Grace Community Church

Freedom to Choose

I have not always been a Calvinist. Even now I do not favor the term. I would prefer to describe my beliefs as biblical. I have discovered, however, that Christians with very diverse convictions all claim to be biblical. These competing truth claims can be very confusing. The Bible, however, contains objective truths, and such truths can be tested. Therefore, just because people claim to be biblical, it does not mean that they are. Someone is wrong, and the only way to find out is to read the Bible. In fact, that is how I became convinced of the doctrines known as Calvinism. I wasn’t reading Calvin; I was reading the Apostle Paul – Romans and then Ephesians to be exact.

I was bowled over by the claims of Scripture,

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. (Romans 8:29)

Also – For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons. (Ephesians 1:4-5)

I wondered why I had never seen it before. There are many other passages of Scripture that teach the same thing. Only later did I connect these ideas with historic Reformed or Calvinistic teaching.

A plethora of people are offended by the thought that God would choose some and not others. There was a time in my life when this idea did not feel right to me either. I never really objected, but I certainly wondered how it could be fair.

While in my early twenties the dominoes of my own resistance began to fall. One of my grandfathers died in 1991, and I remember a well-meaning church leader, who was no friend of Calvinism, encouraged me that there were no accidents in life. God had a plan. Like fireworks going off, I started hearing evangelicals comforting mourners by saying there was a purpose for suffering. As many of them would put it – nothing happens by chance. It became clear to me that no one objected to Calvinism when it helped them make sense of their apparently random world.

Israel is God’s chosen people is an accepted truism in our culture. This belief is so accepted that seemingly no one in the Western world rejects it. Yet, it is manifestly clear that if God chooses some, he necessarily rejects others. In those early years of coming to these life shaping convictions, I realized when it came to Israel, no one on my street was prepared to argue that it was not fair for God to choose them and not others – that’s just the way it was.

After all what is fairness? In our democracy-saturated idealism we define fairness as equal access. Everyone ought to have the same opportunity. Yet fairness, exposed in the light of justice rather than democracy, is what happens when you get what you deserve. Personally, I do not want what I deserve. I want mercy. The kind of mercy described in Romans 9:15 where Paul reports the words of God, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” God’s freedom to give mercy to whom he chooses is inherent to being sovereign.

When a nation claims to be sovereign, that nation claims to have the right to make decisions over its people and territories without having to answer to anyone from the outside. That nation has the right to do what it wants with the people and things it owns. Theologians are fond of saying that God is sovereign. If our definition holds, this means God, like the potter in Jeremiah 18 and Romans 9, has the right to rule over what belongs to him. And, since God is the creator, everything belongs to him.

So why do we object to predestination and election? We are convinced that we are sovereign over our own lives. We believe we have the right to choose our own destinies. We are persuaded that we are free. Consider this, God is only limited by his holiness, which simply means he cannot sin. Nowhere does Scripture say that God is limited by our freedom. As I see it, if any being in the universe should have the freedom of choice, it ought to be the sovereign God.

Learning to Submit to Our Sovereign Savior,

Pastor Andy