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I’ve had people ask me from time to time, “Why do you suppose God chose Israel?”  It’s an understandable question.  Why did God choose this particular people – descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?  It’s funny, the people of Israel probably asked themselves the same question from time to time.  When we ask the question about Israel, we are probably forgetting that God ultimately chose us as well.  That’s the point that Peter is making when he says that we are now God’s chosen people.  Just as the people of Israel asked the question, so might we ask, “Why has God bestowed his favor on us?”  But asking the question this way misses the point.  God didn’t choose Abraham for anything he had done.  He didn’t choose and love Israel to reward them for their righteousness or out of compassion for their bondage.  God doesn’t choose us and grant us his grace because we are deserving.  He chooses us because he loves us.  If Israel’s problem-filled history doesn’t teach us anything else, it is that God loves us despite our faults.

Moses didn’t bother with the “why” – he simply stated that God had chosen Israel and then answered the question, “What does being chosen require of you?”  The answer, echoed by Micah some centuries later, is simple. 

10 I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, as I had done the first time. And once again the Lord listened to me. The Lord was unwilling to destroy you.
11 The Lord said to me, “Get up, go on your journey at the head of the people, that they may go in and occupy the land that I swore to their ancestors to give them.”

12 So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul,
13 and to keep the commandments of the Lord your God and his decrees that I am commanding you today, for your own well-being.
14 Although heaven and the heaven of heavens belong to the Lord your God, the earth with all that is in it,
15 yet the Lord set his heart in love on your ancestors alone and chose you, their descendants after them, out of all the peoples, as it is today.  Deut 10:10-15 (NRSV)

God doesn’t choose us for what we’ve done – he chooses us out of love and we can repay that love by what we do.