'Election' - good news or bad?

In 2 Timothy 2:10 Paul talks about ‘the elect’.  How are we to understand this?  (in less than 1000 words!)

Every Wednesday morning staff and interns dive into the Bible in study and out from the Bible in prayer – it’s becoming a favourite three hours of my week.  We read and review good books (at the moment “The Incomparable Christ” by John Stott) but mostly and more importantly get into understanding, praying and living the Bible. 

At the moment we are studying 2 Timothy.  This question came up – and it is a good one revolving round sovereignty and free will and election and predestination and a whole heap of realities equally thrilling (when understood well) and confusing (when understood poorly). 

To stimulate our follow on discussion this week I emailed round these thoughts as some pre-reading. 

God’s Sovereignty and Human Responsibility

Election is one of a series of concepts or realities that circulate around God’s sovereignty and human responsibility.  God is clearly taught as sovereign.  We are clearly taught to have a responsibility, literally a genuine and real ‘ability to respond’.  The particular location theologies hold on this continuum varies, though all major views fully maintain both truths as real.  Their divergence is in the way the two realities relate to one another.

Most infamously are the locations of Calvinists and Arminians on this tension – groupings named after their perceived theological leads.  Calvinists would historically stress God’s sovereignty though never excluding human responsibility.  Arminians would historically stress human responsibility though never excluding God’s sovereignty. 

Ultimately our location on this spectrum answers two vital questions:

·         What do I believe about God?

·         What do I believe about how God made and interacts with people?

Western ‘linear’ thinking

Western linear thinking tends to categorise and order concepts (i.e.: defaults to either/or) and is not mirrored in either Hebrew or Greek thought which was more fluid and generous (i.e. defaulted to both/and).  Some of our ‘western’ struggle with this tension is the innate desire to order ideas in a way foreign to their presentation in the Bible.  For example: significantly more pages in a classic western systematic theology are spent on this than in a South American, African or Asian equivalent. 

Election

Election in the 2Timothy 2:10 sense is the reality that God must work in the individual (i.e. elect them) if they are to believe.  There are four affirmations about election the NT would have us make[1]:

1.    Election is a gracious choice.  It is ‘by grace’ (Rms 11:5; 2Tim1:9).  It is an act of God freely shown to people who God owed nothing but wrath (Rm1:18ff).

2.    Election is a sovereign choice.  It comes only from God’s grace not from any work or value or contribution that people make (Eph 1:5, 9. Rms 9:11, 15-18). 

3.    Election is an eternal choice.  God ‘choose us before the foundations of the world’ (Eph 1:4) and that choice will be affected through eternity (Rms 8:30).

4.    Election is a Christocentric choice.  Election is by faith in Christ toward likeness to Christ for eternity with Christ (Eph 1:4, Rms 8:29-30).  It is entirely centred on Christ.

Election is a sovereign choice

Probably the aspect of election we most emotionally or intellectually react to is #2. Election is a sovereign choice.  Questions like:

·         Does that nullify human responsibility?

·         Does that mean God both elects for heaven and elects for hell?  (Sometimes called ‘double predestination’ and affirmed by Augustine and Luther, but not affirmed by Calvin – as examples.  A reminder that our exact location on the continuum of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility is not something to use as a definer of authentic or orthodox faith)

·         What does that mean about evangelism, mission and outreach?

·         How does explaining the gospel work alongside God’s sovereignty?

·         What about those who seem to believe and then stop believing?

And the list goes on.  They were common questions of the first churches too and so numerous NT passages are addressing just such questions.  However these good questions, that have satisfying biblical answers, do not nullify four major expectations the Bible has about our ‘ability to respond’ to God’s ‘sovereignty’.

Four major expectations in the NT of understanding ‘election’ and God’s sovereignty:

1.    Gives confidence.  It is a comfort and reassurance.  Because it is all about Jesus and not me I can be confident that ‘nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ’. (Rms 8:29ff)

2.    Motivates worship.  It is a motivation to praise God.  ‘…to the praise of his glory’ is the repeated application of Paul’s full teaching on election in Ephesians 1 (Eph 1:3, 6, 12, 14)

3.    Encourages evangelism.  Because God’s sovereign election cannot be stopped we are able to ‘endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain salvation in Christ Jesus.’  (2Tim 2:10)

4.    Produces humility.  Realising it is all God’s doing leads to the ability to respond with humility, obedience and holiness not arrogance, self-confidence and license.  (Eph 5:5ff, Rm 11:19-22)

Why are there hard things about God to understand?

One question to ask of either difficult texts or hard doctrines is why would God inspire and reveal things difficult for us to grapple with?  A number of answers spring to mind, and should mark how we seek, find and communicate our answers.

1.    It should keep us rooted - it reveals just how far from God we are.  He is right, wise and loving and our struggle to see him as such is not a deficiency on his side but ours.  i.e: ice and cold are not a deficiency in the sun’s ability to heat but in the earth’s ability to receive that heat.

2.    It should keep us humble – if we cannot understand God we will not seek to be God.

3.    It should keep us thinking – our minds matter.

4.    It should keep us motivated – realising there is always more of God to know, worship, trust and proclaim.

5.    It should keep us talking and eager to learn, especially from those who are located slightly differently to us.

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[1] If I remember rightly I have borrowed these partly from the New Bible Dictionary and partly from Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, as I did the four major expectations that come later.