“I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion” (Ex. 33:19).
One of the most common controversies surrounding the doctrine of election has to do with the question of double predestination. Does God actively, or positively, condemn some to eternal death in the same way that He redeems others to life? The basic question is why would God force some people into heaven who obviously don’t want to be there (the elect) while leaving others who want to enter the kingdom outside (the reprobate). There are two things wrong with this kind of thinking. First, regarding the elect, God changes the dispositions of their hearts, thus giving them the desire to embrace Christ and to enter His kingdom. Their natures are changed and thus their wills act in accordance with their new natures. God does not force them into heaven against their wills.
Second, unregenerated people do not want to enter the kingdom of heaven. Those who assume that there are such people have an unbiblical view of the fallen state of man. According to the Scriptures, no one seeks God. No one is clamoring to get into the kingdom. Unless God changes a person’s heart, he will continue to be hardened against God and revel in his sin.
Another assumption regarding double predestination is that God operates in the same manner in the lives of the reprobate and elect. In the elect, He intrudes into their souls and effects changing faith in their hearts. Some maintain that God acts in like manner in the reprobate, that He creates evil in their hearts, forcing them directly and immediately to oppose the Gospel because He does not want them in the kingdom. In this sense, He causes them to sin. This view is called the doctrine of equal ultimacy.
This too is unbiblical. While God does a positive work in which He intervenes by creating life and faith in the souls of the elect, God does not create evil in the hearts of the reprobate. They already have evil in their hearts. God merely passes over them in divine judgment, leaving them in their sin and refusing to restrain their evil ways. God does not have to create unbelief in the reprobate, it is already there. When God elects, He elects out of a mass of humanity that is already alienated from Him. The elect receive mercy and the reprobate receives justice. No one receives injustice.
Read various verses from the account of the plagues against Egypt: Ex. 7:12–14; 8:15, 19, 32; 9:12, 34–35; 10:20, 27; 11:10. Here we have Pharaoh with an already hardened heart, with a heart that he himself is hardening, and that God is hardening. Does God create unbelief in Pharaoh’s heart? Why not?
