Fair Choice

“Maybe the gods found you for a reason. Maybe the ocean brought you to them because it saw someone worthy of being saved.”

Moana (2016)

Blurbs are a tricky business. Some good books have terrible blurbs, and vice versa. Some blurbs imply that a book belongs to one genre when it actually fits better in another. Some blurbs reveal too much, while others fail to tell one anything about the story at all.

And then, some blurbs are pretty much perfect, like this one, found on the back cover of Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall:

 

Mars. Well, not actually, but it looks cool and Mars-ish.

The fact that someone had decided I would be safer on Mars, where you could still only SORT OF breathe the air and SORT OF not get sunburned to death, was a sign that the war with the aliens was not going fantastically well.

I’d been worried I was about to be told that my mother’s spacefighter had been shot down, so when I found out that I was being evacuated to Mars, I was pretty calm.

And despite everything that happened to me and my friends afterwards, I’d do it all again, because until you’ve been shot at, pursued by terrifying aliens, taught maths by a laser-shooting robot goldfish and tried to save the galaxy, I don’t think you can say that you’ve really lived.

If the same thing happens to you, this is my advice: ALWAYS CARRY DUCT TAPE.

Well, you know, I read that and was sold straight away – and happily, the novel did meet my expectations. So call that a recommendation,¹ and, in a break from what I’d usually say at this point, do feel free to read this post before you get hold of the book: nothing I’m about to say constitutes a spoiler of any significance.

The first-person narrator whose dry and deadpan tone lends the blurb, and, indeed, the full story, such charm, is Alice, an English schoolgirl who finds herself being evacuated to Mars from Earth, as conditions there become ever more dangerous thanks to humanity’s ongoing war with a race of aliens called Morrors who’d quite like to nab themselves some more living space. Much as Mars is still only partway through being terraformed and made properly suitable for habitation, it seems that conditions on Earth could soon reach a point of being more hostile even than that, so humanity has decided to send some off its children off-planet to keep them comparatively out of harm’s way. Alice and her fellow evacuees are the lucky ones, the few chosen to be rescued from the anticipated doom.

And they were, indeed, chosen. After all, if you’re saving some but not all, you have to have some sort of method for deciding who sits in which category. The authorities of Alice’s world actually employed three. Some of the children, like Alice, were chosen because their parents were important or famous (Alice’s mum is one of Earth’s top fighter pilots); others, like Alice’s friend Josephine, were chosen because they scored especially highly on an intellectual test; and yet others, like her other friends Noel and Carl, were chosen by mere luck of the draw.

Pedigree, merit, or chance – that’s what stands between the rescued and the rejected. Alice can’t shake the feeling that it isn’t fair, that none of these methods is really fair, that everyone knows none of them is really fair – but what other option is there?

Pedigree. Merit. Chance.

I think Alice’s dissatisfaction with these options is completely justified. I think she’s right that none of them is really fair. Happily, when it comes to the greatest rescue that has ever been enacted, the authority behind that rescue wasn’t governed by any of them. Take a look at Romans 9:

But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring. For this is what the promise said: “About this time next year I will return, and Sarah shall have a son.” ²

Pedigree isn’t grounds for rescue from sin and death. Fleshly descent from Abraham doesn’t guarantee one a place in the kingdom. If that was the vital quality God was interested in, he could get it from stones. It doesn’t matter what your ancestors are or were like: what God makes of you isn’t affected by them in the slightest.³

 

These stones would do.

Romans 9 continues:

And not only so, but also when Rebekah had conceived children by one man, our forefather Isaac, though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad – in order that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls – she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

Merit isn’t grounds for rescue from sin and death. God’s purpose of election logically precedes any human deed, good or bad: we are not saved because we are worthy of it. It was before the foundation of the world that God’s sons were chosen in Christ to be holy and blameless. The saved is precluded from claiming any credit for his or her salvation.⁴

I imagine this is all familiar ground so far. Huzzah, the great salvation is not limited by ancestral background; huzzah again, it’s not dependent on human deeds. But what about the third group of Mars evacuees, those selected by lottery? If being chosen for rescue doesn’t rest on any inherent quality of the chosen, surely the only remaining possibility is that it’s purely random?

I don’t think so. Let’s skip forward a few verses in Romans 9:

Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honourable use and another for dishonourable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory – even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?

Randomness implies interchangeability. Think back to Alice and her friends: in Alice’s case, or Josephine’s, it would have been a problem if some other person had been swapped into her place, because that person wouldn’t have the particular qualities on account of which the selection had been made; but in the case of Carl and Noel, none of the higher-ups would have minded at all if they’d been given a couple of other kids instead. If you choose to select by chance, it must be because you don’t really mind either way; you don’t toss a coin unless you don’t have a preference.

God, by contrast, has deliberately prepared two different kinds of vessels: some of wrath and some of mercy. One of the former can’t be swapped in for one of the latter as if it made no difference. The Good Shepherd knows his sheep as thoroughly as he and his Father know each other, and he lays down his life for them, and no one can snatch them out of his hand. In fact, consider John 10 a moment longer:⁵ at one stage Jesus says that he has other sheep not of this sheepfold whom he must also bring; and then a few verses later, he tells the crowd that’s gathered around him that they don’t belong to his flock. The selection isn’t random. There are some who are definitively part of the flock, and the rest definitively aren’t.

Pedigree, merit, chance – none of them is really fair. The way God chooses those he adopts as sons is in a different category. And in this manner he makes known the riches of his glory. He displays the full extent of his grace, open to individuals of all people-groups; his mercy, in that salvation is bestowed on the utterly undeserving; and his covenant love and faithfulness, in that he will gather and shepherd his own flock, those specific individuals on whom he has chosen to set his favour, and no one will snatch them out of his hand. Redemption is a done deal, no returns, no exchanges, and God was the sole impetus behind every aspect of it.

Alice’s dissatisfaction with the criteria of pedigree, merit, and chance was justified, but it turns out that, when you factor in an omniscient, omnipotent, perfectly righteous God, there’s a fourth option: God’s own sovereign choice.

Footnotes

¹ It’s out of stock on Hive (shocking!) so here it is on Scholastic instead: https://shop.scholastic.co.uk/products/94540.

² Keep it open; we’ll be coming back to it through the rest of the post: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=romans+9&version=ESVUK.

³ On which points, consult Matthew 8:11-12, Matthew 3:9/Luke 3:8, and, ooh, let me see, try Ezekiel 18. That last point will probably produce a post of its own at some point: I am amazed at how many Christians seem to think that, in the Old Testament at least, God was to some extent on board with punishing children for their fathers’ misdeeds. Like, literally not at all, guys.

⁴ Check out Ephesians 1:3ff. I won’t tell you when to stop reading, because it’s Ephesians and you’re perfectly entitled to get carried away. Hopefully you’ll get as far as 2:9, because that’ll do as a reference for the last sentence of my paragraph.

⁵ Here it is for your perusal: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10&version=ESVUK.