Man’s major problem since the fall is that his notion of what is good and what is evil is fundamentally broken. Indeed, this is what it means to be a sinner: we judge what is good by what we want, and also (by extension) by what other people want. Good and evil for us are centered on ourselves. Because sinners reject God, man’s flourishing is the only and ultimate good we can conceive.

This attitude is repaired to some extent when God regenerates us; when he changes our dispositions to “aim” toward him, rather than toward ourselves. We come to realize that the standard of goodness we’ve been aiming at is too low. Far too low. We learn that there is none righteous—not one!—and that from our youth, every inclination of our hearts is only evil continually (Romans 3:10; Genesis 8:21; 6:5). This is what Jesus saves us from.

But old habits die hard. We continue to instinctively judge actions by how they affect us and other people. That’s our natural shortcut for telling what is right and what is wrong. We have to work hard to overcome it; we have to learn to change our instincts; to judge actions by how they relate to God. It is a steep learning curve to come to grips with Paul’s statement in Romans 14:23 that whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. That nice atheist helping the old lady across the road? Yeap, that’s sin. It’s not as bad a sin as Ted Bundy raping and murdering young women—but it isn’t done with the intent of honoring God, and so no matter how well it affects other people, it is done in rejection of goodness itself (God). So it is sin.

The trouble is, because as sinners we are naturally predisposed to reject God’s authority and goodness and substitute them with our own, we should actually expect to feel loathing—or at least unease—about how God deals with people. (Isn’t this why the doctrine of hell is so unpopular?)

As Christians, we should be careful to test our kneejerk reactions against the standard of God himself. But when it comes to election, we quickly see that our initial feeling of how unfair God would be to save only some people is 180 degrees to how we should feel:

/!\God would be quite unfair to save anyone.

Our intuition that God should save all people rather than just some is based in our false but natural feeling that all people deserve saving. Even after we are converted and know better, we still tend to think of people as basically good when of course they are the opposite. But once we look at human beings from God’s perspective instead of our own, we realize that he ought to punish us all in hell forever. He ought not let a single one of us into heaven. That’s why it’s called the “gospel of grace”: grace is undeserved favor.

In other words, not a single person ever has any claim whatsoever on God’s salvation. If God decides to give it to some people, he is being gratuitously kind to them. He is not giving them what they deserve. Commensurately, his failing to be gratuitously kind to other people is not a defect or imperfection on his part. He has utterly no obligation to those he didn’t pick for salvation—because they have utterly no basis to expect his favor. He is not unfair to give them what they deserve—hell—he is, in fact, perfectly fair.

Election and God’s end-game

I noted in the previous part of this series that God’s purpose in creation—his end-game if you will—is to glorify himself. And I argued that God’s glory is simply his revealed perfection. With this in mind, it is actually easy to see why God does not damn everyone, and why he does not save everyone either:

(>) God’s undeserved love and mercy is part of his perfection
(>)God’s holy wrath and judgment is part of his perfection

If God wishes to reveal his perfection fully, he must reveal his undeserved mercy and his holy judgment. Which means he must elect some sinners to salvation, and damn others to hell. It is only a man-centered moral calculus that finds this offensive. When we cast it in light of God’s revealed perfection, election is literally a glorious doctrine.