The dictionary definition of the
word “election” might provide some insight; the most general which is “the
right, power, or privilege of making a choice”
In search of the truth, therefore
the concept of predestination must be explored.
Predestining is essentially
predetermining before-hand an end result as Paul wrote:
(God) has chosen us (the favored) in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love; having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of his will… (Ephes 1:4-5)
Ask yourselves questions like, Who
are the “us”? Paul revealed them in the first verse of that letter: “…the
saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus” (Ephes 1:1).
God favored those who were faithful, so election depends of faith.
Now for the word “saints” we will
turn to the Hebrew; “O love the Lord, all you His saints for the Lord preserves
the faithful and plentifully rewards the proud doer” (Psalm 31:22).
A “His saints” the Hebrew word is
“hasid”. The letter “hey” is the “His” in Engish, and the meaning
of hasid is “His kind” that are faithful to Him.
The key word for saint is “faithful”
— a “proud doer” from Psalm 31, not a proud lazy person Hence, the saints can
be recognized by their deeds. It is not that deeds make them saints, but that saints
must do good deeds or works.
Paul was extremely informative,
patiently defining many religious terms: He wrote, “Faith is the substance of
things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb 11:1). Thus a “saint”
has faith evidenced by the things that he does.
God is a “kind” whose main
attribute is loving-kindness. Hence, His kind are to love both Him and
the all the other creatures like us that God has made — “The Greatest
Commandment”. Saints are manifested, therefore, by loving-kindness. Faith
operationalized would be revealed in love and kindness. Angry, hateful people
are not saints regardless of their claims.
The next question is What is
faith? Paul said that “faith is the substance of things hoped for.” “Substance”
means both real faith and that the things hoped for are believed to be real. What is the hope of Christians? Heaven,
eternal life, the Presence of God, harmonious existence, perfect health, the lack
of stress, without animosity, and so forth.
That environment is “Paradise”,
not in this realm, but the realm of heaven. Since God is the Sovereign there,
the citizens in His realm must be like their King, the “Big Guy” who sits on
the throne in another realm.
Faith is dependent on you; what you
think. Both God and the things of God must be real to you, and the paramount
degree of faith is that Jesus is the Person of the invisible God.
The things hoped for must
be real to you — substantive.
Paradise must be for real to you,
God be for real as Jesus, and that your own soul has the real Substance of God
to be His son and worthy of His Estate there. You cannot be just a pretender to
God but an actual adopted son of God with Him in you.
Hence, election is not
from yourself, but since God is sovereign, only God can elect. God has a plan
and a future for you, according to Jeremiah (Jer 29:11). That pre-existed the
creation of the world. Scripture is quite correct in predestination, but just
whom did God predestine? John seemed to have known the plans of God quite well,
according to John 1; and he revealed the elect that God favored even before
time ever began:
…Whosoever believes in Him should
not perish, but have eternal life for God so loved the world, that He gave his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have
everlasting life; for God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world;
but that the world through him might be saved” (John
3:15-17)
Who are “us”, as asked before? “Whosoever”
that believes in Him. God, as the true Sovereign reserves the right to establish
an orderly process for fairness.
The metric for “election” is belief.
That word requires examination; pisteuo in the original Greek — trust in
God with confidence that Jesus is God, and that as God, He can save. Belief
alone is not enough but trust and confidence are the real metrics. Therefore, election
is God’s plan from the beginning and is based on who does, and who does not,
have confidence in Him
The first sin was essentially trusting
the word of some Beast more so than the Word of God who said, “Do not eat.”
Adam had been favored for He had
dominion over the other beasts of the field (Gen 1:26). God favored Adam and
his kind (as the mem in adam represents) by putting Himself in
the body of the first man. Adam was just a thing until God breathed life
unto him. Adam and his kind were the original elect, and as it appears, the Elohim
of God (El) filled the inner man of Adam.
(Whereas God is one (El) His
Spirit is Elohim, not many, but omnipresent.)
Although God predestined Adam by
putting a fragment of Himself in proto-man, sin blotted out the Elohim
in him and his woman. Why so? They had more confidence in a talking Beast than
in God Himself, and the Beast persuaded the woman that it was God and that she
could be as well (Gen 4:1).
Albeit Adam and his kind were elected
and were the original “whosoever”, they lacked confidence and lost favor of God
who they once favored. They did not deny God but favored real things more so.
Apostasy (apostasia in the Greek;
Heb 6:6) means “defection”. Adam’s kind, once having affection for God in whom
they knew and trusted, defected from God in favor of the Beast.
Since original sin, mankind has favored
the Beast to God, as John wrote, for God seemed to reveal the beginning to him
as He did the ending:
You are of your father the devil, and the
lusts of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and
abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie,
he speaks of his own for he is a liar, and the father of it. (John 8:44)
Now, ask yourself who is “you”?
in that passage. Those who believed in God but failed to trust Him (i.e., the
seed of Abraham; John 8:41).
You can believe, but still be of
the Wicked One, for even demons believe (Jas 2:19). Neither did God elect all
the angelic kingdom, but selected only Adam’s kind, for God loved him so much
that He put Himself (Elohim) into that one man to pass down to Adam’s
kind.
According to John 3:16,
Adam’s kind should not have perished, but they have due to their own volition.
God elected all of Adam’s kind to be His people, and Him be their God, but they
favored the Beast more so, and since all of Adam’s kind are more like the Beast
than God, according to John, it was genetic from the original sin.
“Born again” (John 3:7) is
literally “engendered from above”
Once Adam sinned, God passed the
baton to Abel, not Cain, and with Abel dead, the election “baton” went to Seth
(Gen 4).
When Seth’s kind (“sons of God”)
failed (Gen 6:4), then God passed the baton to Noah who found grace (Gen 6:8) that
was of God for free and underserved, “For by grace are you saved through faith;
and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (Ephes 2:8).
From whom does faith derive? From
a remnant of Elohim in us because we too are Adam’s kind. We are not
totally depraved, but have the seed of God in us that must be sparked by the
Light of God to create a fire in us whose flame we must keep ablaze as scripture
reveals. By grace, God lights the fire, but faith is keeping the fire burning.
God’s command was, “The fire shall ever be burning upon the altar; it shall
never go out” (Lev 6:13). Only we can make the working sacrifice, and albeit
God is the Pillar of Fire that ignites us, we are told to never let the fire go
out. That takes great diligence and confidence.
Believing one time will not keep
the fire burning but vigilance will… “Keep your heart with all diligence; for
out of it are the issues of life” (Prov 4:23).
Faith begins with persuasion. God
provides the evidence, then we test it and hold onto what is good (1 Thes 5:1).
Indeed, God is sovereign and
rules, but it is us who are the household of God that must obey His divine
Will.
Faith is variable all the way from:
the lack of faith, to a little faith, to faith as small as a grain of mustard
seed, to great faith, to the faith of Abraham, to the faith of God.
That you know that you are saved “without
a shadow of doubt” implies it is you that is the sovereign with the right to
judge yourselves. Admittedly, I am humbled and have the hope that God
saves me by grace.
What is a “shadow of a
doubt”? Because we are not God, everybody at times have doubt, and if you think
not, you even lie to yourselves. If there is no doubt, then why are you not
moving mountains and such, or even simple things like trusting healing by
faith? That is crazy talk even to most evangelicals.
However, so many today are so
arrogant — God pre-ordained me, they think. They did not you,
they continue. I have God in me, and you do not!
Why would God elect only those
who enter the doors of a reformed church and whose doctrine is Calvin’s. That
makes Calvin the pontificus maximus
— “The Lord of lords”.
I follow Christ Jesus despite
Calvin’s decoherence.
It is true, Adam’s kind was
predestined and elected, but that waned, not due to God, but due to them. They
lost their first love, El, and fornicated with another “god” (Lucifer).
Once loving God, they gradually defected from Him to the Devil, and now they
have the Devil in their genetics and in dire need of rebirth, according to
Jesus, who said “You must be” (John 3:7).
That is your choice, and your
election belongs to you because the Sovereign God delegated it to you. A
gracious God does not force anyone to do anything. His grace is not irresistible
except for very few incidences.
Adam found grace when not seeking
it, and so did Abel. Then Noah found grace and soon lost it like Adam before
him. God did not remove grace, but people gave it up without even resisting.
Then Abraham found grace because
he chose God over the idols that his father Terah had made for King Nimrod. The
god/king Nimrod would never be his sovereign for he retained confidence in God
withstanding the fire of Ur. Abram faced great tribulation, and his faith saved him. Soom his faith (birthright)
was passed down to Isaac, then Jacob so that the Hebrews became the elect.
The Hebrew lost trust in God
while in Egypt in sin. They wandered until they died and never fully had faith
in God. Moses was elected to lead them out of sin into the Holy Land. Their
destination was not really the Land of Canaan but Paradise in heaven. They
failed to understand God but followed Moses wherever he led them. Their faith
in God was given to Moses, and again, God’s elect slid down the rabbit hole
into Hell. The Jews remain the elect as well but in God’s time, no theirs.
Then after Moses, the baton of
grace was passed to Joshua, and he became the “Jesus” in whom they had faith.
Soon, King David and “sons of
David”, the Israelites, got the baton and Israel split in two because of the
sins of King Ahab and his wife Jezebel who both lost affection for God and
favored the Wicked One.
By the time of Jesus, only the
Jews remained of all the elect of Adam’s kind. The God came to this world in
the Person of Jesus so that all mankind could see Jesus and have faith in God,
but the Jews rejected God in favor of Moses and his priests.
Then God grabbed the baton of
grace back for Himself to hand off, and then those who followed Christ Jesus became
the elect, “You are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a
peculiar people; that you should shew forth the praises of Him who has called
you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Pet 2:9).
Hence, over the course of human
events, the elect of God changed with the onset of rejection by those who were
the elect before them. With that said, God abandoned endless genealogies (Tit
3:9) and “whosoever” inherited the grace of God, despite their credentials as supposed
sons of God. It was a faith thing and who God thought could endure for the long
haul as James wrote:
Blessed is the man that endures temptation
(without sinning) for when he is tried,
he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord has promised to them that
love Him. (Jas 1:12)
Blessedness is inheriting
the Kingdom of God, to wit:
Every one that has forsaken houses, or
brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for
my Name's sake (Jesus), shall receive an
hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life. (Mat
19:29)
Hence, inheritance, or divine
election, is an individual thing (everyone) based on whosoever abandons the
things of the world for Jesus. That rings true for working faith is not
cheap grace!
“Cheap grace” is essentially accepting
the goodness of God without becoming His servant. It’s like the lazy servant of
a king who hates the things and ways of the king but prefers a sloven life to
that of royal living.
Despots make things irresistible.
Despots sentence people without good cause. Despots make servants, willing or
not, to endure his rule to the end. Despots limit their grace. Despots call
people “totally depraved”. Despots refer to common people as “a basket of
deplorables”. God, however, sees the potential in everyone. God is no Despot!
He that lacks these things is
blind, and cannot see afar off, and has forgotten that he was purged from his
old sins. Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling
and election sure: for if you do these things, you shall never fall… (2 Pet 1:9-10)
These “ things” in the above are godly characteristics listed in the previous
verses such as “godliness brotherly kindness and to brotherly kindness charity
(2 Pet 1:7)
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