Chosen for Paradise: Reframing Election in Romans 9-11 by Crowder John

Author:Crowder, John [Crowder, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sons of Thunder Ministries & Publications
Published: 2015-02-21T16:00:00+00:00

Epilogue

God’s predestined intention for you was to lavish upon you the eternal wealth of His goodness. You were created as an object of love. Jesus was not twisting His Father’s arm to love you on the cross, acting as a sort of divine lightning rod to absorb the wrath of a schizophrenic deity. That vengeful, legalistic view of the atonement is a modern invention, and not the message of the early Church fathers. The Father was not venting His wrath on Jesus. The Father was venting His love through Jesus. The Trinity was manifesting Its eternal heart of love for you - making clear that the choice of God is positively for you – even when you were estranged from Him. Jesus was never the whipping boy of a legalistic Father who demanded the scales of some obscure cosmic justice be paid … with a resounding “Too bad!” for those who don’t catch the message this side of their deathbed. No, God is pure mercy. True justice was His demand that you be restored to your rightful place as an heir of your Father’s kingdom. Rather than absorbing the brutality of a capricious deity, Jesus was absorbing the sinfulness of mankind and all its inherent ramifications – destroying our disease in His own broken servant body on the cross. This He did on behalf of humanity.

He who descended is the very One who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill the whole universe

(Eph. 4:10).

In the incarnation, God bound the created order to Himself. We are all enveloped in Him, as is all of creation – whether we realize it by faith or not. The scripture hints at the possibility that all might come to know Christ, but the mystery remains open ended. Leave room for mystery. We are saved through trusting Jesus, not by figuring Him out.

God cut all but Jesus out of the salvation business. He excluded everybody so He could include everybody. Salvation was never conditioned by our performance – including the “drumming up” of faith. Humanity cannot create or manufacture union with God. We can only discover it. One thing for certain is that we are no longer outsiders. Jesus Christ went to the altar and accepted you into His life. Kudos to our Arminian brothers for at least recognizing a beautiful gift of participation in this divine dance with the Trinity. But this salvation was decided for us long before we ever responded to it. Election is God’s solid choice for mankind in Jesus.

To truncate this Message of election to a tract on Heaven and Hell is to sell the Gospel far short of its inherent worth. Our Orthodox brothers in the East are perhaps right in the suggestion that Heaven and Hell are merely our human language to describe what it’s like to be in the presence of God … we all go to the same place, but to some His fire of love is manifest as torment because some demand to reject the inescapable love of God.

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