In That Number

The New Orleans Saints have never canonized anyone.

They are a football team. On a Sunday in the Superdome, seventy thousand people rise to their feet, the band strikes up the old spiritual, and the crowd sings about wanting to be in that number — sings it to a marching beat, hands lifted, meaning the men in black and gold. No one in the building is confused about who they mean. They are singing a church song, and they mean the team.

And the team answers to more than one name. It is the Saints. It is the Who Dats. It is the Black and Gold, New Orleans, the home team, the boys. A sportswriter runs through five of those names in a single paragraph and never stops to say which players he means, because he does not have to. Every name lands on the same roster. You grew up knowing a team is a thing you can call by many names.

Not one of those names marks off a hidden, separate group. “The Black and Gold” is not an inner circle the “Saints” were never told about. “The Who Dats” are not a secret list kept in a back office. They are the same fifty-three men, seen from a different seat in the house.

The New Testament names one group a dozen ways too.

One Group, a Dozen Names

Watch the writers do it. There is no single, official word for the people who follow Jesus, so they reach for whatever fits the sentence. The church. Believers. Disciples. Brothers and sisters. The saints. The elect. The chosen. Outsiders in Antioch pinned a nickname on them that stuck — Christians — and before any of it, the movement called itself the Way.¹ Different words, one people. A man could answer to all of them at once and never change congregations.

The word to test first is saints, because it is the one we are least confused about — or think we are. Set aside the stained glass. When Paul writes to a church, he opens by calling them saints, and he does it even when the church has given him nothing to be sentimental about. Consider Corinth.

To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints…

— 1 Corinthians 1:2 (ESV)

Read the rest of the letter and you will meet those saints. They had split into factions. One of them was sleeping with his father’s wife, and the congregation was proud of how tolerant that made them. They sued each other in front of pagans. They got drunk at the communion table while the poor among them went hungry. This is the group Paul greets, in the second verse, as saints. Whatever the word means, it cannot mean the spiritual elite, and it plainly does not mean the canonized dead — the official, capital-S Saints of the Catholic church. It means the believers in Corinth — the actual, unfinished, embarrassing believers — and it means all of them.

Paul is not being loose with the word. He tells the Ephesians what it covers:

To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus.

— Ephesians 1:1 (ESV)

Saints are the faithful. Not a graduating class, not an honor roll — the ones who belong to Christ. And when Paul wants to stack the names, he does it without a breath between them:

Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts…

— Colossians 3:12 (ESV)

Three names in a single line. God’s chosen ones — that is the elect. Holy — that is the saints. Beloved — that is the family. He lays them side by side on one ordinary congregation and expects no one to sort them into ranks, because they are not ranks. They are the Black and Gold, the Who Dats, the boys.

No one reads “saints” and pictures a sealed list. We know it means the believers — all of them, the messy ones included. But “the elect” sits in the same sentences, addressed to the same churches, written by the same men. What loosens the one loosens the other. If “saints” is only a name for the people in the pews, then “the elect” is another jersey they wear — not a secret roster kept in a back office in heaven.

The Name That Got Promoted

Somewhere along the way, readers came to “the elect” and decided it was different from the rest — that where “saints” and “brothers” and “believers” described the congregation, “the elect” described something standing behind it. A fixed list. A roster drawn up before the world was made, names entered in permanent ink, the rest left off. Not a jersey the believers wear, but a decision made about them in eternity past, before any of them drew a breath.

That reading launched a five-hundred-year argument. On one side, the followers of John Calvin: the list is God’s alone, settled before creation, owing nothing to anything he foresaw in you. On the other, the followers of Jacob Arminius: God chose the ones he knew in advance would believe. Both sides can preach for an hour without repeating a verse. What neither of them questions is the one assumption that would end the fight.

And if you have ever heard this argument, you already know its shape, because it is sports radio. Two callers, one roster, a week to kill. Who is really on the team. How they made it. Whether the coach chose them before the season ever started, or watched them play first and chose them afterward. They cannot even agree on the play — run the ball in, where the other side gets no say, or throw it downfield, where the pass only counts if the receiver reaches up and catches it.

Strip it all away and the whole fight balances on a single word. Paul writes it once, in Romans, at the head of a chain that has held theologians for generations:

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son… And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

— Romans 8:29–30 (ESV)

Five links — foreknew, predestined, called, justified, glorified — and the entire chain hangs from the first one. Everything turns on what it means that God foreknew. The Calvinist hears chose beforehand, set his love on them in advance. The Arminian hears saw ahead of time who would say yes. Two readings, one word, and a war.

How You Make the Team

The question the callers talk right over: how do you actually get on the team? Not how the roster was set in eternity — how a person, today, gets in. The New Testament answers plainly, and the answer is short.

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.

— Romans 10:9–10 (ESV)

That is the whole requirement. Believe it, say it, mean it. Paul adds no waiting period, no pedigree, no screening. And a few lines later he throws the door as wide as it will go:

For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

— Romans 10:13 (ESV)

Everyone. Not the fast, not the gifted, not the ones who would have shined at a tryout. There is no tryout here — no stopwatch, no measuring tape, no coach clocking your speed or sizing you up to decide whether you are good enough. The jailer at Philippi asked what he must do, was told simply to believe, and he was in before morning (Acts 16:30–33). The requirement never narrows. It is a confession, and a confession is something anyone with a mouth and a heart can make.

This is exactly where the football picture breaks — and the break is the point. A real team is closed. The coaches choose who is good enough, and most who want a place are cut before they ever pull on the jersey. If God ran his team that way, the Calvinist would be right: a sealed list, a closed door, the rest sent home. But he does not run it that way. He holds no tryouts and turns no one away for being slow. The one qualification is the confession, and it lies open on the table for anyone who will pick it up.

Notice, too, that the confession is a person, not a password. Paul’s version is that Jesus is Lord. John’s letter puts the same confession in other words — that Jesus is the Son of God.² The two are not identical because a confession was never meant to be an incantation. What you are confessing is not a phrase but an allegiance: whose you are, whose name you just called on. Say it however your own mouth says it. The door knows what you mean.

So the practical question turns out to have a plain answer, and the plainness is the problem. If the way in is this open — a confession, available to all, refused to none — then what were five centuries of callers fighting about? They were fighting about the word. Let us finally handle it.

Outside the Box

Look again at what everyone is reading. The word is foreknew, and the whole fight lives in the first syllable — fore, before, ahead of. Both camps hear a sequence in it. Calvin: first God chose, then the faith came. Arminius: first God saw the faith, then he chose. They cannot agree on the order of events. Neither one questions that there was an order — a before and an after, a first and a then, with God moving through them the way we move through a Tuesday.

That is the thing they are both standing on without looking down. Before and after are not facts about God. They are facts about time, and time is a thing God made. In the beginning, the book says (Genesis 1:1) — and a beginning is the front edge of a clock. Behind it there is no earlier, because “earlier” is a reading on the very clock that has not started yet. The words the argument runs on — foreknew, predestined, before the foundation of the world — are all clock-words. They are ours. We were made inside the clock and cannot form a sentence without it.

And it is not only our words that run on the clock. We do. We begin on a certain day and end on one, and the span between is short. When we reach for something to say about the God who has no beginning and no end, the only words in our hands are the words of creatures who have both. He is. We are, for a little while.

So God does not have foreknowledge. He has all knowledge. The fore is not a description of God; it is a description of us, reaching for him with the only tense we own. He told us his name, and his name is not a past or a future:

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.”

— Exodus 3:14 (ESV)

Not I was. Not I will be. A present tense with no walls around it. And when Jesus took that name for himself, he broke the grammar to do it:

Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.

— John 8:58 (ESV)

He does not say before Abraham was, I was. He says I am, and the sentence buckles under the tense on purpose. That is the sound a timeless voice makes when it has to speak inside a temporal sentence. It is the same voice that calls a thousand years a single day, that names itself the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, and means both at once.³

Now set the word back down and read it from both sides. From inside the clock, on your side, the story runs in order, and every piece of it is real. You heard. You believed. You confessed. You were saved, on a morning you could name. A true sequence, a true choice, a thing that happened to you and not to someone else. From outside the clock — his side — there is no first and no then. He is not waiting to see what you will do, and he is not deciding it for you ahead of time, because waiting and ahead of time are clock-words, and he is not standing in the clock. He simply knows his people, the way you know what is in front of your face. The elect were never a list drawn up before the world. They are the believers, seen all at once by the One who sees all at once.

Then comes the last worry, the one that makes the whole doctrine feel like a trap: if God already knows you will say yes, then you were never free to say no, and the game was fixed before you played it. But knowing is not causing. A man in the stands who sees the runner cross the goal line did not carry the ball there. He saw it happen; he did not make it happen. God’s knowledge of your yes is that kind of seeing — the sight of a witness who happens to take in the whole field at once, both end zones, the opening kickoff and the final whistle, in a single glance. He watches you choose. He does not choose in your place. Boethius worked this out fifteen centuries ago; it is worth knowing only so you do not mistake an old answer for a new trick.

Some, to save the sequence, have said that God himself lives inside the clock and waits with the rest of us to learn what we will freely do. It is a serious view, held by serious people. But it keeps the clock by giving up the I AM, and that is far too much to trade. The argument was never really Calvin against Arminius. It was a God who lives in time against the God who made it.

Which means the verses that look most like predestination — the ones about a choice made before the foundation of the world — are not the problem they seem. We only have to read them knowing which language they are written in.

The Verses They Swing Hardest

The heaviest verse of all reads like a roster carved in stone before the first morning:

Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

— Ephesians 1:4 (ESV)

There it is in plain sight — chosen, and chosen before the world. But read the two words the argument always hurries past: in him. The choosing happens inside Christ. God did not, in eternity past, page down a list of names and check some off. He resolved, before there was a world, to have a people in his Son — holy, adopted, and his own. What he chose was a place and a people, not a handful of individuals drawn from a jar. And you get into that choice the way you get into anything that is in Christ: you come to Christ. The confession is the door into the chosen thing. Election was settled as a process before the foundation of the world; your membership was settled the morning you called on the name. Both are true. They are answers to two different questions, asked from two different sides of the clock.

Now the other one, the passage that sounds like souls assigned to heaven and hell in the womb — Jacob and Esau, loved and hated before either could walk:

Though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad… she was told, “The older will serve the younger.” As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”

— Romans 9:11–13 (ESV)

But look where Paul is quoting from. “The older will serve the younger” is lifted straight out of Genesis, where the line just before it reads, “two nations are in your womb.” And “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated” comes from Malachi, written more than a thousand years after both men were dust — and Malachi is not talking about two babies. He is talking about their descendants, Israel and Edom, two peoples with a long and bitter history.⁴ Paul’s own citations are about nations. So is his potter, the one from Isaiah and Jeremiah who was always shaping peoples, never sorting individual souls.⁵ Paul is not diagramming how one person is picked for glory. He is answering the question that breaks his heart in the chapter’s opening lines: has God’s promise to Israel failed, now that Gentiles are pouring in while so many of his own kinsmen stay out? His answer runs three chapters, and it is entirely about which peoples God is gathering into his one people — Jew and Gentile together. It ends not in a sealed courtroom but in a grafted olive tree, the door still open, Paul on his knees for his nation to come in.⁶

So the hardest verses never needed softening. Read them from God’s side of the clock, and about the people he was forming all along, and they say exactly what they always said — with nothing left over to frighten anyone. The elect are the believers. Chosen in Christ from eternity, and gathered in time, one confession at a time.

There is one verse left, and it is the one nobody had to be taught. If you have followed all of this and still cannot put down the sealed list, hold it up against the most familiar sentence in the book:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

— John 3:16 (ESV)

The world. Not a remnant lifted out of the world, not a number drawn from it and the rest passed over — the world. That is the reach of the love, and the election reaches exactly as far, because they are one act: God gave his Son for the whole of it. Then, in the very next breath, the one condition — whoever believes. The love is poured out on all; the life is held by the ones who reach up and take it. God so loved the world, and threw the door open to every soul in it. The team is everyone who walked through.

Which brings us back to the stadium, and to the song.

In That Number

Seventy thousand people on their feet, the band in full cry, the old spiritual rolling down from the upper deck: I want to be in that number. They are singing it for a team. But the song was never written for a team.

It came up out of the Black church and the funeral marches of New Orleans, sung by people who knew what it was to be counted out — who reached past every ledger that had ever left them off, toward a roll no one could revoke. When they sang about wanting to be in that number, they were not asking to make a team. They were asking to be counted among the redeemed, when the saints go marching in. The song is a prayer. And the prayer has an answer.

John was shown the very number the song reaches for. Here is what it looked like:

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.

— Revelation 7:9 (ESV)

A number no one could number. That is what “that number” is. Not a short list kept in a back office, not a roster sealed before the world with most of us left off — a crowd out of every nation that no one could tally if he tried. You do not have to wonder whether there is room. The number John saw is the size of the open door.

So the elect was never the cold thing five centuries made of it. It is the saints and the believers and the brothers, the Way, the church — the team, wearing one more name. From your side of the clock it is a choice: believe, confess, call. From his side it is a people he has always known, seen whole, loved by name. And the door is still standing open, the way it was in Romans, the way it is in the song. There is a number. You can be in it. All you have to do is call.

References

• The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV). Crossway, 2001.
• Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V. The source of the classic resolution used here: eternity is “the whole, simultaneous, and perfect possession of unbounded life,” so God’s knowledge is not fore-knowledge but the all knowledge of an ever-present now — and because it is sight rather than cause, it does not remove human free will.
• Augustine. Confessions, Book XI. On time as a created thing, with no “before” for creation to sit inside.
• Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I, q. 14, a. 13. On God knowing contingent, freely chosen things as present to his eternity rather than as future.

Footnotes