Have you ever wondered whether God’s love and blessing are only for a chosen few?
George MacDonald, who grew up as a Presbyterian and was trained to be a preacher, struggled mightily with the doctrine of predestination, the theology that only some are destined for salvation. … After a lifetime of pondering the unlimited nature of God’s love and the necessary fairness of divine justice, he wrote: “I will accept no explanation of any way of God that involves what I should scorn as false and unfair in a man. … If it be said by any that God does a thing, and the thing seems unjust, then either we do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it” (Discovering the Character of God, 249). …
Hannah Whitall Smith, who was raised a Quaker but who eventually became an influential evangelical, struggled in the way MacDonald did with this same doctrinal issue. Her personal relationship with the Lord led her to conclude this: “Whatever Christ was, that God is. All the unselfishness, all the tenderness, all the kindness, all the justice, all the goodness, that we see in Christ is simply a revelation of the unselfishness, the tenderness, the kindness, the justice, the goodness, of God” (The Unselfishness of God, 9). [from Yielding to Wonder, chapter 7, ©️ 2009]
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