Ephesians Devotionals
Bob Morris
The Blessings (Part 1: Being Chosen), Ephesians 1: 4
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.
The first blessing of all is being chosen. This is not some arbitrary control mechanism of a manipulative God. This is a God who loved us enough even before we were born to choose us “in Christ” – the only way we could be his. Left to ourselves, as soon as our own choice is engaged, we rebel against any external authority, however benign.
It is important to remember who it is that has chosen us. He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, but also the one Jesus taught us to address as “Our Father”. Each rabbi had a distinctive prayer which identified their students. When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray it was essentially a request for him to teach them his unique approach to YHWH. Calling God Father was certainly distinctive in Jesus’ day. It was blasphemous to a monotheistic Jew! The Jews tried to kill him because he was calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God (John 5: 18). It is no less abhorrent to monotheistic Muslims today. No devout Muslim can call God Father (hence the title of Bilquis Sheik’s book I Dared to Call Him Father). J.I. Packer once wrote. “What is a Christian? The question can be answered in many ways, but the richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God for his Father". It is this God who chose us.
Long before we were born, even before the creation of the world, he decided to make us his children. An ongoing debate is the question of when life begins. Paul implies that it begins before the creation of the world. The subsidiary question relates to when our responsibility for human life begins? The answer would seem to be from conception and even before that.
Just as there are reasons for choices, there are purposes for choices. God’s purpose was that we should be holy and blameless in his sight. Our standard of goodness is not good enough. Our most righteous acts are like filthy rags in the context of God’s standard. And that is the standard he has set for us: holy and blameless in his sight. That is a tall order, an impossible order, apart from his intervention. Yet Jesus affirmed that standard: be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5: 48) and Peter urged his listeners to be holy just as the one who called us is holy (1 Peter 1: 15-16).
The irrefutable DNA of God’s paternity is that we are holy and blameless in his sight. The only way that can happen is by God’s making it happen. That points us to a tiny phrase which will appear repeatedly in different forms in Ephesians: “in him” or “in Christ”. The blessings are ours “in Christ” and in verse 4 we understand that God chose us “in him (Christ)”. The phrase “in Christ” reminds us of Jesus’ words to the disciples, “Stay in and I in you…if you remain in me you will bear a lot of fruit; apart from me you can do nothing”. Paul extends that principle to infinity, in time and in space. Before creation we were chosen in him and we are blessed in Christ in the heavenly realms, a universe that extends far beyond our present world. When we talk to people about Jesus, and live holy lives among them, we become for them “close encounters of the eternal kind” and a glimpse of God’s Kingdom come on earth.
Father, thank you for the purposefulness you have given me in choosing me as your child. Help me to live this day as if I were the child of a holy, loving God.
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