Introduction
– Sometimes it isn’t too difficult to believe, in a general
way, that God is in control of everything.
It is nice to sing ‘He’s got the whole world in His hands’ as long as we
don’t try too hard to push that general doctrine out into all the corners. But the one corner we most often want to stay
away from is the corner of man’s free choice over his eternal state. The modern evangelical church and the general
‘Christian’ religion of our nation today hate this doctrine. But then, Jesus didn’t get a great response
when He taught it either (Luke 4:16-30, John 6:65-66).
Inescapable
Election – If
we are going to ascribe any interaction of God with man in history, we will
have to deal with some form of election in one way or another. God elected Abraham and not His
neighbor. Jesus chose twelve disciples
and not others. Paul was directed away
from Asia and towards Macedonia. These
particular interactions have eternal consequences that we can see today.
The Blessing of Election (Eph 1:3-6) – First things first. If Paul praises God for His electing love, so
must we. If God speaks of election as
similar to all the blessings He gives to His people, if He claims it comes from
His love and the good pleasure of His will, then so must we. If God says that His work of election (and
the declaration of it) to the world is ‘to the praise of the glory of His
grace’, then so must we. We may not
hide from the doctrine of election, nor may we hide it from the world.
The Joy of the
Trinity in Election (Luke
10:21-22) – God’s free, electing love is the subject of rejoicing by the whole
Trinity in this passage. God, as three
Persons, is completely unified in His choice to elect some to eternal life. God does not consider this a terrible, dry
doctrine. He is pleased with Himself in
how He created and controls the destinies of all men. The point is not that there are only certain
classes of men who are chosen. The point
is that there is no class that guarantees anyone’s salvation, nor damnation,
and that God is free to choose the least likely (by our estimation) candidates.
He Elected “Us” – not a category,
‘those who decide to believe’. In 1 Cor
1:27-29 we see that He chose ‘this’ person and not ‘that’ person so that no one
would boast in the flesh. Election is
not a decision to save those who would believe.
It is the selection of a specific number of individuals determined by
God. As we learn in John 10:25-26,
belonging to the sheep is not dependent upon believing, rather, believing is
dependent upon belonging to the sheep.
Unconditional Election (2 Tim 1:9) –
God makes clear that there is nothing in a man that causes God to notice him
and ‘choose’ him as one of the elect.
There are no works at all involved in His decision. Hence in Eph 1:4 we were chosen before the
foundations of the world. We were chosen
before we did anything. The fact that we
call Him ‘Father’ is all because of His work (Isaiah 64:7-8), His choosing.
The Pleasure of
God in Election –
His election is particular and its basis does not reside in us, but it does
have a basis. God’s election resides in
the counsel of His own will, and we are not privy to those reasons. We are told that He elects ‘in love’
that ‘we should be holy’ and ‘to the praise of the glory of His
grace’. If it were to depend upon
us, we would only reduce the praise of His glorious grace.
Foreknowledge: Didn’t I choose first? - 1 Peter 1:2 says
that our election was “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father…”.
Many today argue that the scriptures
teach that God looked down the corridors of time and saw that we were going to
believe on the Lord Jesus and therefore chose us. God chose us because we chose Him. But scripture does not teach that we elected
God.
Those He
Foreknew, He Predestined
(Rom 8:29-30) – If ‘those He foreknew’ means simply the ones
He knew beforehand, that would be everyone and this passage would teach
universalism. We can see that Paul
doesn’t use this term like that in 11:2.
In Amos 3:2, speaking of His election of Israel, God says “You only
have I known of all the families of the earth…”. Foreknowledge can be translated “to approve
beforehand”, and makes sense in these passages.
Jesus ‘knows’ His sheep, and to those who are not His sheep He says,
knowing them full well, “I never knew you”.
Election: No
Basis on Anything Future
(Rom 9:6-12) – The whole point of Paul’s argument in these
verses goes against considering that God’s election stood upon the future works
or decisions of men.
Conclusion – “We love because
He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). We
might just as easily say “We choose God because He first chose us.” This is the teaching of scripture. It was not invented by Calvin and the
Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries; it was
recovered, declared and defended at that time.
More than a millennium before Calvin, Augustine said “The grace of
God does not find men fit to be elected, but makes them so”, and “The
nature of the Divine goodness is not only to open to those that knock, but also
to cause them to knock and ask.”
Election and
Hope –
Some who believe these doctrines act arrogantly towards those who are not
saved, and miss the point. This doctrine
humbles us to our very core, a core full of nothing to merit God’s kindness. But when this doctrine gets a hold of you,
you realize you worship a truly free God, a God who delights in the praise of
His grace, a God who elected not only your salvation, but your full and
complete glorification.
Dave
Hatcher – July 7th, 2002