Sanctification and Reformation

God's Sovereignty: Predestination & Free Will Part 2 Many begin the discussion of salvation through the 5 points of Arminianism or Calvinism with a discussion of man’s natural state.   However, I don’t think that’s the appropriate place to begin.   All theology begins and ends with God, not man.   That’s why we must begin with God and not just in a general sense but specifically with respect to His sovereignty. So once again the history behind how this discussion came into being is helpful in understanding the way that it developed. The Remonstrance, you’ll recall, was a protest against the Protestant church (which itself was a protest against the Roman Catholic Church).   The Protestants, up to that point, largely held to Augustinian (proto-Calvinist) theology.   The Remonstrance opposed this and said they believed that men were sinners but that they were not so spiritually dead that they could not respond to God spiritually. They believed t...

Part 2 (of 2) In part 1 of this post we covered the first four characteristics of the omniscience of God. We covered how God has perfect self-knowledge, perfect knowledge outside of Himself, that His knowledge is eternal, and that His knowledge is immediate and instantaneous. Today, we'll cover four more aspects of this amazing attribute of God. 5) His knowledge is exhaustive . He numbers and names all of the stars (which are incalculable). Not even a sparrow falls without His knowledge. He numbers every hair on your head. These are excerpted from verses which all use this language to help the reader grasp how complete His knowledge is. A sparrow was worthless in that day – yet God does not allow even one to fall to the ground without His complete knowledge. He has numbered the hair follicles on your head – which isn’t a particularly useful thing to know.  So if He perfectly knows these things which are not valuable, then He definitely knows what going on with and in y...

“Who among the gods is like you, LORD? Who is like you — majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders" Exodus 15:11 The throne room of heaven is a fantastic scene. It is richly depicted in Revelation 4 and Isaiah 6. The visions give a glimpse of God in a light that is critical if we are to understand Who He is in a right way. Today, that attribute is God’s holiness. In these scenes of the Old and New Testaments, we are treated to imagery of creatures that declare God’s glory without ceasing. But there is only one attribute that is being eternally declared around that throne in heaven: God’s holiness. They are not crying out ‘ love, love, love’ or ‘ truth, truth truth’ despite being good and right attributes of God’s character. Holiness, however, is the attribute that proceeds from the mouths of those beings which were created for the express purpose of glorifying God for all eternity. Ask yourself when the last time you heard a pastor called his...