Christ’s Lowly Birth
The circumstances of Christ’s birth are nearly all we know of His early life and the emphasis is all on the fact that He was born into poverty, rejection, suffering and persecution. Bethlehem, the stable, the manger, the swaddling clothes, the shepherds, the flight into Egypt—all tell the same story.
Why is the story of His birth told in such detail and why is there so much emphasis on His lowly birth? The story is not told to arouse our sympathy or to convince us that no one ever suffered such poverty and rejection as He did. The story is not a tale with a social moral, not a call for social reform and an end of poverty and suffering. It is part of the gospel, and it is in the Scriptures to show us that He is the Saviour.
Scripture itself tells us the reason for His lowly birth when it says that He was “made … to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (II Cor. 5:21). All His lowliness, humiliation and poverty were part of what He suffered as the one who bore the sins of His people in order to redeem them.
Scripture teaches this most clearly in II Corinthians 8:9: “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich.” There is no doubt that His becoming poor is a reference to His incarnation and to all the circumstances of it. This, the word of God says, was so that through His poverty we might be rich—not with earthly riches but with all the riches of salvation that are in heavenly places in Him (Eph. 1:3).
His suffering, all of it, is our salvation. His humiliation is our exaltation. His lowliness our lifting up. He was not our Saviour only on the cross but all His life long. What a Saviour!
It was necessary, too, that He be our Saviour from birth: just as we are born sinners, corrupt and depraved (Ps. 51:5), so He had to be born suffering the punishment of sin. Just as our whole life from birth to death is under the dominion of sin, so our whole life must be redeemed by His life of suffering, climaxing in His shame and sorrow and the shedding of His blood on the cross.
The story of His birth, therefore, is not just a touching tale, not a matter of mere pious sentiment, but the gospel. Hearing of His birth we can say with old Simeon, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32). Rev. Ron Hanko
Secret and Revealed Things (2)
“The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29).
We discussed this verse in the last issue of the News. To refresh our memories, I will once again quote the question: “I would like you to explain the secret and revealed will of God—how they relate and how they differ in the light of texts like Eph. 1:11, Isa. 46:10, Ps. 115:3, Matt. 7:21, Luke 12:47 and Ps. 143:10.”
I will not quote all these texts here, for that will take up too much room. But I urge the reader to consult them again. If you will read them you will learn that the first three texts have to do with God’s counsel, the next two have to do with punishment for disobeying God’s will and the last one has to do with a request of the Psalmist for instruction and grace from God to walk in obedience to God’s will.
The question really has to do with the relationship between God’s counsel, which is determinative for all our life, and man’s calling to be obedient to God. Or, to put it a little differently, the question has to do with the relation between God’s command to all men that they obey Him and God’s determination to give His grace to walk in God’s ways only to some.
This too involves the question of the relation between God’s “hidden” and “revealed” will. On the one hand, according to His hidden will, God wills to give the grace of obedience to His people only. On the other hand, God wills that all men obey Him. Does this not imply a certain conflict or contradiction between what God has determined in His hidden will and what God wills in His revealed will?
Concerning this I want to say a few things.
In the first place, this is an old problem which has been answered before, notably by the Reformers. Luther in his Bondage of the Will and Calvin in his treatise On the Eternal predestination of God already faced this problem. For very detailed and concise answers I refer the reader to these important books. Nor are these two Reformers the only ones who have faced this question. Turretin, for example, discusses it at length in his Institutes.
In the second place, I do not believe that God’s will to give salvation only to His people belongs to God’s “secret” or “hidden” will. God has made this purpose abundantly clear in Scripture. It may be a part of God’s hidden will who precisely these people are whom God wills to save. But the fact itself is not hidden.
In the third place, God’s will that all men without exception obey Him is rooted in His original creation of man. God created man good and upright, capable in all things to do the will of God. God does not abandon His original demand. Just because man fell and lost the ability to do good does not mean that God no longer requires man to do good—this is what the Arminian teaches. What kind of God would that be? None of us would want a god who says to man, “I am so sorry that you lost the ability to do good! I will just forget about it and be satisfied with your sin.” That would be a denial of God’s holiness and a caricature of God.
In the fourth place, it remains man’s responsibility to do good, and man is and must be punished for his failure to obey God. From man’s point of view, man justly receives God’s wrath and punishment in this life and in the life to come for his disobedience. And he himself knows it, into all eternity in hell.
In the fifth place, all this does not mean that there is conflict in God when He wills to deliver some from sin and death and give them salvation, a salvation which includes the spiritual ability to do God’s will. God is under no obligation to save one or two. He saves some. It is His prerogative to save those whom He wills to save.
Finally, in God there is perfect harmony between His will that all men obey Him and His will to save some. That harmony is this: God is sovereign over all, He is sovereign over the fall of Adam, He is sovereign over all sin and He is sovereign in His work of grace.
God’s sovereignty never destroys man’s responsibility for sin. God accomplishes all His good pleasure, yet He does so in such a way that man’s will is not forced or violated. Man sins because he wills to sin.
Therefore, God’s command that all men obey Him does not contradict His purpose to save only His people. The will of God’s command serves the realization of the will of His decree. God commands all men to obey Him. By grace in Jesus Christ, He saves His people, enabling them to keep His commandments. In the wicked, under His sovereign rule, God fulfils His decree of reprobation. He condemns them in the way of their own disobedience and refusal to obey Him.
Thus, in both salvation and judgment, God receives all the glory for ever. Prof. Herman Hanko
“Almost” a Christian?
One reader asks this important question: “What if a person wants to be a Christian but God has not ‘elected’ him?” This is a good question, not only because important doctrines of Scripture are at stake, but also because the assurance and comfort of God’s people depend on the answer.
The answer is simple. There is no one who sincerely wants to be a Christian who is not one of God’s elect, and there is not one of God’s elect who does not want to be a Christian when God begins His work of grace in him. None of the reprobate—those whom God has not elected—ever truly want to be Christians.
There are those who think they want to be Christians, but when they count the cost (Luke 14:25-33) and discover what it truly means to believe in Christ, follow Him and suffer for His sake, they fall away. There are also those who say, like Agrippa, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian” (Acts 26:28), but it remains “almost,” never “altogether.”
There is good reason why the elect will want to be Christians. Election does not only determine the eternal destiny of some, but is also the source of repentance, faith, holiness and every blessing of salvation (Eph. 1:4-5, 11; 2:10). God does not merely decide who will be saved, but determines to give them everything necessary for salvation. In this way He ensures that all the elect are saved.
The desire to be a Christian is therefore one of those blessings given to the elect. Jesus makes this connection in John 6:37: “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.”
To desire to be a Christian and to be identified with Christ is part of coming to Him and believing in Him. Those who come are those whom the Father has given Him, and every one of them comes.
Thus all who truly desire to be Christians show themselves to be elect by that very desire and by coming to Christ. No one who is not elect will ever truly desire this. Why not? Because that desire is a gift of grace according to election and is part of saving faith in Jesus Christ.
This is also why Scripture assures us that those who seek find and those who knock have it opened. They do not find because they seek by their own merit. Their seeking and knocking are the fruits of election and grace. God will not forsake His own work.
We therefore reject the idea that the reprobate can truly hunger and thirst, seek and desire the things of God. That would imply seeking apart from grace and would mean that some seek who never find. What comfort it is that this is not so! How troubling it would be to say, “You are seeking, but you may never find; you are knocking, but the door may remain shut.”
Instead, we may assure them from the Scriptures that all whom the Father has given to Christ will come to Him, and those who come will never be cast out. Rev. Ron Hanko
