There is a best-selling Christian book by American author Tommy Tenney called The God Chasers. If you have seen any Christian bookstore catalogues I’m sure you’ve seen the book or the companion merchandise. It’s been something of a phenomenon. After visiting the US, I was given a copy so I started reading it. Tenney’s pitch seems to be this: there are normal vanilla-flavoured household variety Christians who drift passively along in the slow lane of Christian experience and then there are the God Chasers. They get the scent of God and run him down, passionately pursuing the Lord like hounds on the hunt, like athletes chasing a gold medal. And to the God Chasers comes special blessing because they will not be satisfied with the left-hand side of the peak-hour escalator—they bound heavenward two steps at a time, consumed with overtaking the otherwise out-of-reach Lord.
If you bother to pick up a book about the God Chasers, there’s a good chance you are someone who wants to know God better. And if you’re told of the two classes of Christians, there’s a good chance you will want to weigh in with the God Chasers. What Christian, when given the choice, wouldn’t want to be more centred on our great and wonderful and wise God? If it is benign school sports day spiritual mediocrity or world class olympic level God Chasing, sign me up for the God Chasers! If …
But I’m reading another book at the moment, too. It’s James Montgomery Boice’s swan song, the last book he wrote before dying of terminal cancer. It’s called The Doctrines of Grace. It’s a wonderfully accessible yet substantial look at the biblical mechanics of salvation. Five God-centred points, the old TULIP acronym, tweaked by Boice not so much for improvement as for clarification.
Total depravity becomes Radical Depravity—sin runs thoroughly through the human heart, yet remnants of the image of God remain. The term Unconditional Election remains—nothing in sinners attracts God’s favour; it is all of God, born from his divine and precise electing love. Particular Redemption replaces the term Limited Atonement, avoiding the possible notion that the atonement is somehow incomplete. Of course, it is quite the opposite—Christ died for the elect, achieving in his death precisely what God purposed. All for whom Christ died are redeemed and adopted as children of God.
Irresistible Grace becomes Efficacious Grace, avoiding the suggestion that God drags us kicking and screaming into the kingdom. Says Boice, “[W]hen God calls us to faith in Jesus Christ he calls us effectively, succeeding in his purpose to save us” (p. 135). Perseverance of the Saints is re-termed Persevering Grace, to place the emphasis back on the God of grace who will keep the saints strong to the end, losing none.
The ‘Five Points of Calvinism’ are a wonderful, biblically faithful picture of where 100% of the credit lies for the gospel. It is by God’s awesome grace that those who are absolutely lost in their sin and who are deliberately and precisely elected by the God of Grace become the beneficiaries of the unwarranted, deliberately personal substitutionary death of the Son of Grace and, by God’s goodness, heed the precise call of God and are set apart and sealed by the Spirit for the certainty of the great eternal inheritance which awaits the adopted sons of God.
So what of these two books? Is one for practical, sleeves-up, in the trenches Christians, and the other for boffinish, under-the-bonnet theologues who are into ‘the doctrine thing’. No! No! A thousand times, no! Boice demonstrates from history the radical, life-encompassing impact that Calvinists have had on the church and on society: Calvin’s biblical defiance in Geneva; the Puritans’ consuming passion for the glory of God. No doubt for these great saints the reactor core of their remarkable lives was the honour of God. But they believed that God alone plants such divine desires in the hearts of helpless sinners. And out of gratitude, in the spirit-led power of eternal security that comes from a God who never fails to achieves his purposes, biblical Christians then, as now, are to live and love and think and work and preach and repent in a humility that comes from being divinely and eternally gasped by the doctrines of grace.
Boice relays a story told by the great Bible teacher, Harry A. Ironside, of an old saint who was asked to give his testimony.
He told of how God had sought him and found him, how how God had loved him, called him, saved him, delivered him, cleansed him and healed him—a great witness to the power of God. But after the meeting a rather legalistic Christian took him aside and criticised his testimony, as some Christians like to do. He said, “I appreciated all you said about what God did for you. But you didn’t mention anything about your part in it. Salvation is really part us and part God. You should have mentioned something about your part.”
“Oh yes,” the older Christian said. “I apologise for that. I really should have said something about my part. My part was running away, and his part was running after me until he caught me.” (p. 154)
Give thanks, you redeemed saints! God is a Man Chaser.
