The Protestant Reformed Churches have not changed
in their position concerning the sovereignty of God and the decree of
predestination as they relate to the will of man. But the doctrine has fallen
on hard times in our day.
A number of years ago, when Prof. Homer Hoeksema
was still alive, he and I were sitting on a Friday afternoon in the faculty
room of the seminary, as we frequently did, going over the affairs of the week,
discussing the problems in the seminary and in general relaxing after a busy
week's work. We were talking about how the church in our day has come to a
point where even though it claims to be Reformed and Calvinistic, it in effect
denies these fundamental doctrines of Scripture and the Reformed faith. Prof.
Hoeksema made the remark: You know, if you stop to think about it, it is only
infrequently in the history of the church that the church has consistently
maintained the doctrines of sovereign grace. In those infrequent times when the
church has maintained without compromise and with consistency the doctrines of
sovereign grace, those times never lasted very long. Soon the church reverted
to the age-old errors of Pelagianism and Arminianism. That struck me at the
time. And while teaching Church History in our Protestant Reformed Seminary,
the point was more and more forcibly driven home.
The question arises: Why is this so? Why are the
great and grand truths of the sovereignty of God, of eternal predestination,
and of particular and sovereign grace so infrequently maintained throughout the
history of the church, and when they are, why are they maintained only for very
short periods of time? I can come to only one conclusion: Their unpopularity is
due to the fact that these doctrines are thoroughly and completely God-centered
and God-glorifying. Men, even in the church, will not have it that way. They
want glory for themselves. They do not want God alone to receive glory. Man
insists on his own place, his own prerogatives, his own importance. He wants to
retain some of the tattered remnants of a pride that burns white-hot in his
heart and is shattered only by the blow of the truth of the absolute
sovereignty of God. So he attacks those doctrines, attacks them vigorously in
one way or another. He attacks them by denying them. He attacks them by trying
to kill them with silence. It would be interesting to ask a thousand people in
any Reformed church, "When is the last time you have heard a sermon that
was devoted exclusively to the doctrine of sovereign election or, much less, to
the doctrine of sovereign reprobation? How many have you heard over the past
year or two?" Silence is an effective weapon, it seems, to destroy these
doctrines.
These doctrines are also openly attacked by those who
profess to be Reformed and Calvinistic but introduce doctrines into the
confession of the church that are at odds with and ultimately destroy the
doctrines of the sovereignty of God. I refer to such teachings as God's love
for all men without distinction; Christ's atoning sacrifice on the cross for
the whole world, head for head; a desire on God's part, expressed in the
preaching of the gospel, to save everyone who hears the gospel — better known
as the well-meant gospel offer, which has become a sacred cow in countless
circles. In the British Isles, for example, it has repeatedly come to my
attention that one can teach any heresy under the face of the heavens and no
one will turn a hair. But let someone deny the well-meant gospel offer and the
wrath of the entire evangelical and Presbyterian world comes crashing down on
his head, as if the only heresy that is of any account in today's world is the
truth of sovereign and particular grace.
That is the situation in the church world. It is
sad.
The Reformed may have won a mighty and powerful victory at the Synod of
Dordt, destroying Arminianism and defeating its nefarious purposes. But the
simple fact of the matter is, and no one can deny it — I say it with shame and
sorrow — Arminius won!
Taken from a pamphlet
entitled The Sovereign God and Man’s Will by Robert Decker, Carl Haak
and Herman Hanko
