The Address of the Gospel (4)

(Continued from the previous issue)

God wants the gospel to be preached to far more people than the elect.

He does not want the gospel preached to every single person who ever lived. This is evident from the fact that, throughout the history of the world, countless thousands have lived and died without ever hearing the gospel. If God had wanted them to hear it, He could easily have seen to it that the gospel was brought to them. But, as the Canons of Dort expresses it, the gospel is preached to "whom God out of his good pleasure sends" it (2,5).

But, although God does not want all men to hear the gospel, He does want a whole lot more to hear the gospel than the elect. In fact, it is probably not incorrect to say that more reprobate hear the gospel than elect, because God's people are, after all, always a remnant according to the election of grace.

And, let it be clearly understood, God does not want many non-elect people to hear the gospel just simply in order that it may be said of them that at one time or another, they heard somebody preaching.

A foreigner may, on a visit to London, enter the Parliament buildings and hear a PM hold forth on the EEC. But because he is from Zaire and because the EEC has no interest for him, he may stay and listen, but the speech is of no significance.

That is not the way it is with the gospel.

When anyone (elect or reprobate) hears the gospel, he is confronted with the Christ Who is proclaimed in it. This can never be avoided.

In a way, it is a dangerous thing to pick up the Scriptures and read them; or to come under the preaching of the gospel. It is impossible to read Scripture or to hear the preaching without being confronted with the question, most solemn and most crucial: "What will you do with Christ?" And, indeed, on a man's answer to that question hangs the eternal destiny of his soul.

So it is not only the preacher, who, by the way, is totally unable to tell who in his audience is elect and who is reprobate, who must bring the gospel to many more than the elect; God Himself addresses many more than the elect with the gospel.

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That this is true is clear from many parts of Scripture.

It is evident, in the first place, from every incidence of preaching recorded in God's Word. Always the preaching was brought to a widely diversified audience including both elect and reprobate. And when the command to repent from sin and turn to God came through the preaching, that command came to all who heard. This was true in the Old Testament as well as in the New.

In the second place, Jesus Himself stressed this very truth in more than one place, but nowhere so clearly as in the parable of the wedding feast (Mt. 22:1-14). Many who refused to come were bidden to the feast (vs. 4). When it became clear that they would not come, the call went out to those in the highways (vss. 9,10). Even then one called from the highways was not an elect, for he was expelled because he had no wedding garment on (vss. 11-13). And the whole parable is concluded with the words: "Many are called, but few are chosen" (vs. 14).

Peter's example on Pentecost is the model for all preaching. We are specifically told by the Holy Spirit that Peter preached to all his audience that they were under the solemn obligation to repent and be converted so that their sins might be blotted out (Acts 2:38. See also 3:19, 20).

There can be no question about it that God brings the gospel to many, many more than His people, and, by bringing the gospel to them, confronts them with Christ and the demand to obey.

God wills this for a specific purpose. And that purpose is that sin may be fully revealed as sin, and that when God punishes in everlasting hell, his judgment on the wicked is just and righteous.