Luke 18:31-34 “Then He took the twelve aside and said to them, "Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written by the prophets concerning the Son of Man will be accomplished. (32) For He will be delivered to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. (33) They will scourge Him and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again." (34) But they understood none of these things; this saying was hidden from them, and they did not know the things which were spoken.”
We have seen in the previous section that the method God uses to predestine believers for salvation, is that He opens their understanding to the gospel message so that they can believe it and thus be saved. This brings us to another truth pertaining to the predestination of believers, which is God’s timing, for scripture reveals to us that just as God predestines who will be saved, so He also predestines when they will be saved. In other words, God decides at what point, in the life of those predestined for salvation, He will open their understanding to the message of the gospel. For just as God decides when and where we are born into the earth, so it is that He decides when and where we will be born-again. And so, the question is then asked, why does God decide when people are saved? You will recall earlier, that we saw that God does everything for a reason, and so His decision as to when the saints are saved is no different. But regarding this point, there is no generic reason given in scripture, as to why God decides when He will open the understanding of each one, for God has a different reason for each individual, which always involves God working out His own purposes in the earth. In the examples I have chosen in this section, we can see the reasons why God delayed the gospel being revealed to them until the time was right, and in both cases the reasons were different. The two witnesses that I have listed to reveal this truth to us are the Lord Jesus and the apostle Paul. In the first example, we see in the above quoted passage of scripture, our Lord Jesus taking His twelve apostles aside and explaining very clearly to them what would happen to Him in Jerusalem on this occasion. Nevertheless, the same scripture also clearly tells us that his disciples understood none of what He was saying, because it was hidden from them. Obviously God had hidden it from them at that time. We have already discussed this passage earlier, to learn how God blinds the minds of the unbelievers, but this same passage also reveals the truth to us regarding the Lord’s timing, in revealing the truth of the gospel to those chosen for salvation.
Michael E.B. Maher
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