(upbeat music) - Welcome back to the Ask Pastor John podcast and welcome back Pastor John. We have a question from a listener named Tuck Warner in Coldstream, Canada. Dear Pastor John, although I see that the Bible supports a predestination concept, I'm still having trouble reconciling the fact that a perfectly loving God would in essence force us to love him and leave us no other options.

If his love is perfect, then how can he not allow us the freedom to accept or reject it? How would you respond to Tuck? - I have three responses. And mainly, these are responses to the way the question is asked, but I think can help get at the underlying issues he's concerned about.

The first response has to do with assuming that we know what it means for God to be perfectly loving. Before we actually see from the Bible how he loved. Second is a response that has to do with the word force. When he asks, would God force us to love him?

I wanna say a word about force. And third is a response to God allowing us freedom to accept or reject his love. So those are my three things I wanna say a word about. When Tuck asks how a perfectly loving God could do this or that, it seems to suggest, and I could be wrong, that he has in mind the way a perfectly loving God must act.

But we humans are not in a very good position to define what perfect love in the creator of the universe must look like. We are too sinful, too finite, too culturally bound. For example, this is right off my front burner, I think that if the federal government of Norway were to vote on what a loving God must or may not do, they wouldn't allow him to spank his children.

This has been very much in the news recently because Norway has become increasingly, it seems, heavy-handed, I would say that anyway, in removing children from their parents who don't measure up precisely to the ideas of what parental love looks like to the government. Whoa, government. Well, it's as plain as the nose on your face that God spanks his children.

God takes the life of his children in 1 Corinthians 11 over the Lord's Supper and he spanks them in Hebrews 12. "In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted "to the point of shedding your blood. "And have you forgotten the exhortation "that addresses you as sons? "My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, "nor be weary when reproved by him.

"For the Lord disciplines the one he loves "and chastises every son whom he receives. "It is for discipline that you have to endure. "God is treating you as sons for what son is there "whom his father does not discipline." Now, the point of what I'm saying, don't distort it by saying Christian parents have a right to take the lives of their children.

God forbid that anybody would interpret me that way, but God does. God has that right. I'm not talking about how to discipline children in this podcast. We can do that another time. I'm talking about the cultural limitations on defining what God can do as a loving God. If you start with the cultural assumption that God cannot do something hurtful to his children, you have canceled out scriptures.

We need to learn from scripture what love is going to look like. So that's all I'm saying, is that we bring to the Bible assumptions that may or may not be true in regard to what the love of God must do. Let's let the Bible define God's love. That's my first response.

My second response is to the word force when Tuck says he has trouble reconciling the fact that a perfectly loving God would in essence force us to love him and leave us no other option. Now, the problem I have with that is that it creates a picture in our minds that is not accurate.

Anyone who loves God genuinely loves God freely. He does. He loves God freely. Anyone who loves God genuinely loves God freely. That is, he loves God because he wants to love God. That's what it means to love God. To love God is to see God as infinitely worthy of being loved.

To love God is to see God as beautiful and worthy and satisfying. And thus seeing God, our hearts are drawn out to delight in him and enjoy him and be satisfied in him and treasure him above all things. Forced enjoyment is an oxymoron. It can't be done. You can't force people to make their heart love what they don't love.

You can force people to make physical movements they don't like to make, but you can't force them to like what they don't like. You can't force them to love what they don't love. So this picture that somehow we are loving God with our arm twisted behind our back in a painful action as God is forcing us to love him is ridiculous.

It's not even ridiculous and wrong, it's inconceivable because that's not what love is. When God brings about love, and yes, he does, when God brings about love for himself in a heart where it didn't exist before, he does it by opening the eyes of the blind to see the irresistible beauties of Christ so that we freely delight in him.

There isn't any other kind of love, but that kind of free love. Which brings us now to the third response that might help him understand the second. He says, "How can God not allow us the freedom "to accept or reject his love?" And the answer is that God does in fact leave many people the freedom to accept or reject his love.

And this is called judgment because nobody left to themselves will accept the love of God. Nobody will accept the love of God. If God leaves us to our own so-called free will, the result will be rebellion and with it, damnation. So all of us, including Tuck, need to seriously consider that we are not neutral.

I mean, Tuck's suggestion that maybe we're like a pendulum hanging straight down, not to the right, not to the left. We're neutral, ready to tilt to God or tilt to the devil. That's not true. The Bible from cover to cover says we're already tilted. We come into the word tilted.

Tilted to the rejection of the love of God and such a firm inclination that the Bible calls it slavery, bondage to sin. And the only hope for us is not for God to leave us in our bondage to sin and watch what our free will will do, but to overcome our bondage and enable us to fulfill every inclination we have to worship Him or obey Him because we've seen the irresistible beauty of Christ.

I'm recording this just a few days after being at Together for the Gospel 2016, where I preached on this issue. And the title of the message was the bondage of the will, the sovereignty of grace, and the glory of God. And I would encourage Tuck to go to that website.

It'll probably be up in a few days and to listen to my argument. Let me try to give it in one minute. The Bible talks in at least five, maybe more ways about how enslaved or in bondage my will is. It does not talk about me having a free will to do good.

We're not free when bondage holds us this way. In John 3, 19 to 20, we're in bondage to the love of darkness. In John 5, 43 and 44, we're in bondage to the love of self-glorification. How can you believe who love the glory of man and not the glory of God?

In Romans 8, 6 to 8, we're in bondage to the mind of the flesh that is hostile to God. Everybody apart from the Holy Spirit is hostile to God. We don't submit to God's law. Indeed, we cannot. Ephesians 2, 1 to 4, we're in bondage to spiritual deadness, deadness.

And in 1 Corinthians 2, 13 to 14, we're in bondage to the natural man's mockery of spiritual things. We can't understand it because we think they're foolish to us. And in 2 Corinthians 4, 4, we're in bondage to blindness, to the gospel of the glory of Christ. So tuck, if God leaves us to our free will, we will perish because we're only free to do what we love to do.

And what we love to do by nature is exalt ourselves, not God. And the only possibility is to be set free by an act of sovereign grace, only the preciousness and beauty of sovereign grace by which He breaks into our deadness and blindness and rebellion and reveals to us the beauty of Christ, can we be set free to freely love Him.

- Yeah, yeah, thank you, Pastor John. And for the question, thank you, tuck. Pastor John's T4G message can be found also at deservinggod.org. It's titled, "The Bondage of the Will, "The Sovereignty of Grace, and the Glory of God." Well, it has been a great week so far on the podcast, and you can catch up on the episodes and search our archive of hundreds of episodes, download our podcast app, or subscribe to the podcast, or even send us a question of your own.

Go to desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. I'm your host, Tony Reinke, and I will see you tomorrow. (silence) (silence) (silence)