"So, " I said, "can you put this all together for me?"

"You mean sort of an overview?"

"Exactly," I said.

Martin leaned forward in his chair, and motioned with his hands. "There are two basic pictures of man’s state in the Bible. The first is that man is a slave to sin. The second is that man is dead in his transgressions and sins. In both cases, man is utterly helpless, and the helplessness is comprehensive. It affects everything he is, and everything he does."

"So the key is the helplessness of man. He cannot contribute to his own salvation?"

"Right. Man cannot lift himself out of the quagmire in which he finds himself. Like someone in quicksand, any 'advance' he makes in one area works to his disadvantage in another."

"What do you mean?"

"No part of him can work unaffected by the Fall. An unregenerate man (by himself) can desire salvation. He can truly want to go to Heaven when he dies. He can also understand what going to Heaven involves. But he cannot do both at the same time."

"So you are saying that no natural man, understanding salvation, wants it."

"Correct. As Paul states, no one seeks after God. The sinful mind is hostile to God and cannot desire Him. But as Paul also recognized, the unregenerate Jews did have a zeal for God, but without knowledge. This zeal only increased their condemnation. Paul, before his conversion, delighted in the law of God, and had a great zeal for it. But he also hated the people of God."

"I think I have gotten confused here. You are saying that no one seeks after God, and yet some people have a zeal for God?"

"A zeal without knowledge. Seeking after God on your own terms, with your own understanding, is simply a subtle way of running from Him."

"Check."

"An unregenerate man can love the Word of God, but only so long as he misunderstands it. An unregenerate man can understand the Word of God, but only so long as he hates it."

" I see what you mean by a quagmire. If he lifts his arm, the rest of him sinks deeper."

"You've got it. The sinful mind is hostile to God. This does not mean that the non-Christian cannot praise God or pray to Him. It does mean that everything is done in the context of his larger rebellion against God. And the context affects everything. Therefore, when he praises God, even his praise is sin. When he prays, his prayer is an offense. This means that evangelical obedience, obeying the gospel, is impossible for the non-Christian. He cannot repent properly, and he cannot believe properly. He can perform what he believes to be repentance (but which is actually a worldly sorrow unto death), and he can assent to the truths of the Christian religion. But as he does these things, he will always be doing something else that negates or denies it. He will take back with one hand what he gives with the other. He cannot remove himself from the context of his rebellion. He cannot cease rebelling; he cannot surrender. If he runs up the white flag, it is with treachery in his heart."

"All right. You have told me about the works of men, and the condemnation we have earned for ourselves. What about the work of God?"

"Do you mind a triune answer?"

I smiled. "No, and what do you mean?"

"You asked about the work of God. Let's begin with the work of the Father, and then go on to the work of the Son and Holy Spirit."

" Fine. "

"Election is the work of the Father. Before the world was formed, before time began, the Father chose certain individuals for salvation from their sins, and gave those individuals as a gift to the Son. Those whom He chose not to elect, by definition, He passed by."

"Why?"

"Because it was His sovereign pleasure to do so. Because He is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. That should be enough to satisfy us."

"All right. Go on."

"In a world where there are distinctions between individuals, those distinctions must be God-ordained. Otherwise God is not God at all. Election is a truth that can be seen merely by looking around us. Before I was convinced of the truth of election as God revealed it in the Bible, I began to see it in the world around me in God's natural revelation. Why was I born into a Christian family, surrounded by love and the gospel? The day I was born, thousands of others were born far away from this position of spiritual privilege. Why was I brought up in a way that lead to my salvation? Why was I not born into a Christless family, surrounded by nothing but superstition and sin? Why did I not die when I was seven back in a jungle somewhere with flies on my face? Why was I born so spiritually privileged?"

I nodded. I had often felt the same sense of undeserved privilege. Martin continued.

"Nothing is clearer than the fact that God placed me into the family He did, and that He only put three children there. Why wasn't it four, with one less given to a family lost in sin? Does not God have control over such things?"

"But couldn't it be said in response that all these blessings, however great, were all external? You could still have rejected Christ in spite of them, couldn't you?"

"Well, let's grant that for the sake of discussion. We are just talking about external blessings; we cannot see in natural revelation the full biblical doctrine of election. But external blessings, when they concern the physical presence of those who know and teach the gospel, are not irrelevant. We can see that God does not treat every man alike, and that the distinctions He makes have some bearing on who is saved, and who not. In order to deny this, someone would have to say that there is no correlation between how much the gospel is preached, and how many people are saved."

"I see. You are saying that when it comes to access to saving truth, God does not treat all men the same."

"Exactly. And this is a truth which no evangelical Christian can consistently deny."

"All right. Is there anything else you saw in this external blessing?"

"Well, it was also clear that this decision to place me in a godly family was made before I had done anything, good or bad. In other words, there is no way to be proud over things such as this. What do I have that I did not receive? And if I received it, how can I boast as though I did not? Under God's government of the world, there are clear distinctions made between individuals which pertain to salvation. Now if a certain measure of election can be seen in natural revelation, we should not be surprised to find it clearly spelled out in the Bible. And this is exactly what we find. We have already discussed the passages which teach this."

"So the next thing would be the work of the Son on the cross?"

"Yes. The Son of God purchased a people for Himself out of the slave market of sin. His redemption was particular and definite."

"He had something in mind when He died?"

"Right. The Son came to earth, not to do His own will, but rather the will of the Father. Jesus was not seeking to accomplish anything more than what the Father had decreed."

"I see. You are saying that if Jesus died with the intention of saving anyone who was not chosen by the Father, then He was no longer seeking to do the will of the Father."

"Yes. Let us say that Jones has died without Christ, and that he has gone to his judgment. With him now in Hell, is it possible to say that God secured salvation for him through the cross?"

"No. When God secures something, it is secure."

"So then, the real question is whether God has secured anything through the cross. The teaching of the Bible is that He secured salvation for His people. Those who differ with this must therefore say that in the cross, God secured a potential salvation."

"What about the universal passages. . . those where it says God loved the world, and that sort of thing?"

"God does love the world. He sent His Son to die for the world, and take its sin away."

"So you believe that the world is elect, and that the gospel will one day be triumphant?"

"Yes."

"And that the world will be saved, although not every last individual will be saved."

"You've got it."

"So what is the work of the Spint7"

"We are born again by the work of the Spirit. I mentioned earlier that we were dead in our sins. It is the Spirit who resurrects us to new life. He brings to fruition the choice of the Father, and the purchase of the Son. The Father chooses, the Son purchases, and the Spirit regenerates."

"So this brings us to the issue that first brought me here. Can a Christian lose his salvation?"

"Consider it this way. A man is dead in his sin. But before the world was created, the Father chose him for salvation. On the basis of this choice, the Son came two thousand years ago and laid down His life to purchase this man from the slave market of sin. On the basis of this, the Holy Spirit regenerated him two years ago. Now, what makes us think that this particular work of God is capable of being interrupted and frustrated? It cannot be. If salvation is a work of man, sure, we could lose it. We lose lots of things. But if it is the work of God, then the work shall stand, and it will stand for eternity."

"Amen," I said, and got up to go. "I guess I'll see you on Sunday."

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