Arminian Today

>DISPUTATION XXVII

ON THE LORDSHIP OR DOMINION OF GOD

I. Through creation, dominion over all things which have been created by himself, belongs to the Creator. It is, therefore, primary, being dependent on no other dominion or on that of no other person; and it is, on this account, chief because there is none greater; and it is absolute, because it is over the entire creature, according to the whole, and according to all and each of its parts, and to all the relations which subsist between the Creator and the creature. It is, consequently, perpetual, that is, so long as the creature itself exists.

II. But the dominion of God is the right of the Creator, and his power over the creatures; according to which he has them as his own property, and can command and use them, and do about them, whatever the relation of creation and the equity which rests upon it, permit.

III. For the right cannot extend further than is allowed by that cause from which the whole of it arises, and on which it is dependent. For this reason, it is not agreeable to this right of God, either that he delivers up his creature to another who may domineer over such creature, at his arbitrary pleasure, so that he be not compelled to render to God an account of the exercise of his sovereignty, and be able, without any demerit on the part of the creature, to inflict every evil on a creature capable of injury, or, at least, not for any good of this creature; or that he [God] command an act to be done by the creature, for the performance of which he neither has, nor can have, sufficient and necessary powers; or that he employ the creature to introduce sin into the world, that he may, by punishing or by forgiving it, promote his own glory; or, lastly, to do concerning the creature whatever he is able, according to his absolute power, to do concerning him, that is eternally to punish or to afflict him, without [his having committed] sin.

IV. As this is a power over rational creatures, (in reference to whom chiefly we treat on the dominion and power of God,) it may be considered in two views, either as despotic, or as kingly, or patriarchal. The former is that which he employs without any intention of good which may be useful or saving to the creature; that latter is that which he employs when he also intends the good of the creature itself. And this last is used by God through the abundance of his own goodness and sufficiency, until he considers the creature to be unworthy, on account of his perverseness, to have God presiding over him in his kingly and paternal authority.

V. Hence, it is, that, when God is about to command some thing to his rational creature, he does not exact every thing which he justly might do, and he employs persuasions through arguments which have regard to the utility and necessity of those persuasions.

VI. In addition to this, God enters into a contract or covenant with his creature; and he does this for the purpose that the creature may serve him, not so much “of debt,” as from a spontaneous, free and liberal obedience, according to the nature of confederations which consist of stipulations and promises. On this account, God frequently distinguishes his law by the title of a COVENANT.

VII. Yet this condition is always annexed to the confederation, that if man be unmindful of the covenant and a contemner of its pleasant rule, he may always be impelled or governed by that domination which is really lordly, strict and rigid, and into which, he who refuses to obey the other [species of rule], justly falls.

VIII. Hence, arises a two-fold right of God over his rational creature. The First, which belongs to him through creation; the Second, through contract. The former rests on the good which the creature has received from his Creator; the latter rests on the still greater benefit which the creature will receive from God, his preserver, promoter and glorifier.

IX. If the creature happen to sin against this two-fold right, by that very act, he gives to God, his Lord, King and Father, the right of treating him as a sinning creature, and of inflicting on him due punishment; and this is a THIRD right, which rests on the wicked act of the creature against God.

There is a misconception when it comes to the Arminian/Calvinist debate that Arminians deny the sovereignty of God.  This could be nothing further from the truth.  No biblical Arminian would reject the sovereignty of God since the Bible plainly teaches that “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3).  The difference between the Arminian and Calvinist views about the sovereignty of God lies whether God is the direct cause of all things.  Arminians don’t deny that God controls all things but we deny that He is the direct cause of all things.  The bottom line issue is that we Arminians believe that if we are to teach that God causes all things then this must include sin yet the Bible teaches that God is absolutely holy and pure (Habakkuk 1:13) and that He does not sin nor does He tempt anyone to sin (James 1:13).  God certainly allows sin but a time will come when He will judge the world in righteousness (Acts 17:30-31).

Lest I divert to the Arminian/Calvinist debate, I want to focus on being thankful for the sovereignty of God.  While I affirm that the Bible teaches the sovereignty of God, I must confess that I don’t fully understand it anymore than I fully grasp the Trinity, the Incarnation, or even God’s grace and mercy.  I certainly believe that God is in control of all things but why God chooses to allow things to come to pass is beyond me.  I do know that because of God’s sovereignty, ultimately all things will be made right when Jesus reigns forever (Revelation 22:1-5).  I believe that everything will be accomplished as God has foretold in His Word because of His sovereignty.  Nothing can stop the purposes and plans of God.  No armies, no ruler, no laws of men, nothing can halt the kingdom of God from glorifying the King.

Yet on a more practical level, I trust God controls my every detail.  Nothing happens in my life without God being fully aware of it.  Romans 8:28 doesn’t say that all things have a purpose but rather that God is able to make all things work together for my good.  In the end, even my sorrows can be turned into triumphs if I release them to the sovereign plans of God.  Whatever comes to pass in my life will come to pass because God sovereignly allows them.  He might not cause them directly but He can use them for His glory (as in Genesis 50:20).  I can place my faith in a sovereign God who foreknows all things and He can, if He chooses to, step into my world and act according to His purposes.

When I look at my life as to where I have been and where I am going, the devil sometimes tries to paint me as a failure.  For instance, I attended college but now I drive a truck for a living.  I once pastored a church but now I am far from pastoring ever again.  Yet I believe that none of this that has happened to me cannot be used by God to exalt His name.  I have learned valuable lessons from my past and I believe, as I examine my choices, that God was (and is) in full control of my life and times.  I can’t explain why things have happened the way that they have happened but I do trust in a sovereign God who knows all things and will work all things, in the end, for His honor and glory.

So be thankful that our God is sovereign.  The world finds its strength in men but we must find ours in the Lord our God (Psalm 20:7).  Our God is all-powerful and nothing nor no one can stop Him from exalting His name.  I, for one, refuse to worship anyone else but the one true and living and sovereign Lord.

The words of the LORD are pure words, like silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.  You shall keep them, O LORD, You shall preserve them from this generation forever.
- Psalm 12:6-7 (NKJV)


Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.
- Psalm 115:3


One of the key factors that leads me to embrace the inerrancy of Scripture is my firm belief in the sovereignty of God.  There is no denying that I differ with Calvinists over the implications of God’s sovereignty and how God has chosen to be sovereign over His creation but make no doubts about it, I firmly believe that God is sovereign.  I believe in a God who created the world in six literal days (Genesis 1-2) and I believe that He is so powerful that He merely had to speak the worlds into existence.  Everything that we see today comes from the gracious and creative hand of God and I believe that He created all that we see out of nothing (Hebrews 11:3).  I also believe that God upholds the universe simply by His word (Hebrews 1:3).

I believe that every miracle recorded in the Bible happened.  I believe that Jesus Christ was God manifested in the flesh (John 1:14) and that He was born of the virgin Mary through the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35-37).  I believe that Jesus lived a sinless life, died a sinless death, and was raised by the power of God and He forever lives today (Acts 1:3; Hebrews 7:25).  I believe that every miracle and every word from Jesus that are recorded in the Bible are completely true (John 20:30-31).  I believe every person named in the Bible lived and that every event found in the Bible happened just as the Bible says it happened.  I believe that every miracle found in the book of Acts occurred to the glory of God.  I believe in the literal second coming of Jesus Christ to planet earth and that Jesus will be Lord of all into eternity (Psalm 110:1).

I also firmly believe that God is all-powerful and that nothing can stop Him from accomplishing His will for His glory.  God’s passion is for Himself to be exalted and that the nations might worship Him (Psalm 2:10-12).

I also believe that God has given us the Bible to reveal Himself and most of all, His Son for its in His Son that we have eternal life and are reconciled to God (John 5:24-25; Acts 17:30-31; 2 Corinthians 5:18-21; 1 Peter 3:18).  I believe the Bible faithfully reveals Jesus from Genesis to Revelation and that Jesus alone is worthy of worship and praise for what He has done in saving us from sin and bringing us to God (Revelation 19:11-16).

So if the Bible is so important for us to know the gospel and be saved (Romans 10:14-17) then it logically follows that God would protect and preserve His Word since He foreknows all things and His passion is to glorify His name through the salvation of souls.  God foreknows every act, every single event, every detail of human history and He controls all that comes to pass.  I differ with Calvinist that God is the direct cause of all things but I do believe that God does control all things and while I don’t fully understand His ways and His wisdom in all things, I trust that God is working all things for His own ends and for His glory alone (Romans 8:28-30; Ephesians 1:11).  Like Paul in Romans 11:33-36, I throw myself at the feet of God’s sovereignty and declare that I might not understand all His ways, I do trust in Him and believe that He is faithful to all His promises.

To me, this is not an Arminian or Calvinist issue concerning God’s sovereignty.  It is biblical and orthodox to embrace a God who is sovereign over all.  If God were not sovereign, how could He rightly be called God?  As God begin to forge out a people from bondage in Egypt in Exodus God revealed Himself to Moses as the great I AM (Exodus 3:14).  I AM THAT I AM is what Yahweh called Himself.  He is just God.  He doesn’t need food or clothing or shelter or air or water.  He is a self-sufficient God who needs nothing.  As Yahweh went to war with the false gods of Egypt in Exodus He was doing this to reveal Himself to the Israelites to show them that He was the one true God and they were to worship Him alone (Exodus 20:1-6).  He soundly defeated the false gods of Egypt to show Israel His glory.  How did God defeat the false gods and idols of Egypt?  Not just with His unlimited power and provision for Israel but through His control of all things and His absolute sovereignty.  Yahweh’s sovereignty set Him apart from the false gods of Egypt and showed the Israelites that they could trust Him to lead them and guide them for His name’s sake.

In Isaiah 40-49 God goes to war again with the false gods and idols.  Through the prophet Isaiah Yahweh again showed that He was the sovereign God.  He declares that there are no gods (Isaiah 43:10-11) and that He alone knows the past, present, and future and He can tell you not just what is to come to pass but also why things happened as they did (Isaiah 45:15-25; 46:6; 48:5).  That is sovereignty!

Now if God is able to do all these things by His own power then can we not trust Him to preserve the very word that was given by inspiration of the Holy Spirit to humans to reveal this God to us?  Psalm 19:1-6 tells us that we can have a general understanding that there is a God but Psalm 19:7-11 show us the power of the written revelation of God, mainly to reveal Yahweh to us.  We can have a general knowledge about God from His creation and from His providence but to really know God and to be intimate with Him requires that we meet His conditions and be saved.  How can we learn this apart from the self-disclosure of God to us and that is found in His Word.  I make no arguments that Jesus is the center of my faith (Colossians 1:15-18) and Jesus alone purchased my salvation through His own blood (Ephesians 1:7) but I believe that the primary way that I learn about Jesus is not from mystical means or from subjective experiences or from creation but from the Bible.

Therefore, I hold to inerrancy because I believe in the sovereignty of God.  If someone ever intended to put an error in the Bible to either take something out or put something in, God foresaw that and protected His Word.  Do I have proof?  The Bible says nothing about this except Psalm 12:6-7 speaks about God keeping His Word.  I admit that my belief in God protecting His Word is largely deduced from the truths of Scripture concerning three things: God’s sovereignty, God’s love for the lost, and God’s salvation revealed in His Son.  When I put these three together I believe that God will protect and preserve His Word because His glory is at stake and His reconciliation to His children through His Son.

So what do I do then with issues regarding textual variations?  For instance, Mark’s ending in Mark 16:9-20.  Frankly, I do doubt that Mark 16:9-20 is from the original text based on textual criticism but I don’t believe that the ending of Mark 16:9-20 either adds to or takes away from the Bible.  This isn’t to imply that I completely accept or reject Mark 16:9-20 but I do believe that there is nothing in Mark 16:9-20 nor any other disputed passages that either adds to or takes away from the precious truths of the Bible.  While textual criticism is a difficult and tedious task, I believe that the researcher should approach the texts knowing that God has protected His Word from error and that we should compare the various manuscripts while taking nothing nor adding to them.  This is why I love translations such as the NASB or the NKJV that leave the debated passages in the Bible and allow the reader to see what passages are debated and why they are?  In every case, I see nothing in the debated passages that would cause Christianity to crumble or would take away from the blessed gospel of Jesus Christ lest Revelation 22:18-19 would come to pass.

What is needed today is a fresh hunger for the Bible.  We don’t need any new revelations.  We don’t need a prophet to speak for God.  We don’t need visions or dreams.  What we need is a fresh hunger for the Word of God that stirs us to read, study, apply, and obey the Bible.  As Mark Twain said, “It is not the passages of the Bible that I don’t understand that bother me.  It is those that I do understand yet don’t obey that bother me.”  I pray that you and I would hunger for the truths of the Bible like never before.  Psalm 1:1-3 speaks about the blessings that comes from the man of God who dives into God’s Law.  Jesus said that we are His true disciples when we study and apply His teachings to our lives (Matthew 7:24-27; John 8:31-32).  Peter said that we were to hunger for God’s Word like newborn babies (1 Peter 2:1-3).  James said that we were to be doers of the Word and not hearers only (James 1:22-25) for the implanted Word is able to save our souls (James 1:21).  Jesus defeated Satan by quoting from the Scriptures (Matthew 4:1-11) and Ephesians 6:17 says that the Word of God is the disciple’s sword.

I pray that we would see a revival of Bible study, Bible translations in other languages so that the gospel would go forth, faithful biblical criticism that has a high view of God and His Word, and a renewed passion for the God of the Bible.  By no means should the Church fall down and worship the Bible but we are to worship the God that the Bible reveals.  When we cast aside the Word of God for errors and traditions of men (Mark 7:1-13), we will soon cast aside the biblical God because we simply will not tolerate a sovereign God.  We want a god made in our image and likeness who is full of sin and the flesh.  This is not the true God and how we need to see Him as He is revealed in His holy and inerrant Word that He has preserved by His sovereign power.

In the last couple of decades we have seen a rise of a new doctrine of God called “Open Theology.” This “Open Theology,” “Open Theism,” or “Free-Will Theism” has been very appealing to many from the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition. According to Open theology, the future is open and thus not entirely settled. This school of thought believes that God does not have exhaustive foreknowledge of the future. This means that while God knows all possibilities, God does not know with certainty what free creatures will actually do until they act.

This view was developed after Openness theologians failed to reconcile human freedom and divine foreknowledge. Open Theology rejects the idea that these two concepts are reconcilable and as a result they reject the idea that God has exhaustive foreknowledge. If the future is truly undetermined, they say, then God cannot fully know the future because much of it is not available to be known. They claim that God has decided to limit his knowledge of the future in order to maintain human freedom as a necessary quality of a meaningful relationship.

According to Clark Pinnock, a leading proponent of Open Theology, “If choices are real and freedom significant, future decisions cannot be exhaustively known.” Open theology does believe that God is all knowing. God knows all things that can be known or God knows everything that may happen in the future. God knows all the possibilities, but He does not know with absolute certainty what every free creature will someday choose to do.

What does the Bible say about God’s knowledge of the future?

Those who hold to Open theology claim the Bible does not provide any clear cut answers. They see many Biblical passages which seem to indicate that God does not know the details of the future. Passages where God repents or changes His mind implies that God does not know the future exhaustively. The story of Hezekiah found in 2 Kings is given as a classic example of an open future. In 2 Kings 20:1 we read, “In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz went to him and said, ‘This is what the LORD says: Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.’” God seems to have decided the future of Hezekiah.

However after Hezekiah spends time in prayer, God adds fifteen years to Hezekiah’s life. This passage seems to imply the future is open and not settled. If God foreknew when Hezekiah would die, God must have told Hezekiah a lie. Open Theology provides a way out for God. God changed His mind out of love.

Many other passages are used by those who promote Open Theology, such as Genesis 18. According to Open Theology we have God on a fact-finding mission. With His limited knowledge God needs to go and see if Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin matches the reports He has received.

Yet reading the passage in this manner seems to create more problems than it solves. Not only do we have a God who has limited knowledge, but now we have a God who has to walk around if He wants to get somewhere. We also get a God who needs to eat and rest as well.

There are of course many passages of Scripture which indicate God’s exhaustive knowledge. When God communicates to us He uses expressions which cannot be taken literally. Sometimes God uses figures of speech and sometimes He uses straightforward statements. Our job is to study His Word and distinguish what is to be understood as a figure of speech and what is to be taken as a straightforward statement.

We see in Scripture many examples where God hides His face (Psalm 13:1); or has arms (Isaiah 53:1) and intestines (Isaiah 63:15). When we read passages like these we understand this is finite man speaking of an infinite Father with the limitations of words. The same can certainly be said of God’s knowledge when we read Scriptures that use figures of speech like: God remembers (Genesis 6:6, Exodus 32:12-14); God repents (Genesis 9:15, Exodus 6:5); or that God forgets (Psalm 9:18, 13:1; Jeremiah 23:39).

What is the big deal? Why can’t Christians have different opinions on what or how much God’s knows? The bottom line is ideas and beliefs have consequences. How can we really trust and accept the promises of Scripture if we have a God who does not know the future exhaustively? Thomas Oden said, “The fantasy that God is ignorant of the future is a heresy that must be rejected on scriptural grounds.” It may be impossible for us to get our mind around the attributes of God. Is that really a problem? Isaiah 55:8-9 says pretty clearly that there are some things we cannot comprehend about God.

We know God does not contradict Himself. We know God is Holy because He has told us so. Yet we witness evil in this world that Holy God created. This is a problem for us to understand, but is it really a problem (Psalm 139:6; Ecclesiastes 3:11)?

Openness and Wesleyan-Arminian Theology

There is no question that Open Theology is not the position of historic Wesleyan Arminianism. Thomas Noble concluded that Pinnock’s view is different from ours. “The immanence of God within the time-space creation is emphasized at the expense of his transcendence. God is not fully transcendent over time since he cannot know the future.”

Classical Arminian theology has historically affirmed God’s exhaustive foreknowledge of the future. While Open Theology is an attempt to reject Calvinistic determinism, both Open Theology and Calvinism have tied predestination and foreknowledge together. It seems for Open Theology to reject predestination one must also reject foreknowledge as well.

John Wesley, in his sermon “On Predestination,” argued that the foreknowledge of God is the first point to be addressed in considering God’s whole work in salvation. Wesley said that, “God foreknew those in every nation who would believe,” and that, “In a word, God, looking on all ages, from the creation to the consummation, as a moment, and seeing at once whatever is in the hearts of all children of men, knows every one that does or does not believe, in every age or nation.”

For Wesley this did not create a conflict between human moral freedom and divine foreknowledge. He affirmed that though God knew the future, he did not determine it. Wesley believed that we must not think that things are because God knows them; rather, God knows them because they are. Wesley said, “I now know the sun shines. Yet the sun does not shine because I know it: but I know it because he shines. My knowledge supposes the sun to shine, but does not in any wise cause it. In like manner God knows that man sins; for he knows all things. Yet we do not sin because he knows it: but he knows it because we sin. And his knowledge supposes our sin, but does not in any wise cause it.”

Calvinism conflates foreknowledge with predestination, claiming that God foreknows the future because He has predetermined it. Wesley, like Arminius, saw God’s divine foreknowledge as the ground of his predetermination to save those who believe and damn those who do not believe. Open Theology is a denial, not a development of historic Arminian theology. For that matter Open Theology is a denial of the historic position of the church. Open Theology seems to want to remove the mystery or the paradox of human freedom and divine foreknowledge, but in this attempt to limit God’s knowledge they have created bigger problems and a smaller God.

The Reformation Study Bible teaches that “we do not know what others God has chosen among those who do not yet believe, nor why He chose us in particular. We do know that we believe now only because we were chosen… . Reprobation is the name given to God’s eternal decision regarding those sinners whom He has not chosen for life. In not choosing them for life, God has determined not to change them. They will continue in sin, and finally will be judged for what they have done… . God’s decree of election is secret; which persons are elect and which are reprobate will not be revealed before the Judgment. Until that time, God’s command is that the call to repent and believe be preached to everyone.”

In his book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, J. I. Packer advocated the necessity of evangelism. He affirmed both the doctrines of divine sovereignty and human responsibility, which he labeled an “antinomy.” “An antinomy exists when a pair of principles stand side by side, seemingly irreconcilable, yet both undeniable.”  While Wesleyan-Arminians affirm that the Bible teaches both divine sovereignty and human responsibility, the real purpose of Packer’s book is to reconcile the biblical mandate to evangelize with Calvinistic determinism.

His advice to Calvinists is, basically, to preach like Arminians. But how can the Gospel sincerely be preached to whosoever will, when the preacher has accepted Calvinistic presuppositions?  Lloyd-Jones declared, “The whosoever is determined by God.”  However, if God did not determine to offer salvation to all, then everyone cannot be saved. The fact is that God determined “whosoever” may be saved.

Shank wrote that, according to Calvin, the guilt of the reprobate is a consequence rather than a cause. “For if by eternal decree God unconditionally ‘preordained’ specific men to eternal damnation simply because ‘it was his pleasure to doom them to destruction,’ it cannot be true that ‘the cause and matter’ of their perdition is to be found within the reprobate themselves, as Calvin asserts, because God’s decree was antecedent to any act of man… . Therefore, he is under the necessity of denying that God desires to have all men to be saved.”

Sproul declared the reason people don’t come to God is not because God fails to invite them, nor it is the logical conclusion from the doctrine of predestination.

It is rooted in disobedience and obstinacy. It is precisely because man is in a state of rebellion that he will never respond to the gospel, unless God sover- eignly conquers that rebelliousness in his heart. To state it another way: any- one can be saved if he wants to be saved, but therein lies the problem. No one wants to be saved, unless God sovereignly plants a desire in the rebellious heart to come to him. If we were left to ourselves, if there were no election, if there were no predestinating grace, none of us would ever come to Christ, simply because we would never want to come, because we are by nature dis- obedient and rebellious.

I was reading in my One Year Bible (NIV) and I came across an interesting portion of Scripture in 1 Kings 22 concerning the prophet Micaiah before the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat, King of Judah. Micaiah is at first told to prophesy only what is good as the other prophets had done prior to his coming (1 Kings 22:13). Micaiah gives a general statement (v. 15) but the king tells him to swear to him to tell nothing but the truth in the name of the Yahweh (v. 16). Micaiah then proceeds to prophesy the truth which means the scattering of Israel (v. 17). This, of course, makes the king angry (v. 18).