In the last post we looked at God’s motive in justification in an effort to see why justification is by faith alone. We tried to show that justification is by the work of God alone and it is moved by motives from within God and man can contribute nothing to his own salvation. The thought of this was based on Obadiah Grew whose original work that was published in 1669 was re-published in 2005 by Soli Deo Gloria as The Lord Our Righteousness. In this post we want to continue to look at how the grace of God is moved by God Himself and not by anything found in a sinner or sinners. God is moved by and from within Himself to justify sinners, which is what grace alone really means. Salvation by grace alone is a salvation that has not motive in God other than God Himself.
Ephesians 1:5 – “He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.”
Ephesians 1:9 – “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention which He purposed in Him 10 with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. In Him 11 also we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will,”
Ephesians 1:12 – “to the end that we who were the first to hope in Christ would be to the praise of His glory. 13 In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation– having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, 14 who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.”
In this post I want to start focusing on three sets of verses from Ephesians 1. In reality all of these verses were originally part of one long paragraph in which the apostle Paul waxed glorious in setting the stage for the glory of God in salvation. The divisions I am setting out are rather artificial, but we simply don’t have the room to deal with all of these verses and show the connections that flow between them. Let us look at Ephesians 1:5-6 first. Instead of thinking like human beings locked in time and space and a chronological view of time, we have to get beyond those things and think in terms of eternity. Ephesians 1:5-6 gives us an eternal view of salvation in which we look to all the causes and reasons of salvation as being from within God.
Verse 5 tells us that God predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself. The truth of the matter is that we will never fully understand predestination. But when the text tells us that this happened and it is brought about through Jesus Christ, we know that the Gospel is of Christ and Christ alone. We cannot over state the issue that all happens through Jesus Christ and the rest of the chapter shows that. The next part is utterly vital. It tells us that the ultimate cause of predestination and the Gospel is in accordance with “the kind intention of His will.” The literal translation of that is “in accordance with the good pleasure of His will.” In other words, this is the God of Psalm 115:3 who does as He pleases. The true God is by definition one that does as He pleases. Predestination is to save sinners according the pleasure of God which is to say that sinners are saved in accordance with the pleasure of God. God is moved to save sinners because it pleases Him to do so. In one sense we are simply back to the foundation of all things.
There is, however, one more step to be taken. We must ask what it means to please God since God is triune. When God does something to please Himself, we know it must mean that it is something pleasing to all three Persons within the Trinity. Another way to state this is to say that what the Father does He does to please the Son and what the Son does He does to please the Father and what the Spirit does He is the pleasure of God that flows between the Father and the Son. While we cannot understand these things fully, if hardly at all, we know that in some way the triune God functions as one God in three Persons and so all are pleased in some way. The goal set out by Ephesians 1:5-6 is that God does all “to the praise of the glory of His grace.” In context of our discussion, we can see without much effort at all that the God who predestines in accordance with His own pleasure (and that in order that salvation would be all to the praise of the glory of His grace) does not save according to anyone or anything other than Himself. The Gospel of the glory of God erupts in glory when we see that the purpose of the Gospel is to shine forth the glory of His grace and is to the praise of that glory. There is little to do at this point but to bow in worship of this great God of grace and join the Trinity in the pleasure of what He does by grace.
God Loves... Himself 
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