Episode 13: Predestination or Choice?
Summary
Question: Is our eternal fate predestined or do we have a choice in the matter?
The issue is between foreknowledge and predestination.
Romans 8:29-30 Foreknowledge is what God knows ahead of time. Predestination is the plan. The plan is for each individual who is called to become conformed to the image of God’s Son. Predestined to be saved or lost is quite different than the concept of predestination in the Bible. What God knows ahead of time is who will and who won’t. He sees all history from beginning to end. Predestination is the plan, what we’re really talking about then is foreknowledge.
Does God’s foreknowledge preclude free will?
The Calvinist’s maintain that God is so totally sovereign and He predestines, therefore you can’t have choice. The other guys would say, because you have free choice, God can’t foreknow. The problem with both of those is they bring God down to man’s level. God is bigger than that. He can see and orchestrate history so that all the pieces on His chessboard move into the right place at the right time.
The issue then is what was the means by which the gospel comes? A Baptist preacher believed that you had to be “quickened” by God’s Spirit. God, through His Holy Spirit, had to cause you to be born again apart from your choice. I asked the question, what was the approach the apostles used in their preaching? Did they look for people to make a decision? Or did they just expect people to be randomly zapped throughout the audience and be instantly born again apart from their choice?
Acts 2:37-38 They ask what shall we do? They were pierced to the heart but they weren’t born again.The answer was that they needed to repent, that was their decision, and then be immersed in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins and to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. That followed a reasoned presentation in which Peter and the rest of the apostles began with the idea that Jesus was known among the Jewish people and by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, He was put to death, resurrected, and ascended. This is a reasoned presentation, of which the points are to be understood by a reasoning audience. Their response is, what shall we do? Then comes the response of what to do. If immersion is necessary for salvation, there can’t be any predestination in that sense that you don’t have a choice. Choice is found all the way through.
Joshua 24:15 “Choose” you this day whom you will serve.
Acts 2:40 When they made the reasoned presentation then they expected a response. The literal is “save yourselves” from this perverse generation. They clearly had a choice to make, and you see that all the way through.
Acts 17:2 -3 If the Holy Spirit does this without the individual’s choice, you don’t have to reason and persuade. If they have to process and make their response, then reasoning and persuading are absolutely necessary. It is interesting that the guys that say you don’t have a choice try and reason with you and persuade you that you don’t…
God foreknows, but His foreknowledge doesn’t preclude individual choice. It just lets you know that He knows what choice is going to be made by who and when, because all of history is already in front of Him.
