[This post is an elaboration on a point in my sermon “The Consolations of God in the Gospel” from Acts 13:13–52. You can also see the distillation of that sermon in this post].
Acts 13:17
The God of this people Israel chose our fathers…
God chose you. Why? Paul says ultimately God chose you “according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved” (Ephesians 1:5–6). God’s purpose is his glory. But there is a purpose within this purpose here. God’s glory, namely his glorious grace, blesses you. His glory is your good. Deuteronomy 7:6–8 captures this purpose of your blessing,
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, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt (Deuteronomy 7:6–8).
There are layers here. Let’s plumb the depths to arrive at the reason. God chose you for a purpose. What purpose? “To be a people for his treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7:6). God chose you so he could treasure you. That is the purpose. But why did God want to treasure you? Let’s continue.
Before we arrive at the reason, we actually discover what the reason was not: “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” (Deuteronomy 7:7). So what wasn’t the reason? You. You were not the reason God chose you. There was nothing loveable, “treasurable,” or “chooseable” about you. Well, that doesn’t sound like much of a consolation does it? Oh but it is.
You see, we’ve finally arrived at the reason. God chose you to be his treasure, the Lord set his love on you and chose you “because the Lord loves you” (Deuteronomy 7:8). God chose you because he loves you! You see in spite of who you are, in spite of what you’ve done, in spite of your unloveliness, in spite of your sin enslaved heart, God loved you. Unbelief often tempts us to think that our unworthiness, our weakness, and our need drives God away from us. But the gospel reality is this: because of your need and helplessness God’s love moved toward you. And in that love, he delighted to deliver you (Deuteronomy 7:8). In that love, God delighted to choose you by setting all of his love and affection on you and choosing you to be his own treasured child. The love of God to choose you when you were not worthy to be chosen, then, proves to be an unshakable, totally secure love. This is not a temporary love that hinges on your performance. This is an eternal love. God saw you, loved you, and chose you from the halls of eternity before creation
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:3–6).
If there was nothing you could have done to earn God’s love, then there is nothing you can do to escape it. Your value to God did not originate in you and is not fixed in your fickle self. Your value to God originated in him, and it is fixed in his eternally unchanging nature and in and through the cross of his infinitely valuable Son, Jesus Christ. And there is nothing in heaven or on earth that can change that. God set his love on you and chose you because he loved you. In that he is glorified. Praise his glorious grace!
God chose you. This is a gospel consolation for you.
