Some texts mark you for life. As Jacob, you grapple with them, and though you come away with a blessing, you leave with a limp. You think differently. You pray differently. You love, speak, and act differently. Life as it was before can be no more.

Elijah’s question to the wavering people of Israel has been such a text for me. As a young college student, alone in my dorm room with a Bible I had just started reading, I came to it:

How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him. (1 Kings 18:21)

When I read it on my futon, it was as though I witnessed the scene unfold firsthand.

“Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” The wicked king addressed the prophet he had hunted like a deer in the forest. He sneered. Not often did the prey beckon the hunter or the fish, the fisherman. But here, weaponless and alone, the prophet emerged from his hiding place to challenge his pursuer, and all of his prophets, to a public showdown.

“I have not troubled Israel, but you have, and your father’s house, because you have abandoned the commandments of the Lord and followed the Baals,” Elijah replied. “Now therefore send and gather all Israel to me at Mount Carmel, and the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table” (1 Kings 18:18–19).

Ahab happily complied.

News spread quickly; the people of Israel clamored around to see the spectacle. I took my place among the masses. The excitement was palpable as prophets and their gods prepared for war. Baal’s king and his army of prophets stood in one corner; the Lord’s prophet approached alone, taking his position in the other.

Pierced Without a Weapon

Yet as the prophet advanced toward the mountain to face off with the hundreds of prophets, Elijah’s eyes of fire rested elsewhere. He gazed at us, drew near to us. The contestant walked over to the crowd, slowly looking us over, and lifted his voice for all to hear,

How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If Yahweh is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him. (1 Kings 18:21)

Weaponless, he shot the first arrow. Swordless, he cut me to the heart. Alone, I trembled to hear another speaking.

As I read those words, a lifetime of spiritual indecision flashed before my eyes. It took shape before me. The amphibious creature, offspring of a hearty worldliness and brittle religiosity, reared its head. It bore the horrible beauty of a demon. This angel of light had pleased and soothed my half-waking conscience for a lifetime, while remaining false enough to damn my soul.

This god I followed took no issue with the lukewarmness — the starts and stops, the ins and outs of what I took to be Christian devotion. None of my prophets interrupted me, nor protested when I went my own way. For over a decade, my god was compliant, polite, civil. He did not ask for much, nor threaten me, nor ask me to do anything I did not already agree to. He sat in the corner of the world, just smiling at me, his beloved.

If He Be God

The prophet, however, served another God. A jealous God. One who would not endure the waffling another moment. And this prophet burned with his Master’s fire. Elijah decided that if he was walking headlong into his death, he would leave his half-hearted people with a simple question: How long, O faithless bird, will you go fluttering back and forth between two branches?

We, the people, were the only ones undecided before that mountain. The priests of Baal were decided, even to the point of shedding their blood. They cut themselves with swords to invoke an answer from Baal. King Ahab was also decided. He and his wicked wife Jezebel hunted down Yahweh’s prophets and feasted with Baal’s. Elijah was decided. He stood alone before a spiritual legion of darkness, sure that his God could swallow all these mighty minnows.

“A God, if he be God, must be totally followed. Any true God must be completely obeyed.”

At this, a nearly novel thought pressed against my mind: A God, if he be God, must be totally followed. Any true God must be completely obeyed. He demanded a decision. He must be the most important reality in one’s life. Then the amazing conclusion that I professed for years finally caught up with me: I believed God existed. An eternal being, an infinite Person, a supreme monarch.

Elijah looked me in the eyes and said, If the world or your flesh or you yourself be god — follow them. Eat, drink, for tomorrow you die. But if the God of Scripture is God, then reason, justice, and sanity itself cries aloud: If this Glorious, Mighty, and Beautiful God will have you, you must follow him — unreservedly, unquestionably, unhesitatingly.

How did I answer the prophet?

“And the people did not answer him a word” (1 Kings 18:21). I joined the crowds in solemn silence.

The most daring among us held their tongue. Tough guys didn’t protest. Not a chirp was heard before the mountain; all beaks were stopped. What could we say in our defense?

If Christ Be God

Before the sun beat upon the forsaken and bloodied prophets of Baal, before fire fell from heaven and gave the outmanned Elijah decisive victory, before the people rallied and slew the priests and Elijah ran for his life, the prophet’s question seared me: How long will you go on indecisive?

How many more days and months and years will pass while you still pretend to have made up your mind? “If Christ be God, follow him. If the world, follow it.”

Has Elijah’s question lost its edge? To others not refusing to associate with Jesus, yet simply adding him to a collection of other allegiances: “How long will you go on fluttering between two branches?” Between Christ and the love of money. Between Christ and this world. Between Christ and your favorite sin. Between Christ and your comfortable, uninterrupted life.

How long, professing Christian, will you too live halfhearted, half-bowed? How much longer will you persist with half-waking commitments to Christ? How long will you think to give him the loose change of your attention, the crumbled bills of your affections? “If Jesus is God, follow him; but if your girlfriend be god, your reputation be god, your earthly pleasures and career be god — then follow them.”

“I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5). “You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars and cut down their Asherim (for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God)” (Exodus 34:13–14). One cannot play footsie with the consuming fire for long.

“One cannot play footsie with the consuming fire for long.”

The Christian God is God, and he will not sit idly by within a pantheon of other gods and pleasures. He entertains no rivals. Friendship with the world is adultery and enmity against him (James 4:4). This text, and this reality, God used to shake me awake and bring me to Jesus.

Dear reader, is your Jesus really God? If he is God — and the Jesus of the Bible is God — then follow him. I long for fire to fall again, pleading with Elijah, “Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back” (1 Kings 18:37).

Audio Transcript

It’s hard to confirm exact numbers, but by educated guess I would safely assume that the most asked-about chapter in the Bible in our emails here at APJ is Romans 9. I know without any exaggeration that we have hundreds of questions in the inbox on this one chapter alone. Within the chapter, Romans 9:22 is very likely the most asked-about text of all the other verses in the chapter. I know of at least 65 emails just asking about this single text, a hard text. Here’s one representative question from a listener named Leslie that captures the heart of dozens of those emails: “Pastor John, hello. I could use your help in my struggle with Romans 9:22. It seems to me to imply that those who are not elect are not even given a chance to repent since they were born for destruction. Is this right, that many people are created with no chance of ever being saved?”

I’m not surprised that Romans 9 is among the texts that people have the most questions about because my own history bore that out. Just recently, I’ve been perusing some of my old journal entries from 1977 to 1979. I was in my early thirties, and almost all of my discretionary time was spent studying and writing about Romans 9, especially Romans 9:14–23.

It may interest our listeners that this text — which highlights the absolute sovereignty of God over salvation as clearly, as forcefully, as any other text in the Bible and is therefore so problematic for most of us — was the text God used on December 14, 1979, to move me from being an academic theologian, who taught for 6 years in a college, to becoming a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church, where I served for 33 years.

This text moved me to become a pastor with a longing that God would use me to save lost sinners from the cradle to the grave and to grow a strong church that would send hundreds of people to the unreached peoples of the world in world missions.

So I’m bearing witness that the most controversial chapter in the Bible with regard to the sovereignty of God in saving sinners was the chapter that God used to move me out of an academic dealing with the word of God into a frontline effort to save lost sinners, and to strengthen the church, and to reach the nations. That’s important.

“Nobody who humbly wants Christ as Savior is lost.”

It’s important because people think that if you believe in the absolute sovereignty of God over the salvation of sinners, then you would be disinclined to be a soul-winning pastor and a missions-driven church. That’s not true. It had the opposite effect on me — as it did on William Carey, John Paton, Adoniram Judson, and hundreds of other missionaries and pastors who laid down their lives to reach lost people with the gospel.

Bible-Saturated Pleas

There is such a thing as hyper-Calvinism, which is not historic Calvinism. Hyper-Calvinism has always been a tiny group who have twisted the Bible by their unbiblical logic to say that the only people you should invite to Christ are those who give evidence of being among God’s elect. So if you are a hyper-Calvinist, you don’t share the gospel indiscriminately — like I do — but you wait and look for signs among unbelievers that they might be elect.

That’s absolutely wrong. It is not what Romans 9 teaches or implies. It is not what any other text in the Bible teaches or implies. The lover of God’s sovereignty who is saturated with a big, biblical view of God’s power in saving sinners says to every human being, without exception, words like these:

Come, everyone who thirsts,     come to the waters;and he who has no money,     come, buy and eat!Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,     and your labor for that which does not satisfy? (Isaiah 55:1–2)

In other words, we are pleading with them, “Come to the water of life. Drink freely, everyone! If you will receive Jesus Christ as the Son of God — crucified for sinners, risen from the dead — and put your trust in him as your only and precious Savior, you will receive with him everything that God has done through him. Everything that God is for you in him — you will have it all. Nothing good will be withheld from you. If you will have the Lord Jesus Christ, you have everything that he achieved, climaxing in everlasting joy in the presence of God.”

That’s what you say. If people will let you talk for a full minute like that, that’s what you say to every single human being.

Unpacking Paul

Now here are the words from Romans 9 that cause people to stumble. Let me say a word about them. Romans 9:18–19 says, “So then [God] has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills. You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault?’” In other words, we’re not asking a question that Paul didn’t ask. We shouldn’t be thinking, “I’ve got a question, Paul, that you never thought of.” No, you don’t.

Then Romans 9:19 continues like this: “For who can resist his will?” Paul did not say, “Well, everybody can resist his will. We all have free will. Everybody can resist his will.” That’s not the way he answered the question “Who can resist his will?”

Paul then says in Romans 9:20, “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God?” Now by that question, Paul did not mean we should never ask God questions. That’s not what he meant. He meant that you should never react with disapproval when God answers.

And he goes on,

Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory . . . (Romans 9:20–23)

Now, Leslie asks, “It seems to me to imply that those who are not elect are not even given a chance to repent, since they were born for destruction. Is this right, that many people are created with no chance of ever being saved?” That’s her question. My answer is no. That would not be a faithful, biblical way of stating the situation. Let me put beside each other two biblical truths that many people consider contradictory, but are not, and then I’ll draw out of those two truths an implication for Leslie’s statement.

His Sovereignty, Our Responsibility

The first truth is, from all eternity God has chosen from among the entire fallen, sinful humanity a people for himself — but not everyone. Thus, this selection is owing to no merit at all in those chosen people. God pursues their salvation not only by effectively achieving the atonement for their sin through Christ, but also by sovereignly overcoming all their rebellion and bringing them to saving faith.

Here’s the second truth: everyone who perishes and is finally lost and cut off from God perishes because of real, blameworthy self-exaltation, which is sin. Because they are hardened against the revelations of God’s power and glory in nature or in the gospel, no innocent people perish. Nobody who humbly wants Christ as Savior is lost. No one is judged or condemned for not knowing, or believing, or obeying a reality to which they had no access. All lostness and all judgment are owing to sin and rebellion against the revelation that we have.

“There will be no innocent people in hell, and there will be only forgiven sinners in heaven.”

What keeps those two truths from being contradictory is this: the moral accountability of man is not destroyed by the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation. To say it another way, God’s final and decisive governance of all things, including who comes to faith, is compatible with all humans being morally accountable to God for whether they believe or not.

Now, we live in a world that by and large refuses to embrace God’s purposeful sovereignty in all things. That is Ephesians 1:11: “[He] works all things according to the counsel of his will.” People reject this largely because the only solution their minds can embrace for maintaining human accountability is the presumption of ultimate human self-determination, otherwise known as free will. But ultimate human self-determination is not found anywhere in the Bible — but God’s sovereignty is, and man’s accountability is. Nowhere are these considered contradictory.

Invited Every Day

Therefore, my response to Leslie’s statement — namely, “many people are created with no chance of ever being saved” — is to say that everyone is being wooed and invited by God every day. They are being wooed through natural revelation — the sun rising on the good and the evil, or the rain falling on the good and the bad — or through conscience, or through gospel truth. These revelations of God are their chance to be saved. It is a real invitation. It is real precisely because if they humbled themselves and received God’s grace, they would be saved.

Those who humble themselves and receive God’s grace know that it was only the sovereign grace of God that enabled them to believe. And those who don’t do it know that it is because of their own sin. That they loved something else more than God is why they didn’t believe. There will be no innocent people in hell, and there will be only forgiven sinners in heaven.

Audio Transcript

Welcome back! In the next two episodes, we’re talking about personal suffering. Suffering so often feels meaningless; suffering feels pointless — “feels” being the key word. But no matter how our suffering feels to us, it’s not meaningless. Not for the Christian. That’s our topic next time, on Monday.

But today, if you’re reading your Bible along with us using the Navigators Bible Reading Plan, for the second half of February we’re in the thick of it, reading through Leviticus. It’s a hard book — a notorious book that ends a lot of well-meaning Bible readers at this point in the year. But stick with it. It’s worth it. And as you stick with it, in our reading tomorrow, we read Leviticus 21:16–24, a difficult text that makes any Bible reader scratch his head and wonder, Why did God shun the disabled in the Old Testament? One such Bible reader is a listener named Gina.

“Hello, Pastor John. I’m reading through Leviticus in my Bible reading plan. One thing that has confused me is why God would not allow people with physical defects to approach the altar in Leviticus 21:16–21. The tone changes drastically in the Gospels. There Jesus, the true Temple, welcomes the blind, the lame, and the diseased right into his very presence. So, why would God in the Old Testament not allow them near the altar? It seems sad to me, and it compounds their suffering. Those people would have felt worse for it, and likely experienced heightened social alienation, too. I’m thankful for the New Testament because there are so many of us with physical defects. But why this discontinuity? To what purpose?”

Good, good, good, good question. Leviticus 21:16–24 deals with whether priests — it’s about priests, but her question is still really valid — who have physical disabilities or deformities can enter the Holy Place to do the work of a priest. I think Gina is probably right that, in reality, when priests with facial defects or crushed genitals or injured feet or a hunched back or scabby skin were forbidden from parts of the priestly service — not all of them, but some of them — probably they would have felt sad and discouraged at times, and maybe even resentful. That would be a normal human response, at least in our culture. We sure feel that. And my guess is that’s pretty basic to human nature.

“God has provided a way, by Jesus Christ, to have the very perfection that we must have to approach him.”

Gina asks, “Why does God in the Old Testament apply such external restrictions for the priesthood, and in the New Testament we don’t have that same kind of restriction? They don’t assume the same excluding effect.” Let me try to give an answer that I think honors the intention of both the Old Testament and the New Testament, because I think both are the inspired word of God, and what God did when he did it was right to do when he did it, and he had reasons for doing it, and it may not be right for us to do it today because such profound things have changed. But let’s look at the key passage. There’s a ground clause that helps us crystallize the issues.

Perfect God, Unblemished Sanctuary

Here’s Leviticus 21:16–24 with just a few verses left out. I’ll collapse it down so you can see the clause.

No man of the offspring of Aaron the priest who has a blemish shall come near to offer the Lord’s food offerings; since he has a blemish, he shall not come near to offer the bread of his God. . . . He shall not go through the veil or approach the altar, because [and our ears should perk up] he has a blemish, [in order] that he may not profane my sanctuaries, for I am [Yahweh] the Lord who sanctifies them.

In other words, God says, “I am the one who sets priests apart for my service; I sanctify them. I have ordained — I have decreed or instituted or decided — that a blemished priest will not blemish or profane my sanctuary.” In other words, God wants to make the perfections of the sanctuary so symbolically and visibly clear that he establishes a correlation between the deforming of the physical body and the deforming of the sanctuary. Or, to say it another way, he insists that there be a correlation between the perfections of those who approach the sanctuary and the perfection of the sanctuary itself, which is a reflection of his own perfection.

It’s entirely possible that the most godly and the most humble, deformed priests would not be offended by this divine order of things, but would gladly acknowledge that it is fitting for those who approach a perfect God to be free from outward and inward imperfections. So, I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with God’s Old Testament ordinances in this regard.

Utter Holiness, Overflowing Grace

The question is, What’s the ultimate meaning of it, especially in relation to New Testament changes? My answer goes like this.

In the Bible as a whole, there are two dimensions to God’s nature that shape the way he deals with mankind. One is unapproachable holiness. That’s one massive truth throughout the Bible. God is holy. Sinners can’t approach him. Nothing imperfect can approach him. Nothing evil can approach God without being destroyed. And so, it’s fitting that, in the presence of God, there can only be perfection — both moral and spiritual and physical — which of course means no one qualifies. It’s not like some of these priests were perfect. The other dimension of his nature is his overflowing mercy and grace.

So, those are the two: unapproachable holiness and overflowing mercy and grace, which reaches out to the physically, morally, spiritually imperfect, and finds a way in Jesus Christ to declare them to be perfect. But the resolution of these two dimensions of God’s nature is not that the first one is replaced by the second one, like holiness is kind of blunted and decreased in its importance because mercy is going to be the main thing now. That’s not what happens — as though the doctrine of justification by faith alone would be sufficient to create the new heavens and the new earth, where God is present among justified sinners without his holiness being compromised. That’s not going to happen.

No, God also undertakes, by sanctification and then by the re-creation of everything that’s broken — physical dimensions of the world and moral dimensions of the world — to make everything in his presence perfect forever. Not just justified sinners are going to be in God’s presence, but no sin is going to be in God’s presence. There won’t be any people who sin in God’s presence. There will be no defects morally, there will be no defects physically in the presence of God in the age to come.

Made Perfect Forever

So, I think God highlighted the demands for perfection in the Old Testament in an outward way so as to make really clear that no form of imperfection would ever stand in God’s presence permanently. That’s how holy he is.

He would one day not only justify the ungodly and be willing to touch lepers — reach out and actually touch lepers, God himself touching lepers in the flesh — but he would also utterly transform the ungodly into sinless, godly people, and take away every leprosy and every disease and every disability and every deformity. So, the Old Testament and the New Testament make both of these dimensions of God’s character plain (it seems to me) by putting the emphasis in different places.

“We need the Old Testament to sober us about how holy God is, and we need the New Testament lest we despair.”

The Old Testament is, as it were, standing on tiptoes, looking over the horizon of the future, waiting and wondering how God could ever create a people, all of whom could come boldly into his presence. And God had put such amazing limits in the Old Testament. So, the Old Testament rightly makes this seem extremely difficult. I think that was the point. He wanted it to look like this can never happen. You can never have anybody with an imperfection walking in here. It’s just not going to happen. God has put such amazing restrictions on it.

And then, in the New Testament, the glorious reality dawns that God has provided a way, by Jesus Christ, to have the very perfection that we must have to approach him now. And he has provided by his Spirit the sanctification and resurrection and perfection of bodily and spiritual newness in the age to come so that we can be in his presence forever.

So, my bottom-line conclusion is this: we need the Old Testament to sober us about how holy God is, and we need the New Testament lest we despair of any hope that we could survive in the presence of such a holy God, let alone enjoy him forever.