Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God by J. I. Packer

Author:J. I. Packer [Packer, J. I.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2012-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

4

Divine Sovereignty and Evangelism

We start this final section by summing up what we have learned so far about evangelism.

Evangelism, we have learned, is a task appointed to all God’s people everywhere. It is the task of communicating a message from the Creator to rebel mankind. The message begins with information and ends with an invitation. The information concerns God’s work of making his Son a perfect Savior for sinners. The invitation is God’s summons to mankind generally to come to the Savior and find life. God commands all men everywhere to repent, and promises forgiveness and restoration to all who do. The Christian is sent into the world as God’s herald and Christ’s ambassador, to broadcast this message as widely as he can. This is both his duty (because God commands it, and love to our neighbor requires it) and his privilege (because it is a great thing to speak for God, and to take our neighbor the remedy—the only remedy—that can save him from the terrors of spiritual death). Our job, then, is to go to our fellow men and tell them the gospel of Christ, and try by every means to make it clear to them, to remove as best we can any difficulties that they may find in it, to impress them with its seriousness, and to urge them to respond to it. This is our abiding responsibility; it is a basic part of our Christian calling.

But now we come to the question that has loomed over us from the outset. How is all this affected by our belief in the sovereignty of God?

We saw earlier that divine sovereignty is one of a pair of truths which form an antinomy in biblical thinking. The God of the Bible is both Lord and Lawgiver in his world; he is both man’s King and man’s Judge. Consequently, if we would be biblical in our outlook, we have to make room in our minds for the thoughts of divine sovereignty and of human responsibility to stand side by side. Man is indubitably responsible to God, for God is the Lawgiver who fixes his duty, and the Judge who takes account of him as to whether or not he has done it. And God is indubitably sovereign over man, for he controls and orders all human deeds, as he controls and orders all else in his universe. Man’s responsibility for his actions, and God’s sovereignty in relation to those same actions, are thus, as we saw, equally real and ultimate facts.

The apostle Paul forces this antinomy upon our notice by speaking of God’s will (thele4ma) in connection with both these seemingly incompatible relations of the Creator to his human creatures, and that within the limits of a single short epistle. In the fifth and sixth chapters of Ephesians, he desires that his readers may “understand what the will of the Lord is” (5:17) and “[do] the will of God from the heart” (6:6). This is the will of God as Lawgiver, the will of God that man is to know and obey.

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