God did all of this

Ephesians 1:3-6 ESV
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

Commenting on the above passage, Dr. Jim Hamilton writes,

God is the initiator here: God chose, God loved, God predestined, God adopted, and God did all of this according to the pleasure of his will (1:3-4). God did not do this for the Jews or the Gentiles because either group had earned it, because either group had sought it, or because either group would respond rightly to it. God did this "for himself, according to the pleasure of his will" (1:5). He did it because he wanted to, and Paul gives the ultimate reason why he did it in Ephesians 1:6: "for the praise of the glory of his grace, with which he graced us in the beloved." God wanted his grace to be praised, so he stunned cognizant beings in the heavens and on earth (3:10, 20-21) by including the Gentiles in Christ. The Gentiles did not earn this. God graced them in his beloved Son (1:6). (Hamilton, James M. God's Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010. Print. 480)

Two great quotes from The Puritan's Woodshop

From The Puritan's Woodshop:

In one of his letters on the importance of Systematic Divinity, Andrew Fuller deals with the seeming inconsistency between Divine predestination and human responsibility. He points out the difference between the reasoning of the fleshly mind versus the Christian.

A fleshly mind may ask, “How can these things be?” How can Divine predestination accord with human agency and accountableness? But a truly humble Christian, finding both in his Bible, will believe both, though he may be unable fully to understand their consistency; and he will find in the one a motive to depend entirely on God, and in the other a caution against slothfulness and presumptuous neglect of duty. And thus a Christian minister, if he view the doctrine in its proper connexions, will find nothing in it to hinder the free use of warnings, invitations, and persuasions, either to the converted or the unconverted. Yet he will not ground his hopes of success on the pliability of the human mind, but on the promised grace of God, who (while he prophesies to the dry bones, as he is commanded) is known to inspire them with the breath of life. - Andrew Fuller

Charles H. Spurgeon understood that just because our minds cannot get a grip on the harmony of truth it does not mean that they are simply contradictory. He sees God predestinating and the responsibility of man as harmonious. He writes in his autobiography:

“That God predestines, and yet that man is responsible, are two facts that few can see clearly. They are believed to be inconsistent and contradictory, but they are not. The fault is in our weak judgment. Two truths cannot be contradictory to each other. If, then, I find taught in one part of the Bible that everything is fore-ordained, that is true; and I find that in another Scripture, that man is responsible for all his actions, that is true; and it is only my folly that leads me to imagine that these two truths can ever contradict each other. I do not believe they can ever be welded into one upon any earthly anvil, but they certainly shall be one in eternity. They are two lines that so nearly parallel, that the human mind which pursues them farthest will never discover that they converge, but they do converge, and they will meet somewhere in eternity, close to the throne of God, whence all truth doth spring.” (C.H. Spurgeon Autobiography: Volume 1: The Early Years; Banner of Truth; page 174)

Great post at The Puritan's Woodshop

this was posted at The Puritan's Woodshop:

Charles H. Spurgeon understood that just because our minds cannot get a grip on the harmony of truth it does not mean that they are simply contradictory. He sees God predestinating and the responsibility of man as harmonious. He writes in his autobiography:

“That God predestines, and yet that man is responsible, are two facts that few can see clearly. They are believed to be inconsistent and contradictory, but they are not. The fault is in our weak judgment. Two truths cannot be contradictory to each other. If, then, I find taught in one part of the Bible that everything is fore-ordained, that is true; and I find that in another Scripture, that man is responsible for all his actions, that is true; and it is only my folly that leads me to imagine that these two truths can ever contradict each other. I do not believe they can ever be welded into one upon any earthly anvil, but they certainly shall be one in eternity. They are two lines that so nearly parallel, that the human mind which pursues them farthest will never discover that they converge, but they do converge, and they will meet somewhere in eternity, close to the throne of God, whence all truth doth spring.” (C.H. Spurgeon Autobiography: Volume 1: The Early Years; Banner of Truth; page 174)

I think Spurgeon had it right here. All truth meets at the cross.

God's love and the atonement

From Redemption accomplished and Applied by John Murray:

No treatment of the atonement can be properly oriented that does not trace its source to the free and sovereign love of God...

The love of God from which the atonement springs is not a distinctionless love; it is a love that elects and predestinates. God was pleased to set his invincible and everlasting love upon a countless multitude and it is the determinate purpose of this love that the atonement secures...

Truly God is love. Love is not something adventitious; it is not something that God may choose to be or choose not to be. He is love, and that necessarily, inherently, and eternally...Yet it belongs to the very essence of electing love to recognize that it is not inherently necessary to that love which God necessarily and inherently is that he should set such love as issues in redemption and adoption upon utterly undesirable and hell-deserving objects. (9-10)