Does God Harden Hearts?
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The power of the flesh is never completely eradicated. That doesn't happen until glory. In the meantime, we struggle every day against the flesh and against the world and all of the power of the world. Why did Demas leave Paul? Because he loved the world more than he loved Christ.
This side of glory, Christians still sin, some of them even seriously. So how are we to think about the sin in our own lives and why it is that in God's providence we do sometimes give in to temptation? This is the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind as we conclude a week on the providence of God. R.C. Sproul has used Scripture this week and the summary of the Christian faith laid out for us by those who penned the Westminster Confession to help us think through the important concept of God's providence. If you've listened all week, you've seen how each section builds upon the one prior to it. And this is true for each of the 33 chapters in the confession. So if you'd like R.C. Sproul to walk you through each of these 33 chapters, today is the final day that you can request the hardcover volume, Truths We Confess. Give your gift at renewingyourmind.org before this offer ends at midnight tonight. Well, here's Dr. Sproul to conclude this week's study on providence.
We're continuing now with our study of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and we're still in chapter 5 on the providence of God. And in our last session, we started section 6, but I wasn't able to complete an exposition of that section. So, just to refresh your memory, let me go back and read over the beginning phrases that I did comment on. where it says as follows, as for those wicked and ungodly men whom God as a righteous judge for former sins doth blind and harden, from them he not only withholdeth his grace whereby they might have been enlightened in their understandings and wrought upon in their hearts, but but sometimes also withdraws the gifts which they had. And let me just stop at that point, and you recall that we pointed out that when God hardens people or delivers them over to sin, it's not arbitrary on His part, but that... delivering unto sin and hardening is already a punishment for sins that were previously committed. So, we always have to keep that in view when we think about God's wrath at that point. Now, before I continue…
in this exposition of the confession, which I've been doing now for several months and following line upon line, precept upon precept, through a historic confessional standard that was developed in the 17th century. And before I continue, I just want to say that we're living in a period of time today where there is a growing hostility, not just to theology in general, but particularly to confessional standards. by which the received Christian faith is set forth in what we call propositional statements. there has been a tremendous reaction against propositional theology, thinking that when we discuss doctrines in abstractions, that what we are doing at that point is reducing the wonderful truths of the Christian faith to pure abstractions, and that our theology becomes a reification, a making of stone or calcium, the living, breathing, dynamic truth of our relationship with God.
With the advent of existential philosophy in the 19th century, and its tremendous impact on theology at the beginning of the 20th century, the idea was that doctrine and truth must be understood not in terms of proposition, but in terms of event, that the Bible is not a revelation of propositions, but rather it is a revelation of stories. of stories of how God interacts with human beings in the plane of history, and what it's all about is personal relationships. And as soon as we try to formulate the truths of those stories in abstract propositions, such as creedal statements, that somehow we destroy and limit the power of that biblical revelation. Now, I don't know if you're hearing that sort of talk where you live and where you experience your Christian life, but this idea has become so pervasive in evangelical circles, even in Reformed circles, that we're in a very severe crisis in our time.
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