A Parable to Explain Predestination

Predestination is like an event organizer who planned a free concert. In his mind, he anticipated comfortably filling the stadium at Lang Park. So he booked the venue, planned the whole concert in advance, issued free-entry tickets to be made available to the public from any Ticketek outlet, then initiated a rigorous publicity and advertizing campaign.

When the time came, whoever wanted to could collect their free-entry ticket from Ticketek, then show-up at the turnstiles and be granted free admission into the concert.

While the audience was sitting there enjoying the event organizer's great generosity, some people who didn't officially represent the event organizer started demanding to see proof of payment from the audience. "Events at Lang Park aren't free," they insisted. It created such a scene that it momentarily threatened to disrupt many in the audience from feeling that they were allowed to stay and enjoy the rest of the concert.

But then many in the audience started producing the torn-off butts of their free-entry tickets, which clearly showed Ticketek's logo as well as the name of the event and the words "free entry". Their ticket-butts proved that the event organizer himself had pre-planned many months in advance that they should be given full admission upon presentation of their free-entry tickets alone. The audience weren't gate-crashers after all - they were the pre-planned; they were there in full conformity with the organizer's original idea, plan and criteria.

That's the sense in which the Apostle Paul meant that believers, as the Church, had been predestined!

Paul was revelling in the gracious truth that the emergence of the Church as the people of God on the basis of faith alone without the requirement of the observance of the Law and irrespective of whether a person was Jew or Gentile, was the very scenario which God had planned, chosen, elected and predestined all along and which had been foreseen by the Prophets. Therefore the early Church's Savior, salvation and faith were legitimate, despite what the Judaizers were insisting.