Wrestling with God
Stephen Armstrong - January 20, 2012
God often does His best work in us by pulling the rug out from under us, theologically speaking. Just when we begin to feel secure and confident standing on our preconceived ideas about God and His program, the Lord will bring us someone or something to intrude upon our blissful ignorance and disrupt our thinking. The effect can be disorienting and even painful.
Nevertheless, disruption is the Lord's favorite tactic for growing us spiritually and bringing us to a greater understanding of Himself and of who we are in Christ. Recently, Verse By Verse Ministry had the privalege to engage in one these disrupting conversations with one of our readers on the topic of God's election in salvation. Few doctrines cause more angst and argument within the Body of Christ than election, and in my experience such debates are usually a battle of wits among unarmed men, as the saying goes.
Our ministry strives to handle these exchanges with grace and truth, and we work hard to present a logical and Biblically-based perspective on serious matters like election without resorting to clichés or recycling unhelpful arguments from various "camps" of thought. In this particular conversation with a reader (I will call "Sally"), we experienced a particularly fruitful outcome. I wanted to share the exchange in the hope others might benefit from it.
Part One of our discussion follows below:
Sally:
I was reading your answer to Is there an age of accountability in the Bible. I liked your explanation of the verses and the final answer to the question, however I am confused and worried about some of the scriptures and explanation that you gave about being saved! You are saying that God decides who gets saved and who doesn't? God gets to decide who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell? Why don't we have free will? I thought that we were able to decide for ourselves if we wanted to follow, accept and love God? If God chooses Who is saved and who isn't, why would there be judgement and what's the point of living life on this earth if our lives are already decided before we were even born?
VBVM:
We understand the challenge of understanding the important and foundational truth of election (i.e., the Bibical teaching of how God choses who will be saved). This core Biblical doctrine has been pushed aside in modern times, but it is the truth of Scripture.
Your surprise at learning of this Biblical truth is not uncommon. Because many churches and pastors have rejected this truth or simply neglect to teach it properly, the doctrine of election (and others like it) has become unknown to many Christians though it was the teaching of the Apostles and the accepted view of the church for many centuries.
In more recent times, false teachings concerning salvation have supplanted the Biblical truth of election, most notably the claim that all men have "free will" to accept or reject the Gospel. To our untaught ears, such teaching sounds sensible, and so we accept it without questioning. Our false understanding will be reinforced and our hearts hardened to the truth if we seek Biblical instruction only from those who reinforce our preferred views, thus preventing us from ever discovering the truth.
Paul taught that we should expect this movement away from Biblical truth and toward preferred teachings during latter times:
2Tim. 4:3 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires,
2Tim. 4:4 and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.
Rather than reinforcing such myths, our ministry is committed to teaching the truths of Scripture (even if they are unpopular), and the Biblical truth concerning salvation is that God chooses who will be saved. While men do have free will to make many decisions in life, when it comes to accepting the Gospel message, the Bible says there is no such thing as a man who willfully chooses to follow God or receive the Gospel.
In fact, the term "free will" never appears in the Bible nor is there any such teaching in Scripture concerning salvation. On the contrary, Paul says in Romans:
Rom. 3:11 THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS,
THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD;
Rom. 3:12 ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS;
THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD,
THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.”
The Scriptures teach that because of Adam's fall in the Garden, all men are born spiritually dead and unable to obey God's call to believe. Our fallen spiritual nature is incapable of accepting the things of God. We are literally deaf to the Gospel message, as Paul teaches:
1Cor. 2:14 But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.
The Gospel message must be "spiritually appraised," which means it can only be accepted as true by a living spirit. If God waited for men to choose Him, no one would ever be saved, since all men are born with a dead spirit that cannot accept the things of God. Simply put, God MUST act first to give us His living Spirit before we have the capacity to demonstrate saving faith, as Jesus taught:
John 6:65 And He was saying, “For this reason I have said to you, that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father.”
This is the very definition of grace: God acting on our behalf because we were incapable of acting for ourselves. As Paul taught in Ephesians:
Eph. 2:4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,
Eph. 2:5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ ( by grace you have been saved),
Eph. 2:6 and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
Eph. 2:7 so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
Our prideful, sinful nature prefers to believe that we are in control of everything in our lives, including over our salvation. God desires to confront our pride, and by His word the Lord makes clear we were not a participant in our own salvation, even in the process of believing.
Eph. 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;
Eph. 2:9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.
The Bible teaches that even our faith itself was not something "of ourselves" but rather "it is the gift of God." This truth offends our pride, because it removes our opportunity to boast (even a little) that we accepted or received Christ. The truth is Christ received us. We prefer to think we were in control when we accepted the Gospel and that we chose Christ as our Savior. The truth is God chose us.
Naturally, we rebel at the notion that God retains control over our eternal destiny, but Scripture teaches that God made His decision concerning our salvation long ago:
Eph. 1:3 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,
Eph. 1:4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love
Eph. 1:5 He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,
Eph. 1:6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
Even before the foundations of the Earth, the Lord had already chosen who would be "in Him" meaning who would receive His grace. He determined His elect would receive His mercy before they were ever born. He made this decision before the foundations of the earth so that His children could never claim that God's offer of mercy arrived on the basis of merit. We could never say we "deserved" or "earned" God's grace – or even that we were clever enough to believe in the Gospel.
Paul uses the story of Jacob and Esau to explain that this principle has always been God's way:
Rom. 9:10 And not only this, but there was Rebekah also, when she had conceived twins by one man, our father Isaac;
Rom. 9:11 for though the twins were not yet born and had not done anything good or bad, so that God’s purpose according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls,
Rom. 9:12 it was said to her, “ THE OLDER WILL SERVE THE YOUNGER.”
Rom. 9:13 Just as it is written, “ JACOB I LOVED, BUT ESAU I HATED.”
Before these two children were even born and before either had done anything good or bad, God's choice had been made, so that the world wouldn't assume that Jacob deserved or earned God's favor. Instead, Paul says God loved (i.e., chose) Jacob and hated (i.e., rejected) Esau and made His choice before they were born.
We should contemplate this example carefully. Before the twins were born, God told Rebekah that He would choose Jacob (the younger) over Esau (the older). and Paul says God did this so men would recognize that God assigned each to their respective fates apart from human actions or merit. In other words, Jacob's "free will" had nothing to do with God's choosing of him.
Regarding your question on why God has purposed this plan, remember that all creation exists for one purpose: to give glory to God. Therefore, God's design of the universe and His plan for salvation is - by definition - the best way to glorify God. We can begin to understand how this is so when we consider the possible alternatives.
For example, instead of saving some men, God could have chosen to save no one. Obviously, this option would not bring as much glory to God, since there would be no one in eternity to praise the Lord for His mercy and grace.
On the other hand, God could have chosen to save all men by grace and send no one to Hell. Though it may not make sense to us immediately, Paul teaches that this option actually brings God LESS glory. It is less benficial to God's glory that He save ALL men than if He were to save only SOME men and permit the rest to perish justly in their sin.
Paul explains:
Rom. 9:22 What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction?
Rom. 9:23 And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory,
Rom. 9:24 even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles.
Paul says that even though God was willing to condemn all men to Hell (justly), for the sake of His glory He chose to appoint some men to salvation while assigning the rest to the destruction they deserve for their sin. By allowing both the elect and the nonelect to exist, God provided His elect a contrast that teaches us to understand and appreciate God's mercy and grace.
If God had chosen to save everyone, we could never fully appreciate what it meant to receive His mercy. We would take His mercy for granted, since everyone received it. We could never appreciate what we were saved from, nor could we appreciate that sin deserves wrath from a holy and just God. This would cheapen our appreciation of grace and diminish God's mercy. He would appear to have less glory in our eyes, but because we do know of His judgment against sinners, we can better appreciate His grace to us. In this way, God's plan brings Him the greatest glory.