Martin Luther’s precise stance on predestination is not easy to ascertain. Primarily and practically, he sought to focus on the doctrine of predestination on the elect under the consoling umbrella of salvation in and through Christ. . . .

Luther stressed that everything flows from God’s eternal decree in accordance with His sovereign will . . . Luther traced all events back to God’s active omnipotence, and emphasized the initiative of God in salvation. . . .

The doctrine of predestination, according to Luther, was a motivation to rest in the promises of God’s Word, which are able to keep a sinner from plunging himself into the despairing abyss of reprobation. Since God does not lie, anyone who trusts His promises “will be saved and chosen.” In his doctrinal writings, correspondence, and even at his table, Luther constantly reiterated this pastoral use of predestination, always seeking to use it as a guarantee of forgiveness and a pleading ground; predestination is for, rather than against salvation. . . . The priority which Luther assigned to the consolatory aspect of predestination above and apart from its connection with the sovereignty of God and conversion itself, contains the incipient seeds of later Lutheranism’s outright rejection of the doctrine of double predestination. . . .

It is clear that Luther did, at least early in his career as is evident in the writing of De servo arbitrio, assert a doctrine of double predestination. His presentation of it was not in the theological sense as seen in Calvin, but in a pastoral sense. The whole doctrine of predestination (reprobation included) is intended to console the believer by purifying faith from all secret claims of merit and from self-security, so as to move him to rely on, and solely proclaim, the Pauline emphasis on the freedom of God’s grace in Chris Jesus (Romans 9-11). For Luther, who once confessed himself, “I am not only miserable, but misery itself,” nothing could be more consoling.

Joel R. Beeke, Debated Issues in Sovereign Predestination: Early Lutheran Predestination, Calvinian Reprobation, and Variations in Genevan Lapsarianism, 17, 19, 23, 24.