Amazing God! (covenant)

The particularity of this God is startling; the God of Israel aligns himself with specific mortals with individual names who live in identifiable places on the map. They have life stories unique to themselves, by no means always edifying. This God, unlike the gods of the religions, has chosen of his own sovereign free will to elect a discrete group of people simply because he wills to do so. The irreligiousness of this election is that it has nothing to do with any spiritual attainments by the chosen ones. The opposite is true — they are selected, we might say, in spite of themselves, for if there is one thing certain about the children of Israel, it is that they did not deserve their election. This factor of undeserved election is in view whenever God is called “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 11 (emphasis original)