In Scripture, predestination is usually expressed generally to the body of Christ, and never to a living individual: it was always God’s plan, before the foundation of the world, to make the Gospel a part of human experience. But it is not sound to draw assurance of salvation from this doctrine. Scripture exhorts us to make our calling and election sure, because only God knows the elect. Election means that God foresees those particular saints who will persevere to the end of their lives with repentant faith in Christ; and it is these saints whom God will choose out of mankind for eternal salvation. The most Calvinistic sounding passage in the Bible is Romans 9:6-29. In this passage, the apostle Paul cites some examples of a few individuals: Jacob as the elect and Esau as the reprobate; and then Moses as the elect and Pharaoh as the reprobate. In this passage he refers to the prevenient grace of God drawing Jacob and Moses to faith by the activity of his Spirit. This does not mean that the Spirit put forth no effort to draw Esau and Pharaoh to God. In fact, the ten plagues of Egypt are evidence enough that God cared about Pharaoh’s salvation. Many of the Egyptians came to believe in God because of those plagues, but Pharaoh refused to believe. He said, “Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go.” His own unreasonable and personal resistance to the Holy Spirit, much like the stubborn Pharisees whom Stephen rebuked, allowed his heart to become hardened, and drove the Holy Spirit away from him, in the same way that “the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul,” and allowed it to be fairly said that God has “mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.”

God does not arbitrarily force his Spirit into some and pass by or overlook others. There is not one clear teaching of double predestination in all the Bible. Peter used to believe that the Jews were God’s chosen people; and that they had a special salvation status when compared with the Gentiles; but after receiving a vision, he changed his mind and said, “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism.” We only wish it were the same way with high Calvinists who continue to assert such a favoritistic notion with their doctrine of election. They take this from the Westminster Confession 3.7, which says, “The rest of mankind, God was pleased, according to the unsearchable counsel of His own will, whereby He extendeth or withholdeth mercy as He pleaseth, for the glory of His sovereign power over His creatures, to pass by, and to ordain them to dishonor and wrath for their sin, to the praise of His glorious justice.” They support this view with several Scriptures, among which is Romans 9:21-22: “Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use? What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction?” The Arminian understands that Paul was only using rhetorical questions, hypothesis, and conjecture here. Notice his use of “what if God” (Gk. ei de thelo ho theos), which shows that he was suggesting to his readers, “What if double predestination were in reality the way that God relates to mankind? I’m not saying that it is, but what if it was? Well, if that were the case, then people should still have an attitude of reverence to submit themselves to the will of God, and not be argumentative and just godlessly chatter against what has been revealed in Scripture.”

However, the apostle Paul did not say that double predestination is a revelation from God. He only brought up the concept as a philosophical response, to those who would irreverently chatter against the Biblical revelation that God decides to judge and send some people to Hell for their sinfulness. There is not one clear revelation in all of Scripture which states that God passes some people by, and “ordains them to dishonor and wrath,” as it says in the Westminster Confession. Such a view of God is monstrous, unjust, unfair, unloving, and completely unreasonable. Biblical election may be a personal experience. It might be possible for the elect to identify themselves as those who feel the presence of God and have true faith in the Gospel: compared with everyone else, whose minds are filled with skepticism, rationalism, and always rely on natural explanations for supernatural occurrences and miracles (Romans 8:28-30; Ephesians 1:4-5, 11; 2 Peter 1:10; 3:9; Hebrews 12:14; Matthew 24:13; Acts 13:48; 2 Timothy 1:9; Revelation 13:8; Exodus 5:2; 11:3; 12:33; Acts 7:51; 1 Samuel 16:14; Romans 2:11; Acts 10:34; WCF 3.7).