J. I. Packer on Unconditional Election

[Ask Mr. Religion]

Unconditional Election
An Interview with J. I. Packer

MR: Dr. Packer, what exactly do people mean by unconditional election?
Packer: It is a phrase which folk use to express this thought: that because we sinners are helpless, God has to take all the steps that are necessary in order to bring us to faith and fellowship with himself and finally to eternal life. Unconditional election is the name for the choice God makes to do that in any particular case, and it has to be unconditional because if God waited for man to merit it, he would wait forever.

MR: Dr. Packer, why do we need an election?
Packer: Because we will never be saved unless God chooses to save us. Election leads to the saving action of God in his lordship, and if we were left to ourselves we would never respond to God on our own at all. This is what people don't seem to appreciate, that all of us by nature are anti-God in our deepest instincts (see Romans chapter 3). We don't always realize this because many of us think we are seeking God, and frankly, people want a God they can manage and manipulate and have as a safety net. Those are facts about human life, and very familiar facts. But when it is a matter of responding to the real God and responding in a way that he calls for --that is by humbling ourselves before him, learning to trust his word absolutely, turning from sin, taking our hands off of the reins of our own life and letting him be in control --we wake up to the fact that we don't like this at all and we shy back from it. That is our nature. So you see, God has to take action otherwise we shall never come to him at all because that is the state in which fallen humans find themselves.

MR: Doesn't this detract from our responsibility to respond to the gospel? If I'm one of the elect, God will save me, and if I'm not I cannot be saved anyway so why worry about it?
Packer: No, that isn't the way to look at it because God has made us folk who act of their own will and he keeps us that way. And so he takes account of us for the things that we have done because they really were our own actions. The fact that we haven't got it in us to respond to God in a positive way doesn't mean that we don't choose not to respond to God. We do choose not to respond to God, and it's for that choice that we're responsible before him. The truth about us is that we are like drowning folk who can't swim and left to ourselves would just go under and eventually not come up again. God takes action, as it were, to dive in, swim to us, grab hold of us and save us. Election, as we said a moment ago, is his decision to do that, and in his lordship and power he does it, and so our salvation is entirely due to him. But all the time we are responsible for being the people that we are, drowning in our own moral mess.

MR: Isn't foreknowledge the basis of election? Didn't God choose us because he looked down into the future and foresaw that we would believe in him?
Packer: He foreknew us all right, but he foreknew us as we are by nature, that is, he foreknew us as folk who wouldn't respond to him unless he first changed our heart, so he chose us to have our hearts changed. But it's all his initiative, all his sovereignty first to last. The Bible describes this human condition in many ways. It tells us that we are spiritually blind, spiritually deaf, our hearts are hard--that is to say we are unresponsive to God, and we are spiritually dead. The Bible says all those things. You couldn't express the thought of unresponsiveness more strongly.

MR: Wouldn't it be unfair for God to elect one person to heaven, but then not elect my next-door neighbor?
Packer: Well the thing to remember here is, first of all, that why God does what he does is often times a mystery to us. He doesn't tell us why he chooses one and not another. To ask the question therefore is foolish; it doesn't get us anywhere. But we should remember, secondly, that in fact as God sees us we all actually deserve to be condemned because we're all actually choosing every day to live in defiance of his laws and his way, and to follow our own way instead; that's rebellion, and that's sin. Well now, it's out of a body of humanity, every one of whose members deserves to be rejected, that God has in fact saved some. The Bible makes it plain that he doesn't choose to save all, but he is under no obligation to choose to save all. In fact, he's under no obligation to choose to save any, because we all deserve from his hands condemnation and punishment.

See the remainder of the interview here:
http://www.modernreformation.org/default.php?page=articledisplay&var2=577

AMR