It is often heard against those who hold to a more Calvinistic or Reformed leaning of Christianity, terms which are definitely loaded and much debated upon, that God is being inherently "unfair" or "unjust" or "unloving" by decreeing by His Sovereign Will that some should be saved and some should be damned. Or to put it more positively, that God should predestine some to salvation, but otherwise leave the rest of mankind in spiritual darkness.
However, the question that then comes to my mind is this. Is it even "fair" that God should save anyone in the first place. Was it "fair" that "He(God the Father) made Him(God the Son, Jesus) who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." (2 Cor. 5:21) In my understanding, if God wanted to be "fair", He could have, should have, simply condemned all of mankind to eternal destruction. As to the charge of being "unloving", if God had simply saved a single fallen human being in the entire history of mankind, it would be an infinite testament to His Love and Mercy that He would even save that one man. And I would go even further then that, if God had chosen not to save a single man, He would still be God and still be Loving.
Is this not where the whole idea of grace comes in? Since grace is unmerited favour, does it not stand to reason that grace is in essence fundamentally "unfair"? Does not God choose to "have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.” (Romans 9:15) How then can one demand for God to be "fair"? Would that not lead to one's eternal condemnation and separation from God? Is salvation a right or a privilege?
How then does this translate into our evangelism and personal walk with God? With regards to evangelism, I am in no way advocating or promoting the idea of let's sit back and twiddle our thumbs because God will save His elect anyway. God uses the preaching of the Gospel and the work of personal evangelism as a means to save sinful men.
"How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent?" (Romans 10:14-15a)
If anything, the very idea that God has chosen some men unto salvation should give us the utmost encouragement to preach the Gospel, the scandalous Gospel (cf. Romans 1:16), to the world. For if our Gospel is a scandal to the unregenerate man, "to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness" (1 Cor. 1:23b), how then would anyone believe our message unless God so worked in their hearts to remove their spiritual blindness?
"Now the Lord spoke to Paul in the night by a vision, “Do not be afraid, but speak, and do not keep silent; for I am with you, and no one will attack you to hurt you; for I have many people in this city.” And he continued there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them." (Acts 18:9-11, emphasis added)
If God had not sovereignly saved for Himself a people, then our work as evangelists would be of utmost despair and uncertainty. For who would believe a message that a carpenter's son, who was born in dubious circumstances, claimed that he was the immortal Son of God, did many miraculous things, even raising a man from the dead, out-taught the greatest teachers of his day without any formal education, and ultimately died a criminal's death on a cross condemned by both the religious and secular establishment; Was resurrected on the third day and appeared to a number of common people, commanding them to proclaim his death and resurrection to all the world before being taken up bodily into heaven. How could such a message have perpetuated for the past two thousand years unless indeed God is the one who moves men by his divine election to believe it. Unless the Holy Spirit moves and convicts men of their sin and their need of a saviour, unless a man is regenerated and his heart of stone replaced with a heart of flesh, all our evangelistic efforts will fail and be of no eternal consequence.
As for our own personal walk, the Sovereignty of God's election is no excuse for complacency, as the derogatory term "Once saved, always saved" seems to have become. Of course the key question to the above is how do you know you are saved, but that isn't quite the point of this post. The point is, should not the very fact of God's unmerited favour being poured upon us be the foundation of our continuous pursuit of Him and a growing desire to know Him, in every sense of the word. How anyone can take God's election as a license to continue in sin and unbelief remains a mystery to me. Should not the fact that God has chosen us unto salvation lead us into a greater and greater expression of praise and worship for the One, who out of the abundance of His Love and Mercy, chose to reveal Himself to us and rescue us in spite of our falleness and sin. What do you have that God needs? If God had a need of anything then He's not God. If Man could somehow work their way back to God then grace wouldn't be grace.
"Even so then, at this present time there is a remnant according to the election of grace. And if by grace, then it is no longer of works; otherwise grace is no longer grace. But if it is of works, it is no longer grace; otherwise work is no longer work." (Romans 11:5-6)
In a church that has been compromised by humanism, a man-centered theology (an oxymoron), the doctrine of election continues to hurt Man's pride, that he can somehow work his way into salvation or that he is not as bad as the Apostle Paul makes him out to be in the first three chapters of Romans. While other much much more capable men have debated and written on the points above, I hope that even this short post might reveal even the tiniest bit of His Magnificence and Glory.
All praise be to Him
Amen
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