Response:

Well, let’s take these one-at-a-time.

1. God loves everyone in the world and the reason why people go to hell is because they freely choose to reject God’s universal love.

It’s important that when we make theological statements we are certain that our conclusions fit both the specific and overarching theology of Scripture. So, try to fit that first statement into this passage:

If God loved one twin baby and hated the other, although they had not yet been born and had not done anything good or bad, then how are we going to conclude that “God loves everyone” and that people go to hell because they “freely chose”?  Paul’s conclusion is that God loved and hated each twin “so that God’s purpose according to His choice (KJV: election) would stand.”

In other words, the Bible says the opposite of what your pastor said.

2. Israel is supposed to represent the church.

This is a widely-held, though Biblically-unsupportable, assumption. I’d ask: since Israel was a stiff-necked, hard-hearted group of rebels who resisted God and fell under His hand of judgment, resulting in their being scattered and “divorced,” exactly how does that represent the Church?

Well, it doesn’t.

Usually when someone makes a statement like this, it is an attempt to co-opt Israel’s promises while ignoring the various warnings and judgments that accompany those promises. In other words, the Church is to receive all of Israel’s positive attributes while avoiding the various punishments and curses, usually based on the argument that Christ became “a curse for us,” leaving nothing but Israel’s blessings for the Church to inherit. Importantly, though, no New Testament writer advances that thinking or develops that paradigm.

I dealt with this in my book “Is The Church Israel?”  You can find the book as a free pdf download on our website:

http://www.salvationbygrace.org/default.aspx?ct=sub/read

3.  We are just mortal and limited human beings and we will never understand the question of predestination v. free will because we are not God.

Pardon my sarcasm, but if that’s true then God pointlessly filled His book full of all that fancy talk about predestination just so we “mortal and limited human beings” could ignore it all.  What was He thinking?

In my experience, people who do not want to do the work and commit the time to study these things always try to excuse themselves by saying it’s too complicated and no one can understand it.  Then, of course, they also use that excuse to dismiss or ignore the people who actually have committed the time and done the work.

Or, to put it another way, just because one person cannot understand something, it does not follow that therefore no one can understand it. Far too often, we egocentric humans assume that our experience is the standard for all human experience.  But, God is selective and He enlightens people and gifts them with particular abilities and skills according to His own good pleasure.  So, rather than making sweeping, universal statements, your pastor should have been more careful and stated his opinion as simply that: an opinion.

The Bible does take the time to explain God’s sovereignty in salvation and it uses the language of predestination and election to do so.  Our job is to stand toe-to-toe with what the Scripture actually says and align our thinking to bring it into conformity with what God has clearly stated.  The failure to do so and excuse ourselves is not evidence of mortal limitations, it’s a demonstration of hubris.  It’s the assumption that we know better than the Bible and we prefer our opinions to God’s clear, didactic declarations.

But this is what passes for teaching and leadership in far too much of the modern, professing Evangelical church.   <<sigh>>

Blessings,

Jim Mc.