God Without Religion_ Can It Really Be This Simple_ - Andrew Farley [25]
The Second Ministry of Christ
As we’ve seen, Jesus brought two ministries with him to planet earth. First, Jesus buried his Jewish contemporaries under the true demands of the old covenant. Second, he prophesied about a new covenant to come. But this new covenant ministry involves a hope that we still haven’t touched on. Through Jesus’s second ministry, he introduced a new hope to those of us outside the Jewish world.
But who among us can enjoy this new covenant—anyone in the whole world? Or is this new hope limited to individuals whom God has already preselected?
The old covenant was limited to a select group—the Jews. Your eligibility for the old way of the law was predetermined by your birth. You were either in Club Israel, or you weren’t. But this changed under the new covenant. The wall between Jews and Gentiles was demolished (Eph. 2:14). The Son of Man was lifted up, and he began to draw all men to himself (John 12:32).
So let’s take a closer look at Christ’s second ministry—his new covenant move to include non-Jews in the gospel. As we do, you’ll be invited to jettison what I call “Grade A Choice Religion.”
11
Fate or free will? Plato or Socrates? Calvin or Arminius? For thousands of years, we’ve been asking, “Is everything fated, or is there free will? Is our every move preplanned by an outside force, or do we have freedom to move about the planet as we please?”
What a headache! And apparently, what a way to divide churches! Predestination—the idea that God appointed some to salvation and left others for eternal damnation—has spawned church divisions all over the world. Believers in predestination, free will, and hybrid versions of each split philosophical hairs as they debate one of the most controversial subjects in the Christian faith, often using complicated terminology and even cryptic jargon.
Was this what the apostle Paul intended for the church when he penned the word predestined a mere four times in only two of his letters? Would he want us to replay the Plato-Socrates fate debate, over and over, with a Jesus stamp on it? With the first traces of the church debate over fate versus free will coming on the scene hundreds of years after the cross, one has to wonder how the first-century church viewed the idea of “individual selection” by God, if they contemplated it at all.
Popular Positions
“Romans and Ephesians clearly say that God predestined us! How can you say he didn’t?” one says.
“But Romans talks about the importance of calling on the name of Jesus, and that’s a choice we make. We’re not robots!” someone else replies.
Then the peacemaker chimes in, “Look, you’re both right. God chose us and we chose him. They’re both true. We just can’t understand it this side of heaven.”
If you’ve been in a church long enough, you’ve likely heard one or more of these three ideas: (1) God chose us to be saved; (2) we chose God out of our own free will; or (3) God chose us and we chose God, but we just can’t understand it.
Of course, there are different flavors of these. But to get the gist, we need only concern ourselves with the two extremes and what I call the “intellectual gymnastics view”—that they’re somehow both right.
For all of the trouble predestination has caused, it’s amazing that the term appears only four times in the entire Bible! It’s obvious that certain acts of God were preplanned ahead of time so they would happen at a future date. But the question here is: Under the new covenant, who is predestined?
The Nigerian Letter
The press recently reported on John Worley, a Christian psychotherapist who was perusing his email inbox one day when he noticed a message from someone with an African