The apostle Paul taught the Thessalonians their only hope to survive the end times perils was God's electing love: "But we ought always to thanks God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved..." 2Thessalonians 2:13.
How do you teach the concept of God's sovereign grace in election to a church steeped for a 130 years in pietistic Arminianism (a theological tradition that has either denied, ignored, or redefined election into meaninglessness)? Here's how I went about it.
We first noticed it was about God's love - they were "loved by the Lord..." So Paul's point is essentially "If God loves you, you'll not refuse the truth; you'll not be deceived, not be hardened, you'll not believe the lie pandered by Antichrist; if God loves you, you'll not be condemned to perish; God's love will sustain you and keep you through the flood of evil in the last days..."
Now to this my people invariably object: "But I thought God loved everybody... You know, 'God so loved the world...' and all that?"
To which I answered that we need to come to grips with the fact that Scripture can only make sense if we recognize a difference in God's love - just as our own lives can only make sense because there are differences in our love.
For instance, we may say: "I love my dog" and "I love my kids". But certainly we don't love each with the same type of love. Or we may say, "I love kids" and "I love my own kids." This too assumes a different kind of love. I will do things for my own kids that I will not do for others' kids.
Another illustration I've often used in this case is to say "I love women" and "I love my wife". This too assumes a difference in love. The former is a general appreciation, even admiration for the female sex and what they add to life - their beauty, softness, refinement, etc. (I shudder to think of an all male world!) The latter is a focused, exclusive, and fully orbed love experienced in the sacred covenant of marriage. In each case above there is a difference in the love expressed.
Theologians have recognized there is also a difference in God's love. There's the general love of God for all His creatures based upon common grace. Common grace being that goodness, kindness, and long-suffering patience with which God treats all people without consideration of their personal merit. Where do we get this idea? Well, Jesus said of God, "He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" Matthew 5:45.
But then there's the particular love which God shows only to His people - and its that love which Paul associates with the Thessalonians here when he says "God chose them from the beginning..." this is a love expressed in giving them not merely common grace blessings of rain and sun but "every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places..." Ephesians 1:3. Furthermore it is a love experienced between God and the redeemed within the special bond of the New Covenant sealed in Christ's blood.
Recognizing this distinction enables us to affirm God's love for everybody and the fact of election, that God chooses some (but not all) to be saved. Or to put it in the language of scripture: "God so loved the world that He sent His one and only Son..." John 3:16, and "Therefore God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy, and He hardens whom He wants to harden" Romans 9:18.
