Systematic Theology -- Salvation

Predestination

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Systematic Theology

Lesson: Government

Genre: Speech

Track: 10

Dictation Name: 10 Predestination

Year: 1970’s

Our subject now is Predestination. Election and predestination are very closely related doctrines. Election refers to God’s act of choice, whereby he chooses us. God can elect an individual, a group, or a nation, for a particular calling, for a task of his choosing. All men have an election, either to salvation or reprobation, and the election of all men includes every aspect of their lives.

Predestination refers to God’s foreordination of all things, his predetermination of all things in terms of his eternal wisdom and decree. James declared at the council of Jerusalem, according to Acts 15:18, “Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world. They are all known to him because they are of his creation, his ordination, and his predestination.

Now, both election and predestination are very unpopular doctrines with sinners, with humanists, and with Arminians. They object to it in terms of the idea of free will, and the doctrine of free will is a myth. It is so illogical moreover that it requires a very stubborn and willful sin to hold to it, as well as moral blindness. Man is a creature. He is not God, and because man is a creature, he has at best a very limited will. Free will is an absolute term. It can be applied only to God. Only God has free will. Man is a creature. My will is limited, but of course, it is man’s original sin to claim to have the right to a free will and independence from God, to be able to determine our own future and to establish, to know, or ordain good and evil for ourselves, according to Genesis 3:1-5, but man’s claim only confirmed God’s predestination, and man faced inescapable death, because God willed and decreed it.

Now, man is not free to choose the time, place, family, or race of his birth, nor his aptitudes, and future. We did not say, “Now go to I shall choose to be born in such and such a family at such and such a time, a particular race, and of particular aptitudes.” We did not say, “I think I would like to be a plumber, or a violinist, or an engineer, or a minister.” We do not have that choice. Man cannot reorder reality in terms of his own plan and imagination. We can only work out God’s plan, God’s calling, and we can only function in terms of God’s ordination, for neither we nor our wills have any existence outside of God. We are his creation. Never, not for an instant, not for a moment can man step outside of God, and say, “Here, in this corner of the universe, here in my closet, here in my basement or cellar, I can think a thought independently of God, and make a decision without his knowledge.” There are no surprises in history for God. He never looks at any of us, at any moment in history to say, in surprise, “Now imagine him thinking, or doing, that on his own.” Free will is an absolute term. It is irrelevant to any discussion of the Bible. Anyone who talks about freewill is importing the religion of Satan into scripture. It was Satan who said, “We shall be as God.” We shall have the freedom to determine all things, to know all things, independently of God, and to act in freedom from him.

Moreover, the Bible never speaks of a single kind of will for all men in all of history. The freewill advocates talk as though there were one kind of will: freewill. Now, all men are created in the image of God. All men are created and all the variables in man’s being are also God’s creation. Man, in his variations in history, has a fourfold estate.

An old classic deals with this, Thomas Boston’s Human Nature in its Fourfold Estate. The first of the four estates, or states of man in history was the state of innocence, before the Fall. Man’s will in the Garden of Eden was righteous, but mutable. It could change. He was righteous but he could fall. The righteousness of Adam was sinless but capable of being lost. Now, this does not mean that Adam was in any covenant of works and righteous before God by works. No other man than Jesus Christ, the second or last Adam has such a righteousness. Adam had no claim on God by his works. He was created as an act of sovereign grace. God’s covenant with him was an act of grace. Adam standing before God in that covenant was by grace, but Adam’s work, if rebellious and lawless, could bring upon him the death penalty of the covenant, but a changed estate, and this is what happened.

So, we have, second, the state of innocence followed by the state of depravity. The Fall affects every part of man’s being so that man is totally depraved. This means that the Fall permeates and governs all of man’s being. Before the Fall, man’s will was innocent, but liable to fall, but in the state of depravity, man’s will is totally corrupt. St. Paul, in Romans 3, of course, gives us a catalog of man’s depravity, declaring in verse 10, “There is none righteous, no not one.” Thus, it is a serious error to talk about freewill in the abstract. The freedom of man in the state of depravity is to sin.

Third, redeemed man is in the state of grace. He is a new creation in Jesus Christ, according to 2 Corinthians 5:17 and Galatians 6:15. It is now the will of the redeemed man to serve and glorify God, not himself. In the state of grace, we are still capable of sin, but only sin as hamartia, falling short or missing the mark. The sin of man in the state of depravity is essentially anomia, anti-law, being against God and his law. In the redeemed state, man is governed by the word of God, not by his own lawless word.

Then the fourth estate of man is the state of glory. In the state of glory, man’s will is essentially and entirely righteous. He is perfectly sanctified by God’s grace so that he cannot sin. Thus, he serves God eternally, according to Revelation 22:4, free from the curse of sin and delivered by God’s grace from the penalty of death.

As you can see, the freewill argument obscures the facts concerning man. It presupposes a common will concerning man in his every estate and plainly violates the facts of scripture. Scripture gives us the fourfold estate: innocence, depravity, grace, and glory, and there is a difference in the will of man in each estate.

Now, we should add that some who argue for freewill, not all, mean by that moral responsibility. This we can agree with. Scripture does teach from beginning to end God’s sovereignty in election and predestination, and all of scripture teaches also man’s accountability. We are not asked to reconcile the two, but to believe the two. We are not asked to understand the two and how they can both coexist, because some things are beyond us, but some people seek to reconcile these two things, and to this we must say first, that we cannot, because to grasp the meaning and the workings of God’s mind and decree means that we have a mind equal to God’s, and second, we are specifically forbidden by God to raise the questions which come to us at this point.

Romans 9:18-21 is very emphatic on this point, so there are some questions we must not ask, but what is required of us is first, to believe in both God’s predestination and our accountability and second, to obey God in all things. In short, what God asks of us is faith.

St. Anselm, of course, summed up the biblical way of thinking: “I believe in order that I may understand.” What we understand when we accept by faith the totality of God’s word is the glory of God’s ways and our place in his ways. We can then understand, too, why Calvin spoke of predestination, saying it was not a matter for disputation, but for the comfort of the saints. He tells us that nothing is meaningless or pointless in God’s plan and creation, and that “he makes all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose,” as Romans 8:28 tells us. We cannot neglect this doctrine.

The only logical alternative to predestination is chance, and no one can found his life or his philosophy on chance. Instead, what men seek to do is to replace God’s predestination with predestination, or total planning and control, by man, by scientific, socialist man. The result is a move towards totalitarianism. We see this all over the world today. Thus, the doctrine of predestination, if neglected by man, will not go away. It will simply be taken over by the humanistic state, the tyrant state, which will seek to control us from cradle to grave, for man’s purposes rather than God’s glory.

Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank thee that thou hast chosen us in terms of thine eternal decree. We thank thee, our Lord, that thou hast given us, through Jesus Christ, a will freed from the power of sin and death, a will which will enter in good time into the state of glory where we shall serve thee perfectly throughout all eternity. Give us grace day by day to know that we live, move, and have our being in thee, that there is nothing meaningless or pointless under the son, that all things serve thee, and all things move to thy glorious and eternal purpose, and the whole creation shall sing thy praise. Fill us with thy praise, even now, and make us ever joyful in our calling and our election. In Jesus name. Amen.

End of tape