Reflections on Lord’s Day 37 of 2019: “God’s Everlasting Love”
This is the start of my thoughts and reflections on the Lord’s Day. The sermon, “God’s Everlasting Love,” preached by pastor Joe Rosales, was based on Romans 8:28-39.
One of the foci was sanctification. It’s important for believers to understand that what we go through in this life, including suffering, is necessary, not for our justification, but for our sanctification, and ultimately consummates in our glorification. “The reason believers inevitably suffer in this life is so they can be sanctified because they must wait in a fallen world for Christ to return before they are glorified, not because it’s a condition they need to fulfill for their glorification [or justification]” (“When Protestants Err on the Side of Rome, Part II”):
The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him….
And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body….
And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified. (Romans 8:16-17, 23, 28-30 NASB)
Unbelievers, however, have no such consolation, because it can only be found in Christ. “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3 NASB).
A related theme in the passage is election. My pastor gave the best explanation of foreknowledge I’ve heard so far. Divine foreknowledge does not mean, as Arminians claim, that God foresaw those who would believe in the future based on their free will, as if God had no determinative influence on them. Gordon Clark thoroughly refutes this view in God and Evil: The Problem Solved. Rather than mere detached knowledge, foreknowledge signifies an intimate relation, such as when “Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain” (Genesis 4:1 NKJV). It really means that God foreloved us—He intimately knew and loved us in His mind, even before he created us. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you” (Jeremiah 1:5 NASB). “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him” (Ephesians 1:3-4 NASB). Amazing Grace: The History and Theology of Calvinism also discusses this in depth.
Another good point the pastor made is that God is not on our side. If He were, He would be sinful and wicked. We therefore need to be on God’s side and get on His terms. Prosperity preaching promotes man-centered self-worship. Our focus must be on glorifying God, not ourselves. Soli Deo Gloria.
Logic also came up. God is logical—God is logic—and thinks according to the laws of logic. A sorites, explains Elihu Carranza, is “a series of propositions in which the predicate of each is the subject of the next. The conclusion consists of the first subject and the last predicate. The chain of propositions is arranged in pairs of premises to make explicit the suppressed conclusion, thereby revealing the syllogism. The validity of the entire chain will depend on the validity of each syllogism in the chain.” The Bible contains many sorites, perhaps most notably:
Moreover we are even found to be false witnesses of God, because we testified against God that He raised Christ, whom He did not raise, if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. (1 Corinthians 15:15-18 NASB)
One final thought is the importance of order in exegetical preaching. It’s good to start the sermon with the Biblical text, and continuously build and preach from the text, and apply the text throughout. There’s so much to unpack from Scripture that it’s important to stay grounded in the passage. When that happens, the entire sermon becomes a cogent sorites, in which concluding exhortations are more relevant and authoritative because they’re closely and intentionally based on the text.
The sermon ended with Philippians 1:6: “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.”