Sunday, October 3, 2010

Abraham and God's Election

Background

God, who is by His very nature transcendently omniscient, created a plan for the redemption of mankind well before He created this world. However, the first real step towards redemption that we are privy to via special revelation is God's election of Abraham as the father of a holy nation and ultimately the establisher of the line of David. Surely, the implications of such a divine choice extend far beyond what could be explicated here, but there are some immediate implications to be gleaned.
Abraham is forever etched in the minds of most "Sunday schoolers" as the great Patriarch. He rescued his brother from an army, dined with angels, and was privileged to take part in a miraculous birth. Furthermore, Paul elevates Abraham as an example of the way that mankind may become justified. That is, Abraham's faith led to his justification. Not to mention, it was through Abraham's line that God "blessed all nations" through Christ. Abraham's life is marked as a life that was specifically chosen by God to produce the Savior and to be an example of how to access that salvation.
However, before God's revelation to him, Abraham lived in Ur of the Chaldeans. This place was a city of polytheistic pagans but it was also a city that maintained a highly advanced civilization. Yes, Abraham demonstrated faith in order to leave the comfort of this civilization to pursue what would be, at least for a time, a nomadic, rural lifestyle. Nevertheless why would God choose this pagan from a seemingly random city?

What Cannot Be Automatically Assumed

Many would say that an underlying theological implication of this Genesis narrative is that God chooses people for His purposes in order to demonstrate that He can take the most unlikely candidate and make them useful in God's program. The idea is that God will get the most glory in this instance. Perhaps that is true. However, I'm not sure that we should presume that God chose Abraham strictly on this basis. It seems, from our limited perspective, that He could have just as easily chosen another pagan worshipper from any polytheistic city. Choosing any pagan would have made the case that God has the ability to glorify Himself with an unlikely person. So why Abraham?
Also, I think that it would be erroneous to assume that God chose Abraham at random, as if he were a name drawn out of the "pagan-culture hat." God has sovereignty over the world and His orchestration of history is multi-faceted and unfathomably complex. So, it is absurd to claim that Abraham was simply chosen with no exacting reason by God Almighty.

What We Can Imply

If God is perfect, and He orchestrates perfectly, and He brings about the salvific story of mankind in a perfect way, then His choice in Abraham was perfect. Moreover, this current world, even with its suffering and need for redemption, is the paradigm that must be the most conducive world for demonstrating God's glorious nature to us. Thus, it could not have been done any other way! The very fact that God did make this choice necessitates this fact.
So then, what can we imply? Certainly, we can imply, in the least, that God does not choose on the basis of one's current, sinful state. It is feasible, however, that God chose Abraham on the basis of his potential decisions and the decisions of his offspring. The Genesis account at least allows for God's choice in elect to be based on the potential qualities of a person. In this instance, it could be that God chose, in part, on the basis of the potential of the children that would be created from Abraham. Maybe this means that some people are more apt to accept God's call or maybe God chooses on the basis of the actions that He knows we will make in the circumstances He intends to put us in once saved.
This is not to say that we are chosen to be the called ones of God on the basis of anything that we are, but that we could be chosen on the basis of what God knows we could be. He knows whether or not we would choose Him and what the necessary conditions are for that choice. Ultimately, we simply do not know the exact criteria for which God chooses His elect. However, the best that we can do is contemplate on possible criteria that Scripture allows for and exclude possibilities that it does not allow for.
We could never hope to systematize all of this, but we can be so very thankful that we can imply from the Abraham narrative that there are at least some instances in which God chooses His elect from amongst an idolatrous and pagan society. God can and does save people in spite of their current involvement in such a sinful state. In other words, despite utter depravity and hopelessness within society, God still chooses to save His people. Thank God, because America today is not exactly known as a godly society.

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