EPC Australia

Adore with astonishment the secret counsel of God, through which, those which seemed good to Him are elected, and the other rejected!^[1]

That was our believer / theologian’s approach to predestination. He prostrated his mind and heart before the God of the Word; and because he heard God speaking so clearly of His eternal predestination, Calvin believed it, taught it, and preached it! Calvin practiced Sola Scriptura!

That reforming principle demanded predestination; and it delivered us from bondage to Rome’s semi-Pelagianism! Predestination, you see, is both the fountain of grace and the death knell to human merit; predestination is what gives us the other great solas of the Reformation: grace alone, in Christ alone, through faith alone, to God’s glory alone. GRACE ALONE! That is the triumphant cry of the Reformation. Calvin took us to its source – the eternal predestination of God. He drove his peg into that mighty truth and anchored us in the free grace of God.

Calvin’s doctrine of predestination stands at the very heart of the Confessions of the Reformed and Presbyterian churches.^[2] The doctrines of grace, or five points of Calvinism,^[3] have rightly become the common-places for biblical Christianity.