So That None

             For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.” (Genesis 22:18)

“This is what the Lord says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armor, to open doors before him so that gates will not be shut:” (Isaiah 45:1)

Some people complain that a certain political candidate is far to great a reprobate to possibly be God’s choice for president. The first issue is that they ignore the fact that the candidate they love is seen by others as being as big a reprobate (or bigger!) as the candidate they hate. They insist that unless the candidate is as wonderful a person as they think their candidate is, no one with an IQ of 1 would vote for him. And, as often as not, they treat anyone who disagrees with them as having an IQ no higher than 1.

Today’s first verse is all about how none of us is what we should be. We need to be saved. And our need to be saved is never met by our own power. It is a gift of grace. This goes against our nature. We don’t want to admit that – even now – we are reprobates. We may want to bring the blessing that the second verse mentions, but it’s the blessing we want, of the people we want to bless, in the way that we want to bless them. I’ll come back to this.

The third verse above answers the whole issue of “reprobate.” God can and does use reprobates, and the anti-Christian to fulfill His purposes. If the “wrong” person wins the election, God’s still in control, and maybe one of the reasons that the person was elected was to get you (or me) off our duffs and doing what we’re supposed to be doing. I’ve watched elections for some years, and the party of the candidate that wins tends to sit back and relax because their candidate is in power, so he/she will do whatever needs to be done. The party of the losing candidate gets busy. But God called Cyrus and gave him power even though Cyrus was a pagan. He gave Nebuchadnezzar and Darius power even though they were reprobates. Except for Himself, God works with no one who isn’t a reprobate. This means the notion that we (or a political candidate) might not be God’s choice for a particular task because we don’t like their behavior is not necessarily true. We can’t use our past behavior (or theirs) as an excuse against God’s using us or them. The whole point is that there is no room for boasting, because God is the One who does it all.