Why God’s Rebukes Are a Means of Preserving the Elect
One of the great misunderstandings in our day is how the warnings in Scripture are meant to function in the life of the church. These warnings—found not only in the Gospels, but woven throughout the New Testament epistles—are not directed at nameless outsiders. They are addressed to real congregations, to people who sit under the preached Word, partake in the sacraments, and profess faith in Christ.
In many circles within the Reformed tradition today, there is a beautiful and necessary emphasis on the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Rightly so. It is the heart of the gospel—that sinners are declared righteous before God solely on the basis of Christ’s perfect righteousness, imputed to us and received by faith. This is our peace, our assurance, our hope. Without it, we have nothing. But with it, we must remember: justification is not the whole of salvation.
“Grace never lifts a man so high that he forgets the dust he came from.” — Thomas Brooks
This captures a deeply biblical truth: the higher grace lifts us, the lower we bow.
“We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called... Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
— 1 Corinthians 1:23–24
Verse 23 highlights the outward call—the universal proclamation of the gospel. Though Christ is preached to all, this message is rejected by all in their natural state. Jews stumble over it; Gentiles dismiss it as foolishness. No one, apart from divine grace, esteems Christ rightly.
(Or, Why Repentance Follows Justification but Is Born at the Moment of Faith)
In Scripture, God's foreknowledge—expressed by the term foreknown (proginōskō in Greek)—never refers to foresight or advance awareness of human decisions or actions, but always to His eternal, covenantal love and sovereign purpose set upon persons. Romans 8:29 says, "For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate..." The key word is whom—not what. Paul does not say God predestined those whose faith, obedience, or potential He foresaw; rather, He foreknew persons, and on that basis—His sovereign love—He predestined them.
Many Arminians point to 2 Peter 2:20–21 as proof that a true believer can lose their salvation:
“For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.”
But interestingly, they often stop short of quoting the very next verse:
One of the most common objections raised against the doctrine of unconditional election is that it makes God seem arbitrary. The reasoning often goes like this: if God chooses some and not others without regard to foreseen faith or merit, then His choice must be random, without reason, and therefore unjust.
But is that really the case?
The Roman Catholic challenge—“So which of the many different doctrines of non-Catholic churches is the truth? All claim to be true but differ from others! Can’t all be true if they differ!”—is a logically flawed, theologically inconsistent, and self-defeating argument. It assumes that the mere existence of doctrinal disagreement within Protestantism invalidates Protestantism itself. However, by this same standard, Roman Catholicism would also be invalidated since it has its own significant doctrinal divisions.
The following piece is a response to a recent assertion by Leighton Flowers:
"Putting your faith in someone else doesn't require a supernatural miracle. People put genuine faith in false gods all the time, so much so they would sacrifice their own lives. No one believes it requires a supernatural intervention of God to grant someone the ability to do that, so why would anyone assume it takes a miracle for someone to put that kind of faith in the one true God?" - Leighton Flowers
