I see, this thread has become yet another debate on Calvinism! Okay then. Here's my view:
Stay away from the Calvinist theology!! They depict God as having a “private club” of people for His mysterious enjoyment. They hand-picked some verses and took them out of context without regard to the rest of the Bible. God is outside the time-dimension we live in. He is “I Am”; sees eternity past and eternity future at the same time. He foresaw us who accepted His grace and declared us “the elect”. But only He knows who we are. If God is to do “everything” Himself, including the “selecting of the elect” without us accepting His grace, then that makes us mere brainwashed programmed robots. For those of us who know God by studying the scripture, we know very well that He would never do such a thing. He doesn’t want robots programmed to love Him. He gave us the freedom to choose. And we chose His grace, and He foresaw it. Why is there a Calvinist church today? It needs to be abolished from the face of the earth. It’s only there to collect donations, and to keep contributing to the confusion where people may wrongly categorize themselves as inside that “club” our outside of it.
Matthew 13:12 explains it well: "Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them."
For us humans, it is a growing state with the knowledge of God as time goes by. But for God, He sits outside time. He sees our beginning and ending. And knowing our tendency to lean towards Him in advance, He helps us along to get there just as He says in Matthew 13:12. The one who has and is given more, is the elect. Nothing mysterious about it. This is what is meant by those that God sends to Jesus. We all start on equal grounds, and some as they hear the word become more interested over time.
Some elements in Calvinism are true, but there needs not be a church or a theology about it. It is confusing to people. Trying to explain how God's deity gives Him access to eternity past and eternity future sounds more like a sci-fi story to people. Shut your doors Calvinists and go home. The "elect" business is God's business. And making it sound like God has "mysterious" reason to choose the elect, is most contradicting to the thousands of pages in the Bible that say otherwise.