The "Destination" in Pre-Destination

The question behind the question

A friend of mine grew up in a legalistic home. Good man... godly man... raises his children to fear the Lord. But his whole life he believed that God was keeping score. I shared with him one day what propitiation means (Rom 3:25)... that God's righteous anger was completely satisfied in Jesus... that no matter who in this world gets mad at you, whether you get mad at yourself or even mad at God... he will never, ever, ever get mad at you again. Not in a way that condemns you.

He looked at me and he said... "no one has ever said that to me before."

Godly man. Raises his children to fear the Lord. Grew up in a Christian home. His upbringing was very legalistic. Very much earning your way to God, being accepted for the things that you do. And no one had ever told him that the wrath was finished. What kind of theology does that to a person? What does it say about us when the doctrine that should be the strongest foundation in all of Scripture... election, predestination, the eternal choosing of God... has become the thing that makes people afraid instead of the thing that makes them free? We took the 'Yes' of God and buried it under our 'No'.

The verses about foreknowledge and predestination and election are loaded for us today in terms of theology. They tend to get used to prove theological points, to defend theological systems. But I think if we read these verses properly, we will see that they bring us great comfort. That God's foreknowledge, that God's predestination mean that unlike anything else in this world... they are unshakable.

To get to the heart of these verses we have to do theology. And theology is just the study of God. But we want to do it the way Paul does it... not as an intellectual exercise, not to prove a point or defend a stance. Paul engaged in theology because he knew people's lives depend on it. Theology that does not just inform but forms. Shapes our spirits. Brings us closer to God.

One theologian put it this way. Paul was not doing theology for the purpose of meeting felt needs or making abstract theological claims. He was doing theology in the sense that the shepherd needs to feed the flock with clean food and clean water and keep a sharp eye out for wolves.

The architecture of Romans 8

My seminary professor, Dr. John Currid, said it like this. Outside of Romans 8:28, life is filled with confusion, anxiety, fear, and uncertainty. People seek refuge in flimsy temporary shelters... drugs, alcohol, entertainment, futile diversions. They rely on fragile investment strategies, fleeting insurance coverages, trivial retirement plans. They fortify themselves with deadbolts, alarm systems, and even weapons. But inside the walls of Romans 8:28... nothing can shake you, for there lies the promise of God's all-encompassing grace.

But to get inside those walls, we cannot just grab verse 28 and run with it. We have to see what Paul built around it.

Paul starts off Romans 8 by talking about the Spirit's life-giving work and the consequences of the flesh. He opens the chapter by saying there is freedom in Christ... no condemnation for those who are in Christ and who are led by the Spirit (v. 1). He then emphasizes our identity as God's children and goes on to talk about suffering and glory, which will be the main themes of Romans 8:28-30.

In verse 18, he says... "For I consider the sufferings of the present time are not worthy comparing with the glory that is going to be revealed in us." Paul is laying groundwork. We are God's children and Jesus is our spiritual big brother. If he suffered, we are going to suffer. But the glory that is coming, that we are destined for, is incomparable.

And then Paul opens the lens in verses 19-22. It is not just about people. It is about all of creation. "Creation eagerly waits with anticipation for God's sons to be revealed" (v. 19). Why is creation eagerly waiting? Because all of creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now (v. 22). Because of our sin, because of our rejection of God, because of the fall in Genesis 3... humanity has subjected creation to decay. And creation eagerly awaits our redemption, our final redemption, because when we are redeemed, that is the signal for creation to be redeemed. All of it tied together.

Now watch. Creation does not groan toward some unspecified future. It groans toward the revealing of the sons of God... which is to say, it groans toward Christ, because he is the firstborn among many brothers (v. 29). Everything God made is aimed at the same destination we are... conformity to the image of the Son. The trees and the stones and the suffering of every living thing... pointed at him. Creation does not know this, but Paul knows it. Creation's groaning and our groaning are the same groaning, because they have the same object.

Jesus Christ.

Then in verses 26 and 27, Paul connects the groaning of creation with our suffering. "The Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, we do not know what God wants us to pray for, but the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words. And the Father, who knows all hearts, knows what the Spirit is saying. For the Spirit pleads for us believers in harmony with God's own will."

This intercession of the Spirit is not detached from our own experience. The Spirit intercedes at the very point of our brokenness. The Father searches our hearts, and the Spirit translates our wordless groanings into prayers before God's throne. There is this divine conversation between the Father and the Spirit happening through us. It involves searching our hearts.

Sit with this. What Paul describes here is God's own life... Father, Son, and Spirit... opened to include us. The Spirit searches our hearts not as an outsider examining us but as God himself present within our weakness. And the Father who searches all hearts knows the mind of the Spirit. God speaking to God about us, within us, for us. The conversation that has been going on from eternity between Father, Son, and Spirit now runs through our suffering. Our groaning that we cannot put into words becomes, by the Spirit's intercession, a word that the Father recognizes... because it is his own Word, his own Spirit, praying in language that existed before creation.

Our pain is not outside of that conversation. It is inside it.

Suffering. Future glory. The redemption of all of creation. The Spirit's intercession. All of it is in the midst of the groaning that Paul is referring to. And all of it lays the groundwork for Romans 8:28-30.

The destination

Paul says... "We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. For those he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters" (Romans 8:28-29).

Paul is connecting verse 28 directly to the Spirit's intercession. The Spirit intercedes according to the Father's will... and because of that, we can have confidence that God is working all things together for our good. The Spirit's prayers do not miss.

This intercession is not passive. We are in the middle of it... the Spirit, the Father, working for our good. Even when we cannot see it. Even when we do not understand. Even when we do not even know how to pray and all we can do is groan. The Spirit takes those groanings and aligns them with God's will.

And God's work is so much bigger than we could ever imagine. It is not just the Spirit interceding for us at the place of our groaning. God is working everything... the things we cannot see, the things we do not know about... for our good. Paul says God works all things. What in our lives is not included in all things? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing that falls outside of this verse. Not a single thing.

And so the point of all this lands in verse 29. "For those he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters."

Catch the word conformed. The Greek is symmorphous... and the prefix, syn matters. It does not mean "similar to." It means "shaped together with"... molded into the same form. God has a plan to make a vast family of people who bear his image with Jesus as the preeminent one in that family. In Genesis, God created us in his image and we wrecked that. We wrecked creation when we turned our backs on him, when we sinned, when, in our rebellions, we decided to live life according to our own terms. But now God is recreating a people for himself. And living in the image of God is now expressed as being conformed to the image of Christ.

That is the destination inside the word predestination.

Not who gets in and who does not get in. Rather, what God has promised that he is is making you into.

But we have to push further. God did not look at Christ and then decide to make us like him, as though Jesus were a template and we were the copies coming off the line. Christ is not the pattern. He is the reality. Paul calls him "the image of the invisible God" in Colossians 1:15. Adam bore the image and shattered it. Christ bears the image and is the image. And our predestination is to be drawn into that reality... not as a second thing running alongside it, but as participants in the one thing God has always been doing, which is to be God not without us but with us and for us in his Son.

That is what Christ is doing in our lives. And God will finish it. No matter how great the suffering, no matter how great the struggle, no matter what opposition we face... God is going to conform us to the image of his Son. Our final destiny is tied to Jesus. God loves the Son in the most supreme way possible, and Jesus leads the way for our salvation, for our redemption. Predestination is tied to Jesus... that he would have preeminence and supremacy in God's family and that we would be his children. Our faith connects us to him.

But the guarantee is not based on our faith.

It is based on Jesus being the firstborn.

Foreknowledge, predestination, and the purposes of God

Verse 29 is not abstract theology. It is not a divine sorting mechanism... who is in, who is out, who is saved, who is not. Paul is still talking about the Spirit's intercession from the previous verses. Even in our weakness. Even in our wordless groanings. God is working for our good and for all of creation.

No prayers wasted. No groanings unheard. Our suffering is not random and it is not without aim. Our lives are woven into the redemption God has been working since Genesis 3... and his plans cannot fail because Jesus will not fail.

When we talk about foreknowledge, it is not God simply knowing the future, which of course he does. But it is not based on information. It is based in love and grace and relationship. God reaching out in advance of anything that we would do to reveal his purpose and to call us in obedience to that purpose.

To be known by God is to be loved. Paul puts it this way in 1 Corinthians 8:3... "If anyone loves God, he is known by him." That is what foreknowledge is. God setting his affection on you and kindling your love for him in return. We love him because he loves us. And foreknowledge awakens that love.

Think carefully here. The foreknowing and the predestining are not two steps. They are one act. And that act has a name... Jesus Christ. When Paul says "those whom he foreknew" in Romans 8:29, he is not describing a moment before Christ. There is no "before Christ" in God's eternal counsel. The knowing is the choosing. The choosing is the incarnation. The incarnation is the cross. The cross is the resurrection. The whole of it... one undivided decision of God to be for us in him.

Predestination is tied closely to foreknowledge. We tend to think of this word as fatalistic... the end is already decided, so why bother. But Paul would not have us take that away. He would want us to see predestination as rooted in God's sovereign plan, God's intention to bring us into conformity with the image of Christ. Not a decree that sorts people into categories. God means to shape us into Christ.

In Ephesians 1:11-12, Paul puts it this way... "In him we have also received an inheritance because we were predestined according to the plan of the One who works out everything in agreement with the purpose of his will, so that we who had already put our hope in Christ might bring praise to his glory." Our predestination is in Christ. According to God's sovereign plan. With the goal of bringing praise and glory to him.

In Deuteronomy 7:7-8, when Moses wrote to the Israelites about God choosing them, he said... "The Lord had set his heart on you and chose you not because you were more numerous than all peoples, for you were the fewest, but because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors." God's election of Israel was not based on anything they did or anything they would do. It was because of that phrase at the beginning of the verse. He had set his heart on them and chose them.

So we could say it like this. God's foreknowledge is the basis of his electing love, and his predestination is the outworking of his electing purpose. It is a mouthful, but in his foreknowledge he sets his affections on us. In his predestination he reveals his purpose for us.

The entire theme of Romans could be summed up as God's covenant faithfulness. That is what Paul is driving at. He is not engaging in disconnected theology. He is not trying to prove some theological system about who is predestined and who is the elect and who is not. He wants us to take comfort in God's covenant plans. These are not plans that God cooked up this morning. These are plans he had before the foundation of the earth... his sovereign plans of redemption. They touch our lives at the most personal level... and they reach to the edges of creation. God is redeeming all of it.

The golden chain

"And those he predestined he also called. And those he called he also justified. And those he justified he also glorified" (Romans 8:30).

Theologians call this the golden chain. It is unbreakable.

Look at those verbs. Foreknew... predestined... called... justified... glorified. What do they tell you?

They are all past tense.

They are all of God.

In his foreknowledge he set his love on us. He predestined us to be conformed to Jesus. He calls us, and in his calling we take up his purposes as our purposes. When he justifies us he takes our faith and counts it as righteousness, makes us part of his family. And he begins the glorification process... shaping us into the image of his Son, putting us on the path of final glorification.

There is nothing in there that we do.

We do participate. But God works all things. Not because of our efforts. Because of God. Because of Christ. Because he is the firstborn, securing our place in God's predestined eternal plan.

Paul uses past tense even for glorification. The thing that has not happened to us yet... he speaks of it as done. Because the decision of God in Jesus Christ is so accomplished, so settled, that what remains is not whether it will happen... but our participation in what has already happened in him. Christ is already glorified. Our destiny is not a separate track running alongside his. It is our inclusion in his. In God's eyes... we are already there. Paul says it again in Ephesians 2:6... God "raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Past tense. Done.

God sees us like this.

Already glorified.

The calling and the cost

Predestination is not pitting human responsibility against God's sovereignty. It brings us into what God has already planned. In Exodus, when God calls for a tabernacle to be built... who builds it? People. We take up his purpose. Our calling today is to be conformed to the image of Christ. God has predestined us to that. And so that becomes our goal, that becomes our calling.

A calling is more than an invitation. It is a divine summons to enter into God's plans and take them up as our own. God repairing what broke in Genesis 3.

We now have what we need to carry out God's work. His Spirit. His assurance. And we can live for him.

This is costly. God knows it. This calling can cost a lot, which is the point of these passages. We are called to advance God's work in a world that does not necessarily want it. We are not passive recipients of God working all things in the background, just waiting around for things to get a little bit better. We are the recipients of his Spirit, called to reflect the glory of God back to him and out into the world. We are to meet the world where it is groaning and take the gospel deeper and deeper into God's creation.

And in that calling we find what we were made for. We agonize over the brokenness around us. We allow the Spirit to move our agonies into prayers and the Father to move our prayers into action... embodying the love and grace of Christ, carrying a foretaste of that final glorification into a groaning world.

Think of a building going up. You walk past the site every day... scaffolding everywhere, dust, noise, exposed beams. It does not look like much. But the architect sees the finished structure because he drew it. He knows where every beam goes. He knows what the thing looks like when the scaffolding comes down.

God saves us as individuals... placing each of us into the structure he is building, conforming each one to the image of his Son. And one day the scaffolding comes down. And we see what he was building all along.

What these words mean for you

When we talk about words like foreknowledge and predestination, calling and justification... I want you to know that these words describe you as a believer. They are not just something that God does. They are who you are, because their meaning comes from your relationship with God.

This is how he sees us. His wrath is completely satisfied because of Jesus. And now we are on the path of final glorification.

I pray that parents, if you have small children, tell them this often. Who they are in God's sight. That we do not raise children who constantly strive to earn our love through their actions. That we teach them to rest in our love and to act out of that love. That our actions are our response to love... not a cause.

We have the Spirit interceding for us. We have the Father searching our hearts and the Spirit having a divine conversation. And we have the Son leading the way. What is more secure than that?

All of it tied to what God decided before the foundation of the earth.

When the enemy accuses... when shame whispers... when your own heart turns on you... you are his child. A co-heir with Christ (Romans 8:17). What belongs to Jesus now belongs to you. The delight of the Father... the welcome... the presence.

It never ends.

And so our groanings in Christ become glory.
And our agonies become hallelujahs.

That is not a bumper sticker.
That is predestination with skin on.