Praising the Glory of His Grace
Notes
Transcript
This morning we are continuing our consideration of the purpose of God according to which He has called the people who make up the true Church, the elect of God, as we deepen our study of Romans 8:28, which states
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
This has been the guiding verse for many weeks, and now as we near the culmination of our consideration, last time we came to a truth that is absolutely essential if we are going to understand His purpose correctly:
God’s saving purpose does not begin with us, and it does not finally end upon us.
Paul writes later in this same letter,
For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen.
We must never lose sight of these three statements, especially when we consider His purpose!
First, everything is from Him, meaning that God is the originating source of His purpose, His purpose does not arise from any other created thing, whether man, or the created world, or even the angels and demons.
Second, everything is through Him, meaning that the accomplishment of God’s purpose rests finally upon His own wisdom, power, and faithfulness. Though He uses the real, actual choices of His creatures in accomplishing that purpose, it never depends upon them for its success.
And lastly, everything is to Him. God has appointed many real and meaningful immediate purposes within His works, but God Himself remains the ultimate end toward which they all move.
In fact, Paul is even more particular here, because he calls out that all of these three things point directly to the glory of God, something Pastor Jeff and I were both bringing before you for your consideration last week from different but remarkably complementary perspectives.
We saw that God does not merely possess glory as we might possess some honor, reputation, authority, or wealth which could conceivably be increased, diminished, surrendered, or taken away.
No, God is glorious. His glory belongs essentially and eternally to who He is, it is an attribute that is inseparable from His being. And when we speak of His glory, we are considering the infinite weight and worth, the majesty and beauty, the excellence and splendor of His very being—the radiant fullness of all His perfections.
God has never been less glorious than He is now, and He will never become more glorious than He has eternally been.
But at the same time, Scripture commands His creatures to render glory to Him, and we took great care last time to understand this does not mean that we supply God with something absent from His being, we do not make God more glorious by praising Him, nor do we diminish His essential glory by refusing Him the praise He deserves.
Rather, God makes the glory eternally true of Him known, and His creatures are called to behold it, acknowledge it, reflect it, and praise Him for it.
In other words, we render to Him the worship and praise that correspond to who He eternally is.
Now, where I had intended to go next when I had planned out our look at the purpose of God, was Yahweh’s response to Moses’ ultimate request in the tent of meeting in Exodus 33, but I was rather amazed when Jeff shared that that passage was what he was going to be centering his sermon on for last week.
But I do want to remind us that when God answered Moses, He did not merely display some impersonal radiance or visible splendor. He proclaimed His name and made His character known: His compassion, His grace, His patience, His lovingkindness, His truth, His forgiveness, His holiness, and His justice.
But when we recall that the glory of God is the ultimate reality of all creation, and that His purpose moves toward the manifestation and praise of that glory, we must ask what God makes known about Himself through the whole work of salvation in those whom He effectually calls!
Because salvation does not terminate upon the people God saves, every part of salvation must be understood within that ultimate purpose, including election, redemption, adoption, sanctification, preservation, glorification! The amazing depth and breadth of things directly related to salvation boggle the mind!
But for our purposes this morning, I think that taking a look at how Paul lays such things out for us in Ephesians 1 will be most helpful in developing our understanding further.
In Romans 8, Paul speaks of those who are “called according to His purpose,” and he tells us that “all things work together for good” for them.
But over in Ephesians 1, he speaks of believers as having been “predestined according to the purpose” of the One who “works all things according to the counsel of His will.”
Similar to what we found in our study in Romans 5–8, Paul begins in Ephesians by declaring what is already true – in a sense, this is an extended outburst of praise for what God has already accomplished! He traces the whole movement of salvation: from God’s choice before the foundation of the world, through redemption in the blood of Christ, to the hearing and believing of the gospel, the sealing of those who belong to Christ with the Holy Spirit, and the promised completion of their inheritance.
And at every stage, Paul will direct our attention away from the worthiness of the sinner, and toward the glory of the God who saves.
This massive, saving work, is the result of the triune Godhead working in unity, yet within that one work, Paul directs our attention particularly to the distinct personal operations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
The Father purposes salvation according to His grace.
The Son accomplishes redemption through His blood.
The Spirit applies and seals that salvation unto its promised completion.
This is one saving purpose of the triune God—and every part of it makes His glory known.
But God’s grace does more than place a glorious work before us to be observed from a distance!
The God whose grace is displayed in salvation also opens our eyes to behold His glory, renews our hearts to love Him, transforms our lives to reflect His grace, and brings forth the willing praise His grace deserves.
God has ordered the whole of our salvation to display the glory of His grace in Christ and to form a holy, redeemed, Spirit-sealed people who live to the praise of His glory.
And Paul begins where we must begin: with the grace God purposed before we ever existed. Let’s start our look at Ephesians 1 with verse 3,
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
Those first words, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”, establish the crucial tone for the rest of the passage. Paul’s not content to let us think about salvation as a detached theological puzzle to be solved, a heady, intellectual exercise best left to the elite thinkers of the age, no! Instead, his purpose is to praise God himself, and to help us join him in that praise!
And that praise is centered upon the blessing God has bestowed upon His people, found only in Christ.
You will see that theme appear repeatedly throughout this whole passage. We are blessed in Christ, chosen in Him, referring to Christ, adopted through Jesus Christ, grace is bestowed upon us in the Beloved, again referring to Christ.
As we work down in the passage, we find that we have redemption in Him – in Christ. God purposes to sum up all things in Christ. We receive our inheritance in Him – again, meaning Christ. We hear, believe, and are sealed in Him, Christ!
Paul does not allow us to conceive of salvation as a collection of benefits God distributes independently of His Son, no! Instead, every spiritual blessing given to God’s people comes to them in Christ and according to a purpose centered upon Christ.
But in verse 4, we find something that unequivocally confirms something that we’ve already touched on in our study of Romans 8:28,
just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love,
We’ve somewhat addressed this when we were looking at God’s effectual call, but it needs to be restated here plainly: God did not form His saving purpose when we believed, nor did He have to wait for us to be born, observe the course of our lives, and then decide how He would respond to what He discovered within us.
There are certain, often well-meaning people, who portray God as continually having to re-adjust His plan regarding people – you likely recognize it in this way… First, Adam was never designed to fail, so when He did fail, God had to adjust things, so He sent in the Law in so that people can be righteous. But when it finally became apparent that that wasn’t going to work, God had to adjust again to send His Son in order to satisfy the Law so that He could still save some people.
To human ears and human hearts, it does seem to have some sort of sense to it – plan A failed, plan B failed, so God had to implement plan C.
But Scripture never presents redemptive history as a succession of failed divine experiments.
The Law was never given because God believed fallen sinners could justify themselves by keeping it – Paul tells us plainly that if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based upon law! No, instead we discovered in Romans 7 that the Law exposed sin and served its appointed purpose in leading sinners toward Christ by demonstrating to people their utter inability to save themselves – that was the point of the ecstatic cry in Romans 7:25, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”, that the Law was never able to save, but as Paul shows in Galatians it serves as a tutor to bring us to the feet of Christ.
Nor was Christ introduced as a contingency after the Law failed. Peter says that Christ was foreknown before the foundation of the world, and Paul tells Timothy that saving grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began.
No… What has unfolded progressively within history was already purposed eternally in God.
Before there was a world in which we could perform any work, exercise any wisdom, demonstrate any willingness, or fulfill any potential, God’s saving purpose already stood.
His choice originated in Him, not in us.
God not only knew what would happen, but God determined what and how and why it would happen before He ever breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils.
But what we particularly need to recognize here is not merely when God chose His people. We also need to notice what He chose them for:
“that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love”
Holiness is not the cause of His choice; holiness is one of the appointed results of His choice, along with blamelessness. The implication of this in our daily life is that election, God’s choosing, can never be allowed to become an excuse for indifference toward holiness or blamelessness.
But neither do that holiness and blamelessness stand alone, separated from love. Remember, love in these matters is more than a passing emotion, rather it is an affection of the soul directed toward what we perceive to be good: the greater the love, the greater the good we perceive in its object. Our secondary affections—anticipation, delight, enjoyment, and desire—then gather around what we love.
So when Paul says that God chose us to be “holy and blameless before Him in love,” he is not describing some stoic, cold, or merely theoretical holiness. Nor is he describing an outward respectability sufficient to satisfy the judgment of other people, no!
This is holiness that is real before God, it is holiness expressed in rightly ordered love – love centered first upon its proper and supreme object, God Himself, and then flowing outward in sacrificial love toward others.
Paul will develop that very theme later in this letter. This love acts with humility, gentleness, and patience. This love causes us to bear with one another, to speak the truth to one another, and to contribute to the growth and building up of Christ’s body, the church. Ultimately, it follows the pattern set by Christ Himself: “walk in love, just as Christ also loved us and gave Himself up for us.”
Grace is displayed when the guilty are forgiven, yes! But grace is also displayed when those once enslaved to sin are increasingly made holy; when those once governed by self-love are brought willingly into love for God and sacrificial love for one another. Their actions, attitudes, and choices increasingly proceed from hearts inclined toward God and being conformed to the self-giving love of Christ.
The reasoning of those untaught and unstable people who twist and distort Paul’s writing to their own destruction often goes along the lines of “if God has chosen me, then it does not matter how I live.”
This is precisely the kind of distortion Peter warns about when he speaks of the untaught and unstable twisting Paul’s writings to their own destruction.
It turns Paul’s teaching completely upside down! The God who chooses the end also purposes the transformation of those whom He has chosen, no! He doesn’t choose sinners and then leave them exactly as He found them.
No… Every single person He chooses is someone who is guilty, defiled, and enslaved to sin – they are dead, Paul will write in the second chapter of Ephesians. But, by His grace He makes them a new creation, causing them to become increasingly holy in this life, and will finally present them blameless before Him at the end of the age!
That transformation itself displays the glory of His grace! God’s grace does not merely change our final destination, no!
In regeneration, God graciously makes us new; in sanctification, He graciously conforms us increasingly to Christ; and in glorification, He will finally present us holy and blameless before Him.
But even this holiness and blamelessness do not exhaust the purpose for which the Father chose people out of the world. Paul continues in verse 5,
by predestining us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will,
To stop short, to fail to consider the richness of this verse, would leave us with an incomplete view of predestination, and it is sad that many don’t realize that our adoption was as predetermined as our election. God determined before the foundation of the world to bring those people who He had chosen into His own family, adopting them as sons through Jesus Christ.
That word predestining speaks of God determining the appointed destination of His people beforehand; προορίζω, the Greek word used here, means to determine or appoint something before it occurs – to foreordain it. Paul is not speaking merely of God making adoption possible, nor merely of His knowing beforehand what someone else will choose.
No, God Himself has marked out the destination of those He chose, and because that purpose rests upon His will, its accomplishment is certain.
We were not born into God’s family by nature, we are not “children of God” on account of our parents, or our lineage, or our nationality, no! Rather, by our very nature, we were children of wrath, Paul will remind us in the next chapter, even as the rest. In other words, we were not only guilty before God, but we were likewise estranged and alienated and hostile toward Him – we had no natural right or claim upon a relationship to Him, to be a part of His household, and certainly no inherent claim upon His inheritance.
And yet, before the foundation of the world, God determined to bring particular guilty sinners into the full standing and privileges of sons! He pre-determined that certain sinners who were not of His household would be brought into His household – before Adam was even formed out of dust from the ground.
And notice carefully how He does this: our adoption is “through Jesus Christ.”
God does not simply overlook our guilt and pretend that rebels have always been faithful children, no! Our adoption comes through the One who is the eternal Son by nature, not by adoption—“very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father,” as the Nicene Creed confessed.
Jesus Christ came into this world, bore the condemnation deserved by His people, and secured their acceptance so that those united to Him might themselves be received into the family of God. The eternal Son brings adopted sons and daughters to His Father.
But God didn’t just “predestine us”, He predestined us to adoption through Jesus Christ “to Himself.”
The ultimate blessing of adoption is not merely that we escape condemnation, which we do. It is not merely that we receive a heavenly inheritance, which we do. It is not even merely that we are given a new name, a new standing, and a new family—all of which are true of everyone who is in Christ Jesus.
No, the great blessing of adoption is that God brings us to Himself. And surely this resonates deeply with what we considered last time in Romans 11:36: “For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things.”
But that also presses a question upon us: why would the holy God determine to bring guilty, defiled, and hostile sinners to Himself? What could possibly move Him to adopt as sons those who were by nature children of wrath?
Paul answers the question consistent with everything else we’ve been learning: it is found entirely within God Himself, “according to the good pleasure of His will.”
Those words bring us directly back to the distinction we have been making throughout our study of Romans 8:28: everything is done according to His purpose, not ours, not Satan’s, there is no chance involved. God has a purpose and that purpose will be accomplished, not out of chance but because He declared it to be so.
In other words, the reason for our adoption is found entirely in the gracious pleasure of God’s own will.
God did not choose and adopt His people reluctantly. The Son did not overcome some reluctance in the Father and persuade Him to receive people whom He otherwise had no desire to save.
No, according to the good pleasure of His own will, the Father purposed our adoption before the foundation of the world, and the Son willingly accomplished everything necessary to secure it
And here’s the key to this whole thing – note where Paul tells us this purpose ultimately leads in verse 6:
to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He graciously bestowed on us in the Beloved.
This is the great end toward which this entire movement has been carrying us.
Paul’s wording here is both important and pointed. He does not merely say that God saves us by grace, although He certainly does, and Paul clearly goes on to describe that grace in the first half of the next chapter in Ephesians.
But what Paul is emphasizing here is that God has ordered, arranged, and established this salvation “to the praise of the glory of His grace.”
Grace is God’s free and undeserved favor toward those who possessed no claim upon His goodness; those who, because of their sin, deserved only His judgment.
But Paul is bringing our attention beyond the fact that God has shown grace, helping us pull into focus the glory of that grace rather than leaving it in the hazy distance for us. He is trying to help us realize with clarity the radiant excellence of God made known as He lavishes favor upon the undeserving without ever compromising His holiness or justice.
And once the glory of that grace is made known, the only fitting response is for His creations to praise Him for this. Again, this isn’t adding some glory to God that He previously lacked, no! It is the willing recognition, declaration, and celebration of the glory He has revealed.
So God did not design salvation merely to distribute gracious benefits, He designed it to make the glory of His grace known, and to form those He saves into a people who behold that grace, delight in that grace, reflect that grace, and praise Him on account of that grace!
In other words, the people God saves are not merely the recipients of His grace, but by their transformed lives and willing worship, they become witnesses to the glory of the God who has shown them grace.
Why did God choose guilty sinners before the foundation of the world? Why did He purpose to make them holy and blameless before Him in love? Why did He predestine them to adoption through Jesus Christ and bring them to Himself?
“To the praise of the glory of His grace.”
Election displays grace. Why? Because the choice arose from God rather than from anything worthy in us – we deserve condemnation rather than justification.
Transformation displays grace. Why? Because God makes the spiritually dead alive and increasingly conforms sinners to the holiness of Christ.
Adoption displays grace. Why? Because God receives former enemies into His family, He even grants them the standing of sons.
And all of this grace is bestowed upon us “in the Beloved” – in Jesus Christ, the Son whom the Father eternally loves.
The glory of this saving grace is never revealed apart from Christ, and the praise of that grace can never be centered upon us. The saved sinner is not the hero of the story; Christ Himself is the Beloved in whom the undeserving sinner has been graciously received.
The glory of grace is not displayed by God merely ignoring sin or lowering the demands of His holiness, no!
Instead, the grace that only God can provide is displayed as He saves guilty people through His Son, makes them holy and loving, brings them into His family, and gives them Himself as their everlasting good.
So, now when we bring this back to Romans 8:28…
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
…we realize just a little more fully the purpose behind this effectual call of God.
God’s effectual call, by which He turns those who hated Him into those who love Him, and His providential working of all things for their ultimate good, both belong to the saving purpose He has established “to the praise of the glory of His grace.”
God’s purpose, then, is not to secure for us the self-centered life of ease we naturally desire. Before we ever existed, He determined that we would be made new, increasingly conformed to Christ, brought into His family, and finally presented holy and blameless before Him – all so that He would receive the praise due to the glory of His grace.
And so this truth both searches us and comforts us.
This means that no one has license to claim the comfort of election while remaining indifferent toward the holiness and love for which God chose His people.
It means that the accomplishment of this purpose does not rest finally upon our wisdom, strength, or constancy. Rather, it rests upon the good pleasure of the Father’s will and the saving work of His beloved Son. No circumstance of our lives can overturn the purpose according to which we have been called.
His saving purpose is from Him.
Its accomplishment is through Him.
And its final end is to Him:
“to the praise of the glory of His grace.”
So let us not merely analyze that grace from a distance. Let us join Paul in rendering the praise it deserves:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!”
Let us pray.
