Unconditional Election
Tom Shrader examines the doctrine of unconditional election, teaching that God chose to save certain individuals before the foundation of the world based solely on His good pleasure, not on any merit within those chosen. Using passages like Ephesians 1:4 and Romans 9:10-16, he demonstrates that salvation is entirely God's work - the Father chooses, the Son dies, and sinners are the recipients of this grace. He addresses the seeming unfairness of election by explaining that no one in their natural state wants to come to Christ, and those who are saved become display cases for God's mercy while the unsaved receive perfect justice.
“God saves sinners - God is the subject, saves is the predicate, sinners are the direct object.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: God's Plan for Salvation (2006)
Recorded: 2006
Duration: 44 min
Themes: election, salvation, grace, mercy, justice, sovereignty, choice, predestination, questioning fairness, struggling with doctrine, new to theology, seminary student, pastor, bible study leader, doubting salvation, mature believer
Scripture: 1 Corinthians 2:14, John 6:44, 1 Thessalonians 1:4, 2 Thessalonians 2:13, Ephesians 1:3-6, 2 Timothy 1:9, Ephesians 2:8-9, Titus 3:4-5, Acts 13:48, Acts 16:14, Romans 9:10-16
Theological Themes: unconditional election, calvinism, soteriology, salvation doctrine, divine sovereignty, predestination, total depravity, irresistible grace
Full Transcript
We continue our study. So grab your Bible on one side and your study guides on the other. I think those study guides have been really helpful to you. Hopefully they have. They're really an important tool. If you haven't been around in a while or you're new, or you just don't yet have a study guide for this series, after the service you'll go out and get a study guide. You're going to need that because I think you can follow along without it, but I think the impact of this series is exponentially increased if you're following along in the study guide.
The series is called God's Plan for Salvation, meaning this: God saved us. We say saved or delivered. We came into the world where sinners were separated from God. How did He save us or deliver us? That's what we're looking at. We've said all along that we want to stay in the scriptures. We will quote all sorts of authors. That's fine with that. But these principles originate and flow from the scriptures. Calvin, Luther, Augustine—these guys did not invent these issues.
We want to proceed in a really logical fashion if we can. I have watched week after week after week that the minute I'm done, people line up with a series of questions that I know we're going to get answered the next week. So we've asked you to be patient. I'm not that way. I'm not characteristically marked by patience, but I ask you to be patient. Most of these questions get cleared up. You're going to have to really—and I have great admiration for you.
I read all sorts of stuff, by the way, from people in churches talking about churches and congregations. They essentially say that you shouldn't or couldn't do something like this. It's a 45-50 minute message that most people are not able to engage that long anymore in this setting and all that goes with it. We have the bar just a little bit higher for you, and we think this is really important for us to be engaged in this very discussion.
Our Mutual Obligations
In fact, the first week, remember what we said? We said there's two things. I have an obligation to you, and my obligation is I have to speak clearly. I have to speak as clearly as I possibly can. This can naturally be confusing, and I have to be as clear as I can. But you have an obligation to listen—to actively listen.
Somebody got me this morning and they said, "You know, I was in the service last week. Then I went home and this week I watched it on the web and listened to a tape. Each time I saw things that I didn't see before. Each time I heard things that I had missed before." So that's really important for you to listen really, really closely.
God's Plan for Salvation—we subtitled it Understanding the Five Points of Calvinism. I've said to you every week you're absolutely legitimate to question the wisdom of using that term. It's a very confusing term, divisive for some. I mean, it's in some instances, in some environments, it's like the worst thing you can say about a person is that they're a Calvinist. Since we are associated that way in the general community—they say that's that Calvinistic church—rather than just let that term hang out there undefined or to be defined incorrectly, we said let's just go ahead and let's just deal with this. Let's make sure we understand what we're saying.
I would love to be able to say, much like Spurgeon did, that Calvinism is but a nickname for Christianity. What we're talking about really are those historic principles of the faith that God saved people, and here's how He saved people.
Review: Total Depravity
We spent the first two weeks on one singular point, and that is that man is depraved. In your study guides you can follow along. We define total inability or total depravity this way: As a result of Adam's sin, all mankind is spiritually dead and—here's the key phrase—unable to comprehend and believe spiritual truths. Man is blind and deaf to the message of salvation.
We're not saying when we talk about total depravity or total inability that man is as bad as he could possibly be. We're acknowledging that even Hitler did not kill his mother. But we're saying that man is as bad off as he can possibly be. Mankind is spiritually dead. Remember last week, we had Andy over here, our buddy, spiritually dead. We can talk to him, we can provide all those things, but he's dead. He's dead, and consequently he's unable to comprehend and believe spiritual truths—blind, deaf to the message of salvation.
For these two weeks, we've really focused on two questions. Let's review them—two very important passages of Scripture. Two passages of scripture that need to be marked that you need to go back to again and again and again in this whole discussion, because they're fundamental in our understanding of this.
Two Foundational Questions
Here's the first one: Can natural man do anything that's spiritually profitable? What's the answer? Not the enthusiasm one would have hoped for, but generally speaking correct. Can natural man do anything that's spiritually profitable? No. First Corinthians 2:14: "Natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; they are foolishness to him." Natural man doesn't receive them, doesn't accept them. Let's say pushes them away or rejects them.
The second part of that verse is even stronger. It says, "Nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned." So here's what we're saying: Natural man, in his natural condition, number one, is not at all interested in these true spiritual things. He's not interested in them at all. Number two, he cannot possibly understand them. It's impossible for a natural man to understand the things of God. It cannot happen. That's what that verse says, right? That's why we said we go back to that verse again and again and again and again. He cannot know them. It's impossible for him to understand it.
The next question, though, it sounds almost...
Understanding Our Ability to Come to Christ
This week is identical to the first one really, but significantly different because we're not focusing on one issue: Does natural man have the ability to come to Christ? What's the answer? No. No would be the answer.
Remember the distinction here. Does he have the ability to come to Christ? When we talk about coming to Christ, we mean being saved. Use whatever term you want: believe, repent, ask Jesus into your heart, which would be a term we would use with younger kids. Does natural man have this ability?
This is an important distinction: we speak here not of permission but of ability. When I raise my hand and say, "Mrs. Gadiot, can I sharpen my pencil?" she appropriately is going to say to me, "I don't know if you can or not. I'll give you permission. You may try." That's a really important distinction.
The Nature of Man's Will
Does natural man have the ability? We understand that natural man has the choice, right? We understand that we preach the gospel and preach it all over. The choice is there just like the vulture. There's free choice. But natural man's will is enslaved to his nature and who he really is. He cannot understand spiritual things.
Pardon the language here, but see if this kind of helps: Spiritual things come in terms of being encrypted, and the Holy Spirit is the decoder. A natural man doesn't have the Holy Spirit in him. It's impossible for him to ever get them. And now the gospel comes along.
What Scripture Says About Our Ability
Now the ability to come to Christ or the ability to be saved: John chapter 6 verse 44. These two verses, man, you ought to be wearing out these verses: First Corinthians 2:14 and John 6:44. "No one can come to Me." There it is right there: an ability. No one has the ability to come to Christ.
As you talk to your friends or you're trying to wrestle this through, you find one verse that says man has the ability to come to Christ, and you won't. Because here's what's explicit: explicitly, man cannot come. Man does not have the ability unless something happens, and that is that the Father draws him.
This word is used in other places of Scripture. It's pictured as people dragging people to court, of Paul and Silas being drug into the marketplace and out of the house. Unless God draws us.
The Condition of Man
So here's what we spent the entire first two weeks on: the condition of man. Man is spiritually dead. He's deaf. He's blind. All of this. He will never respond to the gospel or to spiritual things, and said even in strongest possible terms, he cannot respond. He's unable to respond. That's the condition of man.
Remember the topic, and remember we said also we're going to be repetitive. We're going to move sequentially. We're going to move slow. We're going to make this so clear that even if you're from Tucson you can get this. That's how hard we're working at this.
So man is dead. He cannot respond. And yet we know there are people that responded to the gospel. How'd that happen? That's really the question. We're not debating whether you believe or don't believe. We're going to say yeah, there are some of you that would say yeah. The question is how did that happen? How did that dead man, dead woman, dead spiritually, how did they come to life?
The Need for Spiritual Rebirth
It's certainly a requirement, right? Because Jesus said you must be born again, right? Has to happen. Well, how does it happen? It seems clear that something has to happen to you, because obviously you're not going to pull it off because you're incapable of that, right? You're dead. You're deaf.
This takes us to the "U" in this acronym TULIP: unconditional election. For many of you, this is the word that you've been waiting to hear: election. What does that mean, election? "I'm against election." Well, let's make sure you want to say that.
Defining Unconditional Election
Here's how we define this idea of election: God chose to save some individuals, and that choice was based on nothing within these people. It rests solely on God's good pleasure. That's what we mean by unconditional election.
Again, it's really important. Look up here, you've got to get this: Every Christian believes in election. Every Christian believes in election. Some believe that man chooses God, others believe that God chooses man, but every Christian believes in election.
Two Views of Election
If we were to use terms that we've used along the way—and again if this loses you, if you're new to this, we just can't get back every week and go through this—but if we were going to use terms, we would say the Arminian view, the man-centered view, would say this: that man chose God. God probably did some stuff, God did some work, He might have even influenced this guy as He's influencing everybody, but ultimately there was this point in time where this person listened to the gospel in some form, and at that point in time made a decision for Christ. That's how they would say it.
There's the other view, the Calvinistic view, and of course obviously I'm tainted here, so I'm going to prejudice you. I would say it's the Biblical view: that God chooses men. But everybody believes in election. Everybody believes somebody's doing some choosing. There's a whole lot of choosing going on. People believe in that part. We're just arguing over who's doing the choosing.
Why This Matters
Now let me tell you this: this really matters. If I was you sitting there, I could at this point start to say, "Who really cares? What difference does it make? I'm in the family of God. Who cares how I got here? I'm just here."
Those of you that know me, I think, would know that I am not going to sit and waste a lot of time arguing about something that doesn't matter. I am not intellectually astute, you know? I don't think I'm stupid, but I'm certainly not really bright, nor am I even intellectually curious about many things. I got a letter this week from someone who listens to the radio show with some question, and I read it a couple of times, and I didn't get what they were getting at, but they seemed really adamant about it, so I just threw it away. They seemed like they really cared, but I'm not going to...
I mean, the time it would take to answer that letter, I could be through three episodes of Seinfeld—maybe four. As I processed it, I realized the reason I said I didn't care, that it wasn't important, is because however you answered it didn't matter.
You could be sitting there saying that about this topic. I could understand that, but I want you to see this matters a lot practically. Because if you think you chose God, your relationship with Him is going to be very different than if you understand He chose you.
If you think you chose Him, I'm just telling you, it's bound to be this way. He is going to always be smaller than He really is. You're never going to see the magnitude of God as He really is. You will always be larger in that economy.
You may walk around and say, "I was only a mustard seed of faith," but I produced the mustard seed. So proud of that mustard seed, I want to make a ring or a pendant out of it, so that everybody can share my enthusiasm for my mustard seed. Well, here's the point: you could not even muster the mustard seed if God did not do something. Do you see this? This has a huge practical ramification on God and who He is. That's why we engage in this.
The Simple Truth: God Saves Sinners
Here's what the Bible teaches. Very simple sentence. Three word sentence: God saves sinners.
Every Christian I've ever met—and by that I don't mean just somebody that goes to a Christian church, but I mean somebody that would say I've been converted and talk in those terms—every one of them would say, "God saves sinners." They would say, "Yes, true."
What I've realized over the years is that when I begin to define that, begin to point out that this is a collaborative effort between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that they did everything and you did nothing, when we start to get into that, a lot of times we have a little bit of a fallout. Somebody who said "God saves sinners," many of them are going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, not when you define it that way." Well, I don't know how else you define it.
A Lesson in Grammar
I went to Catholic grade school, high school, and college. In my eight years of Catholic grade school, I was taught by the Sisters of Mercy. There was never a group in the history of mankind more inappropriately named than these ladies. Very frustrated, this group of people. Mercy wasn't part of their whole deal.
They made us do a lot of things that I really thought was stupid. I learned early on, you don't tell them that. You keep that to yourself. I'm home one day, and they made us do a lot of math stuff that I really never thought was important, and just all sorts of stuff.
One of the things we did, and some of you have been through this exercise before, was to diagram sentences, which I really thought was dumb. I mean, you had to draw, you had to have a ruler. They were pretty precise on how it was done, too, with a ruler, and it had to be this, and this line would be this size, and this could not extend beyond a quarter of an inch above the—I mean, they were really precise.
So, I said to my dad one day, "School's stupid." He said, "Really?" I said, "Yeah. Today we diagram sentences." He said, "Well, that's important." I said, "Really?" He worked at the bank. I said, "Did you diagram any sentences today?" It was at that moment that I realized he had a lot in common with the Sisters of Mercy. I learned at a very early age that you don't ask him questions like that.
Breaking Down the Sentence
I did a little work, because we've talked about this before, but I thought to really give this some authenticity today, I would actually do a little work and make sure I formally define some terms for you.
God saves sinners. God is the subject, saves is the predicate, sinners are the direct object. God is the actor, saves is the action, sinners are the recipient of that.
Here's the formal definition of a subject: The subject of a sentence is the part of the sentence about which something is being said. It's usually the doer of the action. It's a noun or a pronoun. In our sentence, that's the word God—He's the actor.
Saves is the predicate, it's the action. The predicate of a sentence is the part of the sentence which says something about the subject. It's the action of the sentence or the condition of the subject. So the actor or the subject or the noun is God, the action and the predicate, the expression of that action is saves.
What Does "Saves" Mean?
Let me spend a second on what we mean when we talk about save. Saves means that we come into the world separated from God, that we're headed toward hell, but God delivers us from that. That word saved, rescued. Saved from what?
That's a hugely important question, natural question. I think I've shared with you before when I first moved to the valley, Youth for Christ was in the middle of their "I Found It" campaign. I pulled up next to a guy in a Volkswagen bus. He had on a bumper sticker that said "I Found It" and I said, "Hey, you know, what's the I Found It?" "It's my brother's van, man, I don't know."
I knew something, but I didn't know what it was. I honestly had no idea. I didn't know if it meant if it was a radio station promotion or the lost Dutchman mine—I don't know what he found. What he meant was "I found Christ, I found the answer to life."
So when we're saying save, save from what? Save from the consequence of our sin. The direct object—the direct object's a noun or pronoun that receives the action of the verb, answers the question what or whom.
God Saves Sinners
When we examine the grammar of salvation, we discover something profound: "God saves sinners." In this simple sentence, God is the subject, saves is the action verb, and sinners is the direct object. If you have a choice in a sentence and you can be anything, you want to be the direct object. It's the perfect deal—you don't have to do anything. It's done to you.
When we talk about God, we're talking about the triune God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They're a collaborative effort working together. God the Father chooses those that will be saved before the foundations of the earth. God the Son, Jesus, dies on the cross. The recipients of that salvation are guilty people before God, helpless, powerless, unable to do anything unless God does something.
God is the actor, the action is saves, the recipient is us. In fact, you can even take the word sinners out of there, and if you're a Christian, put your name in there. God saves Tom. God saves you.
Our Need for Salvation
After the fall, after Adam's sin and mankind's death in Adam, man cannot save himself. We need to be saved. We need to be redeemed. If something doesn't happen to us, we're separated from God forever. We need to be, in Jesus' terms, born again. We need some remedy, some cure, some sacrifice, but we're blind and deaf, dead to all of this. Something has to happen.
That something that has to happen is that God needs to do something. God could have done nothing and saved no one, or God could have saved everyone, or God could have simply saved some. We know from Scripture and our practical experience that God saved some. We know that there are people in this world that God did not save. There are some who never responded, so we know He didn't save everybody. But we know that there are people who have responded and He did save some.
What God did is actively engage in certain people's lives for the purpose of bringing them to salvation. This whole matter raises all sorts of questions about God and the response and fairness and why would God do that.
God's Sovereignty in Salvation
We need to remember that God is sovereign. Sovereign means above or superior to all others, supreme in power and rank, independent of all others. Some want to race out and say that just means God can do whatever He wants and that God can in fact do everything. Can God do everything? No. God cannot act contrary to His attributes or His character. Can God sin? No. God will act consistently with His character. God is never going to act in a way that's unfair or unjust because that wouldn't be holy and righteous.
God is sovereign in salvation. Here's what we mean by that: God will do as He pleases. He doesn't need your permission or my permission or anybody else's permission. He is under no obligation to save anyone. He could have taken any of those three options we just talked about and chosen any of them. Because He saves some, He's not obligated to save everyone.
The Biblical Teaching on Election
Unconditional election means that God chose to save certain individuals and that choice was based on nothing within these people and rested solely on God's good pleasure. Here's what the Bible says about election.
Point one: God is the one who does the choosing. Remember, everybody believes in election. Some believe man chooses. The Bible teaches God chooses.
Look at 1 Thessalonians chapter 1. Paul is writing, along with Silas and Timothy, to this church. He says, "Grace to you and peace. We give thanks to God always for all of you, making mention of you in our prayers, constantly bearing in mind your work of faith, your labor of love, and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ in the presence of our God and Father, knowing, brethren beloved by God, His choice of you."
Some translations will say "your election by God"—it's the same idea. In 2 Thessalonians chapter 2, verse 13, he writes again to them: "But we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation."
God's Choice Before Creation
The second thing the Bible teaches us is that God's choice was made before the creation of the world. Look at Ephesians chapter 1. Paul writes: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved."
Verse 4 declares that He chose us before the foundation of the world.
God's Choice Is For His Own Glory
This idea is this: the Greek verb translated here as "choose" indicates not only that God chose us, that He chose us by Himself, but also for Himself—in other words, for His praise. So when we say, "Why would God choose you?" what we typically start to do is begin to think of ourselves in a way: "What is there in me or what about me?" He doesn't really give that answer because there isn't an answer for that in terms of an answer we need to know.
The answer is a general answer that says here's why God chose you: for His own glory and praise. In John chapter 9, Jesus and the disciples are walking into the town, and there's a blind man. Jesus is asked by the disciples, "Who sinned here, this guy who's blind or his parents?" And Jesus—because that's the conventional wisdom of the day—Jesus says, "Neither this man nor his parents, but he was blind so that he might become a display case"—I'm paraphrasing now—"for the works of God, that I'm going to heal him and you will see My might and power and mercy and all that through this."
The same thing is true in your salvation. That's a physical picture of what's now a spiritual truth. That as people see you, they should see the mercy and the glory and the honor of God. Here you were a sinner, dead in your sins and trespasses, unable to respond, unwilling to respond—dead, deaf, blind—and yet God in His grace and mercy has reached down, ripped out your heart of stone and placed in you a heart of flesh.
If you want to hang with us on the illustration, let's go with the illustration we had last week of the vulture. He's taking out the nature of the vulture here, He's taking out the heart that would drive him to the meat and put in him the heart of a rabbit that would drive him to the lettuce. God chose you, why? For His own good pleasure. So you become a display case for His grace and mercy.
God's People as Display Cases of His Grace
This is what He did with the nation of Israel. So the world would look at the nation of Israel and they would be this expression of God and His grace and His mercy, how they were to live differently and separate because of who they were. The same thing is true of you and me. The world should look at us and we become a display case for the grace and the mercy of God.
God's Choice Is Not Based on Merit
The third thing the Bible teaches us is that His choice was not based on merit within the people that He chose, within the elect. Paul tells us in 2 Timothy chapter 1 verse 9 that He saved us and He called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose, to His own grace.
In a minute we're going to use the illustration of Jacob and Esau. And as he talks about Jacob and Esau, he points out that they were both in the womb. They had not yet done good or bad. And they were chosen, though they hadn't done good or bad. They were chosen that the purpose of God, according to His election, might stand, not as a result of works.
If we were to look at Ephesians, a classic passage, Ephesians chapter 2 verse 8: "For by grace you've been saved through faith, that not of yourself. It's a gift of God, not a result of works, so that no man should boast." You aren't saved by your works. You aren't saved by something that you've done. You're saved by His grace and His mercy.
Titus chapter 3 verse 4: "But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us not on the basis of deeds which we'd done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing, regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Spirit." God indeed chooses those that will be saved. God did that before the foundations of the earth, and that choice was not based on any merit within the person. God did not look at you and say, "Boy, you've got potential. If we just got you on the right team, if we just cleaned your act up, if we just sanded off the rough edges." No. He chose you in spite of you, not because of you. He didn't choose you for something you have done, or are doing, or will do.
The Difference Between Religion and Biblical Christianity
That is religion. That's classic religion. This is really an important truth. Over here, here's what you've got. You've got biblical Christianity right there, and then everything else is over here, and they're all the same. Got different tints to them and a little different coloring, but all religion is the same. All religion is man trying to choose God. A sinful man trying to make a holy God happy. That's what all of those are.
And some include Jesus and what He did, but they're all about man. They're all about works. Somehow I'm going to please God and make Him happy enough that when it's all over, I'm going to heaven based on what I did, based on what I was doing, based on what I didn't do. Didn't do this, didn't do this, did this. Somehow God's got it—and again, there's a whole variation of expression of this, but the basic concept is this: when I die, I've got a stack of bad and a stack of good, and if the stack of good is higher than the stack of bad, I go to heaven. If the stack of bad is higher than the stack of good, I go to hell. That's all religion.
Go to Christianity and it says, you don't even have a stack of good. You've got no good. You're no good. "None righteous, not one." All you've got is a stack of bad. That's all you've got. You've got all this bad and no good. And yet, because of God's good pleasure, He's going to choose you in the midst of this. Open your heart. You're going to embrace the gospel, and you'll be saved. But His choice of you—and the Bible's clear now—God's the one who chooses. He does it before the foundations of the earth, and it's got nothing, not one thing to do with you and your works or what you've done.
God's Choice Is Not Based on Foreseen Faith
Here's the fourth thing, and these are really similar here as we unpack this, but we've got to see it. The fourth thing: God's choice is not based on man's foreseen faith. Here's what we're saying. Some will say, "Yeah, God chooses, and here's how He does it, that God, being God, looks down the corridors of time, and He can..."
God Cannot Look Down and See Us Choose Him
Even do it before the foundations of the earth because He's God, and there He is, and He looks. And when He looks down the corridors of time, here's what He sees. He sees those who will ultimately choose Him, and He chooses them first.
Now here's the problem with that. You already know the answer to this, don't you? If He looks down the corridor of time, what does He see? I see dead people. I don't see anybody choosing me.
We already, didn't we do that for two weeks? They're dead. Didn't we do this for two weeks? That's why we said to you, we're going to spend two weeks on this, we're going to start here, it's so important. He could not look down the corridors of time and see you respond. You could never respond. You're dead. Dead. Don't care.
I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear it. I cannot hear it. Even if you sat me down to talk to me, I couldn't get it, I couldn't understand. All I could do is go "huh," because it's spiritually understood, and I know the Spirit of God in me.
The Simplicity of God's Sovereignty
Isn't that great? I mean, it's so easy, isn't that so easy to understand? And you've had all your friends say that to you, and even pastors and all these other guys. I used to go to a church where the guy said, "God's voted yes, Satan's voted no, you cast the deciding vote." No. I don't have the ability to say yes. There's never going to be a yes.
Here's what we're saying. If God votes yes, it's done. That's what we're saying. He doesn't look and see who believes.
One of Scripture's Clearest Statements
Acts chapter 13, verse 48, you can make a note of it. Of this verse, John MacArthur writes, "One of Scripture's clearest statements on the sovereignty of God and salvation. God chooses man for salvation, not the opposite. Faith itself is a gift of God."
Let me read it again. "One of Scripture's clearest statements on the sovereignty of God and salvation." Well, if that's what it is, then I might want to know that. Acts chapter 13, verse 48. He's talking about people who believed. Here's what he said: "As many as had been appointed to eternal life, believed."
Remember what we said, we said we were going to talk about that at the very beginning. We're not talking about whether you believe or not. Let's, for the sake of argument, say you believe. The question we want to deal with is, why? Why do you believe? Because it was appointed. Because you were chosen.
The Lord Opened Her Heart
In Acts chapter 16, there's this moment where there's a certain woman named Lydia from the city of Thyatira. She's a seller of purple fabrics and a worshiper of God, and she's listening to Paul. All of a sudden, the Lord opened her heart to respond to the things spoken by Paul. There's further evidence of God's sovereignty in salvation.
God's Choice Is Based on His Sovereign Mercy
Here's the last point that we made about what the Bible says about election. The Bible says that God's choice is based on His sovereign mercy. Again, we turn to Romans chapter 9, and as you're turning there, let me read Titus 3 again to you: "But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared to men, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us." Saved us according to His mercy.
This is probably the definitive. It would seem to me, this kind of goes, it would just at this point go case closed, Romans 9, evidence of God's sovereign choice.
The Illustration of Jacob and Esau
He gives us an illustration here, it's a real life illustration. He says, Paul writes in verse 10, "Not only this, but there was Rebekah." So we have Rebekah, and she has conceived twins by one man, and he's of our father Isaac. Here's the situation, we have twins, same mom, same dad. That's really important because some were saying we're chosen by our lineage, it's our background that's important. He chooses, and one of the reasons He chooses, we're Jews, that's why He chooses us, or we're from this church, or we're from whatever perspective. So there's nothing special, same guy, same gal, two twins.
Verse 11, though the twins were not yet born, still in the womb, and they hadn't done good or bad. So they hadn't done anything good to merit God's approval, they hadn't done anything bad at this point to be rejected by God. They were not yet born, they hadn't done good or bad, but in order that God's purpose according to His choice might stand, not because of works, but because of Him who calls.
This is why they were chosen, they were chosen for His good pleasure. It's not ancestry, it's not birthright, it's not lineage, it's not based on their work or their action. In fact it was said to her, verse 12, "The older will serve the younger." It doesn't mean a ton to us, but again, that would be a total reversal in that culture. "Just as it is written, Jacob I loved, Esau I hated." Now they're in the womb, they haven't done anything yet.
What About Fairness?
That word hate has a strong connotation to it. What He really means is, I'm not going to show any favor to him, I'm going to show favor, I'm going to show love to Jacob. To Esau, no.
So the minute you hear that, now just be honest, the minute you hear that, there's something in you that goes, "That's not fair," right? That's okay, that's not fair. Paul understands that, that's what he says, verse 14, "What shall we say then? Is there injustice with God? May it never be."
I know what you're saying, that's not fair. What's not fair? That because God decides to show mercy to Jacob, He's obligated, He must show mercy to Esau? But our sense of fairness and righteous indignation, we raise up and say, "That's not fair." No it's absolutely fair. Jacob will receive mercy, Esau will receive justice.
Because see we can look at that and say, "Well that's not fair, let's go ahead and say He's chosen me and I'm one of those people, what about them, what about them, that's not a fair deal for them." It's absolutely fair, they're getting exactly, if you ask them, "You want to come to Christ?" "Nope." Because see that's what we hear, "This isn't fair, what about all those people that want to come?"
to Christ, but they're not chosen? Now you can answer that because we've got that all around us, as you're navigating your way with your life. That's what they're going to say. What about all those people? What about that guy that really wants to come to Christ and be saved, but he's not chosen? What about him?
Here you go. It's a unicorn, my friend. It doesn't exist. Is there anybody in their natural condition that wants to come to Christ? No. Everybody that wants to come to Christ comes. There's nothing unfair about this. There's nothing unjust about this.
God's Justice and Human Responsibility
Well, what about God? That's not fair. Now God's involved and He hates Esau, so now He's forcing His way. No, no, no, no, no. All God's doing with Esau is saying, "Esau, you be Esau." We don't believe in this thing called double predestination, where all of a sudden God's predestined somebody and He's also intervening and making sure these people don't come. He doesn't have to do anything in Esau's life. He doesn't have to do anything in the non-elect's life. They don't want the gospel. They're closed to the gospel. God doesn't do anything.
It's in spite of us, not because of us, that He saved us. "I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and compassion on whom I will have compassion" (verse 15). I'll do what I want to do. Here you go. This is a big concept. He's God. He does what He wants to do. I'm not going to understand it always and be able to explain it. That's why He says just a little bit later, I'm the potter, you're the clay.
The Limits of Human Understanding
God has communicated to us, in this word, everything we need to know. And if it's not in here, one of two things: either A, you're not smart enough to figure it out, or me, or B, God said, "You don't need to know that."
So why would God choose some? Well, to become display cases for His glory. Why wouldn't He choose others? Well, they become display cases for His justice. They get exactly what they deserve. And let me tell you, exactly what they want.
The Reality of God's Justice
There's no one running around here who's been treated unjustly. There's no one running around Phoenix saying, "I want to come to Christ, I want to come to Christ, but I'm not chosen." Absolutely not. If you want to come to Christ, that's the verification that you're chosen by God.
God saves sinners. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Here's what the Father does: He chooses before the foundations of the earth who are going to be recipients of His mercy. The Son dies on the cross. We said we're going to look at this acronym TULIP, these five points of Calvinism. By far, next week is the one that's the most, if you will, controversial or misunderstood. That's the idea of the redemption or the atonement.
For today, for now, we just bask in His grace and His mercy.