Read Ephesians 1:3-10.

The Greek text of verse ten literally reads: “a dispensation of the fullness [or, fulfillment] of the times.” What is being spoken of is a dispensation, (i.e. an ordering or arranging of all things), that goes into effect at the time when all the periods of time (καιροι) have been fulfilled (πληρcoμα); thus, it is the final dispensation of all things.

Introduction⤒🔗

The famous composer, Franz Joseph Haydn, was present at the Vienna Music Hall when his oratorio, The Creation, was being presented. As the majestic work moved along, the audience was caught up with tremendous emotion. When the chorus and orchestra reached the passage, “And there was light!” they burst forth with such power that the audience could no longer restrain its enthusiasm; the vast assembly rose to their feet in spontaneous applause.

At this point Haydn himself stood and motioned for silence. He then pointed to heaven and said, “No, not from me; but from there comes all.” Having given the glory and praise to the Lord, the elderly composer fell back into his seat, exhausted.¹

Franz Joseph Haydn rightfully blessed God as the true Source of his composing talent and the true Author of the great composition, The Creation. In the same spirit, may we join with the Apostle Paul in blessing God as the Author of our great salvation and all the benefits derived from it.

Our great salvation and all of its benefits are due to the sovereign and gracious work of God, who alone is worthy to receive the glory and the blessing. Because the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has bestowed upon us all of His great blessings in Christ, we are exhorted to bless Him.

Bless God, Because He Chose Us to be Holy←⤒🔗

In verse four, the Apostle Paul, referring to God the Father, writes, “he chose us.” Likewise, Paul informs the Thessalonians, “from the beginning God chose you to be saved through the sanctifying work of the Spirit and through belief in the truth. ¹⁴He called you to this through our gospel, so that you might share in the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Thess. 2:13-14). According to the Scriptures, the ultimate reason a man comes to Christ is because the Father has chosen him, not because the man has first chosen Christ. The Lord Jesus testifies, “All whom the Father gives me will come to me; and he who comes to me I will by no means reject” (Jn. 6:37).

Paul further explains that God chose us “in him,” (i.e. in Christ). Because of His divine majesty and infinite holiness, we could never draw near to God in our own finite human condition apart from Christ, especially as sinners before a holy God. Indeed, God chose us in Christ “before the creation of the world.” There was never a time when God did not view the Christian, (even before he was born), in his relationship to Christ: from His divine perspective, God has never viewed the Christian apart from Christ.

God chose us long before we even had the opportunity to choose or reject Christ, as we learn from the Book of Acts, “all who were appointed for eternal life believed” (Acts 13:48b). Salvation is a work of God’s sovereign grace. If the choice were left to us, we would never choose Christ; note John 1:10­ 11, “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, but the world did not know him. ¹¹He came to his own [people], yet those who were his own did not receive him.” (To “know” is used here in the sense of having affinity with Him, embracing Him and loving Him.) Again, consider the testimony of the Lord Jesus concerning sinful man’s response to the LORD in His holiness:

...this is [the reason for] the condemnation: the Light has come into the world, but men loved the darkness rather than the light; because their works were evil. ²⁰Everyone who does evil hates the light and does not come to the light, so that his works will not be exposed. Jn. 3:19­-20

God chose us in Christ before the creation of the world “in order for us to be holy and blameless in his presence.” We, as believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, were chosen not because we were holy, or because we displayed the potential for holiness. Isaiah 53:6 describes our natural condition, having inherited the sinful nature from Adam: “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way.” The Apostle Paul declares, “it is written, ‘There is none righteous, no, not one’...²³for all have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:10,23).

We were chosen not because we were holy, or because we displayed the potential for holiness; on the contrary, we were chosen in order to become holy. The purpose for which we were chosen is to participate and share with God in the beauty of His holiness. Speaking of the redeemed, the prophet Isaiah declares, “they will be called Oaks of Righteousness, planted by the LORD, so that he may be glorified” (Isa. 61:3). Consider, too, the teaching of 1 Peter 2:19, “you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people appointed to be [God’s] own possession, so that you might display the virtues of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”

Let us bless the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because He has chosen us to be holy. The most beautiful thing to behold is the LORD in His holiness. The apostles were afforded a glimpse of that beauty at the time of Christ’s transfiguration:

Now after six days, Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, brought them up on a high mountain by themselves, ²and was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. Matt. 17:1-2

All the redeem will behold that awesome spectacle at the time of our Lord’s return in glory at the end of the age, “when he comes to be glorified in his saints and to be marveled at by all those who believed” (2 Thess. 1:10).

Notice more closely those words of the Apostle Paul: “when he comes, [Christ] will be glorified in his saints.” As Christians, we have been called not only to behold our Lord in the beauty of His holiness, but to participate in that “beauty of holiness;” and thereby, bring glory to our Lord Jesus, the Righteous One. On the Last Day, when His work of grace has been completed in us, “then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt. 13:43). In the light of this great truth, the Apostle John exhorts us,

Beloved, ...we know that when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. ³And everyone who has this hope in him [i.e. our hope in Christ] purifies himself, just as [Christ] is pure. 1 Jn. 3:2-3

Bless God, Because He Predestined Us to Be His Adopted Sons←⤒🔗

The Apostle Paul goes on to inform us that God “predestined us.” The Greek term used here, προοριζω, means, “to decide before hand;” to predetermine one’s destination. Let us note that what is here attributed to God with regard to our salvation, is something we do on a human level every day: as best we can, we predetermine our activities and our course of action. Why should we find it unusual or offensive to learn that our Creator predetermines the destiny of His creatures, especially predetermining the salvation of those whom He has chosen by His sovereign grace?

The reason sinful man finds this to be offensive lies in the fact that we accept and cherish the devil’s lie that we have an autonomous existence: an existence that is independent of our Creator. This was the lie the devil introduced to Eve in the Garden of Eden, a lie that he seeks to perpetuate through all the generations of mankind:

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field that the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, Indeed, has God said, You shall not eat from any tree of the garden? ²And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; ³but concerning the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, God has said, You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, or else you will die. ⁴But the serpent said to the woman, You shall not surely die. Gen. 3:1-4

The devil sought to convince Adam and Eve that God could not carry out His threatened judgment against them. According to the devil, God could not carry out the pronouncement, “You shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17). In an incredible act of blasphemy and deceit, the devil says to Eve, “You shall not surely die.” The devil was implying that mankind has an existence that is independent of God; he was implying that man is autonomous. It was only after they ate of the forbidden fruit that they tragically discovered this to be a lie. Before the Athenians, the Apostle Paul testifies, “in [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).

It is wrong for any man to find fault with our Creator for exercising His divine freedom and rights. The Apostle Paul confronts us with the fact of God’s divine rights and prerogatives with regard to mankind whom He has created:

But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, Why did you make me like this? ²¹Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use? Rom. 9:20-21

It is hypocritical for man to attempt to find fault with our Creator for exercising His divine rights when we are always demanding the exercise of our human rights! Being made in the image of God, our human freedom and rights are a derivative and a reflection of God’s divine freedom and rights; and our human freedom and rights are always exercised within the context of God’s absolute freedom and rights, never in rivalry to His divine freedom and rights.

When it comes to the matter of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility, we must always bear in mind this truth: We are like God, but God is different than us. Being made in the image of God, we are like our Creator: we have the ability to make responsible moral choices. But the Creator is far greater than the creature, His abilities and range of options, if we might so express it, far exceed that which He has granted to the creatures He has made in His image, one of which is the ability to exercise His sovereignty over His creatures without compromising the validity of our moral decisions.

We might try to express the distinction between our Creator and ourselves, with regard to our respective abilities, by means of the following illustration: Your wife has purchased two large appliances, a new washer and a new dryer. She asks you to go to the appliance store to pick them up for her. You drive your pick-up truck to the store and begin loading the appliances. You find that you can fit the washer or the dryer in the back of your pick-up, but not both. After an hour of trying without success, and with much frustration, you finally conclude that it can’t be done. But then the LORD arrives with His “tractor trailer,” and without any difficulty He loads both appliances into the trailer: He has a greater “loading capacity,” a capacity that is totally beyond our finite comprehension.

Allowing for some “poetic license” with regard to our illustration, we might expand upon it in an attempt to express the manner in which the exercise of our moral responsibility functions within the scope of God’s divine activity: When the two appliances are delivered to your home, you open the boxes. You discover that the washer is actually smaller than the dryer, and, to your amazement, you find that it is able to freely function within the confines of the dryer as the dryer carries out its function.

With reverent humility, we must always bear in mind the fact that the distinction between the Creator and the creature is not merely one of degree, but of kind: The Creator is One whose capacity and scope of action far exceeds that with which He has endowed His creatures. One evident example of this is the biblical doctrine of creation ex nihilo,” creation out of nothing. The fact that the Creator has brought into existence His vast creation, calling it into being, producing by His word what was not there before (cf. Psl. 33:6; Heb. 11:3), doing something that is inconceivable for man to even comprehend, let alone perform, is one example of this vast distinction between the Creator and the creature. Our Creator’s options for action are greater and much more far-reaching than those with which He has endowed His creatures. If we may phrase it like this, our Creator lives and acts in dimensions of reality and decision-making that afford Him alternatives and legitimate options that are beyond the experience of His creatures and which do not violate the creature’s moral decisions and responsibility.

Returning to the text of Ephesians, the Apostle Paul further informs us that “in love” God predestined us. God’s act of predestining us unto adoption is defined as an expression of His love, an act of His divine love; as the hymn writer, Joseph Conder, expresses it:

It was sovereign mercy that called me
And taught my opening mind;
Otherwise the world had enthralled me,
To heavenly glories blind.

My heart owns none before Thee,
For Thy rich grace I thirst;
This knowing, if I love Thee,
Thou must have loved me first.

God predestined us “to be his adopted sons through Jesus Christ.” By way of illustration: In the Broadway play, Annie, little orphan Annie was adopted out of her bondage and poverty in a New York orphanage by Daddy Warbucks, a man who had the wealth and was willing to spend that wealth for her adoption. He was under no obligation to adopt her; his act of doing so was a free act of his will motivated by his love and compassion. All the more so was God’s act of adopting us to be His children and members of His divine household. As verse seven explain, the purchase price of our adoption was nothing less than the shed blood of God’s own Son: “we have redemption through his blood, [namely], the forgiveness of our transgressions.”

As was true in the illustration of Daddy Warlock’s adoption of orphan Annie, God predestined us to be His adopted sons “by his own will and desire.” That is to say, when He predestined us to become His adopted sons, God the Father was not acting out of necessity or obligation. He was not required to adopt us; we had no legal or moral claims to adoption. On the contrary, as is the case in all adoptions, He was acting in accordance with His own free will; it was a divine choice motivated by sovereign love, grace, mercy and compassion.

Finally, we are informed that God predestined us to be his adopted sons “for the praise of the glory of his grace.” The ultimate purpose of our adoption is that God’s grace, which is glorious, may be praised. In His sovereign act of adopting us, an act motivated by His grace, the LORD’s grace is displayed; and as it is revealed, His grace is seen to be glorious, and consequently, it elicits the praise of which it is worthy.

Let us bless the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because He has predestined us to be His adopted sons. (Note: Female Christians are included in the identity of spiritual sonship, just as male Christians are included in the identity of being the spiritual bride of Christ, of which the Apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 5. Although our personal identity will continue on into eternity, it will be subsumed within and subordinated to our spiritual identity in Christ, of which we read, “there is neither male nor female, foryou are all one in Christ Jesus” [Gal. 3:28b].)

Bless God, Because He has Made Known to Us His Divine Plan←⤒🔗

The Apostle Paul goes on to further inform us that God has “made known to us the mystery of his will.” God’s “will” is here a reference to His ultimate plan and purpose for His creation. God’s will is mysterious in the sense that it is hidden and remains unknown to sinful mankind. God’s will is mysterious also in the sense that it is awesome, beyond human comprehension, apart from divine revelation. God has revealed His will to us “by the riches of his grace.” That is to say, He has revealed His will to us simply because He wanted to do so; this, too, is an act of His sovereign grace and love for us; another expression of the depths of God's grace.

God’s will, His ultimate purpose and plan for His creation, is something “that originates from his own desire and that he determined by himself” (vs. 9b). It is a plan and purpose that God Himself has decided upon and has determined to accomplish. In devising this plan and purpose, God was not in any way influenced by any outside forces; nor was His decision in any way dictated by anyone other than Himself. Indeed, He is the God “who causes all things to work for the sake of his own plan” (Eph. 1:11). God has His own sovereign plan, and He proceeds to carry out and accomplish that plan by causing all things to contribute to the ultimate fulfillment of His purpose and plan. Consequently, the wisdom that conceived His plan and the power that brings that plan to fulfillment are all of God, and, therefore, to God alone belongs all the glory and the praise.

God’s will spoken of here “pertains to the final dispensation.” The Greek term translated, “dispensation” (οικονομια), literally means, “the management of a household;” in this case, the arrangement and the purpose of the entire creation. What is being spoken of here is “the final dispensation.” What God has graciously chosen to make known to us is His ultimate plan concerning the final arrangement of all things, (i.e. the eternal state). By way of illustration: If at present your house is in disrepair, undergoing a re-modeling project, it is comforting and re-assuring to know how it is all going to turn out in the end. The same holds true with regard to our lives and the final state of the entire creation. It is comforting to know God’s plan for His creation, such knowledge encourages us, especially in hard times, and gives us hope as Christians. Once again, we turn to the words of the hymn writers, this time Maltbie D. Babcock,

This is my Father’s world,
O let me ne’er forget
That though the wrong seems oft’ so strong,
God is the Ruler yet.

This is my Father’s world:
The battle is not done;
Jesus who died shall be satisfied,
And earth and heaven be one.

God’s will is “to unite all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things on the earth.” This present creation, shattered by sin, shall be “re-assembled” in an altogether more glorious formation by the redeeming work of our Lord Jesus Christ. The philosophers may mourn over the fall of Humpty Dumpty, (that nursery rhyme character is actually a symbol for the world in its present fallen state); but the LORD reveals to us His divine purpose to re-create this fallen creation. Having judged sinful man, the LORD shall “re-assemble” this creation in a glorious and holy form. As Maltbie D. Babcock writes, Jesus who died shall be satisfied, And earth and heaven be one.

Let us bless the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because He has made known to us His glorious divine plan.

Conclusion←⤒🔗

The famous composer, Franz Joseph Haydn, so long ago in the Vienna Music Hall stood up, and pointing to heaven, declared, “No, not from me! But from there comes all!” So may we, too, bless the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ for all the divine benefits He has bestowed upon us in Christ the Beloved. Among the foremost of those blessings we may enumerate these that we have just considered from this present passage of Scripture: He has chosen us to share in His holiness; He has predestined us to be His adopted sons; and He has revealed to us His divine plan.

Discussion Questions←⤒🔗

1. For what reason does the Apostle Paul lead the church in blessing God? See Eph. 1:3. Of what nature are these blessings? Where are they located? In relationship with Whom do we possess them? Christian, do you appreciate the profound and transcendent nature of your life, and the fact that it is intimately bound up in Christ Himself? Note Col. 3:3-4,

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ...Eph. 1:3

For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. ⁴When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.Col. 3:3-4

2. In light of this profound and transcendent nature of our life in Christ, what perspective should we as Christians cultivate? See Col. 3:1-2. How would this focus on the spiritually transcendent affect and change our perspective on our earthly existence? Note 2 Cor. 4:17-18. How would it deepen our relationship with Christ? See 1 Pet. 1:8-9,

If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things that are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. ²Setyour mind on things above, not on things on the earth. Col. 3:1-2

...our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, ¹⁸while we focus not on the things that are seen, but on the things that are not seen; for the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are not seen are eternal. 2 Cor. 4:17-18

Although you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, by believing in him you greatly rejoice with a joy that is inexpressible and glorious, ⁹obtaining as the result of your faith the salvation of your souls. 1 Pet. 1:8-9

As, by faith, we hold communion with the Lord Jesus Christ, we gain a partial experience of the life of the kingdom of God.

3. What has caused God to bestow upon us the spiritual blessings we possess in Christ? See Eph. 1:3-6a. In connection with Whom, did God choose us? Christian, there has never been a time when God did not view you in your connection with Christ, there was never a time when He viewed you apart from Christ—how do you react to this incomprehensible wonder?

³Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ, ⁴since he chose us in him before the creation of the world, in order for us to be holy and blameless in his presence. In love ⁵he predestined us to be his adopted sons through Jesus Christ, by his own will and desire, ⁶afor the praise of the glory of his grace. Eph. 1:3-6a

4. What motivated God to choose us in Christ? Was our selection due to our own righteousness (cf. Eph. 2:3); or, did God foresee that we, in distinction to other men, would exercise faith (cf. Acts 13:48/Eph. 2:8)? What then was God’s motivation (cf. Eph. 1:4b-5a); what was His ultimate purpose (cf. Eph. 1:6a)?

Indeed, we all formerly lived among them for the lusts of our sinful nature, doing the will of the flesh and of the mind, and we were by nature children of wrath just like the rest [of mankind]. Eph. 2:3

Now when the Gentiles heard this [i.e. that the offer of salvation in Christ was being offered to them], they were glad and glorified the word of the Lord. And as many as were ordained to eternal life believed. Acts 13:48

It is by grace that you have been saved through faith, and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God... Eph. 2:8

In love ⁵he predestined us to be his adopted sons through Jesus Christ, by his own will and desire, ^6afor the praise of the glory of his grace. Eph. 1:4b-6a

5. As the unmerited recipients of God’s sovereign grace, what response should this elicit from us? Note Psl. 145:1-3,

I will extol you, my God, O King; and I will bless your name forever and ever. ²Every day will I bless you, and I will praise your name forever and ever. ³Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable. Psl. 145:1-3