Dale Partridge - February 14, 2023


Joel Webbon & Dale Partridge Discuss Unconditional Election

Topics
covenant nurture God's means of grace
Hosted by
Dale Partridge
Mentioned
Augustine Abraham Solomon Timothy Joseph Eunice Isaac Jacob Jesse David Boaz Lois Dale
Jeff Durbin & Dale Partridge Define Jesus Christ How to Raise Christian Kids in a Culture of Transgenderism with Dale and Veronica Partridge

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

153.52

Word count

1,335

Sentence count

57

Harmful content

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the role of God's grace in the lives of His own children, and how it can be traced through family lines. God saves through the ordinary means of spiritual, generational, familial lines, which is not a matter of genetics, but of covenant nurture.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This is essential. I'm going to steal your thunder for a second because I know you have really worked out this theology here is that unconditional election is not, as you said, arbitrary election.
00:00:11.720 It's not random election. It is not that we have any creaturely value or meritorious works that God is looking at us and going, I'm electing this individual because of X.
00:00:24.820 No, that is what it means by unconditional election, but really there is a reality that God saves through the ordinary means of spiritual generational familial lines, which is what we need to be talking about here is that at a basic level, we see this in scripture from Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.
00:00:42.520 We also see that through Joseph or Boaz or Jesse and David.
00:00:46.840 We see this trend in scripture.
00:00:49.860 Solomon, you know, it goes after it.
00:00:52.260 We see Lois and Eunice and Timothy.
00:00:55.660 We see this trend of familial, multi-generational faithfulness is the normative reality in Christian life.
00:01:05.060 I did a little bit of note-taking in Polycarp, Origen, Chrysostrum, Augustine, or Augustine.
00:01:10.220 all came from lines of faithful parents, at least one faithful parent.
00:01:15.000 We know Augustine's story about his mother consistently praying for him.
00:01:20.140 We know this is also true of Spurgeon and MacArthur and Sproul.
00:01:23.420 And so again, this is the normative means of grace
00:01:27.600 extended through the familial line of covenant nurture
00:01:34.760 experienced by the blessedness of being born to two or at least one regenerate parent. And so
00:01:42.540 this is, again, unconditional election and expected redemption or covenant succession
00:01:47.860 is not at odds, as you're saying. They are absolutely congruent. When you see that the
00:01:52.800 unconditional nature, what that means is that it's talking about meritorious or creaturely value,
00:01:58.400 but there's still a means of electing grace
00:02:03.260 that is traveling down through familial lines.
00:02:11.260 It's just how God has saved.
00:02:12.880 I mean, we saw that obviously with the election of Israel
00:02:15.120 and the promise to Israel.
00:02:16.800 We see this obviously as a normative flow of reality
00:02:19.560 in Christian parents, 0.58
00:02:20.880 meaning that my son does not have the same likelihood
00:02:25.220 of being saved as the Muslim child or Indian child or pagan child who is not under the 0.92
00:02:34.100 covenant nurture and means of grace of the gospel proclamation to his ears as a steady diet of
00:02:40.580 covenant blessing. Right. And this, just to pick up on what you're saying, this lineage of salvation
00:02:49.760 that we can track from generation to generation with a singular family um it is not what we're
00:02:55.280 not arguing is it's not um a matter of of nature family nature but it's the the whole point the
00:03:02.880 way that we're defining and we we didn't this isn't our own definition this is the definition
00:03:06.960 of covenant succession um we want to emphasize here covenant succession according to this
00:03:12.000 definition is saying that um it's the expectant so number one not presumptuous not not guaranteed
00:03:19.120 with 100 success rate um not not without ever having any exception but it's the expectant
00:03:26.560 and it's expected not just with a wishful thinking that's not christian hope christian hope and faith
00:03:31.680 has substance so it's expectant because we we are resting in the goodness of god his faithfulness
00:03:37.280 to the thousandth generation but also um because we we believe that this is his ordinary practice
00:03:43.600 i'm not guarantee not 100 of the time but it's normative that god would save not just
00:03:48.240 some or a few of our children, but all of our children. So there's this expectant hope of the
00:03:53.480 salvation of our children and that predestinated end, our children being saved, brought about by
00:03:59.020 the predestinated means and the means being covenant nature, no, covenant nurture. So when
00:04:06.000 we say that we can track through family lines, the reason why is not because of genetics. It's not
00:04:12.380 like regeneration flows in someone's blood. No, it's because what we're assuming, and what the
00:04:19.100 Bible, I think, assumes is that with parents who are believers, the reason why it is a benefit,
00:04:26.160 there's a real advantage to being born into the household of parents who are believers,
00:04:32.180 is because believing parents, if they are truly believing, that faith will work itself out in
00:04:38.640 love. It will manifest itself in obedience, including the obedience to be a Christian
00:04:44.160 father, to be a Christian mother, to lavish upon your children, not covenant nature, but covenant
00:04:50.780 nurture, godly Christian parenting. And when we see the absence of this, when we see parents who
00:04:57.820 truly are regenerate, but they neglect that, so they actually have Christian nature. They are
00:05:04.060 new creatures themselves, but they're neglecting covenant nurture in their parenting and the way
00:05:10.400 that they're not catechizing their children, they're sending them to public school, they send
00:05:14.160 them to Christian childcare on Sunday instead of taking them to church, they don't have family
00:05:18.560 worship in their homes, there's no, there's no, none of those kinds of things, then that person
00:05:24.280 should not be expectant. They should not have a hopeful expectancy that God is going to save
00:05:30.580 their children, because here's the deal. Again, all this is unconditional, and the things that
00:05:37.000 God has revealed belong to us and our children forever, but the hidden things belong to God,
00:05:40.800 and this is speaking of God's sovereign will, so we can't see these things, but we can, without
00:05:45.460 having omniscience, we can still get a good idea. We can have an educated guess, is the way I would
00:05:52.620 put it, right? It's not just a lottery crapshoot, but we can have an educated guess in what God's
00:05:58.100 ends might be by observing what God's predestinated means in the present are. Meaning I can see what
00:06:06.840 God is doing today and I can have at least an idea of what he may be planning to bring about
00:06:12.800 tomorrow. Now, certainly we're not going to have a 100% success rate with these kinds of things,
00:06:17.380 but my point is, because God confounds the wise, you know, but my point is I can look and say,
00:06:24.980 you know what? It's not earning, it's not meriting the salvation of our children. My faithful
00:06:30.720 Christian parenting, catechizing my kids, working hard so I can afford to send them to a Christian
00:06:35.260 school, or then I'm not relying on my wife or second income so that we can have Christian
00:06:39.320 homeschool, all these different things, doing family integrated worship at our church,
00:06:43.040 all these things. I'm not saying if I do these things, God owes me the salvation of my kids.
00:06:48.760 Not saying that. That is wrong. That is unbiblical. What I am saying though is God works
00:06:54.560 through means. And if I'm doing these things, it's only because of the grace of God. I don't
00:06:59.860 have the strength to do these things. Left to myself, I'm a lousy dad. So if I'm doing these
00:07:04.500 things, it's because God is willing and working in and through me in my parenting that which is
00:07:10.260 good and pleasing in his sight. So God is working these means through me by grace. And why does God,
00:07:18.640 More often than not, why does God work his means of grace in an individual?
00:07:24.060 Well, it's usually to save them.
00:07:25.800 Now, God does send missionaries and send preachers to go and preach, and the word of God never returns void.
00:07:32.980 Sometimes it saves, and sometimes God uses the means of grace simply to further condemn an individual.
00:07:38.640 And Dale and I have, we have that category in our theology as well.
00:07:41.760 Sometimes God may, he may use an individual as his mouthpiece, as his instrument in the means of grace, lavishing the gospel on someone again and again and again with the intent of simply further hardening that person's heart and further justifying himself on that final day when he ultimately judges that person as being wicked.
00:08:03.900 So God can do that.
00:08:05.400 But what we're arguing is that's not normative as it pertains to Christian households.
00:08:11.760 We'll be right back.