Unconditional Election

Maybe it has happened to you. You are at a family cookout with a plate of barbecue in your lap, and somebody asks where you go to church. You tell them Sovereign Grace Baptist. An uncle sets his tea down and says, "Sovereign Grace? So you're one of those Calvinists." The whole table gets quiet, and every eye is waiting on your answer.

When you get asked if you are a Calvinist or if you are Reformed, do not take the bait, and do not run from it either. Ask them what they mean. A lot of times they are thinking about John Calvin. Some are thinking about the Synod of Dort, where the five points were formulated. Others just want to know if you hold to what folks call the TULIP doctrines:

T Total depravity
U Unconditional election
L Limited atonement
I Irresistible grace
P Perseverance of the saints

Those truths were being preached long before Luther and Calvin ever came along. Once the label talk is over, though, the real question usually comes out. If God chooses who will be saved, what about everybody else? Is that fair? Why would He choose me? Those are honest questions, and they deserve an honest answer from the Book. Paul heard every one of them before you did, and he answered them right here in Romans 9.

In the last message of this series we took Romans 3 and the doctrine of total depravity. This time we take Romans 9 and the second letter of the TULIP, unconditional election. Here is the whole of it in one sentence: God chose His people before they were born, for no reason in them and for every reason in Himself, and He is righteous in doing it.

So reads the infallible, the inerrant, the all-sufficient Word of the living God.

We will take this text in three movements, and we begin where Paul begins, with a man grieving over his own people.

A Promise That Has Not Failed

To feel the weight of verse 6, you have to back up to the first five verses. Paul opens this chapter with a broken heart. In verse 2 he says he has "great sorrow and unceasing grief" in his heart. Then in verse 3 he says something that ought to stop us cold: "For I could wish that I myself were accursed, separated from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh."

Look at what those kinsmen had. Verse 4 says to them belongs "the adoption as sons, and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the Law and the temple service and the promises." They had the fathers. The Christ Himself came from them according to the flesh. Israel had every advantage a people could have, and most of them were rejecting their own Messiah.

So the question hangs in the air. Did God's promise to Abraham fall to the ground?

Verse 6: "But it is not as though the word of God has failed." It is not so! "For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel." A man could look at the genealogical chart and trace his line straight back to Jacob, and still not be part of true Israel. God has a people inside the people.

Does God have a plan for Israel as a nation? Yes, and Paul gets to that in chapter 11. But will every man who can trace his family tree back to Abraham be saved? No.

Paul is not laying out a new argument here. Jesus said much the same thing to the Jews:

This must have hit them to their core. They were counting on their connection to Abraham for spiritual blessing, and Jesus says not so fast.

Back to our text. Paul sets up his argument in verses 7 and 8: "nor are they all children because they are Abraham's seed, but: 'THROUGH ISAAC YOUR SEED WILL BE NAMED.' That is, the children of the flesh are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are considered as seed."

Remember, Abraham had another son. Ishmael was born first, and Ishmael was not chosen. Isaac was. Both boys had Abraham's blood in their veins, but only one was the child of promise.

Verse 9 tells us what that promise was: "For this is the word of promise: 'AT THIS TIME I WILL COME, AND SARAH SHALL HAVE A SON.'" Paul is quoting Genesis 18:

Who is that son? Isaac! Notice who does the promising. God says, "I WILL COME." Sarah was ninety years old. That child was God's doing from start to finish.

The proud Jew of Paul's day wanted to put a condition on election. He figured he was saved because he was a Jew. What does the Bible say?

Uh-oh. There goes that condition.

It is the same thing today when somebody says you only get to heaven if you heard the gospel from a Baptist preacher or joined a Baptist church. The Bible rises up in condemnation of that and says salvation is of the Lord!

Folks still try to get in on the family paperwork. "My granddaddy was a deacon." "I was baptized when I was nine." "My name has been on a church roll since before some of y'all were born." None of that makes a man a child of the promise. Let me ask you something, and answer it honestly in your own heart. If somebody asked you today why you are sure you will go to heaven, what would come out of your mouth first? If the first thing out is your family or your church membership, you are standing right where those men stood in John 8, pointing to Abraham while the Son of God stood in front of them.

So the word of God has not failed. God has always had a people within the people, and they come by promise and not by flesh. Somebody is already thinking, "Well, Isaac got picked because he was Sarah's boy." Paul saw that coming too.

A Choice Made Before Birth

Paul could have stopped with Isaac and Ishmael. It seems like a good enough argument. But folks, had he stopped there, somebody would have said Isaac was chosen because he was Sarah's son. They might have said Ishmael was rejected because he was not a pure Jew, since his mother Hagar was an Egyptian. Another man might say God rejected Ishmael because of something he did. Ishmael was about fourteen years older than Isaac, plenty of time to show what was in him.

So Paul moves to the next generation, where none of those arguments will hold.

Rebekah had two sons by one man. Twins. Same mother and same father, carried in the same womb at the same time. You cannot say anything about them like what could be said about Isaac and Ishmael. They stood on equal footing.

Verse 11 tells us God's choice happened before they were born, before they had done anything good or bad. You cannot blame Esau's blood, because it was Jacob's blood too. You cannot point to Esau's behavior, because he had not behaved yet. The choice was made "so that the purpose of God according to His choice would stand, not because of works but because of Him who calls."

That word "calls" takes us back up to verse 7: "THROUGH ISAAC YOUR SEED WILL BE NAMED." It is the same word in the Greek. The God who named Isaac is the same God who calls Jacob. Paul is tying the chain one link at a time, and every link is God's doing.

Verse 12 takes us back to what God told Rebekah while the boys were still struggling inside her:

Esau should have had the upper hand. He was the older, and the birthright belonged to him. God reversed it before either boy drew a breath and said the older would serve the younger.

Verse 13 quotes the last prophet of the Old Testament:

Some folks will read Genesis 25 and Malachi 1 and say, "See there? Two nations. Esau's mountains. Paul is talking about nations, not individuals." It is true those old texts reach out to the nations that came from these two boys. But look at how Paul uses them. He is not talking about nations here. He is speaking about individuals. Verse 6 is about which individuals inside Israel are true Israel. Verse 11 speaks of twins who were not yet born and had done nothing good or bad, and a nation does not get conceived by Rebekah. Down in verse 24 Paul names who the vessels of mercy are: "even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles." That is people, called one by one out of every nation. And the objection in verse 14 only makes sense if personal salvation is on the table. Nobody would holler "unfair" because God gave one country better farmland than another.

Charles Spurgeon read this chapter and said:

The word "hated" bothers people, and I am not going to sand it down to nothing. Both boys stood on equal ground. Both were sinners in Adam, and neither one deserved anything from God. God set His love on Jacob and passed Esau by, leaving him in the sin he loved. Esau got exactly what he deserved, which is the same thing Jacob deserved.

I will tell you what puzzles me. Folks ask why God would hate Esau. I want to know why He would ever love Jacob. Jacob's very name points back to the heel he grabbed coming out of the womb, and he kept on grabbing for years after. He cheated his brother out of the birthright and lied to his blind daddy to steal the blessing. That is the man God loved. Grace has never once gone looking for somebody who deserved it.

This is the basis for Paul's argument on election. It is unconditional. So what do we mean when we say "unconditional election"? J.P. Boyce, the first president of Southern Seminary, stated it this way:

Notice what Boyce leaves out. He does not say God looked down the corridor of time, saw who would believe, and picked them for it. That would make election conditional, with your faith as the condition. Verse 11 shuts that door: "not because of works but because of Him who calls." Faith is the fruit of God's choosing, never the root of it.

If God's choice rests on nothing in us, there is no room left for spiritual pride. You were not the better twin. Think about the person you have quietly written off. Maybe it is the coworker who cusses every other word, or the son-in-law who will not darken a church door. You are not better than him. If you are saved, you were taken "from the same lump" he was, as Paul puts it a few verses later. So quit looking down on him and start praying for him. Put his name on your lips before God this week, every day, and ask the Lord to have mercy on him the way He had mercy on you.

God chose Jacob before he was born, before he had done anything good or bad, for nothing in Jacob at all. The minute you say that out loud, somebody is going to cry foul. Paul knew they would, and that is where he goes next.

A God Who Owes No One

If God loved Jacob and hated Esau, what does that mean? Is there unrighteousness with God? Where does an objection like that come from?

This is a rhetorical question. Paul had been preaching long enough to know how people are, and he answers the questions that are bound to come up. Beyond that, God knows the heart of man. Remember, this is His Word. He knows the answers before you even know the question.

This is the objection of the carnal mind. Unrighteousness with God? Can it be? "May it never be!" That is the strongest denial Paul knows how to make. God is infinitely just, and holy, and good, and faithful. There is no flaw in His sovereignty and no unrighteousness in His election.

Look at the ground Paul stands on to deny it. He does not reach for some well-thought-out argument full of the best rhetoric. He rests his case on the Bible. In verse 15 he quotes Exodus 33. Moses had just asked God to show him His glory, and this is what God said:

Moses asked to see the glory of God, and part of what God showed him was His freedom to have mercy on whom He pleases. That freedom is part of His glory.

Folks, we have got to learn to do this. Just as Paul brought up depravity from the Scriptures in chapter 3, he argues unconditional election from the Scriptures here. I hope you are noticing a pattern in my preaching. The driving force of what we believe needs to be the Bible. If we believe something, it ought not to be because Calvin believed it, or Spurgeon, or Pink, or B.H. Carroll for that matter. They did. It should not be because the old Baptists or the old Puritans held to these doctrines. It is true, they did, and you will find these doctrines in the old Baptist confessions. But we do not hold to them because the majority of Baptists and Protestants believed them. We hold to these doctrines because they are Biblical.

If God somehow looks unrighteous or unwise or unfair to you, remember this: God is not to be judged by man. He does not stand trial in the court of men. Who are we to pull Him down to our level and judge Him? He is our Judge! All will stand before Him.

Robert Haldane put it well:

"A debtor to none." That is the key to the whole fairness question. Picture a governor walking down death row with one pardon in his hand. Every man on that row was tried and found guilty, and every one of them deserves the sentence. The governor stops at one cell and signs the pardon. The men in the other cells cannot file suit and claim the state did them wrong. Nobody on that row was owed a pardon. If the governor owed it, it would not be a pardon at all. That is exactly where every one of us stood before God. If God gave everybody justice, everybody would be lost. Mercy that is owed stops being mercy and turns into wages.

Verse 16 is the conclusion of the whole: "So then it does not depend on the one who wills or the one who runs, but on God who has mercy." It is God's gracious choice of certain people unto eternal life, and it does not hang on any human choice or human effort. Paul says the same thing to the Ephesians:

Your salvation from the beginning to the ending is all of God. This is the message of the Bible. We see it illustrated in this text with two boys, twins. One was loved and the other hated, and God settled it before the foundation of the world.

So what do we do with that? For one thing, quit putting God on trial. When you run into a hard text, and Romans 9 is a hard text, bow before you argue. Let God be God.

For another, let this doctrine put joy in you. Listen to what Jesus told the seventy:

Those men had just watched demons obey them, and Jesus said there was something better to get excited about. What lit you up this week? A raise at work, or a clean report from the doctor? Those are kind gifts from a good God. But if your name is recorded in heaven, nothing on this earth comes close to that.

How Can You Know?

Paul opened this chapter grieving over his kinsmen, and that grief never lifts. But he has shown us that God's word has not failed. The promise always ran through the children of promise and never through the children of the flesh. God chose Jacob over Esau before either boy was born, for nothing in Jacob and nothing against Esau that was not already true of Jacob. When the carnal mind hollers "unfair," Paul answers with the Scriptures. God owes mercy to no one, and He shows it to whom He pleases.

Unconditional election leaves man with nothing to boast about and leaves God with all the glory.

Are you rejoicing today to be one of the elect? That is a big question, isn't it? Are you one of the elect? How can you know?

God did not paint a blue mark down the back of the elect, did He? So how can you know? Charles Spurgeon had this to say, and it is very helpful:

If you are not in Christ, hear the warning in this chapter. Go back to verse 4 and look at everything those Israelites had: the covenants, the Law, the temple service, the promises. They had all of it, and multitudes of them perished. You can sit in a building with Sovereign Grace on the sign, know your TULIP forward and backward, and still be lost. Esau was born into the household of promise and carried the birthright, and he lived and died outside of it.

Don't you dare turn election into an excuse. Some say, "If I'm elect, I'll get saved, and if I'm not, I won't, so there's nothing for me to do." Verse 16 cuts both ways. Your willing and running cannot earn God's mercy, and your sitting still will not earn it either. The Bible never tells you to find out whether you are elect before you come. It tells you to look to Christ.

Look at where God put His choosing:

"He chose us in Him." Election never happened apart from Christ. The Father chose a people and gave them to the Son, and the Son came down and laid down His life for them. Their sin was laid on Him at the cross, and His righteousness is put on them. If you want to know whether God chose you, you will not find out by searching your own heart or poking around in heaven's records. You find out by going to Christ.

Listen to the Lord Jesus:

Look at both halves of that verse. "All that the Father gives Me will come to Me" is election. "The one who comes to Me I will never cast out" is the open door. If something in you is being drawn to Christ today, that drawing did not start with you. Do not sit on it. Come to Him, because He has never cast out one sinner who came. If you want to talk about it, reach out to us.

Believer, here is your comfort. If you have come to Christ, you can rest. Your salvation did not begin with your decision, so it cannot be undone by your failures. Paul said God's purpose "according to His choice would stand," and it will. He wrote this to a church full of new believers:

Paul knew they were elect because the gospel had come to them in power. That is how you know too. You cannot read the Lamb's book from here, but you can see the fruit of the gospel in a life that has looked to Jesus. The God who chose you before you were born is not going to let go of you before you die.

Speaking the Truth in Love

Let us carry the banner high. We are Sovereign Grace Baptist Church, and that name is a big indicator that we hold to these truths. We are not ashamed of them. But let us remember the words found in Ephesians 4:

Make no mistake, there are folks who disagree with us on some or all of these five points. Sometimes they will argue about the terms Calvinist or Reformed and call them manmade doctrines. Other times they will use verses out of context. I have family who do not adhere to the five points of the doctrines of grace, and some of you do too.

When we deal with folks who disagree with us on this, let us be patient with them, remembering that if it were not for the grace of God, we too might be Arminian. Indeed, some of y'all were Arminian before, to some extent or another. Even those of us who were raised in churches like this one needed time to grow after we were saved. Knowing where I come from, and seeing where others have come from, you'll not hear me call someone stupid or an ignoramus for not holding to these doctrines.

Baptists have never all lined up on this. John T. Christian, in his History of the Baptists, pointed out that Arminian views largely prevailed among Baptists in this country at first, and Calvinistic principles prevailed later. He noted that some Virginia Baptists who were Arminians became rigid Calvinists after they moved to Kentucky. Folks change their minds when the Book gets hold of them. None of us should want to make the differences between brethren any sharper than they already are.

Paul tells the elect how to dress:

So here is your charge for this week. Before Sunday comes again, sit down with Romans 9 and read the whole chapter in one sitting. Read it out loud if you can. Then, if election comes up with a family member or a coworker, do not argue to win. Ask them what they mean, open the Book with them, and let the text do the talking. Speak the truth, and speak it in love.

And one night this week, before you turn out the light, thank God out loud that He set His love on you when there was nothing in you worth loving.