Without the proper meaning of predestination, we would lack the safest and most powerful stimulus for God’s patience, resignation, and dependence under every spiritual and temporal affliction.
The following considerations should be kind to a grieving believer!
(1) There is certainly an almighty God, all wise and infinitely merciful.
(2) He has provided me in the past, and brings me now (if I only had eyes to see), many signs of his love for me, both in the form of providence and grace.
(3) Your love is immutable; never regrets or stops loving
(4) Is everything that happens in time the result of your eternal will, therefore?
(5) My afflictions are part of your initial plan, and all are classified in number, weight and measurement.
(6) Even the hair on my head is counted by him, not a single hair can fall to the ground if it is not for his determination.
(7) My suffering is not the result of chance, an accident or a fortuitous combination of circumstances, but?
(8) Are they the result of the providential realization of God’s plan?
(9) Were they designed to serve wise and elegant purposes, not even?
(10) My affliction will continue even a moment beyond what God has designated.
(11) He who brought me in such anguish promised to help me and guide me through it.
(12) Will all of this certainly work together for your glory and good?
(13)? Won’t I drink the glass the Father gave me? [John 18:11]
Yes, in the strength he gives, I will even rejoice in tribulation; and using the possible means of relief that he puts in my hands, I give myself and the situation to him whose purpose cannot be thwarted, whose plan cannot be undone and who will continue to do everything according to the advice of his own will, resigned or not.
Above all, when the suffering Christian remembers his choice and knows that he was appointed, by an eternal and immutable act of God, to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ; who has prepared for him a city, a building of God, a house not made by the hand of man, but eternal in heaven, and that the heaviest sufferings of present life are not worthy of comparison with the glory that will be revealed in the saints; What adversity could then happen to us so that the sure hope of blessings like these does not win forever?
With such divine comfort, I can endure trials
As much as afflictions can hurt us at first, once again, in the sense of such a hopeful perspective, we should quickly return to our normal state, and the arrows of tribulation would greatly lose their power to hurt. Christians only need absolute resignation to make them perfectly happy in every possible circumstance; and absolute resignation can only flow from absolute faith and absolute achillescence in the absolute providence of God, founded on absolute predestination.
Original: Girolamo Zanchi? The comforting doctrine of predestination (Reformation500). Translation: William Teixeira. Crítica: Camila Rebeca Teixeira. © 2017 Return to the Gospel. All rights reserved.
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