Does God choose who gets saved?

from the old testament

• God chose the nation of Israel out of all the nations on Earth to be His. Moses reminded them, “You are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers ….” (Deuteronomy 7:6–8).
• God set His love on Israel before the nation even existed because of His promises to Abraham (Genesis 12:1–3; 15:5–6; 17:7–8). He did that to display His greatness to the world (Ezekiel 36:22–23).
• When Moses asked God to reveal Himself, God said, “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion” (Exodus 33:19b). In other words, God declares that He does whatever He pleases (Psalm 115:3; Isaiah 46:9–10).
• People are born rebellious (Psalm 51:5) and unwilling to turn to God (Psalm 14:1–3). Israel, as a nation, repeatedly rebeled, even with God as her God.
• God's sovereignty is demonstrated in His interactions with Israel. As He prepared to punish the nation with exile, He explained His salvation plan: “For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands, and bring you into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances” (Ezekiel 36:24–27). Salvation required changing their hearts and giving them His Spirit so they could obey rightly.

from the new testament

• Just as God chose Israel to be His people, He chooses individuals to be His. This choice happened before creation. Paul said, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ … He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will” (Ephesians 1:3a, 4–5).
• God’s salvation choice was done “in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls” (Romans 9:11b). Paul anticipates charges that God is unjust in election: “By no means! For he says to Moses, ‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’ So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy” (Romans 9:14c–16).
• Paul explains that God choses people to save because all human beings are sinful and do not choose Him. Quoting various Old Testament passages, He wrote, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:10–12).
• Salvation requires God to step in and change hearts so people will believe. Only those whom God does change will be saved. For example, when salvation was presented to a group of Gentiles, Acts 13:48 says, “as many as were appointed to eternal life believed.” Jesus said that no one will come to Him unless the Father draws them (John 6:44). However, He also noted that everything one the Father gives will be saved (John 6:37) and that He will lose none of them (John 6:39–40, 10:28–29).
• Some object to the doctrine of election; they wonder why people are held responsible for our sin if it’s God who chooses. Paul warned against questioning God’s sovereignty, and asserted God's right to do with His creation as He sees fit: “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?” (Romans 9:20–21).
• No one is saved unless God chooses him or her, but that choice does not negate our responsibility. This is why Paul could say that “now [God] commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed” (Acts 17:30–31a). The mystery we are left with is that everyone is commanded to repent, yet only those whom God has chosen can do so.

implications for today

Picture a football field. One endzone is God’s sovereignty; the other is humans’ responsibility. As long as we stay between those two end zones, we hold the tension between God’s sovereignty and our responsibility. But if we go past the “God is sovereign” end zone by denying human responsibility, we are in serious theological danger and need to return to the field. On the other hand, if we go past the “human responsibility” endzone by denying God’s sovereignty, we are also in serious danger and need to return to the field. As best we can, we need to stand at the center of the field, holding both truths at the same time.

Are people saved because God chooses them or because they repent? The answer is “yes”—it's both. Scripture teaches that 1) no one is saved whom God does not personally choose and call, and 2) we must repent and believe.

Paul dealt with this tension in Romans 9, asking how God can hold us at fault when He’s the One who chooses us (Romans 9:19). His answer, in a nutshell, is that God, as our Creator, said so! As our sovereign, He has the right to make the rules. As His children, we trust and obey Him.

We must live with the tension and trust in our loving, merciful, perfectly just God.