The Scriptures . . . accurately reflect the real world in which we live, and most of us are so well acquainted with paradox and perplexity in our own experience that we understand. Only the arrogant and the dogmatic find paradox hard to accept.
—Richard Foster, Money, Sex, and Power
When I do premarital counseling, one of my standard initial questions for the couple is, “When did you know he or she was the right one?” Couples often have fun disagreeing about who took the initiative in the relationship. One person will say, “I chose you.” Then the other will say, “That’s what I wanted you to think. But I really chose you.” Everyone laughs. It makes little difference on their wedding day who chose first. When it comes to a relationship with God, however, the paradox of divine sovereignty and human free will—does God choose first or do we?—creates an uncomfortable tension at the very center of Christian life.
Does my salvation depend on God’s sovereign choice of me (often called election) or my response to the gospel message (human free will)? Does God’s choice of me predetermine my choice for God? Or is my choice the main event, like choosing teams on the playground, with Jesus jumping up and down, shouting, “Pick me! Pick me!”? How can two choices coexist without one dominating or determining the other? Richard Foster’s comment that “only the arrogant and the dogmatic find paradox hard to accept”1 is appropriate, for we find dogmatic Calvinists on one side facing off against equally dogmatic Arminians on the other.
God’s Choice
I still remember a vivid conversation I had more than thirty years ago with a man I’ll call Tom. His religious training taught him that if he happened to die while he doubted God or engaged in sin, he would go to hell. I shared with him some perspectives on the sovereignty of God, especially my tradition’s belief that if we become God’s child, God will never disown us. Tom replied, “But if you’re saved once and for all, why go to church?” To Tom, worship and other religious activities were paying an obligation to stay right with God.
My friend Tom was right about one thing. We do owe a debt to God. If God is the sovereign king of the universe, we are all rebels setting up rival kingdoms where we can be in charge. This is true not just for the worst of us but for all of us: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Our rebellion against God is something we cannot fix on our own, which leads us to an inevitable conclusion: we need outside help. Some of us realize early on that we need this outside help; some of us discover our need for it only after monumental struggle and suffering; some of us go through an entire lifetime thinking we’re just as good or better than the next guy, and never think we need it at all.
The biblical term for this outside help is grace. Grace is help that can come only from God; grace is help that we do not deserve and can do nothing to merit or earn. And (if you’re of the Calvinist persuasion) grace is help that, because we are dead in our sin (Eph. 2:1), we do not want to ask for or that we assume we will never need. Nevertheless, when we ask for help from God, here’s what happens: “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph. 2:8–9, emphasis added). This classic verse posits that nothing regarding salvation is our own doing; it implies even having faith is the gift of God.
But what if our salvation depended on our faith? A little voice at the back of our minds (at least my mind) asks, “Was your faith strong enough? Was it totally sincere? Were there no mental reservations?” If faith becomes a yardstick by which we are saved, how does the Lord deal with blasé, haphazard faith compared with hardcore, committed faith? I can easily find people around me who seem far more committed and full of faith than I am. How will I ever know if my little faith is enough? There is great comfort in believing that even my faith is ultimately a gift of God’s grace.
A captain looked out from his bridge into a dark, stormy night and saw a faint light on the horizon coming straight at him. He immediately sent a message: “Alter your course 10 degrees south.” Promptly, the reply came back: “Alter your course 10 degrees north.” The captain was not used to having his commands ignored. He sent a second message: “Alter your course 10 degrees south. I am an admiral.” Back came the reply: “Alter your course 10 degrees north. I am a seaman third class.” Incensed, the captain ordered a third message: “Alter your course 10 degrees south. I am an aircraft carrier!” Back came the reply: “Alter your course 10 degrees north. I am a lighthouse.” This is a Calvinist story. Humans enamored of their power of choice to move God have a surprise in store: God is the lighthouse!
Our Choice
I lived for years never questioning that I was the captain of my own soul; “making a decision for Christ” was how I entered into a saving relationship with God. Much of what I heard and read portrayed this decision as the crucial turning point in my existence. Although I never would have verbalized it this way, I must admit that somewhere in the recesses of my brain I took some pride in my decision setting everything in motion, especially compared with people who had not yet made such a choice.
The focus on my decision, however, slowly evaporated the awe and wonder and mystery of God like a pool of water in the desert; what was left at the bottom was a calcified deposit of formulas and doctrines. Where was the mysteriously sovereign God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who seemed to be such an actor on the stage of human history? God had become formulaic for me, a divine machine dispensing salvation if we deposit adequate faith and press the right button (say the correct prayer). My inner pendulum began to swing away from this small-time, bureaucrat god, who only processed our choices, toward a much larger, more mysterious, sovereign God.
Gradually, my decision looked more and more like the tip of an iceberg. Below the waterline was what Augustine called the prevenient grace of God, grace that “came before” every decision I thought I was making by myself. Had God the Holy Spirit been working all along, strengthening me, wooing me, nudging me? I became more and more in awe of God’s gracious choice beneath the surface of my life. I began to realize I made my decision for Christ only because Christ had first made a decision for me—even, according to the Bible, before the foundation of the world (Jer. 1:5; Ps. 139:15–16). I began to wonder if I had ever made what turned out to be a good decision without the fingerprints of the Holy Spirit all over it.
All this might convince me there is no paradox here at all, no tension between these contrasting truths of divine sovereignty and human freedom. I am the captain of my ship, but God is the lighthouse. Except for one thing. I’ve also made a ton of bad decisions in my life, and still do! Where do they come from? If the Holy Spirit is always there guiding me (especially after I became a Christian and God’s Spirit began to dwell within me; see John 16:13), I must have the ability to ignore the Spirit’s leading, squash his guidance, and choose to go my own stupid way. The Bible makes a strong case for this; we can indeed quench the Spirit (1 Thess. 5:19) and are justifiably responsible for what we do (James 1:13–15). Furthermore, the Scriptures speak of Jesus coming into the world “to seek and to save the lost” (Luke 19:10) and of God’s “not wanting anyone to perish” (2 Peter 3:9). It is difficult to reconcile this robust picture of God’s desire for “all people to be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4) if humans have no choice and all is predetermined.
In his classic Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis begins his defense of the Christian worldview by describing in detail the moral nature of human beings. Where does our inherent sense of right and wrong come from? Why do we feel guilty when we violate moral norms? Lewis sees this as evidence that God exists as the source of a moral universe and that we are created in God’s image as moral beings ourselves. Adam and Eve seemed to have genuine freedom to choose to obey or disobey God in the garden of Eden; nothing in the text implies otherwise. Without allowing a free moral choice at this point, how could God hold all later humans responsible to face judgment and the penalty that Jesus Christ ultimately bears for them? Parents tell their children, “Actions have consequences.” But such consequences are monstrously unfair if children have no choice in their actions. Moreover, anyone with pastoral experience knows that people agonize over their wrong choices and often agonize even more over their efforts to make correct choices. How do we explain all this unless there is the possibility of real human choice?
Looking through the Paradox
So who chooses first? I like the old illustration of a door that has written above it, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). When we exercise our human freedom to walk through the door, we turn around and see written above the door on the inside, “And all who were appointed for eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48).
God’s sovereign choice and human freedom do indeed present a paradox. Just as light exists as both energy and matter—simultaneously exhibiting properties of waves and particles—so God’s choice for us and our choice for God exist as different facets of the same reality. Scientists joke about thinking of light as particles on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays and as waves on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays; perhaps we should do our thinking about God’s election and human freedom in a similar fashion.
History shows just how difficult it has been for both sides of this paradox to vibrate freely in tension with one another; yet only then do we hear the sweet note that rises from all the biblical evidence. After an exhaustive study of biblical literature, D. A. Carson concludes that this tension is indeed inescapable, “except by moving so far from the biblical data that either the picture of God or the picture of man bears little resemblance to their portraits as assembled from the scriptural texts themselves.”2 It is a crucial point. This paradox in particular is one where taking some biblical evidence to its logical conclusion violates other biblical evidence. Taking predestination to its logical conclusion, for example, seems to violate all we know about God’s love and justice. Taking human free will to its logical conclusion seems to violate the sovereignty of God.
How might we listen for the pure note produced by both tines of this paradox, rather than lose it by emphasizing one tine over the other? Carson returns to the transcendent and personal nature of God, reflecting that “the way transcendence and personality combine is obscure to finite personal beings. . . . [Yet] the combination of the transcendent and personal in one being, God, lies at the heart of the sovereignty/responsibility tension.”3
As personal beings, we have some idea about what choosing means. God is a personal being who also chooses, yet God transcends our space/time existence, so we really have no idea what choosing means for God. Our Creator’s choices are not commensurate with the choices we creatures make; they aren’t even in the same ballpark. God’s way of choosing is itself a mystery to us! However, as soon as we speak about who chooses first (divine sovereignty versus human freedom, God’s intentions versus our intentions), we begin to treat God like any other creature.4
We remember again the difference between duck decoys and real ducks; God is ontologically different from us. This might lead us to conclude that God’s choices and our choices do not necessarily exclude each other: “For we understand neither what divine agency is (since God is transcendent) nor what creaturely freedom is (since human beings, as the image of God, are like God, neither sheerly determined nor sheerly undetermined), and so we have no grounds whatsoever for assuming that one of them must exclude the other. Instead, acknowledging mystery at this point gives us a deeper, richer picture of both.”5 Thus, in the matter of salvation, it is possible to imagine that God’s choice for me and my choice for God might mysteriously coexist.
As we look through this paradox, one arena of Christian life illuminated is God’s will and my will: the issue of guidance. Do I choose first—make my own plans and life decisions and then (perhaps as an afterthought) ask God to bless them? Or does God choose first—create a detailed plan for my life that I must discover and implement step by step in order to be happy and fulfilled? Are God’s will and my will mutually exclusive, or might they coexist? Through this paradox, we might conclude that just as divine sovereignty can underlie human freedom without negating it, so God’s will can underlie my will. For example, if I totally surrender my will to God’s will and want nothing but God’s plans for my life, what happens when I discover God’s plans for me? I must reengage my will! As some of us have experienced only too well, it often takes a stronger will to act on God’s marching orders. Thus we live paradoxically: throwing down our will at God’s feet, only to take it up again as soon as God calls us to do something. Without engaging our will, how can we do anything?
In my story about driving through the fog, I shared how genuine mystery shows us what we know (or can see) by clarifying it against the far larger background of what we do not know (or cannot see). I will see more of God’s will as I move forward; landmarks hazy now will become clearer as I progress. I can earnestly follow the will of God I do see, without becoming immobilized by anxiety because I do not see everything. If divine guidance is truly another mystery, then the things I know can be seen only against the larger background of how much I do not know; stopping the car and refusing to move until all the fog disappears is not an option.
Finally, just as we have seen that it is an error to assume that God’s choices and my choices are commensurate, so it may be with God’s will and my will: might I be in line with God’s will even when my will is bent in the opposite direction from what I assume God desires? Some of us look back on our lives and have those stories to tell.
Reflection Questions
1. If you tend to land on the “human responsibility/free will” side of this paradox, do an experiment and see how many times God’s choice or predestination shows up in these passages: Matthew 22:14; Jeremiah 1:5; Mark 4:10–12; Ephesians 1:3–5; Romans 8:28–30; 1 Corinthians 2:7; Acts 4:27–28; Psalm 139:16; Romans 9:15–18; Exodus 4:21; Romans 9:22–24 (these verses speak of objects of God’s wrath that are destined for destruction); Ephesians 2:8–10; Acts 13:48.
2. If you tend to land on the “divine sovereignty/election” side of this paradox, do an experiment and see how many times human choice shows up in these passages: Deuteronomy 30:19; Joshua 24:15; Ezekiel 18:32; Mark 16:16; Romans 10:9; Matthew 9:29; 1 Thessalonians 4:14; John 3:16; 2 Corinthians 5:15; Jeremiah 18:7–10; 1 Timothy 2:3–4; 2 Peter 3:9.
3. What does it mean to you, as you reflect on your own spiritual journey, that your salvation is both God’s election and your choice?
4. How is the discussion of “finding God’s will” helpful to you?