Inept False Witness
By John Gavazzoni
My thought processes are such that as I set out to write on a subject, I often see a kind of mental film version of what I'm about to put into print. So it is as I set out to expose the ineptness of false witness against God. I see in my mind's eye, someone as a prosecuting attorney in a courtroom setting. He's none other than the apostle Paul who begins to grill a conventionally-minded/conventionally-accepted theologian as the defendant in the case. God is the judge in this picture. The charge is bearing false witness against God, of character assassination, and ruination of reputation based on lies.
As Paul probes what, in fact, the defendant has been saying about the God and Father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the defendant reaches for his handkerchief to wipe beads of perspiration off his forehead. The grilling is getting hot (no pun intended). The defendant is squirming in the witness chair. Then realizing that he just can't seem to get his story right, he asks the judge if he can be excused because he feels like a mental fog has descended over his mind. The judge asks if he's suffered from such an attack before, and the defendant answers, "I didn't think so, until this line of questioning."
Retaining that scene in our minds, let's consider what sort of questioning might make a spokesman for pseudo-orthodoxy so extremely uncomfortable, and in a befuddled, foggy state of mind: Might Paul question how the witness can, on one hand, extoll God's sovereignty, popularized by the expression, "God is in control," yet on the other hand, insist that God is in control only in the measure that man allows Him to be? "How," Paul might ask, "can such an arrangement be consistent with scripture's portrayal of divine sovereignty, i.e., since I, Paul, have it on good authority, that God '...works ALL things after the counsel of His will?' " (Eph. 1:11 NAS) (Emphasis, mine.)
The questioning might proceed along the line of how divine sovereignty relates to what God, in the beginning, set out to do. And, can it, could it, should it, be imagined, that after applying all the resources available to God as intrinsic to His Being, e.g., divine wisdom, never-failing love, awesome grace, and inexorable power, alas, the end will fall FAR short of what God intended, purposed and willed, so much so, that the collateral damage done by what is imagined to be man's competing sovereignty, is too terrible for the mind to dwell on.?
Should the witness ask Paul what he means by "collateral damage," Paul might ask some questions in return, such as, "do you not embrace the notion that God, as He contemplated within Himself what should be His great enterprise for time and eternity, that He placed high on His priority the creation of man with 'free will,' so that he, man, having the option not to, would choose to love and obey God freely? Do you not believe, as integral to that presumption, that God foreknew what each and every man and woman would do with that 'free will?' Therefore, in order to obtain some freely given love from some, God, knowing that many would use their 'free will' to obstinately resist and reject His plan, He, nevertheless, went ahead, "COLLATERAL DAMAGE BE DAMNED?"
Paul goes on: "wouldn't it be consistent with God's love, for God, looking down through the corridors of time, to decide not to create those men and women who He knew would decide contrarily, and only create those who, in His foreknowledge He knew would respond to Him freely and rightly? Are you not bearing false witness against God by portraying Him as some kind of psychopath, given that the consequence of man acting with contrariety toward God will be everlasting damnation?"
"Can this portrayal of God which you embrace be consistent with the God who encourages 'come now let us, reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be as crimson, they shall be as wool?' (Isa. 1:18 KJV) Does not God know all that shall be, because He has determined all that shall be? Can it be possible, that you can be so blind as to miss the very obvious fact that what I wrote about God's predestination was in regard to being conformed to the image of God's Son, and yet you, and other false witnesses, project into my text, that God's predetermining will is about going to heaven or hell?"
"You have presumed darkly, and projected that darkness onto my words. If you were the exegete you claim to be, then you would trace the 'those' of 'for those whom he foreknew, He did predestinate to be conformed to the image of God's Son,' back to those in the fifth chapter of my epistle that are the 'all men,' upon whom, by the righteousness of One, came justification of life. It is that totality of mankind that God has foreknown and predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son. He will not settle for less, and to portray Him otherwise is to bear false witness against Him."
So much for the film version in my mind as an attempt to artistically emphasize my point. For my readers who may struggle with tracing the thread of Paul's thought in his Epistle to the Romans, which I alluded to above, especially in re: to the subject of man's eternal destiny, I hope it will be as exciting for you as it was to me, to be made to understand that the "all men" of the fifth chapter, verse eighteen, which are the "many" of verse nineteen, are none other than "those whom," according to the eighth chapter, verse twenty nine, God foreknew and predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son.
All that Paul wrote in between, amounts to a parenthesis, in which he makes special application to believers of that universal effectiveness of Christ's death and resurrection. In chapters six and seven, and well into chapter 8, Paul is concerned that believers know that they, especially, but not exclusively, have been crucified with Christ and risen with Him in newness of life. What is true of them especially is the truth for all mankind. Paul makes that clear in 1Tim. 4:10, exclaiming, "we trust in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe." (KJV)
There's a certain mind-slant that reads in Rom. 8:29 "for those whom He foreknew, etc." as if by "those whom," Paul has in mind a select FEW out from, and instead of, the majority of mankind, but, to repeat, for Paul, "those," are the "many" in Rom. 5:19, who shall be made righteous by the One (Christ), and in comparing verse 19, with verse 18, we see that by the "many" Paul means "all men."
The repentance (change of mind) that's called for in the face of such false witness, is a repentance unto compete unqualified repudiation of a doctrine that has found a home in the darkest regions of man's psyche. There its claws dig into, and cling to, our defiled conscience with the intimidating insistence that we dare not make light of God's righteous anger toward those who have offended His holiness.
