BIBLICAL Predestination (versus the other kinds!)
BIBLICAL Predestination (versus the other kinds!)
(A young man, also a Calvinist, asked me to explain “Predestination.” Following is a sort of “Readers Digest” version of the chapter on the subject in Volume One of the Blueprint For A Revolution: Building Upon ALL Of The New Testament)
The heart of the BIBLICAL version of “predestination” and “election” (as in Romans 8 and elsewhere) is quite different from what is typically taught (and typically protested against!). Predestination has nothing to do with the idea of arbitrarily throwing a dart into a dartboard: “If His dart happens to hit your little wedge, you are guaranteed entrance into heaven.” (I don’t know Calvin very well, but I suspect even HE did not think that shallowly!). The heart of the matter is what GOD means by “salvation”: In the Scriptures “salvation” is much richer and nuanced than the Evangelical’s idea of “accepting Christ.”
In the revelation of God, the many steps/decisions/experiences that you go through which lead to your ultimate “salvation” on the day of your judgment and glorification are ALL initiated by HIM – you are ALWAYS responding to what HE did to bring you to the next step/decision/experience. His revelation includes your making real choices, but that popular concept of “free will” is NOwhere mentioned or taught in the Scriptures. A truly “FREE will” is not what you START with (since you are still “dead” in your sins, and not yet “born” in spirit (e.g., John 3); it is what you will possess when He is FINISHED with you! But you do not HAVE to have some supposed “free will” (free from all restraints or inner compulsions) in order to make real, accountable, and fruitful choices).
Remember also that in Romans 8, Paul starts off that sequence with “those whom He FOREKNEW, He predestined…”. The God, who “knows the end from the very beginning” (Ephesians 3:4, Revelation 13:8, 17:8) KNOWS every one that He can bring to each of those steps/decisions/experiences that lead to our ultimate salvation – that act of “accepting Christ” is only ONE of those steps! Even though our brilliant Genius of a Creator earnestly “desires ALL men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), He nevertheless knows, from the beginning, what each of us will be WILLING to let HIM do within us that makes the next step/decision/experience possible. He knows from that “beginning” everyone who would, for example, permit Him to bring them to “decision four” (so to speak) but who would refuse to let Him bring them to “decision five” (so to speak). So, since He “foreknows” our decisions – and we do NOT know what our future decisions will be – He marks out for “special attention” those whom He knows He CAN bring “all the way” (Remember, it is “He who endures to the END will be saved”).
This situation is rather how you are raising your child: he does not DISCOVER for himself that he can walk and then make the DECISION by himself to walk from any supposed “free will” that he possesses. Rather, at a certain time, YOU pull him to his feet and then tilt him forward until he puts out one foot to prevent him from falling. HE made that choice, but WHY did he make it?
Then, you pulled him a bit further and he put out the OTHER foot to prevent himself from falling and then the next foot, and the next, and so on. And eventually he starts putting out each foot in front of the other on his own – while you still are holding him up by his hands. At each of those steps, he DOES make a choice – a choice to respond to the direction that YOU are pulling him. But it is YOU who, at a certain time, made the decision to “mark him out for special attention.” You did not decide to teach him to walk when he was one month old because YOU knew he was not physically or mentally ready to respond to your lifting motion.
Then, a few years later, you showed him how to ride a bike. You did not give him that decision-making experience before he knew how to walk by himself. You waited until YOU knew the time was right. And when the time WAS right in your estimation, you put him on the bike seat, and YOU held up the bicycle so that he could concentrate on just operating the pedals. And then you ran along with him, still holding up the bike by the handlebars, until YOU decided that he could coordinate both the pedaling and the steering; then you let go (and maybe held your breath!) Your little boy might be thinking to himself, “I LEARNED how to ride a bike” but you know that it was you who TAUGHT him to ride a bike, no? He did have choices to make, but all of his choices were responding to the setups that YOU had created at the time that you deemed appropriate to him. If you find this analogy too humbling to accept – you being an adult and all that – you might want to meditate of something Jesus said: “”Assuredly I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you shall by no means enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:2).
Or you might think of yourself as a chunk of marble in the hands of Michelangelo Buonarroti– INTELLIGENT marble, of course. That amazing artist (like the even MORE amazing Artist!) knows his marble inside and out, and knows that He can and will turn you into his magnificent “Pieta” (browse to https://www.michelangelo.org/pieta.jsp for a view. Your sculptor does all the actual creative work and chiseling, but – your being INTELLIGENT marble that will be made in HIS image– He asks for your willingness to accept the next act of chiseling. HE gets the credit for the glorious work that YOU will become:
“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:10 NKJV, or “masterpiece” in the ISV version).
“Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why have you made me like this? Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor?” (Romans 9:20-21). [It is even MORE humbling to accept yourself being demoted to mere CLAY, but that’s what he SAID!]
Both of these analogies, like anything dealing with God, leave much to be desired. We actually do have more to do in our path toward glory than to merely “acquiesce” to God’s chiseling. That’s why I prefer the image of learning to ride our bikes. But even then, OUR dads might well accidently let go of those handlebars too soon! My only concern is to make sure that you and give our Creator all the credit that He truly deserves it what has been happening within YOU!
As already said above, in God’s revelation, the doctrine of predestination has NOTHING to do with arbitrary dartboard shots OR with us being God’s puppets. We DO have real choices (like our young sons). But at every point we are responding to His Holy Spirits “prevenient” grace – the gracious action of God that always keeps going before us, right until the day when He fulfills our version of 1 John 3:2 –
“Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”
It is HE who brings His elected, predestined, foreknown children into their glory.
“Foreknowing” is a passive act for God, resulting from Him knowing the future in amazing detail, even from the “foundation of the world”. Predestining is also passive, a decision He made “way back then.” But once He made that choice to predestine someone – YOU, for example – He rolled up His sleeves (as it were) and got to work – fitting you into a PARTICULAR genealogical lineage, that comes with a particular combination of genetic and moral and character traits, that provides a particular “spiritual environment” (whether under godly or wicked spiritual forces). (AND DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT HOW AND WHY HE MAKES THOSE DECISIONS!).
He may decide to work with you like He did John the Baptist (who leaped toward Jesus while still in the womb!), or He may decide to work with you like that Gadarene demoniac (Luke 8:27ff) (AND, AGAIN, DON’T ASK ME…!). It is HE who works – OFTEN from the shadows – to do the drawing toward Him. If so predestined and elected, it is HE who does that “calling” at a time of HIS choosing, whether as a youth or – like the thief on the cross – at the very last breaths you will ever take.
Believing and integrating this revealed truth is more than just a matter of being CORRECT in your theology (something like “12X12=144, NOT 145”). As that revealed knowledge “sinks in” it impacts the kind of “awe,” “majesty” and even “terror” that you experience in your relationship and in your prayer with your Creator:
“Knowing, therefore, the TERROR of the Lord, we persuade men; but we are well known to God, and I also trust are well known in your consciences” (2 Corinthians 5:11).
Do not get trapped into feeling the need to decide whether either Calvin or Arminius was good, bad or wicked because of what THEY taught. Paul, Peter and others wrote what they did LONG before either of them or their current parties ever existed. Just surrender to the plain sense of what God inspired His apostolic writers to put down on paper, and integrate WHAT IS WRITTEN into your understanding and into your prayers!
Even JESUS “was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you who through Him believe in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God (1 Peter 1:20-21).
If your MASTER liked the idea of being “foreordained” (i.e., “predestined”) from the foundation of the world, shouldn’t YOU?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as HE CHOSE US in Him BEFORE the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which HE MADE US accepted in the Beloved” (Ephesian 1:3-6).
DELIGHT TO GIVE YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER ALL THE GLORY!
