Horton on Election

Horton answers the charge that Election is unfair. How can God tell people, “Sorry, folks, but you’re just no on the list'”?

I believe that the accusation of God’s injustice in choosing one person and no another is rooted in the fact that we have really lost our doctrine of grace. We no longer really believe that nobody deserves salvation. We no longer really believe that God could send us all to hell without giving us time to think about it, and that this would be perfectly just. If we did believe that people were saved in spite of the fact that they really do deserve the very opposite, election would appear to us to be a very logical as well as biblical conclusion …

Election does not exclude anybody from the kingdom of God who wants in. Rather, it includes in God’s kingdom those whose direction is away from the kingdom of God and those who would otherwise remain forever in the kingdom of sin and death. …

None of have the faintest idea of what life would be like if God gave us what we deserve. For example, we don’t even deserve the air we breathe, having declared our independence from the God who supplies it everyday.

—Michael Horton, Putting Amazing Back into Grace, pp. 78-79.