“Chosen” in the New Testament

The concept of being “chosen” occurs in two different ways in the New Testament:

In the New Testament the idea of the chosen “servant of the LORD” (as in Isaiah 49:6) is applied to Jesus. He is “the Messiah whom God has chosen” (Luke 23:35), and “the living stone rejected by people as worthless but chosen by God as valuable” (1 Peter 2:4).

In Paul’s theology, it is the believers who have been “chosen” (1 Thessalonians 1:4). From this it could be deduced that the unbelievers have been “rejected” and will therefore “be lost”, which later led to the doctrine of predestination in the Christian Church, a doctrine that proved very divisive.