Liberating you from bad ideas about God
The Bob Dutko Show (noon – 4pm, Mon-Fri) is Detroit’s number one talk Christian radio show. He is heard on radio stations across the country, making him one of the most listened to Christian talk show hosts in the United States. Go here to learn more about Bob Dutko.
Today he interviewed me about my book, (#AmazonAdLink) What is Faith?
Here is a replay of this interview.
How do you define and explain faith? How do you know you have faith? What is faith?
(#AmazonAdLink) 
I have a new book coming out on January 15 which answers all of these questions about faith. The book is titled, (#AmazonAdLink) What is Faith? and is available for preorder on Amazon.
But between now and then, I wanted to publish several Podcast episodes which talks about faith, and looks at several tricky and troublesome texts in the Bible about faith.
We will discuss the concepts of great faith and little faith. We will look at whether there is such a thing as head faith and heart faith. We will also discuss the faith of demons mentioned in James 2.
In today’s study, I just want to introduce some of the key concepts about faith that will help you understand what the Bible is talking about when it talks about faith.
Let me begin by telling you a story, which you have probably already heard.
There once was a man who walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. After the tightrope had been fixed in place, he started gathering a crowd to watch his daring and dangerous feat. “Come one! Come all!” he shouted into his bullhorn. “Watch me walk above Niagara Falls, balancing on nothing more than this little rope!”
As people started gathering, he passed around a sample of the rope so people could see how small it was. “One little slip, and I will tumble to my death in the waters below!” he shouted. “You never know when I might fall. The rope is getting wet from the misting water. A wind is coming up the gorge. I don’t want to die, but today could be the day!”
As the crowd swelled even more, he shouted to those who had gathered, “Who believes I can walk across the falls and back without falling to my death below?”
Most of the crowd shouted that they believed he could do it. Many of them cheered him on to try it. So he climbed up onto the rope, and balanced his way across Niagara Falls. When he reached the far side, he turned around and came back. He didn’t slip. He didn’t fall. In fact, he barely wobbled or wavered. So when he returned to the safety of the shore, he motioned with his hands for the cheering crowd to quiet down.
“That was too easy!” he yelled. “That wasn’t a challenge for me at all! Let’s make it more difficult! Who believes I can do again, but this time, while pushing a wheelbarrow? If my hands are on the wheelbarrow, I will not be able to use them to balance on the rope. Shall I give it a try? Do you believe I can do it?” He motioned to a nearby wheelbarrow, which he had brought for this very purpose.
The crowd cheered their approval, which caused the number of gathering people to swell even further. So with the help of two nearby men, he lifted a wheelbarrow up onto the rope, and then started pushing it across the Falls. He went more slowly this time, and even had a few wobbles, which caused the crowd to gasp and cry out with fear, but he made it to the other side and back without any great problem.
The crowd went wild.
“That was too easy!” he yelled. “Who believes I can do it again, but this time, with another person inside the wheelbarrow?” The crowd roared their approval. “I would not only be risking my own life, but also the life of the person in the wheelbarrow,” the man shouted to the crowd. “With a show of hands, let me see how many of you believe I can do this!” Almost every person in the large crowd raised their hand. It was nearly unanimous.
“Wonderful! I am so glad to see that you have such faith in me! I think I will give it a shot!” the man yelled. “Now … among all of you who raised your hand, do I have a volunteer to get into the wheelbarrow?” Every hand in the large crowd went down. “What?” said the man. “You’ve seen me walk across Niagara Falls twice without any problems, once while pushing this wheelbarrow! And most of you believe I can do it with someone else in the wheelbarrow with me! But when I ask which of you wants to get into the wheelbarrow, none of you volunteer? Do you believe I can do it or not?”
But there were no takers, so the crowd did not see him push someone across Niagara Falls in a wheelbarrow that day.
This story is likely fictional, but it is often used by pastors and preachers as an example of faith. They say, “You see? It’s not true faith unless you get into the wheelbarrow. Those people didn’t really believe. They just said they believed. They raised their hand claiming they had faith the man could do it. But it is not enough to say you believe. It is not enough to claim you have faith. If you really believe, you have to get into the wheelbarrow. Otherwise, you have false faith. Spurious faith.”
Then the pastor goes on to tell the audience how they can have true and effective faith. Usually the pastor says that they need to “prove” the reality of their faith by their good works.
If they don’t have the good works which proves the existence of their faith, then they are just like the people who claimed to have faith, but didn’t prove it by getting into the wheelbarrow.
Most people go away from such a sermon wondering if they’ve really believed, and therefore, whether they are really a Christian.
But you can know that you are really a Christian and that you have really believed.
You can know that you have eternal life.
You can know that you are already in the wheelbarrow, and that it is the safest place you can be.
This knowledge of your safety and security in Jesus Christ begins by properly defining the word “faith.”
When we begin to define the word “faith,” it is important to recognize that modern, English usage of the word “faith” does not match the ancient Hebrew or Greek usage. The way this word is used today bears little resemblance to the way the word was used in biblical times.
Today, when we use the word “faith” or “believe” we tend to use it as a synonym for “hope.” We say, I believe the Red Sox will win the Word Series. But really, we only hope they win. We do not know for sure that they will win.
But this is not how the word “faith” was used in biblical times. In the Greek New Testament, the word “faith” is most commonly used in reference to something that a person knows to be true.
For New Testament era Christians, to believe something, or to have faith, meant that they were persuaded or convinced of the truth of it. They knew it to be true.
Good synonyms for “faith,” therefore, are not “hope or wish” but rather “persuasion, conviction, or knowing.”
New Testament Greek Lexicons typically provides three basic definitions for pistis. When used with an article, as in “the faith,” it typically refers to the body of Christian beliefs that separates Christianity from other religious faiths. It is used this way thirteen times in the New Testament (cf. Acts 6:7; Rom 4:11; Gal 1:23).
Second, the word can be translated as “faithfulness” or “fidelity.” But even most of these could arguably be translated as “faith” (Matt 23:23; Rom 3:3; Gal 5:22; Titus 2:10). We will discuss this concept in a future podcast episode.
The third possible definition for pistis is also the most common. Over 180 times in the New Testament, pistis refers to “believing.” In context, this belief occurs when a person knows something to be true.
Therefore, the primary lexical definition for the verb is “to consider something to be true, to believe.”[1] Faith (and the verb “believe”) is a confidence, persuasion, or conviction that something is true.[2] We have faith when we are fully persuaded by the evidence presented to us. “To believe is to be persuaded that some declaration is true. … If you think something is true, you believe it.”[3]
Joseph Dillow says,
Faith is located in the mind and is persuasion or belief. It is something which “happens” to us as a result of reflection upon sufficient evidence … Saving faith is reliance upon God for salvation. It does not include within its compass the determination of the will to obey, nor does it include a commitment to a life of works. To believe is to be persuaded and be reliant and includes nothing else.[4]
So what then is biblical faith (or belief)?
We can do no better at defining faith than does the author of Hebrews, who writes: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). The author of Hebrews is saying that faith substantiates, or sees as reality, that which we have previously only hoped to be true.
Faith is the evidence, conviction, or confidence in things we cannot see. Certainly, we also believe the things we have seen, but the faith described in the rest of Hebrews 11 is the faith that is confident in God’s promises based on what is known about God’s character and God’s Word.
This brings us back to the illustration of the tightrope walker pushing a wheelbarrow across Niagara Falls. The people truly believed that the man could walk across the tightrope above Niagara Falls. They had seen him do it. They also believed that he could do it with a wheelbarrow. They had seen him do this as well.
In both cases, their faith was real and genuine. Based on what they had seen him do, they also stated their belief that he would be able to push someone across Niagara Falls in a wheelbarrow.
However, none of them were willing to get into the wheelbarrow themselves. Does this mean that they didn’t actually believe?
No, it does not. They did believe and their faith was genuine.
So why didn’t they want to get into the wheelbarrow?
First, walking across Niagara Falls on a tightrope has inherent risks. This is why it is so thrilling to watch. And given all the various things that can go wrong in such a situation—many of which are completely out of the control of the man on the tightrope—there is no guarantee that he will make it across.
Even if he performed this feat a thousand times in a row and became so good at it that he could run across while blindfolded, there is still no guarantee that he would be able to do the one-thousand-and-first time. Maybe a stronger than normal gust of wind would knock him off balance. Maybe it would start to rain and he would slip. Maybe a reckless bird would hit him in the head. There are just too many variables.
No matter how many times the man completes this feat, it is a statistical certainty that eventually he will slip and fall to his death.
So while the crowd could state their genuine belief every time that the man will make it across the falls, they also believe that a time will come when the man will fall. None of the people on the shore wanted to be in the wheelbarrow when that happened.
So the people on the shore had two genuine, but conflicting, beliefs.
They believed that the man could walk across Niagara Falls, and would be able to do it many times, even with a person in a wheelbarrow. However, they also believed in statistics and science, both of which say that eventually, the tightrope walker will fall.
Related to this, while the people on the shore might have had full faith in the tightrope walker’s ability to maintain his balance, none of them had faith in their own ability. It is logical and reasonable to think that the man could take someone across the Falls in a wheelbarrow if the person stayed completely still and did not move.
After all, if the person in the wheelbarrow starts flailing about, screaming in terror, or even sneezes, such movement could throw off the balance, causing both people to plunge to their death below. And as all people know, we cannot always keep fear at bay, nor can we easily hold back a sneeze.
Therefore, here again, while a person might properly believe that a well-trained tightrope walker can push a person in a wheelbarrow across Niagara Falls, there are too many unknown and uncontrollable variables for any person to believe that they themselves could hold still enough to complete such a dangerous journey.
The bottom line truth is that that this fictional illustration about how nobody from a watching crowd would get into a wheelbarrow so that they might be pushed across Niagara Falls on a tightrope does not illustrate the lack of faith in the watching crowd.
To the contrary, it shows their true and genuine faith in a variety of truth claims. They believed the man could do it. But they did not believe in their own ability to sit still enough inside the wheelbarrow. They also knew (i.e., believed) that there were millions of random variables in nature that could create problems as well.
So did they believe the man could push a person across Niagara Falls in a wheelbarrow? Yes, they firmly believed that the man could do it.
But did each individual person believe the man would do this for themselves if they got into the wheelbarrow? No, they did not believe this, for the various reasons mentioned above.
They probably had somewhere over fifty percent certainty that he would, maybe even approaching ninety percent certainty in some cases. But this was not enough reasonable certainty for them to gamble their lives on it.
But notice how different it is when it comes to the promises of God made to us through Jesus Christ.
God is not a tightrope walker who will eventually make a mistake if we just give Him enough time. If He promises to take us across a spiritual tightrope, He will fulfill that promise every single time forever and ever without fail.
There are no spiritual or natural variables which can wreak havoc with the promises of God.
The same goes for Jesus. When Jesus makes a promise, it is a promise with a 100% guarantee. Like God, Jesus is fully reliable.
Furthermore, many of the promises of God are not at all dependent upon our own effort or involvement.
If we were to equate eternal life to getting into a wheelbarrow for a trip across Niagara Falls, then we would also have to say that on this trip, we could jump around and do flips inside the wheelbarrow and Jesus will still not lose His balance or let us fall into the waters below.
We could even try to jump out, but He will not let us fall. Eternal life is His gift to us, and this gift has an everlasting guarantee. We are safe and secure in His hands, and He will never let us go (John 10:27-29). This is His promise.
When we refuse to believe His promises, it is simply because we are refusing to believe that Jesus knows what He is talking about and can be trusted to do what He says.
Jesus is fully trustworthy and reliable. So you can believe in Him for what He says. And when He offers eternal life to anyone who believes in Him for it, you can know that if you have believed in Jesus, then you have eternal life.
When you believe in Jesus, you are already in the wheelbarrow and He is taking you across the falls, and there is nothing that you, or anyone (or anything) else can do to stop Him (Rom 8:38-39).
Nevertheless, I imagine that you still have some questions about the nature of faith and how faith works. You also might still have some lingering doubts about whether or not you really believe. Maybe you have also heard people talk about head faith, heart faith, true faith, false faith, small faith, and great faith, and you want to know how these sorts of descriptions fit with what we have learned in this chapter.
We will continue to look at these sorts of questions and issues in future podcast episodes.
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[1] Walter Bauer et al., (#AmazonAdLink) BAGD, 816.
[2] Wilkin, (#AmazonAdLink) Confident in Christ, 5, 7.
[3] Shawn Lazar, (#AmazonAdLink) Beyond Doubt, 106.
[4] Dillow, (#AmazonAdLink) Final Destiny, 276.
Recently I wrote a post on the All About Eve blog that the theological invitation “Believe in Jesus for eternal life” is more concretely summed up with the statement “God loves you.”
I wrote that many people have trouble understanding what it means to believe in Jesus for eternal life. And while this invitation is referred to over and over in the Gospel of John (e.g., John 3:16; 5:24; 6:47), this offer of eternal life is often equated with the fact and foundation of God’s love for humanity.
So I believe that if we really understand God’s love for us, we will have also understood that He gives us eternal life freely through Jesus Christ.
Therefore, when someone says, “I don’t know if I have believed enough, or believed the right thing,” one way to help people sort through this is to ask if they know that God loves them.
And I mean REALLY loves them. No conditions. No limits. No ifs, ands, or buts.
This sort of understanding of God’s love is so radical, it revolutionizes everything we think about God, Scripture, ourselves, and the church.
Understanding that God loves you infinitely and completely no matter what you have done in the past or what you do in the future, whether you change or not, this is equivalent to understanding that God gives you eternal life freely by His grace.
This sort of teaching about love is what grants people freedom from sin, freedom from religion, and freedom from fear.
I have previously written about this on numerous posts in numerous ways.
But here’s the thing that I have come to realize in the last couple of days:
The church has bastardized the biblical concept of love.
I doubt you could find a church in the world which does not preach the message that “God loves you.” But so few churches and Christians actually understand it or believe it.
Yet rather than try to fight this misunderstanding about love, I think might be best to start saying something else instead.
Rather than saying “God loves you” to people, maybe we should start saying “God likes you.”
Yes, yes, I know. “Like” is a much weaker word than “love.” But there are countless millions of people who would agree in a second that God loves them, but who do not for a second believe that God likes them.
To understand what I’m talking about, let’s back up a bit. In Christian circles, it is not uncommon to hear someone say this: “I love my neighbor … but I don’t like them.” Or maybe instead of your neighbor, you have said this about an in-law, the church gossip, or a rude deacon.
When we say we love someone but don’t like them, we mean this: “I love them (because I know I am supposed to), but I don’t want to hang out with them or be their friend.”
This sort of idea is often preached in our pulpits as well. Again, you will sometimes hear pastors say this: “As Christians, we are supposed to love everybody, just as God loves us. But even though you love them, you don’t have to like everything about them. Remember, we love the sinner and hate the sin!”
Do you see? We have this attitude toward others because we think this is God’s attitude toward us. We think God loves us, but doesn’t really like us. At least, He doesn’t like us the way we are now. He likes some future version of us where we have cleaned up our lives, gotten rid of sin, read our Bibles and pray more faithfully, and witnesses regularly to our friends and neighbors. That future “fixed” person is the one God wants to be friends with and hang out with; not the “broken” and sinful person we are now.
So you see? Though we believe God loves us, we don’t really think He likes us.
But here is the Gospel truth as revealed in Jesus Christ: GOD LIKES YOU!
Let me bring this down to earth a little bit more.
Think of a famous author, actor, or musician you would love to be friends with.
For me, I think of people like N. T. Wright, Brad Paisley, and Keanu Reeves. I think it would be awesome to be best friends with these guys. You know … to have such a good friendship that it became informal … that they just drop by my house to see what’s going on, and I could do the same for them. It would be assumed that we watch football together on Monday nights. That when we went camping, we would invite the other along. That if we just wanted to chat about life and theology, we would call up the other person first.
Do you have someone in mind who is like that? Someone you would love to get to know, hang out with, and have “inside jokes” with?
Usually, when we think about God, we tend to put God in the place of these famous people we want to know. We think, “It would be so cool if God and I were on a first-name basis. If I could call God any time I wanted. If we could hang out like best friends.”
But here is the actual truth: When God thinks about you, He thinks about you the way you think about the famous people you want to know. The way I think about being friends with N. T. Wright, Brad Paisley, and Keanu Reeves, that is how God thinks about me.
God likes me so much, He dreams about being on a first-name basis with me! He dreams about hanging out with me to watch a football game. He dreams about just showing up at my house with no other purpose than to say, “What’s happening?”
And this is the same way God feels about you.
More than anything else, He wants to hang out with you. He wants to be your friend. You are the famous person He would “name drop” to all the angels when He talks about what He did over the weekend. More than anything, God wants to be on a first-name basis with you. He wants to be the one you think of calling when things are going great, and the one you call when things are going bad.
God likes you so much, He wants to even hang out with you when you are weeding your garden, filling your car with gas, and running errands to Sears.
And best of all, God likes you just as you are. He doesn’t want to be friends with some “better and improved” version of you. He wants to be friends with you … as you are right now.
This is the truth about God that many people do not believe and cannot accept. They cannot believe that the God of the universe is so madly in love with them, so infatuated with them, so in awe of who they are and what they like and the sorts of things they do, that He would “like” every single one of your Facebook posts, would “Favorite” every single Tweet, and would “Repin” every single picture on Pinterest.
God is your biggest fan, and He dreams of just being in your presence.
God likes you.
This is the Gospel message. This is what Jesus came to reveal.
Do you believe this?
One critical text for the Calvinistic understanding of Unconditional Election is Acts 13:48.
This text seems to indicate that God specially and sovereignly prepares the hearts and minds of some people to respond to the gospel. In the context, Paul has been proclaiming the gospel in Antioch, and when he concludes, Luke records this about those who heard Paul preach:
And when the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord. And as many as had been appointed to eternal life believed (Acts 13:48).
Due to the apparent clarity of this text, it is nearly impossible to find a Calvinistic defense of Unconditional Election which does not place heavy emphasis on Acts 13:48. One Calvinist even states that this is the verse that converted him to Calvinism in the first place (Nettleton, Chosen to Salvation, 16).
Other Calvinists are in agreement about the apparent power of this verse to prove Unconditional Election:
Here is another text with stunning clarity for whoever will read the Bible without preconceived notions about election (Palmer, Five Points of Calvinism, 29).
… Every article of human ingenuity has been employed to blunt the sharp edge of this scripture and to explain away the obvious meaning of these words, but it has been employed in vain, though nothing will ever be able to reconcile this and similar passages to the mind of the natural man (Pink, Sovereignty of God, 52).
In response to the first quote from Palmer, we would say that one reason the Calvinist so clearly see election in this text is precisely because they read the Bible with preconceived notions about election.
In fact, one reason that people see election in this text is because the translators of our English Bibles often use words that convey this idea, even though it is not present in the original Greek. So it could be said that if someone reads this text in the Greek without preconceived notions of election, they would not come away with the Calvinistic doctrine of Unconditional Election.
There are numerous arguments from the Greek context of these words and the textual context of Acts which provide a different understanding of Acts 13:48 than what the Calvinists would have us believe.
Let us begin with a look at the Greek word for “appointed” or “ordained” (Gk. tetagmenoi, the perfect participle of tassō).
Warning: Since this text is so crucial, and since our understanding of the text depends so much on the Greek word in question, we will have to get somewhat technical in our explanation.
The passive participle for tassō in Acts 13:48 could either be in the middle or passive voice, as both are spelled the same way in Greek. Most Calvinists understand the word to be in the passive voice, and translate it as such so it appears that people who believe in Acts 13:48 are totally passive in their reception of eternal life: They were ordained by God to believe, and so they did believe. End of story.
But if we consider that the Greek participle is in the middle voice, a completely different understanding emerges. In this case, the terms would not be translated as “appointed” or “ordained” but as something closer to “marshalled themselves, prepared themselves, or disposed themselves” (Alford, The Greek New Testament, II:153; Shank, Elect in the Son, 87).
This understanding of the word not only makes more sense in the immediate context, but also fits with the broader context of Scripture.
In the immediate context, those who end up believing attended the synagogue on the Sabbath and heard the preaching of Paul, then joined with the Jews in inviting Paul to speak a second Sabbath, and after hearing him on this day, believed what they heard. The implication then in Acts 13:48 is that they had been thinking and mulling over what Paul had said for an entire week, and after hearing him a second time, became convinced of the truth of his words. Their belief was no passive working of God on their hearts and minds, but was their week-long consideration and response to what God was doing in their midst.
Not only does the middle voice translation of tetagmenoi in Acts 13:48 fit best with the immediate context, but this understanding fits with the broader context in several ways.
First is context of Acts 13 which contains numerous contrasts about how people respond to the gospel. “Acts 13 is a study in contrasts in how different people prepare themselves to hear the gospel” (Lazar, “Election for Baptists,” 6). In the beginning of the chapter, the contrast is between Bar-Jesus and Sergius Paulus. One man was open to the truth while the other was full of deceit (cf. Acts 13:7, 10).
Then when Luke writes about Paul preaching in Pisidian Antioch, he shows how the Gentiles accept what is preached while the Jews oppose it. This event in Acts 13 marks the beginning of the theme in Acts where the Gentiles often respond favorably to the gospel while the Jews do not (cf. Vance, Other Side of Calvinism, 346-348).
The reason for this transition, Luke indicates, is not because God has now “chosen” the Gentiles instead of His other “chosen” people, the Jews, but because the Gentiles were more open to hearing, considering, examining, and accepting the things Paul preached to them, while the Jews are more set in their traditional ways and beliefs, and so are less willing to consider that they might be wrong.
The Jewish rejection of Paul’s message was not foreordained or predetermined by God either, as indicated by the middle voice of the word “reject” (Gk., apōtheō) in Acts 13:46. The Jewish rejection in the middle voice indicates that the Gentile disposition to accept the gospel message should also be in the middle voice.
Robert Shank writes strongly about the way to properly translate and understand Acts 13:48:
The fact that human agency is explicitly asserted in verse 46—“since you thrust [the word of God] from you and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life”—strongly militates against any assumption of divine agency in verse 48 and of an eternal decree of unconditional particular election (Shank, Elect in the Son, 184).
One reason the Jewish people did not accept the gospel message (from Jesus or Paul) is that it threatened their exalted position as God’s only “chosen” people.
If God was now accepting the Gentiles into His family, then the Jewish people could no longer think of themselves as God’s chosen people, for He had apparently chosen all people in Jesus Christ. Such an idea was a threat to their theology, their pride, and their power. The Jewish people were more than willing to accept that God loved Gentiles, as long as the Gentiles tried to become Jews.
But when Paul (as Jesus before him) announced that even the Gentiles were loved and accepted by God (cf. Acts 13:47), the Gentiles proselytes who were trying to become Jews realized that they did not have to become Jews in order to be accepted by God, and as a result, they rejoiced and believed.
On this point, I. Howard Marshall seems to say that the faith of the Gentiles in Acts 13:48 was preceded by their faith in God as Jewish proselyte. He writes that Acts 13:48 “could also refer to those who had already put their trust in God in accordance with the Old Testament revelation of his grace and were enrolled in his people” (Marshall, Acts, 231).
Therefore, the faith of the Gentiles in Acts 13:48 would be very similar to what we saw Jesus saying in John 6 and John 10 about why some Jewish people believed in Him when others did not. Just as some Jews had learned to hear God’s voice and follow Him, and so they recognized the voice of Jesus when He came, so also, some Gentiles had been seeking a place in God’s family by faith, and so naturally believed in Jesus when they heard that God had accepted them by His grace.
Furthermore, what Jesus taught about the Jews in Matthew 22:1-16 is echoed here. In that parable, the first group of people who were called to participate in the King’s wedding feast were judged to be unworthy (Matt 22:8). And why were they unworthy? Because they were unwilling to come (Matt 22:3). The same idea is found here in Acts 13. The Jewish people were unwilling to believe the message which Paul preached, and so they too were judged unworthy of it.
This leads us to consider one of the reasons Luke wrote Acts in the first place. According to his opening line, Luke is writing to a Gentile name Theophilus (Acts 1:1) who is interested in learning about Jesus and the founding of the church. Therefore, it is critical for Luke to impress upon his reader the importance of studying, researching, investigating, examining, and considering the historical accuracy and theological truths which Luke presents in his book.
It would not fit Luke’s purpose in writing this letter to tell Theophilus to teach Theolphilus that if he wanted to receive eternal life, all he had needed to do was wait for God to sovereignly give it to him. Instead, Luke’s message to Theophilus is consistent with what he illustrates throughout the book of Acts with examples like these Gentile believers here and the conversion of Cornelius in Acts 10.
And what truth is this? That people can prepare or position themselves to respond favorably to any future truth of God if they remain open and receptive to the truth God is revealing to them right now (Cf. Vance, Other Side of Calvinism, 347).
Finally, this understanding of tetagmenoi as “disposed” fits best with other uses of the same term in Acts as well. Aside from Acts 13:48, the word is also used in Acts 15:2, 22:10, and 28:23. In Acts 15:2 and 28:23, the word is clearly referring to the actions, attitudes, and decisions of people, rather than to some divinely-ordained predisposition to the Gospel which was unconditionally granted by God.
Outside of the book of Acts, Luke (who also wrote Acts) uses the word in Luke 7:8 to refer to human authority and control. Paul follows a similar track when, in 1 Corinthians 16:15, he uses this word in connection to Christians who have devoted themselves to a particular ministry.
On this final point, although G. Delling says that “According to Acts 13:48 the man who is a Christian is ordained to eternal life,” he explains what the verse menas by writing this:
Elsewhere God is the One who orders or appoints, though only in the passive in the NT and with no mention of God in Acts. God has arranged the commission which results [in Paul’s conversation experience] on the Damascus Road. … The idea that God’s will to save is accomplished in Christians with their conversion is obviously not connected with the thought of predestination, but rather with that of conferring status (Delling in Kittel, TDNT, 29).
In other words, though God may order the events which allows a person to hear the message of the Gospel, and while God gives eternal life and confers the status of sonship to those who do believe, God does not force anyone to believe or restrict others from doing so.
Though God organized and commissioned the events on the Damascus Road which led to Paul’s conversion, Paul was not forced to believe and could have chosen otherwise. So also with those who believe in Acts 13:48. Paul, as a servant of God, was sent by God to preach to the Gentiles in Antioch.
Many of those who heard him preach were God-fearing Gentile proselytes (cf. Acts 13:42-43), and so were predisposed to respond to the gospel when they heard it. It is these who believed the message Paul preached, and it is these who received eternal life.
There are numerous Bible scholars and Greek experts who agree with this sort of explanation. Aside from the citations above, here are quotes from several more:
In the controversies on predestination and election this sentence has constantly been brought forward. But it is manifestly unfair to take a sentence out of its context, and interpret it as if it stood alone. In Acts 13:46 we are told that the Jews had judged themselves unworthy of eternal life, and all that is meant by the words in this verse is the opposite of that expression. The Jews were acting so as to proclaim themselves unworthy; the Gentiles were making manifest their desire to be deemed worthy (Lumby in “The Acts of the Apostles” in The Cambridge Bible, 168).
The din of many a theological battle has raged round these words, the writer of which would have probably needed a good deal of instruction before he could have been made to understand what the fight was about. … It would seem much more relevant and accordant with the context to understand the word rendered ‘ordained’ as meaning ‘adapted’ or ‘fitted,’ than to find in it a reference to divine foreordination. … The reference then would be to the ‘frame of mind of the heathen, and not to the decrees of God’ (Maclaren, Exposition of Holy Scripture, 11:48).
The Gentiles were hungry for the Word [whereas] the Jews were culpable for rejecting the gospel. Indeed they judged themselves unworthy of eternal life. … Those who hear the good news and reject it are condemned not because they were unable to believe, but because they rejected the saving message and hence in effect judged themselves unworthy of eternal life!
… The Greek verb used here is not the one which means to choose or to elect. If Luke were making a point about election, why didn’t he use that verb? Nowhere else in the entire Bible is this word used of election! In fact, not only does the word not refer to election, it is even possible, if not probable, that it doesn’t mean appointed here either.
… In v. 42 the Gentiles “begged [Paul and Barnabas] that these words might be preached to them the next Sabbath.” Begging suggests devotion. They were devoted to learning about the good news of eternal life. This makes good sense in the context and it also makes a nice parallel. The Jews in Pisidian Antioch rejected the teachings of Paul and Barnabas and judged themselves unworthy of eternal life. The Gentiles, oppositely, accepted the teachings of the apostles. However, instead of saying “they judged themselves worthy of eternal life,” Luke chose to say instead that the Gentiles believed, as many as had been devoted to eternal life. (Note: the Greek puts “they believed” before the words “as many as…”) They first devoted themselves to searching out the way to eternal life and then having discovered the message (Jesus guarantees eternal life to all who simply believe in Him) they believed it (Wilkin, “As Many as were Devoted to Eternal Life Believed”).
Chrystostom goes so far as to say that the expression tetagmenoi is employed to intimate that the thing is not a matter of necessity, or what is compulsory. And thus, far from favoring the system of an absolute decree, the words would lead to the opposite conclusion, that the Creator, while ‘binding nature fast in fate, left free the human will’ (Bloomfield, The Green Testament, ad loc.).
The best rendering [of Acts 13:48] then would be, “were (found) disposed to eternal life,” which preservers the exact shade of the verb (‘to set in order, arrange, dispose’ [cf. Thayer]) and has just that degree of ambiguity which belongs to the original (Bartlet, The New Century Bible: The Acts, ad loc.).
So by the weight of contextual evidence, it seems clear that Acts 13:48 does not teach Unconditional Election.
Even if, however, all the contextual and exegetical material presented above is wrong, and this verse does in fact teach that God ordained these particular Gentiles to receive eternal life (which the arguments above show He did not), this verse is still not a good proof-text for the Calvinistic doctrine of Unconditional Election. Laurence Vance explains why:
There are also a number of things that Acts 13:48 does not say. It doesn’t say one has to be ordained to believe. It doesn’t say there are “reprobates” who can’t be saved. It doesn’t say that anyone was ordained unconditionally. It does say that anyone was ordained before the foundation of the world. It doesn’t say that one was ordained by a sovereign decree. It doesn’t say that those who are ordained will believe. It doesn’t say that everyone who was ever saved was ordained to believe (Vance, Other Side of Calvinism, 347).
In the end, we must say that not even Acts 13:48 teaches Unconditional Election, even though it is said to be one of the clearest statements in the Bible on the topic.
If you want to read more about Calvinism, check out other posts in this blog series: Words of Calvinism and the Word of God.
One of the main reasons Calvinists object to the idea that people can believe in Jesus for eternal life is that if we make faith a human responsibility, then this seems to make eternal life somewhat dependent upon a human effort.
But as we have seen over and over in numerous posts over the past two months (see the link list below), faith is not a work. So when God calls us to believe in Jesus for eternal life, this is something that everyone and anyone can do.
Besides, if faith is not something we can do, then eternal life is no longer by grace alone through faith alone, but is simply and only be grace alone.
While it is appealing to say that eternal life is by grace alone and nothing else, the cry of the Reformation and the center of the Gospel message in the Bible is that eternal life is by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone.
So yes, you can believe!
You should believe.
God wants you to believe.
God calls you to believe.
This is just as true for you as it for anyone else on earth.
And by asking people to believe in Jesus, God is not asking people to regenerate themselves, save themselves, or contribute to their own eternal life.
No, God has done everything that needs doing when it comes to the free offer of eternal life. He paid the full price so that it might be a free gift to us.
When we freely proclaim the gospel as Jesus offered it to His hearers, the compelling nature of the free gift of God to all who simply and only believe in Jesus for it is recognizable to all as something that no religion on earth has offered, and hence, is no religion at all but is a message that can have its origin only in God.
Internationally recognized author and evangelist Ravi Zacharias put it this way:
I have found that if you build a proper foundation for what the Christian faith is all about, as you lead up to the cross, the listeners sit in stunned silence. They immediately recognize that Christianity stands in stark contrast to everything that other worldviews affirm and assert. They know that true power is being expressed in the cross (Just Thinking, Spring/Summer 2002, 2).
As Jesus went about preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom and inviting people to believe in Him, thousands responded.
In Acts, we read about Cornelius, a God-fearing Gentile, who heard the message of eternal life and believed in Jesus for it (Acts 10:22, 44-48). After Paul and Silas saved the Philippian jailor from committing suicide, they told him and his family about God’s free offer of eternal life, and they all believed (Acts 16:25-34).
These sorts of examples are found all over the place in the Bible, and the consistent message and expectation of biblical authors is that anyone and everyone can hear and understand the Gospel, and having heard, believe in Jesus for eternal life.
While sin is a universal problem, people are not so depraved that they cannot respond to the call of the Gospel and believe in Jesus for eternal life.
If you want to read more about Calvinism, check out other posts in this blog series: Words of Calvinism and the Word of God.
