Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy (Jude 1:24)
I had the privilege of being able to meet with Gordon, a senior Jehovah’s Witness this week and to share the Gospel with him. This was our third meeting; our previous encounter had been before the summer, and I had wondered if he had given up. Any opportunity to share the good news of the true gospel is occasion for praise, and so I’m thankful for it.
Something that struck me in our conversation, and which I spent considerable time drilling into Gordon was the fact that he has no basis for the hope he thinks he has. During our discussion, the question of free will had come up repeatedly. I had pointed out that in his system, the essential and critical difference between those who have eternal life and those who do not is located in the man himself; that God might do 99.999% of the work of salvation, but that he does this same thing for every human being in JW theology, and so even though man does only 0.001%, that tiny “work” of submitting to and choosing God is the critical and essential difference. And so, I stressed, the most important difference between the saved and the lost in Gordon’s thinking is something in the man and not in God’s work. That, I said, is grounds for boasting. It’s not all of God; God doesn’t deserve glory for that because he can’t have any credit for it; after all, the same things he did for the believer, he did for the lost, right? JW theology robs God of his glory.
See, he was relying, like so many evangelical Christians, on the concept of free will, especially as the explanation why the angels and Adam and Eve had sinned. I pressed him on this point hard; I pointed out that the “free will argument” actually doesn’t solve the problem of evil, because given that God knows the future, God would have known that Satan and humanity would rebel. After all, I said, knowing the future assumes that the future is fixed and that what he knows will happen, will actually happen; he knows it won’t go another way and take God by surprise, right?
So bottom line, I knew, the only way a “free will argument” works is if God doesn’t actually know the future. I pressed him on this to demonstrate that God’s knowledge of the future, because it requires that our actions are fixed and will certainly happen a certain way, proves that history is fixed and that something has “fixed” or ordained it. It couldn’t not be fixed, otherwise it could happen in a different way than God expected and so God wouldn’t actually know it. I said that God created this universe knowing all these things would happen; I pointed out that he could have created a different universe in which everyone freely chose him, but he didn’t. So free will didn’t solve his problem.
Unlike Arminian Christians, however, Gordon was honest on this point. His attempt to escape this problem was consistent and logically coherent, sad as it was. He said, “I don’t think God knew Satan would fall.” He thought Satan’s rebellion took God by surprise. God, he said, chooses not to know certain things. In other words, Gordon, whether he represents all JWs on this or not, is an “open theist.” He tried to protect free will in the only way that it can work, and that’s by denying the omniscience of God. I only wish that most true Christians who hold to a “free will theology” would be so honest and see where their theology actually leads – perhaps then they would see the truth of God’s sovereignty over creation and in election and predestination.
Because, you see, Gordon, because he believes these things, actually has no hope. When he left, I stressed to him that he believes in eternal life, believes in a future of hope and security and safety. But he has no reason to do so! If God could not foresee and prevent the fall of Satan and Adam and Eve, in a perfect world, what’s to prevent the same thing from happening in the age to come?
So I would like to draw two lessons from this experience for us all:
1) Our hope for salvation and eternal life is founded on the total sovereignty of God. We know that we will be saved, because we know that God knows all things. He knows all things because he ordained them and decreed them; they could not be otherwise. And so when God says that none shall be lost from his Son’s hand, he means it. Because he controls everything in the universe, even the will of man, even we can’t screw that up. Poor Gordon, and every person who holds to free will, can’t have that assurance. If God will not touch your free will, if God will not cause you to act and decide certain things, your salvation will eternally be insecure. But the Bible says God is able to keep us from stumbling!
Praise God for his sovereignty over our souls, brothers and sisters.
2) And so the second lesson I have for us all is: don’t be afraid of the doctrines of grace in evangelism. Some think that things like predestination and election are intramural issues and shouldn’t be part of a Gospel outreach. I disagree; Wednesday night was one of the clearest demonstrations in the hours I’ve spent with Gordon of how incoherent and contradictory his theology truly is, and I was only able to show his worldview to be impossible simply because I went into the issues of God’s sovereignty over all things, including the human heart. Calvinism is simply a consistent proclamation of the true Gospel. And so don’t be afraid to proclaim the sovereignty of God, brothers and sisters, because this sovereignty underpins the very hope you proclaim.