Christ died only for God's elect
Three weeks ago I began to take the first steps toward planting a new church in our current location of Badenweiler. In order to immediately focus on the most important things regarding this church plant, I spent Sunday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. looking at the Epistle to the Romans. At the moment there are up to ten of us participating in our living room or via the Webex Internet livestream. Anyone who would like to join can email me and I will send the link.
Since my first pastorate 23 years ago, it has always amazed me that many Christians are not as familiar with the biblical Gospel as the Apostle Paul explained it, especially in his epistles to the Romans and Galatians. However, we know from church history that for many centuries this Gospel was so distorted by the Roman Catholic Church that very few people knew anything about it. It should come as no surprise, then, that this is still the case in our day, given that most evangelical churches teach the Roman Catholic version of the doctrine of salvation. Nothing seems more urgent to me than to emphasize again and again what the sixteenth-century Reformers taught about the Pauline gospel in contrast to the Catholic doctrine of works righteousness.
Today, as at the time of the Reformation, a central teaching of the Bible is rejected by many evangelicals who claim to be Christians. This is the teaching that Jesus Christ died on the cross only for the elect of God, not for all men without exception.
Acts 20:28: Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His own blood.
NASB 1995
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The English theologian John Owen published his book The Death of Death in the Death of Christ in 1648. In it he defended and explained the biblical doctrine of atonement, that Jesus Christ died only for the elect. James I. Packer wrote the following in his introductory essay to this book. I will quote only a brief excerpt, but it is worth reading the entire essay:
"If we listen to him, he will teach us both how to believe the gospel of Scripture and how to preach it. In the first place, he will lead us to bow down before a sovereign Savior who truly saves, and to praise Him for a redemptive death that made it certain that all for whom He died would come to glory. It cannot be overemphasized that we have not seen the full meaning of the cross until we have seen it as the divines of Dort present it - as the center of the gospel, flanked on the one hand by total inability and unconditional election, and on the other by irresistible grace and final preservation. For the full meaning of the cross appears only when the atonement is defined in terms of these four truths. Christ died to save a particular group of helpless sinners upon whom God had placed His free, saving love. Christ's death secured the calling and keeping - the present and ultimate salvation - of all whose sins He bore. That is what Calvary meant and means. The cross saved; the cross saves. This is the heart of the true evangelical faith; [...] this is the triumphant conviction which underlay the old gospel, as well as the whole New Testament. And this is what Owen will unequivocally teach us to believe."
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