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Transcript 339E
The Condition of Our Souls Before Birth + Predestination
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Yes, I have a question. Are our souls here before we actually are born into the world?
HC: The question is, are our souls actually here before we're born into the world? No. Actually, there is no existence in any sense at all of ourselves until we are conceived in the womb of our mother. At that time we are created by God. God is going on in His creative work in that sense. We are created by God. That is the beginning of our existence.
Now each time a human being is created there is an eternal destiny for that person. His destiny will either be to spend eternity in hell or to spend eternity in Heaven. But we do have a beginning.
CALLER: Okay, in Ephesians 1, about predestination, is that the same as what you just discussed?
HC: In Ephesians 1:4 it says we are chosen in Christ from before the foundations of the earth. In other words, God had a very precise plan for every human being who would ever come into this world, in His mind and in His plan, before He ever created the universe. There were no surprises, there were no changes in God's plan. And out of the whole human race He knew exactly whom He was to save.
Now actually, it was in time that year by year this one and that one would be created. And then if he had been chosen from before the foundations of the earth, before that person died indeed he would became born again. And that is what predestination is. He predestinated us to be saved. We were all dead in our sins. None of us deserved to be saved. And yet God, of His own sovereign good pleasure, decided whom He would save.
CALLER: But we still have a free will to accept Christ as our Savior, as our sacrifice, don't we?
HC: That is the mind of man. Man would like to think that he has a free will. That is because natural man is deceived by Satan. Actually, God gives us the ugly truth in Ephesians 2:1-3 that before we're saved we're dead in our sins. We're dead. We're corpses. We're followers of Satan. We're children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Now how can a dead person decide for Christ? That's an impossibility. We're dead. We don't really have a free will. Our will is completely in revolt against God. It is completely in bondage to sin.
Now the reason that we come to Him is not because of an exercise of our will. We read in John 1:12 & 13, where it speaks about those who believed on Him, that He gave authority to become sons of God. Let me read that so I'll read it exactly correctly: "As many as received Him, He gave authority to become sons of God." And then notice: "even to them that believe on His Name." And then notice the next verse: "which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." It wasn't man's will that he decided he was going to be saved. It was God who inclined his will so that he wanted to be saved.
The fact is, in John 6:44 Jesus declares, "No man can come to Me [no man has the power to come to Me] except the Father which hath sent Me draw Him." And then in verse 37 of John 6 God opens the curtain, and we look behind the scenes in Heaven, and Christ declares, "All that the Father giveth Me shall come to Me,'' because, you see, God intends to save those whom He's going to save. And ultimately it has nothing to do with our will.
Now insofar as we know, as the Gospel comes to us we are told to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. And for the moment we think that it is our desire that prompted us to turn to the Lord Jesus Christ. And so we became saved. But after we are saved, and we read the Bible to discover why we became so exercised by the Gospel, we had such a longing to became identified with the body of Christ, then we'll discover that it is because the Father drew us. It is the Father who inclined our will to turn to the Lord Jesus Christ.
CALLER: What about those individuals who refuse the invitation of the Father? Is He actually trying to draw them, and they refuse Him? Have then been predestinated to be lost souls? You know, some people He gave up to a reprobate mind, like Romans says. He gave those people up because of their sins. He's still doing this, right?
HC: Actually, when we look at the whole human race, the whole human race, to the last individual, has a reprobate mind, is altogether antagonistic against God. Of himself, the whole human race, every solitary individual in the whole human race, if left to himself, would reject the Gospel. Not one of us would accept it.
You could proclaim the Gospel for a thousand years—"Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life"—and not one person would be saved, because the human race is spiritually dead and is of a complete reprobate mind.
Now out of this human race God, in His sovereign good pleasure, has elected a remnant, a remnant elected or chosen by grace. By grace we have been saved. And in order to save us He had to pay a fantastic price, the price of enduring the wrath of God, the equivalent of an eternity in hell on behalf of those who were to be saved.
And so He drew us to Himself, and we were saved. No one else would ever want to be saved. Anyone who remains unsaved could never really care, will never really care about being saved. They may act like they're saved. They may even belong to the church. But they're coming to church, and they're accepting Christ on their terms rather than on God's terms. And so they really are rejecting out of hand the Gospel as God has proclaimed it, where they're to come to Christ with a broken and a contrite heart, where they're to came recognizing their spiritual bankruptcy, recognizing that it's only by God's grace that they're saved.
Now you can say, "Well then, God has elected the rest of the human race to reprobation, or to judgment." Well, in a sense you could say this. The Bible does not use that language. It does say in one place, in Romans 9, I believe, that there are vessels "made for destruction." That's about the strongest language of the Bible. But it never uses the word elect or chosen of those who are going to hell. The whole human race is going to hell, and God elects, out of the human race, those who are to be saved.
CALLER: I know God called me, and He touched my heart to accept Him and to repent of my sins and to recognize the fact that He did die because of my sins. And so I fell that I'm one of those chosen ones. And my job is to witness to others, to get them to recognize the same things that I've come to know.
It's not for me then to decide, if a person rejects me, whether that person has been predestinated for God's Kingdom or whether he's predestinated for God's wrath.
HC: That's right. As we bring the Gospel, we may never raise the question, "I wonder if you are one of God's elect," or make a judgment. Even the most wicked, sin-hardened sinner that we are presenting the Gospel to might be one of God's elect. God has His own timetable for saving. Sometimes a person responds to the Gospel the first time he hears the Gospel. On the other hand, someone may hear the Gospel for thirty years before he finally responds to the Gospel.
Our task is not to decide who is elect or not. Our task is to be a faithful witness, to be a faithful ambassador of Christ. And we are not the ones who do the saving. We aren't salesmen for Christ. We are faithful witnesses of the precious Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we have the full assurance that God's Word will not return void, that it will accomplish the purpose for which it was sent.
Those who are to be saved will be saved. We can depend upon that.
CALLER: Okay. Thank you for that answer. I appreciate it very much.