The God of Power and the Power of the Gospel

Amen. We'll be looking to God's Word now in the book of Acts chapter 2.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

Acts chapter 2, and I'll be reading from verse 14 down to verse 23.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

And verse 23 will be the focus of the sermon's attention this morning.

Listen now and open your hearts and minds because what you're about to hear

is God's holy and inspired Word. Verse 14.

But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and address them.

Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give

ear to my words, for these people are not drunk, as you suppose,

since it's only the third hour of the day.

But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel. And in the last days

it shall be, God declares that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh,

and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions,

your old men shall dream dreams, even on male servants and female servants.

In those days I will pour out my spirit and they shall prophesy.

And I will show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth below,

blood and fire and vapor of smoke.

The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the day of

the Lord comes, the great and magnificent day.

And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.

Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by

God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your

midst, as you yourselves know.

This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of

God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.

God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.

This is the word of the Lord. You can be seated.

Let's pray together. We ask, Holy Spirit, that you would guide and direct our

thoughts, my thoughts, my words, that they may be your words,

your thoughts, and the hearts of your people, that they may hear and see Christ Jesus this morning.

We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

So the focus is verse 23 of this chapter, and its sermon is entitled,

The God of Power and the Power of the Gospel.

And this morning, you'll notice in verse 23, it says, This Jesus delivered up

according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by lawless hands.

I want you to note something about that verse because it has contained in it

two very powerful basic ideas, basic words or thoughts or theology from the Bible.

And that is the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man.

You know, we're not on the horns of a dilemma here.

It's not either God is sovereign and in control of all things and predestines

all things, or we're in charge of our own destiny.

It's not either this or either that. You'll notice the verses effortlessly this

morning, put them both together as if they fit. Why? Because they do.

The sovereign, predestinating power of God is ever-present, splashed throughout

the pages of Scripture, and the responsibility of man is equally put together,

as if there's no contradiction, because there's not.

This morning, I'm going to just

open up and look at the doctrine of God's sovereignty and predestination.

It's not because I have some hobby horse as a Reformed pastor to talk about predestination.

As you'll notice, I've been here, has it been now, more than two months.

And I've not preached a single sermon on predestination, and I haven't been itching to do so.

It's not like I'm thinking, I can't wait to talk about predestination at Wilmington

Reformed Church because everyone loves the doctrine so much.

It's actually a topic that many today consider controversial.

Controversial. Now, I've been back in America, and we were following politics

and culture here long enough to know that today, whenever I hear someone introduced

on a news show as, quote, controversial.

I think, well, he probably believes in things like marriage and family and that

boys and girls are different, right?

So because today, anyone who comes up and says, yeah, marriage should be between

one man and one woman, they say, he's controversial.

Even though it's been believed now for thousands of years by almost every culture,

almost everywhere in the whole wide world, suddenly a guy comes along and says

something that everyone's always believed and he's controversial.

So I don't think, I mean, in this sense, I don't think what I'm about to say

is controversial in the sense that it's not been taught and believed throughout

2,000 years of church history because it has.

I would, however, say that it's complex.

It's sensitive. It's something that is difficult, but it's not necessarily controversial.

The doctrine of predestination is similar, as you're going to hear it today,

is similar to what was taught by the great African church father, St. Augustine of Hippo.

In the third and fourth century, Augustine was writing on this doctrine and

established basically this as a church, a fundamental basic doctrine of the church.

Yes, it went up and went down in church history and its popularity.

And yes, now at this point in American Christianity, this doctrine is no longer

believed. It's no longer received well.

And yet you'll notice this is a lead. This is one of the leads by which Peter starts his sermon.

It's a pretty powerful sermon, as I said over and over again.

It's a sermon I wish I could preach every Sunday, because I wish at the end

of every Sunday service, everyone was standing up saying, what do we do to get saved?

What do I do to be holy? Hallelujah. That's how this sermon ends.

And yet it begins with predestination, a supposed controversial subject that

nobody's ever really supposed to talk about, because it will drive people away.

My point is that in this sermon, as if it's taught correctly and biblically,

it doesn't drive people away.

It draws people to Jesus.

The power of the gospel is connected to the God of power here,

a predestinating, sovereign electing God.

It tends to rub Americans the wrong way because we're independent Democrats.

Small d, I know you're not. I'm not a Democrat.

We believe in democracy, right? We all want our say in everything that's done.

We cherish it. We have this cherished belief that my choices and my things that

I do determine my destiny.

And yet it is fundamentally untrue. We are not in charge of our destiny.

Our choices do not determine the future any more than any other person's choice determines the future.

Romans 9, I go back to this now.

It says, so then he has mercy on whoever ever he has mercy, and he hardens whomever he wants.

And then you will say to me, because this is, we'll wrestle with this a little

bit to the end, but this is the common response.

You will say to me, why does God still find fault?

If God predestines it, why do I care? For who can resist his will?

And notice verse 20, we'll keep coming back to this.

Verse 20, Paul doesn't say, well, I've got a really good theological answer

and I can write it on a chart and show you that primary causes and secondary

causes, conditional causes work together quite well with predestinating causes

because the predestining causes you secondary meat?

No, here's what he says. Who do you think you are?

That's what he says. Who are you, O man, to tell God how he should be God?

That's powerful response. Most of us, if we're in a membership Sunday school

class, we want the chart response. We want levels and we want to be,

but Paul doesn't give an answer because in a sense, there is no explanation for this.

God is sovereign. He predestines everything. There could be no other way.

And yet he holds us completely responsible for our choices. How can that go

together? Brothers, I don't know.

Should I stop my sermon now? I don't know. But I know both are taught.

And as people of the word of God, we have to teach them both together as if

they live in perfect harmony together because they do.

And of course, to the American and to most average people, they would say,

yeah, but that's not fair.

Maybe you said that yourself. I did when I was first confronted to this doctrine.

Somebody ran into my college dorm room once and said, are you a Calvinist?

And I said, I don't know what that is. I'm not sure what it means to be.

And then he started going through Romans chapter nine.

And at the end of it, I thought, well, if I believe the Bible,

which I do, and the Bible teaches this, then yeah, that's what I believe. So simple in that sense.

You look at our sermon again from Peter's sermon in Acts chapter 2,

Acts 2:23

verse 23 says, Him, this Jesus, being delivered by the determined purpose and

foreknowledge of God. I want to spend some time on these words because these words are hard to avoid.

In my circles, when I grew up as a child, I never heard a sermon on predestination, ever.

And I always heard overtones in the culture of the congregation,

like those Calvinists, we don't even know if they're Christians.

I'm not sure if they're Christians. They believe that God tells everyone what

to do and that we're just robots.

And so I never heard a sermon on predestination. And I always heard negative

things about people who believed it.

But as people of the word of God, remember, I'm not doing this because I've

been itching to preach a sermon on predestination.

I'm doing it because it's the next verse.

And by the way, if you're here this morning and you're ready for this next verse

and you are, it's what you need to hear as well.

For whatever reason, I don't know. That's the glory of preaching through books

of the Bible in expositional form.

You just go to the next verse, and I can say with confidence,

this is the next verse. This is what God has for you.

I'm not picking on you or singling you out. It's the next verse.

And in this next verse, there are two powerful words. He was delivered up by

the determined or definite, depending on your translation, purpose and foreknowledge of God.

The word for definite there is a word that means to assign someone to a particular

task or function, to appoint or to designate, right?

Those who had been, this is another mind-boggling in Acts chapter 13,

Acts 13 · chapter mention

48, after the sermon, the author, Luke, just says, those who had been destined

or determined or chosen for eternal life, they became believers.

There it is again, by the way.

God predestines and the people willingly choose.

The next word is plan. So now we have a destined, determined plan.

And the word plan can mean will.

It has that which has been purposed or intended or planned ahead of time.

These were things you see all throughout scripture. When we speak about predestination,

we're not speaking about something that God can look forward and see,

but before the time marker, before the foundations of the world, he chose us in him.

These are time markers that help us to understand that this plan of God isn't dependent on us.

It isn't dependent on what we choose or what we do, but on God's sovereign purpose.

It's significant because many people want to redefine this, redefine God's foreknowledge,

the next word foreknowledge.

They often want to see, and this is how I heard it growing up,

that somehow it works like this. Ready?

God looks ahead down the halls of history.

I'm sorry, I'm just looking at you, Tom, because you're the only guy there.

But God looks ahead and says, Tom's going to choose me.

And so that's the foreknowledge of God. So it's as if God just looks because

he's God, he can see ahead of time.

But that doesn't have anything to do with the words that are used here.

The words that are used here are before Tom even existed, God had chosen this

plan. God had predetermined this.

Before Jacob and Esau were ever born or had done anything good or bad,

God had already determined which one would be blessed.

Why? Because God chose one and not the other. And by the way,

if God could just look down the corridors or the halls of history and see something,

you don't escape predestination.

If God looked ahead and saw it, can it not happen?

You still have a predestination. You haven't escaped the problem of something

predetermined happening that will definitely happen.

Now you just have a human being in charge of it rather than God.

And that's not what the word means.

God's foreknowledge is not just looking ahead to see. God's foreknowledge is

his, it says the word foreknowledge can be, by the way, it's where we get our

word prognosis in the medical term.

Prognizomai, I think is the word or prognosco. It's the word we get our prognosis.

When a doctor says, well, I got bad news, the prognosis is you have stage four

terminal cancer, you have X amount of months to live.

That's a prognosis. Now that's a doctor's forecasting of what he thinks.

But the word in this passage is much stronger than that.

The doctor is guessing based on what he has known from medical experience.

God here is predetermining to know something, to know about something prior

to any temporal reference point.

God doesn't look ahead and say, well, it looks like because of this,

this, and that, you might have X amount of time to live.

To know about an event before it happens. That's what the word foreknowledge means.

It's not just that he looks and sees it. He determines in advance what's going to happen.

That's the prognosis of God, the foreknowledge of God.

And two words by way of major emphasis, A definite, determined plan,

his will and foreknowledge, both together, inescapable.

Inescapable. Again, this isn't something that I said, wow, it's a great doctrine

to be thinking about. This is what God's word has brought us.

He knows ahead of time because he has already planned it.

And you see passages like Ephesians chapter one, scattered throughout all the scriptures.

Blessed. And I want to also mention, notice in the scriptures,

in the Bible, when the plan of predestination is presented to God's people,

or when the inspired author is writing about this doctrine,

you don't see him saying, well, that's not fair. That doesn't seem right. Guess what you see?

Praise and glory and honor to God.

Paul says this, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,

who has blessed us in every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,

just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

That's one of those marker points.

It's not like God looked ahead and before the foundation of the world,

and historical marker point, God had already chosen, that we should be holy

and without blame before him,

having, again, different word, but more powerful, having predestined us to adoption

as sons by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.

And verse six, to the praise of the glory of his grace by which he has made

us accepted in the beloved. Praise be to God.

Praise God, nothing depended on me. Praise God, it wasn't because I did anything good or bad.

Praise God, it all belongs to him from start to finish.

Again, in Romans 9, And not only this, but Rebekah had conceived by one man,

even our father Isaac, for the children not yet being born, nor having done

anything good or evil. God wasn't looking ahead.

That the purpose of God according to election might stand not of works, but of him who calls.

It was said to her, the older shall serve the younger. It is written,

Jacob, I have loved, but Esau, I have hated.

What then shall we say? Is there unrighteousness of God? And Paul has said this

powerful phrase, absolutely not.

Absolutely not. There's no contradiction between the sovereignty of God and

the responsibility of men.

You'll notice here and Later in Peter's sermon, you murderous,

evil people took this Jesus Christ with your evil hands, with malintent,

and you crucified him, and you're responsible.

Yeah, right before that, he said this was done according to the sovereign,

premeditated, predestined plan of God. They both go together perfectly.

Sovereignty of God and predestination is not something we should shy away from.

It's something that should draw us closer to love and thanksgiving to God.

The sovereign power of God is used to bolster our grasp of the power of the resurrection.

And it also helps us to understand this constant theme we see in the Bible of reversal.

God takes what evil people do and mean to do for evil ends, and he reverses that.

Classic example in Joseph, what you meant for evil, you already know it, God meant for good.

Yes, they're responsible. Yes, they meant it for evil, and God reverses it.

God is constantly reversing the evil plans and schemes of men who would seek

to destroy the will of God, to change the destined plan of God,

and God takes it and reverses it.

The doctrine of predestination is a beautiful and practical doctrine.

Never heard that when I was a kid.

A beautiful and practical doctrine. The great theologian John Calvin,

you think, well, of course you go to Calvin.

He says this, this great subject is not as many imagine a mere thorny and noisy

disputation, nor speculation which wearies the mind of men without any profit.

That's what my mom used to think. And I came home after my freshman year of

college and I was a Calvinist. She was wearied by it.

I was in what they sometimes call the cage stage, where instead of actually

being allowed to talk to people, you should have been locked in a cage with

your Bible for a few years.

But notice he says, it's not just noisy disputation without any profit,

but it's a solid discussion eminently adapted to the service of the godly.

Why? Because it builds us up in sound faith,

trains us to humility, and lifts us to the admiration of the unbounded goodness

of God towards us, while it elevates us to praise this goodness in highest strains. Beautiful.

Another author says this. He says, this is not a cold, barren, or speculative theory.

It's not an unnatural system of strange doctrines, as many people are inclined

to believe, but rather a most warm and living, a most vital and important account

of God's relation with man.

It's a system of towering but practical truths which are designed and adapted

under the influence of the Holy Spirit to mold the affections of the heart and

give right direction to the conduct of men.

It's beautiful for us. It's practical for us. And God in practical,

beautiful language, God is always writing the story of history according to his script.

Isn't it comforting when you look back at your life and something bad happened

and you realize God meant it for good and it was for your comfort.

There were no accidents. Thank you.

God loves sinners, John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he sent his only

begotten son, that whoever believes in the doctrine of predestination reminds us of that.

God's glory is ultimate, not ours. And so many times when we speak of salvation

in the gospel, we speak only of the sinner and only of his not going to hell and going to heaven.

But part of it is we need to lift up our eyes and say, the fact that God saved

a single sinner here on this earth is enough reason to give him glorious praise for all eternity.

And yet he saved millions upon millions upon millions of us unworthy sinners,

so that God would be given glory.

It's practical. It's grounded in the sovereign goodwill of God.

Therefore, all our sufferings, all our sorrows, all the persecutions,

when we start moving our way through the book of Acts, we are going to see persecution

after persecution after persecution,

martyrdom after martyrdom, people dying and giving their life.

Why? Because they follow Jesus.

This gives us strength. These are not accidents.

Strength to bear that these persecutions and these hardships are eternally grounded

in the love of God, not just a robotic plan for your future, but God's love for us.

And there's nothing more that

we need than to be constantly reminded how great God's love is for us.

It's also one of the animating factors in apostolic preaching.

In the book of Acts, one of the animating things, one of the things that fueled

the fire of their preaching was this belief in the sovereignty of God.

They would go and they would encounter people and princes and governors and

kings, and they would preach the gospel without apology and with power because

the God of power had given power to the words of the gospel.

We believe this doctrine, not because we believe a doctrine that's found in

our book of church order or the Westminster Confession of Faith,

but because it's clearly situated in the word of God.

They preach this. Notice what Peter is saying. It's so powerful,

you might miss it, but I want to compare this.

Throughout this little tiny verse, Peter keeps saying, you killed,

but God raised up. You bound, but God loosed.

Powerful. And all according to the sovereign will of God.

You killed, but God raised up, you bound, but God loose. There's such power in those words.

The feeble attempts of these people to kill Messiah ended up releasing the resurrection

power of God to all who will believe.

And therefore they would conclude as preachers, repent and believe.

Did predestination keep them from preaching to people and telling them,

reach out to Jesus, call on Christ while there is time?

Absolutely not. It seemed to be motive for that.

If you hear the words of Christ, if you hear the words of the gospel,

you must repent and believe.

It's a much more powerful presentation of the gospel than the way I heard it framed my whole life.

Accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal savior, whatever that means.

To this day, and I grew up in that church and I have friends in that church.

In fact, I don't know what they mean by that still.

It's one of that Princess Bride. I don't think it means what they think it means.

I just, I don't know. But here, the gospel is presented as the sovereign, powerful plan of God.

God sent his son. You evil people tried and killed him, but you killed and God raised up.

The power of death bound him, but God loosed him.

You killed, but God raised up. You bound, but God loosed.

This is the way our culture today needs to be preached to as well.

We live in so much absurd confusion.

Foolish people, and not just people in city councils Well-known senators,

congressmen, presidential candidates Don't know the difference between a boy

and a girl My African friends were profoundly disturbed by that They just were like,

wait a minute, America has all this money All this technology You guys have

the most powerful military in the world And you don't know the difference between a boy and a girl?

This is a culture that needs powerful preaching of the gospel and direction back to God.

God is the one who gave the definition of boys and girls and created male and

female after his own image.

This is God. If you reject God, if you reject his power, of course,

you're gonna be making up all kinds of foolish schemes.

But the sovereign predestining God, the God of election is not a God that can be toyed with.

He's powerful. He's all powerful. Why? Because he's God. Why?

That's it. It's that simple. That was Paul's answer in Romans 9.

That's what you're hearing today. That's what we should hear every Sunday.

God is God and you are not. Now repent and believe.

That's the way the apostles preached. That's the way apostolic preaching should

continue in the church today with boldness and power.

Not my boldness, not my power, but the word of God filled with his power and

the power of the Holy Spirit. Do you believe this?

This is the gospel. this is the good news. This is the means by which we're

saved. Paul said, I'm not ashamed of this. Why?

This is the power of God unto salvation to all who believe.

Do we believe it? Or are we wrestling with this and saying, yeah, but that's not fair.

That's not fair. I would warn you this morning, don't ever bring up fairness

in regard to the doctrine of predestination.

Why? Because what would be fair is if all of us went to hell,

because that's what we deserve.

All have been born in sin. There is none righteous, no, not one.

For the wages of sin is death. That's what we deserve.

That's what would be fair. Don't ever respond to this passage where it says,

well, if God does everything, why does he still blame us?

Go back to Paul's word. Be quiet, he said, basically.

It's like when Job was confronted with the sovereignty of God.

He said, I put my hand over my mouth. I'm not saying anything more.

Why does he still find fault for who can resist his will, Paul says,

who are you, O man, to answer back to God?

Has not the potter the right over the clay to make some lump one vessel to honorable

use and another to dishonorable use?

And what if, and this is where I want to move to an ending, because this is a beautiful what if.

It's one of those what ifs that Paul writes that has an automatically understood answer of yes.

So he says, I love this, what if, and the answer is yes, what if God,

desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, which he endured with

much patience, vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,

in order to make known the riches of his glory of the vessels of mercy,

which he prepared beforehand.

I don't know everything about the doctrine of election and predestination.

I don't know how to reconcile the sovereign predestinating electing power of

God with the responsibility of man. But I do know what's said in the word.

Paul says, what if theoretically, which means it's true, What if when we look

at the doctrine of predestination, all we can say is, why me?

That's not fair. But what on earth was God thinking in saving me?

Praise be to God. That's what it says. In order to make known the riches of

his glories to the vessels of mercy.

That's us, beloved, if we believe.

What if the doctrine, at least one part of the doctrine, were to drive us to

such glorious praise and wonder and awe that God would save sinners such as we are?

That's true because that's what Paul says. Again, Calvin writes,

for there is not a mere effectual means of building up faith and the giving

of our open ears to the election of God,

which the Holy Spirit seals upon our hearts while we hear, showing us that it stands in the eternal,

immutable good will of God towards us, and that therefore it cannot be moved

or altered by any storms of the world by any assaults of Satan,

by any changes or fluctuations or weaknesses in our flesh, for our salvation

is then sure to us when we find the cause of it in the heart of God himself.

That's Calvin in a more theological way of saying exactly what Paul says, on which we'll close.

Romans chapter 8, he says, For I am sure that neither death,

Romans 8 · chapter mention

nor life, nor angels, nor rulers,

nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height,

nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from

the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen. Let's pray together.

Father, how we love your word. We love what it teaches us.

It oftentimes grates against our soul. We wonder, we can't understand,

but we do know what's been revealed, that when we look into the eyes of this

doctrine of predestination and election,

we are looking into the eyes of a loving Savior who saved us,

and we're reminded in this doctrine, we don't know why.

Why did he choose us? Why us and not someone else?

Why were we called to this banquet, to this feast, for the riches of God's glorious

love? And we praise you, Lord, for that.

We will continue to praise you and we ask that you would help us by your spirit

to praise you always in Christ Jesus for predestinating us to the love of Jesus Christ.

Help us not to wield this as some sort of noisy disputation,

but help us, Lord, to be humbled by it, that we may love you and serve you more.

We pray in Jesus' name, amen.