ELECT LADY.— See John, Epistles of.
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ELECTIO^^
ELECTIOX
ELECTION. — 1. Definition. — Election, in the teaching of the apostles, is the method by which God gives effect to His eternal purpose to redeem and save mankind ; so that the elect are those who are marked out in God's purpose of grace from eternity as heirs of salvation.
2. Election in the OT.— The doctrine of a Divine election lies at the very heart of revelation and redemption. Abraham was chosen that in him all the families of the earth should be blessed (Gn 12^). It was through the chosen people, the seed of Abraham, that God was pleased to make the clearest and fullest revelation of Himself to man and to prepare the way in the fullness of the time for the world's redemption. Through their patri- archs and their Divinely guided history, through the laws and institutions of the Mosaic economy, through tabernacle and temple, through prophets and psalmists, through their sacred Scriptures, and at length through the Incarnate Word, born of the chosen people, the world has received the knowledge of the being and spirituality of God, of the love and mercy and grace of our Father in heaven. To Israel their great legislator said : ' Thou art an holy jjeople unto the Lord thy God : the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all peoples that are upon the face of the earth. The Lord did not set his love upon j^ou, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people ; for ye were the fewest of all peoples : but because the Lord loveth you ' (Dt 7"")- Israel was chosen to spread abroad the Di\'ine glory, and God desig- nates them by His prophet ' My chosen, the people which I formed for myself, that they might set forth my praise' (Is 43-"- -0. They were taught, also, to realize how great were their privileges : ' Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord ; the people whom he hath chosen for his own inherit- ance ' (Ps 331- ; cf. 135^). Their very position on the face of the earth, placed in the midst of the nations, was chosen with a view to their discipline and sanctiiication, for thus the Maccabtean annal- ist puts it : ' Howbeit the Lord did not choose the nation for the place's sake, but the place for the nation's sake' (2 Mac 5^^). And the destiny of the elect people was to culminate in the Elect Ser- vant of the Lord : ' Behold my servant whom I up- hold ; my chosen (Tn?, 6 €k\€kt6s /jlov) in whom my soul delighteth : I have put my spirit upon him ; he shall bring forth judgement to the Gentiles' (Is 42^ RV ; ' the Elect one ' appears as a INIessianic designation in the Book of Enoch, xl. 5, xlv. 3, 4, 5, xlix. 2, 4, and is found applied to Christ in Lk 9^ 23^'). This conception of Israel as the people of God's election colours the whole of the teaching of the apostles and forms the subject of St. Paul's gi-eat discussion in the chapters where he deals with the problem of their rejection (Ro 9-11). That the Jewish people had come to attribute to it an exaggerated and erroneous value is clear not only from St. Paul's argument but also from the Rabbinical literature of the time (see Sanday- Headlam, Roman^, p. 248 tf.).
3. Biblical use of the word.— In biblical Greek the word iKkenrol {iKKiyeadai, eKXoyn']) is of frequent occurrence. In the OT we find ^/cXe/cros used in the sense of picked men (Jg 20^*, 1 S 24^) ; of indi- viduals chosen by God for special service (Moses, Ps 10623 [LXX 105] ; David, Ps 89-«- 21 [LXX 88]) ; of the nation Israel (Ps 106" [LXX 105], Is 45* 659- 1*) ; of the Servant of the Lord (Is 42i ; cf. 52^). In the NT we find the verb used, always in the middle voice, of our Lord's choice of the Twelve from the company of tlie disciples (Lk 6'^ Jn 6™ 13^8 IS''-*, Ac 1'-') ; of the choice of an apostlu in the place of Judas (Ac 1^^) ; of Stephen and his col- leagues (Ac 6=) ; of God's choice of the patriarchs
(Ac 13''') ; and of the choice of delegates to carry the decisions of the Ajjostolic CouncU to the Gen- tile churches (Ac 15~- ^). It is used of God's choice of the foolish things of the world to put to shame them that are wise, and the weak things to put to shame the things which are strong (1 Co 1^) ; and of His choice of the poor to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom promised to them that love Him ( Ja 2=).
In the Gospels iKXeicrol and kKtjtoI are distin- guished: kXtjtoL, as Lightfoot puts it (Colossians^, 1879, p. 220), 'being those summoned to the privi- leges of the Gospel, and ^/cXe^TOi those appointed to final salvation (Mt 242^- ^*- '^\ Mk 13^- 2-- ^\ Lk 18''). But in St. Paul no such distinction can be traced. With him the two terms seem to be co-extensive, as two aspects of the same process, kXtjtoL having special reference to the goal, and iKXeicroi to the starting-point. The same persons are "called" to Christ and "chosen out" from the world.' It is to be noticed in the Epistles that while 6 KaXQv is used of God or Christ in the present tense (1 Th 2^- 5-*, Gal 5®), 6 iKXey6jj.€vos is never used, nor the present tense of any part, the aorist being em- ployed to describe what depended upon God's eternal purpose (Eph 1", 2 Th 2^3). In St. Peter's Epistles KXrjTds is not found, nor iKXiyecrOai, but the verbal adjective iKXeKTos is found four times, once of 'elect' people (V), once of Christians as an ' elect race ' (2^), and twice, following the OT, of Christ as the Living Stone, choice and ' chosen ' to be the corner-stone (2''- ^). iKXoyf) is found of the Divine act (Ac 2^^ Ro 9" IP- ^, 1 Th l^ 2 P l^\ and once as the abstract for the concrete iKXeicrol (Ro IV).