Why were you saved? Why did the Lord God choose you and not your neighbor, what possible reason could there be in fact for Him to choose any of us?
It is not difficult for some to comprehend that God created all that is, but it is not quite so easy to think that nothing would exist without Him, that all of what we call reality is by His design. There is nothing that is that was not brought into existence by the Almighty. We my friends are not needed.
“Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” (Rev. 4:11)
I ask you to understand this as best as is in you to do, the Lord knew not only you, but everything before He created anything, time did not exist before He made it, nothing existed, and all that He has created He does not need. The Most High is just that, above all that is, without Him there is nothing but Him.
So, now that He has created everything, and we have come to the realization of the truth that He needs nothing that He has created, the verse stands as truth, for His pleasure we were created.
The next question must be is He in complete and total control of everything, does He have the ability to do anything He wants to do at any time with His creation? If He could not, then He could not be all-powerful, if He could not manipulate that which He has made for His pleasure He could not be God. Yet He is and He can.
I cannot express properly what most will deny, that we human beings, in fact that all of creation, have not as much free will as we might like to think. This one statement has consumed me for years now, does foreknowledge infer interdiction?
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” (Gen. 1:1) “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” (1 Thess. 4:17) There is no gap of time in these verses for the Lord, think as far forward in time as your mind can comprehend, and God is already there, and at the same time He is at where He was before He created anything. The Lord is always, has always, and will always be everywhere all the time. Incomprehensible to the human mind, but especially to that part of us that wants to know, if I have free will, just how free is it?
“Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Matt. 25:41) When? When did the Lord make hell and the Lake of Fire, before or after Lucifer said, “I will?”
“What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction.” (Romans 9:22) When were they prepared, before or after the thought, the knowledge came into His mind of their rebellion?
There is nothing that God does not know, and I believe there is much we will never find out about Him. It is a subject I keep telling myself I am going to leave on the shelf, that there is no way of knowing, but I keep returning to it, not because I want to know and understand it, but because it is how, at least for me, I can contemplate the complete and total Sovereignty of the Most High, Creator and Controller of all that is.
How can our free will coexist with the Sovereignty of God?
Those vessels fitted for wrath do not sound like people who have free will, the knowledge of good and evil would not be unless the Lord created them, He knew what Lucifer would do. Did he have a choice in the matter? Did Judas Iscariot?
I am not speaking of “what if” but what is and the reason for it all, for everything. God did not make anything because He needed anything, all that is was created for His pleasure. The Lake of Fire as well as the glories of the eternal heaven we will live in were created for His pleasure.
“What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?” (Psalm 8:4) Perhaps if nothing else from this short poorly written letter that can never be finished you will come to this realization, all your prayers should always start with praise, because the only reason we exist is for His pleasure.