Understanding Predestination: Exploring God’s Sovereignty and Grace

R.C. Sproul explores the doctrine of predestination, explaining its biblical foundation and significance in Christian theology. Sproul discusses how predestination relates to God’s sovereignty, grace, and the assurance of salvation for believers. He addresses common misunderstandings and emphasizes the comfort and assurance that this doctrine provides to Christians.

The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.

Okay, fasten your seat belts. We are now engaged in the study of perhaps the most controversial theological doctrine in the Bible, namely the doctrine of predestination. In our first session, I made the observation that virtually every church and every Christian who has ever lived has had to come up with some doctrine of predestination in an effort to take seriously the manifold references in the Bible to the concept of predestination. But today we want to begin this by asking the question, what is predestination?

Now it would be nice if I could say to you that even though there’s all kinds of disagreement about this doctrine, about its importance, about its truth and all the rest, at least we all agree what we’re talking about when we talk about what the doctrine means or what it is. Sadly, I can’t do that because it seems like there’s as many different definitions of predestination as there are doctrines of predestination. So we’ll have to build somewhat slowly on this.

The way I like to approach matters like this is first of all by looking at the words themselves. And of course the concept of predestination, the word predestination I’ve been saying is in the Bible. I’ve been saying the concept is there, but the Bible wasn’t written in English, and so the English word predestination isn’t in the Bible. We have a Greek word in there, and more than one Greek word that is used there for the concept, pro-orizo, is one of them.

And the idea here is just as the prefix pro- in Greek corresponds to the English prefix pre-, the idea of something that is pre- or pro-, as it were in the case in the Greek, means something that takes place in advance, in front of, or before in time, something that follows later. So when we’re talking about pre-destination, we’re talking about something that happens beforehand or before something else in time. Now, if we just look at the English word, we have the word destination. Now, we use that word frequently in our language, don’t we?

And the destination is the place we are ultimately trying to reach. It is the end of our trip. It is the end of the road. When I get on the train or on the airplane, or if I buy tickets, they want to know what is your destination. That is, to what place are you headed? Where are you trying to go? Now if I want to go to Los Angeles, and that’s my destination, and if I go on the train, I may have to go through Phoenix.

But the idea here is that if I go and buy tickets, and they say, what is your destination? I don’t say Phoenix, I say Los Angeles, even though I am going to Phoenix, Phoenix is an intermediate stop. It’s not the ultimate destination, it may be the penultimate destination, but it’s really not where I’m headed. I am headed to Los Angeles. And so we’re talking here about destinations as a point along a continuum that we are trying to reach.

We have another word that is derived in English from this word, which is a little bit more weighty, and it is the word destiny. When we talk about our destiny, we talk about

more than a geographical location that happens to be a destination. We’re talking about our destiny. It’s what happens to us ultimately. My wife and I grew up in the same community, went to the same elementary school, graduated from the same high school. So we share in common a whole lot of people that we knew as children.

Often when we’re driving somewhere and we’re discussing, in a nostalgic vein, the days of our youth, we will ask ourselves questions concerning or regarding these people that we once knew. Every time that we talk about them, we formulate our question in exactly the same way. We use exactly the same terms, and I suspect you use the same terms. We will speak about Judy Zello, and the question will be what? I wonder, finish it for me, whatever happened to Judy Zello? This isn’t just some private way of speaking that my wife and I engage in.

We all talk, I wonder what happened to Eddie Harmon, I wonder what happened to Jeanne Cunningham, I wonder what, do you understand what we’re saying there? We’re not saying, we don’t say I wonder where they are, I wonder what they’re doing, we may be wondering those things, but it’s interesting that we use the phrase happened to. Because when I say I wonder what happened to Judy Zello, I’m presupposing that in some sense Judy Zello is a victim or a passive receptacle of something that has happened to her.

And I’m really speculating with an assumption about some kind of view of kismet, or of fate. I’m not a fatalist, I don’t read fortunes, I don’t follow the astrological guides in the horoscope or anything, but I do believe that I have a destiny, and that you have a destiny, and that Judy Zello has a destiny, and in God’s providence that destiny is in His hand, and in His eternal plan. But before I was ever born, there was a destiny. It was written by God before the foundation of the earth.

Now that doesn’t mean, in and of itself so far, that every detail of my life was programmed or preordained or foreordained or predestined by God. I mean, the doctrine isn’t saying all that this much. This doctrine is dealing with our ultimate destiny. As I say, those other questions belong more properly into the doctrine of problems. And I should be quick to say, before you pick up your pen and write me a letter and think I’ve become Arminian in the last five minutes, that R.C.

Spill does believe that from the foundation of the world, every detail of his life was under the providential supervision and government of God and was ordained by God in eternity. So don’t misunderstand me. I’m just simply saying that when we encounter the doctrine of predestination in its initial form here, it doesn’t include all of those things in its particular scope, and so that’s well beyond the boundaries of what we’re looking at now. But I’m saying that predestination does concern your destiny, your final destiny, where you’re going. And I think we can all agree on that.

But that’s about as far as we can get. Well, maybe we can do a couple more things. Again, the word pro-orizo means to choose beforehand, or to ordain beforehand, and I think we can get at least most Christians to agree that God is not simply a spectator of human events.

A recent book was published by a group of scholars called The Open God, where they have foisted upon us a view of God where God’s knowledge is limited, His power is limited, His character changes, He’s not immutable, He’s not omnipotent, and He’s not omniscient, but rather He is open. He responds to things in history as they happen, and all of this is designed to escape out from under any idea of a God who in His providence and in His sovereignty governs the scope of human affairs.

I personally think that book that speaks of The Open God is, in my judgment, a godless book. It is a godless book because it strips God of His attributes and of His character and exalts man in the place of God. And I think those who are involved in writing it and those who endorsed it should be ashamed of themselves. But in any case, this concept here of God choosing in advance, I think most Christians would agree that at least with respect to some things, God decides in advance.

And I think most of us will agree that to some degree, God has what we call foreknowledge. Because this also is a concept that is deeply rooted in the pages of Scripture. Now foreknowledge, again, fore is just another word for priest. And knowledge now has to do with God’s apprehension or awareness of things yet future that he knows in advance and he knows them perfectly. Now again, as I say, most Christians believe and will affirm that God has foreknowledge.

As soon as you begin to probe the extent of that foreknowledge and the grounds for that foreknowledge, you will find Christians dividing up into opposite camps and the philosophical debates will be triggered by it. But that, in some way, God knows the future in advance, is generally granted by some Christian or by most Christians.

Now when I said at the beginning that all Christians and all Christian churches have to grapple with the doctrine of predestination because it is so often mentioned in the New Testament, I said that we don’t always have an agreement as to what this predestination is. Now the tiniest little piece of agreement would be this, that ultimately God in his sovereignty in some way predestines who gets to heaven and who does not.

That’s the simplest definition of predestination I can give you, is that from all eternity, God somehow, in some way, predetermines who goes to heaven and who does not. That is, the destiny or the destination that is in view with respect to the doctrine of predestination is not whether I’m going to Los Angeles or Chicago, but whether I’m going to heaven or hell. The focal point here of predestination is the doctrine of election from the New Testament and that has to do with God’s choosing and making a decision about heaven or hell.

Now as I said virtually all Christians believe that much about predestination. Now how God makes the decision in advance about our ultimate destiny is by no means a matter of universal agreement among professing Christians or in the historic creeds. There are many different doctrines of predestination. We don’t have time to consider all the subtle nuances and peculiarities of some of the more esoteric ones. But what we will do is at least mention the two most viable and most frequently conflicting views of predestination that we find in church history.

The first one, which maybe I may only have time to cover the first one today, we’ll see as the clock rolls and we’ll find out in six and a half minutes what God’s providential plan was for me. We won’t know until then. One of the most common and perhaps the majority report of predestination in the Christian world today is called the prescient view, the prescient view of election or of predestination. Prescience is spelled P-R-E science, S-C-I-E-N-C-E, just like the science you studied when you were in school.

And we remember that the word science comes from the Latin word for what? What does science mean? Scio, scienta. means knowledge, to know. And so prescience or pre-science, again we have that little prefix, prefix, and what’s a prefix? It’s a word that goes before even the prefix pre is on the prefix, on the word for prefix. But anyway we have here pre beforehand. So prescience means science beforehand or knowledge beforehand. It means exactly the same thing as the word for knowledge. It’s simply a synonym for the word for knowledge.

So that the words prescience and for knowledge may be used interchangeably. Now the prescient view of predestination or of election works out something like this. The idea being that God from all eternity has the ability to look down the corridors of history. To look down the tunnel of time. And know in advance who will respond positively to the invitation of Christ and his gospel. And who will not respond positively. And so he knows for example that the gospel will be preached to you and to others.

And that some of you will say yes to Christ and some of you will say no to Christ. And from all eternity God ordains that every person that he knows will say yes to the gospel of Christ. He has determined, bound and determined that every person who comes to true saving faith will indeed reach the destination of heaven. And so he predestines believers to heaven. You see that? those whom he knows will in fact believe and not reject the gospel to heaven. That’s the pressing view.

The Augustinian view, which is also called the Reformation view, goes beyond that. And that view of election says that God from all eternity not only predestines those who will believe to be saved, but he also predestines those who will believe to believe. That apart from God’s predestinating grace, this view teaches, no one would ever believe. And that people are not predestined to heaven because they believe, but they are predestined to believe that they might go to heaven. Do you see the difference?

The Augustinian view is from the foundation of the world, before anybody was ever born, before anybody ever did anything, that God decided then, before you were born, whether he was going to bring you to faith or not bring you to faith. That your eternal destiny was rooted and grounded in God’s predestinating grace. And that if you were not predestined from the foundation of the world, in reality you will not come to faith and your destination will not be heaven. I want us to know, do we see the difference between those two views?

In the first view, the decisive, the most crucial decision that determines a person’s ultimate destiny rests with us. In the second view, the most decisive and important decision by which our eternal destiny is determined is made by God. That’s all the difference in the world, isn’t it? Now, obviously those who take the latter view have to answer all kinds of questions about God’s fairness, and about God’s justice, and about man’s free will, and all the rest. And we’ll look at that.

The people who take the first position also have difficult questions to answer, like why is it that God sees some people saying yes and other people saying no? Is it because some people are more righteous than others? Or some people are more intelligent than others? Or some people are more meritorious than others? Those are very difficult questions that they have to wrestle with if they want to hold that position.

My problem is that the prescient view of predestination, which is offered as an explanation for the biblical doctrine of predestination, I’ll say it now, put my cards on the table, although I know that it’s very attractive to many people, I don’t think that this doctrine explains predestination. I think it denies predestination. It’s fundamentally the denial of the biblical concept. But why I say that will have to lead to the next time when we continue our struggle with the doctrine of predestination. Do you have a doctrine of predestination? How much have you thought about this?

How deeply have you pursued the biblical teaching of election? Is this something you’d rather just ignore and not play around with? Is this something that’s for you, casts a shadow over the kindness and the righteousness of God? Is this a troubling thing, a hard sign?

Well, if any of those things are true for you, I hope that you will continue to look at this doctrine and dig into it as deeply as you can, because if there is nothing else to be gained from the study of this doctrine, it is a doctrine that forces us to look more closely at the character of God and at our own sinfulness, and I frankly don’t think we can spend too much time studying the character of God. I don’t think that we can have too much of a developed understanding of the grace of God.

I don’t think that we can ever have an exaggerated view of the greatness of God, nor can I believe that it’s going to be harmful to us to explore the depths of our own human weakness. Because I think virtually all of the errors that plague the church and her doctrine relate to one of two errors: either an underestimation of the greatness of God or an overestimation of the greatness of me.