After last week, and my referencing America’s song “Tin Man”, and after hearing several folks tell me that they couldn’t get it out of their heads during the sermon, I hesitate to do the same again, but here goes. It was a Tuesday night staple in the Harvey household when I was a child growing up; a screen-filling wave being caught by a young surfer and the unmistakable up-tempo theme song signalled the beginning of my favorite show: Hawaii Five-O. We marvelled weekly at the exploits of Steve McGarrett and his faithful sidekicks as they sought to rid the Big Island of crime. My favorite was Che; remember Che? He was the guy in the lab, and every week, McGarrett would send Dano to the lab with some sort of evidence collected from the crime scene, and Che would get to work analyzing it, and when the Five-O team would show up at the lab for a report, Che would be ready. Che could take a single hair and tell the perpetrator’s life story. If it weren’t for Che, there would be no CSI Miami, folks…
Well, as you know if you were a regular, like clockwork every week, in the span of 60 minutes, our boys would bring down the perpetrator, and we all waited for those magic words; you could set your watch by them. McGarrett would turn to his faithful sidekick, and with either a relieved or mildly disgusted air, utter the same five words: “book him, Dano; Murder One”. It was satisfying, because it neatly wrapped up all of the conflicts in the space of an hour—perhaps the antithesis of our modern day “24”, which wraps up nothing for good until the season is over! I liked Five-O, in part because I don’t like to be left hanging; I feel cheated if there’s a carry-over (plus I feel like I have to commit to watching that show the next week, and I don’t like being strung along...but that’s just me). It’s a natural, God-given impulse, I believe, to want resolution.
Contradictions, apparent contradictions, ambiguity are frustrating.
And that is why today’s passage is a bit troubling to many, myself included, because it tells us that we have been chosen before the foundation of the world by God to be His children. Now…that alone isn’t troubling at all, but rather it is the attempt to reconcile this passage with some others that makes for some of the frustration and, in some cases, fireworks! That said, we must allow the Scripture to speak and further, we must be glad, because we can be most certain that whatever Paul means for us to understand by these words, they constitute one of the rich blessings that God has poured out upon His children! God in His sovereignty determined in eternity past that He would choose, through His amazing grace, to declare sinful human beings as holy and blameless in His sight; He made a choice before time to bless you! That is our first point:
I. We are saved because of God’s initiative.
We are so prone to think of salvation from our perspective.
• Some, of course, understand salvation as being works-oriented, as something we earn; this perspective, of course, cannot be supported Biblically.
• We think of salvation in individual terms as well. Interestingly enough, though, the focus of election here involves our corporate election, on the fact that we all, collectively, are in Christ, and thus elect. He loved “us” and chose “us”; God took the initiative to bring “us” together in Jesus.
• Even for those of us who understand that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, we can still take the wrong angle at the equation. It might be true enough to make the statement, “I was saved when I trusted Christ as Savior”, but that is only one portion of a much larger picture.
Were we able to pack up and take a field trip to the Louvre, we’d all admire the artwork, but to focus on our end of salvation, as though we deserve any credit for it, would be like lavishing praise on the custodian who dusts the frame on the Mona Lisa! I am saved first because God made the willful choice to pursue me (particularly since the Bible says that there is no one who naturally seeks after God (Romans 3:11)—which is why the term “seeker” is not one I use with a lot of relish). In John 6:44, Jesus says, “No man can come to Me unless the Father Who sent me draws him.” God is not waiting around like a wallflower at the school dance, hoping that someone—anyone—will stroll over and choose Him. Had God not chosen to save us, to draw us to Himself, we would not be saved.
II. We are not saved on the basis of our merit.
God didn’t select the “cream of the crop”; in fact, Scripture says that God has chosen the foolish things of this world in order to confound the wise. All of us can think of good, moral people who are not followers of Jesus, can’t we? All of us conversely know people who were, by this world’s standards even, pretty bad people before coming to Christ. “Even before He made the world”, Paul says, God chose us. God didn’t wait and see who was worthy of saving; He made the decision to save us before the world began.
There will be a lot of good people in hell. Let’s pose a “for instance” question: will Gandhi be in hell? Now, it’s of course not my point to pretend to be the one to make the final call, and God will do what God chooses to do. That said, so far as we know, of course, Gandhi made no pretense of following Jesus; he was a devout Hindu. Was he sincere? Was he good, in human terms? Was he a great leader, who did a lot of good on a human scale? Certainly, we can say “yes” to each of these things, and we can further have a real sense of appreciation for much about his life. But if salvation is not on the basis of our own merit; if it is dependent upon God’s drawing us to Himself for the sake of Christ; if Gandhi never turned from the worship of the 330 million false gods presented by Hinduism to worship the true God through Christ, then the Bible is pretty plain, isn’t it? If you came here looking for political correctness, you came to the wrong place!
You see, God saves us in spite of us instead of because of us. We are saved because God sovereignly chose to save us, not because we deserve it. Let’s get that quite clear. He chose us prior to our choosing Him.
III. We are chosen “in Christ”.
Another way of putting it is, “because of Christ”. God’s plan, as we know, involved the giving of Himself in the person of Christ. If a person ever suggests that “being good is good enough”, or “being sincere is good enough”, or “being religious is good enough”, the answer is, “why, then, did Jesus have to come and die?” The gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t about us becoming good people; it’s about our horrible sin problem that dooms us to an eternity separated from God, but it’s about the fact that God sent His only Son, Jesus, to die on the cross as our substitute that we might be saved. It’s about God the Father seeing us through the lens of the goodness of Jesus applied to our account. It’s about Jesus, not us, in other words. We are chosen in Christ.
My identity is bound up in my position: “in Christ”. I am who I am because of Christ. All the blessings indicated here are contingent upon this, that I know for certain that I am “in Christ”.
IV. There is a purpose behind God’s choosing: that we be holy and blameless.
Why is it that God sees fit to choose to save us? Again, we tend to see salvation from our own perspective, and thus some of the classic Christian songs from years gone by were songs like “I’ve Got a Mansion Just Over the Hilltop”, and “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”, and “When We All Get to Heaven”. And there’s truth in all of those, and they’re all good and fine, and I’ve got little argument with them, except that that is only one perspective on our salvation, that it involves something that punches our ticket for an eternity with God. But there is more, and as we see in vv. 6, 12, & 14, God has a further purpose in mind in saving us: it brings Him glory when He is able to take undeserving sinners and call them holy and blameless. He takes thoroughly undeserving sinners and declares them to be holy and blameless…it’s one thing to affirm that as a theological truth, but it’s another to really see that truth as applied to yourself. If you are “in Christ”, there is no condemnation that can come down upon you.
Do you have a gnawing sense of guilt, as though you have not been truly forgiven? There could be a couple of sources of that guilt; one, guilt can envelope your life because of unrepentant sin. It’s possible that there is something going on in your life that you know full-well to be as a result of some sin that you have never confessed to God, that you’ve allowed yourself to be content that you’ll never change, that it’ll never improve, so what’s the use? You feel guilt in this instance because your fellowship with God is impaired, but the promise of God to us is that if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. Another possible source of guilt is false guilt, the feeling that you have that you remain guilty before God. But He has chosen you. And He has chosen you to be holy and blameless before Him.
Now that runs counter to our general performance-based understanding of how the world works. It is natural to think that God will withdraw His love from us when we fail/sin; there are some who’ve grown up believing and thinking that—and there are, sadly, some of us who act this way toward others. But God sees me as holy—because He looks at me and my works and declares me so? No…He declares me holy because He sees Jesus when He looks at me. But the bottom line is that He sees me as holy!
And yet, along with this, we have to understand that privilege brings responsibility; we are seen by God as holy; we have the responsibility to live up to who we are in Christ. God calls us to live lives of practical holiness, because He sees us as holy and blameless. The goal of the Christ-follower in this lifetime is to be more conformed to the image and likeness of Jesus; it is the work fo the Holy Spirit to change us as we cooperate with Him; it is a work that God will bring to perfection in eternity. For a professing Christ-follower to merely rest on his “blessed assurance”, content that he is one of the elect, yet sensing no urge toward holiness of life, is a serious problem. Are you progressing toward practical holiness?
V. God counts me as significant in the outworking of His plan.
One Christian writer describes one of the consuming quests of contemporary man as the “Search for Significance”. How much do I really count? Does my life matter? And the answer, ultimately, to the question is that the sovereign God of the universe chose me and you to be a part of His plan. God created me—and that gives me identity as being separate from animals, created in His image and with a soul; that’s true of all people everywhere. But further, for the Christ-follower, I have eternal significance, because God is using me in the outworking of His master plan.
• Do you ever struggle with inadequacy?
• Do you ever feel useless and unwanted?
• People are plagued by demons of discouragement and spiritual depression, people who give ear to the lies Satan will whisper: “you don’t count”; “you’re a failure”; “you’ll never amount to anything”.
On the authority of Epheisans 1:4, those things are lies. For reasons that transcend any merit of my own, for reasons God knows, he chose to bless me and make me part of eternity’s grand chorus whose theme will be “Glory to God in the highest”.
And so we are left with certain mysteries:
• Why did God choose me?
• Why, for that matter, did He choose anyone?
There are plenty of theological questions that this text raises, as I mentioned earlier, and I can’t pretend to solve nearly all of them. But the text isn’t given to us so that we might engage in theological trivia contests nor that we might settle every debate or argument; the main point of the text is to praise God for His choice of folks like us, for valuing us by loving us enough to bring us to Himself and to entrust us with the responsibility of being His holy people, His chosen representatives.
This passage provides a bit of a challenge to some of us theologically, but we will have to content ourselves with two answers: one, we know that God will settle our lack of understanding in eternity, and two, we know that “Long ago, even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.”
Finally, none of us should sit around worrying about whether or not we are one of God’s elect; from our perspective, the matter is simple: God calls men everywhere to repent. Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to place your faith and your future in the hands of the One Who died for you on the cross, and then rose again and beat death at its own game?
