Sermon Tone Analysis

Two weeks ago, my wife and I were in Maryland and Pennsylvania visiting family and friends.

While we were there, I took the opportunity to research a little into my family’s background.

I had always known that I had come from Methodist stock.

My great great-grandfather was named Charles Wesley Walker after Charles Wesley, one of the founders of the Methodist Church.

But I discovered on this trip that his grand­father, a man named Christian Hoopman was especially devoted to Methodism.

He was a brickmaker and builder by trade.

In fact, at least two buildings that he constructed in the early 1800s are on the National Register of Historic Places in Harford County, Maryland.

But he also donated the ground and built the church at which my ancestors worshiped for several generations.

The same church still uses that building today — almost two hundred years later.

Now, lest you think that I have only Methodist blood in my veins, on my mother’s side of the family at about the same time there were several preachers who lived in the southern part of Virginia.

In fact, my mother’s great-great-grandfather was named John Calvin Greer.

Most of his brothers and sisters were given biblical names, like Isaac, Noah, Moses, Eli, Aquilla, Hannah and Elizabeth, but this one son was named after the reformer.

Someday I would like to do more research into this part of the family.

But the one thing that impresses me in all of this is the grace that God shows to his people over the years.

Not everyone was a believer.

In fact, there were few, if any, believers for almost a hundred years, as far as I can tell.

But then God, in his goodness, brought my mother to faith in Christ, and through her he saved me.

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The Biblical Doctrine of Grace

This marvelous grace of God is what I want to look at today.

In our text, the apostle Peter greeted his readers with an announcement of God’s grace and peace.

He said, /Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied/.

Some have defined God’s grace as the unmerited favor of God.

Others use the word /grace/ as an acronym and say that grace is God’s Riches At Christ’s Expense.

An Arminian with whom I spoke several years ago said that grace means that our whole salvation comes from God and nothing comes from ourselves.

Each of these statements is correct as far as it goes, but they’re all missing one very important thing.

Not one of them says that God gives his favor, riches and salvation to undeserving, condemned and miserable sinners.

But we really do not understand the greatness of divine grace until we learn to loath the sin that it overcomes.

One of the greatest summaries of God’s grace in Scripture appears in Acts 16:14.

Describing the conversion of Lydia, Luke wrote that the Lord opened her heart to heed the things spoken by Paul.

Now, remember, that Lydia was a sinner just like everyone else.

We don’t know much about her background, but it’s not hard to imagine that she may have engaged in all the pagan idolatry of her native Thyatira before she became a Jewish proselyte and then a Christian.

But whatever her background was, Luke’s point is that she did not cause herself to hear the gospel.

She heard the gospel only because of a prior act of God on her heart.

The Lord himself gave her the desire to submit herself entirely to the apostolic message.

This morning’s text tells how God manifests his grace to his people.

Peter informs us that each of the three persons of the glorious Trinity had a part in our salvation.

The Father elected us unto eternal life.

The Spirit of God sanctifies us.

The Son sprinkles us with his precious blood.

This work is God’s from beginning to end.

Its success does not in any way depend on us.

In fact, it runs counter to everything that we had desired in our unregenerate state.

It overcomes all our natural hatred of God and our neighbor, and continues to work in us to make us more and more like Jesus Christ.

This is real grace.

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Elect According to Foreknowledge

The first part of this divine work is election, which he attributes to the first person of the Trinity.

We are /elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father/.

This does not mean that the Father alone elected us, but rather that work of election is preeminently assigned to him by emphasis, not by exclusion.

One thing that we have to understand here is that God’s election has specific individuals in mind.

The Lord chose and set apart certain men, women and children to be the recipients of his favor.

II Timothy 2:19 says, /Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.

And, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity/.

Beloved, you and I do not know who belongs to the Lord and who doesn’t.

Sometimes the Lord chooses people that we might pass over.

My brother told this story recently about the time that he was eating in a certain restaurant when a biker gang drove up on their Harleys.

Everyone of them looked the part of a typical biker: leather jackets covered with all kinds of emblems, torn jeans, long scraggly hair, and so forth.

But when their meal came, they bowed their heads and joined together in a prayer of thanksgiving in the name of Jesus Christ.

Who would ever have thought?

And then we have the other side as well, viz., people who have made professions of faith and for years lived respectable, godly lives, only to walk away from the Lord in the end.

Men can and will deceive us.

Our own hearts sometimes make us believe things that are not so.

But God cannot be deceived.

He knows those who are his — every single one of them.

Another very important verse for the doctrine of election is Revelation 17:8 — /And they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world/.

This verse clearly teaches that God has a book in which are written the names of those who will inherit eternal life.

These people cannot worship the beast because their names are inscribed in this book.

In fact, their names were written in it /from the foundation of the world/.

So, it’s not just that God knows every single one of his elect.

He also knows each of them eternally.

Their names were written in the Book of Life before God made Adam and Eve or anything else.

Long before Paul preached in Athens, Corinth and Rome, God had specific individuals set apart to be the recipients of his grace and favor.

This is, no doubt, what Luke had in mind when he wrote, /And as many as were ordained to eternal life believed/ (Acts 13:48).

At this point, we have to make a very important qualification so that we do not misunderstand what this means.

If you ever have the opportunity to go to Philadelphia, you should take a tour of city hall.

Not only is it the tallest building in Philadelphia, it also sits at the center of the intersection of two main streets: Broad and Market.

When the weather is nice, the tour will take you all the way to the top of city hall, where you will discover two things: first, the statue of William Penn that looks so small from the ground is gigantic; and second, you can see for miles up and down Broad Street, which is supposedly the straightest road of its length anywhere in the world.

And while you are looking down at the roads below, you see two cars that are about to collide.

Their crash is inevitable, but there is nothing you can do about it.

You have foreknowledge about something that can have only one outcome.

A lot of people think of God’s plan in the same way.

He looks down the corridors of the future to see what men will do, and then he calls that his plan.

He foresees that Euodia, Syntyche and Clement will believe, so he elects them unto salvation and writes their names in the Book of Life (Phil.

4:2–3).

The problems with this view of divine foreknowledge are many, but I will mention only two of them.

The first is that it doesn’t really answer the question.

Men want to limit God’s foreknowledge because they don’t want to admit that their actions had been staked out in advance by someone other than themselves.

Yet, they admit that the things that God foreknows are absolutely certain.

God, in this view, may not determine the course of history, but someone does.

In any case, the actions of man are not free.

But the bigger problem behind this is that it assumes some force that is greater than God.

It creates an idol out of man’s thoughts.

This is contrary to all Scripture, for only the triune God possesses omniscience and absolute sovereignty.

Only he has sufficient knowledge to map out a comprehensive plan for the entire universe.

The next problem is that the Bible nowhere represents God’s knowledge as conditional.

He does not know because something else is true; he just knows.

Or we could say that he knows because history is nothing more than the outworking of his own eternal pleasure.

It is the regard or attention that he shows to his creation.

This is especially true in election, where we see that God’s foreknowledge implies his will for specific individuals.

Jacob and Esau had not yet been born when God announced that he loved one and hated the other (Rom.

9:12–13).

They had had no opportunity to hear the gospel or to respond to it one way or the other.

Yet, God chose Jacob and rejected Esau.