“There are believers all over the world who view the Bible as teaching the doctrine of election. There is also historically the idea that man has a free will and that he is free to choose and God only chooses man when man first chooses Him. The worst form of that has been called in the past Pelagian, a little less severe view of that is called semi-Pelagian, and then it sort of migrates up the ladder a little to Arminianism. But all of it comes down to the idea that God does not, in the end, determine who is saved, the sinner himself determines that by an act of his own will with which God cooperates.” – John MacArthur, Answering the Key Questions About the Doctrine of Election
Is that what you think I believe? If so then I don’t blame you for not giving me the time of day. But I can blame you for not listening.
God is the God of our salvation. He alone can save. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through Him. God saves by his grace. We are saved by His grace. God completely and 100% decides who is saved without any cooperation from man. There is no caveat, no allowance for anything else. There is absolutely no act of man that can determine himself to be saved. We do not get to choose to be saved. Nowhere in the bible does it say anything like that. Who does God choose? Does the bible tell us? Yes. In fact, it does. Let’s look at the doctrinal sentence in Ephesians 1:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Eph 1:3-6
First, who blessed?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Eph 1:3-6
Who chose?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Eph 1:3-6
Who predestined?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Eph 1:3-6
Who made us accepted?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Eph 1:3-6
What were we blessed with?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Eph 1:3-6
What were we chosen to be?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Eph 1:3-6
What were we predestined to?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Eph 1:3-6
What were we accepted into?
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Eph 1:3-6
Who is the us and we of this sentence? Well let’s look and see who the Holy Spirit through the Apostle Paul is addressing in verse one:
“Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints which are at Ephesus,and to the faithful in Christ Jesus:” Eph 1:1
So who were blessed, chosen, predestined, and accepted? Those who have their faith in Jesus Christ. Does this make us the Blessers, chosers, predestiners or the accepters? No, not at all. Maybe we can gain understanding if we consider another instance in the bible where this happens? This example has nothing to do with salvation directly but it does show God’s sovereignty in proximity to man’s free will. Let’s look at Judges 7 and the choosing of Gideon’s army. In verse three God instructs Gideon to tell all those who are afraid of the coming battle to leave. God says there are still too many for His purpose, He tells Gideon: “The people are still too many; bring them down to the water, and I will test them for you there. Then it will be, that of whom I say to you, ‘This one shall go with you,’ the same shall go with you; and of whomever I say to you, ‘This one shall not go with you,’ the same shall not go.” Here God is announcing beforehand that the members of the army will be of His Divine and Sovereign choice. Then God told Gideon in verse 5 to separate the men by how they drank the water. And finally, in verse 7 God chooses those who lapped, “By the three hundred men who lapped I will save you, and deliver the Midianites into your hand. Let all the other people go, every man to his place.” So in this story, we see God sovereignly choosing without any violation or contradiction to man’s free will choices.
When we turn back to salvation, however, man does not get even the choice of drinking a certain way or any choice actually. What we see is God saying that all those who give up, who surrender to Him, He has already chosen. Faith is not an act, or a work. Faith not meritorious of anything. Repentance does not deserve a response, it is simply an admission of guilt and a trust in the one who has been harmed to do as they see fit.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” John 3:16
In this most famous of verses who is doing the work? Who is loving? Who is giving? Who is granting an everlasting life? Believing in someone else’s work and promise is not itself a work. The Bible teaches this:
“For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.” Eph 2:8-9
“But to him who does not work but believes on Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is accounted for righteousness” Rm 4:5
So I do not believe that “the sinner determines who is saved” God has chosen whom he will save and he has clearly told us whom he has chosen:
“But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” John 1:12-13
Jesus tells us a parable of salvation in Luke 15:11-24. It is the story of the prodigal son. After rebelling he realizes that His father is the only source of salvation from his mistakes and wants to return to beg to be his father’s slave but when he arrives only repents and says he has sinned against his father. In this story, the father is not under any obligation to bless the repentant son. But through his own choice and authority as a father, he does bless the son and proclaims: “And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.” Luke 15: 23-24
In the quote at the top, Mr. MacAthur lists three categories: Pelagian, Semi-Pelagian, or Arminian. As though these are the only things a person who disagrees with him can be. He fails to mention that most Christians for all of history have held the same view that cannot be defined by any of these. The traditional orthodox view is the same one that the church fathers held and the same one that is taught in the bible (as I have shown). God has Sovereignly elected all and each of those who place their faith in Jesus Christ and His redemptive work. This is the standard view. The reformed view of election that John MacArthur teaches is one of fatalistic determinism, or in other words God chose John MacArthur from before the creation of the world to save but chose his brother Jake MacArthur [fictional character I made up to represent the retrobate of reformed teachings] to have no possibility of salvation and decided before He created the world that He would let Jake go to eternal damnation AND that Jake would be responsible before God for the God-ordained desires to sin. His view of a particular determinate election is a departure from the orthodox standard of scripture. It was not taught by anyone until the mid-16th century. And the church as a whole has fought against it ever since. To be clear Augustine did teach that our wills were not free at the end of his life in the mid-600s but almost all of his other teachings support free will. And he did this to support the Roman Catholic beliefs in original guilt, infant baptism, purgatory, and that the Church is the arbiter of salvation not in any attempt to paint God as deterministic.
Personal Note
What really bothers me about all of this is that John MacArthur knows all of this. He is a very smart man. He is smarter than I am. I had to look up how to spell “Sovereignly”. He knows there is a group called “Provisionists” and that we are monergists just like him but without making God the author of evil. He knows about Molinism, the Waldensians, the Ana-Baptist, and others who have carried on the original traditions of the apostles who taught “salvation by grace through faith”. He knows his own belief is inconsistent.
I understand all those hard questions. They’re equally hard for me. And they’re equally hard for you. To say that I believe in the doctrine of election does not solve all the problems, it simply admits to what the Bible teaches. I cannot resolve all the problems. I have all the same questions that everybody else has. I don’t think you’re going to, in this life, get perhaps the final answer to all of those dilemmas, but becoming content and committed to and faithful to what the Scripture says about the doctrine of election is the issue. – John MacArthur, Answering the Key Questions About the Doctrine of Election
He knows that the word of God is consistent and when our understanding doesn’t match what the Bible teaches, we must renew our mind to it. He knows that we should not be content in illogical inconsistencies but that we should press on depending on the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth. He knows that we don’t really know what Pelagius taught. He knows that all we have is Austine’s letters about him and none of his actual teachings. But if Augustine took the same tack as Mr. MacArthur then I don’t really trust him to tell me what Pelagius taught, do you? We can’t always trust when people tell us what others believe. Why not go ask them what they believe? And go read MacArthur for yourself while you’re at it. You’ll prolly learn more than you will reading my scratches.
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