“ For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. ”In the previous chapter, I have covered what it means by God’s love, which I believe have also effectively touched the first three points I mentioned in Chapter 3, i.e., God’s intra-trinitarian love, sacrificial love and providential love. We now arrive at the fourth point, one that is highly contentious and hence the cause of divide amongst Christians since the Reformation – God’s love for His elect. This chapter must be seen in light of God’s sovereignty and His love; so do not restrict your focus as you continue reading, but more importantly, do keep an open mind and a Spirit-led heart to seek out answers and it may just benefit you.
- Ephesians 1:4-6
This particular chapter is also especially messy due to its perplexing and gargantuan nature. I have however tried my best to structure it into 6 essential questions covering the following issues:
1) Unconditional election
2) Free will
3) God’s sovereignty & free will
4) God’s justice & the reprobate
5) Human responsibility
6) Once saved, always saved
To begin with, we must first establish that God is wholly sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient and transcendent. This is not an unfounded notion planted in our brains, so to buttress these points, I should quote scripture:
Omnipotent:
- “Ah, Sovereign LORD, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you.” (Jeremiah 32:17)
- “I am the LORD, the God of all mankind. Is anything too hard for me?” (Jeremiah 32:27)
- “…but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)
- Controlling nature: Matthew 8:26,27
- Controlling men’s hearts: “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh's heart…” (Exodus 10:20)
- Sustaining the universe through His Son’s word: “The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.” (Hebrews 1:3)
- Even your baldness! “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered.” (Matthew 10:29-30)
Omniscient:
- “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” (Hebrews 4:13)
- “for he views the ends of the earth and sees everything under the heavens.” (Job 28:24)
- Even what would be the case in a hypothetical situation, what philosophers call “ middle knowledge* ”: Matthew 11:20-24
- Foreknowledge: 1 Samuel 23:11-13
With His sovereignty established in our minds, we now can extrapolate these properties of omnipotence and omniscience to the issue of salvation. Surely God knows who will choose to believe in Him, doesn’t He? Yet, surely God is able to use His powers to make people believe in Him, isn’t he? Does He thus choose His flock because He knows they would choose Him or does He choose His flock and then they would choose Him?
1) Essentially, it all boils down to this: does God choose whom He wants for salvation?
This question can slide down to the divide between Calvinism and Arminianism, but boxing our thoughts and persuasions into these labels would also be a slippery slope. Herein, I write my personal opinion on the issue of election. In summary, I am inclined towards Calvinism, i.e., that God, in His wisdom and sovereignty chooses His flock, and that this is, while on a balance of probabilities, on the basis of Scripture.
“When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honoured the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48)
Here, we are told that the premise for the Gentiles’ believing was that they were “appointed”.
“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” (Romans 8:28-30)
In these verses, Paul explains a certain ‘order’ or ‘sequence’ to salvation: chosen by God, called, justified, glorified. The sequence again begins with predestined election.
“For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.” (Ephesians 1:4-6)
Indeed, He had predestined us into His kingdom “in love”.
Moreover, Jesus also says: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise him up at the last day.” (John 6:44). God himself draws us, and creates the change in our heart that is necessary to find Jesus.
One may argue from the other side of the fence that John 3:16 tells us “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Undeniably, God did give His only begotten Son to the world because He loved the world. Does it logically mean then that eternal life is for the whole world? This is answered in the very same verse: only “whoever believes in him”. And the above scripture quotations have effectively shown us that it is only because God chooses that He calls and hence those who are called will believe. In other words, God’s love and grace is sufficient for the whole world, but effective only for His elect.
And to answer the question posed at the beginning whether it likely is the case of God choosing because He knows people will choose Him, or people will choose Him before God chose them to do so, I think this would be a matter of personal preference. Personally, I would think that my Lord is sovereign and chose me because the converse does seem to make Him a rather ‘democratic’ God which the Old Testament has shown often to be not the case.
You may or may not choose to take this stand; you may choose to take the Arminian point of view, but I must warn you that it is less scripturally grounded than that of the above (Calvinist). I must also warn you that perhaps just because we are uncomfortable with it, we may choose to deny it and take a contrarian’s view, but risk being deviant from the Word: I know because I have been struggling with this long before I was a Christian. And if it should comfort you, it has been wrestled on by John Calvin, Martin Luther, John Wesley, amongst others, throughout their whole lives.
2) This doctrine of election thus has certain implications on our understanding of free will. One would ask then that if God had given us free will, surely we should be able to choose whether or not to receive our salvation, and not be predetermined by Him?
Indeed, it holds some truth – but only under certain perimeters and limitations. If one were to consider ‘free will’ to be that all possible choices in existence must be made available to us and that our decisions translates absolutely to our own mould of the future, then I must concede that is nonsense. The last I recall, the Bible never tells us that “God lets man choose every thing in the universe”, or to similar effect. To begin with, does any of us get to choose where we are born or to whom we are born to?
Free will must be seen in light of the Genesis story. God placed two trees in a garden, one tree carrying a forbidden fruit – that was God giving Man free will. If God never placed that tree in the garden, I guess our discussion ends here: there would be no free will (and we’d all still be in Eden). This would be the same for other hypothetical questions such as “why doesn’t God make everyone believe in Him then since He could?” It would effectively make us like some of our favourite animal cousins down the hierarchy of sentient beings – maggots, for example; merely existing to find food, reproduce and die. If God wanted that, He obviously didn’t have to create Man; He had already created a whole world of such organisms.
I think the best way to comprehend this concept of free will is to draw an analogy of a timeline seen from a macroscopic lens: draw a straight line, somewhere on that line, mark out point A, and then further down, point B; point A is where God places us to enter this world, and point B is where we depart, plus an additional binary variable (believer in His Son, or non-believer in His Son). I know I’m over simplifying here (I’ve ignored the whole process of justification, sanctification and glorification etc), but I beg your pardon to merely illustrate the point. The points A and B are decided by God, i.e., He chooses where we’re born and whether we’ll end up departing from this world with our passports to His kingdom certified and stamped. The time between A to B is effectively our lives and is analogous to “borrowed free time” – you have the liberty to do whatever you wish but I should emphasise again to avoid the fallacy that “whatever I choose, whatever will happen” because our life’s conclusions are not only determined by our choices alone.
3) This then begs another question: does this mean that our sovereign God is not in charge of our lives?? Not at all.
Remember that our God can control sentient beings as well as inanimate objects. He can turn the hearts of men and control the weather. Keeping this in mind, and reiterating my fallacy I pointed out earlier, our lives can be seen as a whole complex web of events moving along a spatial time axis – our decisions only form one element or coordinate in this whole web.
For example, I may decide at 10am to go for a run at 4pm today. At 2pm, my mother calls and instructs me to go to the supermarket to buy some groceries. Being a good son, I obey and head out after some procrastination at 2.30pm. On my way back, I witnessed a tree fall, pining down a kitten’s tail. Usually, I wouldn’t give so much as a glance but today, I feel extremely compassionate towards the kitten. I spend the next 2 hours lifting the tree, and nursing the kitten’s wound. By the time I return home, it is 6pm and my mother is fuming that she doesn’t have the stuff to prepare her ‘special’ dinner; and obviously, I didn’t get to go for my run. While this is highly hypothetical (I do like cats and definitely would save kittens!), I must highlight that God’s hand might have been in this. He probably could have made the tree fall at the very instant when the kitten was under it. He probably could have ‘softened’ my heart that very moment. He probably could have ‘incited’ my mother to cook a special dinner that evening. In fact, His hand could be in so many things in our lives; we would never know, and probably pass them off as a string of fortuitous incidents.
4) On a more serious note, whatever we’ve discussed above would definitely have bearings on the perspective we take on predestination and God’s love, doesn’t it? For one, most of us would be asking, what about those chosen by Him not to be saved (i.e., the reprobate)? Isn’t that unjust? Isn’t that merciless?
This may sound bluntly caustic but the truth is we all deserve eternal damnation anyway. Because of the Original Sin, we are all born evil, and we exercise our capacity to sin from the very first chance. We are told that “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). None of us meet God’s righteousness and standards. None of us deserve to be saved; everyone deserves damnation. If God was merely just (and not everything else that He is, including love), then I would go so far to reckon we’d all end up in the eternal cesspool, because that would only be just. The typical analogy would be that we’re all criminals and deserve imprisonment anyway; that is justice.
But God is not just a just God; He is also merciful, and He is love. He has chosen from amongst the whole damn lot of criminals an elect few to be granted amnesty – at no cost to us, but a heavy price for Him. So how can we say that God is unjust or merciless or unloving?
At this point, it is appropriate for me to mention the story of Jacob and Esau. If you do not know the story, just go read it in Genesis 25:19-40 and for the full story, read till Genesis 35:29 (or if you’re really darn lazy, you can just borrow a kid’s bible story book). Paul reaffirms the whole doctrine of election in Romans 9:11-13, “Not only that, but Rebekah's children had one and the same father, our father Isaac. Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad—in order that God's purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls—she was told, "The older will serve the younger." Just as it is written: ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’ ” I mention this here because it is stern reminder to us that God does not choose by merits but merely in His love (Ephesians 1:4) and for His glory. The life stories of both Jacob and Esau definitely do not seem to be very favourable – one is stupid enough to sell his birthright and the other a conniving trickster. We know how the story goes: from Jacob came the nation of Israel. Is it unjust for God to have chosen such a sly, cunning man who tricked his own brother? (If you ask me, I feel injustice for Esau that poor hairy jock of a man!) One may also ask, why then did God create Esau? Extending that question further, why did God make Man knowing he would fall into sin?
The only way to look at the issue here is not in terms of just or unjust, or logical or illogical, but in terms of God’s sovereign choice – He will choose for His own glory, He will do as He pleases, for His own glory. It does sound a little pompous, doesn’t it? But the inescapable truth is that He is God, He is holy and set apart, does what He does to show us He is God, and does so in the strangest, most mysterious of ways – just take a look at the events in the first 5 books of the Bible for a start.
5) The next question stems from the earlier one: is it not true then to say that people should not be held responsible for their choices since it is after all God’s sovereign will?
I should now further throw in another thought – that of compatibilism. Simply put, it means that God’s sovereign will and human responsibility are mutually compatible. This strand of theological philosophy does not go so far to show you how this is possible – our human minds are probably inadequate to comprehend. It is however built on scriptural evidence to support that this is not only possible but is most likely the case.
In Joseph’s story, his brothers harmed him with a malign intent; yet, Joseph wisely told them in Genesis 50:20, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” How perplexing: the same coin but two different sides. Does it mean that his brothers are guiltless? Not at all, because we cannot erase the fact that they did intend to harm Joseph [redolent of legal theory: mens rea (intent) and actus reus (the guilty act)]! Is it God’s fault then? Not at all, because He intended it for good, over the fact that He wasn’t the one who committed the crime, mind you.
In Isaiah 10:5, “Woe to the Assyrian, the rod of my anger, in whose hand is the club of my wrath”, God calls Assyria the rod of His anger and uses them to punish Israel. It would definitely be a stretch to think that it was God who ‘incited’ Assyria to attack Israel, and yet, God allowed it with the intent of punishing Israel. Again, same coin, two sides – compatibilism.
And the most poignant example is found in Acts 4:27,28, “Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.” There had been a conspiracy to send Jesus to the crucifix, and simultaneously, it was all in God’s plan. Does that make Herod and Pilate innocent? Not at all; they had acted by their own volition, and yet were elements in God’s big plan. If for a moment, we should think that this was not actually God’s plan but merely a clever manipulation of an ‘accident’ or worse, a totally unforeseen incident, then the entire pattern of antecedent predictive revelation** can be trashed: the Atonement, the Passover lamb, the sacrificial lamb etc. In the words of Donald Carson, “rip Hebrews out of your Bible, for a start”.
And on the other hand, if one were to argue that since God is utterly sovereign, humans should bear no responsibility then. If that were the case, then there wouldn’t even be a notion of sin, would there? In that case, the Cross is absolutely unnecessary. And if you find yourself feeling ‘compassion’ and ‘mercy’ for the Reprobate, ask yourself this: do you think that your compassion, mercy and goodness is more than that of God’s? I too have struggled with this but have since given up and conceded that God, in all His wisdom and goodness and love, would know better; after all, who am I to question His mercy and goodness? It is thus purely in faith that I could proceed from that handicap.
I think the above explanations have sufficiently covered the question on God’s justice for His Reprobate: all of us deserves damnation, the Reprobate themselves choose their own just deserts; yet the Elect have been endowed with God’s amazing grace to be called, to be justified, sanctified and glorified, to be His heirs, the sons of His kingdom.
6) To conclude this lengthy and possibly conflicting discourse, the issue of “once saved, always saved” ought to be tackled here, albeit in a mild manner.
I would like to mention a very famous (or infamous) man: Charles Templeton. He was a fervent evangelist, a close friend and aide of Billy Graham. Together, they co-founded Youth for Christ International. He was also senior pastor of a church he founded and attended Princeton Theological Seminary. Then, 21 years after his ‘conversion to Christianity’, after a long struggle with doubt and uncertainty, with the very doctrines of Predestination, Election and Redemption, he declared himself an agnostic and even wrote a book stating his arguments for agnosticism. He passed away in 2001 as an agnostic.
A glimpse at his book entitled “A Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith” would definitely have me believe that no one but himself had made him choose apostasy. And more so definitely did God not ‘incite’ or make him an apostate. Charles Templeton chose his own end. Now that we can look at his life in retrospect, we can say surely that God had not chose Templeton to be amongst His elect. Yet, when Templeton was a prominent evangelist and senior pastor, would anyone have been able to say the same?
From his life example, we are reminded of an axiomatic platitude: we are not God. We do not know who has been chosen by Him, only God knows; we do not know if we ourselves have really been chosen, only God knows. This can be translated into two lessons for us.
The first point is actually the 5th point I mentioned in chapter 3 about ‘God’s conditional love’. Jesus told us in John 15:9-10, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love.” From our perspective, at whichever point in our lives, there is no 100% certainty that we will finish the race, just as Charles Templeton’s life has shown us. The only way we can find security and “remain in His love” is by obeying Jesus’s commands. It is only through obedience that we can continually be sanctified for His glory, remain in His love and be endowed with His everlasting peace.
Secondly, because we will never know who in this world have been chosen, we must continuously fulfil the Great Commission and evangelise the Gospel of Christ to all, in hope that they may believe, or otherwise, at least, have seeds sown in their hearts. Remember, God calls those He has chosen. But He does so through us. Such a huge responsibility we have!
Having reached the end of this lengthy discussion, I would advise you to contemplate everything, shove all your thoughts into a little box and leave it at the corner of your mind, because the notions of ‘free will’, ‘predestination’ or ‘reprobation’ floating about will not help you obey His commands and remain in His love. The only way to do so is to return to the number one commandment and love our Lord with all our mind, might, strength and soul. It is from this love for God that everything else will grow and bear fruit.
It is because I love Him that I want to tell the world about Him; it is because I love Him that I want to obey and follow Him wholeheartedly; because I love Him, I want to remain forever in His love. But most importantly, it is because He first loved me that I love Him.
* for more information on “middle knowledge”, check out this site: http://www.leaderu.com/off
** I have borrowed this term and the examples here from Donald Carson.
No comments:
Post a Comment