In the last post we looked at God’s motives in salvation from Ephesians 1:5-6. We saw that God predestines through Christ to Himself and He does that in accordance with His primary motive of His own pleasure. I asserted without trying to prove from the text that the translation of “according to the kind intention of His will” should actually be translated “according to the good pleasure of His will.” A good commentary that includes comments on the Greek text should suffice on this. The cause of salvation is His own pleasure and the goal of salvation is the praise of the glory of His grace. We are entering into the very eternal pleasures of God and we must ask for grace to understand and enjoy Him in the midst of it.
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.”
Let us step back for a moment and admire the glory of our great God in sheer delight and pleasure. The beauty of predestination is seen in that God takes helpless and ungodly sinners and adopts them as sons. God takes the worst of sinners (His enemies who hate Him) and makes them His sons. Why does He do that? He does it according to His good pleasure. He adopts them as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself. This is to say that He takes sinners and makes them His sons by the life and works of Jesus Christ on earth and brings them into a union with Himself. He does not do this according to the goodness, works, worth, or merit of the sinner, but He does this according to His own pleasure and that pleasure is seen in why He does this. He does this to the praise of the glory of His grace.
In light of our whole discussion on the freedom of the will and the historical differences between Arminianism and Calvinism, we must see how this shines light on that whole subject. God tells us right here in this text that He does not save according to any good or act of the will that He finds in human beings. He saves in accordance to what pleases Him or according to His pleasure. His stated purpose is to the praise of the glory of His grace. He then states the cause of why He bestowed grace on sinners in the Beloved. God Himself tells us in this text that “He freely bestows” grace and adoption as sons on sinners in Christ. Once again, when we think of what the word “freely” means, we have to wrestle to get at the meaning. In one sense the word means without cost and yet it means far more than that. It must be free of any causation within human beings in order to be truly free, and yet the root of the word translated in this text is from the same root word as grace. We have the idea in this text of God giving grace by grace or graciously. There is no reason within man that God gives grace. It is given according to His grace and according to His good pleasure. There is not the slightest mention in this text of God meeting the free act of man with grace. It is all of grace and so all of God. There is no other reason at all.
It is natural for fallen man to reserve something for himself to do in terms of salvation or anything else. But the Gospel leaves nothing for man to do in terms of earning or being a cause for God to save sinners. There is nothing left for man to do if God saves by Christ alone through grace alone. What act of the will did man do in eternity past to cause God to predestinate him to salvation? What act of the will did man do to cause God to predestine him to adoption in Christ? What act of the will did man do to move God to send His Son to save sinners? What act of the will did man do that has anything to do with God saving sinners according to His own good pleasure? What act of the will did man do that would be to the praise of the glory of God’s grace? After all, the text explicitly tells us that the real cause of salvation is the pleasure of God and the goal of salvation is the praise of His glory. What we must begin to see is that by trying to teach that man must come up with an act of the free-will in order to be saved is to fight the grace of the Gospel. It is also to remove true hope from the sinner who must look to himself for something apart from grace in order to be saved.
Arminian theology in this sense is devastating to the Gospel and to the true hope of sinners. It should be fought with the sword of the Spirit for what it is. To repeat myself once again this is not saying that all Arminian people are unconverted. It is to say that the teaching of free-will which is necessary to be an Arminian destroys the teaching of the true Gospel of grace alone and all true hope of the sinner. Sinners must learn to give up all hope in themselves so that they may have faith and hope in the grace of God alone as found in Christ alone. Instead we present them with facts in our day and look to them to come up with faith themselves. Even professing Reformed people do not teach people to give up all hope in themselves and look to grace alone. The giving of grace and its application must always be left in the hands of God or it becomes something other than grace.
God Loves... Himself 
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