Chosen and Predestined
Ephesians 1:4-6
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Sermon Summary Predestination is a controversial topic nowadays, yet Paul sees no reason to shy away from it. In fact, he chooses this concept as the very first in a long list of God's amazing blessings toward His people. |
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Ephesians 1:4-6
even 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 for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
This past week, my wife did a deep clean of the basement. That meant bringing various bins of clothes upstairs and going through them to see what things could be worn. After she brought a bin up, she opened it, and, one by one, she took out the different items of clothing. She’d pull out a shirt, check the size of it, and then hold it up so Truman could see the style and color. Maybe it was a polo shirt, maybe it was a T-shirt. Maybe it was red or blue, and he could decide if he liked it or not.
My job is very similar to that. I open up the Bible and try to hold up the words and phrases so you can see what it says about this doctrine that we are considering today. I hold up each word and phrase so we may examine their meaning and see what God is trying to communicate. The only difference is that it doesn’t really matter if we like what we see or not. God’s Word is God’s Word, and it must have the rule over us.
I’m thankful for a congregation like ours, though. I am blessed that all of you love the Word and are willing to wrestle with the deep things of the Lord.
As we delve into the passage this morning, I hope that what you find is a great blessing and an accurate display of what the Lord has set forth for us.
If you were here last week, you may remember that we emphasized Paul’s excitement. I said that this passage, in a variety of ways, expressed an energetic spirit. Paul had become so high on thinking about God that he burst forth in this exuberant exaltation of God.
We looked last week at verse 3, and we noted that Paul began to lift praise to God for all the blessings that we enjoy. In our verse this morning, he begins to enumerate specific blessings that we enjoy, and what we find is that in these following verses, he lays out blessings that span all of history. They go from eternity past, into the present, and all the way into the infinite regions of the future.
In the verses before us this morning, we see that Paul begins by going back to the very beginning. He praises God for our salvation, and as he does so he speaks of that moment in which our salvation was first conceived in the mind of God. He speaks of our election. As our verse says, “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” Paul then reiterates the idea in verse 5 by saying that we were predestined for adoption.
It is interesting to note that one of the foremost blessings that so enthralls the Apostle Paul is one of the doctrines that we might be said to be one of the most controversial doctrines. The doctrine of election - the doctrine of predestination - does tend to get a lot of people exercised.
I like the comment made by Albert Barnes on this topic. I’d like to summarize his words on this passage. Barnes said that the doctrine of predestination and election are no doubt unpopular ones. He says, “There is no other doctrine that is as reproached or abused. There is no other doctrine that is more disbelieved or avoided. Many are unwilling to preach it or even find it in the Scriptures. Of those who would tolerate it, they often refrain from talking about it because it is thought to be foreboding and dark.”
However, Barnes goes on to say that this is not so with the Apostle Paul. Paul finds this doctrine to be the foundation of praise. It was the ground of his hope, and it is desirable for all Christians to meditate upon.
That is what we are going to do today. We are going to take a few moments to meditate on the doctrine of predestination. What we are going to do is simply examine this passage and think deeply about what God wants us to know about his choice of us. And I hope that you will find it to be a real ground of hope. I hope that you find that there is nothing controversial or foreboding about it. Really, I hope that you will come to find that the doctrine of God’s election is a foundation for your own praise of God.
Well, what can we say about God’s choice? I believe there are four things we can say about it from this passage. The first thing we can say is that God’s choice is a sovereign choice.
I. It is a sovereign choice
That is to say, it is God and God alone who chooses. This choice is purely God’s and there is nothing and no one else to whom we can attribute his choice. There is nothing else that can be acknowledged to have any kind credit for or participation in God’s choice. It was solely by God’s sovereign determination.
To understand this, I’d like you to consider the word “predestined.” It’s found here in verse 5. “In love he predestined us for adoption.”
Our English word “predestined” means “to set one’s destiny beforehand.” It recognizes that your life is laid out in advance. Before you were born, the exact plan for every single one of your days was set down by God. Specifically, this verse is talking about your salvation. Paul is saying, “God has chosen you and determined beforehand that you would be redeemed by Christ.” It was, you may say, your destiny. Not by fate, nor by the robotic work of cause and effect. It was your destiny because of the direct will and determination of God.
That word “predestined” is a good word to use because it parallels the idea of the original language so well. The Greek word is proorizo, which literally means “to mark out the boundary beforehand.”
Think of the tribes of Israel as they were coming out of Egypt. They were on their way to the Promised Land. When they got to the Promised Land, they were going to claim their territory. But long before they got there, God had marked out the boundaries for each and every one of the tribes. Each family was assigned a specific territory, and the borders for each tribe was specifically laid down while they were in the wilderness. Long before their arrival, God had marked out the boundaries. They were predestined for certain pieces of land.
What is important to note about this boundary marking is that God did it. The Israelites didn’t have a say. He had it marked out and didn’t factor in where they might like to be. They didn’t get to petition God and say that they’d like a lakeside parcel or a mountainous region with a nice view. God did it all.
That’s what it means for God to predestine you to salvation. God marked out in advance how your life would go. He determined your time of birth. He chose your hair color. He chose how many hairs you would have. He determined where you would be educated. He determined if and who you would marry.
And most important of all, he determined where you would spend eternity. If you are one of his children, you need to recognize that long before you existed (long before time itself even existed), He chose to put you within the borders of salvation.
Now I belabor this point because it is one that people often have the most difficulty with. People don’t want to concede the fact that it was the Lord who made this choice without their participation. The typical view today is that God looked down the halls of history and saw that you would choose him and, based on that, he then chose you.
But you see what that means, don’t you? It means that God saw that I was in the boundaries, or would at least make the jump into the boundaries, and then he chose to set up the boundaries around me. It factors me into the process. It makes me the focus of the process. In this view, the choice of God is somehow dependent upon me and my choice.
But that idea of God choosing me because I was going to choose him is completely foreign to Scripture. There is nothing in Scripture that points to God having to get consent from us before choosing us. Rather, as we see here, Scripture sets forth the fact that the destinies of men are fully mapped out in advance. And each of us who are saved are saved not because of our choice or our interest in making that choice, but solely because God had foreordained it.
That’s the real beauty of his grace. That’s what makes us praise God. Because if you really understand yourself, you understand that God is to be praised. If, as we will learn in chapter 2, we are dead in our trespasses and sins, being unable and unwilling to have anything to do with God, then we’ll understand how gracious God was to have chosen us.
Not only is God’s choice a sovereign choice; it is also a selective choice.
II. It is a selective choice
That is to say, it is a choice that selects some as opposed to others.
In verse 4, Paul says, “He chose us in him.” The word “chose” is the Greek word eklegomai. It means “to choose out from many options.” The idea is that there are various options, and you pick particular ones out from the whole assortment that is before you.
It’s like going to the ice cream shop. You have 31 flavors from which to choose. When you go there, you don’t take them all. You select one or two, maybe three at the most, but there are many flavors that you do not choose. There are certain ones you don’t want. There are some that you decide to pass over.
This is the word that is used of Jesus choosing his disciples. Out of all the vast number of Jews who were living in Galilee and Judea, he only chose twelve young men. He selected some fishermen, a tax collector, and a number of other specific guys, and he passed over all the rest.
This is the same word that is used in the Septuagint when it records what David did prior to his confrontation with Goliath. We are told that David went down a riverbed and chose (eklegomai-ed) five smooth stones. Out of all the rocks that lay in that riverbed, he made a specific selection. There were particular stones that he chose and there were many that he didn’t choose.
This is the word that describes how God chose his people. Out of all of the vast humanity, out of all the sinners that ever existed, out of all the irreligious people that had fallen in Adam, the Lord made a choice concerning whom he would save. He selected a particular number of people and he chose to pass over the others.
And that’s what’s so stunning about God’s grace: it means he chose me as opposed to someone else. He gave me the gift of his grace, but he didn’t give that gift to Joe Schmoe down the street. He chose to save you and he chose not to save some other guy.
Let me tell you there were probably a million other better options that he could have gone with. And there were probably a million more that were at least just as good. Yet out of the whole batch, he chose to set his affection on this vile sinner.
And the thing that will boggle our minds for all eternity is that he did. We will spend all our live long life asking, “Why me? Why not someone else?”
“Why was I made to hear Thy voice,
And enter while there's room,
When thousands make a wretched choice,
And rather starve than come?
While all our hearts and all our songs
Join to admire the feast,
Each of us cry, with thankful tongues,
‘Lord, why was I a guest?’”
That will be a riddle that will continually puzzle us for all time. But it will also be that which leads us to praise God because we know that we didn’t deserve it. Because we know that he could have done otherwise. We are going to be utterly humbled by the fact that he chose us.
The third thing we can say about God’s choice is that it is also a saving choice.
III. It is a saving choice
By this I mean that God chooses not groups of people (like nations), nor does he choose them simply for certain tasks, but he chooses specific individuals who will be brought out of the domain of His wrath and curse and into the realm of eternal life through His Son.
Verse 4 says that he chose us “in Christ.” This is one of those phrases that is going to be repeated over and over throughout this chapter. You’ll find it throughout Paul’s epistles, but here in this one chapter he uses it no less than ten times.
This phrase speaks of our union with Christ. It reminds us that we share in all the benefits of salvation because we have this special relationship with him.
Remember that at one time you were not in Christ. You were in Adam. Adam acted as our representative at the beginning of creation. He was alive there in the garden, and God gave him a command not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But he violated that command, and in doing so, he fell into sin. He became corrupt and he was sentenced to die.
But he was not acting just for himself. He was acting for all his posterity as well. He represented all men. So, by his disobedience, he plunged all humanity into sin and death. All men are born in sin and all men die; not because they get old, not because they are in poor health, not because of a freak accident. No, men die because they are guilty of having broken God’s covenant in Adam.
But Christ served as the Second Adam; he came to earth because he was appointed to be the representative of his people. He was the one who obeyed God fully and fulfilled all the demands of God’s covenant. And as a result of that obedience, he brings life to his people, to all those who are united to him. No one who is in Christ (that is to say, who has Christ as his head) can be condemned. If they are united to Christ, they are united to his obedience, and God cannot condemn them.
That’s what it means to be in Christ. It is to be united to Christ as our head and representative.
Paul says here that you were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. He is saying that our union with Christ was predestined. There was a union effected in eternity past. We become united to him experientially at that moment when we hear the gospel and our soul is made alive, but legally, we were bound to him before time began.
Think here about the kind of interaction that occurred between the Father and the Son. There had to have been an inter-trinitarian conversation that transpired. There was a commitment made between the Father and the Son. The Father says, “This is my plan. I wish to save my people from death and hell.” And the Son responds and says, “I will do this. I will go and be their representative.” The Father then interjects, “But it will cost you your life. If you will pay their debts, you must pay it in full. I will not spare my wrath.” The Son replies by saying, “So let it be. I will suffer it all. If they would be redeemed, let it be by my own blood.”
There before time a compact was made: a covenant of redemption. It was an inter-trinitarian covenant between the Father and the Son in which the Son willingly pledged to represent those whom the Father had chosen, and in doing so, he pledged his dying breath.
He chose us. It was a sovereign choice, it was a selective choice, and it was a saving choice. We might also describe it as a successful choice.
IV. It is a successful choice
What I mean is that God achieves every purpose he intended in making this choice. So God never loses. He never falls short of his objectives. His plan of election always accomplishes everything he had intended by it.
You may notice that our passage lists three things that God seeks to achieve by way of his election of us. The first is that we would be holy. Verse 4 says that he chose us in him before the foundation of the world “that we should be holy and blameless before him.”
This reminds us that God didn’t just plan to save us from something, but he saved us to something. He didn’t just give us a “get-out-of-hell-free” card so that we could go on living like a heathen. He saved us so that we would become like him, so that we would move farther and farther away from sin and become more and more holy.
There are a lot of people who confuse the doctrine of predestination with a libertine spirit. They will say that since God has saved us, all is done. Our salvation is fixed in the heavens and no one can change it, and therefore it doesn’t matter what we do now.
This is entirely untrue. God’s election does not negate our effort. It is the very thing that solidifies it and gives rise to it. If you truly have been predestined before time, you will be so inspired by the thought that you will make it your goal to overcome sin and temptation. And you will be successful in it because that was his plan from the very beginning.
The second thing that is achieved by God’s choice is your adoption. Verse 5 tells us that “he has predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.”
It is interesting to note here that predestination is often thought of as a doctrine that is esoteric and theoretical. It is sometimes characterized as is dry or cold. People look at it as dark.
But there could not be anything further from the truth. The doctrine of predestination is by nature relational. It has to do with the most intimate and beautiful relationship that could ever be experienced: knowing God as our Father.
God’s whole purpose in election is that we might come to be his sons and daughters. It is so that we can call out to him in prayer and know that he will listen to us. It is so that we might have the assurance that he is ever watching out for us and is truly concerned for our well-being. We were predestined so that we can have the assurance that he will one day take us home to be with him so that we can dwell in his house forever.
There are some people who might joke about those who believe in predestination and say that they are the “frozen chosen.” But such a notion is absurd, biblically speaking. There is no greater warmth that you can experience than knowing that from all eternity God intended you to be a part of his family. His aim since the world began was to be your Father and give you all the rights and privileges that are afforded to you as one who has been brought into the household of God.
God’s choice is successful. By it we become holy and blameless, by it we become adopted sons and daughters, and by it we also become a megaphone for God’s greater praise and glory.
Here in verse 6, you see that all of this only serves to bring about “the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”
What is Paul saying here? He’s saying that God receives even greater honor and distinction because he has made this choice to save a people unto himself. There is a heightened glory that comes to him as a result of his election.
You might even say that there would be an element of God’s character that would not have been magnified had God not chosen to save some of the sinners of this world. God’s gracious character would have gone completely unnoticed if election had not occurred.
His justice would have been served. If he were to judge us all and sweep all of mankind into hell, that would have been perfectly fair and just. But no one would know just how compassionate he is. No one would know how gracious and kind he is.
And so, to magnify himself all that much more and let the world know how vast and deep his grace is, he made a plan to save some of that deplorable bunch that fell into sin. Not one person deserved it, not one person was owed it. You and I are blessed because He chose to withhold his anger. You and I are blessed because he chose to direct his wrath at his Beloved, His Son, Jesus, rather than at us.
And so the world will eternally resound with praise to his glorious grace. He has been successful in magnifying his name.
The Apostle Paul has much, much more to say about the doctrine of election. When it comes to God’s decree and what happens in his eternal counsel, there is much more that could be said and will be said in this epistle. But understand by what is said in these three verses that the doctrine of election is not by any means a woeful thing. It is a doctrine that is absolutely amazing to consider. If we can understand it like the Apostle Paul did, it will be for us a foundation of praise.
even 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 for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
This past week, my wife did a deep clean of the basement. That meant bringing various bins of clothes upstairs and going through them to see what things could be worn. After she brought a bin up, she opened it, and, one by one, she took out the different items of clothing. She’d pull out a shirt, check the size of it, and then hold it up so Truman could see the style and color. Maybe it was a polo shirt, maybe it was a T-shirt. Maybe it was red or blue, and he could decide if he liked it or not.
My job is very similar to that. I open up the Bible and try to hold up the words and phrases so you can see what it says about this doctrine that we are considering today. I hold up each word and phrase so we may examine their meaning and see what God is trying to communicate. The only difference is that it doesn’t really matter if we like what we see or not. God’s Word is God’s Word, and it must have the rule over us.
I’m thankful for a congregation like ours, though. I am blessed that all of you love the Word and are willing to wrestle with the deep things of the Lord.
As we delve into the passage this morning, I hope that what you find is a great blessing and an accurate display of what the Lord has set forth for us.
If you were here last week, you may remember that we emphasized Paul’s excitement. I said that this passage, in a variety of ways, expressed an energetic spirit. Paul had become so high on thinking about God that he burst forth in this exuberant exaltation of God.
We looked last week at verse 3, and we noted that Paul began to lift praise to God for all the blessings that we enjoy. In our verse this morning, he begins to enumerate specific blessings that we enjoy, and what we find is that in these following verses, he lays out blessings that span all of history. They go from eternity past, into the present, and all the way into the infinite regions of the future.
In the verses before us this morning, we see that Paul begins by going back to the very beginning. He praises God for our salvation, and as he does so he speaks of that moment in which our salvation was first conceived in the mind of God. He speaks of our election. As our verse says, “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” Paul then reiterates the idea in verse 5 by saying that we were predestined for adoption.
It is interesting to note that one of the foremost blessings that so enthralls the Apostle Paul is one of the doctrines that we might be said to be one of the most controversial doctrines. The doctrine of election - the doctrine of predestination - does tend to get a lot of people exercised.
I like the comment made by Albert Barnes on this topic. I’d like to summarize his words on this passage. Barnes said that the doctrine of predestination and election are no doubt unpopular ones. He says, “There is no other doctrine that is as reproached or abused. There is no other doctrine that is more disbelieved or avoided. Many are unwilling to preach it or even find it in the Scriptures. Of those who would tolerate it, they often refrain from talking about it because it is thought to be foreboding and dark.”
However, Barnes goes on to say that this is not so with the Apostle Paul. Paul finds this doctrine to be the foundation of praise. It was the ground of his hope, and it is desirable for all Christians to meditate upon.
That is what we are going to do today. We are going to take a few moments to meditate on the doctrine of predestination. What we are going to do is simply examine this passage and think deeply about what God wants us to know about his choice of us. And I hope that you will find it to be a real ground of hope. I hope that you find that there is nothing controversial or foreboding about it. Really, I hope that you will come to find that the doctrine of God’s election is a foundation for your own praise of God.
Well, what can we say about God’s choice? I believe there are four things we can say about it from this passage. The first thing we can say is that God’s choice is a sovereign choice.
I. It is a sovereign choice
That is to say, it is God and God alone who chooses. This choice is purely God’s and there is nothing and no one else to whom we can attribute his choice. There is nothing else that can be acknowledged to have any kind credit for or participation in God’s choice. It was solely by God’s sovereign determination.
To understand this, I’d like you to consider the word “predestined.” It’s found here in verse 5. “In love he predestined us for adoption.”
Our English word “predestined” means “to set one’s destiny beforehand.” It recognizes that your life is laid out in advance. Before you were born, the exact plan for every single one of your days was set down by God. Specifically, this verse is talking about your salvation. Paul is saying, “God has chosen you and determined beforehand that you would be redeemed by Christ.” It was, you may say, your destiny. Not by fate, nor by the robotic work of cause and effect. It was your destiny because of the direct will and determination of God.
That word “predestined” is a good word to use because it parallels the idea of the original language so well. The Greek word is proorizo, which literally means “to mark out the boundary beforehand.”
Think of the tribes of Israel as they were coming out of Egypt. They were on their way to the Promised Land. When they got to the Promised Land, they were going to claim their territory. But long before they got there, God had marked out the boundaries for each and every one of the tribes. Each family was assigned a specific territory, and the borders for each tribe was specifically laid down while they were in the wilderness. Long before their arrival, God had marked out the boundaries. They were predestined for certain pieces of land.
What is important to note about this boundary marking is that God did it. The Israelites didn’t have a say. He had it marked out and didn’t factor in where they might like to be. They didn’t get to petition God and say that they’d like a lakeside parcel or a mountainous region with a nice view. God did it all.
That’s what it means for God to predestine you to salvation. God marked out in advance how your life would go. He determined your time of birth. He chose your hair color. He chose how many hairs you would have. He determined where you would be educated. He determined if and who you would marry.
And most important of all, he determined where you would spend eternity. If you are one of his children, you need to recognize that long before you existed (long before time itself even existed), He chose to put you within the borders of salvation.
Now I belabor this point because it is one that people often have the most difficulty with. People don’t want to concede the fact that it was the Lord who made this choice without their participation. The typical view today is that God looked down the halls of history and saw that you would choose him and, based on that, he then chose you.
But you see what that means, don’t you? It means that God saw that I was in the boundaries, or would at least make the jump into the boundaries, and then he chose to set up the boundaries around me. It factors me into the process. It makes me the focus of the process. In this view, the choice of God is somehow dependent upon me and my choice.
But that idea of God choosing me because I was going to choose him is completely foreign to Scripture. There is nothing in Scripture that points to God having to get consent from us before choosing us. Rather, as we see here, Scripture sets forth the fact that the destinies of men are fully mapped out in advance. And each of us who are saved are saved not because of our choice or our interest in making that choice, but solely because God had foreordained it.
That’s the real beauty of his grace. That’s what makes us praise God. Because if you really understand yourself, you understand that God is to be praised. If, as we will learn in chapter 2, we are dead in our trespasses and sins, being unable and unwilling to have anything to do with God, then we’ll understand how gracious God was to have chosen us.
Not only is God’s choice a sovereign choice; it is also a selective choice.
II. It is a selective choice
That is to say, it is a choice that selects some as opposed to others.
In verse 4, Paul says, “He chose us in him.” The word “chose” is the Greek word eklegomai. It means “to choose out from many options.” The idea is that there are various options, and you pick particular ones out from the whole assortment that is before you.
It’s like going to the ice cream shop. You have 31 flavors from which to choose. When you go there, you don’t take them all. You select one or two, maybe three at the most, but there are many flavors that you do not choose. There are certain ones you don’t want. There are some that you decide to pass over.
This is the word that is used of Jesus choosing his disciples. Out of all the vast number of Jews who were living in Galilee and Judea, he only chose twelve young men. He selected some fishermen, a tax collector, and a number of other specific guys, and he passed over all the rest.
This is the same word that is used in the Septuagint when it records what David did prior to his confrontation with Goliath. We are told that David went down a riverbed and chose (eklegomai-ed) five smooth stones. Out of all the rocks that lay in that riverbed, he made a specific selection. There were particular stones that he chose and there were many that he didn’t choose.
This is the word that describes how God chose his people. Out of all of the vast humanity, out of all the sinners that ever existed, out of all the irreligious people that had fallen in Adam, the Lord made a choice concerning whom he would save. He selected a particular number of people and he chose to pass over the others.
And that’s what’s so stunning about God’s grace: it means he chose me as opposed to someone else. He gave me the gift of his grace, but he didn’t give that gift to Joe Schmoe down the street. He chose to save you and he chose not to save some other guy.
Let me tell you there were probably a million other better options that he could have gone with. And there were probably a million more that were at least just as good. Yet out of the whole batch, he chose to set his affection on this vile sinner.
And the thing that will boggle our minds for all eternity is that he did. We will spend all our live long life asking, “Why me? Why not someone else?”
“Why was I made to hear Thy voice,
And enter while there's room,
When thousands make a wretched choice,
And rather starve than come?
While all our hearts and all our songs
Join to admire the feast,
Each of us cry, with thankful tongues,
‘Lord, why was I a guest?’”
That will be a riddle that will continually puzzle us for all time. But it will also be that which leads us to praise God because we know that we didn’t deserve it. Because we know that he could have done otherwise. We are going to be utterly humbled by the fact that he chose us.
The third thing we can say about God’s choice is that it is also a saving choice.
III. It is a saving choice
By this I mean that God chooses not groups of people (like nations), nor does he choose them simply for certain tasks, but he chooses specific individuals who will be brought out of the domain of His wrath and curse and into the realm of eternal life through His Son.
Verse 4 says that he chose us “in Christ.” This is one of those phrases that is going to be repeated over and over throughout this chapter. You’ll find it throughout Paul’s epistles, but here in this one chapter he uses it no less than ten times.
This phrase speaks of our union with Christ. It reminds us that we share in all the benefits of salvation because we have this special relationship with him.
Remember that at one time you were not in Christ. You were in Adam. Adam acted as our representative at the beginning of creation. He was alive there in the garden, and God gave him a command not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But he violated that command, and in doing so, he fell into sin. He became corrupt and he was sentenced to die.
But he was not acting just for himself. He was acting for all his posterity as well. He represented all men. So, by his disobedience, he plunged all humanity into sin and death. All men are born in sin and all men die; not because they get old, not because they are in poor health, not because of a freak accident. No, men die because they are guilty of having broken God’s covenant in Adam.
But Christ served as the Second Adam; he came to earth because he was appointed to be the representative of his people. He was the one who obeyed God fully and fulfilled all the demands of God’s covenant. And as a result of that obedience, he brings life to his people, to all those who are united to him. No one who is in Christ (that is to say, who has Christ as his head) can be condemned. If they are united to Christ, they are united to his obedience, and God cannot condemn them.
That’s what it means to be in Christ. It is to be united to Christ as our head and representative.
Paul says here that you were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world. He is saying that our union with Christ was predestined. There was a union effected in eternity past. We become united to him experientially at that moment when we hear the gospel and our soul is made alive, but legally, we were bound to him before time began.
Think here about the kind of interaction that occurred between the Father and the Son. There had to have been an inter-trinitarian conversation that transpired. There was a commitment made between the Father and the Son. The Father says, “This is my plan. I wish to save my people from death and hell.” And the Son responds and says, “I will do this. I will go and be their representative.” The Father then interjects, “But it will cost you your life. If you will pay their debts, you must pay it in full. I will not spare my wrath.” The Son replies by saying, “So let it be. I will suffer it all. If they would be redeemed, let it be by my own blood.”
There before time a compact was made: a covenant of redemption. It was an inter-trinitarian covenant between the Father and the Son in which the Son willingly pledged to represent those whom the Father had chosen, and in doing so, he pledged his dying breath.
He chose us. It was a sovereign choice, it was a selective choice, and it was a saving choice. We might also describe it as a successful choice.
IV. It is a successful choice
What I mean is that God achieves every purpose he intended in making this choice. So God never loses. He never falls short of his objectives. His plan of election always accomplishes everything he had intended by it.
You may notice that our passage lists three things that God seeks to achieve by way of his election of us. The first is that we would be holy. Verse 4 says that he chose us in him before the foundation of the world “that we should be holy and blameless before him.”
This reminds us that God didn’t just plan to save us from something, but he saved us to something. He didn’t just give us a “get-out-of-hell-free” card so that we could go on living like a heathen. He saved us so that we would become like him, so that we would move farther and farther away from sin and become more and more holy.
There are a lot of people who confuse the doctrine of predestination with a libertine spirit. They will say that since God has saved us, all is done. Our salvation is fixed in the heavens and no one can change it, and therefore it doesn’t matter what we do now.
This is entirely untrue. God’s election does not negate our effort. It is the very thing that solidifies it and gives rise to it. If you truly have been predestined before time, you will be so inspired by the thought that you will make it your goal to overcome sin and temptation. And you will be successful in it because that was his plan from the very beginning.
The second thing that is achieved by God’s choice is your adoption. Verse 5 tells us that “he has predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.”
It is interesting to note here that predestination is often thought of as a doctrine that is esoteric and theoretical. It is sometimes characterized as is dry or cold. People look at it as dark.
But there could not be anything further from the truth. The doctrine of predestination is by nature relational. It has to do with the most intimate and beautiful relationship that could ever be experienced: knowing God as our Father.
God’s whole purpose in election is that we might come to be his sons and daughters. It is so that we can call out to him in prayer and know that he will listen to us. It is so that we might have the assurance that he is ever watching out for us and is truly concerned for our well-being. We were predestined so that we can have the assurance that he will one day take us home to be with him so that we can dwell in his house forever.
There are some people who might joke about those who believe in predestination and say that they are the “frozen chosen.” But such a notion is absurd, biblically speaking. There is no greater warmth that you can experience than knowing that from all eternity God intended you to be a part of his family. His aim since the world began was to be your Father and give you all the rights and privileges that are afforded to you as one who has been brought into the household of God.
God’s choice is successful. By it we become holy and blameless, by it we become adopted sons and daughters, and by it we also become a megaphone for God’s greater praise and glory.
Here in verse 6, you see that all of this only serves to bring about “the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”
What is Paul saying here? He’s saying that God receives even greater honor and distinction because he has made this choice to save a people unto himself. There is a heightened glory that comes to him as a result of his election.
You might even say that there would be an element of God’s character that would not have been magnified had God not chosen to save some of the sinners of this world. God’s gracious character would have gone completely unnoticed if election had not occurred.
His justice would have been served. If he were to judge us all and sweep all of mankind into hell, that would have been perfectly fair and just. But no one would know just how compassionate he is. No one would know how gracious and kind he is.
And so, to magnify himself all that much more and let the world know how vast and deep his grace is, he made a plan to save some of that deplorable bunch that fell into sin. Not one person deserved it, not one person was owed it. You and I are blessed because He chose to withhold his anger. You and I are blessed because he chose to direct his wrath at his Beloved, His Son, Jesus, rather than at us.
And so the world will eternally resound with praise to his glorious grace. He has been successful in magnifying his name.
The Apostle Paul has much, much more to say about the doctrine of election. When it comes to God’s decree and what happens in his eternal counsel, there is much more that could be said and will be said in this epistle. But understand by what is said in these three verses that the doctrine of election is not by any means a woeful thing. It is a doctrine that is absolutely amazing to consider. If we can understand it like the Apostle Paul did, it will be for us a foundation of praise.