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Transcript 540A — Is God Responsible for the Unbelief of Sinners?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: I have a question regarding election. I was talking with my mother tonight, and we ended on this note. I said, "Do you believe that God will save whom He chooses to?" and she said, "No." I said, "We have nothing further to talk about then." But my question is, what about the people who end up in hell? They never wanted God because God didn't draw them to Him. So why are they responsible for their unbelief?
HC: Well, that's a very interesting question. If there are those who end up in hell because God never drew them, and John 6:44 insists, as Jesus declared, "No man can come to Me except the Father draw him," that is, no man has the power (the word "can" there is a Greek word that means no man has the power to come to Me except the Father draw him), then isn't God somehow responsible for the fact that they went to hell?
Well, that's an interesting way of putting it, and we'd like to kind of get God in the defence chair and make Him responsible for our going to hell in some way. But when we look at the whole picture, we find that it isn't God who sinned. It is man who sinned. It is man who has rebelled against God. God created mankind in the image of God, to have fellowship with God and to be perfectly obedient to Him. And yet man of his own volition has spurned God, has repudiated the law of God, has rebelled against God.
And God's justice demands that the wages of sin is death. And so if God allowed the whole human race to go to hell, without any exception whatsoever, nobody could complain about it. We all deserve to go to hell. Now the incomprehensible thing is, how is it possible that God in His sovereign grace would decide to save even one of these sinners? And think of what a penalty or what a price He had to pay. He had to satisfy His own justice. He had to bear the wrath of God, the equivalent of an eternity in hell for the ones that He would decide to save. And the fact that He would decide to save a great company of believers is God's business.
Now that very same question is asked in Romans 9. In Romans 9:14 God has just declared that before the twin sons of Isaac were born, Esau and Jacob, God said that "Esau I hated but Jacob I loved." In other words, My hand of grace was upon Jacob, and yet I was going to let Esau end up in hell. And so then the question is raised in verse 14: "What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God," that He would do this? And the answer comes back, "God forbid. For He saith to Moses, I (this is God speaking) will have mercy on whom I will have mercy. And I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion." In other words, God is saying, I am sovereign. And it's My business. I can save somebody if I want to, and if I don't want to save somebody I don't owe them anything. They have rebelled against Me. They were created in the image of God. And it's My business if I decide not to save someone.
And so again the question is asked, and the answer comes from God again. He says in verse 16: "So then it is not of him that willeth nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy." God takes the full responsibility, you see. And then He says again in verse 18 of Romans 9, "Therefore hath He mercy on whom He will have mercy, and whom He will He hardeneth." And then the question again arises, "Thou wilt say then unto me, why doth He yet find fault, for who hath resisted His will?" In other words, it's really a question that is directed at trying to blame God again. And the answer comes back in verse 20, "Nay, but oh man, who art thou that replyeth against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, the same lump to make one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor?" You see, God is claiming full authority and sovereign right to do this.
CALLER: And it sounds like God is a respecter of persons. The Bible says He's not a respecter of persons.
HC: Again, you see, we have to let the Bible be its own interpreter. And God does say this in a number of places, that He's not a respecter of persons. When God says this, we would like to say, well, that means that He doesn't exercise His right to make sovereign choice. But actually, the context of those statements where He's speaking about the fact that He's not a respecter of persons is that God is indicating that there is no nation, there is no political nation, there is no people, there is no generation that has a corner on truth, or that has a corner on salvation. God can save a poor man as quickly as a rich man, He can save a slave as quickly as a king, He can save a Jew as quickly as a Gentile, or a Gentile as quickly as a Jew. God is no respecter of persons in that sense. But God certainly by that statement is not limiting His sovereign right to choose whom He will.