God: My Amazing Daddy

Church history is full of debate over the doctrine of predestination vs. free will, and Mark Driscoll spends a chapter disecting this very topic in Religion Saves: And Nine Other Misconceptions.  He addresses the question of why an all-loving, all-knowing, and all-sovereign God wills into creation people he foreknows will suffer eternal condemnation.  Maybe you're not into theological debates and trying to figure it all out, but I just love how he concludes this chapter with a story from his own life in an effort to take all of the complicated theology and make it more concretely practical.

My personal journey with God regarding the doctrine of predestination has been incredibly insightful to my understanding of God as Father and has deepened my worship of him in response to his predestinating me. So, in an effort to show how the doctrine of predestination is inextricably connected to the fatherhood of God, I want to share with you how I see and savor the doctrine of predestination.

We have been blessed with three boys and two girls.  Our oldest child is Ashley Marisa.  I adore her with all my heart and love seeing her blossom into a beautiful, smart, creative, and godly young woman.  I shudder to remember the day she nearly died when she was roughly two years old.

At that time we lived off a busy street next to the football stadium of the University of Washington. Beyond our front porch there were perhaps twenty feet of property followed by a sidewalk and then four lanes of nearly constant heavy traffic. One day, when we opened the front door to walk to our parked car, Ashley started running toward the street, so we chased her, grabbed her, and carefully explained to her that she was never to run away from us again toward the traffic. She did not fully understand what we were saying; she just thought it was fun that we would chase her. To her, the whole thing was basically a playtime game. For some weeks she stayed near us as we went to put her in the car...until one nearly fateful day.

As we were loading her newborn brother into the car, she turned from my side and ran as fast as she could toward the busy street.  She was exercising her free will and made her own decision for her life.  In panic, I cried out to her, essentially preaching repentance to her, pleading with her to turn around and return to her daddy.  She foolishly did not respond, and I will never forget the smile on her face and the look in her eye as she ran toward the street, thinking we were playing a game and not seeing the death that awaited her.

Ashley ran in front of a vehicle parked on the side of the road. As I sprinted toward her, I looked to my left at the oncoming traffic and saw a large delivery truck rumbling down the road, right in the lane where Ashley was about to step. To make matters even worse, she was so short that the turck driver would never see her if she came out from behind the parked car, and I was certain that my daughter was going to die in front of my eyes. I closed in on her just as she stepped into the lane of the oncoming delivery truck. She was a few steps into the street when I grabbed her by the back of her vest and literally pulled her out of the way of the truck. Everything happened so fast that the truck driver did not have time to hit the horn or the brakes. My daughter's life was spared by just inches.

With one arm, I reached out and overrode the free-will decision of my daughter and saved her. I did this because my love for her is more important than her free will.

Tragically, I have heard a well-known Christian radio show host explain the Reformed view of predestination as God being a rapist rather than a lover because God overrides the free will of some people.  My heart breaks every time I hear that kind of statement, because rapists are not the only people who impose their will on others; sometimes so do loving daddies who want their kids to live. They reach out their hand to ensure they are saved from death.

Being a daddy myself, the predestinating hand of God the Father reaching down to me through Jesus makes me worship him for being such an amazing Dad.