“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, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love, by predestining us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He graciously bestowed on us in the Beloved.” (Ephesians 1:3-6) Who did it say has predestined us to adoption? It was God the Father. Notice that everything we’ve been walking through as of late in these articles, it is all of God at work. The Christian’s life is solely and truly one of God’s grace. “for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.” (Philippians 2:13) It is the Father who adopts us into His family; how suiting considering that we need a father, and not just any father, but the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to take us under His care. The Father is unlike any earthly father, as great or as terrible as our earthly fathers may be, none compare to God the Father. He is perfect in all of His attributes, including but not limited to, His goodness (in the truest sense of the biblical definition), mercy, grace, forgiveness, care, love, justice, and righteousness; He who is thrice holy has adopted those in Christ.I understand that for many who have bad fathers, whether biological and/or stepfather, we can tend to push that image of our earthly fathers onto God, but we would be wise to heed how God has revealed Himself through His word, as I just covered some of His character/nature or attributes. We have nothing and no one to compare to God, so we do Him a great injustice to think or force some image or thoughts upon Him, it is unjust and sinful of us to do so, as we blaspheme His character or nature by inferring that He must be like our earthly father.
So, moving forward, it says He has blessed us. Blessed us with what? With every spiritual blessing, and that in Christ Jesus. This means that only through our identification and unionwith the Lord Jesus Christ are we then eligible to receive His untold blessings. The nature of these gifts are of course spiritual, hence “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ”. God the Holy Spirit, it is He who is the agent (or better thought of as the executor) who applies the work of Christ to our hearts and lives. These blessings are the gifts of redemption and all that pertains to that through unity with Christ Jesus. Let us think of this logically for a moment; it is God the Father who is the source of these blessings, but it is only for those united in Jesus Christ, and it is the Spirit who applies these blessings. The word “trinity” is not found in the word of God, but the concept is; our God is three persons, but one in essence. To deny this, means you’re not believing in the one true God as He has revealed Himself. We serve a triune God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Paul makes this concept of the trinity very real in the book of Ephesians, especially so in Ephesians 1. Continuing on, these spiritual blessings would consist of redemption, forgiveness, sealing of the Holy Spirit, assurance, peace, adoption, sanctification, and more. The phrase “in Christ” would by necessity mean we are no longer of sin and the world, no longer participants in the works of darkness; but it is to be of the Lord and His kingdom, to be marked by a life that bears the fruit or works of righteousness (this from the Spirit at work in us). “Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 6:11) “But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification, and redemption,” (1 Corinthians 1:30) “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17) “For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:26) Everyone whose faith is in Christ Jesus has been made a child of God, adopted into His family, to receive the spiritual blessings in the heavenly places.
When do we receive these spiritual blessings you may ask? Well you’ve received them as you were united in Christ. But is that what is made to known to us by God through His word? No. He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world. So technically, before God had caused the land to appear from the gathering of the waters; long before he created any creature on the earth; God the Father chose you to be in Christ, to receive every spiritual blessing. Why? Well according to God’s word, it is “that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love.” So not only do receive the gracious gift of every spiritual blessing, but God has pre-ordained that we would be holy and blameless before Him. And so if He has chosen us to be justified, He has also predestined that we would be sanctified. As we talked about yesterday, justification is a forensic (or legal) declaration that you are righteous. God has declared those in Christ as righteous, not according to anything within them, but based on the active and passive obedience of Christ. This declared righteousness is not our own but is an alien righteousness, meaning it comes from elsewhere, and that elsewhere is from the Lord Jesus Christ. When you have been graciously given the faith to believe unto salvation, you were at that moment justified as well. However, being fully justified, you were not fully sanctified, that is a process whereby you grow in holiness and Christlikeness, which is a life-long process. “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 1:6) So going back to the portion of our text, “that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love,” of whose love is this referring to? His or yours? We can say in a sense, that it is both, but it all started with Him. See, we don’t have a love for God until He pours out the love of God within us by His Spirit. “We love, because He first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) It is solely because of the love of God that He makes us holy and blameless before Him.
How is this all done? By predestining us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ Himself. He had predestined us to be adopted into His family, which we’ve been granted through faith in Jesus Christ. “But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (John 1:12-13) So, it’s hardly needed to be said, but let’s engage the subject anyway. What is adoption? I think we all know it in a legal sense, which is to legally acquire a child who was born of another and raise the child as your own. But this doesn’t quite fulfill the proper understanding of divine adoption. The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith states it best in my opinion, “All those that are justified, God conferred, in and for the sake of His only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption, by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God, have His name put on them, receive the spirit of adoption, have access to the throne of grace with boldness, are enabled to cry Abba, Father, are pitied, protected, provided for, and chastened by Him as by a Father, yet never cast off, but sealed for the day of redemption, and inherit the promises as heirs of everlasting salvation.” (Chapter 12, Paragraph 1) What a spot on explanation of adoption. “See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we would be called children of God; and we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.” (1 John 3:1)
“Because those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers; and those whom He predestined, He also called; and those whom He called, He also justified; and those whom He justified, He also glorified.” (Romans 8:29-31) When we see this verse, we seepredestination from God; we see conformity to the likeness of His Son; we see God’s effectual calling; we see justification; and we see glorification. You might ask, why mention this verse in a topic about adoption? Well, look closer, and you’ll see it is clearly in there. “so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers”, that speaks of adoption. Christ is the firstborn among many “brothers”, we could not be called brothers if we were not family, if we were never graciously adopted into the family of God in Christ. The foreknowledge of God is often misinterpreted as to mean something along the lines of God saw down the timeline of all time and saw something in us that caused Him to choose us and work in us. This is a false view, and not at all what the word of God portrays God’s foreknowledge to be. See He knows the future because He has determined it. He is omniscient after all, what need would there be to look down the corridor of time to see anything and then make choices? That is against the character and nature of God. He is not changed by any external force, in fact He doesn’t change whatsoever, He is immutable. When thinking of the foreknowledge of God, we read in Holy Scripture that God knows us, that is to say that there is affection being expressed. Think of the psalm of David where He sings of this very thing. “O Yahweh, You have searched me and known me.” (Psalm 139:1) Thinking of the opposite, we see Jesus say the following to the wicked. “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS.” (Matthew 7:23) He is saying there is no fellowship there, there never has been, neither has there been an affection like He has with His true disciples. In this foreknowledge God placed His affections on those whom He chose long before creation, this quite obviously apart from anything within you, and apart from anything you have done or would do, as it is clear this was long before you existed. So, God predestined you for adoption, He did this before all of creation. In this predestination, and it may sound a bit extreme, but think of it this way; He put you in exactly the right place and in the right time in order that you would hear the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ being proclaimed or read. Not only this, but He predestined that you would be convicted over the sin you committed against Him. Predestining you to faith in Christ, “He who was delivered over on account of our transgressions, and He was raised on account of our justification.” (Romans 4:25)By the grace of God you have been saved through faith in Christ Jesus. His predestining you unto justification, you’ve been adopted, made a child of God; this He would not allow anything to happen to prevent you from becoming His child. This is the doctrine of adoption.
None of us are worthy of such. I certainly am not; I know who I am, and I don’t deserve the slightest bit of grace from God. Much less when I think of God who knows me completely inside and out. Yet He still fixed His heart upon me, chose me from before the foundation of the world. What grace, what marvelous grace of God. No longer subjects of His wrath, but recipients of His love and affection. The doctrine of the love of God is so incomprehensible to me. To come to the mirror of God’s word, behold all my faults, all my sins, my shortcomings,and to believe God loves me exactly as He has stated He does in His word, that, that takes faith. Let me close with a chapter from the word of God. “And you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together in Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. Therefore, remember that formerly you – the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called ‘Uncircumcision’ by the so-called ‘Circumcision,’ which is performed in the flesh by human hands – remember that you were at that time without Christ, alienated from the citizenship of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups one and broke down the dividing wall of the partition by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, the Law of commandments contained in ordinances, so that He Himself might create the two into one new man, making peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, having in Himself put to death the enmity. AND HE CAME AND PREACHED THE GOOD NEWS OF PEACE TO YOU WHO WERE FAR AWAY, AND PEACE TO THOSE WHO WERE NEAR; for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the corner stone, in whom the whole building, being joined together, is growing into a holy sanctuary in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit.” (Ephesians 2)