God’s Winnowing Process: “Children of Flesh or Children of Promise?”

What is God Like? – How can we know for Sure? – Part 5

By Richard Allen – April 21, 2025

In the first four Blogs in this series, it’s hard to miss God’s Sovereign Choices!  No matter what poor choices Mankind makes – God is never left without His “Divine Prerogative,” especially in His decisions to reveal Himself once again to fallen men and women. In fact, He always has the final say.  From the time our first parents, Adam and Eve, were expelled from the Garden of Eden, God, for reasons known only unto Himself, has sovereignly chosen to reveal Himself to very few, while leaving the vast majority of mankind in utter darkness!  In Part Four I pointed out that God moved “Redemptive-Progressive-History” drastically forward, by calling Father Abraham, from Ur of the Chaldees to a foreign land called Caanan!  He wasn’t just another “faithful man” like Abel, Enoch, and Noah were. This was God planning that He would take on “flesh and dwell among us.”  In doing so, God’s electing purpose began in earnest, working through a chosen people, Abraham’s descendants, the Hebrews. As we shall see, God has always made a Sovereign Choice regarding Mankind. And by choosing Abraham and His Seed, God was moving Salvation toward that coming day when He would visit His people through a Son, Jesus, who would redeem all Mankind – that is, both Jew and Gentile.

We’ve watched God call Abraham, telling him to leave his family and kindred and go into a land of promise. But we’ve also witnessed Abraham’s partial, half-hearted obedience, bringing his father Terah, his nephew Lot and their clans along for the ride. Yet God intervenes, and Abraham’s father Terah dies at Harran along the way.  God isn’t done in His choosing and separating Abraham from his family. Even after Abraham continues with Lot and his clan, strife is stirred up between Abraham’s and Lot’s herdsmen (Genesis 13), forcing them to separate. And while we can see now that God had a separate purpose for Lot, it’s clear that Lot and Abraham will not be the “chosen people” together, but rather two peoples with different destinies!  This is not to say that their descendants would  not continue to interact.  Lot fathers two sons by his daughters. They end up being the Tribes of Moab and Ammon. Years later, a distant relative of Lot, Ruth the Moabite, marries into the royal line of David, becoming a distant grandmother to our Lord Jesus! 

So I’m not misunderstood, I am not making a moral judgment about Lot or his two sons, Moab and Ben-ammi. If we understand “the universal fallenness of all mankind,” we should also know that “none of us are righteous among Adam’s fallen posterity.”  Paul makes this argument to the Church at Rome, where Jewish Christians were struggling with their own false sense of superiority:

“What then? Are we Jews any better off?  No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written:  ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one’ ” (Romans 3:9-12).

This might sound disheartening. We all know people who we believe to be genuinely good and decent. But God’s judgment is not the judgment of man. Paul is clearly saying that neither Jews nor Gentiles are righteous in and of themselves. None of us understands or seeks after God.  That’s why later in Romans Paul makes the argument that all fallen men and women are like clay – from the same lump. From that same lump of fallen humanity, God sovereignly chooses those whom he’ll make into “vessels of honor,” and those whom he will leave as “vessels of dishonor.” It’s God who calls us, draws us, awakens us by His Spirit and makes us a vessel of honor for His saving purposes!

“You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?’  But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’  Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use?  What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,  in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory,  even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?” (Romans 9:19-24).

This is a hard truth to grasp, but it’s important for us to consider this, regarding God’s Sovereign Winnowing Process. For centuries after the Fall of Adam and Eve, God’s direct contact with man was incomplete and temporary. By God’s providence, Abel’s sacrifice was found to be acceptable, while his brother Cain’s was not. And during the thousand years leading up to the Great Flood, God was very selective, revealing Himself only to Enoch, Noah and finally to Abraham. And we need to remember that most of the descendants of Seth died in the Great Flood. Then even after Righteous Noah and his family were preserved on the Ark, virtually all of Noah’s sons went their own way, not understanding or seeking for God. Observing those men and women with whom God visited and revealed Himself, it was Not because they were righteous or better. They too were part of the same “fallen lump of humanity.”

Furthermore, God did not covenant with just any descendant of  Abraham, no, God rejected Abraham’s flesh and blood son, Ishmael.  Only Isaac was to be the “child of promise,” that is Abraham’s spiritual seed. Later, it was Isaac’s younger son Jacob, and not his elder son Esau, with whom God made His covenant of promise. But we’d make a huge mistake if we somehow imagine that God ratified His covenant of promise with these men because He saw something admirable or virtuous in any of them. The only reason they were singled out to have contact with a “Holy God” was because of God’s own Sovereign Purpose!  Looking at Abraham’s life, we should realize that he was just like all of us – full of Sinful Contradictions, Half-hearted Faith, Fearfulness and Impatience. The reason that Abraham is a special “covenant heir” is, because God chose to set His affections upon him, opening Abraham’s eyes, chastening and disciplining him along the way. If we believe that Abraham was in and of himself a righteous man, full of faith, patience and hunger for God – then we put ourselves at odds with the teaching of Scripture: We are not righteous, No, not one of us!  Not one of us understands or seeks God. It was God who sought us, and drew us to Himself.  Jesus said as much to the fickle multitude of disciples following Him, when they became offended at His teaching:

“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:44). Then later on, Jesus repeated this truth to these disciples, offended at His teachings: And he said, ‘This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father’ ” (John 6:65).

For want of a better word, I call this “God’s Sovereign Winnowing Process.” Here’s the definition of winnowing:

“Winnowing is a process by which chaff is separated from grain. It can also be used to remove pests from stored grain. Winnowing usually follows threshing in grain preparation. In its simplest form, it involves throwing the mixture into the air so that the wind blows away the lighter chaff, while the heavier grains fall back down for recovery. Techniques included using a winnowing fan (a shaped basket shaken to raise the chaff) or using a tool (a winnowing fork or shovel) on a pile of harvested grain.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnowing]

I’m sure that to many of you, “winnowing” sounds as if God is merely recognizing righteous men and women as “fruitful grain” while “discarding wicked men and women as chaff.”  It would appear that Psalm 1 says this exactly:

“He (the righteous man) is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away” (Psalm 1:3-4).

The problem with thinking that we personally are good or bad goes against all we know and believe from Scripture and from our own Practical Experience. There are dozens of verses like the Romans three verses above that teach “There is None Righteous, Not One!”  In the previous four Blogs on ”What Is God Like,” it should be clear that the behavior of Mankind after the Fall of Adam and Eve proved Paul’s statements in Romans 3:11-18. Both our Biblical understanding and our practical experience as “sinners saved by Grace Alone," should convince us that “if left to ourselves,” we are without Hope!  Rather, all Glory to Christ, this is not the case with those whom God seeks and saves by Grace!  We are ALL CHAFF and Worthless on our own. Only God’s Grace makes the difference!  His Winnowing Process is His Sovereign Choice! Was Isaac better than Ishmael?  Was Jacob less of scoundrel than his brother Esau?  And was Peter who denied Jesus three times, really a better man than Judas who betrayed our Lord? The answers should be obvious. God’s Sovereign Winnowing was the difference. This doctrine  gripped St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in the early church, giving him real confidence. He was deeply moved by 1 Corinthians 4:7, in which Paul asks the Corinthians:

“For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” (1 Corinthians 4:7).

Make no mistake, there are two families: Children of the Promise and Children of the Flesh (i.e. Sheep and Goats). But our “natural birth” does not give us a familial connection to be called the Children of God, Only the New Birth does that! As the Apostle John says: Those Born of God!  I love the way the Contemporary English Version translates John chapter 1:

“The Word was in the world, but no one knew him, though God had made the world  with his Word.   He came into his own world, but his own nation did not welcome him.  Yet some people accepted him and put their faith in him. So, he gave them the right to be the children of God.  They were not God's children by nature or because of any human desires. God himself was the one who made them his children” (John 1:10-13).

Soli Deo Gloria!