Ephesians - Lesson 4

Now, in verse 5, he's going to use a different word here, it's the word predestined. And it's the word, I think, that links back up in verse 4 to the verb to choose. So here's how I'm going to read the text.

He chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world, now I'm going to skip down to verse 5, and he predestined us. So let me just pause and say, I think there's a close relationship between election and predestination. I think with election, there's this flavor, though, of God's covenantal love that's attached to that word.

And then with predestination, that word could refer to God predestining events to take place that are not necessarily linked to covenantal love. So Paul says here, however, in the context of covenantal love, that we were likewise predestined. He says we're predestined for what purpose? Verse 5, we're predestined unto adoption.

And remember in verse 3, he's already said, in verse 2 as well, that God is our Father, verse 2. And then in verse 3, he says God is our Lord Jesus' Father. So notice that he also says we have these spiritual blessings from God in Christ. So we're part of God's family in Christ as Jews and Gentiles.

And one of those blessings includes verse 5, predestined for the purpose of adoption. Again, why am I a Christian? Yeah, I'm a Christian because on April the 22nd, 1996, I talked to my teammate and I asked my baseball teammate to ask his preacher father to please give me a call because I wanted to talk to him about the gospel. And his father gave me a call and I heard the gospel again.

And in that phone call, I called out with my, who became my pastor, to the Lord and asked him to save me from my sin. There was a whole process, however, leading up to that moment where I grew up in a Bible belt community. I ran out of Christians.

I had a Christian cousin who witnessed to me as a child. I had a Christian baseball coach who shared the gospel with me. Back in those days, you could do that without worrying about losing your job.

If you were a public school teacher, share the gospel with me, compel me to believe. I had a Christian friend who died tragically, and that was the climactic thing that God used to turn my heart. And the night she died, I was in a church with friends hearing for the first time in my life, John 3, 16 read to me from another teammate, and God used all of that to bring me to a moment on April the 22nd, 1996, where I gave my heart to Christ.

That is real. That was a personal decision. But here's what I learned a few years later.

The reason why all that happened in terms of my decision to follow Jesus is because God determined, predestined, that He wanted to redeem me and make me His child through Christ, verse 5. There are many brothers and sisters who disagree with predestination and election, but my reading of the text is this, is that the reason fundamentally I'm a Christian is because God chose me to be one before I had the ability to do so and before I was even born, and that He worked out the circumstances in my life wherein I heard the gospel, had real meaningful experiences, and the Spirit used the gospel to awaken my heart so that I decided that I wanted to make a personal decision and follow Jesus Christ. So practically here, let me just say a word here in terms of a practical application before we work our way throughout the rest of the verse, down to verse 6. A practical word here is that God's comprehensive sovereignty over everything, which Paul has already hinted at, but talking about the heavenly places, does not provide an excuse for us to avoid compelling people to make a decision to follow Jesus. So the way I think about election is, is that God's election unto salvation and predestination unto adoption guarantee that some from every tongue and tribe and people and nation will be saved.

So that He is not telling the disciples or us as Christians to go out into a world and try by ourselves to resurrect dead hearts. Instead, He is sending us out to go find His elect by throwing gospel seed everywhere we go to anyone who will listen, praying that God would convert the elect, Paul says in the pastorals, He suffers all things for the sake of the elect. So that for us then as Christians, election and predestination ought not to be excuses to avoid personal evangelism, but they ought to be motivations by which to compel people patiently, prayerfully, tearfully to believe in Christ.

Notice in verse 5, related again to predestination, that He predestined us for adoption, that we are adopted into God's family. This is a powerful imagery here, being included into someone's family in the ancient world gives the adopted child access, verse 2 and verse 3, to the father's inheritance. I have many friends who have adopted children.

I basically was adopted. My aunt, grandfather, and uncle, and a lot of cousins raised me and helped me in life. And although they legally didn't adopt me, they basically adopted me.

And as I look back upon that, I think of the profound sacrifices that were made by so many people to make sure that I had a shot at survival in this world. And even though I wasn't raised in a Christian home, I was raised by a lot of aunts and uncles and grandparents, cousins who love me deeply. And I think about their sacrifices and they moved me to tears.

And I had access to relationships, friendships, people who could help me get on the right path because I was adopted, in one sense, within the family. So Paul here is making this point about adoption, that God's choice of us determined that we would be adopted. We would be sons of God.

We would have access to the inheritance. And that adoption, notice it takes place, verse 5, we're predestined for adoption and we're predestined through Jesus Christ. How is God making us part of His family? Through Jesus.

So just notice His sovereign power here over the salvation experience, that God chose us in Christ, in love, before the foundation of the world. He predestined us to be His children through Jesus. Our identity, our fate, our future is forever linked with Jesus' future.

And what's His future? Exaltation, resurrection, reigning over the principalities and powers of the air. So by virtue of our being in Christ, chosen by God to be in Christ, predestined by God to be adopted in Christ, we are guaranteed to have the same experience eschatologically as Jesus. While we don't experience it in full right now, but only in part, but ultimately our destinies are secure so that even, not even death, not even death has the victory over those of us who are in Christ, who are adopted as His children.

Now notice, notice verse five, it's not so much here in verse five, it's a long sentence, by the way, I didn't say this earlier, but this is one long sentence from verse three down to verse 14. He says we were predestined for adoption through Jesus, the Messiah for Him. Now question as to whether he's talking about for Jesus or God is predestining us for Himself.

Think of it in terms of more of a reflexive idea. The I'm inclined at this point to take it, take it that God predestines us for adoption through Jesus for Himself. Because later Paul says in verse five that he did it according to the good pleasure of His will.

So, so why does God do it? Why does God choose us in Christ? What does God predestine us in Christ? Here's Paul's answer, because he wanted to and because he says in a moment it brings Him glory. Now let's just be honest about this question. What gives God the most glory? For me to make an independent decision, to create life in me, to awaken myself and to recognize I need and want Jesus? Or does God receive glory, honor by means of making a decision, taking the initiative, choosing me before I was even born, before the foundation of the world, and then placing me in the circumstances in which He placed me, working out the circumstances so that I would hear the gospel.

And then in a moment's time, it seemed, in history, I respond to it and everything of my existence changed forever. And everybody who knew me knows that that could have only happened because of God's sovereign work when I was running away from God, pursuing a life of rebellion against Him. Well, my answer to that question is what gives God the most glory is God to do what God does by choosing and predestining and then working it out for me to hear the gospel and the Spirit enabling me to choose Jesus in history.

And Paul says God does this, it was His good pleasure, His desire, verse 6, for the praise of His glorious gift. It's that word that we see back in verse 2, charis, it's the Greek word for grace or gift. It's a different form of that word down in verse 6, but it's the same word, basically, that God desired to do it this way because that gives Him honor, fame.

You know, our desire as Christians should be to want to make His name famous. You know, Paul warns a great deal, a great, a great deal about self-exaltation, Christians who self-exalt, preachers who self-exalt, because what he wants to do in his ministry and what he wants us to do in our Christian lives is to live, as one preacher has said, to make God's name famous. And the way we make God's fame, His name famous is by living as holy and blameless people, verse 4, who've been chosen by God for that end and predestined to be His children for that end, verse 5, to reflect the good pleasure of His will for the praise of His glorious gift.

And then He's going to say something about the gift, which He bestowed upon us in the beloved one. The beloved one, He refers to Christ again. So just notice how our election, our predestination, our adoption is linked to Christ.

I have some more application here in a second, but one other piece of these verses I want to refer to to help us think about the theological pop therein, back up in verse 5, this word, this pronoun us again, He predestined us. And in verse 4, He chose us. Paul, you must remember, when he began to follow Jesus, did not stop being a Jew.

It's a big conversation in New Testament studies these days about whether Paul was a Jew or a Christian. And my answer is, yes, he was Jewish and he was a Christian. And at times, readers of Paul's life, they want to break off either aspect of those two identities.

There are some people who would say Paul was not a Christian because Christianity implies conversion and Jews didn't convert, pagans did that. So Paul was called to be an apostle and to believe Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. But that's different from conversion because he's not leaving one religion to follow a new religion, some would say.

Whereas Gentiles, they convert because they're pagans, converting to a new way of living that's connected to a new religion. The thing I want you to recognize here is that Paul is using Jewish language, election, predestination, covenantal love language, redemption eventually, and some other language. And he's applying that language to, of course, Jews who follow Jesus, but he's also applying it to Gentiles who follow Jesus.

One thing we're going to see when we get to Ephesians 2 is that Paul does not expect Jews and Gentiles to eradicate or erase their ethnic identities in Christ. But instead, he makes the argument that ethnic identity in Christ is transformed so that Paul is still a Jew, but not the same kind of Jew. These Gentiles are still Gentiles, that is, they're not Jews now that they follow Jesus, but they're not the same kind of Gentiles, which is why he says you can't walk like the Gentiles walk anymore.

So one thing I want you to feel as you're looking at this very explosive language that's applied to Jews in the Old Testament, he's applying this language to Jews and Gentiles, and watch this, to Jews and Gentiles who are in union with Christ, the Jewish Messiah, so that, and I'll say this gently because it sounds so harsh, so that the only way Jews or Gentiles experience these spiritual blessings will be if they're in Christ, so that what's true of Jews in Christ is true of Gentiles in Christ. Now he hasn't used the language of Jew and Gentile yet, but I want to interject it here because it's in the use of the pronouns us and you, which are coming here in a moment. Regardless of the color of one's skin, if a person is not a Jew, he's a Gentile.

You have American Gentiles, Asian Gentiles, white Gentiles, black Gentiles, Hispanic Gentiles, fill in whatever ethnic blank you want, and Jews are those connected, as I said earlier, to a land, a law, Abraham, a Torah or a law, and connected to David. And so in Christ Jesus, however, the boundary markers of the people of God are being redefined, not by Torah or land or ethnic connection to Abraham, but by means of connection to Jesus by faith. That doesn't mean, hear this very carefully, that the Christian faith replaces Jews.

That is not true. Paul is a Jew. Jesus was not a Christian.

He was a Jew. It's important to remember that. But it does mean the Messianic age redraws the boundary markers for who are the people of God.

Maybe a better way of saying it is extends the boundary markers for who are the people of God. So that when Messiah comes, he's coming to fulfill all these Messianic promises that God promised in the Old Testament from Genesis on throughout the books of the prophets. And we see the reason why God does that is because that was always his predetermined plan.

Verse four, verse five, for the praise of his glory. I know this is not a class on Revelation, but it is a class on the Bible. So I can talk about other parts of the Bible that when John sees Psalm from every tongue and tribe and people and nation who are redeemed, the reason why he sees those people is because God chose to redeem them in Christ before the foundation of the world, which is where Paul goes in verse seven.

Just for the sake of clarity, I want to make sure that people understand what you mean when you say Jesus wasn't a Christian. Yes. Can you can you restate that succinctly? Yes.

Yeah. Jesus wasn't a follower of himself. Yeah.

He was a Jew who was born in a Jewish family. His family kept the law. They were law-absorbing people.

They offered the appropriate sacrifices. He goes to the synagogue. He teaches in the synagogue.

He's at the temple doing the kind of things that Jews do. But he's he's the Messiah. So he's now calling people to follow him who are Christians.

But Jesus is not following himself. He's following his heavenly father. And he himself is God in the flesh.

And this new people he's creating is a people that are not from only Jews, but also from Gentiles as well. So when Jesus goes to synagogue, he's not worship. He's not following himself.

He's following God. Yeah. That's a good question.

So when we say that God's character is love, how is that consistent with God's character when we say only some people are elect or some people are predestined? Yes. It's a great question. It's a question that those of us who hold the view that I hold need to wrestle with.

John 3, 16 is real gospel of the world that he gave his only son. Whoever believes in him should not will not perish, but have eternal life. When we think about love, though, as it relates to this question, Ephesians, I think the first place we want to turn is to the text of Ephesians to see what is Paul doing with this election language in the context of also talking about love, which he does when you look at chapter two.

So that in chapter two, Paul makes reference to a special kind of love. And he says in verse two, verses one through three, he's talking about. We were that you all were dead in trespasses and sins and striking that in verse five, he says he includes himself in that as a Jew, when in fact he was a Torah observant Jew.

But he basically places Jews and Gentiles on the same on the same plane by saying, we we were dead in transgressions and sins. But look at verse four there. He says, but God being rich in mercy.

Now look at this next statement. Because of his great love. Which he loved, with which he loved us.

Even when we were dead in trespasses and sins, he made us alive together with Christ. And then verse six goes on and talks about seeding us and raising us in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. So it seems to me how I read Paul in Ephesians that he doesn't in this letter talk about God's love when he talks about election as something that is universal for everybody, without exception, in the same way he's talking about in electing love, like chose us in love.

And then I think that's supportive when he says we were dead and didn't want anything to do with that love. But God, God, notice how everything changes with the words, but God, verse four, because of his mercy and because of his great love, which he has, with which he loved us. Now, who are the us? That's the key question.

Who are the us? Well, I think at the very least, those who are in Christ. And secondly, Jews and Gentiles. But if we link it back to chapter one, it's those whom God chose.

I think that's a fair reading because he in verse seven, he begins to say in Christ, we have redemption. Those who have redemption are those who he's talking about in verses four and five, who are chosen in Christ. At the very least, that's a straightforward reading of the text.

So that then when he talks about love, it's linked with God's work to resurrect this people supernaturally by the spirit whom he has chosen to be his children. So that would be my first way of answering the question is that God loves the world and God loves everybody, but he doesn't love everybody in the same exact way. There's a special love that he has.

We talk about this in theology, special revelation and general revelation, but God shows himself to the world generally through creation. You know, the so-called man on the island who never hears the gospel. God has revealed himself to him, not in a saving way, but in a way that manifests God's attribute of sovereignty or also attribute of beauty by looking at the creation.

But God reveals himself to some people in a special way when they have access to Bibles, when they hear the gospel. And there are some people who die without hearing the gospel, which is one reason why we go, we send missionaries and we pray and we don't walk around trying to figure out who the elect are. The only way we can know that is if they respond to the gospel.

So we send people to closed countries and we pray for our neighbors and we show hospitality to try to build relationships to share the gospel. And we weep for the lost and we evangelize because we know that God desires not that any would perish, but all to come to repentance. And a means by which that happens is personal evangelism.

And those who hear the gospel are experiencing God in a special way in a different way from the man on the island who never hears the gospel. So those are these two ways I would answer the question. God's love is not the same for everybody.

This is also true, I think, in terms of how we love. I love my son differently from how I love a brother or sister in Christ. It's a different kind of love.

I love my wife in a different way than I love my son. That's a different kind of love. We relate to each other differently.

And so by way of analogy, and all analogies break down, God has a different kind of love for the elect. Now, you know, that question also, I think, invites me to elaborate a bit more practically here because I think some people may hear what I'm saying and have heard what I'm saying to sort of hurt the motivation for missions and evangelism. So that one might think, well, okay, if God chooses this, chooses people, and that's his sovereign power, then why even bother to preach the gospel, pray for the lost? And I think an answer to that question, those questions would be, number one, God uses means.

One means is the gospel. We're justified by faith. We're not justified by election.

It's important. When Paul talks about justification by faith, he doesn't say we're justified by election. We're chosen in Christ, but we're justified the moment we have faith in Christ.

So the means by which our justification takes place is by the gospel and the spirit working to open our hearts and respond to the gospel. So that's the first thing I want to say is that God's design, yes, is to save some, to choose some before the foundation of the world, to be destined some to be his children, but in addition to that reality, God chooses them so that they would hear the gospel and respond to it to be justified by faith and live holy and blameless lives. The gospel is integral to the salvation experience.

Election secures that the person whom God has chosen will hear the gospel. You think about that. I have so much respect for missionaries, and even I've been a Christian now for several years.

Even still, when I hear someone, I just had the privilege of teaching a lot of different people in my teaching ministry, and I've privilege of teaching medical missionaries who are going to leave their comfortable careers and go to remote places in the world to be medical missionaries to share the gospel. When I hear that, I initially think, why would you do that? Even though I know exactly why we seem so daunting, but here's the motivation for doing that. Why would a family of doctors or businessmen and women, or pick a trade, leave a nice, cushioned, comfortable job to go to a part of the world to use that trade to, yes, make the economy better, but also to share the gospel.

Why would they do that? Because they can raise people from the dead? No, no, no, because they can be confident that a sovereign God has chosen to save some people, and maybe some of those people are there, and they won't know until they go. That's one reason why we do missions, is because God has a plan. Another practical thing I want to say related to this question about love is that there's a way to think about election that can make one think God is a monster.

And doesn't love people. The striking thing to me about what Paul says here is, is that he links God's choice to God's love, not to his deficient character, because God's character is not deficient. So a question that I have in my mind is, what would happen if God did not choose anybody to be saved? Well, if Ephesians 2, 1-10 is true, and I think it is, we were all dead in trespasses and sins.

How can someone whom God does not choose respond to the gospel unless God took the initiative? It's hopeless. I think about this gospel ministry for pastors and people in ministry who are watching these lectures, not just for them, but especially for them. What hope is there to evangelize if it's left up to the individual solely to pull himself or herself out of their spiritual deadness? So I read Paul to basically help us see if God doesn't choose to save some, then everybody after Adam goes to hell, because Adam's sin affects everybody and everything.

Original sin is a thing. But Adam was not plan A and then Jesus plan B. It was always God's design to save some from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation. And his election of some for adoption, predestination of some for adoption through Jesus, guarantees that not all, not all will perish.

One reason why I think Peter says he is not willing that any should perish, but all to come to repentance, is because he desires those whom he has chosen, that they're going to be saved as a remnant of all who have fallen. A final practical thought here, then I'll stop for other dialogue, is that this should motivate us to pray for the lost and to persevere in evangelism. There was a point in my life, I have family members who love me deeply, but also I have a lot of these family members who are not believers.

And I remember my dear, beloved aunt who raised me. She was so thankful she wasn't a Christian at first. She was so thankful when I got saved.

She didn't understand it, but everything changed so fast. I went from not going to church to sitting home as a teenager in high school on Friday nights reading my Bible after I became a Christian. And it's just, she's like, I don't know what's going on, but this is great.

And I prayed for her for over 20 years and shared the gospel with her so many times, to the point where my wife and I, we had, we said, let's go have another come to Jesus moment. Let's go and visit my aunt to make sure she understands what I'm saying. Like, am I saying something unclear? And that's why she's not responding.

So we went, we talked, and she's like, yeah, I understand what you're saying. I just don't want to become a Christian right now for all these reasons. Well, to make a long story short, there was a period of my life where I got frustrated.

I just stopped praying for her to become a Christian. And then the Lord convicted me, and I started praying again. And toward the end of her life, she had numerous health issues.

She had a cardiac arrest right in front of me, and she wasn't a believer. And I just cried out to God in the hospital. I begged God, please, please, God, she's, I'm not ready to let her go, but she's not a Christian yet.

Spare her so I can share the gospel with her again, she can come to faith in Christ. The doctors worked, they resuscitated her. She had six more weeks.

When she came to in the emergency room, we had a conversation, and she gave her life to Jesus. In fact, before I had the conversation with her, she said, I kind of, I settled this before you showed up this morning. 20-something years later, and then six weeks after she converted, she died.

She was elect before the foundation of the world, and God loved her and manifested that love in a special way. But it took 20-something years. So application, the application is, is that the rejection of the gospel by some should not cause us to give up on those who reject it necessarily, because the Lord might want to work in His timing.

And the way that happens is through the gospel and the Spirit-awakening heart. So I think election motivates us to persevere in evangelism, because it's discouraging when you pray for people, and there's no response.