Book of Romans

“Victory through carrying out the Word”

Salvation comes from righteousness through faith; a born-again Christian shall fulfill the righteousness of the law.

 / Conjunctive discussion on the errors of predestination

A few important points:

1. The concept of “predestination” originated from the father of Catholicism, Augustine (A.D.354 – 430), and was accepted and then amended by reformers such as Martin Luther, Calvin and Zwingli. To date, there is no unified doctrine of “predestination”, which shows that “predestination” is not the truth.

2. The greatest error of predestination is that one must include the work of Satan as part of predestination, and to regard the destructive ploys of Satan as being allowed by God and therefore part of God’s good will.

3. “The Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the work of the devil” (1 Jn. 3:8). God and Satan are enemies. They can only “destroy”, not complement, each other’s work. “What do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?” (2 Cor. 6:14-15)

4. If “predestination” really exists, then God must have predestined, before the creation, who will be saved and who will not. Those who are predestined to be saved can joyfully quote from the Scriptures that “God chose us in Christ Jesus before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:4-5). But what about those who are predestined not to be saved? Would they not end up saying that “God, before the creation, predestined Satan to entice us so that we would receive eternal punishment”?

5. If the concept of predestination is true, the most frightening thing is that Satan must play a key role in God’s “predestination”. Because if Satan did not exist, God would not be able to fulfill His plan of predestination for those who are predestined not to be saved! According to the concept of “a few will be saved”, God had decided, before the creation, to give Satan a greater and more important task to fulfill than Jesus Christ. However, “the Son of God appeared for this purpose, that He might destroy the devil’s work” (1 Jn. 3:8). How then could God predestine Christ (the one who would fulfill the task of “predestination for salvation”), to destroy the work, which He Himself has entrusted Satan to do (the task of “predestination for condemnation”)?

6. The concept of “predestination” puts Satan in a position equal to that of Christ Jesus, giving him a central role as one of the two great executers of God’s salvation plan. Thus, Satan is merely carrying out the higher will of God. In that case, the “fall of mankind” is also the “higher” will of God who entrusted the work to the “executor” at will. We should say then that ‘God desires men to fall’, for that was His predestined will before the creation, and God’s will must be good – it is His own sweet and pleasing will.

7. One cannot assert that God knows everything and everything is predestined, yet also say that “Satan destroys God’s work”. If you do, then according to this logic, Satan’s destructive work must be a “predestined” plan and his ploys allowed by God (otherwise there is a problem with God’s omniscience and omnipotence)! Under these circumstances, they would not be acts of destroying (opposing God’s will) but rather fulfilling what God has predestined!

8. The popular belief today that ‘God foresees but does not predestine’ is contradictory since from the human perspective foreseeing is different from predestining. A person can foresee tomorrow’s weather, but cannot control it. Therefore, human “foresight” does not guarantee “fulfillment”. However, to God both terms must be synonymous, because if the event God “foresaw” to happen does not happen, there must be something wrong with His “omniscience”. According to the concept of predestination, all things are in God’s hands. If God foresees what tomorrow’s weather will be, then surely His will has already “predestined” it and He has provided all the necessary conditions to allow tomorrow’s weather to turn out as He has foreseen it.

However….

1.     

If we use the saying: “a time to be born, a time to die, a time to weep...” to claim that everything is predestined, then how do we explain the instruction: “…Let him go home, lest he die in battle…” (Deut. 20:5-7)? If everything has been predestined, then you will die either at home or in the battlefield when your predestined time to die comes.

2.     

When God saw the people build the tower of Babel, He said: “…then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them” (Gen. 11:6). If everything has been predestined long ago by God, then what exactly is God worried about?

3.     

God said: “He looked for a crop of good grapes, but it yielded only bad fruit!” (Is. 5:1-7) This tells us that no matter how hard God hopes to accomplish what He has “predestined”, the end result can sometimes be contrary to what He expects.

4.     

In fact, “may Your will be done on earth ‘as’ it is in heaven” clearly explains that everything happening on earth (in time and space) today is not necessarily “all” out of God’s will, nor is it “all” predestined.

5.     

Daniel asked for understanding, and God sent His messenger to him. Afterwards, the prince of Persia went to oppose the messenger (with God’s permission), at which point Michael, the archangel, came up (under God’s instruction) to oppose the prince of Persia (Dan. 10:12-21)! This gives rise to the question: If these three courses of action were all out of God’s good will, does it imply that God does not really know what He wants? Are they all truly out of the “undecided” predestination of God?

6.     

It is asserted in philosophy that “God has no concept of time; to Him there is no past, present or future but only eternal present”. If that is true, then God is a god without feeling, love, or salvation grace. As far as He is concerned, He has not created, He has not come to the world in the flesh, and moreover He has not overcome Satan. Because ‘creation’, ‘the Word becoming flesh’ and ‘overcoming Satan’ all happened within a certain period of time (please note that these are God’s own works and plans which take place in God’s time, not man’s). And of course, He would never have any “expectations” since expectation means that there is a present and a future. (However, this then contradicts the verse: “why, when I expected it to produce good grapes, did it produce worthless ones?” (Isaiah 5:4))

7.     

“Judgment” becomes meaningless and pointless in the doctrine of predestination because then everything has already been predestined before the creation. Since He has absolute authority and is also omniscient and omnipotent, He will fulfill what He has predestined. Following this logic, judgment would not be based on man’s works, but according to what God has predestined instead.

8.     

Jesus said: “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and, I too, am working” (Jn. 5:17). We cannot help but ask what it was that drove our omniscient and omnipotent God to work continuously for at least five thousand years (not to mention the trillions of years that scientists estimate the universe to have existed) and still not finish. If theoretically He can do things by uttering one word, why has He not already completed what He has predestined all this time?

9.     

Predestination in the Bible refers to the way in which God overcomes Satan and brings salvation to mankind. God does not predestine whether an individual will believe Him or be saved.

The purpose of God’s creation and the process of overcoming Satan

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The existence of Satan has nothing to do with God. However, Satan will eventually be destroyed by God to exist no longer.

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Christ was prepared by God before the creation for the purpose of destroying the works of Satan (1 Jn. 3:8). Evidently, the work of the devil was definitely not permitted by God. It is Satan’s own will to ruin the work of God, who Himself determined to destroy the work of Satan before the creation.

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After Satan and death are thrown into the lake of fire, the mission of “creation” will be complete. Then the new heaven and new earth will come.

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The creation of God is full of His mighty power. It is a severe blow to the reign of darkness (God created in the kingdom of darkness; he created “something” out of “nothing”). As soon as God called forth light out of darkness (2 Cor. 4:6), it was only a matter of “time” before the kingdom of Satan would fall (we cannot assume that God can defeat Satan by a single word. When God said “Let there be light”, there was light but darkness still existed, although it had been overcome). Then God separated the light from the darkness. From then on the whole Bible describes the process of defeating darkness.

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“Time” and “entering into time” is one great creation of God for the purpose of defeating Satan. Satan is to be destroyed by God in the process of “time”, which God made.

In the Book of Romans:

• Chapter 9 of the book of Romans does not talk about the predestination of who will or will not be saved, but rather how the “chosen people” came about. The chosen people were elected so that God’s word could come to this world in order to save all mankind (Rom. 3:2). If those who have been chosen first to receive the word of God do not believe, they will be broken off. Those who were not chosen but who believe in God’s word afterwards will be grafted in!
• The central theme of the book of Romans is not that man is weak in the flesh and unable to overcome sin, or that God’s choosing is predestined. Nor is it about “how can one argue with God?” On the contrary, this book tells us how sin came into the world; how God restricted sin through the law; how through Christ sin was overcome and how we, whose bodies and spiritual lives were sold to sin, were redeemed from it. Henceforth, the lives of the redeemed saints are resurrected and their bodies freed from the bondage of sin. Henceforth, we are more than conquerors by the power of the Holy Spirit and the love of God! (Rom. 8:37)
• “Grace” does not only consist of thanking the Lord for His forgiveness, since this implies that God has not given us the strength to overcome sin. “Grace” according to the book of Romans means that “Christ became the sin offering, so that the righteousness of the law can be fulfilled in those who follow the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 8:1-4), and “if God is for us, who can be against us? If God sacrifices His own son for our sake, does He not also give everything else along with Jesus to us?”; “Today, through the Lord’s redemption, we are more than conquerors!”
• Salvation from being justified by faith comes about when, after receiving this grace and the remission of sins, one can “overcome through carrying out the Word” by following the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8). It is not about being justified by faith, and that henceforth salvation depends on grace and not works.”

After word

The Bible, the words of God, is full of “dynamic power of victory”. If we find that the reading of certain verses or stories hinders this power from growing in us, it must stem from our misunderstanding of the passages in question. For instance, when we read verses such as “the clay in the hands of a potter” (Rom. 9:19-21) or “a time for everything” in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, and find that we are losing the power of becoming “more than conquerors”, then our conception of these verses must be wrong. In such cases, we should oppose “fatalism” and “predestination” with the need to “cleanse ourselves to become noble vessels” and “eternal life”.

P.S. For a better understanding of salvation from the “law” and being “more than conquerors” in the book of Romans, please refer to another article in this seminar: “The Perspective on Law in the Book of Romans”. May all the glory be unto the holy name of the Lord Jesus.