“If Islam is a peaceful religion, then what do you call the Amish in Lancaster County?” - Dr. Peter Hammond, WOTMR Hr 2 10/10/07

“’There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.’ —By the mere pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty, any more than if nothing else but God’s mere will had in the least degree, or in any respect whatsoever, any hand in the preservation of wicked men one moment.—The truth of this observation may appear by the following considerations.” - Jonathon Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Preached at Enfield, July 8th, 1741,

”The word “fair” and the word “loving” as defined by whom? I tell people all the time, you want fair? Fair sends everybody to hell. You want what is just? Justice sends everyone to hell. I think what you want is grace, and grace is at the discretion of the giver. Is it not? And forgiveness is at the discretion of the forgiver, is it not? And [forgiveness is] on the terms of the one who has been offended.” - John MacArthur “The Doctrine of Actual Atonement – Part 2” GTY 10/2/07 Said in response to a comment that election and limited atonement don’t sound loving or fair.

“O love that ever burnest and art never quenched! O Charity, my God, enkindle me! Thou commandest continence. Grant what thou commandest and command what thou wilt.” - Augustine “Confessions” (X, 40)( source http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons/ByDate/1994/862_Long_for_the_Pure_Milk_of_the_Word/ )

“The amazing miracle of commanding a man who can’t respond and then giving him the power to respond is analogous to salvation. The gospel commands dead men to rise. [The gospel commands] dead men to believe. [The gospel commands] dead men to understand. [The gospel commands] dead men to repent. The gospel commands dead people to do, frankly, what they can’t do.” - John F. MacArthur Jr. “The Doctrine of Total Inability” 9/27/07 GTY

“There is enough dust on some of your Bible's to write "damnation" with your fingers.” - C.H. Spurgeon

On D.L. Moody: “On Sunday night, October 8, 1871, while preaching at Farwell Hall, which was now being used because of the increased crowds, Moody asked his congregation to evaluate their relationships to Christ and return next week to make their decisions for Him. That crowd never regathered. While Sankey was singing a closing song, the din of fire trucks and church bells scattered them forever, for Chicago was on fire. The Y.M.C.A. building, church, and parsonage were all to be lost in the next 24 hours.” Between 200 & 300 people died in that fire. “I always think about D. L. Moody, the night he preached in Chicago and said - I want you people to go home and think about what I've said and come back tomorrow night ready to make a decision for Christ. And that night the Chicago fire broke out and a great portion of his audience was dead. He said I never told anybody tomorrow again.” - John MacArthur Jr "http://www.gty.org/Resources/transcripts/1378"

“We do well to consider that in the most moral culture this world will ever know, man will love sin. Unless you think that’s shocking, go back to the perfect environment in the Garden of Eden. And remember, there were only two people and they both chose sin. And they did it from innocence, what will humanity do from depravity? It doesn’t matter what age, doesn’t matter what kind of world they live in; depraved people love sin.” – John F. MacArthur Jr. "The Coming Earthly Kingdom of Jesus Christ" GTY 9/6

On [the gay] issue, the emergent crowd is becoming increasingly obscure. Brian McLaren was named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. He was asked this question, “What is your position on gay marriage?” His answer was this: "You know what, the thing that breaks my heart is that there's no way I can answer it without hurting someone on either side." To which I would respond, “Now you have hurt God.” That we cannot simply say there are people who believe heterosexual marriage is acceptable, there are people who think that homosexual marriage is acceptable, and I plead the fifth and refuse to answer the question because someone will have their feelings hurt, when God is in heaven with His feelings hurt. Because He has spoken to this issue with great clarity. He then went on to say, in an online version of Christianity Today, to which I lost my mind and had to repent of what I said so I’m not telling you that he’s a bad guy and I’m a good guy, we’re both bad guys, Jesus is the good guy, he said, “Frankly, many of us don't know what we should think about homosexuality.” I’m not sure who the “many” are. Do you think he knows what he believes about homosexuality? Do you think that a man that is the age of, essentially, my father and has pastored a church for a good number of years has no idea where he is at on the issue of homosexuality? How many of you could possibly be in pastoral ministry and not have a position on homosexuality?

A huge percentage of the people who attend my church have all kinds of sexual sin including bisexuality and homosexuality. And no answer is an answer. An inability or unwillingness to answer the question is, in and of itself by virtue of silence, permission.” - Mark Driscoll – “Convergent Conversation Session 3; SEBTS”

“And in [the revisionist] sort of emergent stream, what concerns me is what I see in genesis 3. I (look at/hold up) the verbal, plenary, inerrancy, and authority of scripture. I might be the only guy in Seattle who does, but that’s where I’m at. And what I see in Genesis 3 is incredibly important because it shows us where history went askew, and we were led by the serpent, which revelation reveals is Satan our enemy, into error and folly, and that is through a conversation. And the emergent church has positioned itself as a conversation. A conversation about things that God has said; a conversation about whether or not God meant what He said. Of course, I don’t mind a conversation. I’ve got a wife and two daughters, I’ve had them.

But when God speaks, we are not to converse, we are to obey. And the subtle manipulation of God’s word is; God speaks, and we’re not denying that, we’re not attacking that, and we’re not undermining that, we just want to question that. And in that stream there are three men that are very prominent; Brian Mclaren, Doug Pagitt, and Rob Bell.” - Mark Driscoll – “Convergent Conversation Session 3; SEBTS” beginning at 18:50

“The very thing that sinners are hoping will save them on the Day of Judgment, the goodness of God, will be the very thing that will condemn them. Because if God is good, He must, by nature, punish murderers, rapists, thieves, liars, fornicators, blasphemers. God is going to punish sin wherever it is found." - Ray Comfort, “Hell’s Best Kept Secret”

“God has given light to every man. The Holy Spirit convicts him of sin, righteousness, and judgment; sin which is transgression of the Law, holiness which is of the Law, and judgment which is by the Law. His conscience accuses him, the work of the Law written on the heart, and the Law condemns him.“ - Ray Comfort, “Hell’s Best Kept Secret”

“Paul stresses justification by faith, and James stresses justification of faith. Paul treats of the justification of the man of faith, and James treats of the justification of the faith of the man.” - Jeff Buck, in an e-mail to me on Aug 31, 2007 11:52 AM, although he would attribute the framing of this quote to someone else, who also would, no doubt, attribute it to someone else…and on and on.

“What does it mean (number one) that God foreknew those He referred to in [Romans 8:28)? ‘Because those whom He foreknew,’ what does that mean? Some would say, many would say, it simply means that God foresees who will believe on Him and then He decides what will become of believers. Now there are two assumptions in that interpretation that are wrong, unbiblical, and which make that view impossible to believe. That he simply foresees who is going to believe, on their own, and then decides what the destiny of those believers will be.

Here’s assumption number one that is not true: it assumes that ultimately we, in our own will power, provide the decisive, ultimate cause of our faith. That’s the point of that interpretation. That God only foresees people, not resting in God to provide the ultimate, decisive, faith that they need to believe, but producing, on their own, the decisive ultimate ground and cause of their faith. That is a false assumption. It’s false elsewhere in the NT, because faith is described a gift from of God in Philippians 1:29 and Ephesians 2:8-9 and 2 Tim 2:24 and Matthew 16:17 and Jeremiah 32:40, and other places. Faith is God’s work, it is God’s gift, and not only that, it is shown to be such here in this very context.

Let’s look just briefly so that you can see. You don’t have to go anywhere else but right here in Romans 8:29-30 to see it. Look at verse 30, ‘those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified.’ [ESV] Now think about that with me. Everybody who is called is justified. You know and I know, from the book of Romans, that nobody is justified except through faith. Romans 5:1, ‘therefore having been justified by faith we have peace with God.’ Nobody is justified except they believe in Jesus, but this text says [that] everybody who’s called is justified. Not, ‘some of those who are called are justified’, namely those who choose to be, but everybody who is called is justified which means everybody who is called believes. How can that be? How can you say, ‘everybody is called believes? Aren’t some called who say “no” to the call?’ No! Now I’m rehearsing an old sermon from five weeks ago, so I can’t give it all, but here’s the summary statement. When God calls effectually, it’s like Jesus saying to Lazarus, ‘Lazarus, come forth,’ and he comes forth. Dead men live when God calls. When God called you to Himself effectually, in and through the preaching, the preaching of the gospel is not the effectual call of God. It’s the general call that goes out to everybody. In and through the gospel comes this mighty, ‘Piper, Live,’ and you live, and the cry of the newborn baby is faith. Therefore, this text will not allow us to buy the assumption that foreknowledge is simply a foreknowing of a faith which we produce on our own, without the decisive, ultimate, enabling of God. That’s clear, and therefore this interpretation won’t stand; that foreknowing is simply foreseeing self-wrought faith, it isn’t. It’s seeing God-wrought faith.

Here’s a second assumption that will make that interpretation not work. The interpretation that says all that foreknowledge is, is the foreseeing of human produced faith so that it will then decide what will become of them fails to give the meaning to the word ‘know’ in ‘foreknow’ a broad, biblical meaning that would make more sense out of this text. For example, let me read for you a half-a-dozen texts about ‘knowing’, and you supply the meaning. I might chip in a suggestion as I go along, but it will be plain to you what knowing means, and then keep this text in mind as I read these. In Genesis 18:19 God says of Abraham, ‘I have known him, so that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord.’ Every English translation translates ‘y-da’ as choose, which baffles me, they shouldn’t. That is the meaning, but you ought to translate the word ‘know’ [as] ‘know’ so that people like you can read it and learn the meaning of ‘know’ for Romans 8:29. It’s not good when translators interpret, that’s another issue. In Amos 3:2 God says to the people of Israel, ‘You only have I known among all the families of the earth.’ He knew about all the families, but only chose Israel. In Matthew 7:23 Jesus said to the hypocrites at the judgment day, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you who practice lawlessness.’ What does that mean? I never knew about you? I never knew you were on the earth? I never knew anything about your life? No. I never knew you, I never made you mine, I never loved you with electing love. Psalm 1:6 says, ‘The Lord knows the way of the righteous, But the way of the wicked will perish.’ He knows about the way of the wicked too. But he knows the way of the righteous in the sense of approving and recognizing and loving. In Hosea 13:5 God says to Israel, ‘I knew you in the wilderness, In the land of drought,’ meaning he took note of your plight and cared for you. And Genesis 4:1 says, ‘Now Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.’ That is, he made her his, and knew her intimately and loved her.

If you don’t know that biblical background of the word ‘know’, so much richer than our heady word ‘know’, it will be hard, I think, to put a proper meaning on verse 29. ‘Whom He foreknew,’ cared for, loved, chose, made His own. Because of all those texts I think John Stott and John Murray are exactly right when both of them say, ‘”Know” . . . is used in a sense practically synonymous with “love” . . . “Whom he foreknow” . . . is therefore virtually equivalent to "whom he foreloved.”’ Foreknowledge, is ‘sovereign, distinguishing love’ (John Stott, quoting Murray, Romans, p. 249). It's virtually the same as set your affection on and choose for your own.

So the meaning of the first act of God that guarantees Romans 8:28 is that God foreknows his own people in the sense that he chooses them and loves them and cares for them. All things work together for good for those who love God and are called because they are foreknown." - John Piper,

“Foreknown, Predestined, Conformed to Christ” preached on 8/4/02, radio broadcast 3/30/07. This quote is a compilation of transcribing (mine) some of the audio to supplement desiringgod.org’s posted manuscript http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/Sermons/ByDate/2002/98_Foreknown_Predestined_Conformed_to_Christ/

“God’s call is almighty, and very different from my call. I’m a preacher; I call you to faith every week. I call you to love God; I call you to follow Christ; I call you to embrace Him; I call you to treasure Him. I call you week after week, and that is not the same as the divine call.

What’s the difference? My call is general, God’s call is specific.
My call offers hope, God’s call creates hope. My call offers life,
God’s call, in and through mine, gives life. My call commands you to love God, God’s call through mine grants what He commands.” - John Piper “All things for Good, Part 3a”, Desiring God Radio 3/28/07