God wants all people to be saved, and so he chose a particular nation through which he could give his Son, Jesus, as the saviour of the whole world.

John Calvin, and many who followed him, was confused about this, thinking that God’s election of the nation of Israel meant God did not create all people to be saved.

Others, in reaction to views like this, make the opposite mistake of concluding that election is only about the nation of Israel, and that God has not elected individuals to life. Some are even so confused as to think that all people will be ultimately saved, even if they completely resist trusting in Jesus their whole lives.

This is the fourth of a series of posts on the doctrine of predestination and how John Calvin in particular misunderstood what the Bible teaches about it.

In our first and second posts we examined what John Calvin taught about predestination, and how it differs from the Bible.

In the third post, we looked carefully at Romans 9-11, which is probably the clearest place in the whole Bible that teaches the doctrine of predestination, and how Calvin misunderstood these chapters.

Our final posts of the series will focus on the key biblical themes that Paul draws on in Romans 9-11. Today’s post is about the election of Israel in Genesis and Malachi.

Calvin’s fundamental misunderstanding of God choosing Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was to treat this as an illustration of eternal election. But we showed in yesterday’s post from Romans 9 that Paul never says this. Instead, God chose the person of Abraham, the family he birthed, and the nation that came from him so that Christ could enter the world for the salvation of everyone.

This is God’s purpose. And a careful reading of Genesis reveals: this is what God was always saying from the beginning.

1) The Line of Promise in Genesis

After Adam and Eve sinned, God entered the garden with a Word of judgment and promise. His Word of judgment condemned the evil and limited its consequences, while his Word of promise mocked Satan by promising a human child would one day be born that would remove the sin he had tempted the first humans to commit:

Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock… I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. (Genesis 3:14, 15)

In Genesis 12, about 2,000 years later, God developed this promise by giving it to Abraham:

And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:2-3)

This promise to Abraham is not a double predestination. God does not promise life to Abraham at the expense of reprobation to all others. God does not say “I will save you and damn all other people.”

In fact, God says the opposite. God chooses Abraham (“in you”), so that through his election “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

This Word given to Abraham is not symmetrical. There is a judicial “curse” (the same word, ארר, spoken to the serpent) that will only fall upon all those who dishonour Abraham. Whereas in Abraham “all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” People will experience this blessing by blessing Abraham, because God has elected him to be the vehicle through which the blessing will come. But God’s stated intention is that all the families of the earth will benefit from it.

Decades later God clarifies that this line of promise through Abraham is not intended to exclude others, but include them. When Abraham prays for Ishmael, his eldest son born from an act of mistrust by sleeping with his concubine Hagar, God assures him:

¹⁸ And Abraham said to God, “Oh that Ishmael might live before you!” ¹⁹ God said, “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him. ²⁰ As for Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation. ²¹ But I will establish my covenant with Isaac, whom Sarah shall bear to you at this time next year.” (Genesis 17:18-21)

God is not saying to Abraham here: “Isaac is predestined to eternal life, Ishmael for eternal damnation, but I’ll give Ishmael lots of nice things in this life while he waits.”

That isn’t what God’s saying at all.

God is saying that his line of promise—now re-enforced by covenant oath—to bless all the families of the earth in Abraham will pass down through Isaac, rather than through Ishmael. But that does not mean he has decided to curse Ishmael.

It is those who dishonour Abraham that will be cursed. Those who bless Abraham that will be blessed. The line of promise is merely the vehicle through which this blessing will come into the world.

It is this line of promise that God is talking about in the rest of the Bible, when he says that he “loved” Isaac’s younger son Jacob and “hated” his older son Esau. Before either child is born, God decided this:

And the LORD said to her, “Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the older shall serve the younger.” (Genesis 25:23)

This decision by God is not about the eternal salvation or damnation of either child. It is about the nations that each child will father. The decision is about which nation will inherit the line of promise through which all the families of the earth will be blessed.

And God does not elect Jacob for this honour because he foresees that he will be better than Esau. Jacob will turn out to be deeply morally compromised. But God works his purposes out even through Jacob deceiving his father and stealing his brother’s blessing (Genesis 27).

But this blessing that Jacob steals is not the blessing of eternal life. It is the same promise that was given to Abraham:

Cursed be everyone who curses you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you! (Genesis 27:29)

At the end of Genesis, Jacob then passes on this promise to his own children—but now, with a difference. Instead of the line of promise being entrusted to a single individual, it is entrusted to all twelve of Jacob’s sons (Genesis 49). God will work out the promise to bring the serpent crusher by using this entire family.

2) The Line of Promise in Malachi

The oracle of Malachi was received by the last writing prophet called to the people of Israel.

After Abraham, Jacob’s family grew into a people. They were enslaved in Egypt, delivered by God’s mighty hand, constituted as a nation under Moses, brought into the promised land, and later given a king. Then the kingdom split in two. The northern kingdom was taken into exile by Assyria, and Judah was later taken into exile by Babylon, until finally a small remnant, mostly Judahites, returned under Persian rule to rebuild Jerusalem. That brings us to Malachi, more than 1,500 years after Abraham.

By this point Israel had developed an attitude problem. They keep blaming their problems on God as though he was a bad person, and using this as an excuse for their own bad behaviour. Malachi is sent to challenge them about this, and remind them of the purpose for which God elected Israel in the first place: to bring through them the promised Messiah on the “great and awesome day of the LORD” (Malachi 4:5).

Malachi opens his prophecy by challenging Israel’s apathy about their privileged status:

 “I have loved you,” says the LORD. But you say, “How have you loved us?” “Is not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the LORD. “Yet I have loved Jacob but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.” (Malachi 1:2-3)

This prophecy is often cited mistakenly as evidence of eternal election and reprobation.

But Malachi’s own language makes it clear that he is talking about the same line of promise spoken of throughout Genesis. Referring to  “Esau” Malachi explicitly talks of “his hill country”—because he is referring to Israel’s elect status as the nation through whom the Messiah will come.

This promise that they will bear the Messiah—and only this promise—is the reason why the insignificant nation of Israel has managed to survive for so long. When so many other tiny political entities around them have collapsed (such as Edom and Moab), against all odds, the nation of Judah has been preserved.

That’s no accident, Malachi says. There’s a reason for it. And that reason is not because of what God is going to do TO Judah, but what he’s going to bring THROUGH Judah.

3) The Line of Promise in Romans 9:6-13

At the time Paul wrote the book of Romans, approximately 400-500 years after Malachi prophesied, the Messiah had finally come. God the Son himself had become incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth to die for the sins of the world, fulfil the promise to Abraham, and crush Satan’s head.

But many Jews (i.e. Israelites) rejected this Christ through unbelief. Whereas many Gentiles (i.e. people outside the line of promise) trusted in him for eternal salvation.

This led many Jewish Christians to struggle with the thought that God’s Word had failed somehow.

In Romans 9:6-13, Paul draws this Old Testament thread together to assure the Roman Christians that God’s Word has not failed. The election of physical Israel had never been election to eternal life—God’s purpose in choosing Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the nation of Israel was always so that the Messiah would come with the intent that in him all the families of the earth would be blessed.

John Calvin did not understand this biblical theme, or Paul’s explanation of it.

Calvin explains the election of Abraham and his descendants to be a pedagogical tool:

This God has testified, not only in the case of single individuals; he has also given a specimen of it in the whole posterity of Abraham, to make it plain that the future condition of each nation lives entirely at his disposal (Calvin’s Institutes 3.21.5)

This is why Calvin interprets statements like Malachi 1:2-3 “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated” to be teaching that God has reprobated (i.e. chosen) the greater part of mankind for damnation.

In this, Calvin goes beyond what Scripture says. Paul doesn’t describe the line of promise as an illustration or example in Romans 9. Genesis doesn’t do this. Neither does Malachi. It’s not reflected in Paul’s words, nor in the contexts that he is relying upon.

In fact, Paul introduces the purpose for Israel’s election in the verses immediately before:

…my kinsmen according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen. (Romans 9:3-5)

Paul lists here the many temporal blessings the Israelites had received from God over the centuries. And he explains the purpose of them: so that through them the Christ would be born.

This is exactly what Genesis and Malachi are talking about in the verses Paul is about to quote from those books. He says:

• The Word of God has not failed (v. 6).
• Because being truly of Israel/Abraham is not about physical descent (vv. 6-7).
• Being truly Abraham’s offspring is about being children of the promise (vv. 7-8).
• This promise distinguished:
  • the child of Sarah (Isaac) from the child of Hagar (Ishmael) (v. 9); and
  • the nation descended from Jacob (Israel) from that descended from Esau (Edom) (vv. 10-13).
• But the explicit reason Paul gives for all this is “in order that God’s purpose of election might continue,” (v. 11)

For Calvin’s explanation to make sense, Paul—or Genesis, or Malachi—should tell somewhere that “God’s purpose of election” of these patriarchs is to illustrate and teach us about eternal election.

But neither Paul, nor Genesis, nor Malachi ever say this.

Instead:

Genesis explicitly told us that the purpose of Abraham’s election was that “in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.”

Malachi explicitly pointed Judah forward to the “great and awesome day of the LORD” when the Messiah finally arrives.

Paul does not explicitly tell us what “God’s purpose of election” is in 9:6-13. We have to read on in Romans 9-11. But, unsurprisingly, he ends his argument in 11:32 by stating God’s intention that of universal mercy, which fits the trajectory of the Abrahamic promise:

For God has consigned all to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all. (Romans 11:32)

Sadly, Paul tells us that universal salvation is not true. Not all people will be ultimately saved. But he assures us in Romans 9-11 that this is not because God does not want them to be saved or has not chosen them to be saved.

Paul’s argument tidily answers the concern that unbelieving Jews along with believing Gentiles somehow means that God’s Word has failed.

The election of Israel was never election to eternal life—those Israelites who refuse to trust God’s promise do so by their own will. But the election of Israel achieved its purpose: for the Messiah to come and take away the sin of the whole world. This actually happened in Jesus.

The promise to Abraham was never meant to shrink God’s mercy, but to bring Christ into the world for all people.

Come and receive this promise with us:

• In person at Manchester Lutheran Church every Sunday.
• Or online with the Confessional Lutheran Church every Wednesday.