God chose because He loved

Geoff Thomas

Paul makes this glorious statement: He chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us… (Ephesians 1:4-5). Because he loved us he chose us and predestined us to all the blessings of salvation. The logic of the whole foundation of God's election is God's love. Paul goes back behind God's election to God's love. We can get back behind his election to his love, but we can't get behind the love to anything. The love is the bedrock. The love is ultimate reality. The love is the foundation. The love is the great source of all of God's redemption. It is like the throne of God. It is the controlling centre of heaven and earth whence God works all things after the counsel of his own will. Someone may ask, for example, ‘But what lies behind the throne of God?’ Nothing. That is the heart of the divine omnipotence. You can't go behind that to something more powerful. Nothing more powerful than the sovereignty of God exists. All the rivers of life flow out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. They all come from that sovereignty. So it is with the divine love. That is the Alpha and the Omega. That is God himself. Who created God? No one. God is unoriginated and uncreated. He is from eternity to eternity. There never was a time when there was no God. There never was a time when he was not omnipotent. There never was a time when he was not love. I cannot get beyond the love of God to something more rational, more involved, more understandable. The love is the headwaters. God's love is the source. The love of God is the ultimate reality of God. God is love, and beyond that we cannot go. This vast creation was made by God, and this God is infinite love. This God has loved his own people, and if we ask when he began to love them, Paul tells us that before he created the world he loved them. In the beginning he loved them. He has loved them with an everlasting love.

I cannot conceive of God as not existing. I cannot imagine God not being eternal. I cannot think of God as not being Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. I cannot speak of God not in love with his

people. That is part of the reality of God. Of course it is voluntary, and gracious, and so it is an act of God, but it is still an eternal love, the only way God has been, always in love with his people, always having a bride to present to his Son, always completely passionate for their salvation. It is in that fact that our election is rooted. He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world because he loved us.

God chose individuals with identities, not a grey faceless group. It was personal love: ‘Jacob is the name of the man I have loved’, God says, ‘and I loved the prophet named Jeremiah even before he was formed in the womb.’ Now that is surely one of the most marvelous aspects of the whole of our relationship with God: the minuteness of his concern, his intensive care of us. It is our names that are engraved in the palms of Jehovah's hands. We are approaching a time when new computers will be able to react more intimately and personally to us. Their letters will have little give-aways to show that they know more about us and even how we feel because they themselves have been made to 'feel'. Will that fact make us feel loved? The old person living alone, and feeling so insignificant and anonymous in a vast and bewildering universe - how will she feel when a machine starts writing more personally to her? More lonely than ever I'm sure.We are all tiny creatures clinging desperately to a little planet on the very outskirts of the universe. That is all we are. Our lives are quickly over and gone. Is there no alternative to machines? Then we see this individual love of a personal God for ourselves and we say with the Psalmist, I am poor and needy, but the Lord thinks on me. He cares for me today. He is touched by this feeling of how infirm I am. He is my own Shepherd and I will lack nothing I need. That is where we Christians find our peace, our dignity, our personhood, the worth of our own identity. That is where we cease to be nonentities. We are proud of a God who knows and loves his own chosen people. We are contemplated by the deep affection of God, so that we can no longer say, ‘Nobody cares . . .I don't matter . . . I'm nothing . .’ because God cares. He has cared so much he has given me his own Son. Paul cries with wonder, He loved me and gave himself for me. It is even possible for me to stand before Calvary in all humility and wonder and say, ‘And I am the meaning of that! You gave up your only Son to that, because you loved me? Amazing pity! Grace unknown! And love beyond degree!’ The Lord of glory inhabited the womb of Mary, and in the fulness of time he was born in the stable of Bethlehem. He lived long years in an insignificant village off the beaten track called Nazareth, and he suffered Golgotha, and breathed his last, and his body was laid in a tomb - and all out of love for me! 

Why was I made to hear Thy voice,
And enter while there's room,
When thousands make a wretched choice,
And rather starve than come?
'Twas the same love that spread the feast
That sweetly drew us in;
Else we had still refused to taste,
And perished in our sin.’

(Isaac Watts).

‘Chosen by Grace’ is not a story of God choosing names at random out of a hat. It is a love story, the most wonderful love story the world has ever heard

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