“God is love,” and the universe, with all its display of wonders and apparent opposition of forces and their ends, was created and is upheld by the eternal hand, for no other purpose than to make his love be seen and felt by his intelligent creation.  Any other view challenges the divine love and reflects discredit upon the divine wisdom.  All that we know of God is revealed in the truth he has given to save man from sin and its consequences.  His love, wisdom and power are all revealed in his great scheme to build up a heaven of eternal glory and bliss for all who desire or are willing to share in its blessedness.  But God does not work out of order.  He works in accord with the love and wisdom which are his essence, and both infinite and eternal with him.  Before the heavens were made, or ever the foundations of the earth were laid, it was the divine purpose to create intelligent beings to be eternally happy.  When God created the heavens and the earth he made man in his own image and likeness.  Man was happy.  But he fell.  And God foresaw that man would fall; and to remedy the loss and restore man to the divine image again, Christ was, as a Lamb, slain before the foundation of the world.  In the Divine estimation Christ was slain before the foundation of the world; but to us, visibly, not until four thousand years afterward.  In the divine foreknowledge the church was established before the world was made, and God foreordained who should compose it, basing this foreordination, not on one in preference to another on any personal ground, but on the ground of fitness as to quality.  Foreordination and election have nothing to do with man other than as pertains to quality and fitness.  The penitent, believing, loving and obeying, humble, self-denying soul is foreordained to be one of God’s ELECT, now, henceforth and forever.

I now repeat the text:  “Elect ... according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit.”  What I have said harmonizes with this, because the qualified fitness of the elect is through sanctification of the Spirit.  Our Lord prays for all in these words:  “Father, sanctify them through thy truth:  thy word is truth.”  It is through the truth that men are sanctified, and the sanctified the world over and through all time are God’s elect, according to his foreknowledge or foreordination, because no others can be.  The all-in-all of this great subject resolves itself into the simple fact that men do not come into covenant union with God unto salvation because God elected and foreordained it to be so in their special behalf as individuals, unconditionally chosen beforehand, whilst others no worse than they are left to go to destruction; but they are elected according to God’s foreordination because they have come into covenant union with him unto salvation; and have, therefore, the fitness to be worthy of being so chosen or elected.  Their election and foreordination are not the cause but the result of the fitness.  It is foreordained that “of such is the kingdom of heaven,” because it cannot consist of any other kind.