With The Heart Man Believes,Unto Righteousness...Romans 9-11 pt 11

But what saith it? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart: that is, the word of faith, which we preach; That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.(Romans 10:8-11)

What does God require of any sinner, Gentile or Jew? Righteousness cannot be attained by any system of works, God cannot be indebted by bankrupt sinners in any way. What God requires is that we all believe in our heart, that God raised Jesus from the dead, and confess with our mouth that He (Jesus) is the LORD.

How is it that believing in the heart brings a man into Righteousness? Why does God require belief?

First of all, when the way of Righteousness is simple faith, there can be no personal glory allotted to any man. All of the glory goes to the God who has made salvation possible.

Faith has an object, God. In heaven the multitudes sing, “Salvation belongs to God, who sits upon the throne and unto the Lamb…”.

Secondly,the most important thing about any person, and the determining factor of anyone’s life for good or evil, is what He or She believes about God. A person’s moral, spiritual, ethical, intellectual and emotional destiny is determined by whether or not they hold the right view of God. All of our personal problems are in fact at the root, Theological problems.

Where did Adam and Eve go wrong? They fell when they entertained a malicious notion about their Creator, that He had been withholding something good from them out of a sense of petty jealousy. The lies people believe about God are the corrupting influence of their whole lives.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.(Genesis 3:4)

The Serpent told all of us a series of lies about God, thus we are all estranged from Him, who is the source of our life, and the only true ground of our happiness.

The gospel sets the record straight about God, and in the process, puts our ruined lives back together again, restoring us to the extent that we ,”grow in grace Through the knowledge of Him that has called us to glory and virtue”, as the apostle Peter tells us.

It is “Seeing Him, as He (truly) Is…”, that transforms us, breaking the power of sin and unbelief. Thus the highest duty of the believer is the worshipful beholding of Him, as in a glass.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.( 2 Cor 3:18)

The fall of man has further distorted our belief about God, rendering all of us unworthy, and unable to worship Him. We cannot ‘see’ him because we are estranged from him, and have become slaves to our own desires. Our fallen hearts have virtually become an “idol factory”, manufacturing ‘Gods’ in our own image and likeness, as projections of our own fallen lusts and desires.

Believing the serpent’s lie, we want to become ‘gods’ ourselves, making our own rules, and seeking our own ‘salvation’, which is self-realization of some form or other.

But in the Gospel, the invisible God presents himself to us again, for Christ is “the image of the invisible God”, he is none less than “God with us”,Immanuel.

Furthermore the gospel gives us something new to believe about God, for God has done something unprecedented in Christ. God became a man, He humbled himself and even became obedient, taking on himself the form of a servant.What does this do to the heart that accepts this revelation of God?

Faith in the gospel of the incarnation alone is what we need to ‘dethrone’ the haughty, false, SELF god we have been enslaved to in our hearts. We don’t want to be ‘god’ anymore, for we have seen a vision of the true God, who ‘humbled himself’, and ‘emptied himself’ of all of his Divine prerogatives, in order to Righteously save us from our sins.

Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;

and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.(Phillipians 2:5-11)

Pastor Bill, I am not offended. But, thank you for expressing concern about that. I do not want to offend you, either. Let me see if I can lay out what I am driving at with a bit more clarity. You have a blog going on here at FR. By this, you represent yourself as a teacher of some kind of doctrine. That puts you in different league. You may want your remarks to be simple, Gospel-oriented, encouraging statements to win folks to Christ. I sense that and do not question your motives. I have read a few of your posts and found them just fine.

However, I believe we both would agree that a few remarks can be one-half inch from the truth and amplify an error into a thousand mile divide. When you said, “God requires…” (fill in the blank), even if the word is “faith”, it can be easily perceived as a work. Perhaps not to you, but to a reader.

When you went on to say to me, “Even faith is the gift of God, but God does require what he provides” your subtle “but” added yet another complication to a novice readers thinking. I am sure you have heard that “…but…” usually translates into “disregard all that goes before”. What is communicated is that if God provides it all, but I must “act” upon it, then God is clearly not providing it all. This kind of double-speak is rampant in the world today. I was, by asking you whether you were Monergistic or Synergistic to eliminate the possibility of misunderstanding by readers.

But, when I asked this, you would not even address the issue or acknowledge the question. I became further concerned. You did not say, “Those are interesting appellations. I am unfamiliar with them. Can you be more specific about their definitions so I can see if I agree with either?” You just avoided them altogether. That by default is the tendency of Synergists. Why? Because, a Monergist is absolutely, completely and fully persuaded that God is managing all the activities in His universe. A Monergist is all in with the clarity. Synergists always equivocate.

But, then you went on to identify these as “humanly constructed categories”, things got even messier. This implies the question was irrelevant. But, I am persuaded that is absolutely not the case. These “categories” are positions that represent God managing everything, or man contributing to his salvation. They are not human constructs; they are two sides of an argument as clear as “Does God exist or not?”

Paul walked right into the fire fight in the 9th Chap. of his letter to the Romans. He makes it crystal clear that it is God alone doing all of the choosing, all of the drawing, all of the adopting.

16 “So then it does not depend on the man who wills (chooses) or the man who runs (acts) but on God who has mercy. 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires and He hardens whom He desires.”

But, Paul did not stop there in making things clear. He anticipated the blow-back from the Roman audience claiming that this kind of control (and lack of free will) was patently unfair.

19 “You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?” 20 On the contrary, who are you, O man, who answers back to God? The thing molded will not say to the molder, “Why did you make me like this,” will it? 21 Or does not the potter have a right over the clay, to make from the same lump (humanity) one vessel for honorable use and another for common use (literal, dishonor). 22 What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? 23 And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, 24 even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles.”

Is this defining the Gospel or not? If so, all other remarks about the nature and process of salvation must either be subordinated or subsumed by this clear argument for God’s control. If you believe this is ambiguous, if you believe that this represents some spurious doctrine, if you believe in “Calminiansim” or “Arvinism” (or whatever other clever name the fence-straddlers use to dismiss God’s ultimate control), then I am compelled to speak up. I am going to call it out as a false doctrine of “co-operation”, the misunderstanding of “a little of both”, the deadly claim that man can control his own destiny.

Don’t misunderstand me, I am of course persuaded that God is managing even the error of Synergism as it replaces the Monergistic position today. As Paul writes in Thess., a day will come (might be here) when God sends a deluding influence over the world so that a lie is believed. But, that should not stop us from speaking the truth in love. And, it is love, my FRiend, to say something is in error and should not be accepted. If you find something errant in my words, speak up. But, if the problem is that they chafe I won’t move back. We are both called to teach truth, not popular doctrines. That is what I am driving at.

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