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They are twin evils. One arises in the face of the glory of victory, the other in the agony of defeat.
When we find ourselves on top of the world, when we have defeated a great enemy or simply beaten a foe in the sports arena, everyone reaches for the game ball. We want to take credit, to amass the greatest mass of glory. Our actual contribution to the win gets clouded. Surely, we reason, without us, all would have been lost. Of course, in the context of victory, it would be petty to get too worked up over such pettiness.
Things get truly ugly only when the other twin shows up. Whether it is on fields of battle or of play, we do our best to avoid the stain of whatever kind of defeat comes our way. Then we begin to point fingers: “If so and so had only done such and such . . .” or “It was his fault that I dropped the ball—he threw it too hard.”
The good news is that, at least in the field of sports, God rarely gets this treatment. Some MVPs are quick to point out their gratitude to God: “I just want to thank the Man Upstairs for putting me in the position to catch the winning touchdown.” Better still, no one yet appears to have had the audacity, in the face of defeat, to direct the blame heavenward. I have yet to hear a loser declare, “I just want to curse the Man Upstairs for making that pass slip right through my fingers.”
The bad news is that, in the one arena in which the stakes are eternal, we find a way to seek the glory for the great come-from-behind victory—even though we are the ones who put ourselves in the hole in the first place. When it comes to the saving of our souls, we do make a contribution: We’re the reason we need to be saved. Our contribution to the greatest comeback ever is the amassing of the greatest deficit ever.
Why, after all, do we need to be saved? It is because we are lost. We are sinners by nature, rebels against the God of the universe. We are at enmity with Him, a fancy way of saying that we are His enemies. We are on the wrong side of the battle. As God is about the business of exercising His dominion over us, we buck His authority. We make war against Him as He seeks peace with us. But it gets worse. We are at war with Him even though we are dead. Now I’ve seen some lopsided games, but never one in which the losing team was just flat dead.
While we were dead in our trespasses and sins, Christ died for us. And He made us alive. He did it. There’s not much glory on our part, having been dead zombies trying to kill the one who was seeking to make us alive. No one should get a game ball for that.
Therein lies the deeply troubling problem with Arminian theology. It is a system of understanding that suggests that, in order for God to succeed in His goal of redeeming us, we have to cooperate. It is a system that holds that our regeneration is a team effort. The problem with denying irresistible grace isn’t so much that it butchers this or that Scriptural passage, but that it denigrates both the grace of God and the sinfulness of man. The problem is that it fails to understand that the flesh profits nothing. If we believe that the flesh actually profits something, aren’t we going to continue to call on the flesh for help? If we believe that we ourselves won the victory, aren’t we going to count on ourselves in the continuing battles of our lives? Won’t we call for the ball in the closing seconds of the game, when everything is on the line?
Arminian theology, in short, not only fails to understand the new life we are given by the Spirit, it also leads inevitably to a failure to understand the outworking of the Christian life. See how Paul challenges the church at Rome to remember who the true MVP is: “But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors—not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh” (Rom. 8:11–12).
In the final analysis, to what is an Arminian a debtor but to his own flesh, which made redemption necessary in the first place? Whom can he thank but himself? It pays to know whom we owe.
We are all, of course, Arminian at heart. Not a one of us has a comprehensive understanding of our own natural sin. We haven’t the capacity of mind or heart to see ourselves as we truly are. Likewise, not a one of us has a comprehensive knowledge of the depth of the grace of God. It is the very depth of that grace that covers our ignorance of its depth. God’s grace is so irresistible that it cannot be defeated by our failure, whether with our hearts or our lips, to honor that grace.
However, this is no excuse to wallow in our pride. We do not sin all the more that grace may abound. Instead, by the indwelling Spirit of God, we are to repent of our visions of self-grandeur. We are to pray that God, in His grace, would irresistibly show us the depths both of our sin and of His grace. And we are, in grace, to call each other to repentance each time we see a brother demanding the spotlight, reaching for the game ball, taking credit where it is not due. In short, we are to sing with the souls of just men made perfect: Non nobis Domine, sed nomini tuo da gloriam (“Not to us, O Lord, but to Thy name be the glory”).