What is election?

Question 07033.

The doctrine of election is one of those subjects where people arrive with their minds already made up and their defences already raised, and I do not blame them. Few doctrines have caused more heat, more caricature and more pastoral damage when handled carelessly. Yet the word is in the Bible, it is used freely and warmly by the apostles, and no one who takes Scripture seriously can quietly leave it out.

So let me say at the start where I stand. I hold to the doctrine of election because Scripture teaches it. I do not hold to the Calvinist construction of it, in which God unconditionally selects certain individuals for salvation and passes over the rest, because I do not think that is what the texts require and I think it collides with a great deal else that Scripture says plainly.

The words Scripture uses

The main verb is eklegomai, to choose or pick out. The related noun eklektos gives us elect or chosen. In everyday Greek these words describe any deliberate selection: choosing men for a task, choosing goods at a market, choosing a course of action. There is nothing inherently mysterious about them.

What matters is what the biblical writers use them for, and here we must be careful readers. Choice in Scripture is very often to a role, a task or a privilege rather than to eternal destiny. God chose Israel out of all the peoples of the earth, and yet Paul is clear that not everyone descended from Israel belongs to Israel in the deepest sense. Jesus chose twelve, and one of them was Judas.

So the doctrine of election begins with a simple observation. God chooses, God has always chosen, and the question that requires care is what exactly He is choosing people for.

Election is first about Christ

Isaiah calls the Servant My chosen, in whom My soul delights, and Peter calls Jesus a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious. Before ever the New Testament speaks of chosen people it speaks of a chosen Person. That order is not decoration; it is the key to the whole subject.

This is why Ephesians 1 puts it as it does. He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him (Ephesians 1:4). The two words in Him are load-bearing. The election is located in Christ, and believers share in it by being joined to Him.

That single insight resolves a great deal. The question is not whether God has drawn up a list of names in eternity past. The question is whether you are in the Chosen One, and the way into Him is faith. On being in Him, see what it means to be in Christ.

Corporate before individual

Old Testament teaching on the doctrine of election is overwhelmingly corporate. God chose a nation, and individuals participated in that choice by belonging to the nation. Deuteronomy states the reason and it is not merit: the LORD set His love on you because He loves you, and because He is keeping the oath He swore to your fathers.

The New Testament transfers this corporate language to the church without abandoning its shape. Peter tells scattered believers that they are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, deliberately borrowing Exodus language and applying it to a new body. He is writing to a group about their group identity.

None of this means individuals are irrelevant. It means the doctrine of election is primarily about a people rather than a private register, and reading it corporately keeps it in step with how the Bible actually uses the word.

What foreknown means in Romans 8

Romans 8:29 says those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son. The Calvinist reading takes foreknew to mean foreloved or chosen, so that the choosing is unconditional and the knowing is really a decreeing. I understand the argument and I do not find it persuasive.

The verb is proginosko, to know beforehand. God’s knowledge is not limited by time, and He knows who will trust His Son. Those He knew in advance He then destined for a particular outcome, and notice carefully what that outcome is: conformity to the image of Jesus. Predestination in this verse is not about who gets in but about what happens to those who are in.

That distinction runs through the whole New Testament. Texts on the doctrine of election and on predestination overwhelmingly describe the destiny and privileges of believers rather than the mechanism by which people become believers. I have gone further into this in what predestination means.

The texts that will not fit unconditional selection

God our Saviour desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Timothy 2:4). The Lord is not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. Christ is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

Those statements are not obscure corners of Scripture; they are plain summaries offered by apostles in the course of ordinary teaching. Any account of the doctrine of election that requires them to mean something other than what they say has, in my judgement, gone wrong somewhere earlier in the argument.

Add to that the pleading tone of the prophets and of Jesus Himself. How often would I have gathered your children together, and you were not willing. That is not the language of a decree that cannot fail. It is the language of genuine refusal.

Does this rob God of the initiative?

Not in the slightest, and I want to be firm here because the objection comes quickly. Nobody seeks God unaided. The Spirit convicts, the gospel is sent, the word is opened, and the heart is drawn. Every part of that is God’s doing and none of it is generated by the sinner.

What I refuse to say is that this drawing is granted to some and withheld from others by a secret decision made before they existed. The invitation of Scripture is universal and honest, and the God who issues it means it.

So grace is entirely prior, entirely undeserved and entirely His. It is also resistible, which is exactly why the New Testament is full of warnings against resisting it.

What the doctrine of election is for

Look at how the apostles use it and you will notice they never use it to make people anxious, and never use it to explain why some people are lost. They use it to comfort suffering believers, to humble proud ones, and to fuel worship.

Paul tells the Thessalonians he knows their election because the gospel came to them in power and they received it with joy. The evidence he points to is their present faith, not a private disclosure about eternity past. That is a model worth copying when someone asks whether they are among the chosen.

The pastoral rule I work by is simple. Election is a family truth, spoken inside the house to reassure the children, not a doorman standing outside deciding who may knock.

Living with mystery honestly

I am not pretending there is nothing left over. Scripture holds together God’s settled purpose and real human responsibility without ever explaining the join, and any system that removes the tension has almost certainly removed part of the evidence too.

Calvinism resolves it by making the human side ultimately unreal. Some forms of Arminianism resolve it by making the divine purpose ultimately reactive. I would rather hold both ends and admit that the middle is beyond me, because that is what the text does.

Humility here is not weakness. It is the honest response of a creature reading about the purposes of his Maker.

How to speak about election in the pulpit

I have a rule for handling the doctrine of election in public. I never use it to explain why some people are not saved, because Scripture never uses it that way. I use it to explain why any of us are, which is exactly how the apostles used it.

That single discipline removes most of the pastoral damage this subject causes. Preached as a comfort to believers, it produces humility and worship. Preached as an explanation of the lost, it produces either arrogance or despair, and often both in the same congregation.

So when the doctrine of election turns up in a passage I am preaching, I ask what the writer was doing with it and I try to do the same thing. That is not evasion. It is treating the text as instruction rather than raw material.

So, now what?

If you are a believer, take the doctrine of election the way the apostles gave it. It is meant to steady you. Your standing does not rest on the strength of your grip but on the purpose of God to have a people for Himself, and you are in Christ, the Chosen One.

If you are not yet a believer, do not stand outside wondering whether your name is on a list. Scripture never asks anyone to work that out first. It says come, and it means it. Will you come, and settle the question by believing?

even 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 for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.

Ephesians 1:4-5 (ESV)