Glad you asked - do we choose God or does God choose us?

Thinking Hard Enlarges our Love for Jesus

The Bible is full of tensions, paradoxes, mind-stretching puzzles.  Call them what you will.  Reassuringly Peter struggles to understand Paul, and they were both Apostles!  Jesus says things which are tough to understand.  That leave people amazed and scratching their heads.  

Why does Jesus make some things hard to understand?

He wants us to think closer to the edge of our mental capacities than we might otherwise do.  He wants us to feel beyond what we might otherwise feel.  As the great teacher he sets us challenges just beyond the comfortable, forcing us to be more.  After all we are rather prone to being lazy with both our thoughts and our feelings. 

But there is a greater goal that Jesus has than simply our minds and hearts
functioning closer to their capacities.  Jesus wants to expand our minds and enlarge our hearts so that there is more volume in which we might love God.  ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’ (Mark 12:28).  Jesus wants those corners of our mind that we have allowed into neutral firing hard.  He wants the sections of our heart we’ve never even bothered to explore ablaze with him.  Tough texts; hard doctrines; ambiguities and mysteries force us to fire the neurons of our minds and light the cavities of our heart.

Here’s a tough text in the part of the Bible we are studying on Sunday mornings.  One that requires head and heart to grapple with; and a life time of both I suspect.

Can we ever reconcile what Jesus says in John 6:39 with what he says in John 6:70?

How does Jesus’ promise in 6:39: ‘I shall lose none of all those [the Father] has given me’ reconcile with Jesus’ fulfilled prediction about Judas in 6:70 ‘Have I not chosen you, the Twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?’ 

Perhaps something like this:

It is true that God elects.  But God’s election does not nullify or void the necessity of our daily response.  It is true that we must choose to believe or not believe.  But this true choice does not nullify nor void the necessity of God’s sovereignty.  It is like two rails of a train-track that seem to us parallel and never to converge. But actually by a degree almost unperceivable to us they bend toward one another.  At a point stretching beyond the horizons of our finite minds they do meet in glorious, God-exalting harmony.  Tough texts, hard doctrines, ambiguities and mysteries will become simplistically and beautifully clear.  We just can’t see far enough down the line to that point.  The Bible gives us hints toward this converging but not a full sight of it.  Until that clarity and harmony comes we are to wrestle and think and ponder and pray and worship and live so our understanding is driven forward.  ‘Think upon these things and the Lord will give you understanding’ says Paul (2Timothy 2:7).

What Jesus makes clear?

We are to take our responsibility seriously.  To maintain our rail from the daily rusting and damage, trusting God is maintaining his with even greater diligence.  Read your Bible, say your prayers, get to church, make good choices, be quick to say sorry (to God and others), tell others how great God is. 

We are to say thank you to God in gratitude that we rest in the assurance of his sovereign drawing of us to Jesus, irrespective of what we do.  God is sovereign; I am chosen.  It should give us joy and confidence and reassurance. 

They are both true: I have a responsibility and God’s call is sure and sovereign.

The great preacher and church planter Charles Spurgeon said it well and similarly:

 “If I find taught in one place that everything is fore-ordained by God that is true.  If I find in another place that man is responsible for all his actions that is also true…These two truths can never be welded into one upon any human anvil, but one they shall be in eternity.  They are two lines that are so nearly parallel that our minds, however far we pursue them will never discover that the point they converge; but they do converge, and they will meet somewhere in eternity, close to the throne of God, whence all truth doth spring.” 

[Charles Spurgeon; died 1892; updated language]

Striving, and grateful that God’s work is complete.