Destined to be Children of God

(Ephesians 1:4-6)

There is and has been a movement within the church for many years who teach predestination. I am not a follower or teacher of that particular subject, at least not in the way it is taught in the modern church.

However, it is evident that there is a degree of predestination in the scriptures and these verses here tell us of one of those instances.

In this section at the opening of Ephesians we see this verse which says:

He destined us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. (Ephesians 1:5-6)

Problems with Predestination

The scripture above certainly says that we are destined to become the children of God, and that is true. All who come to Christ and follow in His footsteps, in accordance with the pattern He proposed and the early Apostles spread throughout the world, are destined to be children of God.

We know also that God “knows the end from the beginning,” and those same words tell us that He has established the mechanisms that will enable those who come to Christ to be His children. God knows that the systems and processes He put in place will work for He designed them so that we may come to Him.

But I believe it ends there. I believe that God developed all that was necessary so that we could come to Him, and He gave His son Jesus so that we could enter into God’s grace by faith and so become the children of God.

The proponents of predestination take it a step further. They argue that every person on this planet is predestined to either come to God or to reject Him. And if a person is thus predestined one way or the other, then they no longer have any free will in the matter and might as well be considered robots or animals of instinct.

If a person has no free will in the matter then they do not need to do anything. They will be accepted or rejected simply because it has been predestined that such a course will happen.

Free Will

If we go right back to the beginning we see God telling Cain the following words, after Cain’s offering was rejected, but his brother Abel was accepted. God said these things:

If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it. (Genesis 4:7)

Now we know that Cain succumbed to sin and he did NOT master it for he murdered his brother Abel in a fit of jealousy.

But the words of God were not telling Cain he had no choice in the matter. Instead God was saying that Cain had to make a choice. Cain had to fight off the advances of sin within and master it or it would wreak havoc upon him.

God also showed Cain the choices, which are the same choices all mankind must make today. “If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door.”

These are not the kinds of words God would say if Cain were predestined to be evil. These are not the words of predestination, because predestination does not offer any choice.

Predestination says, “It is what it is and you cannot change it.” Predestination says that a leopard cannot change it’s spots. The story of the scorpion and the frog is a story of predestination (and is why you will not find that story or one like it in the Bible). It goes like this, if you have never heard the story:

A scorpion and a frog were on one side of a river and both wanted to get to the other side. The scorpion could not swim and so it said to the frog, “Hey frog! Let me get on your back and you can carry me across the river. But the frog said, “No way. You will sting me and I will die!” But Te scorpion promised not to sting the frog and so the frog relented and took the scorpion on his back and begins swimming across the river. When they were halfway across the frog suddenly felt a painful sting in his back and turned to see the scorpion stinging him. The frog began to be paralysed and turned to the scorpion saying, “Why did you sting me? Now we will both die!” But he scorpion answered, “I couldn’t help myself. I am a scorpion!”

In essence the scorpion was saying that because he was a scorpion he could only do what a scorpion would do. He was predestined to act in the way that he did.

But that is not what God had planned fro mankind. In the story of Cain and Abel we see that God showed Cain he had a choice and he had to choose to do right. Cain chose to do evil as do many people still today. But the most critical point in this is that the choice exists and thus the idea of predestination fails.

The Big IF

This same offer of choice is made in the New Testament as well, for we see Jesus says:

31 Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Notice the words that Jesus uses here, especially His first two words, “If you…”

”If you” are not words of predestination. They are words that offer and even insist on a choice. The choice Jesus is giving the people in these few words is that if they continue in Jesus’ words and follow Him, they will be His disciples and will learn the truth. But they also have the option to NOT continue in His words and thus will NOT learn the truth.

But the critical point here that smashes the concept of complete predestination is the FACT of a CHOICE being given.

Jesus gave the people a choice: to follow Him or not. It was their choice. Nobody was forced to follow and nobody was forced to even make the choice. Jesus just put the choice out there for anyone to take up or not. And where there is choice, there cannot be predestination, at least in the way it has been proposed in the churches in some places.

There is also a movement in the modern church that comes out of the idea of predestination that is called: Once Saved, Always Saved. This movement suggests that if you have been saved, then it doesn’t matter what you do, you can never be UN-saved. This concept clearly does not allow for the fact that people come to Christ and then after a period of time fall away.

But coming back to the point about choice, there are many places where Jesus preached and in all those places He gave people a choice. He used the words, “If you…” on many occasions in His preaching, and every time He did so, He defined a choice. He defined the need for the listeners to make a choice. In fact I did a quick count of all the occasions where the words “if you” occurs in the New Testament and they appear 126 times. And you could add to that all the occurrences of phrases like, “if your,” or “if a man/woman/person/etc…” and so on.

In computer programming there is a function that is called a decision making function, where a program needs to make a decision based upon a condition or set of conditions. It is frequently referred to as an “IF…THEN” decision and it defines a point in a program where a choice must be made.

This is not unlike the situations we find in the bible. Choices must be made and they are often prefaced with an “IF” word.

Just taking the words “if you” by themselves we see that there are 126 instances where a choice needs to be made. And if we add in all the other instances where “IF” appears, the choices are multiplied.

And where there is a choice OT be made, there is no predestination.

Destined to be Children of God

This brings me back to the verses in Ephesians 1:5-6 that DOES speak about being destined to be children of God. If there is no predestination, then how can we be destined to be His children?

I believe that the conditions, patterns and processes of salvation have been predestined by God so that we can enter into His kingdom, but it is conditional on each individual making the choice to do so.

To say it another way, God set up the program, but not the participants in the program. God established the path through Jesus Christ, but not who would enter.

Some indeed are called for a specific purpose and are destined to do certain things. For example, we know Pharaoh was established for a purpose, Judas Iscariot was selected for the role of the deceiver and John the Baptist was preselected from birth to pave the way for Christ to come.

This fits with the scripture that says,

”For many are called, but few are chosen.” (Matthew 22:14)

These men were chosen to fulfil certain prophecies, but they are the exception rather than the rule. For the rest of us who are NOT fulfilling specific prophecies, we will hear the call of the Lord, but it is our choice to answer that call.

When or if we do answer the call of the Lord and come to Him, then we enter into the PROCESS predestined by God in Grace and through faith to become the children of God. It is by the process of God’s grace that we are destined to be children of God, and it was the process that was predestined, not the individuals for then there would be no choice.

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