Just like God was leading the Israelites on their journey, we can have every confidence that he has been leading us on ours. Just like every twist and every turn they took was within the wise providence of God, so too every step we’ve taken forward and every step we’ve taken back. He planned that we would approach mountains and valleys, rivers and seas, and he has used them all for his good purposes. 

When I was a child, the maps in my Bible got me through many a sermon. I was rarely interested in listening to the preacher, so I would flip to the back pages of the Bible to study the maps there. I would gaze at the contours of the lands of the Middle East. I would observe how Abraham had obeyed God and left his country and his kindred and his father’s house to journey to the land that God would show him. I would study the ancient world as the Patriarchs knew it. Best of all, I would see how God had miraculously delivered his people from their long captivity in Egypt.
Like just about every Bible, mine had a map that traced the route the Israelites followed after they escaped from Egypt and began to make their way toward the Promised Land. The map had a line in blue that began in Egypt and then traveled south for a time toward the bottom of the Sinai Peninsula. Eventually, it bulged north for a short while before dipping south again. Then finally it turned permanently northward and led the way to Jericho before it terminated on the banks of the Jordan.
The route the Israelites followed is far from straight and hardly looks efficient. Instead of taking a direct approach leading straight from Egypt to Canaan, the route appears to wander and meander, to turn this way and then that, to progress for a time and then bog down.
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Written by D. Blair Smith |
Wednesday, December 20, 2023
We live in a world that turns on influence. Thanks be to God, the decisive influence in His salvation economy is not a saint in heaven or faith on earth. The decisive influence is the Father’s electing sinners to receive His saving grace in His Son, Jesus Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

From the halls of high schools to the corridors of political power, our world is filled with those who fashion themselves persons of “influence.” In the last several years, the category of “social media influencer” has developed out of thin air. Our world values those who can influence others socially or economically. But what about religiously?
During the Middle Ages, an elaborate system developed in the Western church wherein saints in heaven, who were ostensibly closer to God than sinners on earth, were called on in prayer because of their positions of influence in relation to God. In their own way, medieval saints were believed to be people of influence. Thankfully, the theologians of the Reformation addressed this error through teaching Christ alone. Christ alone mediates our salvation, a salvation founded on God’s grace alone and received through faith alone. Salvation isn’t the result of a saint’s influencing a grudging God. Rather, salvation comes to the sinner because from all eternity God elected a people to be His own.
Election is unmistakably a biblical word (e.g., Matt. 24:22–31; Rom. 8:33; 9–11; 2 Tim. 2:10; Titus 1:1; 1 Peter 1:1; 2 Peter 1:10). Therefore, Christians of all stripes believe in election. But that doesn’t mean that all believe in the same theology of election. A theology of election is how one describes the doctrine and connects it to other doctrines, especially the doctrines of God, man, and salvation. Reformed theology has taught unconditional election, which is the U in the famous acronym TULIP, which summarizes the “five points of Calvinism” or “doctrines of grace.”
A foundational theological principle in Reformed theology is the sovereignty of God—sometimes called “big God theology.” Election is a subset of teaching on the sovereignty of God. If God sovereignly causes or permits all things that happen in the world, this includes the salvation of His people. Indeed, while Scripture teaches God’s sovereignty over all things, its authors are especially interested in communicating His sovereignty in the salvation of His people. One of the ways that Scripture does this is by highlighting God’s “election” of a people for salvation. If God is big enough to create all things that exist, if God is big enough to providentially care for all things that exist, He is big enough to redeem His people—a people that He has loved from all eternity.
The doctrine of election depends on the doctrine of God. Eternal in God are His unchanging attributes and His divine counsel containing His sovereign decrees. More general than election, predestination is a term referring to God’s decree by which He sovereignly ordains all things (Isa. 46:8–10). Election is more specific. According to Herman Bavinck, election is the “gracious purpose of God according to which He ordained those whom He had before known in love to be conformed to the image of Christ” (see Rom. 8:29). The doctrine of election focuses on God’s decree to elect or choose to save a people for Himself in Christ.
In addition to a certain understanding of God, the doctrine of election depends on a prior understanding of humanity. The T in TULIP stands for total depravity. Ever since the fall in the garden of Eden, humanity is naturally lost and separated from the loving presence of God. Because of depravity, humanity possesses no resources within itself for personal salvation. Furthermore, given that depravity touches all aspects of what it means to be human and that we are dead in our “trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), there remains in human beings no ability to choose or believe in God apart from His prior regenerating work in them.
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Thursday, August 25, 2022
Prayer is one of the means God uses to bring about the ends He ordains. That is, God not only ordains ends, He ordains the means He uses to bring about those ends. God doesn’t need our preaching to save His people. Yet He has chosen to work through our preaching. He empowers our human preaching with His own power. In like manner, He has chosen to work through our prayers. He empowers our prayers so that after we pray we can step back and watch Him unleash His power in and through our prayers.

My first class at the Free University of Amsterdam shattered my academic complacency. It was cultural shock, an exercise in contrasts. It started the moment the professor, Dr. G.C. Berkouwer, entered the room. At his appearance, every student stood at attention until he mounted the podium steps, opened his notebook, and silently nodded for the students to be seated. He then began his lecture, and the students, in a holy hush, dutifully listened and wrote notes for the hour. No one ever dared to interrupt or distract the master by presuming to raise his hand. The session was dominated by a single voice—the voice we were all paying to hear.
When the lecture ended, the professor closed his notebook, stepped down from the podium, and hastily left the room, but not before the students once more rose in his honor. There was no dialogue, no student appointments, no gabfest. No student ever spoke to the professor—except during privately scheduled oral exams.
My first such exam was an exercise in terror. I went to the professor’s house expecting an ordeal. But as rigorous as the exam was, it was not an ordeal. Dr. Berkouwer was warm and kind. In avuncular fashion, he asked about my family. He showed great concern for my well-being and invited me to ask him questions.
In a sense, this experience was a taste of heaven. Professor Berkouwer was, of course, mortal. But he was a man of titanic intellect and encyclopedic knowledge. I was not in his home to instruct him or to debate him—I was the student and he was the master. There was hardly anything in the realm of theology he could learn from me. And yet, he listened to me as if he really thought he could learn something from me. He took my answers to his probing questions seriously. It was as if I were a son being questioned by a caring father.
This event is the best human analogy I can come up with to answer the age-old query, “If God is sovereign, why pray?” However, I must confess that this analogy is frail. Though Berkouwer towered above me in knowledge, his knowledge was finite and limited. He was by no means omniscient.
By contrast, when I converse with God, I am not merely talking to a Great Professor in the Sky. I’m talking to one who has all knowledge, one who cannot possibly learn anything from me that He doesn’t already know. He knows everything there is to know, including what’s on my mind.
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