Question
I’ve gotten a little confused regarding faith not being a choice.
Say, for example, someone believes Jesus is the Christ, believes that He gives eternal life to everyone who believes in Him for it, but refuses to believe in Him for it. Wouldn’t that be a choice?
Because that person understands and believes that Jesus is who He says He is and yet stubbornly decides to do it his own way, and work for his salvation?
I hope you can help clear up my confusion!
Answer
Interesting question. I think there is a simple contradiction in the way you put it. You said:
Say, for example, someone believes Jesus is the Christ, believes that He gives eternal life to everyone who believes in Him for it, but refuses to believe in Him for it. Wouldn’t that be a choice?
The contradiction is they both “believe” but also “refuse to believe.” You can’t do both at the same time. You either believe or not. Instead, I would put it like this:
Say, for example, someone understands Jesus is the Christ, understands that He gives eternal life to everyone who believes in Him for it, but refuses to believe in Him for it. Wouldn’t that be a choice?
That makes more sense, and it happens all the time, i.e., you can understand a claim without believing that it to be true. For example, I’ve read a lot of Mormon theology. However, while I understand what Joseph Smith taught, I don’t believe that what he taught was true. Likewise, someone can understand what Free Grace people claim about salvation and yet not believe it to be true.
The good news for someone in that situation is that you cannot believe what you do not first understand. So if someone has come to the point of understanding the grace message, he is at least that much closer to believing it.
But is that disbelief a choice? Your question assumes it is. The person in your example “refuses to believe in Him for it.” I don’t think that is quite right, either.
Belief itself is not a choice. If it were, every morning, I would have to choose to believe things like, “I am Shawn Lazar. I am married. I have three kids. I am lying in bed right now,” and make sure not to choose to believe things like, “I am Abraham Lincoln. I am riding a brontosaurus. It’s raining spaghetti.” We would go crazy if we had to choose our beliefs. Thankfully, we don’t choose them; instead, they spontaneously form. I open the curtains, look outside, and spontaneously form the belief, “It is raining.”
However, someone can indirectly choose to resist coming to faith by grace in several ways, such as by: 1) not listening to what you tell them about grace; 2) making sure he only reads or listens to works-salvation teachers; 3) ignoring the passages in Scripture about grace; 4) maybe ignoring Scripture altogether; 5) choosing to attend a works-salvation church, etc. There are many choices someone can make that will shield him from the evidence for grace. In that way, he can actively, but indirectly, choose not to believe.
And people are culpable for those choices.
Jesus said to the Jews who sought to kill Him, “But you are not willing to come to Me that you may have life” (John 5:39). Since they were standing right in front of Him, “coming to Jesus” must be a metaphor for believing. Jesus faulted those Jews for not being willing to believe.
That problem comes up often—people are unwilling to believe the grace message, so they choose to take steps to ensure they will never believe it (such as the ones I mentioned above).
What can you do in the meantime? Keep loving your unwilling neighbor and keep presenting him or her with the Biblical evidence. However, instead of focusing all your attention on evangelizing the unwilling, look for the people who are open and willing to believe and share the grace message with them.
