Do Sinners Seek After God?

 

The seventh video clip from RC Sproul in the list of 16 that I have been commenting on in my previous posts is titled: “Do sinners seek after God?” The transcript is as follows:

“Just yesterday I was preaching in our church on the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel, and the encounter that Jesus had with the Samaritan woman, where he came to her and asked her for a drink. And then he said to her, If you knew who was asking you for a drink of water, you would ask him for a drink of water, and he would give you water that would have it so that you would never be thirsty again. She says, Let me have that water. Now at that moment it seems like, in that initial conversation with Jesus, she was seeking Christ. She didn’t know she was talking to Christ, but she knew that he was offering her something that she wanted.”

That is not strictly accurate. The conversation that she had with Jesus goes like this: first she recognizes him as a prophet:

John 4:

19 The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet.

If she had not been a genuine seeker, she would not have been able to make that initial recognition. Later she indicates that she was a believer, and was looking forward to the coming of a future Messiah:

John 4:

25 The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things.

Then when Jesus identifies himself to her as the true Messiah, she believes, leaves the waterpot that she was carrying at the well, rushes back home, spreads the news to everyone in town, and causes them to believe as well:

John 4:

26 Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.

• • •

28 The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city, and saith to the men,

29 Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?

30 Then they went out of the city, and came unto him.

• • •

39 And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did.

40 So when the Samaritans were come unto him, they besought him that he would tarry with them: and he abode there two days.

41 And many more believed because of his own word;

42 And said unto the woman, Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.

So RC is being a little unfair to the Samaritan woman, failing to recognize her virtue and goodness, her faithful expectation of the coming Messiah, and her immediate recognition of Jesus for who he was when he had introduced himself to her; abandoning her waterpot at the well, and rushing back home to tell everyone else about it, and causing them to believe as well. Then he continues:

“She was tired of coming to that well. Every time she came to that well, it satisfied her thirst for a moment; and now somebody offers her a water that will satisfy her thirst forever. Now there are millions and millions of people out there who are thirsty, who are hungry, who desperately want relief from their guilt, who are looking for meaning and significance to their lives. This woman had been married five times, and now was living with a man. She didn’t do that just because she wanted to set a record for adultery, she did that because she was desperately seeking happiness; and every time she tried it failed. Now from a Christian perspective, we see folks all around us who are looking for peace, looking for meaning, looking for relief from guilt; and we say, Aha, they are seeking Christ, they are seeking God. In fact we have even designed worship in America to accommodate these people who are not Christians, but who are quote ‘seekers after God’.”

That may be so, except that the story of the Samaritan woman is not providing him with a good illustration for that. If they are remotely like the Samaritan woman, whom he is using as an illustration, then I would guess that many of them are indeed seeking after God; except that they haven’t quite figured out exactly how and where to find him—as the Samaritan woman hadn’t initially, but later did. Then he continues:

“That in light of the unambiguous teaching of the New Testament, that no one seeks after God.”

That is a reference to Romans 3:10–12, quoting from Psalms 14, which is another badly misunderstood scripture, which I had previously discussed in an earlier blog post which can be seen here. The Bible teaches that we can indeed seek after God, and are even expected to do so:

Acts 17:

26 And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation;

27 That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:

He then continues:

“I don’t begin to seek God until I am a Christian. My becoming a Christian is not the result of my quest for God, it is the beginning of my quest of God.”

He went about it the wrong way then! Maybe that is why he got his theology so badly wrong! He continues:

“And what happens, and I think Thomas Aquinas understood this the best, because people were asking him the same thing in his day, you know, why does it seem like people were seeking God? And he said, here is why. He said, all around us are people who are seeking desperately for the things that only God can give them, and therefore we leap to the conclusion that they must be seeking God; but the reality according to the Scriptures is, man wants the benefits of God, without God himself. We want the benefits that only he can give us, while we are fleeing from him as fast as we can; and so we need not to make that mistake. People are not in their natural state searching for God. God is the one who seeks us out. Christ is the one who comes to seek and to save the lost.”

That may be true of some, but evidently not all. It wasn’t true of the Samaritan woman, and not of Acts 17:26–27 either. What he is trying to drive home with all of that is the false Calvinistic heresies of “total depravity” and “unconditional election,” which are heretical and false, and have no basis in scripture, like all the rest of Calvinistic theology is.