Predestination And Freewill: “Is life predestined?”
I’m sure we’ve all had moments where we look at ourselves, where we
are, what we’re doing, where geographically we’re now situated, what we
believe, how we’ve travelled in life’s journey... and had the very strong
sense that there is some higher hand in our lives. So many meetings,
situations, coincidences- couldn’t have been mere chance. God was there, far
over and above our own efforts, working through even our failings, and those
of others, to do us good in our latter end.
And yet if we take this too
far, we end up passive, thinking that what shall happen shall happen. That
whatever we do, all the same, our fate and destiny will happen to us anyway.
“Islam”- meaning ‘submission’- has taken this to its ultimate term. Grace,
forgiveness, personal spirituality go out of the window, compared to the
need to merely submit to the will of God. The Bible time and again teaches
that personal behaviour is crucial; that we can alter our own destiny by
faith and the works which are part of that faith- for faith without works is
dead (James 2:17). There are conditions set for salvation- belief in the
Gospel, response in baptism (Mk. 16:16). We must consciously decide for God
and His grace as it is in Jesus; for there is no other Name apart from His
in which we can be saved (Acts 4:12). We are His friends if we keep His
commandments (Jn. 15:14).
And yet, again, if we go too far along this track of thinking, we end
up with salvation being by works, by steel willed self control, rather than
God’s grace to us who are fallen sinners. And without doubt the Bible
teaches that salvation is by grace through faith, “and that not of
yourselves; it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). And not all men “have faith”
(2 Thess. 3:2). Some just ‘don’t get it’. And the fact we do (after a
fashion) isn’t due to our intellectual prowess nor any inherent
righteousness in us that isn’t in the guy next to us.
To bring together these two strands- of salvation by pure grace, and
yet the need for conscious human response to God’s grace- is perhaps
impossible. We can find no trite form of words nor smart ‘quick explanation’
in a Question Box which encases these two profound realities. But Paul does
come to our help in Romans when he starts writing about predestination. But
of course he doesn’t just pull down a new leaf on his scroll and start
writing about these things out of context with the rest of Romans. He has
been arguing throughout that salvation is by grace and not of works; and he
finds himself up against the Jewish mindset that ‘We were chosen, others
weren’t’. And so he speaks of predestination in the context of demonstrating
that salvation is indeed by grace and not works. If it were by works alone,
then there would be no need for any concept of calling [“election”] nor
predestination. But the fact that God does operate such concepts- Jacob was
chosen rather than Esau before the twins were even born (Rom. 9:13,14)- is
in fact a proof of His grace. Paul had begun Romans, as he did so many of
his letters, by reminding his readers that both they and he had been
“called” (Rom. 1:1,7). We cannot deny that we have been “called”. For the
call is in the Gospel. If you hear the Gospel, you are called. If I call out
to a man across the street “Hey you, come over here and share my
sandwiches!”, he cannot walk on by thinking that I didn’t call him to eat my
sandwiches. He heard. He was called.
We have heard the Gospel of the Kingdom. We are called. Therefore we
were predestinated to be in God’s purpose (Rom. 8:30; 9:24). Now we have
freewill, of course, and can fight against God’s will to save us, or kid
ourselves that we never heard. But His will is to save us. Exactly why He
called you and not someone else is the mystery of grace. It wasn’t because
you were better. It was because this was the method God used to articulate
His grace. And the end product of this is humility and zealous response on
our part. There is a fatal fascination with the question of why some weren’t
called. But who are we as the clay to argue with the potter’s grace? John’s
Gospel closes by addressing this question. Peter was following Jesus,
walking behind Him, in response to Jesus’ command to follow Him. But John
was also following Jesus, and Peter turned around, turned back from
following Jesus [just as he lost his focus on Jesus when he was walking on
the water towards Jesus]... to notice John was also following. “Peter
therefore seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do? Jesus
saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?
follow thou me” (Jn. 21:19-23). The fate of others, the nature of their
following or not of Jesus, is not [in this sense] directly our concern; our
focus must be upon single-mindedly following Jesus as we by grace have been
called to do. For we can be assured from the whole Biblical record that “the
judge of all the earth shall do right” (Gen. 18:25); we should be relieved
that actually the ultimate judgment of earths’ billions is actually not in
our hands at all.