One of you will say to me: “Then why does God still blame us? For who is able to resist his will?” But who are you, a human being, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, “Why did you make me like this?” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?
Some years ago, I solved a problem which had been bugging me: predestination.
Predestination is a Bible word describing God’s choice of individuals to be saved in Christ, which He then sovereignly brings about. The idea is widespread across the New Testament, and comes perhaps most famously in Ephesians 1:4-5, where Pauls says that God chose us in [Christ] before the creation of the world, and that in love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ.
In its context in Ephesians it’s easy to understand: Paul links predestination with adoption, and it’s parents who choose children for adoption, not children their parents.
It’s also easy to understand in Christian experience, when we reflect on all sorts of circumstances which were outside our control which led to our conversion. Once we’ve understood what Paul goes on to say in the next chapter of Ephesians – that we were dead (and therefore unable to turn to God) on account of our sins, the fact that our conversion must be the result of God’s prior work becomes even clearer.
Easy to understand in these ways, but also hard. Is God fair? Where is human responsibility? This bugged me, and bugs many Christians.
Some have been so troubled by the idea that they have proposed alternative solutions – a common one being that predestination is really another word for God’s foreknowledge that we would turn to Him. However, in Ephesians, God is not just an onlooker but clearly a driver of the process. Inescapably, we have to conclude that predestination is clearly taught in the Bible.
So what solution did I find? The key lies in the quote from Paul’s letter to the Romans, at the head of this post. The context is remarkably similar: people worrying about God’s sovereign choice. Paul’s answer: don’t try being a pot telling the potter how to do his job! I came to realise that – if I may put it reverently – predestination is God’s problem, not mine. It is not for me to tell our Creator how to run the universe. He is infinite; I am finite. All I know of Him in the Bible points to His justice and love; and I know I can trust Him, and leave these things with Him. And so I do!
That is not to say we are not to think deeply about this, as a great Bible truth. More reflections here, in case they help.
But all the while we must, as C S Lewis memorably put it, “Let God be God”.
