The Basis of God's Election

This article is the fourth in a series on man's free will and God's foreknowledge.
If you missed them, check out part 1, part 2 and part 3.
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You are not the basis for your election. And it's a good thing—because if you were, you'd never have been elected in the first place. In the last article, we saw that God’s perfect knowledge of the future implies that the future is determined. But I left this question unanswered: on what basis is the future determined? Or, to give it a more blatantly soteriological flavor: what is the basis for your election as God's child? Answer: NOT YOU. Yet some Christians would explain it this way: “God looks down the corridor of time with His perfect knowledge of the future, sees those who will respond with faith to the Gospel, and elects them.” A more modern analogy is that God has “watched a movie of the future” and based His election on what He sees. In other words, they think that our being “elect according to the foreknowledge of God” (1 Pet. 1:2) means nothing more than that God knows the future perfectly and bases His election of us on our own future decisions. To put it in theological categories, this is an Arminian understanding of God’s election known as “conditional election”. They contend that God’s election of believers is based on His seeing in advance who will have faith when presented with the Gospel and then He elects those. Besides the fact that the real, biblical meaning of "foreknowledge" is more than just knowledge of the future (which we'll get to in the next article), there are a couple big problems with this understanding.

First, it makes man the fountainhead and foundation of his own election. It essentially implies that those who are just a little more spiritually open, more spiritually insightful or sensitive, etc.—these are the ones whom God chooses. But the Bible says that God elected us “according to the good pleasure of His will” (Eph. 1:4-5), not “according to His ability to see our future choice and spiritual openness on a celestial movie screen.” God also said to Israel through Moses in Deut 7:7-8, “The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the Lord loves you…” In other words: "You are elect not because of anything in yourselves. If that were the case, you wouldn't be elect because... well, you're not that great! But you have been chosen because God has loved you. God loves you because He loves you." The same goes for us as Christians. God says that His own love is the source of our election, not anything in us. His goodness, not ours, is the basis of our identity as His children. 

Second, this theory of conditional election is really an attempt to leave some semblance of man's libertarian freedom in tact. It's as though God at some point before creation looked into a (non-existent) hypothetical future where men have libertarian freedom to choose God in their own power and then God chose the elect on the basis of this fiction. A person who upholds conditional election may very well agree that at the present time the future is set and cannot be changed. But their concept of God's election implies that it was based on a libertarian future which God supposedly saw in eternity past. The claim is that at least this way the “responsibility” is on man for his election, even if it is now determined.

But there’s a problem: The reality where man's will is not fallen and has libertarian freedom does not exist. If God's election were based on viewing some such hypothetical world, then He would be electing fictional characters instead of real people. But if God knows the actual future perfectly and precisely, then He also knew that we would NOT choose Him apart from His own, gracious drawing. As I laid out in my previous article on free will, man’s will is unable to desire God and, moreover, to believe in the Gospel unless God should initiate a work in his heart by grace. So, if God deals in reality rather than fiction (which I believe He does), there would be nothing positive in the elect to foresee that He Himself didn't graciously bring about. And if He merely foresees a person's "free choice"—the unrestricted expression of their fallen will—then there is nothing to foresee except sin and rebellion against the Gospel. And hence, no one would be elect. This is why the idea that our election flows from ourselves while God is a passive observer cannot hold up under scrutiny. 

The Bible clearly says that man is not the source of his own election. He cannot even desire to be elect without God’s supernatural work on his heart. Man’s will is not “free” in the sense that he could, in his own power, want God. Nevertheless, man does bear responsibility for his own sin. Why? Because he chooses it without any influence from God. That is, as I mentioned before, man does have a limited kind of “freedom”. We are free to choose what we want, and so we bear responsibility for our choice. The problem is, in our fallen will, we want sin. And because sin is what we want, we are responsible for it. While the Bible clearly points to God as the source of our gracious election, it just as clearly points to man as the source of his own sin and consequent damnation. Some might try to argue that, “logically”, if God predestines the elect for salvation, He must predestine the reprobate for damnation. While we might tend to reason in this way, the Bible knows of no such doctrine. Again, we must follow Scripture over our natural reasoning. We are in need of God’s gracious intervention to be saved. We don’t need any help in damning ourselves—we can manage that one on our own. It was Charles Spurgeon who wrote: "Damnation is all of man, from top to bottom, and salvation is all of grace, from first to last. He that perishes chooses to perish; but he that is saved is saved because God has chosen to save him."

So what does all this mean for the fact that God elects us “according to His foreknowledge”? It implies that God’s “foreknowledge” must be something more than simple, passive observation of our choice in advance. Our choice, by itself, is always wrong. Foreknowledge must imply not merely something that God sees, but something that God does to overcome the natural inclination of our fallen will. So what is God’s foreknowledge? This is what I’ll look at in the next and final article in this series.