Last week we began our study in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, and we saw that God has blessed us with ‘every spiritual blessing’ in the Heavenly places, in Christ.
I mentioned at that time, that in the following verses Paul goes on to name some of those spiritual blessings, and even listed a few for you.
Today, I want to begin to go down that list, taking these things one at a time, and glean some nuggets from them with the indispensable assistance of the Holy Spirit, without Whom we would understand none of these things.
Let’s read these verses one more time, beginning at verse 3.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will.”
Now, we have come here to a word that has caused very much debate and confusion and even dissention in the church over the past couple of centuries, but if we are to study this book we cannot skip over it or handle it sloppily. We have a duty to sharpen our focus, ask the Holy Spirit to open the eyes of our understanding, and deal with the subject honestly.
Here is the troublesome phrase: “...just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world...”
Here is how we’ll break these verses down for the sake of clarity:
1. HE CHOSE US
2. WHY HE CHOSE US
3. WHAT HE PLANNED FOR HIS CHOSEN
4. WHAT MADE HIM DO THIS
1. HE CHOSE US
There are really two words in today’s text that refer to this same point of doctrine. One of them is “chose”, here in verse 4, and the other is that dreaded “p” word, in verse 5.
Before we go on, I’d like to have you turn and look at a couple of other passages that relate to this same issue:
II Thessalonians 2:13,14
“But we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth. And it was for this He called you through our gospel, that you may gain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ”.
Romans 8:29,30
“For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren; and whom He predestined, these He also called; and whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.”
Our main focus will continue to be on Ephesians 1:4,5, but the things that are said in these verses can help us get a better grip, so we will refer back to them as we go along.
Let me say before we venture further however, that this debate of predestination and whether we are saved because we chose to be or whether we had any choice in the matter at all, etcetera, etcetera, ... is a relatively recent debate.
Christians and Christian preachers of earlier Christianity had, it seems, a lot less problem with just letting God be God, and accepting that they didn’t have all the answers.
I personally do not want to have all the answers. I do not think that I would feel very comfortable with worshiping a God Whom I could explain in every aspect. That god would be too small, if I could completely understand everything about Him.
In the scriptures I see God saying of Himself,
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Neither are your ways My ways, ‘ declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts‘.”
In the eleventh chapter of Romans, verses 33 - 36 Paul breaks into one of his very frequent anthems of praise, and says:
“Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counselor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.”
So I want to offer a friendly warning to you here; if you ever encounter a preacher or Bible teacher who presumes to fully understand this question of predestination and God’s choices verses our choices, ... if he does not readily admit to you that it is somewhat of a mystery to him too, then you just smile politely and say ‘no thank you’, and then you turn and run from that man just as fast as you can.
Personally, I can only tell you what the Bible tells me. It tells me that God, before the foundation of the world, chose those who would be saved, and that He predestined them to be adopted as His children, and that His plan for those He chose was that they would, 1. be conformed to the image of His Son, and 2. that they would be holy and blameless before Him, and 3. that they should walk in the good works He prepared for them in advance, (Eph 2:10,) and 4. that they should be glorified and have a place in His presence forever (II Cor 5:5, Rom 8:30) through faith in the shed blood and resurrection of Jesus.
I have no trouble at all, believing that God, who exists from eternity to eternity at once and sees all of time from beginning to end at a glance, knew who would respond to His call; knew who would repent and believe His gospel, and planned their lives accordingly.
His knowing did not force anyone’s decisions, and He is therefore just in holding each one accountable for the decisions he or she makes.
But whether we can agree that we each had complete free will in deciding, or that ultimately we had no choice because He had determined before hand who would be saved and who would not, this I will boldly declare to you...
...He is God! He is the potter, we are the clay. He is who He is, He will do as His will deems fit, and I have the promise of His word, right here in our text, that His will is determined by ‘kind intentions’ toward us.
And that’s a good enough explanation for me!
Before I pass on to the next point, let me share with you an illustration that you may have heard before, but that helped me a great deal in being at peace with this issue, and realizing that it really isn’t that complicated.
Someone said to me, “Picture yourself walking into Heaven, and as you approach the gate you look up. Over the entrance to Heaven is a sign that says ‘LET ALL WHO WILL, ENTER IN’. After you have passed through the gate, and your eyes are taking in all the splendors of the celestial realm, you turn and look back at the gate you’ve just come through, and there, over the top of it is a sign that says ‘CHOSEN BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD’.”
Paul has declared, following his blessing offered up to God the Father of our Lord, that He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the Heavenly places, ... and then the first blessing he lists for us is, “...he chose us in Him before the foundation of the world”.
So now let’s talk about
2. WHY HE CHOSE US
“...that we should be holy and blameless before Him.”
Now I am aware that some of your translations include the words ‘in love’ at the end of that sentence. Apparently some of the manuscripts do, where others end the sentence at Him and begin the next with ‘In love, ...etc”. I will just say that in my own understanding of the text, “In love...” seems to go better with the thought of verse 5, than as an ending to this sentence in verse 4.
But I also don’t think it’s a major issue. So you take it in the way that you are comfortable with, and we won’t spend more time there.
Some may have a much larger problem with this assertion of Paul’s that the reason He chose us was that we should be holy and blameless before Him.
Wow! If that’s what He expects as payment or gratitude for being chosen, then having been chosen may not be such a blessing after all. I mean, who can be holy and blameless? In fact, haven’t we all failed that little test even before we knew we were being tested?
That’s not fair!
Fortunately, it is also not true.
To take this phrase “...that we should be holy and blameless before Him”, and extract from that the thought that Paul is telling us this is how we should be trying to live in response to His choosing us, would be to violate the very doctrine of justification by faith only.
He chose us, because He wanted us to be holy and blameless.
In the second chapter of this epistle, verses 1 & 5, Paul mentions with no further explanation or apology that apart from Christ we were ‘dead in our transgressions’.
A study of the first three chapters of this same Apostle’s letter to the Romans also establishes that mankind is all under the sentence of death due to sin.
We were not and could not be, holy or blameless, ever, in all our attempts, even if we were vaguely interested in being holy and blameless, which the scripture says we were not.
Now these words, holy and blameless, can also be rendered ’sacred and without blemish’. Never could we have even begun to make ourselves that, to be acceptable and fit for God’s presence.
But there is ample evidence in all of Paul’s epistles, that it is God who, having chosen us, and called us, when we have responded by faith to that call, has then cleansed us and called us justified, (or right with Him), through Christ’s sacrifice.
Ephesians 1:7
“In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace.”
There are many other proof verses, but one from the book we’re studying should suffice.
God chose us before the foundation of the world, because He wanted us to be, not dead in trespasses and sins, but alive, and clean, and above reproach and set apart for Him, through the blood of His Son. “In Christ”.
And so that is what He made us.
So let’s talk about
3. WHAT HE PLANNED FOR HIS CHOSEN
Quite simply, He planned, or predestined us to be adopted into His eternal family, again, ‘through Jesus Christ’, to Himself.
Child of God, can you just for a moment lay aside the relationship you had with your earthly father; if you had a relationship at all? Whether good or bad, I want to ask you to make a conscious effort to separate any concept or misconception you may have about fatherhood or your history with your own father.
Next, I want you to pretend for a moment that the word “Father” applies only to God, and no one else; and I want you to see what kind of a Father HE is.
In Exodus 34 He proclaims to Moses:
“The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; “
To the Athenian philosophers on Mars Hill, Paul declared a God who desires fellowship with His creation:
“...He Himself gives to all life and breath and all things; and He made from one, every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist...”
And we know from II Peter 3:9 that God’s seeming slowness in keeping His promise to return, is because He is not wishing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance.
He wants our company.
More than that; He wants to lavish the riches of His grace on us. He wants us to be heirs and joint-heirs with Christ.
“IN LOVE He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself”
Can you see there why I believe the words “In love” belong to verse 5?
People of God, it is the sin nature, still in rebellion against God and His will, that insists upon seeing Him as cold, and unkind, and stern and ungracious and impatient and angry.
This is the image that has been painted of God in many ways, for us and by us. Some of us learned it in Sunday School; some of us learned it subconsciously by equating God with an evil earthly father; some of us think of God that way, because the people who represented God to us (pastors, Sunday school teachers, parents, other church leaders), were that way themselves!
Now, if you are a Christian ~ and by that I mean if you fit the Biblical definition of a Christian, as a person who has recognized their sin and their need for a Savior, and has understood that Jesus shed His blood and died to pay for your sins, then come bodily out of the grave and now lives to impart His life to you,...and has believed that He is coming back to take you to Heaven, .... if you are a Christian by those standards, then you must let His Holy Spirit and the teaching of the word convince you and change your mind forever about that false image. You must make a conscious effort to look at God as He reveals Himself throughout scripture...
...throughout scripture, that means from “In the beginning God...” to “Amen, come Lord Jesus”, and let Him show you that He is a gracious, compassionate, merciful, patient Heavenly Father, abounding in lovingkindness and goodness, and yearns;
...yearns... for you to be with Him!
“In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ TO HIMSELF”.
No wonder the Apostle Paul picked this as the first spiritual blessing to list for us.
We didn’t choose God. We chose sin and self. We chose the world, the flesh and the devil. We chose pride and rebellion and all sorts of evil. We chose death and hell.
But He chose us.
He chose us, knowing every sin we would ever commit, up to the last breath we take in this life. He chose us knowing these things even before He created us.
When He could have changed His mind and no one but Him ever would have known the difference....because there would have been no one to know except perhaps the angels...
When He could have altered the plan and determined that He would not give us the freedom to choose...
When He could have determined that He would create us and allow us to sin and then decree that we must strive in our own power to once again become holy and blameless before Him or suffer the consequences...
Instead, He chose us.
He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be the recipients of His lovingkindness and mercy, and to be made spotless and pure by the power of the blood of His only Son, and to be adopted through Him to Himself, into His Heavenly family.
Our Father, who art in Heaven, holy is Your name.
Let’s finish by discussing:
4. WHAT MADE HIM DO THIS
Well, we’ve really already been talking about that.
He did all of this, ‘...according to the kind intention of His will...”
I chose to word the fourth point the way I did, because it comes rather foreign to our minds to think of God being ‘made’ to do anything.
But you see, there are things God cannot do, and therefore He is held to certain things by His own character and nature and attributes.
God cannot lie. His own nature makes Him all truth and all truthful.
God cannot change. His eternal nature makes Him remain the same in the sense that change takes time and God transcends time. There is no time with Him.
God cannot deny Himself, and this attribute of His nature makes Him declare Himself to His creation. He declared Himself in nature, He declared Himself through the prophets and through His Law, He declared Himself through the feasts and the order of the ordinances, and finally, He declared Himself through His Son.
And Jesus Himself said, “I and the Father are one” and “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father”.
So what made Him choose us and predestine us and adopt us?
The kind intention of His will.
God is love. Despite the blackness of our sin and the fierceness of our rebellion, He remains, Love, and cannot change.
His will from the very beginning was to lavish upon us ~ pour out upon us in abundance ~ His grace.
I want you to observe once again that He freely bestowed this grace on us, in the Beloved, meaning ‘in Christ’.
Once again Paul returns to His basic and fundamental theme. All that we have all that we are, all that God has done to and for and in and through us, is IN CHRIST.
To the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in Christ, and according to the kind intention of His eternal, unchanging will, God our perfect Heavenly Father, chose us before the foundation of the world, to be his children; holy, and spotless, and perfectly acceptable to Him because Jesus paid the price, gave us life, and introduced us to Grace.
“Pardon for sin and a peace that endureth,
Thine own dear presence to cheer and to guide;
Strength for today, and bright hope for tomorrow;
Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside”
GREAT IS THY FAITHFULNESS!
