Two weeks ago Leslie Wiggins of Lux Venit and I began a month-long series on the 31 chapters of John Piper's book The Purifying Power of Living By Faith in Future Grace, better known as Future Grace. My deepest thanks go out to Leslie for her patience while I sought to apply faith in future grace to work situations last week. We now move on to Chapter 5, "The Freest of All God's Acts."
Be Free, Stanley, Be Free
In my four-year old son's runaway favourite motion picture, the animated feature Cars, the spooked protagonist Lightning McQueen rampages through the sleepy little town of Radiator Springs, believing the Sheriff chasing him is shooting at him. Sheriff's car, unused to high speed chases, is actually backfiring embarrassingly. As McQueen tries to outrun Sheriff, he knocks over a tower of tires, destroys the firehall flowerbed, somehow attaches himself to the statue of the town founder Stanley, and drags the statue free of its moorings. The conical base of the road-surfing statue furrows the pavement the length of Radiator Springs until McQueen suddenly throws on the brakes, flinging the statue into overhead electrical wires, which in turn catapult Stanley into the night air. On his way up, the resident hippie VW cab Fillmore is heard to say, "Be free, Stanley, be free!" In a moment that could only happen in movies, Stanley plunks down squarely onto his original base outside the firehall.
In this post, before I grapple with the nitty-gritty of Piper's chapter, I want to reiterate via paraphrase a conversation on a DR reader's blog that touched on the issue of God's nature: is God a risk taker or not? Those who have read Wild At Heart by John Eldredge, or DR's review of it (total disclosure: I did not write the review in question) will be familiar with this line of thought and its extreme version, Open Theism, which posits that God does not actually know the future but makes extremely well-informed guesses.
The conversation came about because the blogger mentioned he appreciated reading DR's review after having read Wild at Heart and being captivated (pun intended) by the book. This blogger was convinced of the need to hold said book up to the light of Scripture, and found the book wanting. Soon, a Wild At Heart apologist had posted in response, declaring that the blogger's first impulse to love the book had been the correct reaction because "God is a risk taker." The blogger responded with Scriptures pointing to the omniscience of God and the sufficiency of Scripture. Unable to resist, I weighed in, pointing out a helpful article by John Piper (yes, him again) and Robert Reymond's excellent discussion of the dynamic way God works in the world and in time in the book What Is God?
Now let's tie some loose ends together. What was the point of telling the story of Stanley from Cars and summarizing the comment thread from a DR reader's blog? Simply this: when we attempt to release God (as if we could) from the moorings of His own self-disclosure and self-revelation, we do violence to the character of God, and the Scriptures in which He has shown Himself. Even one of the current presidential nominees is on record as stating there are many ways to God, which is tantamount to universalism and denies the "one way" teaching of Jesus Christ. It goes without saying this nominee's claim of God's universal election has no scriptural basis and no effectual power. We cannot release Him from the moorings of His character by wishful speaking: "Be free, Lordy, be free!" His moorings are His character as revealed in His Word, and His Word is Truth.
That said, "God's grace toward sinners is the freest of all God's acts." Far from being frustratingly reigned in from extending universal election because He made rules He cannot break,
Canadian singer Roch Voisine asks (not of God) in one of his songs, "But how can you be so free?" We might well ask this of God. Note especially in the above quote that "He is never trapped by his own wrath." Rather, God's character allows him - nay, motivates him - to be the freest being of all. Risk taking on God's part is not a logical outcome of His character; electing grace is. God is free to explode in grace towards repentant sinners due to the riches of his grace (Eph. 2:6-7). Jerry Bridges further explores God's unsearchable riches in his book The Gospel for Real Life - highly recommended.
I realize, as Piper does, that this discussion begs the question, "But how can electing grace be a totally free kind of grace? If it's sovereignly extended to only those God chooses, it's not free, is it?" Well, Piper says, that's because it's conditional. As one of his subtitles in the chapter puts it, God extends "Free, Unmerited, Conditional Grace." While grace cannot be earned or merited, it still comes on conditions of repentance. "Whoa," you may be saying, "there's the condition - repentance." But it's tacitly not a meritorious condition because Scripture makes it plain that even the repentance itself is a gift of God's grace, which in turn guarantees the freeness of grace. "God's freedom is not reduced when he makes some of his graces depend on conditions that he himself freely supplies." At the end of the day, God is God and will be gracious to whom He is gracious. O how marvelous, how wonderful, is God's sovereign grace extended to sinners!
Please read Leslie's reflections on this chapter.
