Witnessing Activities
Special Lectures
| Lecture 17 : [Predestination] The predestination of God’s will and its fulfillment, the predestination of human beings and elucidation of biblical verses | |
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| Date created : 2014-12-24/ Views : 943 | |
Predestination
Lecture 17: The predestination of God’s will and its fulfillment, the predestination of human beings and elucidation of biblical verses
Welcome back to our series of presentations on the Unification Principle. I’m your host, Dr. Tyler Hendricks.
In our last session, we stated that God wants to bring everyone, as one great family, into His realm of absolute true love, the kingdom of heaven. Now, you might ask, to what extent is this all guaranteed? Does God plan everything? Or is everything up to me… which means, it might not work out, and nothing is guaranteed? This is the topic of predestination, and we’ll talk about it in this session.
Christians are divided between free will and predestination. All agree that the power of salvation comes from God, but they have different points of view about that. Free will thinking—once called Arminianism--claims that God equally provides his power for everyone, and it’s up to us what to do with it. Predestination, on the other hand, claims that God chooses who will be saved and who will not.
People such as Augustine, Luther and Calvin believed in predestination. They argued that God elects some people for salvation while He decides not to elect the others, and that God is entirely right for all His election. This means that the restoration providence only depends on God. Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza, supported supralapsarianism, which says that God decided everything before the Fall, who would be saved and who would go to hell. It’s hard to believe, but it’s Christian doctrine, and so the churches become weak because it doesn’t make sense to us.
Unification Principle clarifies that there are two points: 1. the predestination of God’s Will and, 2. the predestination of the way in which God’s Will is fulfilled.
God’s Will is to accomplish the purpose of creation, which is the purpose of restoration. God determined when He created human beings that they accomplish the purpose of creation. When God could not fulfill His Will due to the Fall, He determined to fulfill His Will once more through the providence of restoration and since then has worked to accomplish it. God is the absolute being, unique, eternal and unchanging; therefore, the purpose of His creation and His Will for the providence of restoration, the goal of which is the accomplishment of the purpose of creation must also be absolute, unique, eternal and unchanging. Likewise, God’s predestination of His Will must also be absolute. So, from this point of view, it is predestined that God’s will of perfect love in the family, going on forever with joy in heaven and on earth, will happen.
How about the predestination of the way in which God’s Will is fulfilled? The principles, the natural laws by which things work, are set. But God’s purpose of creation can be realized only when human beings complete their portion of responsibility. Although God’s Will to realize this purpose through the providence of restoration is absolute and beyond human influence, its fulfillment can be different and subject to free will by whether or not human beings complete their responsibility.
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Therefore, God’s Will to realize the purpose of the providence of restoration is absolute, but its fulfillment is conditional. God predestines the process of its accomplishment conditionally, contingent upon the five percent responsibility of the central figure, which must be completed in addition to the ninety-five percent responsibility of God. The portion of five percent is used to indicate that the human portion of responsibility is extremely small when compared to God’s portion of responsibility. Yet for human beings, this five percent is equivalent to one hundred percent of our effort.
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Hence, God can’t absolutely predestine human beings. We can become the ideal people God has foreordained us to be only when we complete our responsibility. Therefore, God does not predestine in absolute terms what kind of people they actually turn out to be. Even though God may have a mission planned for you, you have to do your five percent responsibility before you can complete it and fulfill God’s Will. If you don’t, you can’t become the person God has purposed you to be. For this reason, God’s providence for restoration centered on figures in the biblical history has been prolonged over and over. Also, we have co-creativity to affect the outcome, to put our own self into it.
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Now, what about the biblical passages that say that God controls everything and we have nothing to do with it? For example:
Those whom He predestined He also called; and those whom He called He also justified; and those whom He justified He also glorified. (Rom 8:29-30)
I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion. (Rom 9:15-16)
Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for beauty and another for menial use? (Rom 9:21)
God loved Jacob and hated Esau even when they were still inside their mother’s womb and had not done anything good or evil. God said that the elder will serve the younger. (Rom 9:10-13)
These verses are often interpreted to mean that everything in an individual’s life—prosperity and decline, happiness and misery, salvation and damnation, as well as the rise and fall of nations—comes to pass exactly as predestined by God.
These verses were written to emphasize God as the subject of the providence in the history of restoration, which is very important! But the doctrine of absolute and complete predestination, which is believed even in our present day, takes it too far, and ignores the true relationship between God’s portion of responsibility and the human portion of responsibility in the fulfillment of the purpose of the providence of restoration.
We have to read the Bible comprehensively. If the Fall were predestined, God didn’t have to warn the first human ancestors not to eat of the fruit in order to prevent their Fall (Gen 2:17), and there would be no reason for God to grieve over fallen human beings, who were acting in accordance with His predestination (Gen 6:6). If salvation were predestined, He wouldn’t have to say that whoever believes in Christ shall not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). He wouldn’t say, “ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. (Matt 7:7)” If human beings’ birth, old age, sickness, and death were predestined by God, He wouldn’t tell us to pray for our sick brothers (James 5:14). If everything in our lives were determined by inevitable fate, as predestined by God, no human endeavor, including prayer, evangelism or charity, can add anything more to God’s providence of restoration.
We have to keep in mind that God’s providence of restoration can be accomplished only when our responsibility is combined with God’s responsibility. We need cooperation between God and human beings in the relationship of giving and receiving. The fact that there is human beings’ responsibility is a great blessing. God put us in the position of His fellow worker! Therefore, we have to try to fulfill our responsibility in the providence of restoration with gratitude. When we do so, we can liberate God from His suffering heart, because God created us to have a living relationship with Him, and He can finally turn from grief to joy.
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We see that God DOES have a plan for each of our lives, and we see that by following principle and living for others, we will fulfill that plan. But you might ask, centered on what? Yes, I want a great marriage and family, but how does that make me, well, like Jesus? I thought Jesus was, … God himself, and I’m not that! And Jesus wasn’t married, so am I supposed to be married? Our next session will cover these really important questions.
I pray these words may really move your heart. Thanks for listening.
