When we sin, does God in His sovereignty bear any of the blame? Certainly not—but why not? Today, R.C. Sproul provides biblical answers to questions about humanity’s fall into sin, the origin of temptation, and the providence of God. 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
We can be so puffed up with our own righteousness. We have so deceived ourselves against the depth of corruption that still resides in our hearts that we have not learned humility. We have not learned grace. We have not learned to depend completely on the righteousness of Christ. We begin to take confidence in our own righteousness, which is filthy rags.
When we think about the theological questions surrounding the sovereignty of God, His providence and evil in the world, we typically think about Adam's sin and the fall of mankind. But what about how God's providence relates to your sin and to temptation in your life? This is the Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham.
The providence of God is a significant and important area of theology, which is why we're spending this week considering it and why the writers of the Westminster Confession of Faith needed seven sections just to summarize it.
So far we have considered the question of where God is when tragedy strikes, God's use of means in providence, how the providence of God relates to the origin of evil, and today Dr. Sproul will consider God's providence, temptation, and our own sin. Well, here he is in section 5 of chapter 5.
We're going to continue now with our study of the providence of God as it's found in the fifth chapter of the Westminster Confession in our last session. We were looking at section four, and we didn't quite complete that entire section. You will recall, I trust, that in that very troublesome affirmation that God's providence extends,
even to the first fall of the human race and to the sins of people in this world, and not simply by a bare passive permission of God, but in a way that He orders and governs and so on. And now we come to another semicolon where we get a proceedeth only from the creature, and not from God, who being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be. the author or approver of sin.
You see, the reason why it tells us that God can't be the author of sin or the approver of sin is because for God to approve sin, or to author sin, actually do sin, would be to act against His own nature, which is altogether holy, so that the law of His own person makes it utterly impossible for Him to do these things.
Sometimes we think the doctrine of God's omnipotence means that God can do anything. The Bible says with God all things are possible, but that is circumscribed by other teachings of the Scripture. With God all things consistent with His nature are possible, but it's not possible for God to be God and not be God at the same time and in the same relationship. It's not possible for God to die.
It's not possible for God to lie, and it's not possible for God to sin. It's not only that he doesn't sin, but he's utterly incapable of it because the necessary conditions for sin to take place don't exist in God's moral character. And so, as strongly as section 4 affirms the extension of God's providence over sin, it equally affirms that the sinfulness of that sin
resides strictly with the creature and not with the Creator at all. Again, yet in such a way that the sinfulness thereof, that is of these sins, proceeds only from the creature and not from God. who being most holy and righteous, neither is nor can be the author or the approver of sin.
So again, we see in summary that what section 4 is saying is that God's providence, His power, His goodness, and His wisdom extends over all things, including the fall, that God in a certain sense ordained that the fall should take place, but that the end would come not through His sinful behavior, but through the free sinful choices of His creatures. out of whose hearts come that wickedness.
Let's go to section 5 that relates God's providence to our sins. The most wise, righteous, and gracious God doth oftentimes leave for a season His own children to manifold temptations. Common, let me stop there for a second. that God will, in His graciousness, in His goodness, often will leave us open to manifold temptations. Now, let me just pause for a second.
Does not James tell us in the New Testament, let no man say when he is tempted that he is tempted of God? Because James goes on to explain that temptations arise from within ourselves. that God never lures us into sin or entices us to sin or tries to tempt us, as the tempter might, to sin. And yet in the Lord's Prayer, what do we pray? Lead us not into temptation.
The petition that our Lord gives us there as the model prayer skirts right along the boundary of blasphemy if the implication is drawn from that, that God might indeed be the one who would tempt us.
But in order to understand what is involved there in the Lord's Prayer, we have to understand the literary form in which it comes to us, because it involves a literary form common in Hebrew literature called parallelism, where there are stanzas set in juxtaposition one with another, and if you look at both of them, they'll shed light on each of the particulars.
Because if you look at that, it says, "...lead us not into temptation, but..." what? Deliver us from evil. What that means is this. First of all, it's a bad translation because evil in the abstract. Evil is a neuter noun, not masculine or feminine. In this case, the noun is masculine.
And the normal translation for the word that is used there, poneiros, that is translated evil, is the word or the phrase the evil one. So a more precise translation would be this, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. What is Jesus saying?
Ask that your Father not deliver you over to the place of testing, that the Father may not put you to the test like he put me to the test. God never tempts us to sin in the sense of entices us to sin, but He will from time to time put us to the test as He put Abraham to the test, as He put Jesus to the test.
And remember the great blessedness that Job enjoyed before Satan assaulted him that God had built a hedge around him. to protect him from the assaults of Satan. And so our Lord tells us that when you pray, Ask for God's grace. Ask God to protect you from being exposed to the unbridled assault of the tempter in your life. You're not asking that God Himself won't tempt you.
He will test us, but He'll never tempt us in the sense of, again, enticing us to sin. But He may, for His perfect and holy reasons. leave us for a season and expose us to manifold temptations. Now let's back up a minute and ask a couple questions.
The two clearest examples of human beings being placed in a position of testing in Scripture are Adam in the Garden of Eden and Jesus in the Judean wilderness. Now, in both cases, it was God who put the first Adam and the second Adam to the test. I'm going to ask a question to you that to ask the question is to answer it. Was it a sin for God to put Adam to the test?
Was it a sin for the Father to drive the Son into the wilderness to be tested? is there anything wrong with God putting a creature to a test of righteousness? There's no violation of His own holiness to do that. We may not like to be placed in that position, but God has every right to leave us to manifold temptations, to expose us to the assaults that come to us for his own righteous purposes.
What are those? They go on to say here, he leaves his own children to manifold temptations and the corruptions of their own hearts. for a season. This is not ultimately. God never abandons us ultimately. His ultimate punishment for the impenitent sinner in hell is abandonment, is leaving them to their own corruptions, giving them over to their own sinfulness. You know, this is what makes
the ecclesiastical act of excommunication, such a ghastly thing. Because what you're doing when you excommunicate somebody is cutting them off.
from the concentration of the means of grace that are there in the fellowship of the body of Christ and exposing them now for a season to the unprotected assault of Satan with the hopes that if that person is a true Christian, they'll come fleeing back for their redemption. And God, for disciplining us, may leave us, even His own children,
Thank God only for a season to the devices of our own corruption. You know, Christians, every Christian is capable of falling into sin, not just minor sin, but gross and heinous sin. and you see someone who was a professing Christian, maybe even a pillar of the Christian community, falling into gross and heinous sin, and the first question you ask is, was that person really a Christian?
And the answer is, maybe, maybe not. Because people who are not Christians make professions of faith in Christ and fool us all because we can't read their hearts, and then all of a sudden they resort to their own nature and their wickedness is made manifest, and they're never Christians at all. Or maybe that it's a Christian, a truly converted person, who is caught up in a gross and heinous sin.
Christians can do that. Christians can fall, and they can fall radically and seriously. What they can't do is fall fully and finally. So when you see someone in this particular condition, you haven't seen the rest of the story. So you can't know for sure whether it's somebody who made a false profession or somebody who made a true profession, but has fallen into a very serious state of sin.
And God will let his own children from time to time remain in such states of corruption before sending His Holy Spirit to convict them, to convince them, and to bring them back and to restore them to His grace. He may chastise them for their former sins.
Or to discover unto them, that is to reveal to them, the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, that they may be humbled. That's why the warning is so severe. Let him who stands take heed lest he fall. And that the Bible says pride... The Bible doesn't say pride goes before the fall. That's one of those misquotes.
It says in the Proverbs, pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before the fall. We can be so puffed up with our own righteousness. We have so deceived ourselves against the depth of corruption that still resides in our hearts. That we have not learned humility. We have not learned grace. We have not learned to depend completely on the righteousness of Christ.
We begin to take confidence in our own righteousness, which is filthy rags. I play a game with my wife. This is one of the silliest games you'll ever hear of, I think. And I'm almost embarrassed to tell you about it. But we have this little game. We have fun, and you'll think it's nuts, but I take on a different persona every day in our relationship.
One day last week, I was Sherlock Holmes, and so during the day when my wife would ask me a question, I would say, elementary, my dear Vesta, and I would play the character of Sherlock Holmes. Today I was Popeye the Sailor Man. I am who I am who I am. Popeye the Sailor Man I am. And we'd talk, make jokes about olive oil and sweet pea and spinach and the rest. So we do this.
Whether it's Bing Crosby or whoever, Mozart, we just go into that. Well, a couple of days ago, I was Lamont Cranston. And his girlfriend, of course, his name was Margo. So all day long, I called Vesta Margo. But when she first woke me up, she knew the night before, she said, who are you going to be tomorrow? I said, I'm going to be the shadow tomorrow.
So when she wakes me up the next morning, the first thing I said to her was, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Because that was, of course, the intro to The Shadow. But the question, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The answer to that is not the shadow, but God. And God alone knows and plumbs the depths of wickedness that is present in
In each of our hearts, even in the hearts of the redeemed, there's still so much evil left in this world before our glorification that if God would not sustain us by His grace, if He would not check and bridle us by His grace, we would be caught up in the worst kinds of sins ever. And so sometimes God has to remind us that we only stand by His grace.
Boy, watch out if we start becoming self-righteous and we start being judgmental of other people in the world and looking at the unbeliever and saying, huh, you know, look at that wicked person. Instead of there but for the grace of God, go I. And so God sometimes will
will allow that corruption free reign, stop his bridling of it and his checking of it in order to bring us to a proper humbling of our spirit. It's a dreadful thing to fall in the hands of the living God. And that's why, I mean, this idea of grace cannot just simply be a pious word that we use and bat back and forth with no thought to it. I mean, we live every second by grace and by grace alone.
And so, to discover unto them the hidden strength, the hidden strength of It was at C.S. Lewis that called it that hideous strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts. Nothing is more deceitful. Our hearts are deceitfully wicked, the Bible says, above all things. The greatest deceit lies in our own hearts.
That they may be humbled, semicolon again, and to raise them to a more close relationship and constant dependence for their support upon Himself, and to make them more watchful against all future occasions of sin, and for sundry other just and holy ends." Again, God's leaving us to our own corruptions for a season is one of those things that we've been looking at already with divine providence.
It's a means to an end. And the end is a redemptive end. It is a good goal. It is a holy end, a holy purpose, so that when God turns His back on me for a season, it's not to abandon me fully and finally, but to bring me closer to Him into a deeper relationship with Him. You know, Thomas the Campos in The Imitation of Christ, that Christian classic,
said it's an extraordinary thing for the best of saints to conquer one bad habit in their lifetime. There is so much sin that still resides in the best of Christian people. How's the old poem go? The country preacher said, there's so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves the best of us to talk about the rest of us.
That's the simple lesson that is before us here. Now in section 6, the scope of the consideration changes. As for those wicked and ungodly men whom God as a righteous judge for former sins doth blind and harden, let me put the comma there and just pause for the couple of minutes we have left to just in passing mention this, that the Bible does speak about God's blinding people. hardening people.
Jesus spoke in parables so that those who didn't want to see the things of God would be blinded. Those who didn't want to have God in their thinking, didn't want to hear the Word of God would be made deaf. That when God blinds, when God hardens, He does that always as a judgment. You see, we protest against that. We say, well, how can God be mad at us for not seeing him when he makes us blind?
How can God be mad at us for not hearing him when he makes us deaf? Well, the reason he makes us deaf is because we don't want to hear him. And what he does is he judges us with a kind of poetic justice. Let him who is wicked be wicked still. If you don't want to hear me, if you despise my word, fine. There's going to come a place where I'm going to make you deaf.
so that you wouldn't be able to hear it if you wanted to. If you can't stand the sight of my glory, I'm going to make you blind to it. If you have a heart that's hard, I'm going to make it harder still as a judgment for your previous sin. We have to understand that every single time the Bible talks about God's hardening people in that manner, it is based upon judgment.
a prior wickedness for which the hardening is a just and righteous punishment.
You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and this is the Thursday edition as R.C. Sproul is teaching from the Westminster Confession of Faith. The way the Westminster Confession is structured makes it a helpful way to read through a summary of biblical Christianity.
So if you've never heard of this confession before, or if you have but you've never read it, I would encourage you to take the time to work through it. And to make that task even easier, Dr. Sproul can be your guide when you request Truths We Confess, which is his commentary on the confession.
When you support the daily outreach of Renewing Your Mind with a gift of any amount, we'll send you the hardcover edition of Truths We Confess as our way of saying thank you. So call us at 800-435-4343 or give your gift at renewingyourmind.org and we'll put a copy in the mail. This substantial resource could make for a great Christmas gift for a pastor or Christian leader in your life.
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