God's Chosen

All Believers have heard the term “God’s Chosen People.” We sometimes hear it in today’s world, when the topic of Jews or Israel comes up. Though many Jewish people in the modern world are secular when it comes to their religious beliefs, many still do practice the faith and consider themselves God’s Chosen. There is a Biblical origin for that idea. When God addressed the Hebrews in the Bible, he told them:

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession. - Deuteronomy 7:6

What exactly does it mean to be chosen by God? Does it mean that God favors the Jews over all other people? What does that mean for most Christians? Most of us are Gentiles. We are expected by faith to give God our obedience and love. That doesn’t seem fair if he views us as second class citizens in his kingdom. Well as with most things, God’s workings and references to how he thinks are not as simple as some would try to imply. For God, choosing Israel was not about favoring the Hebrews. God does not have favorites.

For God does not show favoritism.

All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. - Romans 2:11-13

Paul is telling us that what matters to God is how we behave. Faith in His Son is how we come to be saved and obedience to Him is how we show ourselves to be righteous. The Bible makes no further distinction there. It’s not about Jew or Gentile or race or nationality or any other factor that we humans use to divide ourselves. God does not think like that. We are all His children, and we all have the chance to spend eternity with Him. Yes, the Jews were considered to be His chosen people, but God makes it clear, that was not because they were great people or any great thing they did.

The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 But it was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. - Deuteronomy 7:7-8

God’s “choosing” of the Hebrews was actually Him exercising His faithfulness. He promised Abraham that He would care for Abraham's descendants, and that’s what He did. We see throughout the Old Testament that God was true to His word. He pulled the Hebrews out of bondage. He protected them from enemies. He fed them when they had no food. He provided for them in a way they couldn’t have hoped to provide for themselves. And of course, after being treated so well by God, the Hebrews obeyed God without question and were always true to Him and what he wanted for them, right? Of course not. As much as the Old Testament is about how God cared for his Chosen People, it’s also about how His Chosen People failed him. Psalm 106 is a laundry list from David of many of the failures of the Israelites. 

It’s clear that God did not choose them for their piety, so what was His purpose? Only God knows for sure why He does what He does, but sometimes we can speculate. Maybe, God used the Israelites as a case study. For Christians, the New Testament is the more important of the two parts of the Bible. It explains to us how we came to be saved, and what we should do with that gift. In fact, the New Testament tells us that God chose us, the people who believe on His Son.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love - Ephesians 1:3-4

Being chosen by God does not mean that we can just do whatever we want or that there are no consequences for bad acts. That’s what the Old Testament shows us. The Israelites were chosen, but they did not make the best use of that honor and suffered for their transgressions. As Christians, we need to learn from that example and be humble. No Christian should walk around with a ‘Holier Than Thou’ attitude just because he or she has a relationship with God. We are all susceptible to falling short. Being chosen by God doesn’t make us better. It just puts us in a position to serve. We know what is right, and we should work for the duration of our lives trying to live by what is right. We must also remember that it is our duty to give others the chance to accept God’s gift just as we were given that opportunity. Again, God ultimately makes the choice, but he uses us to share the Gospel and inform others of his choice. It doesn’t matter who a person is. God loves us all.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. - John 3:16

That doesn’t mean we lord our righteousness over others. It means we should obey God and love those around us.

Chris Lawyer

Image Courtesy of coachbrown.org