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10.25.09

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

SERMON SERIES: QUESTIONS FOR GOD

SERIES 5: SACRAMENTS & THEOLOGY

PART 3: WHAT ABOUT PREDESTINATION?

PSALM 139:1-18; EPHESIANS 1:4-14

• Free Will or Destiny
• Forrest Gump
• There’s a scene near the end of the 1994 movie, Forrest Gump, where Forrest, played by Tom Hanks is standing at the graveside of his wife, Jenny
• Throughout the movie, Forrest struggles with the tension between his mother’s philosophy of life, epitomized in the words, “Life is like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you’re gonna get,” and the philosophy of life held by his best friend, Lieutenant Dan, who believed that each of us have a destiny
• Earlier in the movie, while Forrest was serving in Vietnam, his platoon is caught in an ambush
• Forrest gets busy scooping up each of his wounded comrades and running them to safety
• As he scoops up Lieutenant Dan, the lieutenant pleads with Forrest to leave him alone because it was his destiny to die on the battlefield
• Ignoring his request, Forrest runs him to safety
• As a result of his injuries, Lieutenant Dan loses both of his legs, and he is embittered because he believes Forrest interfered with his destiny
• It was not his destiny to live his life as a double-amputee; it was his destiny to die in battle
• As Forrest stands at Jenny’s graveside, telling her about Little Forrest and how life is going for them, he becomes very reflective
• His next words to Jenny are profound
• “Jenny,” he says, “I don’t know if Momma was right or if, if it’s Lieutenant Dan.  I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it’s both.  Maybe both is happening at the same time.”
• Forrest’s musings point out one of the basic questions of human life: Does life have a purpose, or is it all an accident?
• Do we each have a destiny or is life nothing more than a game of chance, a series of random, unrelated occurrences?
• To believe that we all have a destiny, as strongly as Lieutenant Dan believed it, is to remove the possibility of free will from the human equation
• And to believe that life is nothing more than the luck of the draw, as Forrest’s Momma believed, makes life a cruel joke, especially if the luck of the draw brings bad circumstances to you repeatedly
• The Religious Debate
• The issue of free will vs. predestination has been a long debated topic in Christian circles
• They appear to be at opposite ends of the spectrum
• To believe in free will seems to say that we have 100% control over what happens to us in life, that there is no plan for us to follow, and life is what we make of it
• To argue for a totally free will negates the necessity of God
• Why do we need a God if we have 100% control over our life?
• To believe in predestination seems to make us nothing more than puppets acting according to the whims of a Master Puppeteer who pulls our strings
• If, indeed, this is the case, we cannot be held responsible for sin
• If we are not responsible for sin because we have no freedom to choose, we would have no need for a Savior
• God would not only be the author of sin, God would also be responsible for the sins we commit
• One of the essential beliefs of the Reformed faith tradition, of which we are a part as Presbyterians, is the belief in predestination
• However, most of us have absolutely no idea what the doctrine of predestination actually means
• Ask any Presbyterian what the doctrine of predestination means, and they’re likely to tell you that God has predetermined in advance who is going to be saved and who isn’t, and that even our decision to accept Jesus Christ as our Savior doesn’t guarantee that we will be saved
• That’s not at all what the doctrine of predestination means
• We readily confuse predestination with fatalism
• Fatalism teaches that absolutely everything in our life is planned to the nth degree
• Everything happens according to a predetermined plan, allowing no room for accidents or free will
• My dad was a fatalist
• While he believed very deeply in God, he believed that God had a set plan for each of us and that everything that happened to us is according to the plan of God
• If I were to leave church this morning and get struck by a car while crossing the street, Dad would say that it was God’s plan for me to leave this building, cross this street, and be struck by that particular car with that particular driver on this particular day and time at this particular location
• Nothing I could do would prevent that from happening
• John Calvin on Predestination
• The French Reformer, John Calvin, who became the leader of the Protestant Reformation in Geneva, Switzerland, is the primary founding father of our Presbyterian tradition
• He was an avowed predestinarian, and spent much of his time teaching about predestination and writing about it in his most famous work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion
• While he was a predestinarian, he was not a fatalist
• He believed that predestination related to the foreknowledge of God based upon human choice
• Quoting from The Institutes, Calvin calls predestination “the eternal decree of God, by which He hath determined in Himself what He would have to become of every individual of mankind.  For they are not all created with a similar destiny; but eternal life is foreordained for some, and eternal damnation for others.”
• To simplify this a bit, Calvin would say that, based upon God’s foreknowledge of human beings and their choices, God has foreordained that some people would be saved and some people would not
• God knows that some people will believe the truth of the gospel while others will choose to reject it
• What God has predestined is that all who believe the truth of the gospel will be saved while all who reject the gospel truth will be condemned
• At no time did Calvin ever believe that God chose particular people by name to be either saved or condemned
• God predestined believers to be saved and non-believers to be condemned, and it is not God who condemns us, it is we who condemn ourselves
• God offers grace and forgiveness freely to all through Jesus Christ who came to be the Savior of the world
• Those who accept God’s gift of grace will be saved, and those who reject it condemn themselves because they have chosen not to accept the free gift of God given through Jesus Christ
• Becoming Part of God’s Elect
• The Writings of Paul
• Those who are being saved by faith in Jesus Christ become a part of God’s elect
• This is the point of what Paul has to say in his letter to the Ephesians
• In this section, Paul considers Christians to be the chosen people of God
• Paul never thought of himself, or of any other believer, as having chosen to do God’s work
• He always thought of God as having chosen him, just as Jesus said to his disciples, “You did not choose me, but I have chosen you.” (John 15:16)
• God’s choosing of us to be followers of Christ indicates that even the faith we profess is the gift of God
• If it were not for the Spirit of God working in us, we would never be able to come to believe
• Through that gift of faith that God alone can give, God chooses to bless us with every spiritual blessing, and God calls and equips us to be holy and blameless in God’s sight
• Central to the doctrine of predestination is the idea of adoption
• Paul says, “In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.” (vs. 5)
• Adopted children are special children, and they are special because they have been chosen
• Once they are adopted, they receive the full privileges of being part of a family
• Through our faith in Jesus Christ, we are chosen by God and adopted into the family of God
• God offers to each of us the gift of God’s love and grace through faith in Jesus Christ, but only those who respond to God’s offer and accept God’s love and grace are adopted as children of God and become part of God’s elect
• Those who reject God’s offer are labeled as condemned because, out of their own free will, they have chosen not to accept God’s love and grace given through Jesus Christ
• It is only through our acceptance of God’s grace that we receive redemption through the blood of Christ, the forgiveness of sins in accordance with the riches of God’s grace
• Admission to God’s family has not been closed once for all since the beginning of time
• If that were the case, then only Jews could be saved since God chose the Jews to be the human vehicle through which salvation would come into the world
• Speaking to the Ephesian Christians, who were Gentiles, Paul says, “And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.  Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.” (vs. 13-14)
• In these words, Paul indicates that God’s family is not a closed family
• Instead, it is a family that is open to all who hear the word of truth and believe and who are marked by the Holy Spirit
• The Holy Spirit working in the life of an individual is a sign that that person is part of the elect of God
• The Foreknowledge of God
• In Psalm 139, David expresses his amazement by the awesome foreknowledge of God
• He is amazed that God knows our thoughts before we think them and our words before we speak them
• God knows when we sleep and when we rise, and know absolutely everything there is to know about us
• There is nothing we can hide from God, and nowhere we can flee from God’s presence
• What amazes David about all this is that, despite what God knows about us, God still loves us
• Even though we may seek to hide from God, to escape God’s watchful eye and loving care, God never leaves us alone
• Although we might seek to flee from God’s presence, God never seeks to flee from ours
• It is God’s desire that each of us would come to know God personally, to love God and serve God
• God desires to adopt each of us into God’s family, yet God does not coerce any of us
• God has designed us with free will, and God respects our right to choose
• God is always present to remind us of God’s love for us but God never forces us to believe in him and love him—that choice is up to us
• God knows that some of us will believe and some of us won’t
• God never leaves us alone, but God never forces his way into our life
• Instead, he patiently knocks at the door of our life and waits for us to open the door and invite him in
• There are only two days in our life over which we have no choice—the day of our birth and the day of our death
• The number of days set for us have been determined by God, but what we do with those days are up to us
• We can choose to use them to love and serve God, or we can choose to use them to love and serve ourselves
• The choices we make determine our ultimate destiny
• Because we have been called by God and have chosen to accept God’s love and grace in Jesus Christ, we are predestined to eternal life
• Those who choose not to accept God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ are predestined to eternal judgment
• God has predestined to save those who believe and to judge those who refuse to believe
• God knows what we will choose, but God does not predetermine our choice