You say, ‘I love the Saviour, because he died on Calvary for me. Yes, I also love the Father, but I don't understand him. He is God, and Christ too is God, and they are one mysteriously. I can identify with Christ, but Almighty God – I respect him and reverence him as the Father, but he never took a body, and so I can't relate to him.’ This is sometimes how Christians think. ‘Listen,’ says Peter, ‘you must love and feel indebtedness to the Father. It will powerfully help you and lift you up towards the entire Godhead. It was through the foreknowledge of the Father that you were chosen and obtained salvation. The Father is not so mysterious.’ Thank the Father for his overruling determination to save you.
‘Through sanctification of the Spirit’. The word sanctification means the setting apart of the Spirit. When the Spirit began to work in your heart to bring you under conviction of sin, to illuminate your mind and show you Christ and the way of salvation, he was setting you apart for a life of holiness. Is that how we live? I was saved by the Holy Spirit of God, but I do worldly things, and I want worldly things, and I follow worldly things? I was set apart for God. I must remain set apart for God, and distinctive.
‘Unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Christ.’ When you come to Christ and you trust in his shed blood on Calvary and you repent of your sin, and you believe your sins are washed away, that doesn't mean you can live as you like. For some people it does seem to mean that. There are some who say, ‘I'm a Christian’, and yet holiness doesn't seem to matter to them. Clearly, they couldn't possibly have been really saved, because when you are really saved and forgiven by Christ, there is put within you a new nature and a new heart, and you begin to hate your sin, and you strive daily for holiness of life. What is the reference to sprinkling? When people were sanctified under the law of Moses, then sacrificial blood was sprinkled ceremonially upon them. It symbolised that God would forgive and God would cleanse sin, but it symbolised more. ‘You are a people’, it said, ‘who are marked by God. Look, the blood is sprinkled upon you.’ ‘I have got spots of blood on my garments. I was near the act of sprinkling. When I underwent a ceremony of sanctification, the priest sprinkled upon me. I’m marked. I'm not just cleansed from sin in this ceremony; I go away with the marks on me.’ That is what Peter means. You are sprinkled with the blood of Christ: this is an ongoing influence. I was cleansed by his blood, and that blood is always on me. I must live to be worthy of it all the way to glory and for ever. The blood of Christ shed for me is a permanent influence and mark and cleansing.
‘Elect’ – chosen by God the Father. How were be chosen? ‘According to the foreknowledge of God the Father.’ Immediately you come to the word ‘foreknowledge’ there are many friends who want to explain away election. They say, ‘God elected us when he foresaw that we would freely and voluntarily turn to him. God foresaw that there would be something wise in us, something to be commended in us, in that we decided to choose him, and turn to him. So after all, God's election isn't his election. He only chose in response to our choice.’ Well, that is to make nonsense of the passage, because God's choosing comes first. Elect, chosen: that is an act of God. He did it, not because we did it first. He loved us first and chose us. What is meant by ‘foreknowledge’? As it is used here by Peter it doesn't simply mean forecasting, foreseeing; it means foredetermining. God foreknew us in the sense that he joined himself to us. He knew us and created his possession of us before the foundation of the world. In Acts 2:23, in speaking of the death of Christ, Peter uses the same word, and says that Christ was taken by human hands and crucified and slain, according to the predeterminate will and foreknowledge of God. It is used to describe God's advance action. If you choose to interpret foreknowledge as God simply foreseeing our act, then you do away with the word chosen, and the sentence no longer makes any sense.
The problem we have with God choosing and electing people for himself is that our fallen human heart and our idea of fairness says, Is it fair? What about the people who are not elected? Is it fair for God to choose some and not others? The answer to that is that everything that God does his fair. We cannot challenge God. We could put is like this: God's mercy is for everyone, and nobody will have it. Everyone rejects him; everyone spurns him, including those who are ultimately saved. You could say that what is fair is that nobody should be saved. What is beyond fairness and infinitely more than fair is that in spite of that God should determine to overrule in the case of millions of people, and in spite of their rejection show them his mercy. If we think of our own experience and ask, ‘Did I make an intelligent, sensible decision, to choose God?’, we have to say, ‘No, I didn't. It was all of grace; God broke through my stubborn, sinful, rebellious, darkened heart. It was only because he brought me to that state where I saw my sin, and fell on my knees and pleaded for help and trusted in Christ. I would never have done it if he had not moved me.
Calvin asks how anyone could know that they were ‘elect’, since this election was hidden in the mind of God from all eternity so that it could not be discovered by any amount of investigation. How did what was hidden in God from all eternity become known to men in time? Only because God revealed it. His calling and his work in the heart in conversion is a revelation of his eternal secret choice, because it marks a change that only he could only bring about and is reserved for those he has loved from eternity.