Video from desiringgod.org
If No One Seeks God, How Is Anyone Saved? - Ask Pastor John
Audio Transcript
A week ago, in APJ 2129, we heard from Bethany, an eighteen-year-old wrestling with how she could have been an enemy of God despite her lifelong Christian upbringing and lack of any conscious opposition to him. Pastor John, you related to her story. It’s your story too, and you explained how enmity with God is both a human and divine issue and that our true condition outside of Christ is revealed not merely through personal memory but through God’s word, which exposes the depth of our sin and separation from him, even if we don’t feel it.
That episode last Monday connects to today’s question on this Monday from Monika, a twenty-year-old woman from Albania, reflecting on our Bible readings from the first ten days of March. “Hello, Pastor John, and thank you for leading us through the Bible on the podcast and through Romans in March. I am new to the faith and joined my first Bible reading with you last year and am doing it again in 2025. This discipline reminds me there’s so much I don’t understand.
“But one thing I do know is that sinners refuse to come to God. That became clear in last March’s readings, including Psalm 53, Romans, and Matthew 23. Of course, the gospel is a wide-open offer to all, as I read in Romans 1:16. But God looks down to find someone who seeks him, and none do, according to Psalm 53:2. The same point is repeated in Romans 3:11: ‘No one seeks for God.’ Romans 5:10 even says we were enemies of God. And in the Gospels, we see Jesus weep over Jerusalem because they refused to come to him (in Matthew 23:37–38). To be a sinner seems hopeless. If there’s such a strong theme of sinners who cannot come to God, how does salvation even happen?”
Some of our listeners will think, Wow, that’s a really basic question. And it certainly is. And I think it is really good for us to regularly turn to very basic questions and see whether or not we have moved so far beyond the basics that we’re not able to explain the basics anymore. That’s a real good test.
Free Gospel, Enslaved Soul
Monika has read her Bible carefully enough to see that sin is really serious, not only because it offends God but because it enslaves people. She sees that. So much so that Romans 3:11 — she points out — says, “No one understands; no one seeks for God.” And so, she asks, “Well, if there’s such a strong theme of sinners who cannot come to God” — those are her words — “how does salvation happen?” And it is a really good question because Jesus says in John 6:37, “Whoever comes to me I will never cast out,” in John 6:35, “Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst,” and in Revelation 22:17, “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely” (KJV).
“The reason anyone comes to Christ is that God, in his undeserved grace, overcomes our deadness and draws us.”
So, Monika sees accurately in the Bible that, on the one hand, there is a free gospel offer, and we must exercise our will and come to Jesus in order to be saved and have eternal life. She sees that. It’s there. And on the other hand, she sees that sin is so deep and so powerful, and our will is so anti-God, so enslaved to sin, that we cannot come. Our will not has become a cannot. It is so deep. Romans 8:7 says, “The mind of the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” That’s how deep the will not has gone to become a cannot, a moral cannot.
Monika is asking an absolutely basic and important question. Amen. Thank you. It was good for me to think about this. And in the history of the church, this question has been answered two different ways.
View 1: Man Has Decisive Power
One way is to say that it’s just a mistake to believe that the Bible says humans are so enslaved to sin that they can’t use their wills to believe. That’s a mistake. Or a variation on this view is to say that, yes, the will is that enslaved, but God provides a kind of universal grace to everybody and overcomes that impossibility of believing for everybody and puts everybody in a position where they are now able to use their ultimately self-determining will to believe or not to believe. So, both of those versions of that view insist that human beings must have ultimate self-determination. Or another way to say it would be that humans must have decisive self-determination in order to be responsible moral human agents.
Now, that’s an assumption. It’s a presupposition, and it governs the view. Or to put it another way, the view says that man must be finally decisive in the creation of his faith, not God. And decisive is the right word. Decisive is an important word here because I’m not saying that they deny divine influence. But at the moment of conversion, when a person passes from death to life, from unbelief to belief, whose influence is finally decisive? And they say the human person performs the decisive action, not God.
I think that view is not what the Bible teaches. I think that view is governed by a presupposition, an assumption brought to the Bible, not gotten from the Bible — namely, the assumption that human beings simply must have ultimate, decisive self-determination, at least at the point of conversion, if they are going to be morally responsible. And I think when you bring that presupposition, that assumption, to the Bible, it distorts what the Bible teaches. It forces the Bible to say things that it does not say, and it denies that the Bible says things it does say.
View 2: God Has Decisive Power
The other view of how we get saved when our sin is so deep and so powerful that it makes coming to Christ humanly impossible, is — and this would be what I believe the Bible teaches — God overcomes that impossibility and brings us decisively to faith and to union with Christ for salvation. In other words, from start to finish — eternity to eternity — our salvation is a gift of God, a work of God.
“God overcomes the humanly impossible and brings us decisively to faith and to union with Christ for salvation.”
And by calling it a work of God, we don’t mean there’s nothing we do, like believing and living a life of faithful obedience. Rather, what we mean is that our believing and our obedience are enabled, worked in us, by the Spirit of God. Hebrews 13:21 says God is “working in us that which is pleasing in his sight.” We believe this because of texts like these. Jesus said, “All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out. . . . No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. . . . This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” That’s John 6:37, 44, and 65 — a really important chapter.
So, we must come in order to be saved. And the reason anyone comes to Christ is because God, in his undeserved grace, overcomes our deadness and draws us to Christ. That’s the miracle of the new birth (as the New Testament calls it), and that new birth makes faith happen. Here’s 1 John 5:1: “Everyone who believes” — that’s faith; everyone who has faith — “has been born of God.” The new birth, which God performs by the Spirit, precedes and brings about believing, and that’s a work of the Spirit.
We were dead. We could not make ourselves alive, and he made us alive. Ephesians 2:4–10: “Even when we were dead in our trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ” because of “the great love with which he loved us. . . . For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God. . . . We are [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.” We don’t cause ourselves to be born. We don’t cause ourselves to be created. We don’t make ourselves alive. This is the work of God’s saving grace.
Saved to the Glory of His Grace
So, Monika, the way your salvation happened, the way all salvation happens, was that when you were dead in your trespasses, before you were born again, before you were a new creation, before you had been made alive, you were willfully resistant to God’s truth, whatever age you were. And your inability to come to him was blameworthy and deserving of wrath. “But God” — that great phrase in Ephesians 2:4 — in his “great love” for you, you in particular, “made [you] alive,” caused you to be born again, made you a new creation, gave you the gift of repentance (as it says in 2 Timothy 2:25) and the gift of faith (as it says in Ephesians 2:8).
And he did it this way so that you and all of us, all of his people, would not take any credit for our salvation but would praise the glory of his grace forever and ever.
John Piper (@JohnPiper) is founder and teacher of Desiring God and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary. For 33 years, he served as pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is author of more than 50 books, including Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist and most recently Foundations for Lifelong Learning: Education in Serious Joy. " from the Transcript
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