June 3: Deuteronomy 7
Thinking through election
A common misconception about God’s election of people is quickly put to rest in Deuteronomy 7. On the one hand, Israel were God’s “chosen people,” chosen out of all the nations of the world to be his priestly nation. Which, if left to the human heart to interpret, so often leads to pride.
Thus Moses quickly chases off that notion:
It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, 8 but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Deuteronomy 7:7-8
Why does God elect some to salvation? It’s right here that, for once, we must watch our pronouns. He elects to salvation because He loves them, not because they deserve it. It’s cuz God, not cuz us. Thus God’s salvation of people is based entirely by what Christians in English call “grace”: a favor bestowed that is completely unmerited, unearned. And that grace resides entirely within God.
Now, to this, many Jews would find their longing for personal achievement to not be satiated, and they would take pride in the next phrase - that God was keeping His oath to their fathers. Thus the Jews in John 8:39 said as much to Jesus, just before they called him a bastard (John 8:41).
But this pride means they were not really children of Abraham. They were not true Jews. They had a different father (John 8:44). No, the true Jews, Paul would say later, are those who share the faith that Abraham had in God (Romans 4:16-17). God promised Abraham an impossible blessing - that the old man would have offspring numbering like the stars in the sky - and the man who was good-as-dead believed him. And God, all by grace, took that faith and credited it to Abraham as if it were perfect righteousness.
What God wants most from us is that we simply believe Him. Do you?
Yet we must hold two truths at the same time. God’s sovereignty in bestowing grace does not in any way reduce our own moral responsibility. Note then the kindness and the severity of God, and believe it:
Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates him. He will repay him to his face. Deuteronomy 7:9-10