Today’s reading: Isaiah 48; Revelation 14
God’s election and maintenance of Israel in the Old Testament was always for His own purposes and glory, often in spite of, rather than because of, the Israelites themselves.
It seems like a lot of people today misunderstand the concept of election in the Bible. Israel was elect, but that did not mean all Israelites were pleasing to God or went to heaven. In Isaiah 48 God tells them they are obstinate, rebels, treacherous, idol worshippers, etc. It is not for their goodness, their righteousness, or their faithfulness that God chose Israel, in fact, exactly the opposite, He says that He knew they would be all these things before He drew them forth and created their nation from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
So if God knew how they would turn out before He created Israel, why did He elect them in the first place? God elected Israel, in spite of herself, for His own purposes. Humanity, from the beginning, was supposed to be God’s people, but in their continued rebellion, He gave them over and they were no longer His people. But in the midst of His disowning the nations from being His any longer, He selected Abraham and told him that He would make a new nation out of him, and that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him. In the context of having just disowned the nations, that promise of blessing to the nations is their restoration back into the family of God. This was God’s desire, to make a way for all peoples to be brought back into His divine family, and Israel was the instrument by which He was going to accomplish that desire, ultimately through Jesus.
This is why God says, through Isaiah, “For my name’s sake I defer my anger, for the sake of my praise I restrain it for you, that I may not cut you off.” If it was based on the goodness, faithfulness, righteousness, or otherwise worthiness of Israel, God would have already destroyed them long ago. He was not continuing to preserve them because they were so good, He was continuing to preserve them because it was through them that He was going to bring His Messiah and reconcile the nations back to Himself for His own praise and glory.
Because God had elected Israel for this purpose, individual Israelites had more access to Him and His truth than the people of the other nations, but having access to the truth did not mean they all responded to that truth and found salvation; half the book of Isaiah (maybe more than that honestly) is about their apostasy in chasing after other gods. So while Israel was elect, it did not mean that every individual Israelite went to Heaven, or even that a majority of them did. Their election meant that God revealed more of Himself to them, because He was using them to bring about His plan for the the forgiveness of sin and the reconciliation of the nations, but it was still on each person to respond to the revealed truth if they wanted to ultimately be with God for eternity.
In terms of election in the New Testament, while it carries different implications for salvation due to the fact that only those who are already in Christ are ever called elect, it is only in Christ that we are brought into the elect people of God. If we fail to think well about what it meant for Israel to be elect, we will not be thinking well about New Testament election either, and that could very well lead us to incorrect theology on some very important issues…
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