Acts 10:44-48, Psalm 98, 1 John 5:1-6, John 15:9-17
One question I often get asked is how can we belong to a church that teaches predestination. How can we teach that God chooses to save some people and not save others. This cruel doctrine seems to deny free-will and our responsibility. Are we puppets on strings, or pawns in God’s game?
Old First does not ask our members to believe in predestination. No Reformed Church does. What a Reformed Church asks its members to believe is the Apostles Creed, nothing more. For pastors it is different. I am accountable to the official doctrines of the Reformed Church, and these include predestination. Our official doctrines serve to keep my ministry rooted and grounded and protected from fads and fashion. If an official doctrine is unpopular, that may be exactly the point. And I do hold myself accountable to our official doctrines, even the ones I dissent from.
Predestination is associated with Calvinism. But John Calvin taught it as the old tradition, not something new. The full elaboration of it goes back to St. Augustine, and it became official Roman Catholic doctrine, though eventually it got underplayed. Martin Luther revived it as a teaching of great comfort, and it’s official doctrine for the Lutherans and the Episcopalians, although they rarely teach it. The Calvinists taught it boldly and systematically, and the Calvinist version of predestination is what’s in the official documents of the Reformed Church.
I believe that predestination at its core is sound and Biblical and valuable and comforting. I think much of the criticism of Calvinism is prejudiced and inaccurate. I also believe that Calvinism went too far with predestination, that we let the logic go too far, that our attempt to be intellectually consistent took the doctrine further than the Bible does. For clarity we lost the mystery. And for the sake of defending God’s sovereignty we missed the functional centrality of God’s love.
When Jesus says, “You did not choose me, I chose you,” he’s talking about his love. The choosing by God is a function of love. The doctrine of predestination has to be understood under the overarching rubric of God’s love. Yes, God chooses you, but God chooses from love and in love and for love. And that love sets limits and boundaries on what we may say about God’s choosing.
Last Sunday, I said that when we say God is love, that does not mean that we take what we prefer of love and magnify that into God, or that God is the same is love, or that love is all God is, or that there is nothing in God but love. God is much more than love. God is the origin and source of love, God defines and determines what love is, God is the great lover, the universal lover, so that when we say God is love we mean that there is nothing in God that is not also love, we mean that all the richness that God is and that God does is always loving. So then God’s love, as revealed and described in the progress of the stories of the Bible, is a necessary corrective and discipline upon any of our doctrines that we might develop from the Bible, including predestination.
That means that we should not take the logic of predestination beyond the boundaries of love. If our logic suggests the deduction that God also chooses people to suffer forever in hell, then we must not follow that logic because that logic goes beyond God’s love. We have said too much. We cannot go that far. Predestination must remain to some extent a mystery, under the greater mystery of God’s love, that greater mystery of which so much has been revealed that we can evaluate by it.
Neither should we take the logic of predestination to the denial of free will. That too would take predestination outside of love. God chooses us for freedom. God gives us room. The lover loves to give freedom to the one she loves. We are not compelled by fate or destiny. Predestination is not determinism. God has not predetermined what color shirt you’re wearing or where you’ll eat lunch. God’s sovereignty is in love and it’s for your freedom, for your freedom to make your life and to do the true and good and beautiful. Whatever you freely choose is gathered by God into God’s plan for the world, and God’s sovereignty is so deep and wide that it can embrace and enfold whatever you choose with your free will. God even chooses for what you have chosen, God lets you choose for God. That’s love!
I am speaking this Easter Season about the power of God, and I spoke last week about the power of love, the love that comes from God’s love. What we learn this week is that the power of love entails the power to choose. To be a lover is to be a chooser. Love means choices, and choice means freedom, discretion, decision, and the room and the right to make your choice. So today I am saying that the power of God in your life goes through love to give you the power to choose.
You can see this illustrated in the liturgy for weddings. There are two sets of vows, and the first set is the vows of consent, which are the legal instrument to determine that the couple have freely chosen each other, and not by compulsion. In love with each other, they freely choose to say, “I do,” and then, “I will”. In love they choose to love, and from that they can make their second set of vows, the lifelong vow of marriage. This loving and choosing in marriage is taken by St. Paul as a mystery that illustrates the mystery of God with us, the mystery of “I choose you.”
Jesus says to the disciples, “You did not choose me, I chose you.” He says this in the Upper Room, the night before he died, which means, remarkably, that just a couple hours after he says this to them they will run away and abandon him. No, they did not choose him—not what he was really in for. But that’s not the whole story. After his resurrection he gave them the Holy Spirit and in so doing he gave them to the power to choose him. In response to his prior choosing. The power to love him, in response to his prior loving.
That’s true for you as well. The reason that you are here is that you are choosing this God whom you feel has somehow chosen you. Why you are here and most of your friends are not is something of a mystery to you. You are here again because you can’t get away from it. You are here to love the God whom you deeply sense loves you. No one has forced you here. You choose it.
The difference between your choosing and God’s choosing is that God is absolutely free to choose, while you have conditions and limits to your choices, and you have to live with many things that are not your choice. You did not choose to be born, you did not choose your parents, you did not choose the color of your skin or the shape of your nose. You didn’t choose to have high blood pressure and you didn’t choose to get sick. And then there are very many things you might like to choose but you cannot. There are limits to your choices and your freedom, just as there are limits to your love, while the love of God is limitless.
You didn’t choose to live, or even how your life turned out, but you finally do have to choose it, even after the fact. You have to accept it, the life you have been given, and it’s best if you can love it. You have to choose it as a gift instead of a burden, and to choose the life that you’ve been given as a gift is an important step in love. I mean love in the sense of agape love that I talked about last week, that you be hospitable and welcoming to your own life. To choose that is one of the most important choices that you make, to love your own life no matter what otherwise you might have chosen on your own, to love your own life as a gift.
I would say that takes a daily choosing, and you can do that when you recognize that others love you too, that others welcome your life into their lives, that others welcome your peculiar history and personality. We do that for each other—by loving each other we help each other choose the way we have turned, out as gifts within the mystery of God’s sovereignty, and we help each other believe that God has chosen us and that God loves us.
Jesus says, This is my commandment, that you love each other. It’s his only commandment, and it’s both minimal and global, and it’s strange because the movement is circular. If you love, you will keep the commandment, and if you keep the commandment, you will abide in love. The choices you are choosing are carried in the momentum of God’s choice, and the love that you are loving with is carried by the loving energy of the Holy Spirit, flowing through you and out into your world.
Copyright © 2018, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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