“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,

To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”

That some are elect and others not, that some are saved by God’s grace from destruction and others are not, is often seen as a cosmic unfairness. This predestination is seen as arbitrary, and that it reveals an unjust God.

On the contrary, as the wages of sin are death, and we are dead in our sin, all are deserving of punishment. For God to elect none, and pass all of us into damnation, would be a perfectly just result. The remarkable fact is that he did not, and rather chose to save his own for his glory. Those who are justified inherit this saving gift of faith through no effort of their own, and for no inherent quality in them, but purely by the will of God for his own purposes. It is a grace, a gift, an undeserved delight.

A very imperfect analogy might consist in imagining a couple hikers who are drunk and fall down the hill, one of whom is rescued by a passerby. In such a scenario, do we ask why the passerby saved one and not the other? Is it not sufficient that one of the two was saved? Do survivors of the one who died have a claim against the passerby?

This is imperfect insofar as God is not limited as our passerby, though it illustrates something of the presumptuousness in these matters. Both the hikers in their drunkenness, and we in our sin, have no claim to God’s mercy. We have nothing to offer for our rescue, and there is nothing in us to merit such a kindness. That God could save both, and does not, is no strike against God. Rather, it is a strike against us to so question his grace, and to pretend ours would exceed his.

Whether it is we who are saved and others not, or others saved and we who are not, there can be no objection to the acts of God, and no court that dares to preside over Him. We may only place ourselves at his feet, and receive what he gives us. If we may do so in genuine faith, according to his word, we rejoice for his riches.