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01 September 2024

SCRIPTURAL APPLICATION:  Ephesians 1:1-14
 
SERMON REVIEW:
The Work of the Father vs. 1-6
He has blessed us
He has chosen us
He has changed us
He has predestined us
He has adopted us

The Work of the Son vs. 7-13a
In Him we have Redemption
In Him we have Revelation
In Him we have Riches

The Work of the Spirit vs. 13b-14
We are Sealed 
We are Guaranteed

QUESTIONS:
  • What did the message teach me about God/Jesus/Holy Spirit?
  • What did the message teach me about the human condition?
  • Is there anything I need to confess, repent, or be grateful for, because of this passage?
  • How do I need help in believing and applying this scripture to my life?
  • How can I encourage others with this passage?
 
Life Application:
Gold among the Gravel
Paul presents a picture of a Christian which is much different from how we would naturally perceive
ourselves. Without the Bible, none of us would dare to believe that all these things could be true of us.
We are children of God. We have been spiritually adopted into his family according to his plan which
existed before the creation of the world. Christ has redeemed us, forgiven us, enlightened us, and made
us fabulously wealthy, on both a spiritual and a physical level in heaven. We have been sealed and made
secure by the Holy Spirit. We are not who we once were.

To this, many of us might respond: “I want to believe all this, but I’m having trouble. I don’t feel like I
have infinite worth. How could I have inherent worth? I may have started out with infinite value, but
look at all the things that have happened to me. Look at all the things I’ve done. How can God love me
with all my faults and all my inherent deficiencies?”

Ah, I’m glad you asked.

God can love you the way you are now the same way you can love a gold mine. You buy a gold mine,
and you are overjoyed. The gold asks, however: “How can you love me? I’m all dirty. I’m all mixed up
with that worthless iron ore, and I have that sticky clay all over me. I’m contaminated through and
through with bauxite and mineral deposits. I’m ugly and worthless.”

You reply: “O, but I do love you. You see, I understand what you really are. I know you have all these
imperfections; but I have plans for you. I am not going to leave you the way you are now. I am going to
purify you. I am going to get rid of all that other stuff. I see your inherent worth. I know that the iron
ore, clay, and mineral deposits are not part of the true you. You are temporarily mixed up with them for
now, but I know how to change you from what you are now to what you can be.

“I must warn you: it won’t be easy. You will go through a lot of heat and pressure, but look at this gold
which I have purified from another mine. See the fine jewelry it makes? See how it glistens? Isn’t it
beautiful? That’s what you are! Left to yourself, you would not be; but I know how to complete your
beauty. I will make you beautiful, and you will make me rich.”

That is how God can love us, even with our imperfections. God is not finished with us yet. We are not
yet what we are going to be. One day we will fellowship, worship, and serve the Lord unhindered by sin.
Until then, certainly, God wants us to serve righteousness and not sin (Rom. 6). As John writes in his first
epistle:

If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is
faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have
not sinned, we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives. My dear children, I write
this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our
defense—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One (1 John 1:8–2:1).

On the basis of those promises, we understand that, once we are in Christ, our sin does not sever us
from God. Christ’s death is sufficient for our sin. God views us through the righteousness of Christ. In
Christ, we are “gold in God’s eyes.” He knows we are still mixed up with sin, but he is going to free us
totally from that some day. He knows better than we who we have become in Christ. So rejoice in the
blessings you have in Christ. Glorify the Father, and give him praise. Tell others how wonderful he is.
Don’t keep the good news to yourself. Enjoy it and spread it.[1]

Digging Deeper:
A. Chosen (v. 4)
This verse poses, as directly as any verse in the Bible, the issue of the sovereignty of God and the free
will of people. The historical phrasing of this dichotomy is that if God is sovereign, then do we have free
wills? Verses throughout the Bible call on us to act as though we have free wills and are responsible for
our actions. Yet a passage such as this suggests that we do not have free wills. Such an understanding
would say that we are predestined to become Christian believers even before birth.
There is no easy solution. Scholars and laymen alike have been debating this issue for two thousand
years. The greatest difficulty is, of course, that the Bible appears to teach both: that God is sovereign,
and that a person has a free will. Rather than trying to decide between these two options, we need to
find a way to live with them both.

Passages which suggest the sovereignty of God:
•“He chose us in him … he predestined us to be adopted” (Eph. 1:4–5).

•“For those God foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son …
And those he predestined, he also called; and those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he
also glorified” (Rom. 8:29–30).

•“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44).

Here you have the very clear statement of human election. That is not the complete message from the
Scripture, however. Several passages support human free will:

•“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28).

•“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him
shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).
•“I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for
everyone.… This is good, and pleases God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a
knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:1, 3–4).

•“[The Lord] is not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9).
We see that the Bible appears to teach both truths without reservation and without qualification. How
do we begin to make sense out of these teachings? We begin by recognizing a fundamental principle in
Isaiah 55:9: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my
thoughts than your thoughts.”

It follows, then, that men cannot and should not expect to understand the Bible exhaustively. If they
could, the Bible would not be divine but would be limited to human intelligence. The Bible contains
some things so simple that even a child can understand them and some things so complex that the
brightest minds will never understand them.

Ken Boa says, in his book God, I Don’t Understand:
This can be illustrated by contrasting the mental ability of a dog with that of man. A dog has a limited
number of bits of information that it is capable of handling. A man also has a limited number of bits of
information, but he is capable of storing and working with a good deal more than his dog. Even so, there
is some overlap between the dog and the man. For example, the dog can relate to its master’s eating of
food. The dog can be trained to lead the blind, herd the sheep, bring back the duck. It has that much
ability to relate to its master’s world. It cannot relate to its master’s reading a book, however.
Nevertheless, there is enough common ground for a person to love a dog. It is almost impossible for
anyone to love a worm or an insect. Why? Because there is no communication.

When a man does something beyond the comprehension of an animal, it must remain a mystery to that
animal since it has no categories it can use to correlate this behavior. A dog can be taught to fetch the
morning newspaper, but it is another matter to teach it how to read it (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1975,
12).

The situation between us and God is similar, though even more exaggerated, because the distance
between God’s intelligence and ours is greater than between our intelligence and a dog’s. Nevertheless,
God can and has communicated with us; however, the communication is not always within our ability to
grasp.

When the Bible presents seemingly irreconcilable information, such as human free will and divine
sovereignty, rather than trying to force the two ideas together, it is more helpful to understand them as
antinomies.

Webster defines antinomy as “a contradiction between two equally valid principles or between
inferences correctly drawn from such principles.” More simply, we might say that an antinomy contains
two apparently mutually exclusive truths which must be held simultaneously. The sovereignty of God
and the free will of people represents an antinomy.

The Bible teaches that God is sovereign. The Bible also teaches that people can make choices. If you try
to merge the two ideas, you will distort truth. If you try to remove all tension between the two, you will
destroy one or the other of the truths, and possibly both. We say “apparently” mutually exclusive truths
because the truths cannot actually be mutually exclusive. If they were, God would become the author of
the impossible and perhaps even of nonsense. They appear mutually exclusive to us because of a
limitation either to our information or intelligence or both. The two truths are not mutually exclusive to
God.

It is not intellectual suicide simply to believe them both. Here is why.
1. An infinite revelation will always take a finite mind beyond its intelligence. That is the case
with antinomies in general, and this truth in specific. With an infinite revelation, we are simply not able
to understand everything we know.

2. Antinomies exist outside Scripture. Take “light,” for example. Matter cannot be energy, and
energy cannot be matter. Yet light has properties of both energy and matter. That is impossible. Yet it is
true. The character of light is an excellent example of an antinomy because while the inherent
contradiction within light cannot be resolved with our present laws of physics, every morning the sun
comes up. Every evening we switch on lamps. And there is light.

3. If we are to know anything about God, he must reveal himself to us because he exists in a
realm beyond our five senses. God did reveal himself. Through miracles, visions, dreams, direct
conversation, and then, through Jesus. Much of this revelation was written down in the Scripture and
superintended by God so that it was without error in the original manuscripts. We have found this God
to be utterly trustworthy. We know of no errors in this revelation, and it has stood for thousands of
years.

Therefore, (1) if infinite revelation, by definition, will take a finite mind beyond its intellectual capacity,
and (2) unexplainable things exist all around us in the world of science and nature, and (3) God and
Christ have demonstrated themselves to be reliable, it is not intellectual suicide to say, “The Bible
teaches both human free will and divine election. Therefore, I will embrace them both.”

Remember also that our ability to comprehend God’s truth has been radically affected by the fall of
man. First Corinthians 13:12 reads: “Now we see but a poor reflection; then we shall see face to face.
Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” When we stand before God in
heaven, we will smack our foreheads and say, “Oh, I understand.” Until then, we suspend judgment: we
hold the truths in tension, understanding who God is and who we are.

When we do that—when we accept both truths fully, without letting one diminish the other—we can
rise up in glory at the fact that we have been known and chosen by God from before the creation of the
world; and, at the same time, we can commit ourselves unreservedly to the spread of the gospel
message, knowing that among those who hear the gospel some may choose salvation.
B. Adoption (v. 5)

one way the Father takes care of our past failures and makes us holy and blameless is that he changes
families for us. William Barclay writes of this Roman concept of adoption in his commentary on
Ephesians:
When the adoption was complete it was complete indeed. The person who had been adopted had all
the rights of a legitimate son in his new family and completely lost all rights in his old family. In the eyes
of the law he was a new person. So new was he that even all debts and obligations connected with his
previous family were abolished as if they had never existed” (The Letters to Galatians and Ephesians,
The Daily Study Bible, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1959, 91–92).

That is what God has done for us. We were absolutely held in the power of sin and of the world. We
belonged to the family of Adam. God, through Jesus, took us out of that family and adopted us into his.
That adoption wipes out the past and makes us new.
C. Redemption (v. 7)

The Greek word for redemption (apolutrosis) means “to buy back for the purpose of setting free.”
Donald Gray Barnhouse, the great expository preacher of a past generation from Tenth Presbyterian
Church in Philadelphia, told for years what is perhaps the best real example of the true meaning of
apolutrosis. A boy was given a model sailboat by his father to sail in the lake in the park. One day as he
was sailing it, the wind came up, broke the string, and blew the sailboat away. The boy was heartbroken.
One day, sometime later, the boy was walking past a toy store downtown. There in the window was his
sailboat. Apparently, someone on the other side of the lake had found it. The boy went in the store and
said, “The boat in the window is my boat, and I would like for you to give it to me.” The store owner
said, “I’m sorry, sonny, but that boat is mine. Someone brought it in here the other day, and I bought it
from him. It is mine.”

The heartbroken boy went home and told his father the story. His father gave his son the money. The
next day, the young boy went back to the store to buy back his own boat. That is the picture of
apolutrosis—to buy back, to set free.

Discussion Questions:
      1.   How does it make you feel to know the spiritual blessings you have in Christ?
      2.   Which of the blessings seemed to take on the most meaning to you as you studied them? Why?

PRAYER:

 
[1] Max Anders, Galatians-Colossians, vol. 8, Holman New Testament Commentary (Nashville, TN:
Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1999), 96–97.