The London Baptist Confession on Foreknowledge/Election

It is common in Christian circles to explain election/predestination on the basis of mere foresight. Predestination, it is reasoned, is merely God looking into the future and seeing what man would decide, and then electing the believing ones. The main point of this conclusion seems to be that it is an attempt to avoid concluding that God actually predestines who will be saved via a decree.

This explanation, though, is deficient on a number of different levels.

First, the Bible clearly refutes it (some quick examples: study Ephesians 1, Romans 9, etc).

Second, it is a self-defeating argument and philisophically bankrupt. You can't consistently hold that God's knows the future perfectly and that fallen humans have initiating autonomous free will to arbitrarily initiate whether they will be elect. Consider this: If God knows the future perfectly, which would include Joe being saved, is it possible for Joe not to be saved? Hence, the consistent application of this argument defeats its self by leading to the denial of its underlining premise. Most modern intellectual Arminians have recognized this dillema. When forced to chose between God's perfect knowledge of the future or their assumption of autonomous free will, they've chosen autonomous free will. This decision has led them to reject the fact that God has perfect knowledge of the future (this comes in various forms: Open Theism, Molinism, etc.).

The framers of the London Baptist Confession of 1689 anticipated this issue and spoke of it in Chapter 3: "Although God knoweth whatsoever may or can come to pass, upon all supposed conditions, yet hath he not decreed anything, because he foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions."

The language there may be a bit hard to grasp, but basically it outlines the following things:

1. God sees the future perfectly.
2. God sees what could happen hypothetically.
3. But when God decrees things, he doesn't do so because He saw them in the future as happening.

If God doesn't elect people based on His foreseeing of their choice, then on what basis does He do it? The confession answers with a very Biblical answer to that: "according to his eternal and immutable purpose, and the secret counsel and good pleasure of his will"

Is this hard to swallow? Sure. But it is the truth! And, really, it is a glorious truth!

Monday's Question

I'm instituting a new feature. Monday's Question. On Saturday I post my Mini Codices and on Monday a "frequently asked question" coupled with my attempt at an answer.

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Q. If God predestines who will be saved, why should we go out and preach the gospel to the world?

A. First and foremost, Christians have a mandate from God's word to preach the gospel and evangelize, so that in and of itself should compel us to do so. We must consider that God's means of saving those He predestined is by the preaching of the gospel. Romans 10 makes this clear. So, by obeying God's directive to evangelize, we are potentially being used of God in His master plan to save sinners.

We need to also consider that while only the elect are saved--we as humans do not necessarily who the elect are. Our duty is to plant and water and leave the increase in God's hands. That means that Christian evangelism spreads the word to many (both elect and non-elect) trusting that God will bless the effort as He sees fit by opening hearts to receive the message. This is just like the parable of the seed and the sower, we KNOW that some of the seed will fall on bad ground. It is not the evangelists job to determine who is elect and who isn't, it is his job to faithfully carry out the assignment God has given him.

There is no contradiction between God predestinating individuals as per Ephesians 1 and a free offer of the gospel to all inhabitants of the earth. People that feel there is a conflict probably have unwittingly accepted a false cariciture of the doctrine of predestination.