Jesus Only, Part Four
I have watched two good men lose a friendship over a doctrine neither of them will ever fully understand.
It was late. The coffee had gone cold hours ago and somebody had switched to something stronger. One of them was Reformed down to the bone, the kind of man who can quote the Westminster Confession and mean every word of it. The other was a Baptist of the free-will persuasion, just as serious about his Bible, just as in love with the same Lord. And they went at it. Election. Predestination. Does God choose us or do we choose Him. Round and round, past midnight, voices rising, each one sure the other was one bad conclusion away from heresy.
They did not speak for a year.
A year. Two men who would both, without a second’s hesitation, have died for Jesus Christ, and they let a question about the mechanics of how He saves people put a wall between them that took a funeral to finally tear down. They stood over the casket of a mutual friend and remembered, too late, that they were brothers.
I have never forgotten it. Because both of them were partly right, and both of them made the same mistake, and it was not a mistake about doctrine. It was a mistake about what a doctrine is for.
Let me be fair to both, because this is real and it is not silly.
The Reformed man is guarding something precious. He has read his Bible and he has found God everywhere at the wheel. “It is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy.” (Romans 9:16) He has read that before the foundation of the world God “chose us in Him” and “predestined us to adoption as sons.” (Ephesians 1:4-5) And he is terrified, rightly, of any theology that makes salvation finally depend on the strength of a sinner’s own decision. He wants God to get all the glory, because he knows his own heart, and he knows that if any part of his rescue rested on him, he would find a way to sink the boat. That is not arrogance. That is worship.
The Baptist across the table is guarding something precious too. He has also read his Bible, and he has found a God who pleads, who calls, who weeps over a city that would not come. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish.” (John 3:16) Whoever. He has heard Jesus cry out that He longed to gather Jerusalem “as a hen gathers her chicks, but you were not willing.” (Matthew 23:37) And he is terrified, rightly, of any theology that makes God the author of a person’s damnation or turns the free offer of the Gospel into a rigged game. He wants the “whoever” to mean whoever. That is not rebellion. That is love for the lost.
Now look at what just happened. Both men are protecting the character of God. One is guarding His sovereignty. The other is guarding His goodness. And God is not embarrassed by either one.
The words themselves will not settle it, though we keep hoping they will.
Proorizō (προορίζω, G4309) means to mark out or determine beforehand. It is a real word and Paul really uses it and it really means what it says. God predetermined. That is in the Book and you cannot preach it away.
Eklektos (ἐκλεκτός, G1588) means chosen, selected, picked out. Also real. Also in the Book. The people of God are called the elect all through the New Testament, and no honest reader gets to delete it.
But here is what neither word does. Neither one tells you the thing you most want to know, which is exactly how divine choosing and human believing fit together inside the mind of a God who lives outside of time. The Bible holds both. It says God chose you before you were born, and it says whoever believes will be saved, and it says both without the slightest anxiety, on the same pages, sometimes in the same breath. The tension you feel is not a flaw in Scripture. It is the edge of a mystery too big for the size of your head, and mine.
Men far smarter than either of us have spent centuries down in that mine and come up with lanterns, not sunlight. That should make us humble. It usually makes us louder.
Here is the thing I want to set right down in the middle of the table where both men can see it.
The Philippian jailer was saved that night without ever hearing the word “predestination.” Nobody handed him a diagram of the decrees. Paul did not walk him through the ordo salutis before letting him believe. Paul said “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved,” and the man believed, and he was saved, and the theology of exactly how the choosing worked was a conversation for another day. (Acts 16:31)
So were you saved that way. You came to Jesus with a mustard seed of trust and a hundred things you did not understand, and He received you. He did not quiz you on the sovereignty of God at the door. If He had, none of us would be inside.
Which means this. Predestination is a family conversation, not a property line. It is the kind of thing brothers argue about at the same table, passing the same bread, because they already belong to the same Father. The Reformed man and the free-will Baptist are not standing on opposite sides of the Gospel. They are standing inside it, both of them, holding two true things that God never asked them to reconcile before He would love them.
So let me say the honest, firm word, because this series does not dodge those.
If you have made your position on election a fence, a checkpoint, a thing a person must get right before you will call them brother or sister, you have taken a mystery God left open and slammed it shut as a weapon. You have done to your predestination what the men in Galatia did to their circumcision. You have added it to Jesus. And the moment you make being right about the decrees a condition of belonging, you are no longer defending the sovereignty of God. You are defending the sovereignty of your own opinion.
Hold the doctrine. Hold it with conviction. Study it, preach it, love it, argue it late into the night if you want to, over cold coffee and warmer drinks, the way brothers do. But hold your brother tighter than you hold your certainty. Because one of you is probably more right than the other about the mechanics, and neither of you will know for sure this side of glory, and you were never saved by getting it right in the first place.
You were saved because you believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. Same as the jailer. Same as the man across the table you stopped speaking to.
Do not wait for the funeral. Call your brother.
Next in the series, The Spirit Fence. A believer sits in a service and quietly wonders if God skipped him, because somebody taught him that without a certain experience he only has half the Gospel.
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