Prologue: They Couldn’t Handle It Then Either

Somewhere around the second century before Christ, a man whose name we will never know sat down and wrote these words:

“I know by Your understanding that it is not by human strength . . . a man’s way is not in himself, nor is a person able to determine his step. But I know that in Your hand is the inclination of every spirit . . . and all his works You have determined before ever You created him.”

And then he wrote this:

“You alone have created the righteous one, and from the womb You established him to give heed to Your covenant at the appointed time of grace . . . But the wicked You created for the time of Your wrath, and from the womb You set them apart for the day of slaughter.”

That was over two thousand years ago. Those words were found in a cave near the Dead Sea in 1947, written on scrolls that had been buried and hidden for centuries. And when modern scholars dug them up and read them, they dismissed the theology. Too predestinarian. Too radical. Too sovereign. It didn’t fit the religious assumptions of the men who found them, so they set the theology aside and focused on the archaeology instead.

But the theology was there. It had always been there. Buried in a cave, waiting.

The man who wrote those words is known to history only as the Teacher of Righteousness. We don’t know his real name. We don’t know his face. We know that he taught the sovereign grace of God in an age when the Pharisees were gaining power, and that the Pharisees, when they got that power, killed people who disagreed with them. We know that his followers fled into the desert. We know that his writings were hidden away in clay jars and sealed in caves along the cliffs above the Dead Sea. And we know that for two thousand years, nobody read them.

The Pharisees won. They always do, for a time. They had the institutions. They had the political power. They had the majority. And they used all of it to silence the men who said what the Teacher of Righteousness said, that a man’s way is not in himself, that God alone creates the righteous and the wicked, that salvation is not a human achievement but a divine act.

And then fifteen hundred years later, a German monk named Martin Luther sat in a tower in Wittenberg and read the book of Romans. And it was as if the cave had been opened again. “The just shall live by faith.” Luther didn’t discover a new doctrine. He uncovered an old one. The same truth that had been buried in the Judean desert was buried again under a thousand years of medieval religion, and Luther pulled it out of the ground with his bare hands. And when he nailed his theses to the church door, the institutions came for him too. They tried to burn him for it. They excommunicated him. They called him a heretic.

The Pharisees won again. For a time.

But the truth doesn’t stay buried. That’s the thing about it. You can seal it in a cave. You can excommunicate the man who found it. You can preach against it from pulpits and put websites on “bad theology” lists and write long articles explaining why it’s dangerous. And it just keeps showing up. In another century, in another cave, in another monk’s tower, on another man’s computer screen at two in the morning.

I know something about that.

In 2005, a man named Phil Johnson, who was the right hand of the famous preacher John MacArthur, put my website on his public list of “bad theology.” He called Pristine Grace “hyper-Calvinism of the most virulent kind.” He said the site was “doing more to befoul and degrade the doctrines of grace than practically any other Web site” he had seen. He said I was “naturally drawn to radical ideas.” He wrote all of this without ever speaking to me.

I was thirty years old. I had no seminary degree. I had no denominational backing. I had no publisher. I had a website I built myself on a computer in my living room, and a set of convictions I had built from Scripture the same way. And I sat down and wrote a point-by-point response, civil and thorough, and published it on the very website he was attacking. He never responded.

That was over twenty-one years ago. I still hold every doctrine he attacked me for. And I’ve added a few more since then that would make his original criticism look like a compliment.

This book contains everything I believe. All of it. Not just the parts that are safe to say in Reformed company. Not just the parts that will get a nod from the sovereign grace world. Everything. The doctrines that earned me the label “hyper-calvinist.” The positions that cost me friendships. The convictions that got me quietly removed from a preaching rotation at a church I moved across the country to attend. And the conclusion that none of my critics expected, that after holding the hardest theology I know how to hold, the last word is love.

I didn’t build this framework in a seminary. I built it in the Scriptures, in conversations with a man named Bob Higby who became one of the most important people in my life, in late night sessions on my website, predestinarian.net, and in the slow, painful process of watching the sovereign grace world eat itself alive while I tried to figure out what was true and what was just tribal loyalty dressed up as doctrine.

The framework was mostly in my mind by the time I was twenty-nine. I stress-tested it against one of the best covenant theologians I knew. He couldn’t break it. I defended it against Phil Johnson. He wouldn’t engage. I’ve published two hundred articles on pristinegrace.org over the course of twenty-eight years, and every single one of them was a piece of this system before I knew the system had a name. The theology came first. The vocabulary caught up decades later.

What you are holding is not new knowledge. Almost none of it is original to me. The Teacher of Righteousness had the sovereignty. Luther had the justification. John Gill had the particular redemption. Gordon Clark had the supralapsarian logic. Bob Higby had the two seeds and the Dead Sea Scrolls and the baptism framework and a dozen other things I learned sitting next to him in church, getting more out of the conversation than the preaching. I stand on the shoulders of men, most of them dead, all of them braver than me.

What is new is the assembly. Nobody, as far as I can tell, has ever put all of these pieces together in one place and shown that they come from one sentence. That’s what this book does. One sentence generates every position across every domain, from ontology to eschatology, from covenant theology to quantum physics, from the nature of the human mind to the nature of heaven and hell. One sentence. And if you accept that sentence, everything else follows. And if you reject it, none of the rest matters.

Here is the sentence:

“Everything that exists is a thought in the mind of God, sustained by His will, authored by His purpose, and held together by personal covenants of love.”

They couldn’t handle it in 200 BC. They buried it in a cave.

They couldn’t handle it in 1517. They tried to burn the man who said it.

They couldn’t handle it in 2005. They put the website on a list.

They won’t handle this book.

But the Author already knows who is going to read it. And the ones who need it will find it. Same as they always do.

“I will present the truth softly and wait on the Lord.”