This was a question a Bible student raised one morning at the end of a class I was teaching on the doctrines of grace. On that particular morning I lectured on “The Glory of God: The Cornerstone of the Sovereignty of God.” I’m saddened that I didn’t get to finish the lecture. But that’s what I get for trying to pile too much truth into one morning with a late start!

What I attempted to relay that morning was this truth: the origin of God’s free sovereignty, to do with His creation what He pleases and wills, is found in His glory, since He only sovereignly chooses to do that which will bring Him the most glory. I then threw out a truth grenade, knowing that the process of cleaning out the biblical shrapnel would be good for everyone: God loves His glory more than He loves us. This statement was followed by a long list of passages that loudly and clearly preached the message that God does what He does first and foremost for Himself.

Later on, toward the end of the class, one person asked the question, “Can’t God love His glory and me at the same time?” A fellow soldier was among us that morning, I believe, who whether by intent or by God’s providence tossed another 'truth grenade' in our midst. And this time, I was digging biblical shrapnel out of my own mind! That particular question had never been asked of me before, though it seems quite harmless and simple enough to answer. Now, my answer was biblical and I still stand by it: the Bible is clear that God acts first and foremost out of a love for His glory and that we are the benefactors or recipients of that love for His glory.

Now, as I just stated, I do believe this is the biblical truth. But there still remains a piece of shrapnel in my mind and probably in your minds as well. In fact, there seems to be two problems.

1. First, the question itself bespeaks an unclear connectedness between God’s love for His glory and His love for me.

2. Second, the truth statement at which the question was aimed leaves some with the conclusion that God’s love for us is like a barge we have cut loose out in the middle of the ocean. We watch it slowly drift away from our ship until it becomes a tiny little speck on the horizon. And while in the back of our minds we know it will always be out there floating around somewhere, it doesn’t really make in impact on how we conduct our shipping business right now.

But as Paul was fond of using the strongest Greek negative available in his language, ME GENOITO! God forbid! It cannot be this way and it must not be allowed to stay this way! So now, for many of you, I will jump ship and tread the shark and jellyfish-infested waters to retrieve that barge while it is still in my line of sight.

A former colleague of mine, named Jim Knight, planted the idea (and he didn't even know it!) for this little article in my head one Sunday morning when he himself addressed the same question and gave his answer to it. He too seemed to feel that the scales were tipping out of balance in the minds of many and his attempt to right the scales was terrific: “In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself…” (Eph. 1:5). IN LOVE He predestined us. IN LOVE He adopted us. God’s love for us was the guiding principle of predestination and adoption. Now, I’m not here to disagree with Jim, primarly because he was right when he stated that adoption is a huge if not major theme in the book of Ephesians, and a lens through which it must be read in its entirety. In fact, it makes the most sense when read this way.

So having righted the scales, we are left with two equal truths. The first truth is one that Paul states three times over in chapter one of Ephesians: salvation was for the express purpose of praising and glorifying God (vv. 6, 12, 14). I stated this first truth this way in my lesson that morning: God’s love for His glory is the foundation of His love for His people.

The second truth is one that Paul states more times than the first truth, yet not as directly as the first truth was stated. (And let me tell you, it is a truth that was not easily concluded upon without having first gone to the mat many times, wrestling with some of the smartest theologians and scholars throughout church history.)[1] Jim alluded to this truth at the outset of his lesson this past week, but I’ll put it in concrete here: God’s love is the cause or reason for His saving activity. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Pastor Rob, but you said a couple of weeks ago that ‘the kind intention of His will’ as mentioned in verse 5 was the cause of God’s saving activities!” It was. But so is God’s love. And it is at this point that you’ve got to hang on because the roller coaster is doing one those 360° loops! At what point are you going up and at what point are you coming down? The truth is that you’re doing both at the same time. (I think that’s why they called one of the prototype roller coasters of this kind the “MindBender” at many of the Six Flags theme parks way back in the early 80’s, because you couldn’t figure out what you were doing, much less what you were going to do next!)

You see, this is just one of those truths in one of those places of Scripture where two things are true at the same time, even though they seem to contradict human logic. Here’s the ‘low-down’ on the verse as plain as I can make it. The fact of the matter is that the phrase “in love” represents God’s love as the cause of God’s predestination to adoption. And the other fact of the matter is that the phrase “according to the kind intention of His will” also represents God’s pleasure as the cause of His predestination to adoption. So when you ask, “Was it God’s love or God’s pleasure that caused Him to predestine and adopt us?” all I can say is “Yes!” (while I really have my fingers crossed behind my back, thinking in my mind, ‘ I don’t know how to explain it!’). He predestined us because He loved us and because it pleased Him.

This is a tough sentence in the Greek for two reasons. First, as just alluded to, the phrase “in love” is a prepositional phrase in the dative case being used in a causal sense. That’s exegetical jargon for this: God’s love is the reason He predestined us.

Second, as alluded to again, the phrase “according to the kind intention of His will” is also a prepositional phrase in the accusative case being used in a standard sense. Scholarly jargon again for: God predestined us according to the standard of His pleasure.

Now, you may not care about all this jargon, but jargon helps us with precision, and precision is important when dealing with truth because error begins with imprecision. Being precise here enables us to see that God’s love is the reason why He predestined us and adopted us, and that His good pleasure was the measure by which He did it. His loving and saving activity toward us was measured by the kindness of His will.

Another way to put it would be to say that He wanted to be kind to you and so He loved you by predestinating you to be adopted as one of His children. In God’s eternally huge heart, there welled up within Him such a degree of kindness that He willed to express it by loving us which was expressed by predestinating us for the purpose of adopting us. And why do people adopt children? Because they want to love them! And there it is! This is the truth at which Jim Knight was driving (and would have successfully and boldly preached had I not assigned him the task of teaching us about the history of the Doctrines of Grace instead). God adopted us because He loved us!

Now, how is God’s love for His glory connected directly with His love for us?

They are both true, but how are they related to one another? To our feeble minds they seem poles apart and unrelated. But Paul sees them inseparably and intimately connected with one another. Scratching the surface in Ephesians 1, to which referred this past Sunday, I’ll try to tread that shark-infested, dangerously deep water and reattach the floating barge to our ship.

First, in verse 3 there is the thought of blessing. God is spoken of as the source of our blessing: “Blessed be…God…who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing…” Thus, immediately from the outset of the epistle, God is the Actor and we are those acted upon. God gives the blessing and we are infinitely blessed. Now, link this up with the purpose clauses in verses 6, 12 and 14 and what does it look like? I propose that God blesses us because when He does it brings Him glory. It brings Him to glory to give everything He has to all of His people. When they are blessed, He is glorified. Thus, God glorifies Himself by satisfying us with His blessings.

Second, in verse 4 we are taught that God did the choosing, and He did it before there were ever any people created or born. And the purpose of this choosing is found in the purpose clause, “that we should be holy and blameless in Him.” Therefore, God chose us to be sanctified and to live holy lives in Christ. What about its relation to God’s love for His glory? That’s almost a no-brainer: God is glorified when we are made holy and blameless like Him. Another way to state it would be in the active sense that God glorifies Himself when He chooses people who will be like Him. And that is the same thing as saying that if we are not like God He is not glorified. Therefore, if all of this is done in love, as verse 5 teaches, then He is actually loving us by making us like Him. Hence, my submission is that we feel loved the most when we are most made like Him. So our sense of being loved by God and God’s sense of loving His own glory seem to be the same.

Third, verse 5 teaches us that love, as we have already seen, is the reason why God predestined us to adoption. Paul is the only one who uses this word for “adoption” in the Greek, and besides one reference from Dr. Luke, he is the also the only one who uses the word for “predestine.” Almost all of Paul’s usages of these same words elsewhere in his writings reveal that predestination and adoption are connected with God’s love as the source. In Romans 8:15, our adoption as God’s children means that we cry out “Abba! Father! Daddy!” What earthly father wouldn’t delight to hear the cry of his little child. Nothing makes a Daddy’s heart fervent than when he is able to display his fatherly strength and might by coming to the rescue of his little child. And so it is here!

God is never more glorified and magnified than when He is able to display His might and strength by coming to our aid, to our rescue, and saving us. Then consider a few verses later in 8:29-30 where Paul speaks of predestination. There we read that we were predestined, among many other activities that God performed. What does that imply? In verses 31 and following it implies that God is for us (v. 31)! “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (v. 32). Nothing whatsoever can harm us (vv. 33-39)! “For I am convinced that [nothing]…shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (vv. 38-39).

There it is! Do you see it! God is for us (v. 31) because He is for Himself. He predestined us so that we would become like Him (v.29). This means that He is for Himself and His glory. But it also means that He is for us. Because being for us means being for His glory. Being for us means freely giving us all things (v. 32). It means defending us against condemnation (vv. 33-34). It means protecting us and preserving us in the midst of tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword (v. 35), death, life, angels, principalities, things present, things to come, powers (v. 38), heights, depths, and from any other created thing (v. 39).

He loves Himself when He loves us. He is glorifying Himself the most (as if such a concept with God were possible) when He is loving us the most (as if the opposite were at all biblically possible). When we were without Christ, we glorified God by magnifying His ability to do that which we could do for ourselves. We could not rescue ourselves from anything. Who ever heard of such a concept?[2]

No! Someone else must rescue us when we are in danger. And it is the rescuer who is the hero. And God always wants to be the hero! (There's your more God-centered approach to Wild at Heart, Mr. Eldridge!) He glorifies Himself when He acts as the divine Hero and rescues us from sin and subsequent condemnation in hell.

And what about after we are saved? Well, when His people call on Him in prayer, they glorify Him by magnifying His infinite and eternal ability to answer their prayers. Answering prayers is an opportunity to make Himself known. And since He loves to make Himself known, He wants to answer prayer!

And when God’s people find themselves in the midst of tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, war, and even death, we glorify God by magnifying His ability to sustain and maintain us throughout the entire experience. Preserving and delivering His saints amid all these things will always and forever be God’s way of making Himself great. This is why eternal security, as we have come to know it in Baptist circles, is unbreakable, because our security is based on God’s glorifying Himself. And we can no more be lost once we are saved than God can stop glorifying Himself.

The Challenge in Ephesians One

Now, your challenge is to head back to Ephesians 1. There I urge you to first, locate all the saving activities of God that Paul speaks of there. Second, I call you to seek to understand that saving activity in light of His love. Third, I point you to understand how that saving activity glorifies Him. And fourth, I lay on you the toughest labor of connecting God’s love for His glory in performing those saving acts with His love for you as the recipients of those saving acts. It will take much time and mental effort, but the payoff is huge!

My heart is swimming with great strength and vigorous joy as I have attempted to weld the chain of our floating barge back to the ship. And if you do your homework that barge won’t go anywhere, I guarantee. Your final duty, above all, is to rejoice in what God does for you in loving and saving and rescuing and delivering and preserving you. It is this singular act of rejoicing that terminates in glorifying God. In other words, when you have plumbed the depths of His love and come up to the surface rejoicing over what you have found, God will then be glorified. And conversely, He wants to glorify Himself even more by continuing to have you continue to scour His ocean floor of precious truths and loving acts again and again so that you will rejoice and He in turn will be glorified!

He delights in making you happy and joyous. It brings Him joy and glory to do so. Just like my wife and I are filled with delight each Christmas morning when we watch our children tear into their presents with awe and amazement that they would receive such a gift, so our heavenly Father lights up in a divine way (that we cannot even begin to imagine) when we unwrap His precious gifts and truths of salvation as we experience them each and every day.

In closing, I want to leave you with something I was left with yesterday as I was meditating on some of the thoughts in Jonathan Edwards’ sermon The End for Which God Created the World. An edited version of this sermon is found in John Piper’s book God’s Passion for His Glory,[3] along with four helpful chapters of introductory and explanatory material. I greatly encourage you to read especially, if nothing else, the first chapter of Piper’s book where he masterfully details many more implications of this truth I have laid before you in this article. In that chapter Piper states,

“The further you go up in the revealed thoughts of God, the clearer you see that God’s aim in creating the world was to display the value of his own glory, and that this aim is no other than the endless, ever-increasing joy of his people in that glory” (John Piper, God’s Passion For His Glory, p. 32).

“The happiness of the creature consists in rejoicing in God, by which also God is magnified and exalted.” (¶ 72)

“God in seeking His glory seeks the good of His creatures, because the emanation of His glory…implies the…happiness of his creatures. And in communicating His fullness for them, He does it for Himself, because their good, which He seeks, is so much in union and communion with Himself."

"God is their good."

"Their excellency and happiness is nothing but the emanation and expression of God’s glory. God, in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks Himself, and in seeking Himself, i.e. Himself diffused…He seeks their glory and happiness.” (¶ 114)

“Thus it is easy to conceive how God should seek the good of the creature…even his happiness, from a supreme regard to Himself; as His happiness arises from…the creature’s exercising a supreme regard to God…in beholding God’s glory, in esteeming it and loving it, and rejoicing in it.” (¶ 277)

“God’s respect to the creature’s good, and His respect to Himself, is not a divide respect; but both are united in one, as the happiness of the creature aimed at is happiness in union with Himself.” (¶ 278)

Footnotes

[1] The wrestling matches centered on whether or not the words “in love” should go with verse 4 or with verse 5. Some scholars understand the phrase to go with the verb “chosen” in the first part of verse 4. This makes love the sphere of life into which we were chosen. This is undoubtedly biblical, especially in the writings of John. Further, there is an even greater number of scholars (Ambrosiaster, Erasmus, Luther, Beza, Calvin, Grotius, Alford, Salmond, et. al. along with the ancient Vulgate and Coptic texts) who see “in love” as going with the preceding phrase “holy and blameless.” These godly men believe that (1) it is Paul’s habit to place this phrase “in love” after the clause which it modifies (e.g. Eph. 4:2, 15, 16; 5:2; Col. 2:2; 1 Thess. 5:13), and that (2) Paul is representing love as the end-all-be-all of the Christian virtues of holiness and blamelessness. Now comes the hard part. As much as I am not in any way, shape or form the godly theologians nor the scholars that these men were, I must take a different road based on what I believe to be more sound exegesis. That sounds scary just saying it! But let me explain why based on three reasons.

First, answering Calvin and Luther, and those accompanying them, I would (very nicely and humbly) mention the fact that the passages to which they refer to make their point actually make the point that Paul’s habit was to place the phrase “in love” close to the clause which it modifies (cf. William Hendricksen, Ephesians NTC [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1976], pp. 78-79, fn 18) and not immediately after it.

In answering the second argument, I appeal to Paul’s usage of the same phraseology elsewhere in the same letter or same set of letters (being the prison epistles also including Philippians, Colossians and Philemon) to help shed some light on his usages. And in so doing I found that “holy” and “blameless” were also used in Ephesians 5:27 and Colossians 1:22. In the Ephesians passage the phrase “in love” does not appear with or accompany the phrase “holy and blameless.” And in the Colossians passage the phrase “beyond approach” appears with “holy and blameless” (NAS). So, it does not appear to be Paul’s usual habit to follow “holy and blameless” with the phrase “in love.”

All of this leaves one other option, namely that the phrase “in love” actually precedes the participle “predestined” in verse 5. In favor of this view are also a great company of godly pastors and scholars (Chrysostom, Theophylact, Theodoret, Jerome [which is interesting since his interpretation as given in his commentary on Ephesians is different from that which he utilized in his Vulgate translation], Zanchius, Crocius, Gengel, Ellicot, et. al.). But despite what these men may say, I still want exegetical evidence from the text! Just because it wasn’t Paul’s habit to use “in love” after “holy and blameless” is not necessarily a 100% closed case conclusion. It is only a cased based on circumstantial evidence. It argues for what he doesn’t normally do as an argument for what he probably was doing here. So on the positive side I offer four arguments for why “in love” should go with verse 5.

The first is an exegetical reason. “In love” is a prepositional phrase in the dative case of the Greek (en agape). And believe it or not, there are at least ten different ways to understand this preposition “in.” So which is it? Common sense rules out most of them, leaving us with about two solid possibilities. One of the most reliable Greek dictionaries available helps to seal the case shut, at least for me personally. BAGD (A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature by Walter Bauer, William F. Arndt, F. Wilbur Gingrich, and Frederick W. Danker [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1979]), in referring to the understanding of the dative as being ‘of cause or reason,’ remarks that the preposition “in” can be used with “verbs that express feeling or emotion, to denote that toward which the feeling is directed” (p. 261). There are certain words in the Greek language that express feeling, and BAGD then lists these words. The first one on his list is the word eudokein or eudokia. Now it just so happens that in the very same verse for which we are arguing that “in love” be connected, this word eudokia appears: “[In love] He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will.” This means that “in love” becomes a dative of cause, meaning that God’s love was the cause or reason for God’s predestinating and adopting us.

The second, third and fourth reasons are more theological, as relating to the rest of Paul’s teaching, though not necessarily using the very same exact terminology. Starting with the second, the fact that in man’s redemption God (or Christ) was motivated by love is in harmony with other passages in this same epistle: 2:4; 3:19; 5:2, 25 (cf. Hendricksen, p. 79). And third, the truth that God’s love is the cause of His saving actions is normal Pauline doctrine through and through: see for example Romans 5:8; 8:28, 35, 37; 2 Corinthians 5:14; 13:11; Galatians 2:20; 2 Thessalonians 2:16; Titus 3:4. Fourth, and finally (!), the tone or spirit of the paragraph in Ephesians 1 is God’s saving activity toward man in all of its great and gracious features. To put it another way, the heart of the passage is seen in the revelation of the glorious features of God’s saving activity toward man and not in the features of man as he is saved and secured by God (cf. John Eadie, Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians [Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1977 reprint of 1883 edition] p. 30).

[2] Yet it is this very concept that Arminianism would have us embrace in its logical end. In this scheme God has done all that He will do by making salvation from sin possible, but man must actually choose to be saved. You know what? That’s biblical garbage. I call it biblical eau de toilet! No rescuer swims out into a raging river and poses the question as to whether or not they wish to be saved. He just grabs them and swims back to shore. Can you imagine a rescuer at Ground Zero on 9/11 finding someone alive under the rubble and asking if they wanted to be rescued from the impending danger of the remaining building to collapse upon them? Of course not. All rescuers proceed in their operations under the assumption that the one in danger wants to be rescued. And you know what? Nothing changes even if they are not alive. All the rescuer knows is that if he sees a human body, he is to pull it out and recover it, then attempt resuscitation. And this is the imagery we have of the very word ‘deliverance’ in Scripture – a synonym for salvation. God doesn’t ask us. He knows that we are not just buried alive under the collapsing World Trade Center. He said in Ephesians 2:1 that we were dead in sins. But the analogy is the same in this respect: we were not consulted or asked if we wanted to be rescued. God simply acted and we were saved.

[3] John Piper, God’s Passion for His Glory: Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1998). The original text of Edwards’ sermon is found in volume 2 of the Banner of Truth edition of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth Trust, 1984, Reprint), pp. 94-121.

posted by rob wilkerson  # 1:47 PM