Robert McLaughlin Bible Ministries |
God's decrees provide freedom; Pharaoh had more opportunity to believe in Christ than anyone.
Sunday, April 26, 2009.
ROM 9:16 “So then it is not from who desires [blessing], and not from him who runs [after blessing], but from God who has mercy.”
Two judicial imputations = your sins to Christ and the Righteousness of God to you.
Three real imputations = logistical grace after salvation adjustment, escrow blessings after maturity adjustment, and ultimate grace after eternity adjustment.
GAL 5:1
It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery.
GAL 5:13
For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.
1 Peter 2:16
Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God.
The magnitude of blessings imputed to the Righteous within follows the magnitude of capacity from BD in the heart.
1. Neither human thought nor human action can extract blessing from God.
2. There is nothing man can do, think, devise to bring blessing from God since in eternity past God devised the system.
3. Divine blessing is an imputation from the justice of God to the righteousness of God at the point of maturity and thereafter.
4. God can only provide blessing when capacity for blessing exists.
5. God’s imputed blessing is designed to glorify God as the tactical victory of the angelic conflict.
6. The tactical victory compliments the strategical victory of our Lord in His death, burial, resurrection, ascension and session.
ROM 9:16 “So then it is not from who desires [blessing], and not from him who runs [after blessing], but from God who has mercy.”
God placed Amenhotep II soul into his body at the generation of the exodus because God saw that he would be the hardest man alive with the result that the Gospel would spread throughout the world.
In the first 6 plagues Pharaoh hardened his own heart. But in plagues 7-10 it is said that God hardened his heart to demonstrate His power throughout the whole earth.
Jesus Christ controls history and He allowed this man to grow up, become the Pharaoh of Egypt and reject His gospel more than anyone in the world.
Up until this time Pharaoh had always hardened his own heart - simply negative volition.
Pharaoh from the initial requests of Moses gave 18 major no’s. That is called Pharaoh hardening his heart from his own free will because this is exactly what he wanted to do.
God did not reach into Pharaoh’s heart and just put him on negative. All He did was to give him greater opportunity to say no to God than anyone in history.
The omniscience of God in eternity past knew all of the facts, the actual; he also knew the probable. The probable is never fed into the computer, only the actual.
God will take his no’s from now on to demonstrate His power, not simply to the Egyptians but to the entire world. And in this way a whole generation of people scattered throughout the earth who have positive volition at God-consciousness are going to respond.
Verse 16 - “In contrast to what I did not do, this is what I am going to do.”
So this demonstration of divine power has already been mentioned in Romans 1:20 - “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made. So that [the human race] is without excuse.”