A new friend of mine asked a question about Predestination and I promised an answer that would be biblical, simple, and an expression of God’s love for all mankind.
Its sometimes a good idea to not worry too much about understanding everything or admitting that somethings we will never fully understand but I don’t think this is one of those subjects. While my answer is very simple, it does take a little walk through of several passages of scripture. But the conclusion will be worth the effort. First a quick disclaimer. I would normally never think using such a potentially polarizing issue as my first blog post, but… oh never mind, I totally would!
My friends question:
“I’ve kind of given up on the Bible as a reference… Not completely, but you understand.”… “My biggest issue with Calvinism is the following question: How can I follow a God who does not love everyone, who has intentionally created a portion of his children to go to hell?”
Hey friend! I’m going to start with your comment first because well, it’s understandable, but its probably not a good idea 😉
“I’ve kind of given up on the Bible as a reference… Not completely, but you understand.”
Contrary to “popular” opinion, I’ve found that the bible really is trustworthy, accurate and dependable. It is not at odds with itself. What it’s sometimes at odds with is our understanding of it. 😉
While there are a small number passages that we may never know the correct or full meaning of, and there are fewer of these than most people think. There are a few more, that have a simple and clear meaning, but still seem to be able to provide fertile ground for disagreement (still pretty few really) This is passage is one of the latter group. There is a simple, clear answer but some people have never heard it yet or they may be too attached to their current view or their other theology that has dictated they stay with it. But most people generally agree on the vast majority of passages. Indeed, it’s the ones that keep people spinning that I find the most interesting. Sometimes its very similar to Science. I remember 20 years ago when the whole medical field was demonizing eggs, the cause of all high cholesterol and heart disease. They must be removed from our diet. 10 years later, Ooops! It turns out that those eggs are really good for you because, while they do have cholesterol, it turns out it’s the kind that was good for you! How did they get it so wrong? They just didn’t know as much then as they did later. Many thorny biblical questions have been solved in the past 40 years. But most people are too busy to doing ministry or life to keep up with progress. Then we stumble around with each other debating old news, old facts and old understandings instead of get a refresh before we do. Staying current in anything in this day and age is time consuming. Even when we are talking about a 4,000 year old book!
To me, I’ve found over 40 years that the main problem almost always turns out to be man’s imperfect attempts to glean meaning (or extra meaning or special meaning) out of passages that are initially not clear, have a unique historical/cultural context that we didn’t know about or they have been pre-disposed to one interpretation due to a faulty or incomplete interpretation or theology somewhere else.
In any case, if we follow good hermeneutic principals, understand the literary structure (which is the structural context UNDER the worded context of a passage), the historical context, the cultural context and the greater references that might, do, or do not apply… we can almost always come to what we are looking for. That is… what in the heck is a given passage really saying! 😉
I believe each passage has one true and correct main meaning. Sure there may be extra or “bonus” things you can take from a passage but they are just that, extra. they are not the main core meaning. When we write, when the authors of the bible wrote and when God inspired them, we, they, and He are all trying to say something. We are not ever trying to say everything and anything with each sentence and paragraph in a book or letter. We use common forms or writing techniques to communicate and those bring clarity of meaning as bones bring form to our bodies. When I study the bible, I am first looking for the one main thing being said. We have to get that nailed down first before we go off taking a word or verse from its tapestry and thinking it is really cut from a different cloth. That meaning is normally plain and easy to see. But sometimes it’s not and we must dig a bit and look around it and sometimes look under it to get to it.
Once we do, there should be have a sense of simple obviousness to it what says to our hearts and minds that this is so “right” and “like God” and at the same time, “How did I not see it before”. It should feel at home, even if it’s in contrast to, the rest of scripture and our understanding of Who God is, how He works and his character, nature and Word.
If we don’t have that happening then I’ll bet dollars to donuts that we don’t really know what it’s saying yet and should look more closely.
I would like to encourage you to not be so frustrated by man’s ability, or lack thereof, to figure things out or keep from superimposing his own bias on the Word, that you give up on looking closely at it. For over 45 years, it has yet to disappointed me! I can’t believe I’m that old!
Ok. Back to the question…
“How can I follow a God who does not love everyone, who has intentionally created a portion of His children to go to hell?”
The Short answer (which is really just to get you reading the longer answer ;-), is that you can’t and you shouldn’t!
Because that is not the God of the Bible or the God you intrinsically know and love. There is another reason you can’t and shouldn’t. Because He didn’t! 😉
Here we go…
At issue is this idea of predestination. Where it seem that for some inexplicable reason God has chosen, before the foundations of the world were laid, to have some people be saved and some not saved. Where it seems that our personal volition and choice is either an illusion or a compulsion. Where our destiny to love God or hate Him has been determined for us before we were born or even conceived! To spend our future eternity in heaven with Him or in Hell away from Him (Don’t ask me about the nature of heaven or hell. That would create a worse fire storm than this post has! ;-).
How do we know if the above theological view is a true and correct understanding of the verses it comes from?
Well to save time, rather than trying to prove that it is correct, I’m just going to throw caution to the wind and show you why it’s not correct. I’ll do so by employing a technique used by Federal Reserve to teach people how to spot counterfeit money. Instead of showing people all the different ways people try to copy money, they put them in a room full of authentic bills of various denominations and let them touch, feel, handle, study, and experience authentic bills closely. Then, when they see a counterfeit bill, they instantly recognize it as a fake! We can easily see the error once we know the truth and we can easily spot Biblical “meaning” errors once we see the biblical And I’ll show you why it’s not correct by showing you what is obviously correct!
We know it is not true because of several things actually.
The first reason you are well acquainted with. It’s the same reason that causes you to struggle with the idea of a loving God creating people who’s only reason for existence is for them to burn in hell. You know, intrinsically, that something is wrong there. What is this? It’s our heart, which has the law of God written on it. God’s law of love is standing up and telling you it’s wrong. – I know that a lot of people are thinking, “OK, that does it, he us just driving us over the cliff in his heretic buss! We don’t interpret Gods Word based on what we like and dislike, what makes us feel good or bad. That’s ridiculous! God’s word is true and we need to bow before it! We need to pray that He will straiten our twisted minds and souls and give us understanding of his Higher than we can imagine ways! I’m getting off this theological terror ride of death right now!”
Still on the buss? Whew! Don’t worry, I know that some people will say that the last thing that we should base our lives on is how we “feel” and that we should only base our lives and His Word and on what we know. But in this case we are not sure if we really know what we know and our heart says, at some more than a mere feeling level, that it is wrong. That may not be much to go on but remember even Paul tells us that this “law written on our hearts” is trustable enough to condemn the unbeliever or even justify them before God! That it is trustable enough to even allow non-Christians to condemn US if we are not following Gods written Word! So, while it’s no nearly as black and white as print on a page, it has some oomph behind it. (Can I say oomph in a theological discussion? 😉 But, Not to worry, I’ve got some other reasons that can help us know it’s not true. Like the Bible! Yay!
The biggest problem with referencing the bible to find answers is that many times we don’t reference it enough! The other problem is that we sometimes don’t reference it well or even at all.
So let’s take a look at the three passage that can help us out here and can show not only why this predestination idea, as described, is not true but what is true about predestination. My prediction is that if we get to the true and core meaning of things, we’ll also find ourselves going “Ah!! Of course!!! It’s so simple!” And we’ll find continuity between what we find in the rest of scripture (which is something that, at least at first blush, seems hard to find on this issue!)
Romans 8: 21-30 this is the crux of the passages. Most other verses that are referenced do not effect or negate the solution we are going to look at or they are part of it! A couple other verses give us the idea that there are a few exceptional cases where God may intercede in individual peoples lives. Like when He hardened Pharaohs heart in order to accomplish a larger purpose of freeing Israel, but It’s pretty obvious that Pharaoh was anything but repentant, so he was never going to be repentant anyway and the hardening was just pressing in on his personal choice, not God forcing pharaoh to reject Him.
Lets take a look:
Rom 8:29-30 “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. 30 Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.”
Wow! That sure looks like predestination to me! Wow. I guess we’re done here. Thanks for stopping by! I hope to see you all back again soon! Don’t forget to subscribe! 😉
Oh, wait, what are some other verses that might tell us something about this? Are there any? Well, if you do a search on the keyword “predestination” you’ll find about 17 other verses. But like I said they are either not all clearly about predestination or they are in some cases not really about it at all. Some people may consider the few examples of God intervening in a individual’s life (like Pharaoh) to be proof of predestination, but I think seem to be pretty clearly exceptions rather than examples of a default method of God’s dealing with man. We could get into that but let’s leave it for now.
The first thing I do when looking for verses to help me know the meaning a verse, is to back up and look at the other verses around the verse, like from verse 8:1 to 8:39? You know, the chapter that this verse sits in. Context! At first glance it looks like it’s got a lot more of this predestination stuff… but hummm… If we look closer, we might notice that the whole chapter is about people as a group, “We”, “those” “He” seems to be used in the sense of “anyone in the group.” And there is this idea of all of Israel, corporate Israel, and how Israel and WE as “lovers of God,” through God’s Son Jesus, have victory. It’s a victory and final outcome of being with God that is unstoppable, un-revocable, un-separable from the love of God. In fact following 9th chapter is clearly all about Israel.
But the wording and language of chapter 8 appears to be consistent all the way through in that it is talking about “those who love God”. It appears to be saying, in both context, and wording that “We as his people are predestined to be delivered from bondage, to be set free, to be victorious and in-separable from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.”
What happens if we look “under” the words? What is the literary structure under-girding this passage and of Romans in general?
If we look at a quick outline of the whole letter of Romans we see something like this:
Theme of the whole letter of Romans appears to be found in verse 1:17-17 : “The Righteous Shall Live by Faith”
16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed [a]from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.”
It’s easy to divide Romans into 4 sections. (Grant Osborne’s outline, my notes 😉
- Universality of human sinfulness (1:18-3:20) – (No one can be righteous on their own – we choose wrongly!).
- Salvation from God on the basis of faith (3:21-8:39) (Faith is of course an act of our will, our choice!)
- Defending God’s covenant: Rejection of the Jews and inclusion of the Gentiles (9:1-11:36) (through their faith/choice)
- Living life in the Spirit (12:1-15:13) (Walking in the Spirit requires our choice of submission)
If you read through Romans its like there is a laundry list of choices we have to make!
- In the first section, Paul lists all the ways we are given opportunities to choose and make the wrong choices. We exercise our free will over and over and still come up short of righteousness.
- Then in the second section he talks about how if we make the choice to love God and follow Jesus, we win! choice is integral in both our failure and our success… Gods love for us is consistent through it all, all they way through Romans.
I could go on. But what we can see here is that this idea of predestination seems to be applicable to anyone who freely chooses to love God/Follow Jesus and it appears to the the running theme of the whole letter of Romans! It does not seem to suddenly apply just to an individual “he” but to all a corporate “He’s” – like “He who has an ear, let him hear!” that can be any number of people and it can be anyone who stops to listen.
The structure of Romans is consistent with this understanding of us needing to be “in” a relationship with God to gain Salvation. The flow of ideas within Romans, and within the chapter, and the wording in the verse are consistent and seem to all agree.
This whole 8th chapter is talking about predestination in a corporate/group sense. Its describing the pre-determined course and result of everyone who loves God and accepts Christ as their Lord. and it fits right in with the message, ideas and meaning of the chapters before and after it.
It is saying that (vs28) all of “those who love God” and are called will be, as they are IN Christ, inseparable from God’s love (vs39). That is pre-ordained. Non-negotiable.
The logical question then is WHO is called?
What is interesting is that there are a couple other verses that don’t use the word Predestination in them, so people don’t normally consider their meaning when look at the topic, but they do substantially add to our understanding.
Paul tells us who is called in his letter to Titus:
Titus 2:11 says “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men.”
and to Timothy
I Tim 2:4 tells us that God “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.”
These two verses from Paul are the “Call” of God to salvation and it is given to everyone. And the heart of God, His will, that that all men (and women 😉 be saved!
It’s the same call to repentance and salvation through relationship that Jesus offers over and over again, almost as if you have to make a choice to take it! 😉
His grace, that brings salvation, is an open invitation to everyone. All individuals are invited, qualified and desired to respond to the love of God and they have free will to make the choice to accept it by loving God and following Christ. Or to not do so. The call is to everyone. The option is to everyone. God does not predestine individual people to love him or hate him, He loves everyone and wants everyone to answer the call! Even if we go back to Romans 1:19-20 we can see that God has been revealing his nature and love to all men since the creation of the world. This idea of calling everyone is not just some proof texting pulled from other letters, it’s right in Romans too.
Lets look at our last passage.
Ephesians 1 gives us a little more clarity on this. And you worship leader types are going to love it!
Verse 3-14 in the Greek is one big long sentence. It’s a Doxology! It’s possibly a new song of praise and worship! What is in it so cool that Paul just couldn’t keep this on the down low… it’s just too darn exciting! He had to write or quote a song! Now I know you all want to start singing it, but just calm your jets for a minuet so we can see what it actually says first!
3 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, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love 5 He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
If you go back and read it again, you’ll notice that everything it’s talking about, including predestination is conditioned on us being “IN” the grace of Jesus, in a relationship with Him. We have to accept Him and be living our lives IN Him for any of this stuff to apply to us.
Not convinced? Read it again and count the number of times Paul clearly ties all these blessings to being “IN” or coming “through” our relationship with Christ. 4 times!
Guess what? I didn’t post the whole thing here, but if you keep reading verse 7 – 14 you’ll find that Paul used this specific qualifier of being “In Him” 7 more times. That’s 11 times in 12 verses!
It’s clear here that the condition of our predestination and all this good stuff, is that we be IN Him.
The next logical question of course is How do we get IN Him?
It’s very simple of course, we choose to accept Him of our free will. Just like it talks about pretty much everywhere else in the Old and New Testaments.
So, when we look at the context of the verse… in the first case Paul is talking about a corporate predestination that is dependent on our relationship of loving God, and in the second case stipulates that we must be “In Jesus,” in a relationship with Jesus to qualify to get any of the promises – including being consider “predestined.” And we know that everyone is called, invited, and wanted to come into relationship with Christ and that all we have to do is accept Jesus as our personal Lord and savior of our own free choice.
There is no personal predestination here. Only predestination of the group, who are clearly defined as those who love God and are walking with, living their life IN a relationship with Christ.
Personal predestination does not take effect until, unless, and only if, we freely elect to give our lives to Jesus and walk In Him. It’s clear that God has predestined a group. Its anyone who chooses love Him and follow His son to be in heaven. But no one is predestined to “have” to make one choice or the other. We all must make our choice. Once we do… we join the corporate group of believers, lovers of God that He promises can never be separated from Him.
God doesn’t predestine you or me. We choose to follow him. Once we are in Him, the game is rigged! We are guaranteed a win!
Now… I’ve just shown you is that God loves everyone, His Word even says it.
We know this is true also in our hearts. He wrote it there.
I’ve shown you that everyone has a choice to respond and receive forgiveness and have a relationship with God through Jesus and we all, are in fact, called by God to please do so! Everyone.
The fact that so many ignore the call only shows that they, like you and I, have something that is so important that Jesus died on the cross to in effect make sure we would have it. A choice. Without His atonement for our sins, we have no choice but eternal separation from God because we are all guilty of breaking the law. With it, we get to choose. Accept him or Not. And he gives us so many chances and “do overs” to hopefully make the right choice.
But from the beginning, and in the end, God gives us all our free will. What He promises is that once we are “In Him”, we are in the arms of a loving God who is so powerful and amazing that nothing can ever separate us form him… unless we don’t want to stay (free choice still is in his arms!).
It’s simple.
Being In Jesus does not require predestination, rather predestination requires us being IN Jesus!
Predestination is about and for “those who love Him” it is not about who “will” or “wont” love him.
As soon as you enter into a love relationship with Jesus, you enter into that group that is going places!
Wow! That feels so much like God. That looks so much like God. It’s even is right there in His word. It’s so simple that I have to wonder why so many people miss it!
Probably because we so easily grab on to one word in one verse and then start trying to figure everything out from our first flash of brilliance. What could it all possibly mean? Just think of all the spinning we do at the mere mention of the though “predestined”. Without looking close enough, or pulling back far enough, to see the whole picture it’s easy to make a mountain out of a mole hill. I’m certainly guilty of that from time to time. 😉
Anyway I hope this helps.
PS. You might protest my solution by saying, “Hey, you just tried to prove that this is the right way to look at this just because it looks right, seems right and feels right!, but that doesn’t prove anything!” To which I respond “That’s right!” 😉
