Predestination: An Introduction
Towards the end of 2025, I found myself fielding question after question about predestination from a few different people in our youth group. How is it fair for God to choose who will be saved? What about the people he hasn’t chosen? Do our choices actually matter?
The topic had come up in some of our Bible studies, including a doctrine series. Then, earlier this year, we worked through Romans in our Sunday youth studies, and there was plenty more to talk about.
For some, these questions were becoming an obstacle to putting their faith in Jesus. They were interested in Christianity, but couldn’t see how predestination fitted with God’s goodness. Others were already Christians but didn’t really get it. It had landed in the “too hard” basket.
But then I realised it wasn’t just our youth asking these questions. There were plenty of questions among our young adults too. More recently, I’ve even started getting questions from some of our “older adults”. People were struggling to understand how God’s love, goodness and sovereignty fit together. For some, it was making them second-guess whether they could trust him.
As a youth pastor, this is one of the most common topics I get asked about, both by Christians and by people who have been around our youth group for a while but haven’t yet put their faith in Jesus.
Originally, I was just going to write a page or two of notes for each study in our predestination series, to give our young adult leaders something to help them prepare. But the notes kept growing. Eventually, I turned them into full articles.
They still have that original purpose: helping our leaders think through these questions with the young people they lead. But I’ve tried to write them so that people reading the blog can follow along too.
There’s an argument running through the series: predestination is good. God’s gracious sovereignty gives us every reason to trust him and get on with following Jesus.
Salvation begins with God’s grace. He takes the initiative, and he carries out his purposes through Jesus. We still make real choices. We’re called to trust Jesus, turn from sin, pray and tell others the gospel. God’s control gives us good reason to do those things. He chooses to involve us in what he’s doing.
A quick word about the title. Predestination usually refers to God deciding beforehand to save people through Jesus. But these questions soon lead to a bigger one: how does God’s control fit with everything else that happens? That broader subject is often called God’s providence. We’ll explore both in this series, even though I’ve put them together under the heading “Predestination”. That includes suffering and evil. Saying his sovereignty is good doesn’t make everything that happens good. Evil is still evil, and pain is still painful. But God can work through even terrible things to accomplish his good purposes. We see that most clearly at the cross. We won’t always know why he allowed something to happen, but we can trust the God who gave his Son for us.
Here’s what we’ll be looking at:
Each article works through a Bible passage, tackles some pushback questions and considers what difference it makes to how we live.
I’m coming at this from a Reformed understanding of the Bible. Christians disagree about some of these questions, and there are things I don’t think we can fully explain. But I want to take the questions seriously and let the Bible shape the answers.
My hope is that, by the end, predestination will seem less like something to leave in the “too hard” basket and more like a reason to trust God, keep following Jesus, and sleep at night.
