Sermons
“Out of My Hands”
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The scripture readings from John 1022 to 30, I'll be reading from the ESV.
John 10 starting in verse 163.
At that time, the feast of dedication took place at Jerusalem.
It was winter, and Jesus walking in the temple in the colonnade of the Solomon.
So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, How long will you keep us in suspense?
If you are the Christ, tell us plainly.
Jesus answered them, I told you, and you do not believe.
The works that I do in my father's name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep.
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.
I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand.
My father, who has given them to me is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the father's hand.
I and the father are one.
Sometimes technology steals from some of our fondest joys in life.
For instance, GPS has cheated us.
Out of some of those wonderful occasions where we were trying to travel by navigation, or follow the directions of somebody who says, when you get to the clump of trees, turn right.
Go straight past the 3 cows in the pasture.
And when you go by the red barn, not the gray barn, the red barn, you need to turn left.
I remember when Debbie and I would travel, Debbie was the navigator.
And we will be traveling on a highway.
We're traveling, you know, 55, 65 miles an hour.
And those are back in the days of the Rand McNally maps.
You young people don't know what you've missed.
And so we would be traveling and I would say to Debbie, well, where is it that we're supposed to turn?
How close is our turn?
She would get the map out and she's trying to find a place and everything, and she'd say, that was it.
as we cruise by at 25 miles an hour.
I was not always gracious about those kinds of things.
And GPS has cheated us out of that because now you just get an address.
And you plug it into your GPS, your navigation system, and your car says in that annoying voice, turn right, turn right, turn right now.
And so you know exactly where to turn.
Well, Suppose you were given the directions to a friend's house in the following fashion.
I want you, as you're coming to my house to turn left on Mutton Chop Road.
Go straight through two intersections with stop lights and then turn again at the next stop sign.
Make a left on the 210rd road.
Continue straight until you reach a stop sign and make a left turn again.
Aren't you glad for GPS?
You know, you'll get there if you manage to follow all the directions.
If the directions are correct, you'll get to your location.
But what if you started, and as I sometimes have to say to Debbie, your other left hand.
What if you made a wrong turn in the very beginning?
Every turn after that is gonna put you on the wrong street.
You're not going to get your destination because you started.
Wrong This morning I want to talk to you.
About the systematic theology sys uh called Calvinism.
And Calvinism like this example of getting directions and making a wrong turn in the very beginning, Calvinism does that very thing.
It takes a wrong turn in the beginning and understandably then ends up in the wrong place, having taken every wrong street after that.
We understand that when you build a building, you have to start with a good foundation.
If you don't have a good foundation, then as good as the construction might be on top of that foundation, the house is going to be, or building is going to be compromised.
In the same fashion, as we study God's plan of redemption as it's laid out in the scriptures by the Holy Spirit, we need to start with the proper initial assumptions or premises.
And Calvinism does not do that.
Now, you may not wake up every morning worrying about Calvinism, but Calvinism is making a resurgence in the religious world and specifically among members of the church.
There are uncertain writings by some, suggesting that they're being influenced by Calvinism or what's sometimes called neo-Calvinism.
And so what I'd like to do is to begin A series of sermons that will spread out over a number of months on Calvinism.
And I want to begin this morning with kind of a survey of that systemic theology.
We're going to begin by providing a historical background for uh Calvinism.
Where did it come from?
How did it get started?
We'll talk about the 21.
Major tenets of Calvinism and how they are related to one another.
And then I want to end by showing you how important this is, suggesting some, not all, of the consequences that come about as a result of this false doctrine.
We're going to start with John Calvin, although that's not really where all of the major tenets of Calvinism began.
John Calvin lived, as you can see on the screen in the 214th century.
He was a French reformer.
He actually was trained in uh religion, but he became dissatisfied with the Roman Catholic Church, which was in many places the only game in town at that point, and took up the study of law.
But he was outspoken about his reformed ideas, and so Calvin was forced to flee to Switzerland, where in 212, at the age of 228, he published his seminal work called The Institutes of the Christian Religion, which is really a laying out of this systematic theology that we call Calvinism.
Calvin would later move to Geneva, Switzerland, where he would have tremendous influence in spreading what are today considered Protestant doctrines or reformed theology and not only in Geneva, but his influence would spread across the European continent.
So that today, most groups that have come out of the Reformation movement at least subscribe to some degree to what we call Calvinism.
Later, in fact, born not long before Calvin died, was another man by the name of Jacobus or Jacob Arminius.
Arminius was a Dutch Reformed theologian who, as a professor of theology at the University of Leiden.
Disagreed with the Calvinistic doctrine of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands.
There were a couple of documents that had come out and were essentially subscribed to as a good descriptions of God's redemptive plan, the, the Belgic confession, the Heidelberg catechism had come out in the 103.
210s, there were important summaries of the doctrine of the reformed churches and Arminius was very vocal in his disagreement with some of the contents of those documents, particularly the idea of predestination.
I want to dispel what I think is a misunderstanding of Arminius.
Arminius didn't agree with that, didn't disagree with everything that John Calvin taught.
We wouldn't agree with Arminius in all of his teachings.
Sometimes, uh, people say, well, if you're not a Calvis, you're an Armenian.
No, we're not either, because we wouldn't agree with either man's summary of God's redemptive plan.
Those who became followers of Arminius who subscribed to his way of thinking, his understanding were known as Armenians or remonstrances.
After his death, these Armenians presented a written protest to the reform faith, uh, to the Dutch parliament.
And that sparked a synod, a meeting of the Church of the Netherlands, the Reformed Church of the Netherlands, and in that meeting in 228, they condemned the five points of the Armenians and suggested in opposition, 25 points.
That basically are Calvinism.
This is back in 1618 and wasn't in English.
And so what we typically think of as Calvinism and particularly the acronym Tulip, didn't come along until the early 1900s.
But it is a good acronym for understanding or maybe remembering the five major tenets of Calvinism, and that's what we're going to be talking about this morning.
Now, I said this morning that the foundation of Calvinism is inherited depravity and that's a doctrine that did not originate with John Calvin.
If you were to go back into the church fathers much earlier in the history of the church, men's like, men like Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, and origin, all of you remember when they lived, believed that somehow mankind, all mankind, had participated in the sin of Adam.
And that's at the core of the idea of inherited, total inherited depravity.
Augustine, who lived in the last part of the 4th century and into the beginning of the 5th century, was responsible for fully developing this idea of original sin, which is another way of describing the doctrine of total inherited depravity.
The reformers, those who were resisting or trying to reform the Roman Catholic Church did not substantially disagree with the Catholics on the doctrine of total inherited depravity.
The Roman Catholic Church holds to the idea of total inherited depravity and nearly every mainline Protestant body in America today holds to the Calvin, Calvinistic concept of total inherited depravity or some variation of that main concept.
And so that's an important idea.
It is essentially the foundation for the other four tenets of what we call Calvinism.
Now, my intention this morning is not to give you an in-depth discussion of these five tenants.
Time wouldn't allow us to do that.
It's a rather involved type discussion.
So what we're going to do this morning is just survey these 5 tenants so that we get a feel for how They work together and what are some of the conclusions that John Calvin and others came to and then in successive sermons, studies, we'll look at each of these doctrines in more detail and talk about how they are opposed to scripture.
But I am going this morning, allow some who hold these doctrines to give you an explanation of what they mean, rather than me just summarizing it, I'm going to read from confessions of faith and other writings by Calvinists.
So Toherited depravity.
According to the Philadelphia Confession of Faith, says this, and I apologize for the smallness of the type.
I'm going to read these things, so maybe you can hear it if you can't read it well.
Our first parents, by this sin, speaking of the sin in the garden by Adam and Eve, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them.
And so the idea is that when Adam and Eve sinned as the representatives, particularly Adam, of the human race, what they did influenced all of us.
They acted on our behalf, so to speak.
And we in them whereby death came upon all, all becoming dead in sin and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.
They being the root and by God's appointment standing the room instead of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity.
Descending from them by ordinary generation, being now conceived in sin and by nature, children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death, and all other misery, spiritual, temporal, and eternal unless the Lord Jesus set them free.
Please understand this was written a long time ago and so the English, it's a little bit different from the way we would probably write.
From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions.
So two things that I want to say to summarize what they've said, and that is that when they acted, Adam and Eve acted, and they sin.
Every one of us in a sense participated in that sense.
So when we're born, we're born guilty of Adam's sin.
No such thing as an innocent child.
They're all guilty of sin from the time that they're born or perhaps even before that, depending on how you understand Calvinism.
And secondly, not only are we guilty of Adam's sin when we're born, but our nature has been corrupted.
That is human nature has been corrupted in Adam and Eve, and they passed that corrupted nature down.
We're all descendants of Adam, right?
And so all of us inherit both the guilt of Adam's sin and that corrupted nature, meaning that we really can't do anything good in the sense of seeking salvation.
That's important to understand.
In the sense of seeking salvation, and that corrupted nature is what's responsible for our sins that we commit.
That is total inherited depravity.
And it is followed in that acronym by unconditional election.
Again, from the writings of Calvinists, the doctrine of election declares that God before the foundation of the world chose certain individuals from among the fall.
Members of Adam's race to be the objects of his undeserved favor.
These and these only he purposed to save.
God could have chosen to save all men, for he had the power and authority to do so, or he could have chosen to save none, for he was under no obligation so mercy to any, but he didn't either.
Instead, he chose to save some and to exclude others.
His eternal choice of particular sinners unto salvation was not based upon any foreseen act or response on the part of those selected.
That's important.
When God made this choice, he didn't look forward into your life to see what kind of person you would be or what you might do with your life.
He made a choice about you and he made a choice about me before the foundation of the world, had nothing to do with anything that we would do in this life, continuing on.
But was based solely on his own good pleasure and sovereign will.
Thus, election was not determined by or conditioned upon anything that man would do, but resulted entirely from God's self-determined purpose.
And so again, just to, to kind of summarize this quickly, God chose specific individuals to be saved.
Now I think this is interesting, this summary, this is not part of a confession, it's part of a book that's explaining uh Calvinism.
But they make the observation that God chose to save some and to exclude others.
Most Calvinistic expressions or documents do not talk about God choosing to exclude others.
It only, they only talk about God choosing to save some.
But the implication of that choice is that he excluded others.
If he chose A to be saved, but not B, then he essentially chose B to be lost.
Does that make sense?
Calvinists don't talk about that.
Because that makes God seem. Arbitrary.
It makes God seem mean perhaps.
Because after all, you're going to be lost if you're not chosen by God, regardless of what you've done or haven't done.
It's what happened to you and Adam sinned, and you had nothing to do with that.
And so it's just this, well, as one of my study partners says, it's just a big cruel joke.
Where God brings us into this world by human generation, by birth, knowing that we're going to be lost and he predetermined that before the foundation of the world.
And that's the Calvinistic concept of a just God.
So that's unconditional election.
Moving along here to the next major tenant in the Tulip acronym is limited atonement.
And again, from the same source as the previous one, Christ's redeeming work was intended to save the elect only and actually secured salvation for them.
His death was a substitutionary sacrifice of the penalty of sin in the place of certain specified sinners.
And so the thing to remember on this doctrine is that Jesus did not die for everyone.
He only died for the elect.
The elect are the ones that God has chosen or elected to be saved.
Well, that makes sense, as we'll note in just a little bit.
There's another problem with this doctrine, but for now, just remember that limited atonement means Jesus didn't die for everybody.
He only died for the people that God had decided would be saved.
And then the eye is irresistible grace.
Although the general outward call of the gospel can be and often is rejected, the special inward call of the spirit never fails to result in the conversion of those to whom it is made.
This special call is not made to all sinners but is issued to the elect only.
You would have guessed that probably.
The spirit is in no way dependent upon their help or cooperation for success in his work of bringing them to Christ.
It is for this reason that Calvinists speak of the Spirit's call and of God's grace and saving sinners as being efficacious, invincible, or irresistible.
For the grace which the Holy Spirit extends to the elect cannot be thwarted or refused, it never fails to bring them to true faith in Christ.
And so here's what I want you to remember.
As they said in the opening sentence of this description, a sinner can reject the call of the gospel, but that doesn't make any difference.
Because when the spirit calls that inward special call of the Holy Spirit, which is needed to rejuvenate or regenerate the corrupted nature of the sinner, There is no resisting the spirit.
You can reject the outward call of the gospel.
The preaching of the gospel, but when the Spirit calls, it never fails to prepare the sinner so that he can accept the gospel so that he can be saved.
Never fails to bring them to true faith in Jesus Christ.
And so then the last one and perseverance of the saints, we sometimes would describe it as once saved, always saved, but the idea is that those who are elect will persevere unto the end.
Here's a statement, one statement from the Westminster Confession of faith.
They whom God hath accepted in his beloved in Christ, effectually called and sanctified by His Spirit can neither totally nor finally.
All away from the state of grace but shall certainly persevere therein to the end and be eternally saved.
Just to add to that from a previous source, the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints does not maintain that all who profess the Christian faith are certain of heaven.
It is saints, those who are set apart by the spirit who persevere to the end.
Did you catch that?
There will be some people who will proclaim to be Christians, who will profess to be believers in Christ, but they're not true elect.
And they're not going to be saved.
It is believers, those who are given true living faith in Christ, who are secure and safe in Him.
Many who profess to believe fall away, but they do not fall from grace, for they were never in grace.
And friends, that's one of the best examples of circular reasoning that you'll find.
In logical discussions.
True believers do fall into temptations and they do commit grievous sins, but these sins do not cause them to lose their salvation or separate them from Christ.
And here's the bottom line.
If God decides that you are going to be saved, and he would have decided that before the foundation of the world, and not just somebody like you, but you particularly, if God's decided that, then you're going to be saved no matter what, or God is not a sovereign God.
The next series in this lesson in this series is the sovereignty of God.
Because I think that's largely misunderstood and not just by Calvinists, but even by some members of the church.
God is a sovereign God, but we need to understand what that means.
The Calvinist says that if God decides something's going to happen to you, then it's going to happen.
And as we've said a couple of times already, if you start with the first premise wrong and everything after that tends to be tainted by illogical reasoning.
So if God decides that a person will be saved, that person must be saved or God is not a sovereign God.
Now, the 5 tenets or main points of Calvinism are not stand-alone doctrines.
By that, I mean they are interrelated.
They are connected to one another with a total inherited depravity, essentially being the foundational doctrine of these other four major tenets of Calvinism.
A fellow by the name of JC Ryle made this statement.
He is a Calvinist, and so he's writing from his perspective, his understanding of God's redemptive plan.
Here's what he says though, and I think it's worth listening to.
He says there are very few errors and false doctrines of which the beginning may not be traced up to unsound views about the corruption of human nature.
That's ironic.
Because I think he has an incorrect view of man's nature.
But what he says is correct.
You start with the wrong view of man's nature and you're gonna end up at the wrong location.
Wrong views of the disease will always bring with them wrong views of the remedy.
Wrong views of the corruption of human nature will always carry with them wrong views of the grand antidote and cure of that corruption.
Well, he's speaking from the vantage point of the Calvinist, he would suggest that we have the wrong view.
But what he says is correct in the sense that you start with the wrong view, you're gonna end up at the wrong location.
Let me show you why that's true.
Total inherited ravity.
If, if man is unable to choose salvation.
Remember, he can't because he has this corrupted nature that he inherited by physical generation from Adam and Eve.
If man's unable to choose salvation because of his corrupted nature, then God needed to make the choice for him.
That's the doctrine of unconditional election, where God decided decided whether you're going to be lost or going to be saved as a specific individual.
So that doctrine just grows out of or is the consequence of total inherited depravity.
If in that unconditional election that was necessitated by our corrupt nature, If God makes that choice and he only chooses some to be saved, Then limited atonement comes out of that.
Doctrine It would be contrary to suggest, contradictory, I should say, to suggest that God chose by implication some people to be lost and then sent Jesus to die for those lost people.
And so the Calvinist says, God's decided who's going to be saved, and those are the only persons who need the saving blood of Jesus Christ.
The rest of them are gonna be lost by implication of God's choice to save some.
And so Jesus didn't die for those lost people.
Jesus only died for the elect.
You see how these doctrines just lead one into the next one?
Go back to total inherited depravity.
If man is unable to choose salvation as a consequence of this corrupted nature, then God has to do something to enable us to Respond to the gospel.
To be saved, and that's irresistible grace.
All of us, uh, when we're born, we absolutely are outside of the purview of the gospel attraction.
And so, God has to give this special inward call by the Holy Spirit to regenerate our nature to the extent that we can even respond to the gospel.
And then be made alive.
By God And so the doctrine of irresistible grace is the response or the result of total inherited depravity also.
If man is unable to resist the grace of God, the plan of God, then those who are chosen for salvation cannot fail to be saved.
And that essentially is the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.
When God starts the salvation process, you can't stop it, no matter what you do.
People have actually debated pre uh propositions like if a man was caught, uh, was involved in in adultery rather, and he dies in the midst of that sin, he still goes to heaven if he's one of the elect.
Doesn't make any difference what he does because the imputed, the righteousness of Christ is imputed to him and that's really all that God sees.
He doesn't see our sins.
That is the sins of the elect.
The sins of the non-elect. Yeah.
He'll judge us for those if we are in that group.
If total inherited depravity is the foundational doctrine of the other major tenets of Calvinism, and so they flow from that doctrine, then the hard determinist view of divine sovereignty is the foundation of the whole system, the whole uh systematic theology of Calvinism.
And that's why the next thing we need to talk about in another sermon, not this morning.
Is the sovereignty of God.
We need to understand what that means according to the scriptures.
Well, you may not believe any of these things, but some people are kind of thinking that some of these things sound pretty good.
They, they look at the scriptures and think, well, maybe that's what it's saying.
I want you to see some of the consequences of Calvinism.
One of the most obvious ones, I think to me and probably to you also, as we were describing these major tenets is that God becomes responsible for those who are lost.
After all, if he chose who's going to be saved, then he's really responsible for those who were lost, as the writer said, he could have chosen to save everyone.
Why didn't he?
Well, he didn't, according to the Calvinists, and so those who are lost, that's God who made the choice.
For those people to be lost, he becomes a respecter of persons, and in Romans the 10nd chapter in verse 11, Paul said, God shows no partiality much more could be said about each of these consequences.
I just want you to get a flavor for some of the problems that Calvinism has with respect to scripture.
God becomes a respecter of persons.
And one man will be judged guilty for another man's sin.
In fact, all of us become guilty of Adam's sin, according to the Calvinist.
And if you're not one of the elect, you'll be condemned for the fact that you're guilty of Adam's sin.
God imputed Adams send to you.
But the Bible talks about in the final judgment, each of us will give account for our own behavior.
Ezekiel 18 says that we don't inherit the guilt of a father or a son.
2 Corinthians 5:10 says we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ so that each 1 may receive what is due for what he's done in the body, whether good or evil.
And Paul writes to the Romans in chapter 14 verse 12.
So then each of us must give account of himself.
To God And the gospel invitation essentially becomes meaningless.
It's a mockery.
Now, the Calvinists might argue, well, the gospel invitation is how God reaches those people who have been regenerated in their nature by the Holy Spirit.
But the gospel invitation, according to Matthew 28, Mark 16, was to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
Why would you do that?
Why would you preach the gospel to people who are lost?
They can't possibly respond to the gospel.
They can't possibly be saved because God didn't choose for them to be saved.
You see that this universal invitation of the gospel, whosoever will, becomes just a cruel mockery.
When we understand that the Calvinists believes that The, the, the unsay, the non-elect, they can't respond to the gospel even if they Wanted to or even if they need to.
The elect are released from moral responsibility.
This is a little bit more complicated than what we've talked about this morning, but according to Calvinism, the elect are going to be saved regardless of their sins committed after their conversion.
The righteousness of Christ is essentially counted to those people, and that's what God sees.
He doesn't see the sins of the elect.
And so they're in a sense released from moral responsibility.
They use passages like John 10, which is why I asked Jim to read that in the scripture reading.
Verse 28, Jesus said, I give them eternal life and they will never perish and no one will snatch them out of my hand.
Well, that sounds like once you're in, you're in.
But that whole context is talking about the sheep that belonged to Jesus, those who hear his voice and follow him.
We can be eternally secure as long as we continue to hear and follow the good shepherd.
We'll say a lot more about that in a future study.
And then finally, if you've ever wondered why it is that people are baptizing babies, usually sprinkling water on them, which isn't Bible baptism anyway, but the, the reason for that is that the Roman Catholic Church even before John Calvin and now Calvinists also believe that child is born in sin.
And so they baptize these babies.
Because of their misunderstanding of the nature of man.
All of these consequences, and this is just a small sampling of the buffet that is available.
When you begin to compare Calvinism with the Bible and understand That all of these consequences fly in the face of the clear teaching of the scriptures.
The doctrine of total inherited depravity forms a foundation.
For the whole 5 point system of Calvinism.
And as we've said before, an incorrect view of man's nature just leads to an incorrect view of the gospel in general.
As Ryle said, wrong views of the disease will always bring with them wrong views of the remedy.
Calvinism Takes your salvation completely out of your hands.
That's why I titled this sermon out of our hands.
Because according to Calvinism, you really have very little to do, if anything, with your salvation.
God chose you before you were born, regardless of what you do in your life.
It was an unconditional choice or election.
And because of inherited total profit, you can't do anything anyway.
You're already got two strikes against you when you were born, you're guilty of Adam's sin and got this corrupted nature.
So God is the one who has to even enable you to act toward the gospel message by the irresistible call of the spirit irresistible grace.
And then it doesn't make any difference what you do.
If you're one of the elect, you're going to be saved no matter what.
Because when God decides as a sovereign God that you're going to be saved, there's nothing you can do to stop it if you wanted to, that is.
You see that salvation really is out of your hands.
Solar Grassa All grades, faith only.
You can't do anything.
The Bible teaches that man can respond of his own free will to the invitation of Christ to be saved.
If we are guilty of sin this morning, it is our own sin, not Adam's sin or anyone else's, not your father's, not your parents, not your children, not your neighbor.
If you're guilty of sin, it's because you have chosen or I have chosen to violate God's law.
The Bible is very clear about that.
And the Bible teaches that you can choose life.
Don't wait for some special better felt than told enlightenment from the Holy Spirit.
The spirit is speaking to you.
The Spirit speaking to you through the words that are recorded in the New Testament as those apostles and prophets were guided by the Holy Spirit and the Spirit laid out God's plan, and the gospel call is extended to you and it's up to you.
It's up to me how we will respond to that call.
It's in our hands.
Not out of our hands.
You need to respond to the gospel this morning to become a Christian by obedience to Christ, being baptized into him for the remission of your sins, or if you simply need to make a fresh start in your life, you're already a Christian, but you've gone off on the path of sin.
You have the free will to make those choices.
And if we can encourage you in any way, we want to do so, and we stand and sing to give that opportunity.
- 2025.02.23A-OutOfHand.mp3 (12.52 MB)
