Are We Predestined – Part 1 Series

NOTE: New Light Faith Ministries and Barry Johnson Ministries, founded by Rodney V. Johnson and Barry O. Johnson, respectively, are partnering to offer Bible studies for Christians who are seeking to grow in their relationship with Jesus. This is a Bible study lesson, not a sermon. The Bible studies teach foundational truths that are designed to challenge, encourage, and, most importantly, flame the fire of hunger in the Christian who wants to learn more about who they have become in Christ Jesus. The Bible studies you find on this site contain the written version of the lesson. However, these lessons also include a video and an audio file of the study, a PDF version of the lesson, and a sheet for note-taking. If you would like any of the additional resources for these studies, please email us at newlightfaithministries@gmail.com or bjteachingltr@gmail.com for more information or contact us at the email provided on both of our Sermon Central pages. Be blessed.

Are We Predestined – Part 1

(Rev. Barry Johnson and Rev. Rodney Johnson)

Introduction

How many of you like having the opportunity of having the chance to choose whether or not you will go to heaven and spend eternity with Jesus? How many of you would not be in favor of not having that opportunity to choose and know that you will go to hell and spend an eternity tormented in the lake of fire? But what if you didn’t have the opportunity to choose? What if that decision was made for you before you were born? And, what if you had to spend your entire life not being sure where you would spend your eternity, but desperately wanted to spend it in heaven?

What I have just described is a commonly held belief in some Christian circles and is the topic of our lesson today, the doctrine of predestination or election. This lesson is titled, “Are We Predestined?” Rodney, I’d appreciate it if you would open this first lesson with a word of prayer and then share some of your thoughts about the subject.

If you recall from our last couple of lessons, we discussed the belief that some have that God is in control of everything. In those lessons, we reviewed how this belief impacts our relationship with God and our belief in what He will or will not do for us as His children. We talked about how some believe that trials and tribulations are designed by God to teach us “lessons”. We talked about how people read the story of Job and walk away believing that God is orchestrating things in our lives that both help and, at other times, hurt us to make us stronger. A natural extrapolation from believing that God is in control of everything is to believe that we are predestined to certain things in this life.

Predestination is a topic that has widely different views among Christians. Some see predestination as being essentially identical to divine determinism. Divine determinism is the doctrine that teaches that all of our life choices and what happens in our lives are determined by God. Others view predestination as a non-biblical doctrine. However, when we read the Bible, we see that predestination is mentioned in Acts and in Paul’s writings. We also see language that appears to confirm predestination even though the actual word itself is not used.

In the history of the Church, few doctrines have been as hotly debated as that of predestination. Throughout the centuries, theologians and laypeople have argued whether or not this doctrine, as it’s currently understood and taught, could be true. It has been called the “damnable doctrine of predestination” and others have called it the “sweetest truth in all of God’s Word”. Although books have been written to prove and disprove predestination, many will argue that if God is God, then He can do whatever He pleases and conclude that predestination must be true.

Again, we are faced with the connection between predestination and the prevailing belief that God is in control. Consequently, there is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding this doctrine. Some teach that predestination teaches that God determines who will and who will not go to heaven – whether they want to or not. Or worse, that God will refuse someone into heaven even if they want to go and have confessed that Jesus is their Lord and Savior. When this topic is discussed, whatever your position may be, the same questions come up:

• If the way predestination is currently taught and understood is true, do we have free will?

• If the way predestination is currently taught and understood is true, are we just puppets on a string, doing what God has sovereignly ordained in eternity past?

• If the way predestination is currently taught and understood is true, does that mean God has already decided who will go to heaven and who will go to hell?