© Eric M Schumacher – Preached September 18, 2011 at Northbrook Baptist Church, Cedar Rapids
(Audio will be made available here.)
(This is Part 3 of a series. See Part 1, Part 2.)
(There is more addressed in the audio than in the prepared manuscript.)
(This is Part 3 of a series. See Part 1, Part 2.)
(There is more addressed in the audio than in the prepared manuscript.)
Club-Hoppers or Cliff-Jumpers?
If you’re like me, upon first hearing the doctrine of election, it is easy to form the wrong mental picture. Too often, we think of election as a doctrine of exclusion, rather than a doctrine of gracious salvation.
We think of God as a big, burly bouncer in shades, standing behind velvet ropes at the entrance of a dance club called “Heaven.” At those ropes there is a crowd, a line of people, all of them wanting to go in. God, the bouncer, looks down his nose at each person, perhaps checks the list on his clip-board, and then proceeds to reject some and turn them away. Occasionally, he unclips the rope and lets a lucky soul in. If that is how you think of election, you’ve got the wrong picture. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A better picture is to think of humanity as a massive heard of lemmings—wild, mangy, rabid lemmings—running full-steam toward a cliff over which they plunge into an abyss of unquenchable fire. For that is what we are—and worse—according to Ephesians 2:1-3. We are born dead in the trespasses and sins in which we walk. We freely and willfully follow the world, the devil and our flesh to our destruction. We deserve our end. And, God would be perfectly fair and just to allow us to continue on that path.
But, God, being rich in mercy, chooses to love some of these lemmings with a great love, goes after them, claims them as his own, and so changes them that they love him and want to live for him.
The Question
Given that what we have seen about the nature of man and the nature of election are true, a natural question follows: How does Christ’s work relate to predestination?
I want us to turn to the Scripture to answer the question: What is the nature of Christ’s work—its intent and effect? In other words, we will ask two questions:
1) What is the intent of Christ’s work?
How does the Bible present the intent and design of Christ’s work? Is Christ’s work presented as a work intended and designed to provide salvation for every individual person that ever lived? Or, is the intent and design of Christ’s work to secure the salvation of a particular people—namely, the elect (whom we discussed last week)?
2) What does Christ’s work actually accomplish?
Does it effect a certain and sure result? Does it guarantee a certain outcome? Does it actually save people? Or, does it make salvation possible but not certain? Did Jesus Christ die to make salvation a hypothetical possibility or an actual certainty?
Here is how the Bible consistently answers those two questions:
(1) Christ’s work was intended to save his people in particular.
(2) Christ accomplished actual, certain salvation for his people; as a result, they are saved.
We will see that atonement is efficacious substitution—the substitute of the one in the place of the many which effects a certain and sure result.
“Atonement is God’s works on sinners’ behalf to reconcile them to himself” (New Dictionary of Biblical Theology).
