When John Calvin began to expound the doctrine of election ('Eternal election, by which God has predestined some to salvation, others to destruction', Institutes, III.XXI.I), he issued a timely warning:

Human curiosity renders the discussion of predestination, already somewhat difficult of itself, very confusing and even dangerous. No restraints can hold it back from wandering in forbidden bypaths ... If allowed, it will leave no secret to God that it will not search out and unravel ... First, then, let them remember that when they inquire into predestination they are penetrating the sacred pre­cincts of divine wisdom. If anyone with carefree assurance breaks into this place, he will not succeed in satisfying his curiosity and he will enter a labyrinth from which he can find no exit.

These are wise and necessary words. If Calvin's warning had been heeded more light and less heat would have been generated in debates about election. So we must approach the revelation of God's truth concerning this doctrine with humble, reverent and attentive minds and hearts. We must be prepared to be astonished, humbled and even perplexed, for, 'Who has known the mind of the Lord?' (Rom. 11:34). Certainly not sinful, fallible men and women!

Divine Love – The Fountainhead of Election⤒🔗

For many people the doctrines of God's sovereign election of sinners to eternal life and God's love seem to be mutually exclusive. Election is conceived as arbitrary, cold and clinical. How is it possible, then, that the God who says he is love (1 John 4:8) could conceivably choose some sinners to eternal life while passing other sinners by, condemning them to eternal and unremitting misery? Would this not by definition make God arbitrary and selective? Would it not expose his claim to be all loving as a pious fraud?

Robert Burns famously parodied the doctrine of election in Holy Willie's Prayer (1785). The poem is an attack on the bigotry and hypoc­risy of the Scottish Kirk as told by the (fictional) self-justifying prayer of a church elder, 'Holy Willie'. Throughout the poem, Willie condemns himself as a hypocrite while simultaneously asking God to judge harshly and to show no mercy toward his fellow-transgressors. Burns used the example of 'Holy Willie' to make the point that the Calvinist theology underpinning the entire Kirk was equally hypocritical:

O Thou, that in the heavens does dwell,
Wha, as it pleases best Thysel',
Sends ane to heaven an' ten to h-ll,
A' for Thy glory,
And no for ony guid or ill
They've done before Thee!

In reality there is little doubt that the Calvinism in the Church of Scotland in Burns' day was often desiccated. The dead hand of theologi­cal 'Moderatism' had squeezed the life out of the doctrines of grace. But did this arbitrary and clinical attitude to divine sovereignty remotely reflect the biblical teaching on election?

When we turn to God's Word, surprisingly (at least to some) we dis­cover that the doctrine of election is regularly co-ordinated with God's love. Again and again God impresses on us that his love is the fountain­head of the election to life of every sinner whom he saves. Moses told the Israelites, 'Because he (God) loved your forefathers and chose their descendants after them, he brought you out of Egypt by his Presence and his great strength' (Deut. 4:37). Later he underscores the sovereign graciousness of God's choice of them: 'God did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peo­ples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you' (Deut. 7:7-8). In the New Testament the apostle John tells us that 'We love because he first loved us' (1 John 4:19). Paul traces our adoption as God's children to the predestinating love of the Father (Eph. 1:4-5). He further writes to the Christians in Rome, 'Who will bring any charge against God's elect? ... Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?' (Rom. 8:33ff). Far from divine election being a cold, clinical, arbitrary act, its origin lies in the sovereign, undeserved love of God.

The intimacy of God's electing choice is seen, for example, in the call of Jeremiah. As the Lord issues his call to Jeremiah to serve him, he says: 'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations' (Jer. 1:5). The key words here are 'I knew you'. Before Jeremiah was born, he was 'known' to God. The verb means much more than intellectually known. More properly it contains the idea of intimate, particular and relational knowledge. The same verb is used in Genesis 18:19 where it clearly has the idea of special, covenant choice ('For I have chosen [known] him [Abraham], so that he will direct his children and his household after him'). Similarly we read in Genesis 4:1 (KJv/NKJv) that 'Adam knew¹ his wife Eve'. Jeremiah was 'known' to God in the sense that God had freely and sovereignly embraced him in his covenant love. God's choice of sinners is rooted in his covenant love, a love that God was pleased to lavish on judgment-deserving sinners.

Election – An Act of Grace←⤒🔗

Throughout the Bible God's sovereign choice of sinners for a pre­ordained destiny is presented as nothing less than an act of grace. Thomas Goodwin memorably described what grace is:

Grace is more than mercy and love, it super-adds to them. It denotes not simply love, but the love of a sovereign, transcendly (sic) superior, one that may do what he will, that may wholly choose whether he will love or no ... Now God, who is an infinite Sovereign, who might have chosen whether ever He would love us or no, for Him to love us, this is grace.

In other words God chooses to save sinners not because of anything in them, because there is nothing in them worthy of his blessing. He chooses to save sinners because it has pleased him to set his love upon them. If we are to make any sense of this we must take a step back and consider what God's word teaches us about ourselves.

The proper, or biblical, starting point for our thinking about elec­tion must be the fallenness of the whole human race in Adam. 'There is no-one righteous, not even one ... all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God' (Rom. 3:10, 23). Paul goes on in Romans 5:12-21 to explain the source of this tragedy: 'Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned' (verse 12). Our union with Adam in his sin, the corruption of our natures through his sin, and our own sin have all brought every one of us under God's just and holy condemnation. We are all 'by nature children of (God's) wrath' (Eph. 2:3). Not one child of Adam who has ever lived has any claim upon God. The wonder of the gospel is not that God chooses to save some, but that God has been pleased to save any!

God's choice is not in any sense occasioned by meritorious achieve­ments on the part of those he chooses. Election is all of grace and grace excludes merit absolutely. Paul makes the point unequivocally in Romans 11:5-6: 'So too, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. And if by grace, then it is no longer by works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace.'

God's gracious election is, then, free and unconditional. God owes us nothing except his righteous condemnation. If God is pleased to choose anyone to be saved, how can he be charged with injustice of any kind? The Lord himself said to Moses, 'I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion' (Rom. 9:14-15, quoting Exod. 33:19). So, Paul continues, 'It does not, therefore, depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy ...' (Rom. 9:16).

Only the Humble Receive This Doctrine with Joy←⤒🔗

It has to be acknowledged with great sadness, however, that the doc­trine of election has been a source of controversy within the Christian church. Yet remarkably the apostle Paul was neither puzzled nor em­barrassed by this doctrine. On the contrary, he embraced it and even gloried in the grace and wonder of it:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ ... For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy ... In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons ... to the praise of his glorious grace.Ephesians1:3-6

In human life we recognize that a man has the right to choose to love whom he will. He is not obligated to love every woman with the same intimacy and commitment. So it is with God. He sets his intimate, committed, saving love on whom he pleases. He is under obligation to no-one.

All this, of course, is repugnant to the world in which we live. Men and women have a high sense of their own importance and a low sense of God's greatness and glory. Sin, if it exists at all, is a minor blem­ish, a little local difficulty, not the heinous, seismic crime the Bible makes it out to be. God, if he exists at all, is conceived of as having an obligation to do us good, to wink at our rebellions against him, and to move heaven and earth to pander to our needs (even our whims). This is simply an expression of the twistedness of our fallen, sinful nature. Sin shows itself in our thinking too much of ourselves and too little of our Creator. George Swinnock, a contemporary of Goodwin's, could have been speaking of our own day when he wrote,

We take the size of sin too low, and short, and wrong, when we measure it by the wrong it doth to ourselves, or our families, or our neighbours, or the nation wherein we live; indeed, herein somewhat of its evil and mischief doth appear; but to take its full length and proportion, we must consider the wrong it doth to this great, this glorious, this incomparable God. Sin is incom­parably malignant, because the God principally injured by it is incomparably excellent.Works, vol. 4, p. 456

Until this fact dawns upon us, the doctrine of God's gracious election will always be anathema to us. But when the true seriousness and wickedness of sin conquers our proud hearts, we marvel at the wonder that God should ever have been pleased to save one sinner, far less a multitude no man can number.