-11-
The God of Election
Romans 8:29 - 39
In the previous four chapters we have talked about Peace with God, Walking with God, Bound to Christ, and Walking in the Spirit. All of these chapters are so very special and precious to believers. They describe a relationship like no other. We are now progressing to a section of scripture where Paul mentions things like predestination, foreknowledge and election. This topic has been talked about and 'fought over' ever since it was first written.
It is not my desire to 'join the fight' and prolong a debate. But it is my desire to put this section of scripture in context with what Paul has been leading up to.
So, considering the progression of topics in the last four chapters, seeing and sensing the love God has for His children, it is fitting that this chapter focuses on our God.
We finished with this verse in the previous study:
.Ro 8:28 “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”
God has a purpose. His purpose is eternal. That is, before the foundation of the universe … God had a purpose and a plan. Before we talk about how God brings us alongside and includes us in His plan, we need to talk about God Himself and remind ourselves of some of His 'attributes' as we have come to know them.
Now I wish to turn our attention toward those attributes which apply to His foreknowledge. In our Romans study we come to this verse:
Ro 8:29 ¶ For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
The 'foreknowledge of God' is an interesting topic. It is based on the attribute that we call 'omniscience'. The first part of the word (omni) means 'all'. Literally, this fancy word just means 'all-knowing'.
Here is what we need to consider:
2Ki 20:1 ¶ In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz went to him and said, “This is what the Lord says: Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”
This king had been suffering from an illness for some time and was now close to death. Further in this story we read that he had some kind of a tumour.
It appears that this man's illness was common knowledge.
“Isaiah the prophet came to him ...” on his own initiative? Was he summoned to the palace by the king? We are not told. At any rate we need to ask, how clear was Isaiah's message? ‘You are going to die.’ That seems quite clear. Is this Isaiah's opinion? Is this his own assessment of the king's condition? Isaiah prefaced his announcement by saying, "Thus says the LORD”; was he making that up? We need to remember that the book of Isaiah was written by a prophet appointed by God. He wrote about the coming of Jesus. He even wrote about things pertaining to the end of this age. Can we trust him?
We have no reason to doubt that God actually told Isaiah that king Hezekiah would not recover from this illness. This is an example of the 'foreknowledge' of God. God, who can see the future, said that this man would not recover from this disease. Isaiah told him to 'set his house in order'; to make sure his will was current.
The king's natural response is to pray for healing.
2Ki 20:2 “Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD, saying, 2Ki 20:3 "Now, O LORD, please remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight." And Hezekiah wept bitterly”.
Does prayer change things? Did God say, 'You are going to die from this disease, unless you pray hard!'? No, he just said 'You will not recover, you will die'. That seems very clear.
Now we read,
2Ki 20:4 And before Isaiah had gone out of the middle court, the word of the LORD came to him:2Ki 20:5 "Turn back, and say to Hezekiah the leader of my people, Thus says the LORD, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will heal you. On the third day you shall go up to the house of the LORD,2Ki 20:6 and I will add fifteen years to your life. I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria, and I will defend this city for my own sake and for my servant David’s sake."
It looks like prayer changes things.
But it leaves us a bit confused about the foreknowledge of God. Did God see him die of this disease or not? If we say God saw the whole thing … saw that King Hezekiah would pray earnestly, also in His foreknowledge saw him healed, then He did not really see him die of that disease at all. God's message was not “You will die, …. unless you pray”. God cannot and does not lie. But for Him to say, “You will die and not recover” sounds like a lie if God knew all along that Hezekiah would pray and God would heal him. So what is going on here? Let 's take a closer look.
Foreknowledge. Omniscience. When we talk about God's omnipotence, we define it this way; God is all-powerful. But we do not stop there. We add, He can do anything! And this is true. But it is not true to say that everything in the universe that is being done … is all God's doing. He is not doing everything. Mankind is doing things. The Devil is doing things. So we say God CAN do anything. And, although He is the Almighty, He is never 'maxed out'.
A person can create an engine with a couple of thousand horsepower and put it into a car and drive it around town. It has a lot of power, but as you see the car move ahead when the light goes green, the driver is not using all the power. If he 'floored it', he would be using all the power. At that point the motor would be maxed out. That would be 'all there is'.
But what about God's power? Can he 'floor it' and be maxed out? No. Why not? Because His power is infinite. That is hard to understand. God can do anything … but He limits his power to do just what he wants to do.
So now let's take a closer look at omniscience.
We say God knows everything that is going to happen because He has infinite foreknowledge. But I am suggesting that we are making the wrong assumption. When we talk about omnipotence, we say God CAN do anything. Why not say the same thing about omniscience? Why not say God CAN know anything He wants to know. I know the objections to that, I can almost hear them. We think that if God CAN know anything, that implies there are some things that He does NOT know, and that implies weakness of some sort, and God does NOT have weakness.
But if that is what you are thinking, look at it this way. If God CANNOT limit His foreknowledge when He wants to, can we still say that He is ALL-powerful?
As a matter of fact, God puts limits on His own power all the time. He does what He wants and uses His power to do it. But when came to earth, He put limits on His power and limits on his omniscience. As a baby in the manger He was not all-powerful and not all-knowing. He could have been. But He limited Himself. (Philippians 2:5-8) A number of years later He was talking about His second coming … and He said … I don't know the day or the hour … only the Father in Heaven knows that.
Jesus is God, and yet He limited Himself. Jesus, by the way, is the creator of the universe, but God limited Himself and came to earth.
So we know God can limit His own attributes.
Does God know EVERTHING pertaining to the future? …or should we say, God CAN know anything pertaining to the future? If this is true, this does not weaken God in any way. God, in this case, can look ahead and see exactly as much as He wants to see. He does not have to 'see' every prayer that we are going to pray, ahead of time, but He can if He wants to.
In the book of James we read, Jas 5:16 “Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much”.
I believe God's word. The fervent prayer of a righteous person .. makes a difference. Can it change the mind of God? Can it change how He 'fore-saw' it? Obviously the power of God is so great that he has the ability to see the future in a variety of ways. In our limited way of thinking, it might be something like … “If Richard does this, I will do this. But if Richard does that, then I will do this other thing.” But God has an eternal purpose and plan. In no case can we ever make a choice that will affect His plans in the slightest. What He has given us in the way of prophecy is unchangeable. God cannot lie.
So that is all we will say about God's foreknowledge. Verse 29 also says that those whom God 'foreknew' He 'predestined'. We will talk about predestination in just a moment. But verse 29 leads right into verse 30 which gives a sequence of events;
Ro 8:30 And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
God 'foreknew' some people and therefore, predestined them to something.
From these verses comes the interpretation that God predestined some people to have salvation and only those can be saved. This has been called 'the doctrine of divine election'. The most popular proponent of this doctrine is the late John Calvin. However, before him was a very influential person called Augustine, who also held to the doctrine of individual election unto salvation.
I wrote in study number seven of this series:
According to Calvin all humans are born totally depraved and incapable of placing any faith in God. He gave this acronym to help understand his fundamental belief system.
T – Total depravity
U – Unconditional election
L – Limited Atonement
I – Irresistible Grace
P – Perseverance of the Saints.
Calvin made his teaching very popular - that God elected certain individuals to salvation. He said that the death that we all died in Adam, left us with the complete inability to choose anything else but evil. He said that we have a will that can choose which evil to follow and how much evil will we do. But he said we cannot choose God or anything good (T Total Depravity). And for this reason, said Calvin, God elected some to salvation before the creation of the universe. Calvin taught that the only human that God gave the choice to do good or evil was Adam. But in His foreknowledge He knew Adam would choose wrong, so God planned to become a man and shed His holy blood for sinful man … but, Calvin said, only for the sinful people that he elected (U Unconditional Election). Otherwise, if he had shed his blood for the whole world, obviously most of His blood would have been wasted. (That is what L, Limited Atonement means). Calvin also taught that a person did not have have the ability to choose God, so when it came time for one of His elect ones to get saved, God would first have to destroy the person's evil will and replace it with a will that can choose God. That choice, said Calvin was Irresistible. Salvation would have nothing to do with a person's choice. And since God is the one who does all the above … there is no way that this person could ever be lost. (P Perseverance)
So what about individual election? Is that what these verses are teaching us?
There is another term I wish to introduce to you at this time; corporate election. Ephesians 1.4 says, … “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world ….”
Let me show you the difference between taking this verse to mean …
Example 1: God called and chose Abraham, then his son Isaac and then his grandson, Jacob.
“For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.” (Jeremiah 7:6)
Eze 20:5 ¶ … Thus says the Lord GOD: On the day when I chose Israel, I swore to the offspring of the house of Jacob, making myself known to them in the land of Egypt; I swore to them, saying, I am the LORD your God.
Isa 41:8-10 “But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend; you whom I took from the ends of the earth, and called from its farthest corners, saying to you, "You are my servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off"; fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
Ro 11:2 “God has not rejected his people whom He foreknew. …”
From these verses which speak of Israel as the 'elect' of God, notice that God chose them. In Romans 11.2 are the words, 'whom He foreknew'. We believe that God foreknew them before the creation of the world. And He 'chose' them. That makes them 'the elect'. But wait a minute? Does this mean that every Israelite was saved and going to heaven? God foreknew them, right? But were they all born again children of God? No. Only some of them. Only the ones who put their faith and trust in God. And yet, it is important to note that ALL Israel is called the elect. Even the ones who are unsaved. So what gave any individual Israelite the right to be able to say, “I am one of the elect”? Here is it: All he had to be was a member of the corporate body of Jews. If a gentile of the nations became a believer in God, he could 'proselytize' and become a Jew. From that point on he also could say, 'I am now one of the elect!' Does this mean that he was elected before the foundation of the world? No, he wasn't personally, but Israel as a nation was. So now that he is in Israel, he too was one of the elect.
In the New Testament – Jesus replaces Israel. Or should I say, continues to be the true body … the elected body, that when we join him, just like when an outsider joined Israel, we then become one of the elect. Did he 'foreknow us individually before the foundation of the world? No, He foreknew … or predestined Jesus to be the body … the elect one, into which anyone could enter … and thereby become one of the elect. This should be our understanding of Eph 1:4 “...even as he chose us … in him before the foundation of the world, …”
Our personal 'election' is not guaranteed as Peter points out:
2Pe 1:10 “Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, for if you do these things you will never stumble”
Is salvation open … only to a select number that God 'foreknew'? No, because He did not foreknow a number of people. He foreknew Jesus, that He would come and pay for the salvation of anyone who would turn to Him for salvation.
Does God 'call' only those individuals that He foreknew? No. He calls everyone to Himself. Paul said in Ac 17:30 “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent”; “many are called but few are chosen. Mt 22:14 "
Is God the Savior of a select few? No, Paul said to Timothy, “We have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.” 1Ti 4:10
In what way is He the Savior of ALL men? In the same way that a lifeguard is the 'saviour' for everyone in the pool, especially is he the Savior of all who are in trouble and call out for salvation.
God provided Jesus to be our Ark. The Ark is the chosen way of salvation from the flood. When we enter the Ark we identify with the 'chosen'. What a wonderful God! Wonderful to create such a thing as freedom of choice. Wonderful that he provided a secure salvation in Jesus for all those who realize that their freedom caused their own spiritual death.
In these next few verses Paul glorifies the God of 'election'.
8:31 ¶ What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?
33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.
34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died — more than that, who was raised — who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?
36 As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded 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 sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers,
39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Who is your eternal security? Your life is “hidden with Christ in God.” Col 3:3
Amen!
It is not my desire to 'join the fight' and prolong a debate. But it is my desire to put this section of scripture in context with what Paul has been leading up to.
So, considering the progression of topics in the last four chapters, seeing and sensing the love God has for His children, it is fitting that this chapter focuses on our God.
We finished with this verse in the previous study:
.Ro 8:28 “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.”
God has a purpose. His purpose is eternal. That is, before the foundation of the universe … God had a purpose and a plan. Before we talk about how God brings us alongside and includes us in His plan, we need to talk about God Himself and remind ourselves of some of His 'attributes' as we have come to know them.
- God is Spirit: “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." John 4:24
- God is unchangeable: “I am the Lord, I change not.” Malachi 3:6
- God is omnipresent: “Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the LORD”. Jeremiah 23:24 (Relational-ly close or close in essence?)
- God is Omnipotent: "Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me?” Jer 32:27 God is almighty, God can do anything.
- God is omniscient: “ ... I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose’” Isaiah 46:9,10
- God is Holy: "... You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.” Leviticus 19:2
- God is Love: “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” 1John 4:8
Now I wish to turn our attention toward those attributes which apply to His foreknowledge. In our Romans study we come to this verse:
Ro 8:29 ¶ For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
The 'foreknowledge of God' is an interesting topic. It is based on the attribute that we call 'omniscience'. The first part of the word (omni) means 'all'. Literally, this fancy word just means 'all-knowing'.
Here is what we need to consider:
- Did God make mankind with a freedom to choose good or evil? As a 'fallen' people do we possess the freedom of choice, to do good or evil?
- If God knows EVERYTHING, knows the end from the beginning, so that our life is a movie that God has already watched … can my free will and choices change the outcome of anything? In other words, If God looked into our future and told us what was going to specifically take place, and we decided we did not want that to happen, could our freedom of will permit us to change directions and change the outcome?
2Ki 20:1 ¶ In those days Hezekiah became ill and was at the point of death. The prophet Isaiah son of Amoz went to him and said, “This is what the Lord says: Put your house in order, because you are going to die; you will not recover.”
This king had been suffering from an illness for some time and was now close to death. Further in this story we read that he had some kind of a tumour.
It appears that this man's illness was common knowledge.
“Isaiah the prophet came to him ...” on his own initiative? Was he summoned to the palace by the king? We are not told. At any rate we need to ask, how clear was Isaiah's message? ‘You are going to die.’ That seems quite clear. Is this Isaiah's opinion? Is this his own assessment of the king's condition? Isaiah prefaced his announcement by saying, "Thus says the LORD”; was he making that up? We need to remember that the book of Isaiah was written by a prophet appointed by God. He wrote about the coming of Jesus. He even wrote about things pertaining to the end of this age. Can we trust him?
We have no reason to doubt that God actually told Isaiah that king Hezekiah would not recover from this illness. This is an example of the 'foreknowledge' of God. God, who can see the future, said that this man would not recover from this disease. Isaiah told him to 'set his house in order'; to make sure his will was current.
The king's natural response is to pray for healing.
2Ki 20:2 “Then Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the LORD, saying, 2Ki 20:3 "Now, O LORD, please remember how I have walked before you in faithfulness and with a whole heart, and have done what is good in your sight." And Hezekiah wept bitterly”.
Does prayer change things? Did God say, 'You are going to die from this disease, unless you pray hard!'? No, he just said 'You will not recover, you will die'. That seems very clear.
Now we read,
2Ki 20:4 And before Isaiah had gone out of the middle court, the word of the LORD came to him:2Ki 20:5 "Turn back, and say to Hezekiah the leader of my people, Thus says the LORD, the God of David your father: I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. Behold, I will heal you. On the third day you shall go up to the house of the LORD,2Ki 20:6 and I will add fifteen years to your life. I will deliver you and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria, and I will defend this city for my own sake and for my servant David’s sake."
It looks like prayer changes things.
But it leaves us a bit confused about the foreknowledge of God. Did God see him die of this disease or not? If we say God saw the whole thing … saw that King Hezekiah would pray earnestly, also in His foreknowledge saw him healed, then He did not really see him die of that disease at all. God's message was not “You will die, …. unless you pray”. God cannot and does not lie. But for Him to say, “You will die and not recover” sounds like a lie if God knew all along that Hezekiah would pray and God would heal him. So what is going on here? Let 's take a closer look.
Foreknowledge. Omniscience. When we talk about God's omnipotence, we define it this way; God is all-powerful. But we do not stop there. We add, He can do anything! And this is true. But it is not true to say that everything in the universe that is being done … is all God's doing. He is not doing everything. Mankind is doing things. The Devil is doing things. So we say God CAN do anything. And, although He is the Almighty, He is never 'maxed out'.
A person can create an engine with a couple of thousand horsepower and put it into a car and drive it around town. It has a lot of power, but as you see the car move ahead when the light goes green, the driver is not using all the power. If he 'floored it', he would be using all the power. At that point the motor would be maxed out. That would be 'all there is'.
But what about God's power? Can he 'floor it' and be maxed out? No. Why not? Because His power is infinite. That is hard to understand. God can do anything … but He limits his power to do just what he wants to do.
So now let's take a closer look at omniscience.
We say God knows everything that is going to happen because He has infinite foreknowledge. But I am suggesting that we are making the wrong assumption. When we talk about omnipotence, we say God CAN do anything. Why not say the same thing about omniscience? Why not say God CAN know anything He wants to know. I know the objections to that, I can almost hear them. We think that if God CAN know anything, that implies there are some things that He does NOT know, and that implies weakness of some sort, and God does NOT have weakness.
But if that is what you are thinking, look at it this way. If God CANNOT limit His foreknowledge when He wants to, can we still say that He is ALL-powerful?
As a matter of fact, God puts limits on His own power all the time. He does what He wants and uses His power to do it. But when came to earth, He put limits on His power and limits on his omniscience. As a baby in the manger He was not all-powerful and not all-knowing. He could have been. But He limited Himself. (Philippians 2:5-8) A number of years later He was talking about His second coming … and He said … I don't know the day or the hour … only the Father in Heaven knows that.
Jesus is God, and yet He limited Himself. Jesus, by the way, is the creator of the universe, but God limited Himself and came to earth.
So we know God can limit His own attributes.
Does God know EVERTHING pertaining to the future? …or should we say, God CAN know anything pertaining to the future? If this is true, this does not weaken God in any way. God, in this case, can look ahead and see exactly as much as He wants to see. He does not have to 'see' every prayer that we are going to pray, ahead of time, but He can if He wants to.
In the book of James we read, Jas 5:16 “Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The effective, fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much”.
I believe God's word. The fervent prayer of a righteous person .. makes a difference. Can it change the mind of God? Can it change how He 'fore-saw' it? Obviously the power of God is so great that he has the ability to see the future in a variety of ways. In our limited way of thinking, it might be something like … “If Richard does this, I will do this. But if Richard does that, then I will do this other thing.” But God has an eternal purpose and plan. In no case can we ever make a choice that will affect His plans in the slightest. What He has given us in the way of prophecy is unchangeable. God cannot lie.
So that is all we will say about God's foreknowledge. Verse 29 also says that those whom God 'foreknew' He 'predestined'. We will talk about predestination in just a moment. But verse 29 leads right into verse 30 which gives a sequence of events;
Ro 8:30 And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
God 'foreknew' some people and therefore, predestined them to something.
From these verses comes the interpretation that God predestined some people to have salvation and only those can be saved. This has been called 'the doctrine of divine election'. The most popular proponent of this doctrine is the late John Calvin. However, before him was a very influential person called Augustine, who also held to the doctrine of individual election unto salvation.
I wrote in study number seven of this series:
According to Calvin all humans are born totally depraved and incapable of placing any faith in God. He gave this acronym to help understand his fundamental belief system.
T – Total depravity
U – Unconditional election
L – Limited Atonement
I – Irresistible Grace
P – Perseverance of the Saints.
Calvin made his teaching very popular - that God elected certain individuals to salvation. He said that the death that we all died in Adam, left us with the complete inability to choose anything else but evil. He said that we have a will that can choose which evil to follow and how much evil will we do. But he said we cannot choose God or anything good (T Total Depravity). And for this reason, said Calvin, God elected some to salvation before the creation of the universe. Calvin taught that the only human that God gave the choice to do good or evil was Adam. But in His foreknowledge He knew Adam would choose wrong, so God planned to become a man and shed His holy blood for sinful man … but, Calvin said, only for the sinful people that he elected (U Unconditional Election). Otherwise, if he had shed his blood for the whole world, obviously most of His blood would have been wasted. (That is what L, Limited Atonement means). Calvin also taught that a person did not have have the ability to choose God, so when it came time for one of His elect ones to get saved, God would first have to destroy the person's evil will and replace it with a will that can choose God. That choice, said Calvin was Irresistible. Salvation would have nothing to do with a person's choice. And since God is the one who does all the above … there is no way that this person could ever be lost. (P Perseverance)
So what about individual election? Is that what these verses are teaching us?
There is another term I wish to introduce to you at this time; corporate election. Ephesians 1.4 says, … “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world ….”
Let me show you the difference between taking this verse to mean …
- we were each chosen individually, before the foundation of the world, vs
- Christ was chosen before the foundation of the world and anyone receiving Christ is an elect person … because He was an elect person, and we are IN Him.
Example 1: God called and chose Abraham, then his son Isaac and then his grandson, Jacob.
“For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.” (Jeremiah 7:6)
Eze 20:5 ¶ … Thus says the Lord GOD: On the day when I chose Israel, I swore to the offspring of the house of Jacob, making myself known to them in the land of Egypt; I swore to them, saying, I am the LORD your God.
Isa 41:8-10 “But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend; you whom I took from the ends of the earth, and called from its farthest corners, saying to you, "You are my servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off"; fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
Ro 11:2 “God has not rejected his people whom He foreknew. …”
From these verses which speak of Israel as the 'elect' of God, notice that God chose them. In Romans 11.2 are the words, 'whom He foreknew'. We believe that God foreknew them before the creation of the world. And He 'chose' them. That makes them 'the elect'. But wait a minute? Does this mean that every Israelite was saved and going to heaven? God foreknew them, right? But were they all born again children of God? No. Only some of them. Only the ones who put their faith and trust in God. And yet, it is important to note that ALL Israel is called the elect. Even the ones who are unsaved. So what gave any individual Israelite the right to be able to say, “I am one of the elect”? Here is it: All he had to be was a member of the corporate body of Jews. If a gentile of the nations became a believer in God, he could 'proselytize' and become a Jew. From that point on he also could say, 'I am now one of the elect!' Does this mean that he was elected before the foundation of the world? No, he wasn't personally, but Israel as a nation was. So now that he is in Israel, he too was one of the elect.
In the New Testament – Jesus replaces Israel. Or should I say, continues to be the true body … the elected body, that when we join him, just like when an outsider joined Israel, we then become one of the elect. Did he 'foreknow us individually before the foundation of the world? No, He foreknew … or predestined Jesus to be the body … the elect one, into which anyone could enter … and thereby become one of the elect. This should be our understanding of Eph 1:4 “...even as he chose us … in him before the foundation of the world, …”
Our personal 'election' is not guaranteed as Peter points out:
2Pe 1:10 “Therefore, brethren, be even more diligent to make your call and election sure, for if you do these things you will never stumble”
Is salvation open … only to a select number that God 'foreknew'? No, because He did not foreknow a number of people. He foreknew Jesus, that He would come and pay for the salvation of anyone who would turn to Him for salvation.
Does God 'call' only those individuals that He foreknew? No. He calls everyone to Himself. Paul said in Ac 17:30 “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent”; “many are called but few are chosen. Mt 22:14 "
Is God the Savior of a select few? No, Paul said to Timothy, “We have our hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.” 1Ti 4:10
In what way is He the Savior of ALL men? In the same way that a lifeguard is the 'saviour' for everyone in the pool, especially is he the Savior of all who are in trouble and call out for salvation.
God provided Jesus to be our Ark. The Ark is the chosen way of salvation from the flood. When we enter the Ark we identify with the 'chosen'. What a wonderful God! Wonderful to create such a thing as freedom of choice. Wonderful that he provided a secure salvation in Jesus for all those who realize that their freedom caused their own spiritual death.
In these next few verses Paul glorifies the God of 'election'.
8:31 ¶ What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?
33 Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.
34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died — more than that, who was raised — who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?
36 As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded 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 sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers,
39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Who is your eternal security? Your life is “hidden with Christ in God.” Col 3:3
Amen!