Glory Be to the Father | Ephesians 1:3-6

Intro

One of the highest pleasures as a human is the experience of breathtaking awe and wonder.

If you’ve ever gazed at the mighty ocean, stretching beyond not just your eye’s ability to see, but your mind’s ability to fathom; if you’ve come around a corner and suddenly beheld majestic mountain peaks; if you’ve stood atop a mountain and looked down on the earth as if from heaven; then you have experienced that thrill and terror, that joyful longing, that sense of smallness that comes in the presence of grandeur and splendor and beauty.

Like other feelings, awe or wonder is not something you can toggle off and on. It is the right response to glory, to the sublime (lit., “up to the limit”). To experience it, you must behold glory, and then respond rightly. There is a reason tens of millions of people annually visit the world’s natural wonders like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon.

Coming to Ephesians 1:3–14 is like coming to the rim of the Grand Canyon. The grandeur and glory of God is on display here. And it’s meant to fill you with awe and wonder that overflows in passionate praise.

Have you ever tried to take a picture of something breathtaking, only to be disappointed? As amazing as our smartphone cameras are, they can’t do justice to expansive grandeur. Even professional photographers can only capture a small sense of the beauty.

That’s the challenge as we come to this text. It can feel like looking at someone else’s pictures from the Grand Canyon. But there’s hope because this is how God has revealed his glory. The way you behold the glory of God is not by going to a geographic location to see a physical statue or relic or manifestation. The way the human heart beholds the glory of God is through hearing and believing the Word of God describing the wondrous works of God.

Ephesians 1:3–6a

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, 4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace ….

Reasons to Worship

Our text is part of a larger unit (Eph 1:3–14) in which Paul glorifies God the Father for his grace toward sinners accomplished through Jesus the Son and applied by the Spirit. We’re going to take it in three parts in order to slow down and behold the glory of the Triune God.

Paul begins (v. 3), “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” “Blessed be God” could be worded, “Praise be to God!” Or, “God be praised!” Paul’s first words (after his opening greeting) are a declaration of praise to God.

Paul is following a form of praise common in OT Israel. E.g., Melchizedek says to Abraham: “Blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand!” (Genesis 14:20). Or Psalm 72 says, “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things” (Psalm 72:18).

“Blessed be God” begins a joyful verbal outburst of delight in response to God’s deliverance. This is a prayer of praise overflowing from a God-entranced soul. Paul follows the initial form, but he identifies God, not as the God of Israel, but as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” When the Son of God became a man in the person of Jesus, that became God’s supreme act of redemption and self-revelation.

Ephesians 1:3–14 is both light and heat. You can feel the heat coming from Paul’s white-hot worship. And that fire of delight in God blazes bright with illuminating light. In other words, as Paul expresses praise to God, he communicates truth about God.

Praise completes our joy by expressing it outwardly, and praise increases our joy by inviting others to share in our joy with us. This text is meant to be contagious joy—worship on fire, catching fire and spreading. The aim is that Paul’s praise would become your praise. That Paul’s joy would become your joy, that his awe and wonder would become yours.

In vv. 3–14, Paul gives us reasons to worship God. And in vv. 3–6, those reasons focus on the Father’s eternal and gracious purposes.

Praise God for Blessing Us (v. 3)

Verse 3 is the heading over the whole passage: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 1:3). We bless God because he has blessed us in Christ.

But what does it mean that God has blessed us? First, that language is an echo from Eden. When God created the first humans, he blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1:28). When God called Abraham, he blessed him and promised to bless all the nations of earth through him (Gen 12:1–3). God blessing people is rooted in God’s purposes in creation and his covenant promises. So this when Paul announces that God has blessed us in Christ, he is declaring that those purposes and promises have come true in Christ.

I think the clearest statement in Scripture is the promise of the new covenant in Jeremiah 32, where God says: “And they shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make with them an everlasting covenant, that I will not turn away from doing good to them. And I will put the fear of me in their hearts, that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul” (Jeremiah 32:38–41). To be blessed by God is to have God committed to joyfully doing good to you with all of his might. And Paul declares that that promise has come true in Christ.

According to verse 3, God the Father has blessed us “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” This is where it can feel like looking at a picture of the Grand Canyon on someone else’s phone. What does that mean? How can we do this justice?

Let’s take that phrase, “every spiritual blessing.” When you hear “spiritual blessing,” what do you think of? Our modern minds tend to think of the spiritual as anything not material or physical, which might as well mean imaginary.

But when Paul describes something as spiritual, he usually means “of the Spirit” (capital S). Try that: God the Father has blessed us in Christ the Son with every blessing of the Spirit. 

Blessings of the Spirit are the benefits that the Spirit of God applies to you. Paul describes them as blessings in the heavenly places. He speaks of heaven a lot in Ephesians. Here and in several other places, he uses a form of the word that one commentator helpfully translates as the high-heavenlies. That better captures the sense of grandeur and lofty exaltation. This is the location from which these blessings originate.

Paul is talking about the realm of the Spirit, the transcendent realm above and beyond this earthly realm where we exist. It’s the realm where God the Father dwells and where Christ is seated: “He raised him [Christ] from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 1:20).

When you hear “blessings of the Spirit in the high-heavenlies,” do not tune out! It’s tempting to think that is something irrelevant and out of reach. But that is the exact opposite of what Paul is saying.

Blessings of the Spirit in the high-heavenlies are not intangible blessings. The realm of the Spirit is not a wispy, intangible realm. The heavenly realm of the Triune God is more real and more vivid than the earthly.

Think of your shadow compared to you. Your shadow is real in the sense that it really exists. But your shadow’s existence is fleeting and flimsy compared to yours. Your shadow exists because you exist. You have depth; your shadow is flat. The heavenly realm is to the earthly realm as you are to your shadow. The author of Hebrews says that the earthly tabernacle was “a copy and shadow of the heavenly things” (Heb 8:5). That is, heavenly things are more real, not less.

Nor are these exclusively future blessings reserved for when you get to heaven. Paul says that God has blessed us. That is a completed action. It’s a statement of fact. He has already done it.

So what does this mean for us now? Heavenly blessings are benefits that have their source and origin in the high-heavens. Not pie in the sky by and by. They are blessings that come from heaven, not from earth. That is, they depend on the Triune God who never fails, never lies, and never changes. They do not depend on you—not on your fickle feelings, not on your faltering performance, not on your changing circumstances.

Heavenly blessings are backed by the highest authority in the universe. Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father “in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (Ephesians 1:20–21).

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was created by Congress to restore trust in banks after the Great Depression. If you deposit funds in an FDIC-insured bank, your deposit is supposedly backed by “the full faith and credit of the United States government.” It’s like a backstop: even if your bank fails, the U.S. government won’t. “The full faith and credit of the government” might not mean much to you, but since the FDIC was created, no one has lost a single cent of insured deposit.

To be blessed by the Father in the Son through the Spirit from the high-heavenlies is to receive favor that is fully guaranteed. There is no higher authority, no higher source of good!

Is this where you find your joy and security? Do you spend your days mainly aware of how you feel, or of what God has done? Do you look for approval from another human, or from your Father in heaven? Do you find security in your possessions or achievements, or in God’s promises?

Every blessing of the Spirit in the high-heavenlies is available to you in Christ. And this is the grand and glorious reason to glorify God. Bless God because he has blessed us in Christ with every blessing of the Spirit in the high-heavenlies. The rest of the passage unpacks the specific blessings with which God has blessed us.

Praise God for Choosing Us (v. 4)

“Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him” (Ephesians 1:4). This further elaborates how God has blessed us. Even as could be translated insofar as or because: “God has blessed us … in that he chose us.” This drills down into that truth and gives us a more specific reason to praise God.

We refer to God’s choosing as the doctrine of election, which sounds technical. But the word for choose simply means to choose. It’s just a basic, everyday word for choosing or selecting something out of a group. In Luke 6:13, Jesus chose twelve apostles out of a larger group of disciples. Jesus told his disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you ….” (Jn 15:16).

God’s relationship with his people has always been based on God’s initiative, not man’s. God chose Abraham, to bless him and make him a great nation (Gen 18:19, Neh 9:7). Israel didn’t choose Yahweh to be their God; God chose Israel to be his people: “The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth” (Deuteronomy 7:6). David didn’t choose to be God’s anointed king; God chose David to be king over his people (Ps 78:70, 89:3).

And we did not choose God; rather, in Christ, God the Father chose us. God’s eternal and sovereign choice is personal. It’s not just that he chose that he would save some. Paul says, “He chose us.”

The specific aim of God’s election is here in that last phrase: “that we should be holy and blameless before him.” That phrase “holy and blameless” describes the salvation of guilty sinners who never would have chosen God. Holiness is moral purity. And blamelessness is freedom from guilt and blame. 

In Ephesians 5:27 Paul says that Christ gave himself up for the church, “so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (same word as blameless here).

In Colossians, Paul writes, “And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him” (Col 1:21–22).

In both of these passages, it is the death of Christ that cleanses defiled people and reconciles alienated sinners to God, making them holy and blameless before God. To be holy and blameless in God’s sight is both to enjoy a new legal status (justification) and to experience a change in conduct (sanctification). Have you experienced that salvation and transformation?

To underscore God’s gracious initiative toward us, Paul adds this staggering statement: “He chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” That simply means before God made the world (cf. Heb 4:3).

God is eternal and exists independent of time and space:  “Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God” (Psalm 90:2).

Before the foundation of the world, the Father and Son existed in glory and love. Jesus prayed, “And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed” (John 17:5). And he prayed that his disciples would be with him “to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).

But not only did the Father and Son exist in glory before the foundation of the world. Look at Revelation 13:8. “And all who dwell on earth will worship it [speaking of a blasphemous beast], everyone whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who was slain” (Revelation 13:8). So there is a book, and it was written before the foundation of the world. And that book is called the book of the life of the Lamb who was slain.

Before the foundation of the world, the Father chose you. He chose to save you from your sin and to make you holy and blameless before him. And that means he chose you in Christ. He chose to give his holy and blameless Son to die for you. Before the foundation of the world it was the plan of God to provide his own Son as the Lamb slain for sinners.

That is hard to wrap our minds around. Not just hard, but impossible really. We are finite creatures. You had a beginning. Everything that exists had a beginning. Except for God, the Creator of all things.

Thankfully, your inability to comprehend does not prevent you from experiencing the intended effect of this revealed truth. In fact, your inability to comprehend intensifies your wonder. Like beholding the Grand Canyon or gazing at the stars in the heavens, your ability to feel awe does not require you to grasp the dimensions and measurements. The very sense that you can’t grasp it is what evokes awe.

Praise God for Adopting Us (v. 5)

Finally, in verse 5, Paul says, “In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will” (Ephesians 1:5). This, too, is a mind-boggling truth meant to fuel passionate praise.

The Father “predestined us for adoption.” To predestine means to decide upon beforehand, to predetermine, or to pre-appoint. This builds on the eternal purpose of God introduced in v. 4, where Paul said that God “chose us … before the foundation of the world.” God predetermined or foreordained that he would adopt you. That was not an afterthought or a reactionary response to sin. That was the eternal purpose of God from before he even created the world.

Now, adoption in the ancient world differed somewhat from our concept of adoption. When we think of adoption, we tend to think of parents taking a baby to be their child. The main idea is the relationship.

In the ancient world, the focus was not on a baby, but on an heir. And the main idea was the rank or privilege that came with the new relationship. Adoption was mainly about appointing an heir. The focus was on inheritance, passing on an estate, the family business and property.

That’s the point here. In adoption, God is not simply providing food and shelter to orphans. God is appointing his own heirs. God has made us co-heirs with his firstborn Son, Jesus. He has given us co-rule with Jesus, seating us with Jesus in the high-heavenlies (Eph 2:6). Here is another truth too lofty to fully grasp.

And the glory of God’s grace in adoption is magnified when you consider what we were. In Ephesians 2, Paul calls us “sons of disobedience.” He says, “You were dead in the tresspasses and sins in which you once walked” (2:1–2). We “were by nature children of wrath” (v. 3). 

I love the way S. M. Baugh puts it: “These stupendous acts of divine grace have no parallel in Graeco-Roman society. It surpasses even the unthinkable idea of the Roman emperor adopting a slave from the most barbaric hinterlands to be the next emperor.”

What would motivate God to act toward us with such stunning grace? Look at the very end of v. 4, where this sentence begins: “In love he predestined us ….” Many people regard predestination as a form of fatalism, a cold, impersonal force that mindlessly predetermines future outcomes. Nothing could be further from the truth revealed here!

God predestined us in love and for adoption to himself as sons. Predestination is not an impersonal force, but the gracious action of a loving Father. It makes all the difference in the world whether you view the world in general and your life in particular as governed by impersonal force or by an infinitely personal Father.

God chose us in eternity-past and predestined us to be his own heirs. That inevitably leads to an important question. Why did God choose me? On what does God base his choice?

Paul tells us at the end of v. 5: God has done all this “according to the purpose of his will.” Or the NIV says, “in accordance with his pleasure and will.” That is, the basis of God’s choice is located entirely in God and not in you. If you are in Christ, God chose you and predestined to adopt you because it pleased him, and not because you deserved it. God does not choose you because of some quality he sees (or foresees) in you. He chose you because he wanted to.

Such is the glory of his grace. What do you do with that? Stand in awe and wonder! All of this, Paul says (v. 6), is “to the praise of his glorious grace ….” Glorify God for his grace toward you. That is the main point of Ephesians 1:3–6.

Conclusion

God made you with the capacity to perceive glory and to feel awe and wonder.  And God has displayed his glory—the glory of his grace—for your joy.

Have you beheld the glory of God’s grace in Christ?

The question is not whether you have fully grasped it. It is impossible for us to understand exhaustively. But do you see even a glimpse of the glory of the grace of God, who has acted from the heavens and before the foundation of the world to bless you in Christ?

If so, then glorify God for his grace toward you.