If God chooses, can a man blame Him?

Greetings,

In No. 36 I promised a harder version of the question that ran through the Trusting God series. This is it. If God is sovereign over salvation, who is responsible when a man is lost?

I remember when it first became clear to me that salvation starts with God. As a young believer, overwhelmed by the lavish grace of a God who had set his affection on me, I started reading through the New Testament, book by book. John. Acts. Romans. And I kept running into the same thing. Almost everywhere I turned, salvation started with God. Not with me deciding. With him choosing.

Scripture is plain about it. Jesus told his disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you.” Paul says God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” He chose us before we had a single thought of choosing him. Not by looking down the corridors of time, seeing who would choose him, and choosing them back. Paul closes that door in Romans 9. God’s purpose of election stands “not because of works but because of him who calls,” settled before Jacob and Esau were born or had done anything good or bad.

That matters more than it might seem. If God chose me only because he saw I would choose him, then the deciding factor in my salvation is me. Two men hear the same gospel. One believes, one doesn’t. And the one who believed gets to look at the other and say, “We heard the same thing. I chose right.” That’s a reason to boast. Scripture leaves no room for it. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”

Paul goes further. He speaks of “vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory,” and of “vessels of wrath.” Only those God calls will come.

Many of us balk at that. It sounds as if man has no will at all. And the objection that follows is an old one. Paul raises it himself.

Paul doesn’t soften it. He puts the man asking back in his place.

But Scripture doesn’t leave us there either. The same Bible that says God chooses also holds every man responsible for what he does with the gospel. A man hears it, again and again, and he turns it down. Not because he wanted to come and was kept out.

He rejects it because he wants to, so the rejection is his own.

We want to resolve that. So we pick a side. Either God chooses and man is a puppet, or man chooses and God is waiting to see what we’ll do. Scripture refuses both. It holds God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility side by side and never reconciles them for us.

The clearest place to see both at once is the cross.

Peter puts both halves in one sentence. God planned it. They did it. He doesn’t apologize for either.

God sent his Son to die. Jesus said no one takes his life from him; he lays it down of his own accord. Centuries before Bethlehem, Isaiah wrote that he would be “pierced for our transgressions.” This was no accident of Roman politics. It was the plan.

And men killed him. Judas sold him for silver. The crowd shouted for Barabbas. Pilate found no guilt in him and handed him over anyway. The soldiers drove the nails. None of them was forced. Each man did what he wanted to do, so the guilt was his own.

Did God send his Son to die? Yes. Did men kill Jesus? Yes. Not one of them could stand before God and say, “You made me do this.” And no man will stand before God and say, “I’m not in heaven because you didn’t choose me.” The man who is lost will know exactly why. He was offered Christ, and he didn’t want him.

I know that man, because for years I was him. I grew up hearing the gospel. I knew it in my head, but I never embraced it. My life before Christ was full of pride and rebellion against God. When I look back, I can see how many times I turned him down, and every one of those refusals was mine. But I can also see his hand the whole time, refusing to let me go. Where sin could have destroyed me, he was patient. He held me back and pulled me back from the edge, again and again, until he finally opened my eyes. I saw the gospel and I embraced it. But only because Christ kept coming after me.

I can’t fully explain how both are true. I don’t think I’m meant to. “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us.” What has been revealed is enough. God chooses, and every man is called to come.

If you’re wondering whether you’re chosen, Jesus answers with an invitation: “whoever comes to me I will never cast out.” You find out by coming.

So if you’re in Christ, where does that leave you? Not coasting. Paul tells the Philippians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” and in the same breath he gives the reason: “for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” God’s work in you doesn’t make your effort pointless. It’s what makes your effort possible.

We will all stand before him and give an account of what we did with what he gave us. And through every turn your life takes, the hard seasons and the ones you didn’t see coming, he is still the one at work. Both are true. Live like it.

Since God is at work in you, what are you working out right now, and what are you coasting on?

Grace and peace,
Seun

If this one landed, No. 36 goes further — seunadeyemi.ca/reflections/36-if-god-is-sovereign-whats-left-for-you-to-do