Quotes & Sayings About Predestination

Racism negates two aspects of man's life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination. — Ayn Rand

Predestination ... and salvation are clean taken out of our hands, and put in the hands of God only ... for we are so weak and so uncertain, that if it stood in us, there would of a truth be no man saved; the devil, no doubt, would deceive us.23 — Steven J. Lawson

There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent "what if" scenarios
what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?
because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency. — Louis Menand

My conclusion on Freewill and predestination- they are identical. — Winston S. Churchill

What is predestination? Answer: God is more powerful and wiser than we are, therefore he deals with us according to his pleasure. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I did this movie, Predestination, and it's one of my favorite movies I've ever made, because sci-fi really lets you talk about ideas in a way that's not pretentious. — Ethan Hawke

I knew at an early age I wanted to act. Acting was always easy for me. I don't believe in predestination, but I do believe that once you get where ever it is you are going, that is where you were going to be. — Morgan Freeman

But if everything's already decided, then what's the point of living? - Tom, pg 437 — Joseph Delaney

It is obvious that the aspects of mystery which gather round the word "election" are not confined to it alone. An important class of words, such as "calling," "predestination" "foreknowledge," "purpose," "gift," bears this same character; asserting or connoting, in appropriate contexts, the element of the inscrutable and sovereign in the action of the Divine will upon man, and particularly upon man's will and affection toward God. And it will be felt by careful students of the Bible in its larger and more general teachings that one deep characteristic of the Book, which with all its boundless multiplicity is yet one, is to emphasize on the side of man everything that can humble, convict, reduce to worshipping silence (see for typical passages Job 40:3, 1; Ro 3:19), and on the side of God everything which can bring home to man the transcendence and sovereign claims of his almighty Maker. — James Orr

For Scripture is the school of the Holy Spirit, in which, as nothing is omitted that is both necessary and useful to know, so nothing is taught but what is expedient to know. Therefore we must guard against depriving believers of anything disclosed about predestination in Scripture, lest we seem either wickedly to defraud them of the blessing of their God or to accuse and scoff at the Holy Spirit for having published what it is in any way profitable to suppress. — John Calvin

O how far remov'd, Predestination! is thy foot from such As see not the First Cause entire: and ye, O mortal men! be wary how ye judge: For we, who see the Maker, know not yet The number of the chosen; and esteem Such scantiness of knowledge our delight: For all good is, in that primal good, Concentrate; and God's will and ours are one. — Dante Alighieri

Humanity is identity. All men are made of the same clay. No difference, here below at least, in predestination. The same darkness before, the same flesh during, the same ashes after. But when ignorance is mixed with human dough, it blackens it. This incurable blackness takes over man's insides and there turns into evil ... Destroy the dark hold, Ignorance, and you destroy the mole, Crime. — Victor Hugo

When I was a little girl, if someone asked me why I was a Christian, I said it was because Jesus lived in my heart. In high school, I said it was because I accepted the atonement of Jesus Christ on the cross for my sins. My sophomore year of college, during a short-lived Reformed phase, I said it was because of the irresistible grace of God. But after watching Zarmina's execution on television, I decided that the most truthful answer to that question was this: I was a Christian because I was born in the United States of America in the year 1981 to Peter and Robin Held. Arminians call it free will; Calvinists call it predestination. I call it the cosmic lottery. — Rachel Held Evans

If God is love (1 John 4:7) but intended Christ's atoning death to be the propitiation for only certain people so only they have any chance of being saved, then 'love' has no intelligible meaning when referring to God. All Christians agree that God is love. But believers in limited atonement must interpret God's love as somehow compatible with God unconditionally selecting some people to eternal torment in hell when He could save them (because election to salvation and thus salvation itself is unconditional). — Roger E. Olson

There is no fate ... no predestination ... no luck. Don't use that as an excuse to not live the life you want. Work for it. You make your future - no one else. — Ingrid Weir

If psychics are real, it implies that the universe is far vaster and stranger than conventional perception would state. If psychics can talk to the dead, that removes the sting of mortality and loss. It also suggests there is predestination, a way to cheat the vagaries of Fate with foreknowledge. The cost for believing in them is tiny indeed compared to that. — Thomm Quackenbush

A man may be so bold of his predestination, that he forget his conversation. — Thomas Adams

The ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry — G.K. Chesterton

Because of Jesus' supposed predestination, God would have had to choose the people who would kill and betray his son, choose the method by which he would be killed (crucifixion), and the time at which the event would occur. Those guilty of killing Jesus would therefore be simply carrying out God's wishes without the free will to have chosen a path for themselves. — David G. McAfee

I don't believe in predestination, even though I was raised a Presbyterian. — Shelley Long

Sometimes I do believe in predestination. I feel helpless to do anything but what I am compelled to do. — Why The Lucky Stiff

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. — Neal Stephenson

God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation. — John Calvin

There are two aspects to the life of every man: the personal life, which is free in proportion as its interests are abstract, and the elemental life of the swarm, in which a man must inevitably follow the laws laid down for him.
Consciously a man lives on his own account in freedom of will, but he serves as an unconscious instrument in bringing about the historical ends of humanity. An act he has once committed is irrevocable, and that act of his, coinciding in time with millions of acts of others, has an historical value. The higher a man's place in the social scale, the more connections has with others, and the more power he has over them, the more conspicuous is the inevitability and predestination of every act he commits. "The hearts of kings are in the hand of God." The king is the slave of history. — Leo Tolstoy

What the fates have writ, men shall not erase . . . . How many times he [Lut] had uttered those words. But what exactly did they mean? That one's fate was inalterably fixed? A man's entire life? Was there no chance for redemption? Though he had never revealed this to anyone, especially not the elders, he'd long entertained the notion that perhaps not all of a man's life was preordained. For, if so, what was the point of living? Perhaps, just perhaps, he dared to imagine, impediments were placed in our paths by the gods, and a man was judged by how well he dealt with those obstacles . . . . Instead of a man being wholly defined by his fate, perhaps a man's very character was defined by his response to the fate that was spun for him. Couldn't it at least be possible? — James Jennewein

Free Will : "I made you think so."
Predestination: "I knew you had to. — Toba Beta

St. Thomas Aquinas deeply loved this beautiful chant thus understood. It is told of him that he could not keep back his tears when, during Compline of Lent, he chanted the antiphon: "In the midst of life we are in death: whom do we seek as our helper, but Thou, O Lord, who because of our sins art rightly incensed? Holy God, strong God, holy and merciful Savior, deliver us not up to a bitter death; abandon us not in the time of our old age, when our strength will abandon us." This beautiful antiphon begs for the grace of final perseverance, the grace of graces, that of the predestined. How it should speak to the heart of the contemplative theologian, who has made a deep study of the tracts on Providence, predestination, and grace! — Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

Pandora's Box could not be unopened, no one could return to Eden. — Selena Kitt

When we approach theology as facts to look at, it is easy to allow certain theological debates to replace Scripture as our primary theological subject matter. These debates - such as the categorization of God's attributes, the nature of predestination, the age of the earth, and the continuation of certain spiritual gifts - are not unimportant issues, and sometimes the church must return to them for extended theological reflection. However, the church's mission is derailed when theology becomes little more than a discipline helping people know what to believe about these particular issues. These debates are necessary to the task of theology, but they are not primary. The primary role of theology is to cultivate in us a love for and knowledge of — Daniel L. Akin

Predisposition is not predestination. — William Landay

Given Freudian assumptions about the nature of children and the biological predestination of mothers, it is unthinkable for mothers voluntarily to leave their babies in others' care, without guilt about the baby's well-being and a sense of self-deprivation. Mothers need their babies for their own mental health, and babies need their mothers for their mental health
a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship. — Sandra Scarr

most religions adhere to some form of determinism and predestination. Since God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, He knows the future, and hence the future is determined ahead of time. He knows even before you are born whether you will go to Heaven or Hell. The Catholic Church split in half on this precise question during the Protestant revolution. According to Catholic doctrine at that time, one could change one's ultimate fate with an indulgence, usually by making generous financial donations to the Church. In other words, determinism could be altered by the size of your wallet. — Michio Kaku

It was not the Fall of Adam, therefore, that set God's agenda; it was the decision to share the great dance with us through Jesus. Adam's plunge certainly threatened God's dreams for us, but that threat had been anticipated and already strategically overcome in the predestination of the incarnation. Jesus Christ did not become human to fix the fall; he became human to accomplish the eternal purpose of our adoption, and in order to bring our adoption to pass, the Fall had to be called to a halt and undone ... .Jesus is not a footnote to Adam and his Fall; the Fall, and indeed creation itself, is a footnote to the purpose of God in Jesus Christ. — C. Baxter Kruger

PREDESTINATION, n. The doctrine that all things occur according to programme ... not be confused with that of foreordination. The difference is great enough to have deluged Christendom with ink, to say nothing of the gore. — Ambrose Bierce

War between free-will and predestination makes
the idea of time travel is still too difficult to digest. — Toba Beta

To get rid of predestination we have been willing to degrade our God into a godling. — B. B. Warfield

It is inconceivable that the God who gives Himself in His Son to save us, should have created some people ordained to evil and damnation. There can only be one predestination to salvation. In and through Jesus Christ all people are predestined to be saved. Our free choice is ruled out in this regard. God wants free people, except in relation to this last and definitive decision. We are not free to decide and choose to be damned. — Jacques Ellul

On November 5 he landed at Torbay, on the coast of Devon. Reminded that it was the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, he remarked to Burnet, What do you think of Predestination now? — Winston S. Churchill

There's a new reality born every minute. Unless one is a believer in predestination (in which case I'll call the prestidigitator), or other puppet-like restraints on our powers, one is free to imagine and effect changes on the world. And if enough people do it, there are big changes. These things happen. Anything can. — Neil Peart

Predestination therefore, as it regards the thing itself, is the Decree of the good pleasure of God in Christ, by which He resolved within Himself from all eternity, to justify, adopt, and endow with everlasting life, to the praise of His own glorious grace, believers on whom He had decreed to bestow faith. — James Arminius

would seem as though language is the only predestination of man, and that he is created to bring it forth as his fruit. Man frets until he has given external expression to that which works within. Written language is like a mirror which it is necessary to have in order that man may know himself and be sure that he exists. So long as he does not see himself in his works he is not sure that he lives. The soul, like the body, has its ripe age. — Alphonse De Lamartine

I may not be free, but I'm not about to surrender the illusion of choice. — Johnny Rich

Humanity is identity. All men are the same clay. No difference, here below at least, in predestination. The same darkness before, the same flesh during, the same ashes after life. But ignorance, mixed with the human composition, blackens it. This incurable ignorance possesses the heart of man, and there becomes evil. — Victor Hugo

Habit is, to weak minds, a species of moral predestination, from which they have no power to escape. — Maria Edgeworth

Some of the Fathers went so far as to esteem the love of music a sign of predestination, as a thing divine, and reserved for the felicities of heaven itself. — William Temple

I believe in fatalism, the positive one. — Bangambiki Habyarimana

Human existence may be simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life. Demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world. What counts for long-term survival is intelligent self-understanding, based upon a greater independence of thought than that tolerated today even in our most advanced democratic societies. — E. O. Wilson

Which brings me to my conclusion upon Free Will and Predestination, namely - let the reader mark it - that they are identical. — Winston Churchill

This great question of predestination and free will, of free moral agency and accountability, and being saved by the grace of God, and damned for the glory of God, have occupied the mind of what we call the civilized world for many centuries. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The higher a man stands on the social ladder, the greater the number of people he is connected with, the more power he has over other people, the more obvious is the predestination and inevitability of his every action. — Leo Tolstoy

By predestination we mean the eternal decree of God, by which He determined with Himself whatever He wished to happen with regard to every man — John Calvin

It is the Godfather, not God the Father, who makes you an offer you can't refuse. — Peter Kreeft

O Jesus! Remember the sadness that Thou didst experience when, contemplating in the light of Thy divinity the predestination of those who would be saved by the merits of Thy sacred passion, thou didst see at the same time the great multitude of reprobates who would be damned for their sins, and Thou didst complain bitterly of those hopeless, lost, and unfortunate sinners. — Brigit Of Kildare

Some may object that to speak of election or predestination is to limit the kingdom of God to a few. Does it make God a capricious tyrant? We must answer that such objections usually stem from a refusal to accept that we are faced here with a mystery that is not given to us to solve. There is also a radical misunderstanding which maintains that God's sovereignty in election removes man's responsibility. Such is not true. How divine sovereignty and human responsibility work together we cannot know. The Bible makes it clear that they do. // Let us remember that Jesus discriminated and limited the numbers of the saved: 'Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it' (Matthew 7:13-14). This is in line with the Old Testament teaching that only a faithful remnant of Israel would be saved. — Graeme Goldsworthy

I lost the ability to consider the question of predestination with necessary scepticism. — Alain De Botton

You see him and you think me and I knew if you saw him first you would be afraid because it is frightening! I am frightened! I have to turn into him! He's already been all the Saturdays it takes to be that Saturday, but whatever happened is still coming for me, I still have to stand up for the hurts and the grief that made him and I can't not do it, but knowing I will is like looking at a hot stove and knowing you're going to touch it, knowing you're going to burn, and feeling the blisters and the peeling before even you reach out your hand. I have to feel it now, all the time, and I don't even know what the stove is. — Catherynne M Valente

Things are a great deal better in your part of the world - better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They're foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can't get rid of them, can't take a holiday from them, can't go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It's freedom, if you like - but freedom in a telephone booth. — Aldous Huxley

I don't know much about the Presbyterian faith, but the atmosphere alone was enough to put me off predestination. — Sue Grafton

No one ever came to Christ because they knew themselves to be of the elect. It is quite true that God has of his mere good pleasure elected some to everlasting life, but they never knew it until they came to Christ. Christ nowhere invites the elect to come to Him. The question for you is not, Am I one of the elect? But, Am I one of the human race? — Robert Murray McCheyne

Believe it or not, the notions of free will and destiny are not mutually exclusive.
Predestination is the universal framework of limits (based on natural physical laws) placed upon us.
Free will is our infinite ability to make choices within that framework.
Because the universal scale is so great - and most of it constitutes an undiscovered frontier - our choices are only limited by our knowledge, our abilities, and our imagination.
To put it simply, the world is such a huge playground sandbox that we will never run out of sand or reach the faraway safety fence of destiny.
So go out there and play! — Vera Nazarian

We talk about predestination because the Bible talks about predestination. If we desire to build our theology on the Bible, we run head on into this concept. We soon discover that John Calvin did not invent it. — R.C. Sproul

This is exactly the way others argue from predestination: "If I am predestined, I cannot perish, whatever I do." These are voices of Satan which should be avoided. It is, indeed, true that whatever is foreordained will come to pass, but it should be added that this is unknown to you. You do not know, for example, whether you will die tomorrow or live, and it is God's will that you do not know this. It is therefore foolish for you to search out what God by His special counsel has concealed from you. But because you do not know how long you will survive, you should use the things necessary for life. If it is foreordained that you should die after a month, nevertheless, God should not be tempted since, indeed, you are uncertain about that, but you should use the things necessary to sustain life. Therefore, — Martin Luther

Women have a predestination to suffering. — Bela Lugosi

Now, that is probably my least favorite topic of conversation in the entire world. I have spent a great part of my life hearing that doctrine talked up and down, and no one's understanding ever advanced one iota. I've seen grown men, God-fearing men, come to blows over that doctrine. The first thought that came to my mind was, Of course he would bring up predestination! — Marilynne Robinson

Eddie Fislinger's church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination. — Sinclair Lewis

If the world go wrong, it was, in some off-hand manner, never meant to go right. — Charles Dickens

If we are to be biblical, then, the issue is not whether we should have a doctrine of predestination or not, but what kind we should embrace. — R.C. Sproul

There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true. — Robert A. Heinlein

If a dream can tell the future it can also thwart that future. For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come. He is bound to no one that the world unfold just so upon its course and those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream? — Cormac McCarthy

Unbeliever is he who follows predestination even if he be Muslim, Faithful is he, if he himself is the Divine Destiny. — Muhammad Iqbal

Because I do not accept the hand of God; I do not believe in divine intervention or predestination. I cannot believe that our paths are pre-chosen and that our lives have no will. That there is no such thing as choice. — Carrie Ryan

Heartbreak is more common than happiness. No one wants to say that, but it's true. We're taught to believe not only that everyone deserves a happy ending, but that if we try hard enough, we will get one. That's simply no the case. Happy endings, life long loves, are the products of both effort and luck. We can control them, to some extent and though our feelings always seem to have a life of their own, we can at least be open to love. But, luck, the other component, well there's nothing we can do about that one. Call it God's plan or predestination or divine intervention, but we're all at its mercy. And sometimes God isn't very merciful. Jane taught me that. — Beth Pattillo

The whole struggle was over, and yet there seemed to have been no moment of victory. You might say, if you liked, that the power of choice had been simply set aside and an inflexible destiny substituted for it. On the other hand, you might say he had delivered from the rhetoric of his passions and had emerged in unassailable freedom. Ransom could not for the life of him, see any difference between these two statements. Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heart on the subject. — C.S. Lewis

A coward: a man or woman who is unsatisfied by his condition and believes he was destined to accept it that way — Bangambiki Habyarimana

You can and you can't - You shall and you shan't - You will and you won't - And you will be damned if you do - And you will be damned if you don't. — Lorenzo Dow

Every man hath greater assurance that God is good and just than he can have of any subtle speculations about predestination and the decrees of God. — John Tillotson

There's nothing more unattractive than a man who blames predestination for his own failures and a woman who blames men for her own vulnerability ...
Blame thyself — Sanhita Baruah

I am not impressed by big words,' said my uncle, who was always read enough to bandy 'predestination' and 'infralapsarianism. — Peter De Vries

Just so we're clear the words "free will" are not actually in the Bible. Predestination, on the other hand ... — R.C. Sproul Jr.

That is what Reason can neither grasp nor endure, and what has offended all these men of outstanding talent who have been so received for so many centuries. Here they demand that God should act according to human justice, and do what seems right to them or else cease to be God. — Martin Luther

The first verse that comes to mind that refutes all of Calvin's points is "Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." Whoever means whoever. Not just some, not just the elect; that means that anyone who wants to come to God and repent may do so. There is not a certain group that is predestined for hell and they can't do anything about it. How then would God be just? Knowing God's nature, and that he IS love, I simply cannot believe that and believe it to be a completely false teaching. — Lisa Bedrick

Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject. — C.S. Lewis

If there is Predestination, then God is the devil. — Mary Ann Shaffer

... apparently sees some value in the antiquity of the doctrine of ... This means absolutely nothing to me, for whom the Scriptures alone are my sole doctrinal authority, beyond the fact that this is just one more error of the ancient fathers. I could fill pages documenting other errors that the ancient fathers held and espoused.

Response to The Classic Arminian View of Election, page 135 — Robert L. Reymond

Angels do not whisper in our ears. Predestination is a fairy tale, a bedtime story for adults scared of meaningless death. — Paul Doiron

Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it - which must have been a great spiritual struggle - and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now seems to be leading you back towards predestination. It is most difficult. — Neal Stephenson

Only the wise know just where predestination ends and free will begins. Meanwhile, you must keep on doing your best, according to your own clearest understanding. you must long for freedom as the drowning man longs for air. Without sincere longing, you will never find God. — Paramahansa Yogananda

The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace. — Rebecca Solnit

There is no single outside force imposing meaning on the events of your life. There is no evidence whatsoever that people's life events conform to some sort of divine plan or predestination. Life is, objectively, meaningless; given the size and scope of the universe and our tiny role within it, it's absurd to think that we might have any sort of cosmically vital role. — Armin Navabi

everything is foreordained and it was bound to happen anyway. But even so, it's nice to think one was an instrument used by predestination. — L.M. Montgomery

I infer that God's decrees, and the necessity of event flowing thence, neither destroy the true free-agency of men, nor render the commission of sin a jot less heinous. They neither force the human will, nor extenuate the evil of human actions. Predestination, foreknowledge, and providence, only secure the event, and render it certainly future, in a way and manner (incomprehensibly indeed by us; but) perfectly consistent with the nature of second causes. — Augustus Toplady

A perfect example, in matters of life and death, of love and passion, of choice or destiny; options decrease to a singular course. — Bruce Crown

The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray because they make no choices. — Clarice Lispector

Free-will followers should learn more about "somebody's bitch".
Predestination followers should learn more about "sexual fantasy. — Toba Beta

The decrees of the Sovereign Ordainer, as related to fate and predestination, are of two kinds. Both are to be obeyed and accepted. The one is irrevocable, the other is, as termed by men, impending. To the former all must unreservedly submit, inasmuch as it is fixed and settled. God however, is able to alter or repeal it. As the harm that must result from such a change will be greater than if the decree had remained unaltered, all, therefore, should willingly acquiesce in what God hath willed and confidently abide by the same. — Baha'u'llah

Mary is the Mysterious Book of Predestination to glory. — Frances Xavier Cabrini

The camera was waiting for me by predestination and I took to it as a musician takes to the piano or a painter to canvas. I found that I was master of the elements, that I could work miracles. — Alfred Stieglitz

On the bottom staff - the taste of earth, worms, and dust; the smell of dead leaves and frankincense. On the top - the luminosity of awareness making sense of transience and predestination. Three quiet major chords marked the moment of death, because death was sweet. It was our true home, the home we'd left and been trying to get back to. It's what we had passed through before and would pass through again, a moment of truth that suspended the weight of thought, the weight of the will to inhabit a dead universe. — Nikolai Grozni

No attempt should be made to "reconcile" Yahweh's hardening of Pharaoh's heart (plagues 6,8,9,10) with statements in the other plagues that Pharaoh hardened his own heart.
The tension cannot be resolved in a facile manner by suggesting, for example, that Pharaoh has already demonstrated his recalcitrance, so Yahweh merely helps the process along, or that he is doing what Pharaoh would have done on his own anyway. Rather, 9:12 is a striking reminder of what God has been trying to teach Moses and Israel since the beginning of the Exodus episode: He is in complete control. However Pharaoh might have reacted is given the chance is not brought into the discussion. He is not even given that chance. Yahweh hardens his heart. It is best to allow the tension of the text to remain. — Peter Enns

I believe that nothing happens apart from divine determination and decree. We shall never be able to escape from the doctrine of divine predestination - the doctrine that God has foreordained certain people unto eternal life. — Charles Spurgeon