Ephesians 1:4

4. According as The blessing of us by the blessed One is in full accordance with his eternal choice of us. But who are this us? This is a most important question in determining the meaning of this epistle. The objects of choice must present to the Chooser the proper qualities, either seen or foreseen, in order to being intelligently chosen. They cannot be mere characterless blanks. Nor are they personal or impersonal entities in which exist no qualities, conditions, or suitableness for being chosen rather than not, for that makes the Chooser act without a wise reason. But they are those who present the proper rational conditions of the divine choice, namely, submitting and believing men.

We may say that in the section 3-12 St. Paul uses the first person plural of the personal pronoun, namely, we, us, and our, thirteen times in all, which, while it explicitly includes himself and the Ephesians, it also, by implication, takes in all believers. With Ephesians 1:13 commences the second person, used mainly throughout the epistle. It applies specially to the Ephesians, with much that is inferentially true of all believers. In Ephesians 1:14 the our refers to the Ephesians and himself directly, and all other believers inferentially.

Hath chosen The Greek is a word full of force chose out for himself. The prefix εκ , out from, implies an unchosen remainder really or conditionally left, which remainder constitutes the anti-Church of chapter Ephesians 5:1-21. This choice was part of the grand divine ideal, the universal restoration of Ephesians 1:10.

In him In Christ; as the mystical embodiment of the redemption in whom it was the divine idea and purpose of God’s mercy that all should be gathered, Ephesians 1:10.

Before the foundation of the world The world is here figured as a building; and the builder as laying his plans for the transactions in the house before he lays its foundations. And as the builder is no less than the Eternal, so this before sends our thoughts back into the deep, dim, anterior eternity. And, then, Paul’s glad thought is, that salvation and the Church being gathered from out the world, is not a human thing of to-day, but a divine thing from eternity. The choice of a sinner conditioned upon his faith, now first objectively performed, is traced far back into the divine mind, as in a mirror; the mind that, foreseeing all things, and precognizing the evil to result from the misdirected freewill of finite man, provides and adjusts them with the good, so that the highest good is ultimately attained.

The fact that God chooses chooses us from all eternity, chooses us out from the world, chooses us from his divine good pleasure does not in the slightest degree countenance the inadmissible idea that God does not know and foreknow what he is choosing, as well as the reasons both without the man and within the man on account of which he is chosen. Scripture most decisively shuts out from the text such an idea. The apostle puts foreknowledge as antecedent to predestination. “Whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate,” Romans 8:29, where see our notes. So also 1 Peter 1:2: “Elect according to the foreknowledge of God.” And this election is made definite, individual, and sure by our performance of the human condition: 2 Peter 1:10, “Give diligence to make your calling and election sure.” So that this elective purpose, as ideal purpose in eternity, becomes objective and real divine act in time.

In this present paragraph, Paul says little about conditions, and nothing to exclude them. He says little about them because it is not the human but the divine side of this election upon which he is now, with grateful rapture, expatiating. The human side comes in at Ephesians 2:4. Preaching to unconverted men, he would make the condition the main topic, calling upon them to enter, by faith and repentance, into the range of God’s eternal conditional purpose, by which he, from all eternity, chooses all who truly believe.

That we should be holy As faith is the condition upon which we are elected, so holiness, blamelessness, and eternal life, are the results for which and to which we are elected. See note on Romans 8:29.

Holy and without blame ”The positive and negative aspects,” says Ellicott, “of true Christian life.”

Before him Blameless even under His dread scrutiny.

In love Meyer, Ellicott, and others, join this to predestinated; making a predestination in love. To this Afford objects, conclusively, that all the three leading verbs, chosen, predestinated, made known, being co-ordinate with each other, have no qualifying phrase prefixed, but lead and give the drift of what follows. Love is the element in which the forgiven soul is held before God as without blame, not justice or innocence in the past; love, as from God and reciprocated to God.