Tonight was a little different. I went to another local church other than that one that I normally go to as there was a guest speaker by the name of Patrick Mead that had been giving a series of lessons over the course of the week. I had heard from others that he was quite an exceptional speaker, and figured it would be a good opportunity to hear someone that I hadn't heard speak before. I looked online, and the lesson title for the evening was "Forgiven Much, Forgiven Little", which, as many of you reading this might guess, dealt with the "sinful" woman who came in while Jesus was with Simon the Pharisee. She wept on his feet, dried them with her hair, and poured perfume on them. Simon was shocked by this action, and questioned Jesus in his mind why he would allow a woman such as this to touch him, for if he was truly a prophet, than he would know and would have been appaled as well, because, well, that's how you should be when "sinful" people come up against "good" people. Rather than agreeing with the usual thought pattern of the learned teachers of the day, Jesus tells the story of the man who cancelled the debts of two men, who owed 500 and 50 denarii respectively. When he asked Simon who would love his master more, he correctly replied the one with the larger debt. Jesus makes the telling statement in Luke 7:47 - "Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven - for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little." An excellent story to remind us that we all should love much, for we have been forgiven much. Nobody in the eyes of God is righteous in and of himself. The blood of Christ makes us that way. And without a humble spirit to recognize that we are not any better than anyone else should lead us to a life where loving others, and loving God, is of the utmost importance.
However, that wasn't exactly what caught my attention, as I have heard that story and that lesson preached a hundred times. What got me interested was a little Q&A session, that maybe lasted 10 minutes, that happened right at the start of the service. Of the 3 questions he took, there was women in the church (where he referred us to his online sermons which he said were prepared after 3 years of study with the elders of his church and scholars of language and religion), something regarding the role of elders and deacons (I wasn't really paying attention to that one as it was the last question), and that of the meaning of predestination mentioned in Ephesians 1. And in the space of the 3 minutes that he talked about, he probably made it clearer in my head than anyone else had before. Here's the general idea:
Ephesians 1:4,5 says, "For he chose us in him 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, in accordance with his pleasure and will." Now, some people will take this to mean that God has already chosen who will be saved and who will not be saved. I cannot agree with this in the least, for one, it takes away free will, which we all have. Secondly, it would negate the many, many, many times that Jesus specifically says "Whoever believes in me..." and then fill in the rest. If only some of us were to be saved from the beginning, He would have said something like, "Well, for the four or five of you, but not for anyone else, that will believe in me...".
Looking back at the verse, we see that Paul wasn't talking about our spiritual journey being predestined, but that in fact, God had predestined the journey of Christ as our intercessor. It says we were predestined "to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ." God wasn't taking away our ability to make decisions. He was in fact giving us another decision to make...whether or not we would become an adopted son of his by coming to Him through Christ.
I guess when I've heard it discussed, so many people get to the word predestined, and then something blows up in the thought process and the rest of the verse, chapter, Bible, gets tossed out. Suddenly, our thoughts are controlled, our futures are set in stone, and there's not a thing that anyone can do about it. To me, what he said, and how he said it (to which I've tried to reproduce here) made perfect sense in terms of being consistent with other statements in the Bible, and the fact that God has given us free-will to make decisions, whether they be good or bad for us. The thing that we didn't have control of was whether God would offer us a way back to him since we are all sinners. But from the beginning of time, He had a plan that would bring us back to him. In that sense, I guess it was all laid out before us and set in place before we had a chance to have a say. And for me, that's not such a bad thing.
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