Last week, we began to work through a new section in our study of “The Love of the Triune God” - God’s Covenant Love. I explained that we experience God’s love based on our relationship. God’s love is ordered towards the good, and his Son, Jesus Christ, is that ultimate good. He has loved his son from all eternity past, and so, if we are in Christ, we experience the fullness of God’s love. The trouble is, as we saw last week, there is no one who deserves God’s love. As Paul says in Eph. 2:3, we are by our nature, children of wrath. We are spiritually dead, walking after the ways of Satan, and following the passions of our flesh. If this is our natural condition, then we have a real problem. How are we ever to be in a right relationship with God? How are we to ever be found in Christ?
The good news is that God’s love is not bound. He is totally free to love as he chooses. God in his mercy and grace chooses to act when we cannot. He chooses to bless us, redeem us, and seal us in Christ. This is the very nature of God, and it is a pattern we find throughout the Bible. God chooses to lavish his love on undeserving sinners. Abraham, the great man of faith in the OT, was a pagan living in the land of Ur when God called him. Neh. 9:7 says, “You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram and brough him out of Ur…”. The covenant did not begin with Abraham’s search for God. It began with God’s search for Abraham. Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. Both technically fulfilled God’s promise that the blessing would continue through his offspring, but God chose Isaac according to promise, not natural expectation. In Gen. 17:18-21, Abraham begs God to extend the blessing through Ishmael, but God insists that his covenant will be established through Isaac. God’s electing grace is even clearer in the sons of Isaac. Esau and Jacob were twins, and God promised before they were born that the older (Esau) would serve the younger. Paul points out in Romans 9:10-12 that God did this before the boys were born and could do anything good or evil. So, God didn’t do it based on the works of either man, but, Paul says, “so that God’s purpose of election might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls.” Abraham had nothing that obligated God to call him. Isaac had nothing that required God to choose him over Ishmael. Jacob had done nothing at all when God chose him over Esau.
This theme of God’s electing love continues in the nation of Israel. In the book of Deuteronomy, God repeatedly reminds the Israelites that he did not choose them because they were worthy. Deut. 10:14-15 says, “God owns heaven and earth, yet the Lord set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them.”
Understand, God has not changed, and he did not suddenly do something different with Jesus. God is still in the business of making covenant, and, praise God, he has made a covenant with us that saves us and unites us to his Son, Jesus Christ. It is in this new covenant that we experience the gracious love of God as his adopted sons and daughters. But, how do we enter this covenant? Do we earn it in some way? Does God see something good in us and choose to save us? To see the answer to those questions, let’s read Eph. 1:3-6. From this passage, see three points: The Blessing of God’s Choice, the Beginning of God’s Choice, and the Basis of God’s Choice.
First, from verse 3, see the blessing of God’s choice. Verse 3 begins the longest sentence in the NT. In the original Greek, Paul does not pause to take a breath until he gets to verse 14. This is all one long sentence of praise to God for his marvelous grace. That praise begins with the blessing of his grace. God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places through Christ. Last week, I gave the analogy of a beam of light. When you shine a spotlight on an object, it brings that object out of the darkness and makes it shine with the radiance of your beam. And, anything that is around that object receives the same beam and radiates with the same glory. God loves his son with an uninterrupted, eternal love that, like an unfiltered beam of light, magnifies his son. So, if you are in Christ, you receive the blessings of that glory. All of God’s blessings extend to us through Christ. If you are not in Christ, you cannot know the blessings of heaven. If you are not in Christ, you do not know what it means to be holy and blameless. If you are not in Christ, you will not experience the adoptive love of the Father. But, if you are in Christ, all of these blessings are yours.
That raises an obvious question. What have I done to deserve these blessings in Christ? The short answer: absolutely nothing. We established last week that we cannot deserve God’s love because we are spiritually dead children of wrath. There is nothing we can do, but praise God, he acted when we could not! In fact, God acted to bless you in Christ when you were least able to do anything to deserve it. He acted before the world ever began. To see that, consider my second point: The Beginning of God’s Choice, from verse 4. Paul says, “Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” The blessings that God poured out on us began before the world was ever formed. Before God ever spoke a word of creation, he knew you and chose you. As 2 Tim. 1:9 says, “[He] saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose of grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.” Notice that God doesn’t just choose us in our sins, though. He chooses that we should be “holy and blameless before him.” Before the world ever began, God chose to make you holy and blameless. Yes, he knew that you would be spiritually dead. Yes, he knew that you would chase after the passions of your flesh. Yes, he knew that you would be slave to Satan. But, in his love and grace, he chose you anyway. God didn’t look down through history and see the people who would make themselves holy and choose them. He chose them THAT they would be holy.
This brings me to my final point - the basis of God’s choice - from verses 5-6. Paul continues this list of God’s works for our salvation by saying, “In love he predestined us for adoption…” We are still in the eternal past, and Paul says that God acted in love towards us to predestine us for adoption through Christ. Understand from this that God’s love for you did not begin when you walked the aisle. It did not begin when you started going to church. It did not begin when you got your life right. God has always loved you. That love motivated him to “predestine” you. The word “predestine” means to determine beforehand. God loved you, and so before the world ever existed, he determined beforehand that he would do something for you. He determined that he would adopt you as a son or daughter through Jesus Christ. Oh what beautiful grace! It makes me want to weep for joy! Remember from last week, Paul said we were “by our very nature, children of wrath.” Because of our sins, we were sons and daughters of Satan. But even before we took the first breath, God had already determined that he would adopt us and make us children of glory!
But why? Well, maybe there was something he saw in us. But that can’t be. 1 John 4:10 says, “In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us…” Perhaps he saw our potential. That can’t be either, because 1 Cor. 1:26-31 tells us that God chose what was foolish and weak and low and despised, “so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” Paul gives us the reasons for which God predestined us for adoption. First, he did it “according to the purpose of his will.” God chose to adopt you because he is completely free to act. God does not owe a debt to those who work. You cannot obligate God to save you. God does all that he does according to the counsel of his will. As the London Baptist Confession puts it, God predestined us “out of his mere free grace and love, without any other thing in the creature as a condition or cause moving him thereunto.”
Second, Paul says that God predestined us “to the praise of his glorious grace.” Before the world ever began, God set his love on you and chose you in Christ and predetermined that you would be adopted as a son or daughter of God so that you might be a testimony of praise to God’s glorious grace. If God saved you because you earned it, then who would get the praise? You would! If God chose you because he saw potential in you, who would get the glory? You would! But, he wasn’t motivated to choose you for any other reason but so that you might be a testimony of his grace, that you might sing with all the redeemed of his amazing grace!
Oh friend, if you feel now the call of God on your life, and you recognize that there is nothing you can do except to plead upon the mercy and grace of Jesus, know that he is mighty to save. He will not save you once you clean up. He will not save you when you start being more committed to church. He will save you now, because he has known you before the foundation of the world. Won’t you turn in faith to Christ today and be saved?
Brothers and sisters, you did not earn your salvation, and you cannot keep it. God did not save you because you were worthy or good. He loved you before time and chose you in Christ to be his child. There is a beautiful hymn in our Baptist Hymnal that most people don’t know. It’s hymn 289, “My Lord I Did Not Choose You”. I want to close with its lyrics. “My Lord I did not choose you, for that could never be; my heart would still refuse you, had you not chosen me. You took the sin that stained me, you cleansed me made me new; Of old you have ordained me, that I should live in you. Unless your grace had called me and taught my opening mind, the world would have enthralled me, to heavenly glories blind. My heart knows none above you; for your rich grace I thirst. I know that if I love you, you must have loved me first.”
Bibliography
London Baptist Association. The 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith. n.d. https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-10?utm_source=chatgpt.com (accessed August 8, 2026).
Southern Baptist Convention. The Baptist Hymnal. Nashville: Convention Press, 1991.
1 The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, Chapter 3, paragraph 5
2 The Southern Baptist Convention, The Baptist Hymnal, 289
No comments:
Post a Comment