04 November 2022
Some of you are going to call me a heretic.
I'm not a Calvinist. I've read Calvin's Institutes (got a copy right here next to me) and he was wrong about a lot of things. However, I am a predestinarian. I'm not going to defend it; I came to that place by conviction, not by logic. Yes, I'll tell you that's the biblical doctrine, particularly from Romans 8 and 9, and I'll keep referencing that, but by intellect alone you could draw a different conclusion than I. This is not a matter of reason; it's what God tells me I must do.
If you understand and embrace predestination, it does bring with it certain consequences. You no longer talk about getting out there and making sure everyone hears the message of Jesus before they die, or before Our Lord returns. You don't think that way at all. It's not that you don't care, but that you realize it never was the gospel message in the first place. Read the Gospels; Jesus spent all of His time talking about the Covenant. And when it came time to translate the Old Covenant into the New, most of what He changed was a matter of the rituals. He changed how people talked about the Covenant, and restored what Moses dreamed he could do, if the people would only cooperate.
It's not like Jesus opened the door for all of humanity to be spiritually born. That door had always been opened for the Elect, from the first day our ancestors were chased out of the Garden of Eden. Jesus mentioned spiritual birth as an issue before His death on the Cross, before the Old Covenant was closed. So, it was always available on the same terms as it is now: It has always been wholly God's prerogative without any reference to our choices. The Elect were chosen out of all humanity before humanity was put on this earth.
If you could just understand how scholarship and intellect worked among the ancient Hebrew people... They never presumed to understand eternal things; it was all incomprehensible to fallen flesh. The best we could hope for was to turn our hearts to Jehovah and trust Him for how things turned out. Jesus said that was the whole Covenant in the first place. The Hebrews knew about the afterlife. David talked about seeing his dead son after death. Job acted like dying was a gift from God. They easily represent the pinnacle of Hebrew philosophical traditions; they knew there was an afterlife, but didn't talk about it much because they could never pretend to understand it. So Hebrew scholars and prophets addressed it in parables; the Hebrew language was inherently symbolic in the first place. You weren't supposed to take stuff literally until that was the only option possible.
In the Gospels, there is no fevered rush to tell the whole world about going to Heaven. Rather, there was a strong urge to declare how the closed Covenant of Moses is now open to all. It was always about the Covenant. The part about going to Heaven was left an open question, one with no answer in this life. The ancient Hebrews were convinced there was nothing they could do here to change their eternal fate. That was never part of their teaching in the first place. Rather, the whole duty of all humanity was to bow before Jehovah as your feudal Master for as long as you lived in this world. Eternity would take care of itself.
Jesus dying on the Cross didn't change who went to Heaven; that decision was made for each and every human before anyone was born on this earth. The choice of election is eternal in nature; it cannot be handled within time-space boundaries. Jesus died on the Cross to open up the Covenant to all. What that might have to do with gaining an eternal spiritual birth was always impossible to put into words, and far beyond anything the brain could process.
Thus, the common evangelistic message about "getting saved" is a perversion of what the Gospels actually say. It's not the words that are the problem, but the meaning that the evangelical mainstream injects into those words. Living by the Covenant is salvation. It's saving the only thing you have the choice to save. This confusion is why so few believers walk in the Covenant today. They are convinced it's not necessary; they've got their eternal fire insurance, their ticket to Heaven, and the rest doesn't matter. It's why believers have such a poor concept of how Satan works and what defilement is all about.
You want to carry out the Great Commission? Make the Covenant winsome by how you live it. Show the world what a privilege it is, not a burden. The Covenant reflects Eternity. Demonstrate that this life is one massive deception, a computer simulation at best. Our goal is to break out of it by observing the boundaries of the Covenant. That's the path back to Eden. That's how we bring Him glory; that's how we fulfill our purpose in this world.
The eternal fate of humanity does not hang on your actions. The glory of the Lord does. You are under no obligation to talk people into conversion. Nothing any human can do will change anyone's eternal destiny. What we can change is how well we reflect His glory. That's why we bother to keep living.
This is where I stand by the mercies of God.
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