Sunday Morning Meds--Election

“He has done this for no other nation;

they do not know his laws.” Psalm 147:20

William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice leaves a permanent mark on the soul. A woman arrives at Auschwitz with two children in her arms and is directed, forthwith, to send one of them to the gas chambers. One must die. That is Sophie’s awful choice.

Hitler created villains sufficient for the rest of the 20th century and beyond, but among the most hideous was Josef Mengele, chief medical officer at Birkenau, who stood at the railroad station, arm up, choosing which deportees exiting the freight cars would go to the work camp and which would go to the showers. I’ll never forget Sophie holding her children, a smiling Mengele blessing her with the horrific choice.

There’s something horrifying about the final verse of 147, something antithetical to the human spirit, because, hard as it is to say or even imagine, God almighty does discriminate, just as surely as Mengele did. God has his druthers, and he acts on them. “He has done this for no other nation,” the poet says; “they do not know his laws.” He’s taken some and sent others away—and I’m being nice by saying it that way.

If there’s one thing people hate about Calvinism, it’s the p-word—predestination. And it’s not hard to understand why. I remember little of church catechism class when I was a kid, except the discussion about election. The bright little preacher stood up in front us nervously, hemming and hawing, then suddenly sprung a new idea when we weren’t convinced by sheer logic. “Think of it this way,” he said, trying to convince us. “He could have damned us all.” Then a nodding smile, phony as a bad cheerleader.

That argument may well have been a convincing to some, but, even at the time, I didn’t find it particularly appealing.

The dilemmas inherent in a line like this really can’t be avoided. The great I AM is not an equal-opportunity savior. What grants me eternal comfort in the trust that I am loved by my Savior may well make others, not so assured, spit bitter gall. I get that, and it’s not a joy.

But let me climb into the psalmist’s skin, a poet whose heart is so full of joy that he lists everything God has done—everything he can think of and imagine, not simply in his own tent but throughout the vast life of the entire creation. He has been blessed—the very first word of the book of psalms—and no one knows it better than he. God has chosen him and his people; he is—and they are—loved. What he sees around him is that God’s favor, his grace, has not be given to everyone; and that perception serves to amplify his joy, not because others aren’t blessed but because, amazingly, he is.

I say this as a Calvinist, a believer in God’s sovereignty, someone who knows the psalmist’s own rare joy: what the poet says in verse 20 is his perception, a perception with which we are blessed thousands of years later. The only way to talk about election, I think, is as perception, not precept. It’s what I know and what he sees and what prompts us both to sing. Election is the song of the redeemed, of those who come to understand that, for reasons that are as blinding as baffling, they are the totally undeserved recipients of divine love, their very selection an eternal mystery.

Faith is a gift. I can’t know it any other way. God’s favoring me with what little I have of it is eternal comfort, but I have no clue why I’m so blessed.

I can only thank him, which is really what the psalmist is up to here in 147—praise as thanksgiving. Thanks is what we do when we know that, like the psalmist, we are blessed with his love.