Predestination: He Loved Us First

While predestination might seem an unsettling doctrine at first, the Bible shows that this is a wonderfully comforting teaching. Today, Sinclair Ferguson reflects on the absolute grace of God in choosing to set His love on us.

This week on Things Unseen, we’ve slowed down on the breakneck speed of last week, when we took a helicopter tour of the whole of Paul’s letter to the Romans. And this week, we’re going back to visit just one of the sites, Romans 8:30, and its four big words: predestination, calling, justification, and glorification.

Let’s start with predestination. It means deciding on a destiny, deciding the destination of the journey—and doing that before it actually begins. I think I’ve referred before to my old church history professor in university. He didn’t publish much, but he did write a book on the Scottish reformer, John Knox. And one of his chapters is on John Knox’s teaching on predestination. In fact, the one real work of theology that John Knox wrote was on the subject of predestination. As I recall, in that chapter my professor said something like this: “The Bible is a book about predestination.”

I recall how that simple sentence arrested my attention. Of course, God didn’t just let creation happen. That’s an idea that’s nonsensical. I mean, it’s non-sense. God planned it—that is to say, He predestined it. He had a plan, even before He created anything. The cosmos didn’t one day think to itself, “It would be a good idea if I existed,” did it? That’s a laughably incoherent idea. But God’s purposes, His plans, His predestination, involves more than the original creation. It includes our existence, doesn’t it? That wasn’t our decision, was it? Nor do we believe our existence was just our parents’ decision. No, their actions were sovereignly superintended by the planning of God.

Now, occasionally an evangelical Christian has said to me, “I don’t believe in predestination.” Well, I suppose the right reply to that is: “So you don’t really believe the Bible. You don’t believe the Apostles. You don’t believe the Lord Jesus.” Usually, they’ll splutter. But hopefully, they’ll go away and think about it. But why would a Christian say that kind of thing? Of course, the reason may simply be that they’ve been prejudiced against predestination by preachers and teachers that they’ve heard or books that they’ve read.

And yes, along with that, predestination can be an unsettling teaching, can’t it, for this reason: because it’s what we might call a bottom-line doctrine. If it’s true, it means I’m not the one who is in charge. If it’s true, then it means I depend entirely upon God for my salvation. If it’s true, it means God is Lord and I’m not Lord. And so, in all these different ways, it humbles me. And none of us really likes being humbled by nature, but of course, that’s exactly what we need as sinners. And so, predestination is a spiritually helpful doctrine to us. But then once you accept that it’s the Bible’s teaching, predestination becomes a wonderfully comforting and encouraging teaching.

It’s always seemed a bit odd to me that the Arminian Methodist, Charles Wesley, in his great hymn “And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior’s blood . . .” could write that he was:

Fast bound in sin and nature’s night;
Thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray,
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off . . .

It’s actually a confession that we’re not able to save ourselves. Indeed, as Jesus says, we’re not even able to see and enter the kingdom of God ourselves; God needs to bring us to new birth. And all of that means we need God to be acting, first of all. But if He is the first actor, then He surely planned to act beforehand—and that’s predestination.

We should think of this often as Christians: even before we were born, God had set His heart on us. That’s incidentally what “foreknew” means in Romans 8:29. Even before I was born, He had planned my salvation, planned that He would take my broken and marred life and transform it by His grace so that the Lord Jesus would be reflected in me. Isn’t that amazing? What love, what grace, what security, and yes, what planning, because this reassures me that even although I am weak, His purposes stand forever.

You know, Martin Luther’s superior in his monastery was a man by the name of Staupitz, and he once said to Brother Martin when he was troubled by this doctrine of predestination, “Martin, seek predestination in the wounds of Christ.” Something wise about that, I think. I can’t climb to heaven and pry into the mind of God and His plans. I’ll not find any answers to my questions about predestination in myself either, except why I so badly need it. But when I take hold of Jesus Christ in faith and come to love Him, He surely responds to me, “Yes, My child, but I loved you first.” We love Him because He first loved us, and that’s at the heart of predestination.

So, thanks be to God that those He predestined, He also called, and justified, and glorified.