Galatians 1:15 - Set apart before I was born

1:15

Paul’s becoming a Christian and becoming an apostle was all down to the will of God. There are arguments about Calvinist and Armenian approaches to understanding the sovereignty of God and free will. I have said this many time before, and will say it again because I believe it is so important, and because I believe if we get hooked on Calvinism, hooked on Arminianism, or hooked on Molinism we end up a blind alley. The Bible teaches the sovereignty of God on every page, it also teaches human responsibility on every page. That should be the foundation of all our thinking, not any philosophical understanding (which is inevitably a severely limited understanding). Moreover, “human responsibility” is a far better way of looking at things than “human free will”, or “libertarian free will”. Thinking of things in term of “libertarian free will”, or worse, “human autonomy”,  also leads you up a blind alley.

But let’s look at the matter in hand, Paul’s conversion. The event itself (Acts 9) and the various accounts in Acts and here make it plain that Paul’s conversion was all down to the will of God. God had set Paul apart before he was even born and he was called by grace.

And here we come to a case of asking the wrong question. We want to ask “could Paul have refused the call of God”? From all that Scripture records the answer has to be no, moreover, Scripture does not even contemplate the question. As far as the Bible is concerned it is a stupid question. Seeking to answer it in the terms within which we normally consider this sort of question profits us nothing. Does this mean that Paul was an automaton, mindlessly following the path God had chosen for him? Again the answer has to be an emphatic no, from the book of Acts, and all of Paul’s writings, nothing could be further from the truth. Paul was fully alive!

This morning (12 August, 2018) I heard a podcast from a Q&A session at the Refuel Conference and heard what I thought was an excellent description of how the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man go together. We so often set one against the other, or we see it is “both and” (which is nearer the truth than making a choice between the two). Instead it was suggested that we look at it like music, where two notes both completely fill the sound. They don’t work against each other, don’t cancel each other out, one does not dominate the other, but the fullness of both fills the sound. So it is with the sovereignty of God and human responsibility. They work together.