Upon some offline discussions about Divine Election, it seems I need to add some clarifications.
Start with the foundation: We cannot know eternal things the way we know about our lives here in the Fallen Realm. From ancient times, our Heavenly Father has revealed just as much as we need to know about the situation in His courts via parables. His revelations came in bits and pieces over the centuries. This is how the entire Ancient Near East understands spiritual things. Eventually He sent His Son, who in turn also spoke in parables.
Parables are understood by the heart. If you strive to live from your heart, you’ll have a much clearer connection to what God has revealed. Your heart can translate parables into the context for your mind. It’s not as if nothing can be explained in more or less concrete terms, but that such explanations will always lack something that is better expressed in parables.
Typically, Scripture tends to offer concrete descriptions of things that point back to the ineffable truths of the Spirit Realm. Paul does this quite a bit. When he talks about election in Romans 9-11, he’s offering a more concrete discussion of something that far exceeds human understanding. He also uses parabolic language. In other words, you cannot nail down what he says as anything more precise than manifestations of something we can experience here and now, but that reflects truth beyond words.
The huge flaw in the debate between Calvinists and Arminians is that both are striving to nail down concrete logical conclusions for the mind that are hardly on the same level as divine truth. The entire TULIP thing is asking the wrong questions. You cannot nail down how God operates the way TULIP attempts to do. You will invariably get something wrong that does not fit the rest of what the Bible says about God’s sovereign will. You cannot hope to understand what motivates Him or how He makes decisions that affect His Creation, to include us.
The best you can hope for is something that describes how you and I will experience that sovereign will. We cannot know who is Elect. We can only grasp how this or that person acts enough like God’s eternal family that we should treat them as such.
The whole point of Paul mentioning Jacob and Esau is to bring the discussion back to the practical results: Jacob became the progenitor of Israel, and Esau became the father of the Edomites. Election has a broad purpose. We are permitted to understand something about the Three Rebellions and the Divine Council of elohim in terms of the details about how some of the rebellions affected humanity. We know the history of how those rebellions resulted in God’s actions through Abraham’s lineage and the give-n-take between Israel and Edom. Otherwise, we cannot fully comprehend what’s going on in Heaven.
If you think about Divine Election in terms of what kind of privilege it hands to you, then you have missed the whole point of Paul’s discussion. It’s not about that at all. It’s about what role you are supposed to play in His Kingdom while living here below. Trying to nail down the logic of election in human terms is almost as bad as rejecting His will for you.
One of the few things we can nail down is that Election is part of how we understand that the majority of humanity at any given time and place always seem bound for Hell. There is nothing we can do to change that. The change has to start somewhere else, not with us or the people we would dearly love to bring into the spiritual family. We need to know that. We need to understand that it’s not a conversion, but a miracle of grace. We can’t possibly try to understand grace, and it’s wrong to even try. What we can understand is how God uses us to reach just a few here and there in our world. It’s always just a select few individuals who truly turn out to manifest a strong faith in Christ.
So, if you waste your time building large institutions so you can call them “churches”, you will miss everything that God is doing through Election. You’ll have large institutions of people who have never found grace, but are deceived into thinking they have found it because of what they were told that by well-meaning people trying to talk them into the miracle of faith.
The most important two things about Election are that (1) it is not democratic because God plays favorites in our experience and (2) the whole point is what role individuals play in shining divine glory into this world. Don’t blame sinners for not responding to the gospel; they cannot. Don’t blame yourself for failing to move them; they cannot move by any human agency. Know that everything you do and say feeds into either God’s glory or the Devil’s contention against humans.
Stop and look at the pragmatic meaning of doctrines like Divine Election. Maybe you cannot avoid trying to make sense of it, but never take yourself or your answers too seriously when it comes to understanding such things. It’s not about you, but about what you will do for Jesus’ name.
