Is Fallen Man Unable to Believe?
Ephesians 4:17-19
Ephesians Lesson #157
July 17, 2022
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Father, we thank You so much that we have Your Word, that we have our own personal copies of decent translations of the original languages, and recognize that throughout history that has been so rare for most believers; and though we have so much available to us electronically, we have it available to us in print, we live in a world that ignores and denies Your Word more than just about any time in history, and yet we have so much available to us.
“Father, we pray that we may not take Your Word for granted, that we may not get bored with our study, our learning about You, for it is the one reason that we are saved, is to serve You, to come to know You, to grow and mature as believers that You might be glorified.
“So, Father today, as we continue our study in this tremendous epistle to the Ephesians, we pray that You would help us to understand some of the things that are taught in the Scripture about how we come to understand the gospel and the importance of our response to the gospel, and we pray these things in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Slide 2
Open your Bibles with me to Ephesians 4, and we are studying in Ephesians 4:18. We are studying the last phrase in Ephesians 4:18 this morning, and the way it’s been used and abused in terms of church history.
Slide 3
The last phrase refers to and is translated in many versions as “the blindness of their heart,” and over the course of history in different translations, in different languages, it’s been translated that way. It’s not a textual problem. A textual problem is when there’s a copyist error that has entered in. It is a lexical problem. That means it’s an understanding of the word itself and how it has been used and how it has been translated. This has led to some problems and some misunderstandings, so we have to clarify this.
The three verses we have been focusing on Ephesians 4:17–19. Ephesians 4:17–18 says, “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart.”
Now all of that is giving a tremendous description of the fact that there is to be a difference in how the believer thinks and lives as opposed to the unbeliever. You have to be careful with statements like that because it’s really easy to slip into some form of legalism.
When I was first out of seminary looking for a pastorate—it seems like the Lord always had me learn a few things by the negatives. So, I had an opportunity to candidate for church over in Louisiana. And for those of you who don’t know in South Louisiana, in the Cajun country, things are little bit different. It’s like a world all unto its own. This church was in Opelousas, Louisiana.
So, I went over there to the candidate, and I had to meet with the deacons. When I met with the deacons, the first question they asked me was what my philosophy of ministry was. So I explained focus on the Word, teaching the Word, that it’s God the Holy Spirit plus the Word God that transforms lives.
They were all fine with that at a superficial level, and then they asked me if I would preach against smoking, drinking, and dancing. That took about a 1½- to 2-hour discussion. We never got to the third or fourth question.
The reason they wanted that as a hallmark of the ministry of the church was because so many people were getting saved out of a Roman Catholic background, where there was just the spirit of licentiousness, that you could just do anything, and it would be okay with God. So, they wanted to not do anything that the Roman Catholics did, and they wanted to avoid things that the Roman Catholics did, and since they were always involved in partying, and I guess dancing and drinking and smoking, they wanted that to be preached against.
When you’re young and you’re ready to go serve the Lord, you often pray, “Lord, I’m ready I’ll just go anywhere you send me.” But my prayer driving back from Louisiana was, “Lord, please don’t send me to Cajun country.” I literally got out of the car—there’s a roadside rest area there on I-10 as you come back into Texas—I got out and kissed the ground of Texas. I was so glad to be home. A couple of weeks later, I got a call, and the deacons decided that I probably was not the right person for their church. I was glad that the Lord was leading all of us in the same direction.
But that’s a problem when you look at a passage like this, is that you think, “Well, I can’t live my life like the rest of the Gentiles do.” You’ve got to understand the entire context of what this is talking about, which is what we have gone through.
Next time we will get to Ephesians 4:19, which talks about what they are doing in terms of their lifestyle that is the product of their darkened understanding and the problems with their soul,
Slide 4
But today what I want to focus on is this phrase “the blindness of their heart.”
Slide 5
So, we’ve gone through this in detail showing that this is descriptive of the thinking of Gentiles. I think it is important to understand that this is descriptive. It’s not necessarily setting up a precise cause and effect order of these things, as much as it is describing the root problem, and the root problem is spiritual death, being alienated from the life of God.
The result of that is that their understanding is darkened, and that’s what’s led to the last phrase of Ephesians 4:17, which is “the futility of their mind,” and then it ends the sentence with “because of the blindness of their heart.”
Slide 6
There is a grammatical structure here that’s important to note, that the Gentiles were living in the futility of their thinking. That means that their minds were impacted by sin, and because of sin every area of our being is corrupted. That’s what is known as the Doctrine of Total Depravity.
Total depravity does not mean we’re as bad as we can be. It means that every area, the totality of our being, our body and soul, everything is corrupted by sin. It doesn’t mean we are unable to do anything in the direction of God, including exercising some positive volition to God. Just saying, “Lord, I understand that you’re there. I believe there must be a God. Please reveal Yourself to me.” That is—the term I use is—nonmeritorious. There’s no merit to that, and God will respond in grace to providing for you.
Unsaved Gentiles live in the emptiness of their thinking. It is not a way of thought. As God designed the brain and the mind, it is not a way of thinking that is going to achieve what God intended for man.
So we see we asked the question then, why is their thinking futile? (Answer) It’s because their understanding is darkened.
Why is their understanding darkened? (Answer) It is because they are alienated from the life of God.
Why are they alienated from the life of God? (Answer) It’s because of the ignorance that is within them.
Why are they ignorant? (Answer) Because of—and it should be translated—the stubbornness of their heart.
The word that we see here is the Greek word POROSIS. This word was frequently understood in the history of biblical translation to relate to blindness, and so this was one of the primary ways in which this word had been translated. But the word POROSIS conveys the idea of a callus.
As one writer puts it, a callus serves as mortar to reunite the surfaces of fractured bones, and that this will harden. So, you see that’s the main idea here and has the idea of a petrification that takes place.
But when the Scripture was translated into Latin, then the Latin picked up the idea that it had to do with the hardening of the eyes, a dullness or blindness that would come in, and so the idea is that man then was blind, as opposed to being hard.
Now the difference is if you’re blind, if that’s a constitutional defect as a result of sin, then there’s nothing that you did about that and there’s no personal responsibility in that “I can’t see anything of the gospel because I’m totally unable to.” That’s called the Doctrine of the Inability of Man, total inability as opposed to total depravity. So, these are the two issues that we’re going to be looking at.
On the one hand you have those who take this blindness as a constitutional defect, so they say the only way that their eyes can be opened is God has to first open their eyes and then gives them faith. Then when He gives them faith, they are regenerated. So, God first regenerates them and then gives them faith, so regeneration precedes faith because a dead man can’t do anything. God has to make them alive before they can believe, before they can see, and we’re going to see what some of the problems are with that.
Slide 7
In Acts 26:17–18, as Paul is describing the purpose for which God called him, what God said to Paul was, “I will deliver you from the Jewish people, as well as from the Gentiles, to whom I now send you, to open their eyes—so Paul’s mission was to open their eyes. He is not ascribing that to an irresistible grace. He is describing that to Paul’s teaching of the Word, his proclamation of the gospel and teaching of Scripture. Paul would through the teaching of the Word—in order to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God.”
Slide 8
So the lexical problem that I’m highlighting here
Slide 9
is this meaning of the word POROSIS for stubbornness or blindness.
Slide 10
A very well-known 19th century scholar by the name of J. Armitage Robinson wrote a commentary on Ephesians. I’ve heard many professors when I was in seminary say that this is the best commentary on the Greek text, and yet when he came to this word he said,
“In Ephesians 4:18 the word POROSIS has been uniformly interpreted as ‘blindness’ in the Latin, the Syriac, and the Armenian versions, and, with perhaps but one exception [in the Geneva translation of 1557, it was translated ‘hardness.’] The Latin understood it as obtuseness, moral obtuseness, which isn’t the same as hardness, so was taken as blindness rather than stubborn.”
So many people have followed that, and that has caused a problem.
Slide 11
Now Harold Hoehner, who was head of the Greek department at Dallas Seminary when I was there, has written and outstanding commentary on Ephesians.
He said, “The word conveys this idea of a callus that serves as mortar to reunite the surfaces of fractured bones or a pus which comes out of the bone and produces callus … In Job 17:7 it refers to the eyes growing dim.”
That is why in the Old Testament they think of it as blindness.
Slide 12
Now in Scripture we have this illustration that’s used that the problem of fallen man is a spiritual blindness. We have to understand just exactly how these metaphors are used. Man is blind or man is dead. If he is blind, he can’t ever see anything, so how can he respond to anything; and if he is dead, he can’t hear or see or taste or touch. So, we’ve got a problem here with these metaphors, and sometimes they’re pressed too far.
This idea of being physically blind is often used in Scripture as an illustration of the spiritually dead. In the Gospels Jesus as the Messiah often healed the blind, thus showing physically that He was God and He could solve the physical problem of blindness, so He could solve the spiritual problem of blindness.
There were those in the Jewish world at that time that performed false miracles, but the Jews understood that there were two miracles that were definitive signs of the Messiah, and that is the healing of a leper and giving sight to someone who had been blind from birth.
Slide 13
This is what Jesus demonstrated in John 9. We read in John 9:1–2, “Now as Jesus passed by, He saw a man who was blind from birth, and His disciples asked Him, saying, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents—because their idea was that if you’re born with a defect, then that was either your parents’ fault or your fault. It was a problem that resulted in some kind of divine discipline. It was a problem of your own making.”
John 9:3–5, “Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him. I must work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day; the night is coming when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
To demonstrate that He then reached down, grabbed some dirt, spit in it and it made a little mud pie, put it on the guy’s eyes, and they were healed. That amazed everyone. Of course, it upset the Pharisees because this was clearly a Messianic miracle.
Slide 14
Now that’s the lexical issue blindness, but there’s a theological problem with how blindness has been handled. and this brings us up to the problem that is found in five-point or even four-point Calvinism.
Slide 15
Charles Hodge was a famous well-known reformed Calvinist theologian, taught at Princeton Seminary in the mid-19th century. When he was describing the nature of fallen man, he said “And this want of power of spiritual discernment arises from the corruption of our whole nature, by which the reason or understanding is blinded, and the taste and feelings are perverted.”
So, for him this is a constitutional defect and fallen man can’t see or respond to any kind of revelation.
Slide 16
This is what is known is “irresistible grace.” That is the “I” in the acronym TULIP.
Coming out of the Protestant Reformation, you had your major streams of the Reformation. You had the Lutheran Reformation, the followers of Martin Luther in Germany. Then in France and in French Switzerland you had those who were primarily impacted by the teaching and the theology of John Calvin and his ministry out of Geneva.
By the time you get to the 2nd to 3rd generation of his followers, their theology had somewhat hardened or petrified, and you got into this big theological controversy in Holland in the early 1600s, about the same time that the pilgrims were there and living there just before they left to come to America. This is known as the Calvinist-Arminian Controversy.
The Arminians were followers of a theologian who had been a very strong Calvinist, but he began to have some questions about their theology. His name was Jacobus Arminius. He put forth—or his followers did because he had died before all of this really bubbled to the surface—five assertions about their beliefs in the area of salvation. In response to those five assertions, the Calvinists came up with their five, and that’s remembered by the acronym TULIP.
Someone who was quite creative came along and said, “Here’s the controversy over flower theology.” You have “Daisy Theology” for the Arminians, “He loves me, He loves me not; He loves me, He loves me not; He loves me, He loves me not,” because in Arminian theology you could lose your salvation, get it back the next day, lose it again, that’s kind of an exaggeration, but that’s the “Daisy Theology” of Arminianism. This is TULIP.
The “T” is really for total inability, though some will say total depravity.
The “U” is for unconditional election. These all flow logically together. If you are totally unable to respond to God’s revelation or to the gospel because you’re spiritually dead and blind, then how is God going to save anyone? Well, He is going to choose who is going to be saved and who will not. In more extreme forms you would have double predestination. But in unconditional election, God is not choosing who will be saved on the basis of any condition. He has chosen them, they would say, from Eternity Past.
The “L” is for limited atonement. Christ didn’t die for the non-elect, He only died for the elect. So if you’re totally unable to respond, then God is going to regenerate those who are elect, and they will then respond in faith. So regeneration precedes faith, and they are the ones for whom Christ died.
They will be irresistibly drawn to the gospel by the Holy Spirit. This means they can’t resist; they can’t say no. Those who are elect will be irresistibly drawn to the gospel.
They are the ones who will respond in faith, and if they are the elect, they will persevere to the end in their spiritual growth, and if they don’t, well, they weren’t really part of the elect.
So that’s just a flyover of five-point Calvinism.
Regarding the “I” in TULIP is what we’re talking about here to understand what Scripture teachers about the importance of human responsibility and human volition.
Slide 17
In their book, The Five Points of Calvinism, David Steele, Curtis Thomas, and Roger Nicole, all well-known Calvinist theologians, said:
“… Because men are by nature dead in sin and under its power, they are of themselves unable and unwilling to forsake their evil ways and to turn to Christ for mercy. Consequently, the unregenerate will not respond to the gospel call to repentance and faith. No amount of external threatenings or promises will cause blind, deaf, dead, rebellious sinners to bow before Christ as Lord and to look to Him alone for salvation.”
Slide 18
They go on to say, “Therefore, the Holy Spirit, in order to bring God’s elect to salvation, extends to them a special inward call in addition to the outward call contained in the gospel message.”
So in the proclamation of the gospel by the evangelists, those who are the elect will feel this inward call and they will respond, but the others will not. They go on to say,
“Through this special call, the Holy Spirit performs a work of grace within the sinner which inevitably brings him to faith in Christ.”
It’s irresistible. That’s why it’s called irresistible or efficacious grace. He goes on to say,
“The inward change wrought in the elect sinner enable him to understand and believe spiritual truth; in the spiritual realm he is given the seeing eye and the hearing ear. The Spirit creates within him a new heart or new nature. This is accomplished through regeneration or the new birth by which the sinner is made a child of God and is given spiritual life.”
So did you read anything in there about faith, other than the fact that the special call brings him to faith in Christ. But that’s after this interchange has taken place.
Slide 19
So, in addition to this outward call or presentation of the gospel, there’s this inward call. This is explained in the Westminster Confession of Faith. If you grew up in Presbyterian Church, you probably had to memorize this when you went through catechism, The Doctrine of Irresistible or Efficacious Grace.
Now some of you have heard the term “efficacious grace” used in another way, but it is defined historically here. This is what it means in these documents:
“The Doctrine of Irresistible or Efficacious Grace is set forth in the Westminster Confession of Faith in the following words. ‘All those whom God hath predestined unto life, and those only, He is pleased in His appointed and accepted time, effectually to call by His Word and Spirit, out of that state of sin and death in which they are by nature, to grace and salvation by Jesus Christ; enlightening their minds spiritually and savingly to understand the things of God; taking away their heart of stone, and giving unto them a heart of flesh; renewing their wills, and by His almighty power determining them to that which is good, and effectually drawing them to Jesus Christ [Notice all of that happens before they believe]; yet so as they come most freely, being made willing by his grace.’ ”
Slide 20
What they’re basically saying is:
“Blindness is a constitutional defect, that is, spiritually blind and spiritually dead people cannot see, hear, or believe the gospel because of the Fall [because of total inability]. God will irresistibly draw the elect, give them saving faith, and they will necessarily persevere as evidence of their salvation.”
Slide 21
The problem is you have passages like John 5:25 where Jesus says, “Most assuredly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear will live.”
Seems pretty clear that Jesus says that the dead can hear, so you can’t push dead and blind to cover all of the things that the Calvinist is trying to make it cover. As I’ve pointed out, it is Ephesians 4:18 that defines what spiritual death is, that we’re alienated from the life of God.
Slide 22
Now one passage that I want to look at here briefly, we will come back to it later, is Romans 1:20–21, where Paul tells us, “For since the creation of the world His—God’s—invisible attributes are clearly seen,—a blind person can clearly see the invisible attributes of God through His creation—being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse, because although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile—that’s the same word that’s used in our passage in Ephesians 4:17—in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts are darkened—those two words are both used in Ephesians 4:17–18.”
Slide 23
Sin has an impact on the thinking of the unbeliever, but not in such a way that he cannot come to know that God exists, even with nonverbal or what is called “natural revelation,” that is, through God’s works. Psalm 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows forth his handiwork.”
Romans 1:19–21 clearly states that through His creation His invisible attributes are seen, so that they know God from an external witness and they know Him internally. It is made clear within them.
Slide 24
So, as we look at those verses there are four points:
Now let’s look at a few key passages and see what Scripture indicates.
Does this indicate that man has a constitutional problem so that he cannot at all understand the gospel or the existence of God and respond at least with positive volition? I’m not denying the role of the Holy Spirit. We will get to that at the very end.
Slide 25
I am going to look at three parallel passages here that are part of the Parable of the Sower. There are a lot of details here I’m not going to touch on. What’s important is to observe the response of Satan not mentioned in all of the passages.
In Matthew 13:19 Jesus is speaking to the disciples, “When anyone hears the message of the kingdom, and does not understand it, then the wicked one comes and snatches away what was sown in his heart. This is he who received seed by the wayside.” This is the first one.
Now what we see here is that he hears the message, he understands the message, but then the wicked one comes along, that is Satan, and steals it.
When does this happen? Let’s look at the parallel in Mark 4:15, “And these are the ones by the wayside where the word is sown. When they hear,—not later, not tomorrow, not the next day, not in six months—Satan comes immediately and takes away the word that was sown in their hearts.”
Why is he so quick to take the word away from those who don’t understand, they’re responding negatively?
Slide 26
That’s in the third passage, Luke 8:12, “Those by the wayside are the ones who hear; then the devil—Mark said it’s immediate—comes and takes away the word out of their hearts—why does he do that?—lest…”
“Lest” is a really important word because it’s going to point out an exception. It’s a good translation in English. It’s the Greek word HINA, which means “in order that.” It introduces a purpose clause, and then that is adjoined to a negative. If I’d translated it literally it would read “in order that they should not believe and be saved.”
So, if they are constitutionally incapable of even responding in positive volition to the hearing of the gospel message, why does Satan need to immediately pluck it out of their mind? He does so, so they won’t respond and be saved. He would not have to do that if they were constitutionally blind and unable to respond.
Slide 27
Now we see this same thing when we look at 2 Corinthians 4:1–4. In this passage we have another “lest.” It’s almost identical in the Greek. It’s a little different, but it’s the same idea.
2 Corinthians 4:1–2, “Therefore, since we have this ministry,—we being the apostles—as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but by the manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.”
2 Corinthians 4:3–4, “But even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, whose minds the god of this age has blinded, who do not believe, lest the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine on them.”
Slide 28
Now 2 Corinthians 4:3–4 are very interesting. He talks about the fact that the gospel is veiled.
Now if you have on a blindfold or a veil because you want to have darkness, you can still see, can’t you? The blindfold or the veil is external to the eyes. The problem is not that the eyes are blind, unable to see, but that there’s something put over the eyes that veils them.
Who puts that there? It is the god of this age; it is Satan. It is not that they are constitutionally blind and incapable of understanding the gospel.
The point that I’m making is simple. If man is unable to understand the gospel or unable to even express a desire to know God or to find out about how we can know God better, if he can’t even do that, why does Satan need to put a veil over his eyes? He can just sit back and rest, because they’ve got this constitutional defect.
What this tells us is that Satan uses various things, philosophies, religions, various other tools, to veil the eyes of those who might respond to the gospel.
2 Corinthians 4:4, “whose minds the god of this age has blinded—via the veil—… lest—that is, for the purpose—that the light of the gospel of the glory of God, who is the image of God, should not shine on them.”
Now in Acts 9 when Paul is on the road to Damascus and Jesus appears, it is a blinding light that pierces that veil, so that the blindness that is caused by the veil of the legalism of the Pharisees is pierced by the light of the revelation of Jesus Christ.
When that happens, Paul says in Acts 9:5, “ ‘Who are You, Lord?’ Then the Lord said, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. It’s hard for you to kick against the goads—or the prodding.’ ”
This tells us that we have a way to respond, but we can’t save ourselves. It is nonmeritorious. The merit is in what Christ did on the Cross. It’s not in and of ourselves.
Slide 29
Let’s go look at one more passage and that’s Romans 1:18–21:
Romans 1:18, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness,”
This is descriptive of those who reject this external revelation of God through His creation.
Romans 1:19 says, “because what may be known of God is manifest in them ...”
See, they know God exists. They’re not constitutionally unable to grasp the concept, but they reject it. They suppress it in unrighteousness. They have the volitional ability to respond, to desire to know more or not, and they historically suppress that truth in unrighteousness.
What often happens is, you have the goads pricking, as the Lord says to Paul, and what does that do? It makes people angry. Paul was so angry about the gospel that he was killing Christians. There are a lot of people who reject the gospel, and they hate Christians, they hate Christianity, and they’re mad about it. That doesn’t mean they won’t ever be saved, but it does mean that there is great hostility in reaction to the gospel that we should pay attention to.
We see that they know God. It’s manifest in them because God has shown it to them. So there’s an external witness and an internal witness that is true for every single human being.
Slide 30
Let’s go to one more passage. In John 6, I’m not going to take time to go through and set up all of the context of John 6. This is an important passage, but I just want to focus on the two most important verses that are pulled out. These are the verses that are at the very core of this doctrine of irresistible grace.
John 6:44 is the verse that is usually cited as the proof text. Jesus says, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.”
They will go to this particular passage and say, “See, this word that is translated ‘draw’ is the word HELKO and this has the idea of pulling somebody against their will.” It is used that way, but that’s not the core meaning of the word. It simply means to drag something from one location to another.
Slide 31
For example, in Acts 16:19, these are the three verses that are usually cited. Paul and Silas were arrested and they were dragged into the marketplace by the authorities. They’re dragged against their will. See, that’s what drawing means. God is going to draw you against your will.
Acts 21:30 is talking about seizing Paul again. The Romans arrested him “and dragged him out of the temple.” They dragged him against his will.
James 2:6, “But you have dishonored the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you and drag you into the courts?”
In these examples it is always against their will. Well, #1 against their will is not the point of any of these passages. #2 if it is part of the meaning, it’s a secondary meaning that’s made clear from these contexts, but it’s also a word that is used by John, the writer who is recording what Jesus said in John 6.
Slide 32
And it is used again in John 21. This is after the crucifixion, after the resurrection. Jesus appeared to the disciples on a beach on the Sea of Galilee, and the disciples have been out fishing all night and they came up with nothing, so Jesus appeared. They weren’t sure who He was, (John 21:6) “and He said to them, ‘Cast the net on the right side of the boat, and you will find some.’ So they cast, and now they were not able to draw it in because of the multitude of fish.”
It was not a resistance of the will. It was only because of the situation of the water and the boat and leverage. They didn’t have enough leverage to pull them all in. A little while later, once the boat has come to the beach, Peter goes to the boat and he drags the net to land. So it doesn’t indicate an inability to do something or that you are dragged against your will. It’s just simply your move from one thing to another.
Following John 6:44, John 6:45 says, “It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught of God.’ ”
This is a quote that comes from Isaiah 54:13, “All your children shall be taught by the Lord,—it’s a Millennial reference, looking to the future—and great shall be the peace of your children.”
This explains the answer to the question of how does the Father draw people. They are taught by the Lord. It is through the Scripture.
In John 6:45 Jesus builds on this on this quotation from Isaiah 54:13. He says, “It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Therefore—now He’s going to add to it. He says—everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.”
Notice He didn’t say just “heard,” He said, “heard and learned.”
In the context of John 6 where He has fed the 5,000, He’s used that as an illustration of Himself as the bread of life, but He talks about the fact that these are people who heard, but they didn’t respond to what they heard. So now He says Isaiah 54:13 applies to those who A) heard and B) applied it. They learned from the Father.
So those who hear and learn, what is it that draws them? It is the content of Scripture. It’s the same thing that we saw earlier in God’s commission of the Apostle Paul, that he would open the eye of those who were spiritually dead. How would he do it? Through the proclamation and the preaching of the gospel.
Slide 34
Now we will look at one more passage to show that this is not a merely human endeavor. This is John 16, and this points out the important and indispensable role of God the Holy Spirit. God the Holy Spirit is working with the proclamation of the gospel to make it clear to the spiritually dead unbeliever.
Jesus in John 16 is talking to His disciples, and He’s been explaining to them all through this, John 14–16, that He’s going to leave, and that He has to leave so that He can send another Comforter, and that when He sends another Comforter, this is going to be the Holy Spirit. It’s another Comforter like Him.
In John 16:7 He says, “Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper—that is, the Holy Spirit—will not come to you, but if I depart, I will send Him to you.”
John 16:8, “And when He has come,—He will do three things—He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.”
Now who’s He convicting? He’s convicting the world. Not just the elect, He’s convicting the world. This is the same phraseology you have in John 3:16 where we read, “For God loved the world in this way—that is, all of the inhabitants of the earth—that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
So what is the Holy Spirit doing? He’s convicting them first of all, John 16:9, “of sin, because they do not believe in Me.”
He’s convicting them of their unbelief, that they have not accepted Jesus as the promised and prophesied Messiah who died on the Cross for their sins.
John 16:10, “of righteousness …”
Why righteousness? Because they don’t have righteousness. We’re born unrighteous. We were spiritually dead and the only way we can become righteous is to trust in Christ, and then we receive from God the imputation of Christ’s righteousness. This is Genesis 15:6, that Abraham “believed God, and it was accounted to him as righteousness.”
That was quoted by Paul in Romans 4 as he is explaining how justification happens, that we are declared just not because of anything that we have done, but because we now, as a result of faith in the gospel, we receive the righteousness of Christ, and instantly, God credits us with that. As it were, we are clothed in a robe of righteousness and God’s justice looks on us not as spiritually dead, corrupt sinners, but He sees the righteousness of Christ that clothes us, and He declares us to be just.
Then third, John 16:11, “of judgment, because the ruler of this word is judged.”
At the Cross Satan is judged and he is therefore condemned at that point. So he is just, as it were, out on parole until God is going to finally judge him at the end of the Tribulation period. He will be cast into the bottomless pit for 1,000 years, then he is released for a short time. He will then lead a rebellion against God at the end of Revelation 20, and God will destroy all of those who follow Satan in that rebellion. Then He will bring about the close to history, and there will be the Great White Throne Judgment.
When we look at all of this, we realize that man, in and of himself, cannot save himself. We can do nothing that brings us any kind of value, any kind of approbation from God. Christ is the One who did the work. Christ is the One who paid the penalty for our sins, so that by trusting Him and Him alone, we have eternal life.
But we have the ability to respond to the revelation that God has given to us, and that’s Romans 1, to know that God exists; and then secondly, we respond to the explanation of the gospel because God the Holy Spirit is going to make the gospel clear to us to help our understanding, so that we have a clear understanding of the gospel.
But the negative of that is if we are rejecting it, immediately you have Satan snatching it out of our minds, so that we don’t have more of a chance to respond. We may hear the gospel at other times and the same thing happens, but Satan is trying to blind us to keep us from responding, and he does that through the various philosophies and religions and rationales that somehow are used by our minds to justify our suppression of truth, which is Romans 1:18.
The issue for every person is when you hear the gospel is to respond by trusting in Christ as Savior, and at that instant we’re declared righteous. It’s not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration, which comes after we trust in Christ as Savior. Just a microsecond after we are instantly regenerated and made new creatures in Christ, and we are entered into the body of Christ, the church, and we have everlasting life.
That is the gospel. It doesn’t have anything to do with how we feel, it doesn’t have anything to do with what church we go to, it doesn’t have anything to do with what we’ve done or haven’t done. It has everything to do with what Christ did on the Cross.
Closing Prayer
“Father, we thank You for this opportunity that we have to understand some of the dynamics that You have revealed in Your Word about how we can respond to the gospel, but also showing that there is a greater invisible war that goes on as Satan seeks to blind us, Satan seeks to veil the truth, Satan seeks to pluck it out of our minds, so that we do not respond to the gospel.
“But there is a shadow of and ability where we can respond to the nonverbal revelation of Your creation, and we can respond to the gospel. Yet it is God the Holy Spirit, who then makes that salvation possible as we put our faith in Christ. It’s not something that is meritorious, it’s not a different kind of faith, it is the object of faith that has all of the merit: Jesus Christ.
“Father, we pray for anyone here, anyone who’s listening online, anyone who listens at some future date, that this will become clear to them that God the Holy Spirit would make clear what the issues are for eternal salvation, and it has nothing to do with our works, our efforts, our background, our sins. It has to do only with trusting in Jesus Christ as our Savior.
“We pray this in His name. Amen.”