“As He chose us in Him before the world’s foundation,
That we should be holy and unblemished before Him:
When in love He foreordained us
To filial adoption through Jesus Christ for Himself,
According to the good pleasure of His will,—
To the praise of the glory of His grace” (vv. 4–6a).
Here is St Paul’s first chapter of Genesis. In the beginning was the election of grace. There is nothing unprepared, nothing unforeseen in God’s dealings with mankind. His wisdom and knowledge are as deep as His grace is wide (Rom. xi. 33). Speaking of his own vocation, the apostle said: “It pleased God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb, to reveal His Son in me” (Gal. i. 15, 16). He does but generalize this conception and carry it two steps further back—from the origin of the individual to the origin of the race, and from the beginning of the race to the beginning of the world—when he asserts that the community of redeemed men was chosen in Christ before the world’s foundation.
“The world” is a work of time, the slow structure of innumerable yet finite ages. Science affirms on its own grounds that the visible universe had a beginning, as it has its changes and its certain end. Its structural plan, its unity of aim and movement, show it to be the creation of a vast Intelligence. Harmony and law, all that makes science possible is the product of thought. Reason extracts from nature what Reason has first put there. The longer, the more intricate and grand the process, the farther science pushes back the beginning in our thoughts, the more sublime and certain the primitive truth becomes: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
The world is a system; it has a method and a plan, therefore a foundation. But before the foundation, there was the Founder. And man was in His thoughts, and the redeemed Church of Christ. While yet the world was not and the immensity of space stretched lampless and unpeopled, we were in the mind of God; His thought rested with complacency upon His human sons, whose “name was written in the book of life from the foundation of the world.” This amazing statement is only the logical consequence of St Paul’s experience of Divine grace, joined to his conviction of the infinite wisdom and eternal being of God.
When he says that God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world”—or before founding the world—this is not a mere mark of time. It intimates that in laying His plans for the world the Creator had the purpose of redeeming grace in view. The kingdom which the “blessed children” of the Father of Christ “inherit,” is the kingdom “prepared for them from the foundation of the world” (Matt. xxv. 34). Salvation lies as deep as creation. The provision for it is eternal. For the universe of being was conceived, fashioned, and built up “in Christ.” The argument of Colossians i. 13–22 lies behind these words. The Son of God’s love, in whom and for whom the worlds were made, always was potentially the Redeemer of men, as He was the image of God (Col. i. 14, 15). He looked forward to this mission from eternity, and was in spirit “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. xiii. 8). Creation and redemption, Nature and the Church, are parts of one system; and in the reconciliation of the cross all orders of being are concerned, “whether the things upon the earth or the things in the heavens.”
Evil existed before man appeared on the earth to be tempted and to fall. Through the geological record we hear the voice of creation groaning for long æons in its pain.
“Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,”
grim prophets of man’s brutal and murderous passions, bear witness to a war in nature that goes back far towards the foundation of the world. And this rent and discord in the frame of things it was His part to reconcile “in whom and for whom all things were created.” This universal deliverance, it seems, is dependent upon ours. “The creation itself lifts up its head, and is looking out for the revelation of the sons of God” (Rom. viii. 19). In founding the world, foreseeing its bondage to corruption, God prepared through His elect sons in Christ a deliverance the glory of which will make its sufferings to seem but a light thing. “In thee,” said God to Abraham, “shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed”: so in the final “adoption,—to wit, the redemption of our body” (Rom. viii. 23), all creatures shall exult; and our mother earth, still travailing in pain with us, will remember her anguish no more.
The Divine election of men in Christ is further defined in the words of verse 5: “Having in love predestined us,” and “according to the good pleasure of His will.” Election is selection; it is the antecedent in the mind of God in Christ of the preference which Christ showed when He said to His disciples, “I have chosen you out of the world.” It is, moreover, a fore-ordination in love: an expression which indicates on the one hand the disposition in God that prompted and sustains His choice, and on the other the determination of the almighty Will whereby the all-wise Choice is put into operation and takes effect. In this pre-ordaining control of human history God “determined the fore-appointed seasons and the bounds of human habitation” (Acts xvii. 26). The Divine prescience—that “depth of the wisdom and knowledge of God”—as well as His absolute righteousness, forbids the treasonable thought of anything arbitrary or unfair cleaving to this pre-determination—anything that should override our free-will and make our responsibility an illusion. “Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate” (Rom. viii. 29). He foresees everything, and allows for everything.
The consistence of foreknowledge with free-will is an enigma which the apostle did not attempt to solve. His reply to all questions touching the justice of God’s administration in the elections of grace—questions painfully felt and keenly agitated then as they are now, and that pressed upon himself in the case of his Jewish kindred with a cruel force (Rom. ix. 3)—his answer to his own heart, and to us, lies in the last words of verse 5: “according to the good pleasure of His will.” It is what Jesus said concerning the strange preferences of Divine grace: “Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight.” What pleases Him can only be wise and right. What pleases Him, must content us. Impatience is unbelief. Let us wait to see the end of the Lord. In numberless instances—such as that of the choice between Jacob and Esau, and that of Paul and the believing remnant of Israel as against their nation—God’s ways have justified themselves to after times; so they will universally. Our little spark of intelligence glances upon one spot in a boundless ocean, on the surface of immeasurable depths.