This morning I
arrived home from chapel with the intention of writing a couple songs, fleshing
out a book idea, and practicing my violin – all very quiet and relaxing things
to do on my day off. But as I started to
pull stuff out, I started thinking about a topic that’s been on my mind lately,
and the thoughts and ideas wouldn’t leave me alone. So I spent three hours writing this blog post
instead.
Predestination – a
word that strikes fear and trepidation into the hearts of Sunday school
teachers and bible study leaders everywhere, and it’s not hard to figure out
why. It’s a highly debated point of
Christianity in scholarly circles, so the majority of us who don’t speak Greek
and Hebrew just prefer to avoid it all together. However, I’ve always found it to be a
fascinating subject. I grew up as the
daughter of a seminary graduate (but not pastor) who liked to say he was a
four-and-a-half point Calvinist, and that missing half a point was on the
tenant of Irresistible Grace – the belief that God chooses His elect, and when
He extends His grace to us, we have no ability to say no. Being intrigued by predestination and the
type of person who likes to analyze things to death, I’ve spent a lot of time
thinking and researching, and, though I don’t claim to be any sort of expert,
I’d like to share my thoughts and discoveries.
The biggest
complaint and objection I’ve heard to predestination from Christians and
non-Christians alike is free will. If
God chooses who will come to salvation, then we don’t have a choice,
right? And if we don’t have a choice,
then aren’t we just robots? I was stuck
on this for some time, too, and for a while, the answer I settled on was that
God doesn’t exactly choose us, we still have a decision in the matter, it’s
just that He knows beforehand who will come because He’s God, and that can look
like predestination. But I have to say
now that I think that was just a cop out.
There’s way more to it than that.
So let’s look at
free will. What is it? My mom used to tell me that God gave us free
will to choose Him or not choose Him because He didn’t just want robots to
worship Him. The worship of robots
doesn’t mean anything because they’re not invested, they have no emotions; the
words are empty. I’ve heard a lot of
people say that free will is just the ability to make choices, but that’s
really only the surface of it. Does a
person who is in boot camp, where nearly every area of your life is dictated by
someone else, have no free will? It may
look like it from the outside, but a person’s free will doesn’t just go away
when they’re put in a situation like that.
There is still the desire to
make choices (and often the anger and rebellion when you can’t!) even if the opportunity is unavailable.
Okay, so let’s
define free will as the desire and ability to differentiate between options and
pick one based on reason and emotion.
The objection to predestination we’re talking about is that if God
chooses us, we don’t have free will. I
would beg to differ. I don’t think we
had free will before. See, before we
become Christians, the Bible is pretty clear about our condition. We are “dead in our trespasses and sins,” as
Ephesians 2 says (and many other places as well). I don’t know about you, but there is
absolutely no doubt in my mind that dead people cannot come alive again by
themselves. Before Christ, we are
spiritually dead. And this isn’t like in
Princess Bride where we’re only mostly dead;
we’re all dead. Unfortunately, there will be no loose change
searching, because our souls don’t have pockets. But while our souls are dead, our bodies are
alive; we are, in fact, the Walking Dead.
(Ah! Zombies are real!) But I’m getting off track. So if we are spiritually dead, and Christ is
life, and we have no ability to bring ourselves back to life, we have no
choice. On our own, we are stuck being
dead, and what’s more, we don’t even have the desire to have a choice.
Based on the previous definition, we have no free will.
Then Christ comes
and begins to work in our dead soul, and we understand that we are dead. I think it’s at this point that we get hung
up on the other side of the free will issue.
Did we have the ability to say no to Christ when He called us? I have my opinions, but I think it’s really
beside the point. If you’re about to
fall off a cliff and someone saves you, does it matter if you had no choice
about being rescued? What if you had wanted to fall to your death? As far as I can see, whether you had the
choice or not, if you realize you’re about to die and there’s nothing you can
do, it’s not much of a choice. You want to be rescued, so choice or not,
you’re saved either way.
The final reason I
think people cling to the free will argument against predestination is that we
like to think that we chose Christ of our own volition. I have definitely fallen into this category
before. We as humans are very prideful,
and we will take the credit for everything we can. But God knew this, and he inspired Paul to
write in Ephesians 2:8-9 that we are saved by grace through faith and not of
ourselves so we can’t boast. We are
sinners like the rest of humanity, and we’re not better than anyone else
because we found Christ, since it’s He who found us. So to sum up, the argument people most use
against predestination is really an argument for predestination.
I’ve heard a lot
of people say that it’s not fair that God would choose some people to be
Christians and not others. Well, you’re
right, to be fair, He shouldn’t have chosen anyone. To be fair, He should have just not sent
Christ and let everyone die in their sins like they deserve. We need to remember that He’s not obligated
to save anyone. But He did. Because He had a perfectly unfair plan, a
plan that would bring much glory to His name and give us a beautiful love
story. It all started before Christ ever
came. God chose a righteous man, his
name was Abraham. God told Abraham that
He would make a great nation out of his children. At that point, God knew all the things Israel
would do. He knew they would rebel against
Him time and time again. He knew they
would curse Him, bow down to idols, and disobey constantly. But he didn’t chose some other nation that
might have behaved better. He chose
them. Why? Because they are a picture.
As an author and
avid reader, I love being able to look back as I’m reading and see how things
that seemed inconsequential, strange, or out of place now make sense because of
what’s happened in the story. I’ve come
to understand that God is the Master Storyteller. And He’s so good at foreshadowing. God’s choice of Israel before She existed,
knowing her sins, is a perfect foreshadowing of God’s choosing of us as
believers. He chose us. We didn’t want it. There’s nothing we did to earn it. There’s no way we can ever pay it back. There’s nothing we can do to lose it. We’re His.
“Just as He chose
us 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… to the praise of the glory of His grace.” – Ephesians 1:4-6
