Sometimes, the same trial serves to soften the heart of one person toward God while hardening another in his bitterness and sin. What makes the difference? Today, R.C. Sproul reflects on the mystery of divine providence. Get Truths We Confess, R.C. Sproul’s commentary on the Westminster Confession, for your donation of any amount: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3706/truths-we-confess Meet Today’s Teacher: R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was known for his ability to winsomely and clearly communicate deep, practical truths from God’s Word. He was founder of Ligonier Ministries, first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine. Meet the Host: Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of ministry engagement for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, host of the Ask Ligonier podcast, and a graduate of Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. Nathan joined Ligonier in 2012 and lives in Central Florida with his wife and four children. Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
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.
And I'm standing here talking really to a handful of people who have shown interest in studying the affirmations of a historic creed like the Westminster Confession. Now, I don't believe that any proposition can contain or capture or all of the dynamic that's involved in a personal relationship with God.
But when God gives those stories in Scripture, when He gives narratives and when He gives events, He also gives us the apostolic interpretation of the meaning of those events. And the truth of God is not a pure, subjective, personal experience. There are objective truths that God has revealed to us about Himself and about salvation and about the Christian life.
And as soon as we start throwing propositions under the rug, you might as well kiss Christianity goodbye as far as I'm concerned. And so that's just a word of introduction before we proceed again that I'm treating these propositions of the Confession in a propositional manner because I believe in a very clear and important way they explain to us the content of sacred Scripture.
And the Scriptures themselves, as I say, is filled with propositional truths, not just stories that are left for you to interact with in your own subjectivity. But in any case, we read, But sometimes God also withdraws the gifts that they had had. Now here we're speaking about those who are unconverted.
And one of the persons that immediately comes to mind whenever we read a statement, at least whenever I read a statement like this about God withholding gifts that He had given to people in the first place, the first person that comes to my mind is Saul. because you know that Saul was gifted of God. He was endowed with grace and charisma by God for his kingship.
And then in his madness and in his wickedness, God took those gifts away. Now, some people look at that and say, does that mean that Saul was a saved man who then lost his salvation? Not necessarily. I really am not certain whether Saul ever was in a state of salvific grace or not. But you remember when David, who was called a man after God's own heart, who was not an
fell in the gross and heinous sin, when he gave his great penitential prayer in Psalm 51, one of the petitions he gave to God in great earnestness was he pled with the Lord, "'Take not thy Holy Spirit from me.'" Now, when I read that psalm, again, I'm not sure if what David had in mind because he didn't explain in the Psalm in what sense he was asking God not to remove the Spirit.
Was he saying, don't remove the Spirit by which you've regenerated my soul? I doubt that. I think that what he's saying is, don't remove the gifts that you have given to me because I need them. in order to function in the role to which I have been called.
Now, whether God takes such gifts away from the believer is one question, but here in the confession, it's saying that God gives gifts even to the wicked. we find in this world people who are not only not Christian but are overtly hostile to Christianity who are supremely gifted, intellectual gifts,
musical gifts and talents, athletic gifts and so on that they have, and we read in the Scriptures that every good and perfect gift is given to us from God, and so that the gifts that we receive even as unbelievers are gifts of God. And with every gift that comes from God, there also comes with that package the responsibility of using that gift and using that talent to the glory of God.
But those who are wicked yet have been gifted by God use those gifts for their own glory, not for the glory of God. And God will from time to time, as a punishment of their wickedness, take their gift away. caused them to lose their talent, to lose their ability.
This afternoon, I was watching an old movie that was made in 1952 with Charlton Hespin called The Greatest Show on Earth, which was about the Ringling Brothers' Barnum & Bailey Circus, and the story centered around this great aerialist, this trapeze artist who was billed as the Great Sebastian, and he fell.
And in his fall, he injured his arm so severely that he was no longer able to be a trapeze artist. And part of the story involves his crisis of being grounded permanently from what had brought him fame and riches and all the rest. And that illustrates what can happen to a person in terms of what the confession is saying here, is that God can take away the ability, can take away the gift.
Now, again, in the sacred Scriptures, We are warned not to assume that every time a person receives a debilitating injury or disease or suffers any personal calamity, that that automatically indicates a divine judgment upon them. I can think of two biblical incidences where this question comes front and center.
Of course, there's a whole book in the Old Testament that deals with that question, and it's the book of Job. No person in biblical history is portrayed as dealing with the degree of affliction and suffering as Job does in that story. And we remember that when Job is in the midst of his agony and is sitting on the dung heap in abject misery, his friends come to comfort him.
And one by one, the assumption that they bring to him is what? Job, the only explanation for this degree of suffering that you are experiencing is you must be guilty of some terrible sin, because the assumption was that we suffer in this world in direct proportion with a kind of mathematical calculus that of suffering equated with the degree of our sin.
And yet the beginning of the book of Job, as well as the end, makes it clear that the purpose of Job's suffering is not that Job may be corrected by God, by God's wrath, but that Job is suffering for the glory of God to stop the mouth of Satan who has accused God of of having Job serve him only because he had been supremely gifted and blessed.
And so the whole book of Job should stop us in our tracks from ever assuming that there's a one-to-one correlation between sin and suffering. Likewise, in the New Testament, in John, where the disciples come to Jesus and ask Him about the man born blind, you remember the question they ask, was this man born blind because of his sin or because of the sin of his parents?
And Jesus, of course, answers by saying, neither. He was born this way for the purpose of manifesting the glory of God through His Son and so on.
But the question that was raised by the disciples was not completely out of left field because the disciples realized that in spite of the book of Job, there are manifold illustrations in Old Testament history where God does inflict judgment as a direct result of sin and so that the warning is this.
We cannot assume that our suffering is a direct response to God's judgment upon us, but neither can we assume that it's not. because the point is from time to time God does visit judgment upon people for their wickedness in this world by even withdrawing gifts which they had and exposing them to such objects as their corruption makes occasion of sin.
You know how Paul develops this concept, doesn't he? When the law comes, the law, which is designed in the one hand as a restraint against sin, nevertheless, in a very real way, often functions as an excitement to sin. That if you want to have people stirred up into sin, just tell them that there's something they can't do. The
You tell a child that there's something they're not allowed to do, that's the first thing they want to do. And so the law becomes an occasion to fuel the corruption of the human heart that's already there. But when the law is given to corrupt people, it can be used to make them all the more corrupt.
And again, when we see Paul's indictment of the entirety of the human race beginning in Romans chapter 1, when he gives that catalog of sins that is common to the whole world of violence and murder and adultery and so on, he goes on and says that not only do people do what they know God forbids, but they encourage others to do it as well.
that the spirit of the lawbreaker is to find comfort in partners in crime and inciting others to participate in their wickedness with them. This is basic to human nature. And so, even God in His providence will fuel our corruption. by giving us the very occasion to commit more sin.
But again, not because God gleefully enjoys the creature's wickedness, but rather this is part of His judgment upon us. And that's why we need to be on our knees all the time pleading with God not to expose us to those places where we have weaknesses.
The old Methodist minister, the itinerant preacher, once told the story of a man who was a Reformed alcoholic, and he had been on the wagon for several years, but then he got into the habit every time he rode into town, he tied up his horse at the hitching post in front of the saloon. It was only a matter of time until he walked in to the saloon and fell off the wagon because he placed himself.
in that position where his greatest weakness was, and he was exposing himself to his own temptations. And that's, again, what we pray that God will keep us from those things. We need to be profoundly aware of our own weaknesses because our weaknesses are are tremendous.
Again, the warnings that him who thinks that he standeth take heed lest he falls because there's nobody in this room and there's nobody anywhere that I know who's immune from serious temptation and from serious fall. And so we need to plead with God in his mercy to keep us from those occasions. that we may not be given over to our own lusts, to the temptations of the world and the power of Satan.
Remember Luther saw that the trinity of evils that seek to destroy the Christian in the Christian life are the three things, the world, the flesh, and the devil. In our sanctification, we are given the Holy Spirit within us And the Holy Spirit rescues us from bondage to the flesh. But in this life, the power of the flesh is never completely eradicated.
That doesn't happen until glory, until we go to the zenith of sanctification, which is our glorification. In the meantime, we struggle every day against the flesh. and against the world and all of the power of the world.
Remember when Paul wrote to Timothy at the end of his life in 2 Timothy, and he was talking about his situation there as he was languishing in prison and was ready to give himself over to death, and he speaks of his loneliness because he had been betrayed by his closest friends. and his comrades. Remember that?
And he speaks of Demas particularly, who was part of the apostolic entourage and had been a co-worker with Paul in his missionary enterprises. And he talks about how Demas had departed. Why did Demas leave Paul? Because he loved the world more than he loved Christ.
And the world sets before us the glittering enticements of all that is worldly, and it can undermine the strength of our sanctification. The world, the flesh, and finally the devil Here's again where most Christians, at least true Christians, if you ask them, do you believe in a devil, a real personal devil, most Christians will say yes. Yet at the same time, there is this fading interest.
affirmation of the reality of Satan. And even though we profess here's a case where we can reduce our faith to an abstraction and remove our hearts from it, we say we believe in Satan, but we live as if he didn't exist. And yet the Scriptures are filled with admonitions about guarding ourselves from the wiles of Satan and what an extraordinarily formidable foe he is to the Christian life.
and He does go around as a roaring lion seeking to devour those whom He will. If the Word of God teaches anything, it teaches us that from the dawn of creation, Satan has been at work to undermine the lives of the people of God. And so,
We have to be aware of these temptations that come from the world, the flesh, and the devil, and realize that it's only in God's benevolent providence that we can escape the power of these things. It goes on to say, "...whereby it comes to pass that they harden themselves..." even under those means which God uses for the softening of others. That's an interesting almost footnote, isn't it?
We've already talked about this business of how God hardens the heart, not by creating fresh evil in the heart, but by giving people over to their own lusts and to their own desires and so on. But the very things that God uses to soften the hearts of His people, those very things harden the hearts of those who hate Him.
The law of God softens my heart because it exposes my sin and brings me the conviction of the Holy Spirit. But to the unbeliever, the law hardens them rather than softens them so that those very things that are the means of grace for us can be the means of destruction for For those who are outside of faith, those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
A sobering reminder today from R.C. Sproul. May we each be prayerful as we're aware of our own weakness. You're listening to the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind, a listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. For 30 years, Renewing Your Mind has been broadcasting truth over the airwaves and around the world thanks to the internet.
And when you give a donation of any amount to further the reach of this outreach, thank you for your generosity, we'll send you a hardcover edition of R.C. Sproul's helpful and detailed commentary on the Westminster Confession of Faith. It's called Truths We Confess. Call us at 800-435-4343 or visit renewingyourmind.org to give your gift and we'll get a copyright to you.
This is not merely a reference book, but it is a commentary on a church confession that can help deepen your understanding of the Christian faith as it addresses God's sovereignty. Man's fall, repentance, the church, the resurrection, the last judgment, and more.
Thank you.