chosen and free

chapter one

a mystery we were never meant to master

Let me begin with a distinction that has brought me a great deal of peace. There is a difference between a truth God has hidden and a truth God has made plain but we simply do not like. We must never call disobedience mystery. If the Lord has spoken clearly, our business is to bow. But when He has spoken clearly on two sides of a matter and has not shown us the join between them, our business is not to manufacture the missing piece and then preach our invention as though it came down from Sinai.

We already know how to live with this in the very center of the faith. We believe one God in three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and every honest Christian knows that he can state that truth far better than he can comprehend it. We believe the Lord Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, one Person in two natures, and the old church councils did not explain that mystery until no questions remained. They did something wiser. They guarded what Scripture had said and refused the ditches on either side.³

There is something wonderfully freeing in that. You are allowed to reach the end of what God has revealed and stop. You are allowed to say, I believe both things because the Book says both things, and I do not know how the Lord holds them together in His infinite mind. That is not intellectual laziness. Sometimes it is the first honest thing a theologian has said all afternoon.

We have very small heads, My Friend, and a very great God.

Look at the matter before us. Paul says that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. The Lord says that no man can come to Him except the Father draw him. And the same Bible turns around and says, whosoever will, let him come; be ye reconciled to God; today, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts. Election is there. Drawing is there. Command is there. Invitation is there. Responsibility is there. I cannot make Ephesians 1 disappear because Revelation 22 makes my system uncomfortable, and I will not make Revelation 22 shrink because Ephesians 1 is inconvenient.⁴

The Book holds both without embarrassment. I think we should learn from the Book.

So this is the first stake in the ground: I do not believe election is a mistake, and I do not believe human response is theater. I believe God means what He says on both sides. If He has chosen not to show me the hidden machinery by which His sovereignty and my willing act meet without contradiction, I can live with that. The creature does not become wiser by demanding the Creator explain Himself past what He has revealed.

chapter two

the old argument and the two ditches

The words Calvinist and Arminian have gathered so much dust and heat over the centuries that sometimes it helps to remember there were actual people under them. Jacobus Arminius was a Dutch Reformed theologian who died in 1609. His followers set out five disputed articles the following year, and the Synod of Dort answered them in 1618 and 1619. That old exchange sits behind much of the argument Christians are still having today, only now we have comment sections to make it louder.⁵

The two sides begin, I think, by seeing two real dangers. The Arminian looks at Scripture and hears the wideness of the invitation: God loved the world, Christ died for men, the sinner is called to repent and believe, grace may be resisted, and the refusal is really his. The Calvinist looks at the same Book and sees the helplessness of fallen man and the glory of sovereign grace: we were dead, not merely sick; God acts first; salvation is of the Lord; nobody will be standing in Heaven one day polishing a little medal that says I supplied the decisive part.

Both are guarding something worth guarding.

And both can run too far.

There is a man-centered way of speaking about free will that makes faith sound almost like the one good work the sinner managed to contribute. God did 99 things, I did the last one, and therefore I am here while my foolish neighbor is not. No. If there is one thing the gospel will not tolerate, it is boasting. Grace gets all the glory or it is not grace.

But there is a ditch on the other side too, where the decree becomes so total in our telling of it that the invitations, warnings, pleadings, and tears of Scripture begin to sound like scenery around a decision already doing all the meaningful work. Hyper-Calvinism has gone there openly at times, restricting the free offer of Christ and cooling the urgency of evangelism. Historic Calvinism is not the same thing, and I will not pretend it is. The Reformed confessions themselves say that God ordains the means as well as the end and that the gospel is to be preached.⁶ But the ditch exists because the logic can pull that direction when it is pressed past the text.

A gospel that gives the sinner something to boast in is too small. A gospel invitation that cannot be honestly laid before every sinner is too small too.

So I am not asking which label makes us feel safest. I am asking what the Bible will not let us surrender. God is sovereign. Man is responsible. Salvation is all of grace. The offer is real. Those four stakes are going to stay in the ground, even if they ruin somebody's neat little fence line.

chapter three

reading the five points

You know the flower: TULIP. Total depravity. Unconditional election. Limited atonement. Irresistible grace. Perseverance of the saints. The little English flower came later than Dort, but it is useful enough for our purposes, and nearly everyone knows what you mean when you say it.⁷

Start with total depravity. I have very little quarrel here, provided we mean what the doctrine actually means. Total does not mean every man is as wicked as he could possibly become. It means sin has touched the whole man: mind, will, affections, desires, all of him. There is no clean little room inside fallen humanity from which a sinner climbs the stairs to God unaided. We were dead in trespasses and sins. There is none that seeketh after God. The sheep had all gone astray before the Shepherd came looking.

That is why I have no interest in a theology that makes the first great move toward salvation man's move. It was God's. He sent the Son. He sends the gospel. He convicts. He draws. He opens blind eyes. Whatever place we give the human response, grace was standing there before the sinner ever knew enough to respond.

Unconditional election is harder to fit into a tidy human scheme, but the verses behind it are not hiding. God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. His purpose according to election is not of works, but of Him that calleth. I do not believe my salvation began when I finally made a sensible decision. I believe God knew His own before any of us had a birthday to put on a calendar. That truth does not frighten me. It comforts me.

And perseverance, or the security of the believer, is sweeter still. The child of God is not being kept by the strength of his grip on Christ. Christ is keeping him. The Shepherd gives His sheep eternal life and says they shall never perish. I am deeply grateful for that, because I would make a miserable keeper of myself.

Then we come to the two petals where I begin to part company: irresistible grace and, especially, limited atonement. And let us say the latter correctly. The careful Calvinist does not mean there was somehow not enough value in the blood of Christ for the whole world. Dort itself speaks of the death of Christ as infinitely sufficient. The claim is about design: that in the saving intention of the atonement, Christ died particularly for the elect.⁸

There. We have stated it fairly. Now I am going to disagree with it.

Because when I read the New Testament, I find the Spirit choosing words that keep opening outward: world, whole world, all men, every man, whosoever. And I have never been persuaded that the best way to protect the sovereignty of God is to spend page after page teaching those words to mean something smaller than they first appear to mean.

chapter four

for whom did christ die?

This is the place where the whole argument gets very simple for me, My Friend. For whom did Christ die? Not what does my system require Him to have meant. What do the apostles actually say?

Begin where children begin.

World is kosmos. Yes, the word can carry different shades in different places; every word can. But John does not leave us with only one use of it. In his first epistle he writes:

That sentence has always stopped me. Not for ours only, but also for the whole world. Propitiation is hilasmos, the satisfaction of wrath, the sacrificial provision by which sin is answered. The usual Reformed answer is that John means the elect throughout the world, or believers not from one people only but from all nations. I know the answer. I simply do not believe it is what the sentence most naturally says. John has already given us an ours, and then deliberately reaches beyond it.⁹

Paul writes that God “will have all men to be saved,” and that Christ “gave himself a ransom for all.” Hebrews says He tasted death “for every man.” Peter can even speak of false teachers who deny “the Lord that bought them.” The explanations come quickly: all means all kinds, every man is read in a particular frame, bought means something less than redemptive purchase. Some of those arguments are clever. Some are serious. But after a while I find myself looking at the pile of qualifications and then back at the plain words on the page.¹⁰

World. Whole world. All. Every man.

I am reluctant to build a doctrine whose maintenance requires all four to keep shrinking in the same direction.

Now do not run into the other ditch. To say Christ died for all is not to say all are saved. The gift may be provided and genuinely offered without being received. Scripture never teaches universal salvation. It teaches salvation in Christ received through faith, and judgment for the one who refuses Him. Even the old Remonstrance made that distinction plainly: the death is for all, while forgiveness is enjoyed by those who believe.¹¹

So the question is not whether every man is saved. He plainly is not. The question is whether I may look any man in the eye and say, without an invisible footnote, Christ died for you; there is room for you at the cross; if you will come, you will be received. I believe I may. More than that, I believe the language of the Book positively invites me to.

chapter five

the door with writing on both sides

There is an old illustration from Harry Ironside that I have loved for years, because it lets the mystery stay a mystery and somehow makes it easier to breathe around it. Picture a door, My Friend. You are standing outside it, a sinner needing Christ, and over the door are the words:

That is what you can see from where you stand. There is no list of the elect tacked beside the handle. There is no little examination you must pass before you may knock. The word facing you is whosoever. You are thirsty? Come. You are weary? Come. You are guilty? Come. You have made a wreck of things? Come.¹²

So you come. You believe on Christ. You pass through the door. And then you turn around, and on the inside you find another inscription:

There it is. From the outside: whosoever. From the inside: chosen.

I do not want to sand either sentence off the door.

Election, rightly held, is not a cold notice hung outside the gospel telling frightened sinners to determine whether they are welcome. It is a family truth discovered in Christ, and it is beautiful. You came to Him, and then you discover that the grace which met you was not an emergency measure God invented after you surprised Him. Your salvation is rooted in a purpose older than the world. You were loved before you knew enough to ask for love. If that makes you proud, you have managed to misunderstand one of the humblingest truths in the Bible.

And the outside inscription is not decoration. When the Spirit and the bride say come, I believe they mean come. When Christ says the one who comes to Him He will in no wise cast out, I believe I can hand that promise to any soul alive. No sinner will ever stand before God and say, I came to Christ and discovered there was no Savior there for me.

The Book gives me both sides of the door. It does not give me the hinge. I can leave the hinge with God.

chapter six

the answer from the other side

Now there is an answer to all this from the five-point Calvinist, and it deserves enough space to be heard. He will tell me, quite correctly, that election does not make evangelism unnecessary in his system. God ordains the means as well as the end. The elect are gathered through the preaching of the gospel. Paul must preach, missionaries must go, sinners must hear. The historic Reformed confessions say exactly that.¹³

Good. I am glad they do.

But that is not where my difficulty lies.

My difficulty is smaller and sharper. If Christ, in the saving intention of His death, died only for a fixed company of elect persons, what precisely may I say to the particular lost person sitting across from me? May I say Christ died for you? Not merely, Christ died for sinners and if you are elect the provision is yours. Not merely, there is infinite value in His death. May I say to this actual man, with his actual name and his actual sins, Christ gave Himself for you, and you may reject that mercy to your own ruin?

The Calvinist has distinctions ready. There is the outward call to all and the inward effectual call to the elect. There is sufficiency for all and intention for the elect. There is the promise that every believer will be saved, so the preacher may sincerely call every hearer to believe. I understand the distinctions.¹⁴ I simply think the New Testament speaks more freely than the system allows me to speak.

When John says whole world, I want to say whole world. When Paul says ransom for all, I want to say ransom for all. When Revelation says whosoever, I want to fling that word as far as the Spirit flung it. I do not think God needs me to protect His sovereignty by putting a fence around an invitation He left open.

And let me say this plainly, because here I do not want the kindness of the tone to blur the conviction. I believe limited atonement is wrong. I believe it takes a conclusion drawn from a system and uses that conclusion to narrow words which, left to themselves, are wider. I believe the better reading is that Christ's death is genuinely provided for the world and savingly applied to those who believe.

That does not make my Calvinist brother my enemy. It makes him my brother with whom I disagree about a doctrine. The difference matters. The brother matters more.

chapter seven

when doctrine comes home

Theology never stays in the study. Sooner or later it follows somebody home.

It sits beside a frightened teenager at two in the morning. It rides in the car with the woman who has sinned badly and is wondering whether she has finally outrun mercy. It whispers to the old saint who has walked with God for fifty years and suddenly finds himself in a season of doubt. This is one reason I care about the way we speak of election. A theologian may carry six careful qualifications in his head at once. The wounded soul in the pew may hear only one sentence.

I have watched the fear take root in a real person: What if I am simply not one of the elect? What if Christ did not die for me? What if there is nothing I can do because the answer was no before I was born? I am not presenting one person's fear as an exegetical proof. People can misunderstand good doctrine, and frightened hearts can make a maze out of almost anything. But I would be lying if I told you the pastoral fruit did not matter to me. It does.

And I know very well that good Reformed pastors do not send a trembling sinner hunting through the secret decree. Their own confessions warn against that. They point him to Christ and the promises of the gospel.¹⁵ On that point I am glad to stand beside them and say the same thing: stop staring into Heaven trying to read a page God did not hand you. Look at Christ.

Where I part company is over how wide I believe I may make that promise. I want the frightened soul able to hear whosoever and know that he has not been secretly edited out of the word. I want him able to read “God so loved the world” without immediately being handed a theological pencil to erase himself from world. I want the lost man to know that if he perishes, it will not be because he came to an open-armed Savior and found the arms closed.

That is not sentimentality. It is what I believe the verses say.

So yes, I care about the fruit. I care what doctrines do when they leave the lecture hall and sit down beside ordinary people. But the final test is still the Book. I do not reject limited atonement merely because it can trouble a soul. I reject it because I believe the text is wider, and I am very glad that the wider reading gives me a gospel I can place in any trembling hand without an asterisk.

chapter eight

whosoever will

After all these pages of systems, come back with me to the sound of the gospel itself. It does not sound like a seminar. It sounds like somebody standing in the street calling thirsty people to water.

Come. That is the word.

Not earn. Not qualify yourself. Not discover whether your name is hidden somewhere in the decree. Come.

Now I want to guard grace with both hands here, because human freedom can be preached just as badly as sovereignty. The sinner does not generate the grace that saves him. God gets there first. The Father draws. The Spirit convicts. The Word gives light. Christ has already done the saving work before the sinner ever hears the invitation.¹⁶ You did not build the fountain because you drank from it.

Receiving a gift is not earning the gift.

That is why I have no patience with the little picture in which God has done His part, Satan has done his, and now the poor sinner stands in the middle holding the deciding vote which will make salvation finally happen. No. Salvation is of the Lord from beginning to end. If you are saved, you will never have one inch of ground on which to boast before Him.

And yet the same Scripture speaks to your will as a real will. Jesus said to men, “ye will not come to me, that ye might have life.” Stephen accused his hearers of resisting the Holy Ghost. The Lord looked over Jerusalem and said, “I would... and ye would not.” Those are terrible words if refusal means nothing.¹⁷

So I prefer the word responsibility to autonomy. Man is not autonomous. He is not a small god standing outside providence with a sovereign little will of his own. His will is fallen, bounded, influenced, creaturely, and in desperate need of grace. But he is not a chair either. God addresses him, calls him, warns him, pleads with him, and judges his refusal as truly his.

Chosen and free, then, does not mean half God and half man. It means God is sovereign and man is responsible, grace is first and the response is real, salvation is all of God and unbelief is still truly ours. I cannot draw the geometry of that for you. I am increasingly content not to.

chapter nine

keep your eyes on the road

C. S. Lewis once observed that errors have a troublesome habit of arriving in opposite pairs, and that our great hatred of one error can become the very thing that drives us straight into the other. He was not writing about Calvinism and Arminianism, but I cannot read the thought without seeing this old argument all over it.¹⁸

One man sees the pride of man-centered religion and runs from it. Good. Run. The sinner does not save himself, and any doctrine that leaves him polishing a medal at the end has gone badly wrong. But if he keeps running after he has reached the road, he can tumble down the other side until the invitations and warnings of Scripture begin to lose their plainness and everything is swallowed by the decree.

The other man sees that cold ditch and runs the opposite way. Good again. Run from any gospel that cannot cry come with its whole heart. But if he keeps running, he may soon be speaking as though grace were only assistance and the human will were the one untouched thing in creation able to rescue itself. That ditch is no better. The throne still belongs to God.

Do you see the pattern? Each man is so busy proving that he is not the other man that he forgets to watch where his own feet are going.

This is why I keep coming back to the road. Where Scripture says chosen, say chosen. Where it says draw, say draw. Where it says whosoever, say whosoever. Where it says ye would not, do not quietly rewrite it to mean ye could not possibly have willed otherwise unless that is what the passage itself demands. And where the Word stops, stop.

Where the Word is plain, be plain. Where the Word stops, stop.

There is no prize in Heaven for having the tightest system. A system is useful only so long as it helps us see what the Book actually says. The moment it begins ordering the verses around like furniture, it has become a very bad servant and an even worse master.

So keep your theology, by all means. Study it. Sharpen it. Defend what the Word clearly teaches. But leave enough room in your hands for God to correct you. The goal is not to become a Christian with no labels and therefore, presumably, no errors. The goal is to stand where the text stands, even when the ground under your feet is less tidy than the map you brought with you.

chapter ten

why do you believe what you believe?

Now I want to turn the mirror around, My Friend, because there is a danger in this booklet that has nothing to do with TULIP and everything to do with you and me. We can read page after page about everybody else's system and enjoy ourselves far too much.

So ask the harder question. Why do you believe what you believe?

Election, received rightly, ought to make a soul almost unbearably grateful. I did not find Christ because I was cleverer than the man next door. I was not born with better spiritual instincts. I had nothing in my hands with which to purchase mercy. And yet before I had done good or evil, before I had taken one breath, the grace of God was not ignorant of me. He knew His own. He sought. He saved. Election ought to bend a person low.

And yet the flesh can pick that beautiful doctrine up and turn it into a little crown. I am one of the elect. I understand the doctrines of grace. I see what those other Christians cannot see. What an ugly trick that is: taking the doctrine that excludes boasting and using it as the occasion for boasting.

The free-will man can do the same thing from the opposite chair. I chose. I saw. I responded. I had enough sense to say yes. Perhaps he would never say it aloud, but pride is quite capable of speaking under its breath. If my response becomes the secret reason I feel superior to the man who refused, grace is leaking out of the room.

And do not think I get to stand above both of them with clean hands. There is a special kind of pride available to the person who thinks she has escaped the old camps altogether. We can become very pleased with our balance, very impressed with our humility, very thankful that we are not like those poor dogmatic people over there. And before we know it, we are praying the Pharisee's prayer in softer shoes.

Pride does not care which doctrine you choose, provided you will use it to admire yourself.

The Lord told of two men who went up to pray. One thanked God and then spent the rest of the prayer admiring himself. The other could hardly lift his eyes and asked only for mercy. The second went home justified. That little parable has a way of walking into theological arguments and embarrassing everybody in the room.

So when you study this question, ask the Spirit to search more than your conclusions. Ask Him to search the pleasure you take in being right. When a passage opens to you, do you thank God first, or do you immediately think of the person you can correct with it? When a teacher you love turns out to be wrong on one point, are you grieved because truth matters, or delighted because for one delicious moment you get to be smarter than your teacher?

Go to the Word. Use the lexicons. Read the old men. Read the men who disagree with you. And keep every one of them, including Hannah, underneath the Bible. If the Book proves me wrong, then I am wrong. There is no shame in that. The shame would be seeing it and refusing to move.

chapter eleven

election is his business; going is ours

There is a wonderfully simple thing waiting for us at the end of this very complicated argument: God never told you to identify the elect.

He did not hand you the Lamb's book of life and tell you to take it door to door. He did not say, Go ye therefore and first determine which neighbors have been chosen, so that you do not waste the gospel on the others. He gave us something much plainer.

Look at the order, because I love it. “All power is given unto me.” There is sovereignty, enormous and complete. Then: “Go ye therefore.” There is our action, tied directly to His authority. The Lord does not seem to think His sovereignty will make our going unnecessary. He makes His sovereignty the reason for it.

Paul does the same thing when he says faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God, and then asks how they shall hear without a preacher. God is perfectly able to save. God has also chosen to put the gospel into human mouths and send those mouths toward human ears.¹⁹

And here is where the whole old quarrel becomes a little embarrassing. Christians have spent oceans of ink arguing about exactly whom God intends to save while people within walking distance of our churches have gone years without hearing one plain explanation of how to be saved. We can spend an evening proving the scope of the atonement to another believer and never tell an unbeliever there was an atonement at all.

Something has gone crooked when the argument over the commission eats the hour in which the commission might have been obeyed.

Election is His business. The Great Commission is ours.

Doctrine matters. Of course it matters; I have just spent a booklet on it. But doctrine is supposed to send you somewhere. Election should send you to your knees because salvation is of the Lord. Human responsibility should send you toward people because men must hear. Providence should make you brave because the saving of souls does not finally depend upon your eloquence. And whosoever should make you generous because you do not have to inspect a man's secret history before offering him Christ.

So preach to everybody. Pray as though only God can open a heart, because only God can. Plead as though the hearer truly must respond, because he truly must. And when somebody comes, do not congratulate yourself for preaching well or him for choosing wisely. Thank God that another sinner has come home.

chapter twelve

chosen and free

We have come a long way, My Friend, through old names and old arguments and Greek words and flowers and doors, and I want to leave you with something much simpler than any of them.

You are not required to know what God has not revealed. You are required to believe what He has.

If you are in Christ, election is not a black cloud hanging over your head. It is one of the sweetest comforts in the Book. The Father chose us in Him before the foundation of the world. Your salvation did not begin on the afternoon you finally understood the gospel. It reaches backward into a gracious purpose older than your first breath, older than your family, older than the stars you can see. Rest there. You are not holding yourself together by your own spiritual cleverness. The Shepherd who came for you is able to keep you.

And if you are outside Christ, election is not a locked filing cabinet you must break into before you are allowed to come. The sign facing you is the sign God actually hung there: whosoever will. Christ says come. The thirsty may drink. The weary may find rest. The one who comes will not be cast out. Do not stand outside an open door trying to read the writing on the other side. Come through the door.

Let me leave you with one more picture, from that beloved old teacher from whom I have learned so much, Dr. J. Vernon McGee. I remember him comparing the matter to a great train bound for its destination. The train is going to arrive where it is appointed to arrive. Its course is not hanging upon the nervousness of the passengers. And yet while you are aboard, you really do move. You walk down the aisle. You sit here or there. You take your meal. You speak to this passenger and not that one. Your movements are genuine movements, and the certainty of the train's destination does not turn you into luggage.

That picture has stayed with me because it refuses to make either truth eat the other. God's purpose will arrive. Your choices inside His providence are still real choices. I do not need to crawl underneath the train and diagram how every wheel turns in order to ride in peace.²⁰

The train will arrive. Your steps aboard it are still your steps.

Norman Geisler called his book on this question Chosen But Free, and I have borrowed the shape of that title deliberately. I do not follow every sentence he wrote, nor do I need to. I have learned from him, from Ironside, from McGee, from Wiersbe and others, and the best thing any of those men ever taught me was to keep going back to the Book and let it correct the teacher.²¹

So hold both. Hold election with joy. Hold responsibility with seriousness. Hold grace so tightly that no man gets an ounce of glory for saving himself. Hold whosoever so openly that no sinner within reach of your voice wonders whether Christ might refuse him before he comes. And where you cannot see how the two truths meet, leave room for the possibility that God knows something you do not.

There is no humiliation in being a creature. It is a very restful thing, once you quit fighting it.

Then go live. Love the people God has actually put around you. Pray for the lost by name. Speak the gospel plainly. Make disciples. Ask the Spirit to do what no argument of yours can do in a human heart. Call every thirsty soul to the water and every weary soul to Christ. You do not need to know whether a name is written in Heaven before you speak the invitation written on earth.

And one day, when we are home and finally see how perfectly the sovereign purpose of God and the real deeds of men were held together all along, I suspect none of us will spend very much time boasting that our little system got closest. We will be looking at Christ. We will be occupied with the One who knew the answer when we did not, who saved us when we could not save ourselves, and who was never for one moment puzzled by the mystery that kept His children arguing for centuries.

Until then, the door is open. The command is clear. The secret things belong to Him.