============================
Description:
“I give you four options: unmerited favor (grace), merited favor (a wage), merited disfavor (just punishment), or unmerited disfavour (arbitrary punishment). Make your choice.”
“I give you four options: unmerited favor (grace), merited favor (a wage), merited disfavor (just punishment), or unmerited disfavour (arbitrary punishment). Make your choice.”
============================
Argument:
When
God does anything related to us, logically, it must fall into one of four
categories. Either it is unmerited favor (grace), merited favor (a wage),
merited disfavor (just punishment), or unmerited disfavor (arbitrary
punishment). We know, Biblically, that 2 and 4 don't happen. God never owes us
anything, and He is never arbitrary. Moreover, we are born sinners. We don’t
deserve anything good from God. We deserve immediate, painful death and
eternity in hell. Punishment is the only thing we ever merit. Hence, everything
God does is either unmerited favor or merited punishment.
But,
it is obvious that continued life, provision, happiness, and restraint of sin
are good things. And, it has been established that they came from God, and we
don't deserve them. Therefore, they must be unmerited favor. Therefore, God
shows grace to all people.
============================
Response:
The serious fault in the argument is the unspoken
assumption that grace is in things, whether health, or food, or riches, or
other material things.
The grace of God is not ‘things.’ Things may
be good in themselves. But they are not grace. Grace is the favor
of God towards a (human) creature with the resulting blessing of the creature
in that grace. And blessing is God’s doing of good to that
creature.
So long as [the advocate of the common grace] is
determined to identify grace with good things, he wins the theological argument
concerning common grace by his unproved, unbiblical presupposition.
"Grace is good things; the ungodly enjoy good things; therefore, the
ungodly are recipients of grace and blessing.”
Take note of the inescapable, necessary implication
of his argument: "Wrath is bad things; the godly suffer bad things;
therefore, the godly are the objects of wrath and curse." Thus, the
gospel is denied.
Identifying grace with good material things in this
life, [one who holds to common grace] ignores and contradicts the message of
the Bible. Proverbs 3:33 warns that the curse of the Lord is in the house
of the wicked—in his house, in this life, including his kitchen, his easy chair, and
all his earthly life. Psalm 73 teaches that the wealth and other good
things of the ungodly are a slippery slide to bring him into hell (whereas the
struggles and burdens of the godly are God’s way with him to bring him to
glory.
Another error of the identification of grace with
good things is that it refuses to see the present life of humans in light of
the eternal end of humans, whether damnation or glorification.
In addition, the defender of common grace denies
the justice of God. On what basis does God bless the ungodly (in this
life)? Did Christ die for the reprobate ungodly, to merit blessing for
him? Is God unjust in blessing those whose sins deserve and demand
cursing and only cursing? The New Testament is full of the teaching that
the wrath of God abides on the workers of iniquity. Where is the teaching
that God’s grace abides on the workers of iniquity in this life? One
thing, and one thing only delivers sinners from the wrath of God, and merits
for them blessing, and this is the substitutionary death of Christ.
There is grace only in the death of Christ, applied
only by faith, with its source in election.
Blessings.
Cordially in
Christ,
Prof. Engelsma
No comments:
Post a Comment