to see how these people act with a damaged volition. In Revelation 6:16, these people, at the crisis moment, when Jesus Christ returns, watch their reaction; isn’t this amazing. Here they see Jesus Christ in person coming, and you’d think they’d bow down, why here is the evidence, Jesus Christ Himself is coming, but look what they say, “And say to the mountains and rocks, fall on us, hide us from the face of Him that sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb.” Why do people react this way? On the conscious level I am sure these people are sincere. This is the horror of volition when it’s destroyed spiritually, that on this level your mind is sort of like this; it’s kind of like an iceberg, it’s got conscious up here, unconscious down here, and they have rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected to the point where they’re even unconscious of their own rejection, and it comes this time in history when God returns, Jesus Christ comes, and they are perfectly sincere when they say “let the rocks fall on us,” we don’t want it, let the rocks fall on us. If you preach to the gospel to them at that moment they say we don’t want to believe, we sincerely do not want to. And this is what happens when volition is destroyed spiritually.

So what’s worse, being born congenitally defect, being born like David’s son where you never have a choice? Oh no, don’t feel sorry for the idiot, the idiot is covered by the atonement of Jesus Christ. Don’t feel sorry for those with congenital defects like the blind man because God can make up and give them a chance. Who is it to be pitied? It is the people who have the volition and go on negative, negative, negative, negative, all during their life until God finally says I’ve had it, and that’s it. And of all the three classes those are the people to be most pitied.

So let’s summarize this second attack on volition; the attack is, is there a difference between man and animal? There are two answers you can give; the two answers are no, there aren’t any significant differences between man and animal. If you believe this then you should be honest to live out the results and live like an animal. If there is a difference, and the Bible says that difference is volition, then it changes the picture completely. This means that no matter what your background, no matter what kind of a home life you have had, a horrible home life, a bad home life, maybe no home life, maybe your parents beat you four times a day or something like this while you were growing up. You had a horrible background; maybe you lived under extreme pressure, maybe you have certain physical defects, maybe you economically aren’t able to make it in certain areas and so on. Maybe you’re frustrated because of all these things. Do you know what the doctrine of divine institution one says to you? You still have an area over which God will hold you responsible for your free decisions, and you can never come back and say well God, You never gave me a chance. Maybe He didn’t in some areas, but the doctrine of divine institution one says in the crucial area of all areas you had your choice.

John 7:17, Jesus said, those “who will to do My will, will know of the doctrine, whether it be of Myself or whether it truly be from God.” And Jesus passed out the gauntlet at that time and He challenges every thinking person, if you desire to do God’s will, and you seek it out, God always rewards those who seek. And you can look at the Bible, the pages of the Bible and you can study your Bible from dawn to dusk and it isn’t going to help you one bit unless you desire positively to do God’s will. And you can sit here and accumulate all sorts of memory of hearing words but that won’t solve your problem until you desire positively to do God’s will in your life, whatever it is. And that’s a wonderful thing; you are an individual. That’s one of the great corollaries to divine institution one, nobody can choose for you. That’s why it’s against legalism; legalism means that you come into a congregation and you have your little pet taboo, it isn’t based on the Word of God but you have your own little taboo, and you go around banging everybody over the head with this taboo. In other words, you are trying to decide for them. Now the Bible says oh no, that’s legalism, that’s not true fundamentalism, that’s not true Biblical Christianity, that’s just something, tabooism or something that you’ve picked up from somewhere and if you have picked that up I’m sorry for you.

But volition means that you are an absolutely unique person. No one will have the opportunities to make the decisions you have; no one will ever be faced with exactly the same decisions that you are faced with, and nobody is ever going to be called to account for the decisions that you have been called to make. So therefore it can something wonderful. It’s something scary though, because it means that we all have a responsibility from which we can never escape. No matter how hard we run, no matter how many sleeping pills we take to get away from it, the Bible keeps coming back and hitting you over the head again and again, but you’ve got a choice…you’ve got a choice. You’ve got a choice!