VI. If it be objected, that from these inferior and inconsiderable benefits, it must not be concluded respecting the life to come, that he who has been raised to the honour of primogeniture is therefore to be considered as adopted to the inheritance of heaven,—for there are many who spare not Paul, as though in his citation of Scripture testimonies he had perverted them from their genuine meaning,—I answer as before, that the apostle has neither erred through inadvertency, nor wilfully perverted testimonies of Scripture. But he saw, what they cannot bear to consider, that God intended by an earthly symbol to declare the spiritual election of Jacob, which otherwise lay concealed behind his inaccessible tribunal. For unless the primogeniture granted him had reference to the future world, it was a vain and ridiculous kind of blessing, which produced him nothing but various afflictions and adversities, grievous exile, numerous cares, and bitter sorrows. Discerning, beyond all doubt, that God’s external blessing was an indication of the spiritual and permanent blessing he had prepared for his servant in his kingdom, Paul hesitated not to argue from the former in proof of the latter. It must also be remembered, that to the land of Canaan was annexed the pledge of the celestial residence; so that it ought not to be doubted that Jacob was ingrafted with angels into the body of Christ, that he might be a partaker of the same life. While Esau is rejected, therefore, Jacob is elected, and distinguished from him by God’s predestination, without any difference of merit. If you inquire the cause, the apostle assigns the following: “For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”[472] And what is this but a plain declaration of the Lord, that he finds no cause in men to induce him to show favour to them, but derives it solely from his own mercy; and therefore that the salvation of his people is his work? When God fixes your salvation in himself alone, why will you descend into yourself? When he assigns you his mere mercy, why will you have recourse to your own merits? When he confines all your attention to his mercy, why will you divert part of it to the contemplation of your own works? We must therefore come to that more select people, whom Paul in another place tells us “God foreknew,”[473] not using this word, according to the fancy of our opponents, to signify a prospect, from a place of idle observation, of things which he has no part in transacting, but in the sense in which it is frequently used. For certainly, when Peter says that Christ was “delivered” to death “by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God,”[474] he introduces God not as a mere spectator, but as the Author of our salvation. So the same apostle, by calling believers, to whom he writes, “elect according to the foreknowledge of God,”[475] properly expresses that secret predestination by which God