Chosen
It may not happen so much anymore, but there was a time when kids weren’t afraid of competition. It was before children’s teams were about more than participation. Facing disappointment was learned early. It might start with choosing the teams. A captain for each team was selected first and they would take turns selecting players. It was a process that could be humiliating for the last pick, or worse, the extra person nobody drafted. Entertainer Garrison Keillor recalls the childhood pain of being chosen last for the baseball teams.
The captains are down to their last grudging choices: a slow kid for catcher, someone to stick out in right field where nobody hits it. They choose the last ones two at a time—“you and you”—because it makes no difference. And the remaining kids—the scrubs, the excess—they deal for us as handicaps. “If I take him, then you gotta take him,” they say.
Sometimes I go as high as sixth, usually lower. But just once I'd like Darrel to pick me first and say, “Him! I want him! The skinny kid with the glasses and the black shoes. You, c’mon!” But I've never been chosen with much enthusiasm.
There was a reason the process of choosing teams was a bit humiliating for some. Their skills, or physical and athletic attributes, were being evaluated, graded and recognized accordingly right there in front of all onlookers. Not unlike what happens in life, but completely unlike what happens in God’s kingdom.
Jesus had a team during His earthly ministry, His inner circle, the twelve disciples. One would assume that God-in-the-flesh would choose the smartest, wisest, most articulate and educated individuals He could find. We know He didn’t. Far from it. At times we may think the opposite. There’s good evidence of that:
“…but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God” (1 Corinthians 1:27–29).
So what was His criteria? We don’t know. Did He have any? We don’t know. What we do know is that He always knows what He is doing. That’s what sovereignty is all about. He chooses whom He chooses because He chooses to choose them. It’s a mystery.
Just to deepen the mystery is the fact that we still have the choice to choose Him. We are the chosen who are free to choose. It seems contradictory, but it’s not. Just like He’s God, but you’re not. There’s no contradiction, just contrasting perspectives. There’s the divine perspective and our perspective. He sees it all and we see as “in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). He is at once the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end. He sees the entire parade while we may be stuck between two floats unable to see what’s ahead and forgetting what lies behind.
Author and theologian Norman Geisler, in his book Chosen But Free, explains God’s choosing of us this way: “Whatever God knows, He determines. And whatever He determines, He knows” (p. 53). He not only knows in advance what we cannot know, including our choices, but He superintends circumstances in ways we will never fathom.
One thing we clearly know about being chosen. He chose us to be “…His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Being chosen of God, focus on a life characterized by that.
“…who are chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, by the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to obey Jesus Christ and be sprinkled with His blood: May grace and peace be yours in the fullest measure.”
─1 Peter 1:1b-2