Knowledge of God
STATEMENT
In your writings you have said: "Because the scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35) it follows that none of these acts (believing, repenting, turning, following) are involved in the impartation of eternal life to an unregenerate man. If they are then the flesh is, in some sense, profitable unto man's salvation." But Jesus states, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." (John 17:3) Eternal life before and without a relationship with God and His Christ is non-sensical. (Anonymous)
RESPONSE
Let’s look at the matter in more detail:
In your writings you have said: "Because the scripture cannot be broken (John 10:35) it follows that none of these acts (believing, repenting, turning, following) are involved in the impartation of eternal life to an unregenerate man. If they are then the flesh is, in some sense, profitable unto man's salvation."
That is precisely correct. Christ’s insistence upon the abject unprofitability of the flesh in the matter of gaining eternal life (John 6:63) eliminates all aspects of instrumentality of the fallen creature from participatory involvement in the impartation of eternal life.
But Jesus states, "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." (John 17:3)
Primitive Baptist totally affirm that biblical statement. All of God’s elect family “know” God. Since Jesus is God, they “know” Jesus as well, even as a child “knows” its own mother. However, they do not all “know” him in an explicit, New Testament gospel sense. To insist that this is what is intended by “know” cannot be reconciled with the lack of knowledge possessed by some saints of God in the bible. This is established by many scriptural examples such as Job (Job 9:2), and Rachael’s Children (Jeremiah 31:15-17, Matthew 2:16-18). These people “knew” God in a relational sense, but they did “know” God in the sense of either hearing or understanding explicit, New Testament, gospel mechanics during their natural lives. To state the matter more plainly: If one insists that “knowing God” means knowing the explicit New Testament gospel and the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, then none of the Old Testament saints “knew God.” That observation requires that we develop a biblical definition of “knowing God” that ALL of God’s people possess at some point in their natural lives. It is clearly something other than gospel knowledge.
Eternal life before and without a relationship with God and His Christ is non-sensical.
You should be more careful about the accusations you level against the Primitive Baptists. I have never insisted that some men have eternal life “without a relationship with God and His Christ.” It is a crass mischaracterization of our beliefs and those who use it to describe our doctrine are guilty of either ignorance or malevolence. Primitive Baptists believe that all of God’s elect have a relationship with God that is at first COVENANTAL, and subsequently VITAL by spiritual birth. Children are BORN of their parents into a relationship. This occurs even though they lack any intellectual understanding of the mechanics whereby they were brought to life or much at all in the way of particulars regarding their parents. Spiritual birth is very much of the same sort. A child’s relationship to the parents is ever and always the result of the actions of the parents, not to their own actions. This is irrefutably true both in the natural world as well as in the spiritual world. That relationship, established by the action of the parents, is not in any sense beholden to any actions of the child in order to be in effect. Neither is it dependent upon some requisite degree of understanding on the part of the child to be in effect. Spiritual life works this way as well.
Your portrayal of Primitive Baptist doctrine is wrong but I’m thankful for the opportunity to demonstrate that the parent/child relationship is NEVER a function of the child’s knowledge or understanding. What we believe is that all of the elect are born again at some point between conception and death (John 3:3) as a result of a covenant promise (Galatians 4:6) by an immediate divine fiat of God himself (John 5:25). Not all of these elect are blessed to encounter or embrace the revelation of explicit, New Testament, gospel mechanics during their natural lives. The Old Testament alone is an enormous monument to this evident, though oft overlooked, fact.
May God bless our studies and understanding of his word.
- Elder Daniel Samons