John MacArthur on the Doctrine of Election

"My own struggle with the doctrine of election comes from my emotion. It comes from the influences of my fallen heart. It comes from my expectation that everybody ought to have a right to make a choice. And it also comes from the early years of my Christian experience when I didn’t understand what it meant to be depraved. As a young Christian, I didn’t understand how really dead the sinner is. That is the bottom line issue here. Salvation has to be all of God if you understand the doctrine of human depravity. If you understand what it means to be utterly unable to do right, unable to know God, dead in trespasses and sin in the most profound kind of unalterable death about which you can do nothing, and if you understand there is no human merit, there is no human effort, there is nothing we can do to alter that situation or to please God. Out of the doctrine of what I call utter human inability comes the doctrine of election. It was when I understood the sinfulness of man and the total inability of the sinner to do anything about his condition that I was left with nothing but the doctrine of election to solve that problem. That doesn’t, of course, as we said today, solve all of the tensions...we’ll have to wait for heaven to come to a full understanding of that."