Due to some conversations I’ve been having lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about election and predestination and why I feel so repulsed by the idea that God doesn’t give some people a chance and just predestines them to hell. I don’t think that idea will (or should) ever sit well with me, but I came across this quote from Lesslie Newbigin, which has been encouraging to me in the tension I’m feeling inside.
No one can say why it is that one was chosen and another not, why it is that here the word came “not only in word only, but also in power, and in the Holy Ghost” (1 Thess. 1:5), while there the same word carried no regenerating power. The answer to that question is known only to God. But if we cannot know for what reason one was chosen, we can most certain know for what purpose he was chosen: he was chosen in order to be a fruit-bearing branch in the one true vine (John 15:16), a witness through whom others might be saved. He is chosen in order that through him God’s saving purpose may reach to others, and they too be reconciled to God in and through His reconciled and reconciling people…
And we can also see that wherever the missionary character of the doctrine of election is forgotten; wherever it is forgotten that we are chosen in order to be sent; wherever the minds of believers are concerned more to probe backwards from their election into the reasons for it in the secret counsel of God than to press forward from their election to the purpose of it, which is that they should be Christ’s ambassadors and witnesses to the ends of the earth; wherever men think that the purpose of election is their own salvation rather than the salvation of the world; then God’s people have betrayed their trust.”
I really like this idea from Newbigin, because he says, that predestination or election is a fact that happens biblically and is something that we can’t get around, but also offers that much of how we dwell on it is usually misguided. It seems to me that Newbigin’s stance is that when we ask the how question about election, we can miss the more important why question. That is why are we elected? To be a part of God’s mission of salvation in the world.
It’s comforting to know that we don’t need to agree on how predestination happens, but that we can agree that it happens so that God can send His church into the world.
