How do covenant and election relate to one another?
There are many issues of semantics that enter into this discussion and many issues of real substance, so we need to be careful. If we may oversimplify, we can say that election relates to Gods eternal plan to save a people for himself. The number of the elect is fixed from eternity past and may not be increased or diminished. The covenant is Gods administration of salvation in space and time, the historical outworking of his eternal plan. We have then two basic perspectives, the decretal/eternal and the covenantal/historical, through which to view salvation. The Bible ordinarily (though not always) views election through the lens of the covenant. (For more on this, see Norm Shepherds book Call of Grace.) This is why covenant members can be addressed consistently as Gods eternally elect, even though some of those covenant members may apostatize and prove themselves to not be elected to eternal salvation. To do full justice to the biblical teaching, we must distinguish covenant and elect
