Predestination

I was almost  positive that Dr. Pratt would beat me to writing on Romans 8:38-39, and I was correct. The fact that I'm still seated on my couch and not slowly drifting into space is proof that the world didn't stop spinning, so I'll move onto different territory. Romans 8:29-30 states:

²⁹ For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. ³⁰ And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. 

I'll freely admit that I've had my struggles with these verses, because one (incorrect) interpretation could be that our lives have already been planned out for us, and we're just going through the motions. For a Christian, this is disturbing, because this implies that our salvation has already been determined. I'll probably discuss this briefly this coming Sunday, but for now, I'll begin by defining two words that are extremely important in understanding these verses.

The first word is "foreknow," and to foreknow something is to know in advance that something is going to occur. The second word is "foreordain," which is the ability to not only know what is going to happen, but be able to cause it as well. My favorite example of contrasting these notions happens every day, and has for quite some time--the sun rises, and it rises in the east. I foreknow that, and absent some pretty drastic circumstances, it will rise again at 7:15 am tomorrow (Wednesday, December 7th, 2011), but my foreknowledge IN NO WAY will cause that to occur. To foreknow something is completely different than being able to foreordain it. We can foreordain things as well--say I don't want my daughter to go somewhere, but she's getting uppity about it. I can pretend to give in and instead just take the battery out of her car--not only do I know that she won't be going anywhere, I was the causative agent in that happening. I foreknew it AND foreordained it.

God knows what we're going to do, and has known it for all eternity. It won't be God's fault if we fall away, and in no way will God cause it--that foreknowledge does not go so far as to write a person off before they're even born. But, if God foreknows how we will act, he can certainly prepare us to fulfill the mission that we will undertake. Free will and Christianity have to be interlinked, because if they're not, we can't be judged for the simple reason that we aren't responsible for our own actions. That would be me blaming my daughter for not having a battery in her car when I removed it. God is mysterious, but life isn't one big riddle that he's waiting to see if we solve correctly. I think it was Einstein who once said "God is clever, but not tricky."

I don't lose too much sleep over these verses, as they come perilously close to angels-on-a-head-of-a-pin territory, and you should know my reaction to that by now--if I don't understand something, I take comfort in the knowledge that it isn't the right time for me to know. I know what I know, and if God wants to increase my knowledge and understanding, he'll do it through the Holy Spirit at the time I need it. For our purposes, all we need to know is that God knows what we're going to do, but it's still entirely up to us that we go down that path, and  therefore we shouldn't go blaming God for our own shortcomings.

Scott