Election

This passage is part of the Apostle John’s introduction to the identity and mission of Jesus, and the reality that even as Jesus came directly to His own people - the nation of Israel - with powerful signs, profound teaching, and tremendous grace, He was rejected by them. Yet there were those, even amongst the Jewish people, who trusted in Jesus, and they were given the ultimate privilege of being God’s children. This would have been a somewhat shocking statement for some of John’s readers; John is stating that belonging to God is not the result of being a certain ethnicity or doing good things, but is instead the result of God causing them to become His children. Election, then, is personal and relational - Jesus doesn’t just have disciples, He has brothers and sisters. As Wayne Grudem writes, “[Election is] an act of God before creation in which he chooses some people to be saved, not on account of any foreseen merit in them, but only because of his sovereign good pleasure.”