Chosen

"For your sake we face death all day long;

we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered."

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

NIV

Prayer

I. Chosen

A. Chosen because of God’s foreknowledge

There are two basic understandings in the Bible of what it means to be chosen. Much of this argument circles around the word election or to be elected.

This isn't the way that we think of this right now.

In our experience, if you are elected to something that means you decide to try and get a position within an organization or a government that is dependent upon getting enough votes to win it. We're in the middle of an election season right now where we will be deciding who our elected leaders will be for the next several years.

But that's not what the Bible means when it uses the word election or elected.

A better way of understanding this would be to use the word chosen.

So how does God make this choice? The big, meaty word for that is Soteriology- the study of how God saves humanity.

This is probably one of the biggest arguments within the church and why so many denominations exist.

There are two basics understandings that are put forward, and the form two different camps if you will within Christianity-

The first camp would will say that God made a sovereign Choice who he was going to save. If you are not in that group God elected to save, you are doomed. That's a very very condensed and very simplified version of what Calvinism would teach. I know anyone who may be listening to this it's a Calvinist say that's not what we believe but it is the end result of what they believe.

In the other camp, they would say that yes indeed, God made a choice, but it wasn’t arbitrary- it was based from His foreknowledge of who would accept Christ. Since God created this thing called time that he exists at every point within this timeline and therefore has ultimate knowledge of who will accept Christ as Lord God savior and King and therefore be elected to Salvation.

Most of us don’t think of time as part of God’s creation. You might think of it as a consequence of creating finite being, but we know from Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, that time is a created thing.

Time can be twisted, sped up, slowed down, warped, warped and even stopped dependent on variables like relative velocity and gravity.

So, God is sovereign over time as its creator, and therefore uses time to pre-know those who will accept salvation.

Those are the two beliefs on how God decided who will be saved.

The second one is what our fellowship and this church would believe- that we are Chosen based from God’s foreknowledge of who would accept His free gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. This theory is called Arminianism.