Simply put, the proposed resolution recognizes without reservation the true and total sovereignty of God as well as the necessity of human beings choosing, by faith, God’s sovereign will, if they wish to enter His Kingdom. “By faith” means simply recognizing that God’s ways are not our ways and that His ways are higher than we can reach by our own power and wisdom. “By faith” we trust our heavenly Father as an infant must trust its earthly parents (Matthew 18:2-4). By faith means surrendering our temporal rationality to God’s eternal beneficent reason. “By faith” is explained in the book of Proverbs.
(Proverbs 3:5-6) Trust in the LORD with all your heart And do not lean on your own understanding. {6} In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He will make your paths straight.
Proponents of both the extreme predestination view and the extreme free will view argue from the temporal perspective. They appear to contradict one another, because they conceive of God as caught up in “the flow” of time as men are. From this temporal perspective people at the Calvinist extreme mistakenly interpret God’s election as unavoidably deterministic and their responses to His grace as arbitrarily predetermined before they come into being. Hence the choices they make are not real but illusory. From the same temporal viewpoint people at the Arminian extreme see God peering into the future by some supernatural but unspecified means to “sneak a peek” at what they actually do choose in time, in order to make up His mind whether to elect them to salvation before the beginning of time. Both think of God’s choosing and predestining “before the foundations of the world” as accomplished “in relation to time,” and therefore preceding their birth and ability to make their own personal choices.
But God is not bound by our temporal perspective. The eternally present great I AM is outside of time, and so He knows the days and the hours of all of time (Mark 13:32). God came once into historic time as His Son to accomplish man’s deliverance from the curse of time, just as He promised early on in Genesis 3:14-15. God the Holy Spirit is continuously operating in time to convict, comfort, and confirm what Jesus has said and done in time, and to seal and secure (2 Timothy 2:19, Revelation 9:4) those who call upon the name of the Lord.
These temporally perceived paradoxical passages have generated more heat than light, for the simple reason that they are only considered from our limited present moment perspective in time. But the Biblical context of passages regarding predestination and election is that they are written for the comfort of struggling believers, not for their confusion. Nevertheless, this comfort is given in grammar inextricably linked with the temporal perspective, which must use time-encrusted words like “predestine, foreknow,” and “foreordain,” or phrases like “before the foundation of the world.” Since this grammar is part of the way we think in our temporal perspective, it is easy for us to turn words of comfort into words of conflict, just as the factions in the argument we are considering have done.
As an example, let us take a representative passage from the Apostle Paul, which used by the Calvinist extremists to support their position, and analyze its grammar.
(Rom 8:28-30) And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.
The underlined verbs in this passage are in the Greek aorist tense. The aorist tense denotes completed, finished action performed at a singular point, not an ongoing, continuing or repetitive action. Therefore, Calvinists are reasonable in their temporally constrained interpretation that this verse means that our salvation is decided by God before we are born! And if salvation, then also its corollary, condemnation (the lack of salvation), must be similarly decided! When we read such verbs we naturally refer their action to our past, for that is the structure of our temporal grammar. But from God’s eternal perspective, the action accomplished by these verbs is equally referable to our future as singularly accomplished and completed from God’s eternal perspective. I believe that it is this eternal context which Paul is proclaiming to the comfort of those who are struggling and being persecuted for righteousness and faithfulness to Christ in their temporal environment. The aorist verbs in such passages are spoken by the eternal God, I AM, who stands at the beginning as well as at the end of our historic time, because eternity surrounds time like an ocean surrounds an island, and in eternity time is eclipsed!
What greater assurance to those trapped in the ever-changing present moment than to know that God has chosen and secured them from before the foundation of this time-cursed world, wherein they live in uncertainty about what the future will bring?! Their salvation and destination are as sure at the end as if decided before they were born! Which they are (and were)! For in the eternal mind of the omniscient, omnipresent God, the beginning and end of the entire Biblical timescape (a timescape is a landscape with the added dimension of time) are eternally known and accomplished (finished, as in past) facts. Both the beginning and end of time are “past tense” to God as well as eternally present to Him; and this fact serves to comfort the believer in the midst of the storms of time. This comfort is prominent in the context of Romans 8, which begins with “no condemnation” (Romans 8:1) by God in Christ Jesus and ends with “no separation” (Romans 8:39) from God in Christ Jesus.
The assurance of any person who trusts God is that his or her future is guaranteed by the One Who knows him or her personally before the foundation of the world, which is one and the same as His knowledge of the person from the end of the world! That is the comfort, in my opinion, that the Biblical writers, Paul in particular, seek to provide. Therefore, the struggling believer, trapped in time, may be confident as he or she perseveres in faith, even to the point of death, that the One Who graciously bestows salvation from “before the beginning” of time is the same simultaneous and unchanging One Who stands with open arms “at the end” of time. God is fully comprehending and cognizant of both beginning and end of our personal timescapes all at once in eternity. From God’s eternal perspective, which we will all eventually share, there is no “fore” or “pre.” There is only truth! The pastor, evangelist and hymn writer John Wesley put it this way in a comment on 1 Peter 1:2:
“elect [chosen]. . . chosen according to the foreknowledge of God” –
“Strictly speaking, there is no foreknowledge, no more than after knowledge, with God; but all things are known to him as present, from eternity to eternity. Election, in the scriptural sense, is God doing any thing that our merit or power has no part in. The true predestination or foreappointment of God is,
1. He that believeth shall be saved from the guilt and power of sin.
2. He that endureth to the end shall be saved eternally.
3. They who receive the precious gift of faith thereby become the sons of God; and, being sons, they shall receive the Spirit of holiness, to walk as Christ also walked. Throughout every part of this appointment of God, promise and duty go hand in hand. All is free gift; and yet, such is the gift, that it depends in the final issue on our future obedience to the heavenly call. But other predestination than this, either to life or death eternal, the Scripture knows not of: . . .”
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