The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. George G. Findlay
of man’s brutal and murderous passions, bear witness to a war in nature that goes back far towards the foundation of the world. And this rent and discord in the frame of things it was His part to reconcile “in whom and for whom all things were created.” This universal deliverance, it seems, is dependent upon ours. “The creation itself lifts up its head, and is looking out for the revelation of the sons of God” (Rom. viii. 19). In founding the world, foreseeing its bondage to corruption, God prepared through His elect sons in Christ a deliverance the glory of which will make its sufferings to seem but a light thing. “In thee,” said God to Abraham, “shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed”: so in the final “adoption—to wit, the redemption of our body” (Rom. viii. 23), all creatures shall exult; and our mother earth, still travailing in pain with us, will remember her anguish no more.
The Divine election of men in Christ is further defined in the words of verse 5: “Having in love predestined us,” and “according to the good pleasure of His will.” Election is selection; it is the antecedent in the mind of God in Christ of the preference which Christ showed when He said to His disciples, “I have chosen you out of the world.” It is, moreover, a fore-ordination in love: an expression which indicates on the one hand the disposition in God that prompted and sustains His choice, and on the other the determination of the almighty Will whereby the all-wise Choice is put into operation and takes effect. In this pre-ordaining control of human history God “determined the fore-appointed seasons and the bounds of human habitation” (Acts xvii. 26). The Divine prescience—that “depth of the wisdom and knowledge of God”—as well as His absolute righteousness, forbids the treasonable thought of anything arbitrary or unfair cleaving to this pre-determination—anything that should override our free-will and make our responsibility an illusion. “Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate” (Rom. viii. 29). He foresees everything, and allows for everything.
The consistence of foreknowledge with free-will is an enigma which the apostle did not attempt to solve. His reply to all questions touching the justice of God’s administration in the elections of grace—questions painfully felt and keenly agitated then as they are now, and that pressed upon himself in the case of his Jewish kindred with a cruel force (Rom. ix. 3)—his answer to his own heart, and to us, lies in the last words of verse 5: “according to the good pleasure of His will.” It is what Jesus said concerning the strange preferences of Divine grace: “Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight.” What pleases Him can only be wise and right. What pleases Him, must content us. Impatience is unbelief. Let us wait to see the end of the Lord. In numberless instances—such as that of the choice between Jacob and Esau, and that of Paul and the believing remnant of Israel as against their nation—God’s ways have justified themselves to after times; so they will universally. Our little spark of intelligence glances upon one spot in a boundless ocean, on the surface of immeasurable depths.
The purpose of this loving fore-ordination of believing men in Christ is twofold; it concerns at once their character and their state: “He chose us out—that we should be holy and without blemish in His sight,” and “unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ for Himself.” These two purposes are one. God’s sons must be holy; and holy men are His sons. For this end “we” were elected of God in the beginning. Nay, with this end in view the world was founded and the human race came into being, to provide God with such sons[28] and that Christ might be “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. viii. 28–30).
“That we should be holy”—should be saints. This the readers are already: “To the saints” the apostle writes (ver. 1). They are men devoted to God by their own choice and will, meeting God’s choice and will for them. Imperfect saints they may be, by no means as yet “without blemish”; but they are already, and abidingly, “sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. i. 2) and “sealed” for God’s possession “by the Holy Spirit” (vv. 13, 14). In this fact lies their hope of moral perfection and the impulse and power to attain it. Their task is to “perfect” their existing “holiness” (2 Cor. vii. 1), “cleansing themselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit.” Let no Christian say, “I do not pretend to be a saint.” This is to renounce your calling. You are a saint if you are a true believer in Christ; and you are to be an unblemished saint.
Thus the Church is at last to be presented, and every man in his own order, “faultless before the presence of His glory, with exceeding joy.”[29] God could not invite us in His grace to anything inferior. A blemished saint—a smeared picture, a flawed marble—this is not like His work; it is not like Himself. Such saintship cannot approve itself “before Him.” He must carry out His ideal, must fashion the new man as he was created in Christ after His own faultless image, and make human holiness a transcript of the Divine (1 Peter i. 16).
Now, this Divine character is native to the sons of God. The ideal which God had for men was always the same. The father of the race was made in His image. In the Old Testament Israel receives the command: “You shall be holy, for I, Jehovah your God, am holy.” But it was in Jesus Christ that the breadth of this command was disclosed, and the possibility of our personal obedience to it. The law of Christian sonship, manifest only in shadow in the Levitical sanctity, is now pronounced by Jesus: “You shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Verses 4 and 5 are therefore strictly parallel: God elected us in Christ to be perfect saints; for He predestined us through Jesus Christ to be His sons.
Sonship to Himself is the Christian status, the rank and standing which God confers on those who believe in His Son; it accrues to them by the fact that they are in Christ.[30] It is defined by the term adoption, which St. Paul employs in this sense in Romans viii. 15, 23, as well as in Galatians iv. 5. Adoption was a peculiar institution of Roman law, familiar to Paul as a citizen of Rome; and it aptly describes to Gentile believers their relation to the family of God. “By adoption under the Roman law an entire stranger in blood became a member of the family into which he was adopted, exactly as if he had been born in it. He assumed the family name, partook in its system of sacrificial rites, and became, not on sufferance or at will, but to all intents and purposes a member of the house of his adopter. … This metaphor was St. Paul’s translation into the language of Gentile thought of Christ’s great doctrine of the New Birth. He exchanges the physical metaphor of regeneration for the legal metaphor of adoption. The adopted becomes in the eye of the law a new creature. He was born again into a new family. By the aid of this figure the Gentile convert was enabled to realize in a vivid manner the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of the faithful, the obliteration of past penalties, the right to the mystic inheritance. He was enabled to realize that upon this spiritual act ‘Old things passed away and all things became new.’ ”[31]
This exalted status belonged to men in the purpose of God from eternity; but as a matter of fact it was instituted “through Jesus Christ,” the historical Redeemer. Whether previously (Jewish) servants in God’s house or (Gentile) aliens excluded from it (ii. 12), those who believed in Jesus as the Christ received a spirit of adoption and dared to call God Father! This unspeakable privilege had been preparing for them through the ages past in God’s hidden wisdom. Throughout the wild course of human apostasy the Father looked forward to the time when He might again through Jesus Christ make men His sons; and His promises and preparations were directed to this one end. The predestination having such an end, how fitly it is said: “in love having foreordained us.”
Four times, in these three verses, with exulting emphasis, the apostle claims this distinction for “us.” Who, then, are the objects of the primordial election of grace? Does St. Paul use the pronoun distributively, thinking of individuals—you and me and so many others, the personal recipients of saving grace? or does he mean the Church, as that is collectively the family of God and the object of His loving ordination? In this epistle, the latter is surely the thought in the apostle’s mind.[32]