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CHAPTER SEVEN
THE CHOICE OF WHAT IS CHOICE
AND WAYS TO AVOID IT
In John 15, we are told that we did not choose Christ, but He chose us, who believe in Him, and that He ordained and sent us forth to bear fruit, that the fruit should remain, and that we might ask whatever we had need of for Him.
Now a point could be made here to clarify. It is also says in Romans 8, that He foreknew us (and next in logical line, predestinated us). At length and in much detail on this site*1, it has been shown that so far from the predestining point being a merely mysterious sovereign act, John 3:19 and Colossians 1:19ff., with I Timothy 2 (and on cf. SMR Appendix B), it all depends on the FACT that He would not have any to perish but INSTEAD would have all, even in terms of the blood of Christ, reconciled to Himself. He is also Almighty and does whatever He pleases in heaven and earth (Psalm 115, Luke 1).
Hence in the interstices of foreknowing us, knowing us as Ephesians 1:4 declares, before the foundation of the world, and knowing who would fall as in I Peter 2, there are aspects of that foreknowledge which are revealed in the divine specifications as to His own nature and desire. NO ONE is to fall (eternally) through lack of divine love, in a sort of apartheid. It is MAN who in his own lack of love falls and is responsible for the non-fulfilment of the profound divine love, in salvation, where this negation occurs and this is specified in John 3:19 as in a host of biblical declarations, histories and protestations at all levels.
Hence the foreknowing on the part of the God who does NOT change (Psalm 102, Hebrews 13:8), and who as trinity foreknew, must include this same desire, that all might be reconciled: but this must not be distorted into something quite different. In other words, it is NOT so that it was not love at all which won, but some kind of deception or deviousness or psychological confusion, as if they were conquered by guile, taken without any relevance of preference, and saved without reference to love, but only as the result of possession. Let alone is it viewed as without reference to the primacy of love, for God is love (I John 4). Hence the love of God seeking its own in this foreknowing, which came logically before it attained its final end of salvation, relates accurately to what it would desire to have, as so often stated in the Bible, but not to what it would gain by lust or force, which is another realm entirely. It was love and it did seek.
Thus to what was in mind and in view, logically broadly and inherently before what it would not gain, that is, the eternal dissidents, John 3:19 applies; their ultimate preference was not ruptured. Just as Colossians 1:19 applies in its vast scope of shrouding lovingkindness, despite the scurryings of human rejection, so the ALL THINGS within it means that the scope of the love of God has nothing left out.
Neither love nor its active need was short-circuited by anyone's rejection, as if to despoil it; but its application was nullified. The scripture does not stutter; the Bible does not flutter. Those who falsify it, flutter around it, but never land.
God does not utter in vain. The divine love was there; its access to those hearts AS SUCH was not present for it did not reach the distant heart, that wanted something else (John 3:19); and love does not shove or deceive.
No biblical theology can stand which short-circuits ANY statement or declaration clearly made in the Bible (as for example, Ephesians 1:4). Theology is servant to the mastery of divine words, and the Lord helps (Proverbs 1:23). Turn and I will make My words known to you, He declares. His word (Proverbs 8:8) is not crooked but plain to those who will to do His will (John 7:17).
Whether God IN FOREKNOWING people
before they were actually invented and set forth in history on the earth,
held in mind by Himself, each one seen beyond the sin in which they would be brought forth when time did come, so that He knew them freely apart from the pathological veil later to be stretched over their rebellious faces, penetrating it;
orforeknew them with sin being a foreseen but penetrated impediment,
does not matter so long as one thing here applies:
His word.
This is an exposition of the word of God, who so shows, and would not appeal to those who like deicide or to decide against Him; but then rejecting a model simply because it is not your own, even when you can find nothing in your own template which works, is logically invalid. We are dealing with works that were actualised, provisions before time, profundities past mere force, not the mere flouncing of variable fallen will (John 1:13). Indeed, when will comes to face what has been done in the mercy and grace of the Lord to institute free pardon and new nature in a new realm, then even the most profound works with mental and conceptual skills way beyond our own, by which we also work in our place, may be turned aside by what what it prefers in the knowledge kept in the heart of God. Then this leads not only to the falsities of error and misconception, explaining their source like dust clouds in the desert in the wantonries of this fallen world, but to woe. Human freedom indeed does not pass intact through the convulsions of sin (Ephesians 4:17-19), but God leaves for dead the inhibitions of fallen man, and and truth is in His own purvey (John 14:6), knowing, keeping and at length taking His own.
Human will creates only what man can, and himself is not among his scope, power, or visible products. Man is a creation. He is not his own author, or a god as product, and if he chooses illusion, it fails him. Man without God is like an embryo refusing to be born. Since nothing creates nothing, man needs to find his own Creator from His own uniquely verified word. Living by guesswork is like trying to find the meaning of E=MC2 by daydreaming.
Physically, some among mankind may juggle bits already made, as in the DNA at times, but the construction of the whole, it is not his own, and his thoughts on it, have literally nothing compared to them; for they require something more, more than man, for their source. The commands to create each generation stay lodged, their symbolism authoritatively interpreted to enable action, according to the writer of the body man, the biological book, creator of the logic of mind, the categorical researcher, and spirit, the licence for imagination, will, wonder and inspiration.
Indeed, cause has to be correlative with result for rationality, at whatever level, and to deny this is to prevent logic's operation, and so is irrelevant to constructive and valid thought. When logic is denied, then argument is already invalidated, for those choosing such a model indeed, for it depends on it.
What then, when we deal with the flesh, the residue still called mankind, thus with what is not fatally flawed, and instead deal with God ? How is destiny appointed to man ? What does it tell us, the Bible ? What is the model that works ?
At the outset, and at every phase of institution, it was His own choice which was fundamental, and not ours. In Hebrews 6 and 10 we find that it is not impossible for any glimmer or view of divine things to reach an unconverted person, for it states the contrary, and they so taste such spiritual things; and when GOD HIMSELF ACTS, we need to remember it makes a difference, and often ALL the difference, so what is not possible with man is possible with God, as Mary learnt. The natural order is not impregnable to or indifferent to the power, presence and action of God Himself. Leaving Him out of the situation in seeking to interpret it, is not wise.
What then of this foreknowledge of God concerning mankind's kind of alignment (Romans 8:29ff.) ? What of his individual destiny ?
We find this, that there was neither necessity nor merit in the transaction before time, on OUR part, for with the former, then the freedom as in Adam, which was profound in the respect of relationship to God, and demonstrably so in the initial utter tragedy, would be extinct, and not merely shattered by the sin which distorts and can chain, enslave and blind. Yet it is far from extinct as man weighs principles, priorities, targets, purposes, acquisitions, impositions, compositions of his own, evaluating as he will. It may be warped but God is not so. He can allow for that and surpassing it, know the actual and final dispositions in each case, in every one.
Were it not so, and sin rules even foreknowledge, then such an anti-biblical warp would point to God as ultimately utterly responsible for MAKING some better than others so that their natures really were the created determinants and all His grief would be a fumble. Such is not the word or the work of God, whose lamentations, grief, exhortations, invitations and intense regret for what is lost is so often exhibited; but He WILL not make man a subject of force or frenzy, manipulation or pretence; since He is the truth! He knows and He foreknows. He is aware of His creation exhaustively, comprehensively and understands the realities He has made, before they even appeared. Indeed, this is hardly surprising, as even our architects may conceive and consider before acting!
This anti-biblical warp, then, this distortion directly contradicts central propositions, basic principles and explicit declarations in the word of God, as in John 3, Colossians 1, I Timothy 2, Ezekiel 33, Matthew 23:37, Luke 19:41, and a whole mass of interpersonal expressions from the God of the Bible, and has no more relevance to biblical Christianity than logic has to organic evolution.
Not only is the God who spawned the tender love of parentage through much of life, such as you see in an adult lion to its offspring, but He is the One who spurned the self-confident brigandage of petty man imagining himself mighty, masterful, some kind of god, a grabber of glory which he did not create, and of that life which without God he cannot even begin to instal!*1A (cf. Amos 2:13-16, Ezekiel 28:9,19, 29:3, Isaiah 37:21-29). A derelict in delusion then proceeds on his own free course, and the fees are very high, as normal in delusion, but especially when it is about one's own and, without intervention by God, one's only life!
The Bible indicates the folly of this. They were SO free in heart and essence, the pathological descent to come to one side, that they could seek to abrogate the divine ruling in the midst of marvels of blessing and joy; and ALL THINGS are manifest with Him with whom we have to do. HE is not blinded by ANYTHING. Hence the freedom to the point remains a status aspect of man in the image of God, though one which may leave him IN himself bewildered by disjunction from the real and operative source of that liberty, who made him.
God however is not so bewildered! He sees the status freedom of man-in-His-image and acts on it, not frustrated but giving Himself gladly (Psalm 40) divine labour issuing in the Cross, for His pains and patience. He knows, in whatever way He chose to perform the foreknowledge fit for predestination, who ARE HIS (II Timothy 2:19); and the issuance of liberty before life begins in normal historical reality for each soul that might be saved. He knows what it would cost, and did, and from the very beginning outlined this (Genesis 3:15, protoevangelium).
The merit of redemption was 100% that of God who paid and removed man from not only a fallen, but an indebted and foolish estate. Accepting a bail-out is not a merit but an escape; it is not meritorious to accept the gift of escape but rather to provide the open door and pay for the opening and the hinges! Accepting it is a preference for what rescues, over one's own way of life and living, and is not to be confused with any pre-loading, initial denial of freedom, pre-bent at creation, .This would merely be a matter of being tilted in construction, lost to liberty and hence to love, of construction as self-serving, demolished at entry into the kingdom of heaven (Luke 14, Galatians 2:20).
It is the nature of sin however not the nature of man's creation which is aborted at entry. The preference is for life over death (John 3:16,19,36), yielding to God rather than yapping against Him, coming to Christ rather than viewing Him bleakly, for a life run by God in His own environment, and not run by one's self-will, where self-rule and ideas of desire, are pruned of all that is extraneous.
If now someone's election by God had been a matter of some X-factor, something which the Lord saw in you, in your character, pre-set in your nature as given, in your style, whatever, this as a ground for preferability, then you would be a mere self-realising spiritual robot, a pretence. Such is not the biblical depiction, and is infinitely removed from the options inherent in the power accorded to man as seen from the first with the tremendous, dual destinies available to Adam and Eve.
Consider then, If something assigned within you worked outside your preference, then what ? Then whether that desire would be for something imagined, some dreamy desire, or for some satisfaction or realisation, or some intellectual lust or insistence on passing all bounds and possessing the universe in a godless morass, yet it would be a chimera, a by-product of the way you were made. This is merely an importation from another model, a baseless distortion, and has no more to do with the God of the Bible, than has a scientist who invents the data, to do with science.
Or is a person so made that what is wanted is something more like God Himself, or some more godly, attractive and leading feature, a thing thus to be desired ? If so salvation is not a matter of grace alone, or despite unmeritoriousness on your part (Romans 3:23ff., Ephesians 2). It would simply express what was first put in you, no more love than the kick of a machine, when the switch is turned. You would be the basis, as made, for congratulatory selection!
To what does this point ? You would fascinate favour, grab attention: and being what you are, would achieve impact ? It would be your inheritance for the way you are made. Such and all such is not the biblical depiction. Your whole salvation is not of yourself (Ephesians 2:5-8), and your condition is not of your disposition. Clearance of debt before God is not in the hands of the debtor, nor spoliation of spirit in the arm of human power. Liberty misused is not God confused, for He knows His own, and seeks for the lost. Isaiah 48:16ff., for example, shows the divine lamentation for the life which COULD have been and SHOULD have been different, not thrust into horror but into peace and joy. The scope for the difference was accorded to man, and man misusing it brought divinely lamented results, vast and understanding.
Yet despite the acute grief and lamentation of the Almighty, they missed the opportunity (Isaiah 48), as did Israel the nation, as Christ showed (Luke 19:42ff.).
He offered, Himself, and even became the offering of the ages, a single and singular death from the love of the trinity, one to cover sin where its holy grant was taken, as those in Israel would formerlyin symbol take the animal sacrifice, now eternally replaced (Hebrews 8-10). However they chose another course, desolatory and grievous to the God of liberty. As Isaiah 30:15ff., puts it, "In returning and rest you shall be saved, in quietness and confidence, but you would not." Indeed, this is not some quirkish moment, for God has foreknown it, and appointed the way, so that nothing misses, whether mercy or judgment, as the case moves from within towards its end. The idea of NOT being in the image of God at all, NOT gifted ultimately with liberty, while God nevertheless in essence preserves preference into destiny from before time; the concept of man, therefore, coerced and manipulated by his created chains is the utter opposite both of observation on earth and information in the Bible.
If anything is far from the ways of God in the Bible, this takes honours! To the humble and contrite He looks (Isaiah 66:1-2), and so provides (Matthew 20:28) that any conceivable prospect of boasting - wherever, even if arriving in heaven - is positively excluded (Romans 3:27ff.). Indeed to the wonders to be found within mankind, at the moral and spiritual level, He is no baby-sitter (Ephesians 4:17-19, Psalm 2). What is better is still profoundly below the celestial! and what brazens life without Him is already on parade. The assumption of sufficiency to move among the children of God in heaven in entire godliness with one's own merits and masteries fulfilled is such a height of boastful misconception that a better destiny is hard to conceive!
IMPOSSIBLE and not merely impermissible therefore is any boasting in heaven; for you are saved by grace through faith, and even that (as the Greek indicates of the entire procedure in Ephesians 2:8), is not of yourselves. God invented the way home, the merit source to enable it, in Himself applied to those who receive Him, the ground for pardon to secure it and the ground of exclusion (John 3:19). Before time, He had His way, before man's very day, and in love selects those whom in His love He reaches, knowing all things and not dependent on our time, which is merely one of His creations. When however it is as biblically stated, YOUR preference which counts before His sovereign will as HE chooses (John 3:19) in His overall oversight, then it is not your character, but your liberty which counts. HE would like ALL (Colossians 1:19ff.), and here lies the beauty of His grandeur in grace.
YOUR foreknown preference is the cited ground for dissolution or deliverance, and it is made clear to Him, not as if you were controlled by the distorted vagrancies of pathological will but as the actual outcome beyond every and any controlling disposition for each person. It is part of the wonder of grace that we have ever been given such a place, one chosen by Him, with our extradition pre-paid as revealed at the taking, so that going to be eternally with Him in heaven is not like hell to those who must be themselves first, together with their own appointees. The desired and the donated are the same; the sought and the wrought freely agree.
It is HE who chooses that it should be so and supervising the reality of response, achieves His will. In freedom, there is NO MERIT for man, since otherwise it would be secretly not freedom at all, but a form of programmatics, created status that led one way and not the other. Indeed, it is not only HIS DIVINE CHOICE but HIS MERIT also which is operative. It is HIS created liberty for man which makes such freedom both normal and operative, divinely discernible whatever the future may hold for fallen man; and as He knows, so He operates.
Part of the wonder of freedom is that it does not abide with constraint, is not ruled by force, is not a mere predictable outcome of the method of construction of the one who is free, but is a wonder amid creation. It is one which man can experience, but never make, he not being the Creator, but infinitely below*2, not a furnisher or fabricator of spirits, but merely the recipient of one EACH.
Part of the wonder of grace is this, that it is not a skewed term, misused and abused, really meaning selective satisfaction. Rather, it means that it does not abide by a merit scale, but provides all, the divine willingness to the divine redemption, the divine power in bodily resurrection and the divine willingness to pass over the huge indebtedness of each and every sinner for a reason as applicable.
That reason, basis, unique provision, THAT is as in John 3:19 and discernible most readily in Isaiah 48:15ff.. This HE applies. It is His choice but by His knowledge of us, despite our coming condition from before time to the present, as He overshadows every impediment and secures His own people with their inbuilt liberty operative in His sight, whatever its fallen condition. Nor is He unable as in Hebrews 6 and10 by any means, to reveal to the abashed heart, the nature of its position as He acts. When God acts, is present, works, what is merely natural (limited or dysfunctional) is overwhelmed as in disease, when a doctor replaces a nurse in the operating theatre.
Much of the wonder of grace plus liberty is that it here betokens a love and mercy which is pure to infinity, a practical pursuit of it which even gives up for sacrifice the only begotten Son of God, and a competence which raises the paid-up body of Christ, once sacrificed, from the dead in an affusion of power which like the love, knows no limits. There is indeed a limited atonement and it is here equivalent to the limited attainment of the love of God amid free persons. Love is like that, individual in kind, singing in preference. What in the end is unreceptive is for that very reason, outside the redemptive accruement, and for them, though offered willingly and more, keenly, there is no payment available. Those for whom He is "delivered up", by consent, have Him as their payment, and hence possess all things as in Romans 8:32ff.. That is one of their distinctives.
As to freedom, it is indeed the precursor and the pre-condition logically, of love.
From the suppositions of making man descend to the surrounding material depths in a deterministic dive, we have the liberty to be delivered, seceding from that confusion as from any others which presuppose what is in principle denied by reason and revelation alike (cf. The gods of naturalism have no go!). While some try to strangle believers on the ground of inserting their own alien, and unworkable terms, their muddled models into the environment of a wholly other realm, saying, See, our ideas set in your approach do not work!
Well how would they, a motor bike would not power a Rolls Royce, and liberty enabling love to be meaningful, and not some surrogate, is the height of wonder. Man cannot generate it but God in His power and all-penetrating majesty can make it operative, even when man would have it degenerate.
Liberty (even to curse God if so desired) makes loving real, decisions moral, responsibilities honest and honourable, and determinism a mere reductionistic piece of contra-real data-flouting cynicism. If man WERE in some ghastly irruption of meaninglessness, determined, then free thought would be excluded and its results unavailable, and this includes his thoughts about himself, and so his theories, which are contrary to the model!
Is man simply controlled ?
Of course not; the ideas of an illiterate and deprived person are not likely to fit into some advanced physical hypothesis either, since he neither understands it nor shares it. Liberty, like logic, is a divine invention for the creation, beyond the anvils and irrational religious passions of the man, whether in universities, palaces or slums; it is like houses amid a wilderness, order amid confusion; and indeed, it gives meaning amid the bawling of ignorance, frequently wilfully shaved off its base (cf. Repent or Perish Chs. 7, 2 , Christ Incomparable, Lord Indomitable Ch. 2). That, let us note it again, leads freely to reductionism*3, where not only is much of the substance of issues ignored, but much of life is lived amiss, deprived and at times, depraved, without the facilities of the spiritual surgeon, or the God who made. It is like removing all mechanics after making a car, a strange omission, but no more real than bad-tempered stars.
Hence when it comes to history, no one need lament saying, Oh that I had been born one of His! as if we were not in His image and yet were to be treated as if we were. The opposite is true and the operational felicity of the Lord is total. He WOULD have all reconciled to Himself, and we know this because He repeatedly SAYS SO. You don't have to be great or an angel; but you do need it to be relevant to prefer light to darkness when offered, Christ to antichrist, truth to fallacy, or at least Christ to any other option; and you need to believe in Him. If you think yourself better, or your irrational philosophy, try it, buy it. But it is more debt that you buy. Buy the truth and do not sell it, says the word of God (Proverbs 23:23). You lost your own (degree of) autonomy, but I would far rather be governed by God than by myself; for He is far better than I, and has wrought wonders to provide for me.
Hence whatever danger, peril, horror, ultimatum from the devil or his disciples, or pangs may be forthcoming, there is no point in trying to blame these things while weakly capitulating as Peter began for a tiny time to do. Instead of turning his weak capitulation into surrender, He FACED his fault and remedied it fast! Since Christ knew and foreknew him, He had prayed for him "that your faith fail not", and so in the end was the result, if not in Pullman comfort. That is one lovely feature about God, who prepares saints for heaven, not devils for hell, for which they have kind of affinity: He has foresight AND is faithful.
A failure, foreknown and forgotten, both ? Does this happen ? The reverse is the case, to such a chain of complaint. God is DESIRING ALL, and each is one of the all, He is ready to save, Almighty to save; and no one and nothing can impede Him in bringing His love (but not His force or any other substitute for love, as the operative instrument of 'choice') to bear. You may be challenged as to integrity in the reception, its motives, its reality, for God is a Spirit and there is no place for anything less than the truth; but this will not be an impossible barrier, for sin is precisely what is borne by the Saviour, Himself in sacrifice adapted for all and sufficient for any. Then, having even foreknown each one, past all pathology, in whatever way He elected to do it, having electing His own, He knows how to keep them, and to this adds both the will and the power (Ephesians 1:11, John 5:24).
The labours of love before creation therefore, are not invalidated, but confirmed, not unnecessary but essential, not mysterious in kind, but wonderful in conception; and He has done all things well.
Incidentally, this is just one place where the word of God resolves issues which confound non-Christian philosophies. There is a rigorous natural side to things, and when you enter this by vacating any place with the Lord, you may indeed notice your own abandonment into that sphere as in Psalm 1; but when you find Him, as also in that Psalm, where the contrast is drawn, then all that is mere furniture. The confusion of this merely basic phase of initial perception with inter-personal relationship with the Lord becomes ludicrous, for you see for yourself. As logic taught (cf. SMR), so experience teaches, and you with Him, agree in the wonders of divine friendship, casting all your care on Him for He cares for you; and the result is delightful, challenging, awakening as if from sleep.
This is what we are FOR, not distempered misalliance with household goods, features and foci of history as if they were our god. Choose that and you abuse life and confuse your mind into superficiality and ignorance. That is why eternal life, His gift, not only makes the temporal and temporary meaningful, and the end sure, but the environment through which one passes on the way, a mere accompaniment and at times a probing test, on the celestial way to the holy city. He is the way; the rest is just a path.
NOTES
See SEVEN VOLUME SET, On Predestination and Foreknowledge, Liberty and Necesity, Responsibility, Duty and Creativity.
*1A There areas of sober science, when it reviews the caricatures and fantasies of scientific method which many scientific religionists purvey, which are acutely hilarious. The mere careful review, because of WHAT it is reviewing, is so like Alice in Wonderland, as a whole world of a different character to this one is continually in view, without acknowledgement, and the exclusion of what fails to be verified, which should methodically end the ambits of false theories, is seen to be ignored. Information is NOT seen writing itself without intelligence, nor are the conditions for making what is comprehensible included in the task at hand, that of having life slip in somewhere. The requirements of setting things within the means of conveying information, without intelligence, are not present. The empirical approach is likewise ignored.
The means and the marvel alike are not present. Dreams therefore arise; but there is no apparent sleep. Alas this is simply the nature of the case.
Such a classic exhibit is found in the Journal of Creation, Open Questions of the Origin of Life, 2014 (Volume 28(3)). The scholarly survey of the scholarly writer because of its restraint, makes for perhaps unintentional satire, and certainly provides a beautiful portrayal of the obstinate confusion of what ignores logical necessity, as found in the topic there under historical review (origin of life thought, OoL).
In the prolonged dismissal of evidence, so well attested here, it becomes like a recording a a society meeting, where they dress in children's clothing. Imagination alone is at relevant work; NO data count, and the answer of logical necessity is viewed rather as one of the old-time ladies with lorgnettes might some social aspirant, that is, most distantly! The works of some of those reviewed may be seriously put, but they are not relevant either to reason or to observation, and thus not at all to science. On this, see
1)Scientific Method ... and
2) DEITY AND DESIGN, DESIGNATION AND DESTINY.
See Ch. 1 in this volume, with The gods of naturalism have no go!
See Secession from Suppositions Ch. 4, *1.