Predestination and the Will of Man

The Protestant Reformed Churches have not changed their position concerning the sovereignty of God and the decree of predestination as they relate to the will of man.  But the doctrine has fallen on hard times in our day.

A number of years ago, when Prof. Homer Hoeksema was still alive, he and I were sitting on a Friday afternoon in the faculty room of the seminary, as we frequently did, going over the affairs of the week, discussing the problems in the seminary and in general relaxing after a busy week’s work.  We were talking about how the church in our has come to a point where even though it claims to be Reformed and Calvinistic, it in effect denies these fundamental doctrines of Scripture and the Reformed faith.  Prof. Hoeksema made the remark: You know, if you stop to think about it, it is only infrequently in the history of the church that the church has consistently maintained the doctrines of sovereign grace, those times never lasted very long.  Soon the church reverted to the age-old errors of Pelagianism and Arminianism.  That struck me at the time.  And while teaching Church History in our Protestant Reformed Seminary, the point was more and more forcibly driven home. 

The question arises:  Why is this so? Why are the great and grand truths of the sovereignty of God, of eternal predestination, and of particular and sovereign grace so infrequently maintained throughout the history of the church, and when they are, why are the maintained only for very short periods of time? I can come to only one conclusion:  Their unpopularity is due to the fact that these doctrines are thoroughly and completely God-centered and God-glorifying.  Men, even in the church, will not have it that way.  They want glory for themselves.  They do not want God alone to receive glory.  Man insists on his own place, his own prerogatives, his own importance.  He wants to retain some of the tattered remnants of a pride that burns white-hot in his heart and is shattered only by the blow of the truth of the absolute sovereignty of God, so he attacks those doctrines, attacks them vigorously in one way or another.  He attacks them by denying them.  He attacks them by trying to kill them with silence.  It would be interesting to ask a thousand people in any Reformed church, “When is the last time you have heard a sermon that was devoted exclusively to the doctrine of sovereign election or, much less, to the doctrine of reprobation?  How many have you heard over the past year or two?”  Silence is an effective weapon; it seems to destroy these doctrines.

That is the situation in the church today. It is sad.  

The Reformed may have won a mighty victory at the Synod of Dordt, destroying Arminianism and defeating its nefarious purposes.  But the simple fact is, and no one can deny it- I say it with shame and sorrow- Arminius won!

It is therefore, important that we address this subject: “Predestination and the Will of Man.”

Taken from a pamphlet entitled The Sovereign God and Man’s Will by Robert Decker, Carl Haak and Herman Hanko