Freedestination Revisited

Ben:     If our personality is made up from our genes and our environment, then are we really to blame for what we do?

Kelly:   That’s a brilliant question, actually, Ben: quite a few neuroscientists are starting to question whether there is such thing as free will and, if that’s true, people can’t really be blamed for their actions.

Ben:     Right. Could you write that down for my dad?

Outnumbered S3 E6, ‘The Hospital’ (2010)

 

How’s this for a visual metaphor? It’s kind of tricky to come up with ideas for pictures when I’m dealing with such abstract ideas.

At almost exactly this time last year, I wrote a post called ‘Freedestination’,¹ which basically consisted of me sticking my oar into the predestination-versus-free-will argument by asserting the existence of a paradox whereby both are true: it is both the case that God determines and guarantees in advance who will come to obtain eternal life through following Jesus, and that each of us who obtains eternal life through following Jesus makes the personal decision to do so. I still believe, based on what the Bible says, that such a paradox exists, but since my understanding of exactly what that paradox looks like has shifted somewhat over the past year,² this seemed like an opportune moment to revisit the issue. (You might want to open that earlier post in another tab round about now, because I will be referring to it quite heavily for the rest of this one.)

The thing is, the Bible puts a lot more emphasis on predestination than it does on free will. When, in ‘Freedestination’, I offered three snippets of scripture in support of each argument, I was utterly spoilt for choice when it came to predestination – aside from my settled-on choices of John 6:44, Romans 8:29-30, and Ephesians 1:3-6, I could have made mention of any of the following:³

“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.” – John 15:16

“And when the Gentiles heard this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the Lord, and as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.” – Acts 13:48

“But when he who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles, I did not immediately consult with anyone.” – Galatians 1:15-16

Equally, I could have picked up on any of the many references to the ‘elect’ that occur throughout the New Testament (try Titus 1:1, Romans 11:7, and Luke 18:7, for instance). On the other hand, I had a pretty hard time scraping together even three verses that seemed to express the free-will argument with any kind of explicitness. 2 Corinthians 9:7 does show that humans have some kind of capacity to make their own decisions, but it certainly isn’t asserting that in the context of salvation. Deuteronomy 30:19 makes it clear that the choice at hand is between life and death, but it’s part of the Law that the Israelites failed to keep; flip a few hundred pages forward and it’s stated that nobody was ever actually capable of choosing life: the Law could never actually save anyone, but was intended to reveal people’s sin to them and point to the coming Saviour.⁴ And as for 1 Timothy 2:3-4, it comes at the argument from a bit of a different angle, the logic being that if God desires all people to be saved, it can’t be that he predestines some of them not to be – but that line of thought is stopped in its tracks by a bunch of other predestination-y verses:⁵

“The Lord has made everything for its purposes, even the wicked for the day of trouble.”⁶ – Proverbs 16:4

“For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” – Jude 1:4

“While I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them, and not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction, that the Scripture might be fulfilled.” – John 17:12

I apologise for the wanton proof-texting; I do encourage you to have a peer at the context of these verses to check that I’m not horribly mishandling them. But I do think that we have to conclude from Scripture that yes, some people are predestined for condemnation. That’s a horribly hard notion to swallow, it really is, and it’s easy to start questioning God’s justness off the back of it – but that’s exactly what objection to it amounts to, a questioning of God’s justness. In ‘Freedestination’, I laid out some of the issues people have with predestination, and they do basically centre on doubting that a good God could create people only to doom them to destruction. It’s an argument made from a human point of view, using human logic and human ideas of right and wrong, instead of in humble submission to what God reveals about the nature of justice, of which he is the definitive measure and distributer.

So the most frequently cited arguments against predestination basically exhibit a problem in our understanding, rather than an actual inconsistency in who God is and what he does. The arguments against free will expose, I think, far greater problems in the object of their criticism. To suggest that human decisions can disrupt God’s purposes is, straightforwardly enough, an attack on his sovereignty; and to suggest that any one of us contributed anything, even mere active acceptance, to the achievement of her or his own salvation, is to steal some, however little, of the credit for it – back-door salvation by works.

 

Yeah, that’s not going to work.

At this point it might look as if I’ve tipped over into thinking there’s no paradox at all. God predestines everyone as he wishes, none of us has the smallest smidgen of autonomy in determining our eternity-defining response to him, and to suggest otherwise is to impugn his character: surely I’ve pushed free will out of the picture altogether? Not so. The paradox has actually just got deeper and stranger and more impossible-seeming – which I think testifies even more abundantly to the unfathomable mystery and ungraspable majesty of the God who devised it.

We’ve established that it’s not a slight against God’s character to say that he predestines some people for condemnation, but it is a slight against God’s character to say that he is responsible for evil. Plus, the exhortation to trust and follow him because he is good that forms the backbone of Scripture kind of falls apart if we claim that he’s capable of evil. Nevertheless, evil, quite clearly, exists. So evil must be blameable on human initiative – even though nothing is truly blameable on human initiative, because God is sovereign over all. This, O Suitably Perplexed Reader, is the new location of the paradox. It’s still the case that we have to hold together two seemingly incompatible ideas, but the exact substance of those ideas isn’t quite the same as my previous post implied. (I don’t think I’d say I was downright wrong before, but I also definitely don’t think I was portraying the issues at hand as fully or accurately as I hope I am now.)

                                                                

A helpful way someone explained these concepts to me earlier this year was that every human decision has a primary and a secondary will behind it. God’s will is the first reason behind every event, but every time any of us makes a decision, her or his will is also behind the consequent event as its second reason. I still made the decision according to my own initiative, so I can still be blamed for it. And this is our everyday experience of the world: we don’t sense cosmic forces compelling us to behave in particular ways; rather, as far as I am concerned, as far as I am able to perceive it, my will is my own. But at the same time, none of us makes any decision that God hadn’t already preordained, because his sovereignty over everything is absolute and irreducible.

It’s a paradox even crazier, more profound, and more difficult to come to terms with than my previous version. One of the toughest obstacles to coming to terms with it, actually, is the sense that we as humans get a pretty rough deal out of it. How come we can be held responsible for our sin if even that was part of what God purposed? How come we can’t take even the slightest bit of credit for our salvation if the blame for our sin is laid to our charge in its entirety? It hardly seems fair. As fortune would have it, Paul actually explicitly addresses this very concern in Romans 9:

“You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?’ But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is moulded say to its moulder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’”⁷

Seriously? That’s all the answer we get? Yes, it is. If we’re dissatisfied with it, the problem is that we haven’t truly humbled ourselves before God. Brothers and sisters, we were dead in sin. Every inclination of our hearts was only evil all the time;⁹ we were incapable of anything but sin; there was nothing to claim credit for; there was only blame to be laid to our charge. And despite all that, God rescued us into an inheritance of eternal life, even at the cost of laying the punishment we deserved on his beloved Son. This is not for us a rough deal, but an unbelievably good one.

OK, sure, but why bother in the first place? Why would God purpose to set up time and space in such a way that it would be so full of misery and corruption? The same reason God does everything – for his ultimate glory. And if that sounds like a bit of an ego trip, again, it must be that we haven’t truly humbled ourselves. God is the most perfect, magnificent, glorious, praiseworthy being that could ever exist. His creations are necessarily lesser than he is. Everything else in creation, from the elders of heaven to the very stones of the earth, understands that it owes everything of itself to God in endless praise;¹⁰ humans are the only ones who seem to have missed the memo, who dare to look God in the face and say ‘no’, to set ourselves up as his rivals. The right order of things is that God is exalted to the greatest possible extent, and so God would be doing wrong not to pursue his own glory. That chunk of Romans 9 I quoted above continues:

“Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honourable use and another for dishonourable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory – even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?”

 

I wonder what sort of use this vessel is going to be for.

There’s predestination again – some predestined for destruction, others for glory – and the point of it all is for God to make known the riches of his glory. Beings who have never sinned can praise God for creation, but they can’t praise him for salvation, for redemption, for mercy on the undeserving. Beings who have never sinned can’t praise Christ for taking the blame and conquering the punishment. If sin had never happened, the whole mind-blowing brilliance of the cross would be lost. The perfection of God’s attributes would never be displayed to its fullest extent. God would not be glorified as greatly as he could be. The right order of things would never be reached.

One of the reasons that I’m convinced by my new understanding of the freedestination paradox – aside from the primary one that I think Scripture affirms it – is that it leads me to think less of myself and more of God. This paradox crushes my pride to nothing and opens up whole new dimensions of God’s amazingness; it renders me a greater sinner and Christ a greater Saviour. And as we’ve seen, anything that causes God in his perfection to be glorified more greatly must belong to the right order of things.¹¹

Footnotes

¹ In the box on the right under ‘2015’, then ‘December’. Obviously.

² Yes, folks, I do change my mind about stuff, even stuff I’ve splashed all over the Internet in heartfelt fashion. Please challenge me if you think anything I post is a load of rubbish. Iron can only sharpen iron (Proverbs 27:17) if the two actually meet.

³ To save space and effort, I’ll put all the full-chapter links in this one footnote: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+15&version=ESVUK, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+13&version=ESVUK, and https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gal+1&version=ESVUK.

⁴ I think particularly of Romans 7, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+7&version=ESVUK, but that’s not the only place this idea is expressed.

⁵ Again, all your full-chapter links to check I’m not taking anything out of context: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+16&version=ESVUK, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=jude+1&version=ESVUK, and https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+17&version=ESVUK.

⁶ Or ‘day of disaster’, as the NIV puts it and as Shai Linne quotes it in ‘Our God Is In The Heavens’, one of my favourite of his tracks (which is saying a lot). Some kind human has uploaded a homemade lyric video to YouTube, featuring all your favourite qualities like stock-photo backgrounds and Windows Media Player visual transitions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV3136cv3HU. The accuracy of the lyrics seems to be pretty spot on, though, so concentrate on that.

⁷ Last Bible link for today: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+9&version=ESVUK.

⁹ See Genesis 6:5 for the allusion.

¹⁰ Revelation 4:9-11 for the former; Luke 19:37-40 for the latter.

¹¹ And I couldn’t very well finish the post without pointing you towards another excellent Shai Linne song called ‘Election’, that explains a lot of the same stuff I’ve been talking about, but in much cooler fashion. Here’s a similarly appealing lyric video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXdPow0lcd8.