In Love, Eph, 1:4-6
Ephesians 1:4-6 · Vern Peterman · Feb 1, 2004
Ephesians & Colossians, No. 06
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826232435169

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

Good morning. We're, of course, going to be looking at Ephesians chapter 1, continuing on from what we began last week in verse 3 and through verses 4 through 6. Now, I understand today is one of those days when a lot of you are going to be distracted. The Super Bowl thing tends to get everybody's mind sort of lurching ahead. I'd like you to focus with me. I understand this distraction thing. I'm thinking of the Super Bowl II, okay? So don't worry about it.

But we want to focus on this passage here. So this is Ephesians 1, 4 through 6. And as we look at this passage, boy, I got more and more excited the more I looked at this thing. There's just wonderful things in here. So let's go ahead and move into the passage there.

One of the key perspectives to keep in mind is the verse we looked at last week. that what he has done is to introduce with verse 3 that we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus, in the heavenly places. And what he has begun to do then, as we move into the next verses, is he has begun to enumerate what are those blessings. How have we been blessed?

He's explaining them. And as we brought out before, verses 3 through 14 are all one sentence. his pen has gone into turbo mode as he has begun to lay these things out. Now, there are some hot words and hot phrases in here that we want to look at first. He chose us. He predestined us. His will. These are hot words because they are words that come out of what has become an historic conflict. It goes like this.

This tug of war, if you will, began about four centuries ago These theological minds came up with this conflict, what is called the Senate of Dort. And it was the Calvinists versus the Armenians was the tug of war. This particular tug of war was supervised, if you will, by the Dutch government at the time. There were government monitors over what was taking place as these theological minds interacted.

And I'll just preface this thing. If this whole thing between the Calvinists and Arminians is lost on you, don't worry about it. If it's a concern of yours, that's why I'll take a few minutes to address it. First, let's look at the Calvinists, typified by the TULIP, the TULIP standing for the acronym of kind of their five points of doctrine.

Some of those would be that God sovereignly chose who would be saved and who would be lost. Those who would be saved are called the elect. The idea of hardline Calvinism or extreme Calvinism is that Christ died only for those who are God's elect. He didn't die, according to the teaching, for those who are not God's elect. And another teaching that is commonly associated with this is that God first brings the elect who are spiritually dead. I mean, their teaching is out on a slab, cold, dead.

He first brings them to life, then gives them faith as a gift. That's the logical consequence of this approach. Now, you have on the other end of the tug-of-war rope the Armenians. I symbolize them with a banana peel. And the reason is because the Armenians commonly teach that you can lose your salvation. The will of each human being is the pivotal point in salvation for the Armenians. and a person can lose his or her salvation as a matter of will. There are teachings that go along with each of those. We won't take the time to go into them all, but that's the brief introduction. Now, the question is, how did these turn out?

Several of those at the Synod of Dort who followed the Arminian teaching were imprisoned. One or two were whipped. One was sentenced to life in prison, although his wife helped him escape. And another was beheaded as a result of this. Unfortunately, both sides, as time went on, continued the atrocities. I'm glad that we're not doing that today. It would be a rather rough time. But nonetheless, that was how they reacted and dealt with one another.

Both the Calvinists and the Arminians initially, for some decades to follow, abused one another horribly. and pointed the fingers. Now the finger pointing is what continues in the name calling. Among the various Arminian groups, the groups who tend to hold the Arminian end of the tug-of-war rope, Wesleyans, Methodists, Nazarenes, Free Will Baptists, and you can add to that a lot of the Pentecostal groups are of the Arminian persuasion. The Calvinists, on the other hand, tend to be now of the Reformed Presbyterian. Calvinistic Methodists, we don't hear much of them because they're largely in England. and some Baptist groups, and they may run into a few others. Then there are those who try to combine them and call themselves Calvinians and Arminianists and things of that sort. We won't go into that. But I think the bottom line is, if you look at this, there's a problem here. Now, some people know how to recognize danger when they see it.

Let's look at both ends of the rope. were developed in the midst of the rise of humanism in Western Europe. Humanism was on the rise and a concept of the universe that described the universe as a large machine. God had simply set a machine in order so everything was predetermined by God.

The other thing is that each of these views require extending human logic beyond what Scripture directly reveals. They are an exercise in human philosophy rather than biblical exegesis, biblical interpretation. And the next step of that, they each base some of their teaching on adding to or setting aside what is revealed in Scripture. Why? Because each of them are a philosophical end of the rope, pulling one from the other, rather than asking the question, what does Scripture say?

I want to give you some observations here. Scripture does reveal truths that we couldn't know if God didn't Himself take the initiative to reveal those truths. Isn't that why we have Scripture? We have Scripture because we couldn't know what is taught in Scripture if God didn't tell us. That's why we have it. We need to know what's in Scripture.

The flip side of that, though, He is not obligated to answer every question we might ask. And in truth, He does not. Scripture itself even says that there are things that we're not told. Remember, as we went through Revelation, at one point John was ready to write, and he was told, don't record that. Isn't that interesting? It is also true that Scripture is not, in every respect, going to be guaranteed to be understandable by us.

Case in point, the Trinity. We are accustomed to thinking of one person, one essence. When we come to three persons, one essence, the human mind begins to blow circuits. When we insist that something be reduced to the point where we understand it, we run a risk of two different kinds of violations. One is we start to do damage to the truth that has been revealed, The other is we start saying something is true, and it may in fact not be true at all. Those are the dual risks of insisting that Scripture be reduced to something that is understandable. Now, some people recognize a problem when they see it, okay? And we want to do that here.

The bottom line is, you see in Ephesians 1, 3 through 6, There are those hot-button words of choosing and predestined and His will, but do you notice, what is God doing? He is not giving us some fearful, ominous, bad news. He's telling us how we're blessed. Is that the place for me to begin giving people a bunch of bad news of telling them, you don't have any choice? Of telling them these other people are deliberately sent to hell to burn forever because God chose that? What kind of good news is that? That's not the context that we get here.

The context is, this is how we are blessed. This is how we are blessed. He is beginning to tell us how we're blessed. And as we see through the rest of this, we're going to see in the rest of verses, all the way through 14, how the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are involved in blessing us.

That's what this passage is about. Not ominous decisions by God that condemn masses of humanity. Now, as we look into this, we look at this, He chose us. We see this phrase jumping out at us here. And this key phrase comes this way. The He is God the Father, because that comes out of the context. 1-3 in Ephesians.

This word chosen, this ek-lego, it's a compound word again. Paul loves those compound words, you notice that? And that ek-lego isn't this thing, those little plastic toys that you see with multicolored that you give to the kids. No, instead this is ek means out of, so ek-lego means called out of.

So you say, that's great, out of what? And the point being, we get multiple messages in scripture that the Lord has called us out of the world. We see this where the Lord is speaking to the disciples. He says, you're not of the world, but I chose you out of the world. Cosmos.

Or, here's Paul writing to the church at Corinth, 1 Corinthians 1.27 and 28, three times he says, God has chosen you, basically, out of the world. Three times.

The other point that we made last week and we've made before is we are chosen in Him, that is, in Christ. He's reiterating that. We brought up the point before that in Christ is spoken of in the first chapter of Ephesians. In Christ, in Him, in whom, and in the Beloved, multiple times over.

That is a statement of our position in Christ. This is where our blessings are located. It's not because of what we do. It's not because of the place we're sitting right now. We are blessed in Christ. That's where all the blessings are to be found. No exceptions. They're all to be found in Christ in the heavenly places. And that's good news. It's untouchable in the heavenlies.

The next thing that we see is before the foundation of the world. I saw this phrase and I thought, boy, this is really amazing. This word foundation is katabalo. That word ballos, again a compound word, ballos, where we got our word ball, and this word that's translated foundation, it's the throwing down of the world, the casting down of the world. Now, we don't control the universe, do we? Human beings don't control the universe.

Here's a cultural insight. As I saw this, this just really jumped out at me. The people of Ephesus, and frankly, much of the Roman Empire, had been steeped in this idea that their fate was determined by the stars, and the appeal was to Artemis to intervene and to guide and direct in how the stars controlled your life, and to look to Artemis to give you insight and understanding into how that happened. We brought up before, here's Artemis with the signs of the zodiac about her neck as a necklace. And we see them now, same ones that you see printed in our modern era. Now, here's what's amazing.

So Paul says that the saints had been called out and chosen before the foundation of the world. That completely headed off at the past, completely cut off the whole astrological concept of control. Why? God chose you before the stars were even created. Astrology goes down the tubes. The people who read this, they said, you mean before the stars that we've been worried about since the day we were born? The stars that we've been scared of for decades? Before that, God called us and chose us? Yes. That's marvelous good news. That's fantastic good news.

You see how they would have read that? They would have read that and gone, because they're completely free from these stars that control their lives. They were in dread fear of what the stars determined for them. Now, it's all cut off. Why? Because they're chosen before the stars even came about. That is wonderful news. The stars are made powerless. Look at what we were chosen for. that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love. I saw this and I just got really excited. Let me show you why.

This phrase, holy and blameless, in fact, this whole verse frequently, I looked through all the commentaries I could find and I never saw anybody that picked this out. Would be holy and blameless is a phrase that relates to the Jewish wedding ceremony. And how do I know that?

Look here, Ephesians 1-4, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, who? The Father. How were weddings established during the biblical era? All the way from the very earliest chapters in Genesis into the New Testament times? The Father would choose a bride. He chose us in Him, and look, that we would be holy and blameless before Him He's going to elaborate when he gets to Ephesians 5, verses 22-33, that he might present himself, the church, having no spot or wrinkle.

That's the negative statement. The positive statement, that she would be holy and blameless. Aha! There's the connection. The character holy and blameless is the character of the bride. The negative statement being without spot or wrinkle, but the positive statement being that she would be holy and blameless, you can see also in Colossians 1.22, and add this to your notes because it was added before the copy was made here, and 2 Corinthians 11.2 also makes reference to this idea of being presented and or being holy and blameless as a bride. Both of those are connected up.

So what is 1-4 looking at? 1-4 is basically, he is giving them good news about the stars being preempted. He's using an illustration of the marriage that is to take place to do it. Isn't that amazing? Now, let's look further here. Now, a lot of the scholars will argue back and forth about this little phrase, which one is it connected to? And in fact, you'll see the New American Standard connects it to the next verse.

I'm convinced that both by structure, and I talked with Hal about this and looked at it pretty carefully, both by structure and by one other thing, that we'd be holy and blameless in love, and the word is enagape, and that enagape That word form is either used as noun or verb four times in the Ephesians 5 passage that talks about marriage. The holy and blameless in love is connected up four times with marriage in Ephesians 5, 22 through 33. So further connection there between this choosing of the Father to be holy and blameless and God's ultimate and eternal intent for marriage. Again, what he's going to tell them in chapter 5 is that the marriage between a husband and wife is the living out of the eternal romance between Christ and the church.

And he's making an introduction in Ephesians 1.4.

Now, the thing to remember in this whole thing is that the Father is dealing with us entirely in unconditional love. It is all about our being presented holy and blameless before the Lord. It is our position. We have our position in Christ because of love. That is where the Lord has placed us. That is the Lord's intent in choosing us. Love is how it was carried out. Then we get into verse 5 and we see this word jump out as predestined.

This is the one that makes a lot of people just shiver and tremble. Do you mean I don't have any choice whether I crinkle my paper or not? That's not what it says. Let's look at what it does say. Here's this word predestined, proorizo, before declare, or as some would say, before ordain.

The idea here, he uses the same tense voice and mood as he's used with blessed. It's something that has happened in the past. and the focus is on God's action. You see what's stated here, and we'll see more about this in a minute, God is not making a statement that makes us mechanical robots. What is predestined is our position. We're predestined, not that we have no choice at all, and your next breath is absolutely determined by God in an eternity past, And that's a good thing. You're not going to slip out of it, folks. God's not going to go, whoops, lost another one.

Okay? Your position is predestined, and that's good. That's a good thing. Okay? That's great. That's wonderful good news. That's what predestination is all about. If that's what predestination is all about, I'm all for it. I like it. That's a good thing. choose to do, my position is predestined. I like that. Now, here's the really cool part. Predestined to what?

Adoption as sons. This is another compound word. It's huia synthesia. It means son position. I don't mean son the glowy thing. This is a position of being a son How could you have a better statement of our position in Christ than son position? Romans 8.15 and 23 and Galatians 4 and 5 also make reference to this exact same thing. Adoption as sons. Key that we understand that. The Roman law had the position of an adopted son as better than a natural-born son, and we'll see more about that in a minute. Because otherwise you think, what's he talking about adoption of sons? Why is that so great? Well, it's really good. Let me explain why. You were a full heir. It was irreversible. The adopted son was completely severed from any prior sonship. Why is that valuable?

Ephesians 2.2.5.6 and Colossians 3.6, remember we said these were parallel books, those three passages talk about sons of disobedience. That's what we were before we were in Christ. Therefore, being adopted meant that your prior position of being a son of disobedience, you were entirely cut off from.

Let's go over what this adoption of sons means. This is the way adoption of sons works under Roman law. By the way, the Jews didn't have an equivalent. This was only a Roman practice. The adopted son lost all association and rights under his old family and gained all the rights as if he were a fully legitimate son of his new family. This was a procedure that required a decision of a Roman magistrate or in some cases even the Roman Senate was involved. It was done before at least seven witnesses. You had to have seven witnesses. Only the father could do it and only a son could be adopted. Only a male could be adopted.

The next point, he became a complete heir to the new father's estate even if other natural-born sons came along. Irreversible. We've mentioned here before that a natural-born son, either up to the time of adulthood or a time of legal acceptance, could actually be abandoned legally. You could take an infant child or even a child into later in years take them out in the woods and leave them, and that was perfectly legal under Roman law. So being a natural-born son, it was possibly something you could lose the advantage of. An adopted son, you could not. So it was better to be adopted than to be a natural-born son. Now, the old life of the adopted son was completely wiped out.

Basically, he started a new life. Isn't that a good thing? A new life. including this, it didn't matter how much you owed as a son or how many people you owed it to, all your prior debts were completely wiped out as if you never had them. Eliminated. Isn't that cool? That's great news. So the adoption of sons means this debt that we have in our old life as sinners, it's all gone.

It is as if it never existed. Your history has changed. Now, the final thing, the adopted son was literally and absolutely the son of the new father. There was no exception, no getting out, no loopholes. It was tied in there permanently. This is a cool thing. This is a neat thing.

Now, what if you don't want to be a son? It might appeal to you in some respect and otherwise it might not. But think about it, what Scripture does is Scripture uses analogies like this to illustrate points. What we need to do rather than to look at that and say, well, I don't want to be a son, or I don't want to be adopted or something like that, gain the truth, learn the truth, apply it here and now, and otherwise don't worry about the analogy. Scripture says that we've been bought as slaves. We may not even care for slavery, okay? The point being, gather the truth from it, don't worry about the analogy, because the truth is presented to give us something to live by, and it's valid and it's valuable. Let's look at the next one. Here's another one of these hot word phrases again.

According to the kind intention of His will. Here's this His will. And notice that His will is conditioned. It's not by, here's God's will and it's some hard, harsh, cruel thing. Instead, what is it? It's the kind intention of His will. One of the things that Christians often struggle with is God's will. Have you noticed that? Oh, struggling to find God's will. Let's make God's will simple. It's three things. There's God's sovereign will. God's sovereign will for the believer is absolutely something that cannot be changed, and it's not something that can be reversed, and you can't fall out of it. God's sovereign will for you is your position.

That's the first part of God's will. The second part of God's will is God's moral will. That moral will of God is an area that is revealed in Scripture, and what Scripture describes We'll see later on in the last half of Ephesians where he says, don't be stealing from one another and no longer be drunk. That's God's moral will and the intent in God's moral will is not that you follow a set of rules. Here, those who are believers in the church age, God's intent is that God's moral will is fulfilled by the very life of Christ. The third part of God's will is God's individual will for each believer. which is based substantially on wisdom, not the yellow brick road, not trying to find the golden path or trying to find the right fork in the road.

That is rarely at issue. And if it is, God will make it clear and it won't be ambiguous. What he's spelling out here is the first one, isn't he? When he says, his will, he's spelling out the first of those. You are given your position. For every believer, that is your position. You are given your position. Every single believer, male, female, doesn't matter, you are given that position by God's sovereign will. You can't slip out of it. And that's good news. That's good news. So there's nothing mysterious about this. There's nothing ghostly. There's nothing foggy. what he has spelled out here.

Now, finally, to the praise of the glory of his grace which he freely bestowed on us and the beloved. What this is, is a pair of words that are related. Remember, as we went through Philippians, we kept bringing up the charis family of words. This is one of them. So he's used this word charis, and then freely bestowed, or in the King James Version, accepted his kerito.

It's grace. It's free, abundant grace, overflowing grace. Basically he's saying it's his grace wherein he has graced us. It's his grace wherein he has freely bestowed us. He has taken action based on who he is. He has taken action based on who he is. His character is that of grace. If you look at these words, these verbs that are built into these verses here, we've been chosen, we've been predestined, we've been adopted, we've been graced.

All these things are totally at His expense. They are all God's actions entirely. Why is He doing it? Not to give us some ominous He's not going to give us news about how things are locked into place and you have no choice and people are going to go to burn in hell because that's what God chose.

Instead, He is telling us, He's going to spend verses and verses and verses telling us how we've been blessed in the heavenly places. Blessed and blessed and blessed. Unfathomably blessed. All who believe and to the praise of His glory. And finally, and it's only finally in the verses we're looking at here, it's not finally for what he's writing. But finally in this section, in the Beloved. This word in the Beloved, Agapao is the word that's behind Beloved there. It's a part of the set of phrases that we've called attention to, or in Christ, in whom, in him, that keep showing up, particularly in the first chapter, but he's going to continue on through the book of Ephesians, highlighting this phrase, because that is where we are blessed. We are blessed in Christ, in him, in whom, in the Beloved. That's where our blessings are. Nowhere else entirely there. In Christ, in the heavenlies.

It's interesting, this same idea comes forth in Matthew 17, 5. It speaks of the relationship between the Father and the Son. And here, instead of Paul telling us about it, here you see, here's the Father speaking out. He says, This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him. This is the beloved.

This is the one who is beloved. the love we share with Him, the love we share with one another, is based upon the love relationship between the Father and the Son. And that's a neat thing as we continue to look at this phrase that has all these hot words in it. God chose you, you're predestined, God's will. All those hot words come out of a passage that are telling us it's out of kindness, kind intent, that is between God the Father and God the Son.

And our own response to the Lord, to love Him, is because He loved us first. That's what John says to us. We love Him because He first loved us. So these are not scary words. These are not words that lock us in and give us no room to move, words that put us in a prison of God's will. that shower us with blessings. There are words that shower us with His kind intent. There are words that shower us with His love and the relationship eternally between God the Father and God the Son that is love.

And that's what this focuses upon. As we look here at this passage, think about this. The entire passage that we've looked at so far, and we're going to see this approach continue as we go through it, Have you seen anything yet in here that you've got to do?

Remember, if there's anything in there you've got to do, you better go out here making sure you know what it is. Have you seen anything you've got to do? Have you seen anything to feel guilty about? Have you seen anything that you look at and you say, oh man, I sure wish I hadn't have done that. Have you seen anything that you have to do so that any of these blessings are hanging out in front of you? You don't see that, do you?

What you see instead, these are all actions that God has taken. These are all the actions that God has done. He has taken the initiative. He did the choosing. He did the blessing. He did the adopting. He did the predestining. All these things are things that God has done out of His grace, out of His character. It's grace and love. Nothing ominous, nothing scary, nothing that has you in handcuffs or straight jackets. It's all His accomplishment in marvelous grace.

I'm sorry, this verse leaves you with nothing left to do. I know you'll be disappointed. All you can do is praise Him. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Good wording. Eulogy. That's all you can do. There isn't anything left. I can't send you home with, boy, you ought to feel guilty about this. I can't send you home with, here's your list of things to do.

It's just grace overflowing. And we're not done. We've just started into this chapter. That's awesome, amazing grace. Isn't that neat? Isn't that wonderful stuff? And the pictures that he uses, the marriage picture, the adoption picture, all those are just such tremendous things. And folks, there's nothing we can do to deserve it. There's nothing we can do to lose it. I just think that's marvelous good news.

Lord, as we look at what you presented here, how awesome this is. No wonder, as Paul began to write this, his pen just couldn't write fast enough. He didn't know where to put a period in the sentence. It just went on and on. How marvelous your grace, Lord.

We have been blessed so immensely. And Lord, to have preempted all the things we worry about. We worry about whether we've done this or haven't done that. We even get horrified by the things that have happened to us. And yet, Lord, we look at this and before the foundations of the world, before anything was cast down, you chose us. You predestined that we would be holy and blameless before you. You predestined that we would be adopted as sons in the sense that we would be completely displaced from our prior life and prior identity and completely taking on who you've made us to be. Lord, this is such marvelous good news. Thank you. Thank you for your will. Thank you, Lord. And for eternity, the praises will not end. And that's a wonderful thing. We thank you for that in Jesus' name. Amen.