Why did God choose Israel as His elect nation? I found a good answer for this in the book "God and the Nations" by Henry M. Morris.
"The Lord did not set His love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the Lord loved you, and because He would keep the oath which He had sworn unto your fathers..." (Deut. 7:7-8).
And just why did the Lord love Israel like this and do all this? It was not because of anything at all about the Israelites themselves, but "...because He loved thy fathers, therefore He chose their seed after them, and brought thee out in His sight with His mighty power out of Egypt" (Deut. 4:37).
Because of the great faith and character of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, God made an unconditional promise to them and their descendants - that was why He chose Israel!
But why did He need to choose a special nation at all? In addition to the obvious reason that all the existing nations had become apostate at Babel, there were two other main reasons why He had to choose and prepare a special nation.
First of all, He had promised from the very beginning that the "seed of a woman" would eventually come to redeem the lost world from sin and death (Gen. 3:15). That seed would have to be a man, but not one born in a sin-nature like all other men, and that meant that God Himself would have to become a man. He would have to be virgin born in some human family, and therefore in some human nation. Consequently, a nation would have to be prepared to receive Him as a babe and nurture Him to adulthood.
Secondly, all nations would need to know about His coming and His provision for man's redemption. There would have to be a written revelation, or series of revelations, both before His coming to prepare the nation for it, and after His coming, to acquaint its people with its accomplishment and what is to follow.
Those revelations would have to be given in human language, which means the language of some particular human nation, though they could, and should, then be translated into the languages of other nations. Initially, of course, some nation must be designated to receive these revelations, and that would obviously be the same elect nation.
So there would have to be a nation selected to receive both God's Word and God's Son. These were surely two main reasons why God had to choose a nation, and the main reason why Israel was chosen was because of the faith of its fathers...
What a tragedy it was - for Israel, that is - for the Jews to reject the main purpose of the Mosaic Law in which they took such great pride (that purpose being to serve as - "our schoolmaster to bring us into Christ, that we might be justified by faith" (Gal. 3:24) when they rejected Christ (that is, their promised Messiah) when He finally came. For Christ was not just the promised "seed of the woman," but the woman in whose womb that holy seed had been sown by God Himself was herself of "the seed of Abraham" and "the seed of David" (Heb. 2:16; Rom. 1:3).
Furthermore, God had used Israelites exclusively as the prophets who would receive and record His series of revelations. Not only Moses, David, Isaiah, and all the authors of the Old Testament Scriptures, but also the writers of the New Testament (with some uncertainty about Luke) were Jews.
And yet most of the Jews of Jesus' day, as well as those of every generation since, have continued to reject Him, both as their promised Messiah and also as God's promised Redeemer. They have served their purpose in bringing both the Scriptures and the Savior into the world through their nation, so a number of professedly Christian denominations and organizations believe that God has finished with them, now that they have repudiated Christ.
However, God's original promise to Abraham was unconditional, "I say then, Hath God cast away His people? God forbid" (Rom. 11:1). As a matter of fact, Israel was temporarily set aside as a nation, so that God could deal with the Gentiles for a period of time. "For... blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is My covenant until then, when I shall take away their sins" (Rom. 11:25-27)."
By George Konig
June 11, 2006
www.georgekonig.org
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