Do Christians Freely Choose Christ if God has Foreordained it?
Part II: The Christian’s Role
(Pre-Ramble: In Part I, we discussed three key decisions that bring an unbeliever to faith in Christ: God’s choice, an intercessor’s choice, and the believer’s choice. We covered God’s choice here in Part I, but now we’re skipping over the intercessor’s choice and going straight to the unbeliever’s choice. No one can accuse us of linear thinking!)
We’re exploring the question of how God can preordain the salvation of the lost without interfering with their “free will.” In other words, if God chooses in advance those who will be saved, isn’t coercion the only way to ensure that all those He chooses in fact are saved? 
We argue that God ensures the salvation of His chosen people by breaking the unbeliever’s bondage to sin and gifting him or her with a nature not at enmity with God. Once the gift of a new nature is bestowed, the believer is no longer subject to the tyranny of the old nature. Moreover, this new nature ineluctably seeks God, through repentance and faith. But God doesn’t “force it.” It happens quite naturally. (Jesus and the common folk call the change of nature, “being born again.” The green eye-shade theologians call it, “regeneration.”)
Our natures determine our desires. If I have a chocolate-loving and asparagus-hating nature, and both chocolate ice cream and asparagus are placed before me, I’ll choose the ice cream every time, absent countervailing factors like dieting. The choice will be quite natural, as is the choice to believe the gospel for one with a “born again” heart, who is newly desirous of union with God, for which he or she was originally designed. (John 3:5-7) Re-animated by grace with the knowledge of God’s holiness and the need for a mediator, the believer can and will choose Christ. (Ephesians 2:8-9)
While our desires, by necessity, flow from our nature, the choices we make to fulfill these desires are our own. Even the lost person freely acts upon his fallen desires, and not by compulsion. God does not tempt or in any way encourage the lost person to sin — we all sin because, well, it seems like a good idea at the moment. (James 1:13-14)
Christians will continue to sin — but their choices to sin actually are contrary to the desires of their new nature. Paul writes: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” (Romans 7:15) A believer — unlike an unbeliever — can choose to honor God or not. An unbeliever can only defy God, in keeping with a fallen nature.
All of us enter into this world in that fallen condition. Well, excepting John the Baptist and perhaps a few other super-saints who are “born again” in the womb. (Actually, that would be their first birth; their physical birth would then be the second birth.) That’s why we are separated from God until and unless God’s grace appears. Mysteriously, our bondage to sin is a means of God’s mercy: “For God has bound everyone over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.” (Romans 11:32)
I’ll admit that’s hard to understand. But, if we could figure all this out with our finite minds, God wouldn’t be God. He’d be — heaven forbids it — like us! Scary thought.
We’ll wrap this up in Part III. And, we’ll posit a key reason why the unbeliever, even while enslaved to sin, is still accountable to God. We’ll also get to the intercessor’s role in salvation, which we skipped over — just because we could. If you don’t like it, start your own blog!
See you soon.