The following are excerpts from the work of Shawn Lazar on the nature of “election” in the Bible:
5. God Elects Places
God not only elected individuals to serve Him, He also elected cities. The most obvious example would be the election of Jerusalem:
“When Your people go out to battle against their enemy, wherever You send them, and when they pray to the Lord toward the city which You have chosen and the temple which I have built for Your name” (1 Kgs 8:44, emphasis added; cf. 8:48; 1:13, 32, 36; 14:21; 2 Kgs 21:7; 23:27; 2 Chron 6:6, 34, 38; 12:13; 33:7; Neh 1:9; Ps 132:13; Zech 3:2)
As a sign of Jerusalem’s election, God had the Temple built there, which, by the way, is another example of a place that was elected by God,
“For now I have chosen and sanctified this house, that My name may be there forever; and My eyes and My heart will be there perpetually” (2 Chron 7:16, emphasis added; cf. 33:7)
Jerusalem was elect, the Temple was elect, and so was Mt Zion, the hill upon the Temple was built:
For the Lord has chosen Zion; He has desired it for His dwelling place (Ps 132:13, emphasis added; cf. 78:68).
Three places chosen by God. None were chosen for eternal life, but to serve His purposes.
And they were not the only places God elected. Many other places were chosen to serve His purposes (e.g., Deut 12:5, 11, 14, 18, 21, 26; 14:23, 25; 15:20; 16:2, 7, 11, 15, 16; 17:8, 10; 18:6; 26:2; 31:11. Cf. also Josh 9:27; 2 Chron 7:12)
Clearly these are vocational elections. And as we saw with other vocational elections, they were conditional.
For example, if the people of Jerusalem or the Temple didn’t serve God’s purposes, they would suffer the consequences.
Due to Israel’s apostasy, the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC (Jeremiah 52, Lam 1:8-9), and the Romans destroyed it in AD 70 (see the Lord’s warning in Luke 13:2-5, 34-35). Likewise, the Temple was sacked and destroyed twice times.
Nevertheless, both Jerusalem and the Temple will serve again once the Messiah comes back to restore the kingdom to Israel (Acts 1:6). (Shawn Lazar, Chosen to Serve: Why Divine Election is to Service, not to Eternal Life [Denton, Tex.: Grace Evangelical Society, 2017], 38-40)
C. Aaron’s Election Was Corporate
Aaron was chosen as an individual, but his election was also implicitly corporate. In choosing Aaron to be high priest, God was also choosing Aaron’s descendants to serve as priests after him.
In fact, Aaron’s election was doubly corporate.
On the one hand, through Aaron, God chose his immediate descendants to be the Aaronites, who were the actual priests. On the other hand, God also chose Aaron’s tribe (Levi) to act as helpers in the Aaronite priests. The Levites attended to the Aaronites’ needs as well as to the needs of the sanctuary but were not allowed to handle the sanctuary vessels or approach the altar (Num 18:2-4; cf., Deut 18:5-8; 21:5; 1 Chron 15:2).
In both cases, the Aaronites and Levites were not chosen for eternal life, but for service.
Their election was vocational.
D. Membership in the Priesthood was Conditional
Earlier, we saw that election is often conditional. The same is true of the priesthood. Not every individual Aaronite or Levite could quality. Many descendants of Aaron were excluded outright (such as the women, or deformed men, Lev 21:18).
But even those who qualified to serve could have their vocations cut short by an early death if they were disobedient. In fact, that is what happened to Aaron’s own sons:
Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took their respective firepans, and after putting fire in them, placed incense on it and offered strange fire before the Lord, which He had not commanded them. And fire came out from the presence of the Lord and consumed them, and they did before the Lord (Lev 10:1-2).
Apparently, this was a recurring problem.
Priests would disobey God, fail in their vocation, and God would kill them. The sons of Eli are another example. God killed Hophni and Phinehas because they were disobedient (1 Sam 2:30, 33-34).
The lesson is that when God gives someone a vocation, He holds them accountable to it, and the results of disobedience can be grim.
There can be no mistaking the fact that the priestly vocation was thoroughly vocational and conditional. It was not an election to eternal life. It was an election to service. (Ibid., 48-50)
4. The Contrast Between Acts 13:46 and 48
It is surely significant that Acts 13:46 and 13:48 are the only two verses in the whole of Acts that uses the expression everlasting life. The fact that Luke places them so close together in the same chapter indicates they are antithetically parallel, meaning to contrast with one another.
Compare the two verses:
“Since you repudiate it and judge yourselves unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles” (Acts 13:46, NASB, emphasis added).
The reflexive translation of v. 48 complements the self-condemnation of v. 46:
As many as were predisposed to eternal life believed (Acts 13:48, emphasis added).
The Jews were closed to the truth, so they proved themselves unworthy of eternal life, while the Gentiles were hungry for the truth, predisposed to it, so they believed the apostles’ preaching.
Henry Alford agreed with this line of thought. He suggested that understanding tetagmenoi as an unconditional decree is forced, and that it would be better translated as were disposed, rather than were appointed:
48. [tetagmenoi] The meaning of this word must be determined by the context. The Jews had judged themselves unworthy of eternal life [v. 46]; the Gentiles, as many as were disposed to eternal life [v. 48], believed. By whom so disposed is not here declared; not need the word be in this place further particularized. We know that it is God who worketh in us the will to believe and that the preparation of the heart is of Him; but to find in this text preordination to life asserted is to force both the word and the context to a meaning which they do not contain. (Henry Alford, The Greek Testament, Vol. II: The Acts of the Apostles, The Epistles to the Romans and Corinthians, fifth edition [Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, and Co., 1865], 153, emphasis his).
Similarly, A.T. Robertson agreed this verse speaks to the different dispositions of the Jews and the Gentiles:
The word “ordain” is not the best translation here. “Appointed,” as Hackett shows, is better. The Jews here had voluntarily rejected the word of God. On the otherwise were those Gentiles who gladly accepted what the Jews had rejected, not all the Gentiles. Why these Gentiles were ranged themselves on God’s side as opposed to the Jews Luke does not tell us. This verse does not solve the vexed problem of divine sovereignty and human free agency. There is no evidence that Luke had in mind an absolutum decretum of personal salvation. (A.T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament).
And finally, J. Vernon Bartlet said that Acts 13:48 conveyed the idea
“of preparedness of heart, without any thought as to how this came about . . . The best rendering then would be, ‘were (found) disposed to eternal life,’ which preserves the exact shade of the verb (‘to set in order, arrange, dispose’) and has just that degree of ambiguity which belongs to the original.” (J. Vernon Bartlett, The New Century Bible: The Acts, quoted in Shank, Elect, 187). (Ibid., 155-58)
