The Divine choices are wise selections.
Abraham and Jacob are God's chosen ones as founders, and first fathers, of the Israelite race. By this we are to understand that they were selected, in the Divine wisdom, as having just the qualities which, developed in a race, would make a people precisely fitted to carry out ibis purposes. We are not to understand that, in a way of accident, or in a way of mere sovereignty, these first fathers were picked out. God's choices are never arbitrary; they are always judicious selections. "The race is described as God's servant and his elect, or, combining the two characters, his chosen servant, chosen to be his servant." This special relation to Jehovah is the thing which distinguishes the people of Israel from the heathen nations around them. "What advantage then hath the Jew?… Much every way' chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God" (Romans 3:1, Romans 3:2). The truth that the Divine choices are selections, on the ground of recognized fitness, may gain illustration from three distinct spheres.
I. FROM THE SPHERE OF THE SACRED SCRIPTURES, These cover long spaces of the earth's history, and the most marked feature of them is the way in which individuals are set forth prominently; we are shown the precise work they did, and then it is impressed on us that these are the Lord's chosen ones. In the light of that view we read again their story, appraise their qualities and gifts, set their endowments alongside their life-mission; and then we can see clearly that they were selected because they were precisely fitted for their particular work. If we think that subtle laws of heredity have gone to the making and endowing of men, we may also think of God as watching the fitnesses of men, and taking them out for the doing of certain parts of his work. Illustration may be taken from Moses, who was characteristically patriotic and disinterested; or David, whose poetical genius sanctified song for Divine worship; or Paul, whose natural impetuosity adapted him for his service as the first Christian missionary.
II. FROM THE SPHERE OF COMMON LIFE. For Scripture is but. the illustration "in the small" of what God is ever doing "in the large." The mistake is so often made of thinking that God exhausted himself, or limited himself, to the spheres dealt with in Scripture. The true view is that God illustrated himself there. Cyrus is the man in common life of whom God says, "I girded thee, though thou hast not known me." We see God's selections in the fitting of men to places, men of genius and common men, the Tennysons and ourselves.
III. FROM THE SPHERE OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Here too there are evidently elect men and women; but we need to see that God has no "pets," only "servants"—men whose fitnesses are recognized, and who are consequently selected for office to praise, to preach, to pray, or variously to minister to the Church's needs.—R.T.