A Sermon on Ephesians 1:3-14
This sermon on Ephesians 1:3-14 has been lightly edited for ease of reading.
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Well, if you have your scriptures with you today, and I hope that you do, please take them and turn with me to the book of Ephesians, Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus. Today we are going to be in Ephesians chapter 1, and we’ll start in verse 3 and read through verse 14. Let us look at Ephesians chapter 1, beginning in verse 3.
“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will, to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the one he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.
And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times will have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. In him we were chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be for the praise of his glory.
And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having believed you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession, to the praise of his glory.”
Let’s pray.
To the great God above, blessed Lord, you are the one who caused the scriptures to be written. Since you wrote them, we ask that you would help us to hear them.
As we read them, as we mark them, as we learn them, and as we inwardly digest them, we ask that you would help us to embrace and hold fast to that blessed hope of everlasting life. You have given us that life through Jesus, and so it is in his name that we pray. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
In his new book, Daily Doctrine, Kevin DeYoung says that when we approach the study of theology, we should do so in four ways. First, he tells us to do so biblically. We should test every conviction against the scriptures, whether it’s the Apostles’ Creed, the Westminster Confession of Faith, or even a multi-volume systematic theology. All of the conclusions should be checked and double-checked against scripture to make sure that they agree with the ultimate authority.
Secondly, we should approach theological study rationally. God has given us the capacity to reason, to look at situations and to figure out a way through them, and the Scriptures are no exception. God has given us the capacity to use our reason and the reason of those who have come before us to study and to learn.
Thirdly, we should approach all theological studies humbly. We’ll cover this a little bit more in a few moments, but when we dive into the subject of Scripture, we look into the things of God, and we are not him.
He is higher, he is holier, he is greater than we are, and so we must humbly come before God, admitting that we are limited in our study of the infinite God.
And fourthly, DeYoung says that we should approach the study of theology doxologically. We sing a doxology every week. That is, doxology is merely a word that means to worship. We should study theology worshipfully. Most of us hear that and we go, no, we study theology so we can grow in knowledge. Yes, but we are growing in the knowledge of God, and the greater our knowledge of God, the greater the obligation upon us to love and to worship him.
Today we are going to look into a difficult doctrine, and we will hopefully see that first, yes, it is biblical. While the word trinity is not in the Bible, the trinity most definitely is.
We saw it in the Scripture we read from Matthew earlier. In the name, not the names, the name, singular, of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. So we see a three-in-oneness there already in Matthew chapter 28.
We will have to use our thinking caps, we will have to use our reason to work our way through the Scriptures, and we will not exhaust the scriptures by any any stretch of the imagination today. We will not exhaust the scriptures on the Trinity today, but because it is not explicitly given to us, we must use our reason, our rational capacity.
But we must humbly come to this doctrine, the doctrine of the trinity. I’m going to be honest with you starting out, we are going to wade into some deep waters today, or at least look at some deep waters. And the temptation is to come to the end of this study and say, man, I’ve got it, I understand the trinity, I understand God. That is potentially a dangerous and arrogant place to be. And so we must be humble as we look into the things of God.
But most importantly, we should leave the study of the Trinity or any theological concept with a greater sense of awe and worship for our great God. It is easy, we’ll touch on this again, but it is easy to get discouraged when we come across doctrines that we can’t quite grasp, even after decades of reading and study.
Yet I want us to flip that around and to see that our infinite God, our infinite God has revealed himself to us in words that we can understand when he has no obligation upon himself to do so because of our sin. Since he has given us enough to understand what we need and how to find salvation, whatever minuscule growth in understanding that we have over a lifetime should still lead us to greater worship, should still lead us to greater love for our great God. So today we’re going to begin our discussion of the trinity by looking at a concept called theological mystery and how it relates to the incomprehensibility of God.
Then we will stretch our mental muscles a little bit as we consider God’s existence as Trinity and also the truth that God acts as Trinity in his creation. And once again, this is not designed to confuse or to discourage. Knowing that our God is Trinity should lead us to greater trust, greater love, and greater worship of our great God.
THEOLOGICAL MYSTERY
So first, the concept of theological mystery. Oftentimes when you hear pastors and theologians talk about God, they will talk about God’s incomprehensibility. What does it mean that God is incomprehensible? Well, to begin answering that question, I want us to start with question four of the Shorter Catechism, which asks, “What is God?” And answers, “God is spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”
There are two sets of attributes of God in this answer to the fourth question of the Shorter Catechism, separated by the words “in his.” In the second half of this, we see that God has being, God has wisdom, God has power, God has holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. And these are communicable attributes because each of us as the image of God can reflect these things from God back to him or into the world.
Each of us exists. We have being. We can be wise. Sometimes we aren’t, but we can be. We can have power. We can be holy. We are called to be holy. We are called to act justly in our world. We are called by the power of the Holy Spirit to be good and to be proclaimers of truth into our world.
And so these are areas where we as the image of God can have a little bit better understanding of who God is because we reflect some of these same attributes. But it’s those first four that put a separation between us and God because God is spirit. We are not.
We have a material body. Now, another part of this that we are not going to cover today is that the second person of the Trinity who is spirit did take upon himself a human nature in becoming our Savior. He was fully human and fully God.
But God is spirit and we exist in a material body, soul and body together. God is infinite. He is not bound by space.
I can’t be here and there at the same time. I can’t even be here and a millimeter away from here at the same time because I am bound by space. God is infinite, not bound by space.
He is eternal. He never had a beginning. He will never have an end.
We all have a beginning. Some of us celebrate it once a year. He is unchangeable. Brothers and sisters, we change. We begin life as a totally dependent infant. We grow up into adulthood being just a smidge less dependent than an infant and we will mature and age as life goes on. God is perfect in all of his attributes.
He never grows or matures in anything that he is. And I go briefly into these four attributes because it helps us understand the idea of theological mystery. If God is spirit, if God is infinite, if God is eternal, if God is unchangeable, and he is, it means that he is completely different from us.
Not just a different type of being. He is what it means to be. He is completely separate from us in a way that we cannot understand.
We can’t understand infinite. We can’t understand eternal. We can’t understand unchangeable because we are not those things.
And what this has to do for our study of the Trinity is God is so infinitely, eternally, and unchangeably different from us that that means that what we can know about God, we cannot know perfectly or completely.
Now, some people will say that the doctrine of God’s incomprehensibility means that he cannot be known at all. And that’s not true. He has provided a way for us to know him. He has given us his world and his word so that we can know who he is. But whether it’s his world or his word, we will never understand him exhaustively.
And so as you and I peer in these next two points into the deep end of the pool, we need to understand that no human being will ever completely understand God. Even if you had an infinite line of human beings who took the Trinity, the first person took the understanding of the Trinity to point A, and then the next person took it to point B, to point C, to point D, E, F, G, on into infinity, expanding collectively the knowledge of the Trinity, they would still never exhaust it. I and we are arrogant to think that in the next 20 minutes we’re going to.
But this is true of all doctrines within the scripture. We feel it when we talk about God’s sovereignty and humanity’s responsibility for their choices. We feel the bind in there.
And we should humbly admit that we can never understand fully. We truly feel it when we come to the doctrine of the Trinity. And so today, as we move through these next two points, we will come to a definition of what we mean when we say God is Trinity.
But we will also come to the end of our rationality. We will come to the end of our capability to reason. And when that happens, and our head starts to hurt just a little bit because we’ve begun to wander into these theological and philosophical waters that are a little deep, trust me, we’ll stop.
We’ll take a breather, and we’ll come back another day to reconsider and to learn more.
GOD EXISTS AS TRINITY
We’re going to look at God as Trinity in two different ways. The first is that God exists as Trinity.
God’s existence is as one God in three persons. This is how God is. This is how God exists. For those of you keeping score, the theological word for this is the “ontological Trinity.” Don’t worry, no test next week.
Deuteronomy 6:4 highlights for us the oneness of God.
In Deuteronomy 6:4, we hear God tell Israel, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” He is one God, he is God alone. Now we look at this oftentimes in the context of the pagan world in which Israel was given that revelation, and it’s good to.
There were other false gods out there, but God was laying the foundation for the truth that he is God, and he is God alone. But if he is God alone, that also means that there is one God and one God alone. We don’t worship three gods.
We’ll cover that here in a few minutes. We are not going to fall into tritheism. We worship a single God.
This is echoed in James chapter 2, verse 19, where James is talking about professions of faith. You say that God is one. That is a true and a good thing to say.
God is one. He is the only God, and so far we’re okay, most of us. Where the monkey wrench comes in, so to speak, the confusing part is when we add the second part of the definition of the Trinity, is that God is one God who exists in three persons.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct personalities within the Godhead who all share one divine essence. Now, when I think of person, I think of one individual, one person. I am one being. I am one person. You are one being. You are one person. God is one God, but he is three persons, three personalities.
This doctrine develops or begins to develop in the Old Testament, and it gets filled out for us in the New Testament. In Genesis 1:26, God refers to himself in the plural, pointing toward a personal self-distinction.
In Genesis 19 and other places throughout the first six books of the Bible, we see the angel of the Lord showing up, who is also referred to with some of the same names and attributes that God himself has. Many theologians believe that we see a pre-incarnate Christ in the angel of the Lord.
As the history of redemption develops, we also see the doctrine of the Trinity develop. We saw it in Matthew 28, where Jesus says, baptize them in the singular name of three people, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. That’s why we baptize the way we do. We baptize in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because that’s how Jesus told us to, but it also points to this relationship of one God and three people.
In the Old Testament, God is called the Redeemer of his people. We see this in places like Psalm 19:14, which says, “May the words of my mouth and meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O God, my rock and my Redeemer.” In the New Testament, it is Jesus the Son who is the Redeemer of God’s people in places like Matthew 1:21, Luke 1:76-79, and Acts 5:3.
In the Old Testament, Jehovah dwells among Israel and in their hearts in places like Psalm 74:2, and the prophet Ezekiel in chapter 43, beginning in verse 7, says this,
“Son of man, this is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet. This is where I will live among the Israelites forever. The house of Israel will never again defile my holy name, neither they nor their kings.
When they place their threshold next to my threshold and their doorposts besides my white doorposts with only a wall between me and them, they defile my holy name by their detestable practices. So I destroyed them in my anger. Now let them put away from me their prostitution and the lifeless idols of their kings, and I will live among them forever.”
Who lives among the people of God in the New Testament? It is the Holy Spirit we see in Romans chapter 8, beginning in verse 9.
“You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you.”
So we see this development of one God who hints at his plurality, developing into one God who exists in three persons forever.
Now let’s flip this around to help us understand and look at it negatively to see two things that we are not saying.
Number one, as I mentioned before, we are not saying that there are three individual gods. That was a heresy that came up early in the history of the church, was refuted by a couple councils. We have three distinct persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but they are all the same God.
We are also not saying that there is one God, one person, who shows up in three different modes or ways in the time of the history of the church and the history of salvation. This is the ancient heresy called modalism, which still exists in some areas today. I posted a YouTube video on the church Facebook page that kind of goes through some of these ancient heresies, and I mentioned there was extra credit for anybody who came to me with an Irish accent and said, “That’s modalism, Patrick.”
This is where some of our analogies of the Trinity break down. We talk about the Trinity being like water: gas, liquid, and solid. Water can exist in three different states, but water is not all three states at the same time.
And so we have to be careful with our analogies because they break down. That specific one breaks down into this idea of modalism, that when we need something cold, we have solid water. When we just need something liquid, we have liquid water.
And when we’re boiling something, we have vaporous water. Water just shows up how we need it. That’s not what we’re saying with the Trinity.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in perfect relationship at the same time as one single God.
Now, I get it. You’re probably wrestling with these things, because I am, too. This hurts a little bit when you start to think about it. It stretches the limits of what our minds can conceive, and it should, as we’ve already mentioned. But take that confusion, take that lack of understanding, and use it as a motivation to fall to your knees and to worship the God who truly is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable.
We can’t understand because He is God. Use this as an opportunity to be overwhelmed by the immensity and infinity of God.
So that’s God as He exists as Trinity.
GOD ACTS AS TRINITY
Now we’re going to look at God and how He acts as Trinity, and this might be a little bit more easy to understand. For those of you keeping score, again, this is called the “Economic Trinity.” We looked at the Ontological Trinity earlier. We’re looking at the Economic Trinity, how God acts in creation. We’re going to look at one specific act.
We could look at creation. We see God the Father using the Word. Remember John 1:1, “In the beginning, the Word was God, and the Word was with God,” and then we see the Spirit hovering over the deep and bringing things to pass.
But we’re going to look where Paul looks in Ephesians 1, and we’re going to look at salvation today.
First thing, we see the Father working in salvation in Ephesians 1, beginning in verses 3 and 4. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight. He goes on to talk there about in love, He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ.”
This points us to the truth that in the Trinity, salvation comes from God the Father. God the Father has chosen us. It is God the Father who has set things in motion.
It is God the Father who gives us the gift of grace. But God the Father cannot give it directly to us, because we are sinners and He is holy. So we need a mediator, and that mediator is God the Son.
Verses 5 and 6, He goes on to say that while salvation comes to us from God, it comes through the work of Jesus Christ. We’re going to be celebrating Christmas here soon and the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. After that, we’ll celebrate Easter, Holy Week and Easter, His death and His resurrection.
And we talk constantly about His life and everything that happened in between and everything that continues to happen as Jesus ministers on our behalf in the throne room of God. But God cannot just give us salvation because God has said sin must be punished. He can’t just say, “I know I said sin must be punished, but I’m going to let it slide this time.”
In order for Him to remain God, sin has to be punished. And so that gift comes to us through the life, the death, the resurrection, the ongoing ministry of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It’s part of His work of mediator as He brings salvation through Himself to us.
And then lastly, salvation is applied by the Spirit. The end of that section, verses 13 and 14.
“You also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. And having believed, you were marked in Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession to the praise of His glory.”
John Murray says that Jesus has accomplished salvation for humanity. But it has to be applied to humans who are going to be saved. And it is by the work of the Holy Spirit that salvation is applied to the humans. So this gift is given from God. It comes to us through Jesus and is sealed to us by the work of the Holy Spirit.
God works in salvation as Trinity. Well, I really should be more careful oftentimes when I’m talking about the different aspects of salvation and just saying God does this, which is true. But we should go one step further to say, well, my righteousness comes from Christ and it is applied to me by the Holy Spirit.
And all of this together is a gift from God. God works as Trinity to bring us salvation. And it’s important for us to understand that.
It’s also important for us to understand that if any single member of the Trinity were not involved, salvation could not be found. So God exists as Trinity. God acts as Trinity.
CONCLUSION
So that leads us to two statements that we really should leave here with. The first comes from Ray McLaughlin, and he says, “There is only one God and he exists in three distinct persons who are not identical with each other.” So that’s that first thing we talked about. God exists in Trinity.
Secondly, from Christine Thornton, “Salvation comes FROM the Father, THROUGH the Son, and BY the Holy Spirit.” Now, if those two statements are all that you leave here with today, then I have been successful.
It’s about as far as I could get. This is the truth of who God is. This is the truth of the God that we worship.
It is a difficult doctrine, but it is a doctrine that should lead us into greater worship and greater love for our three and one God who gives and secures our salvation.
Let’s pray.
Lord, I thank you for what words you have given me today, and I humbly pray that you would use them to drive who you are, the knowledge of who you are deeper into our hearts so that we might worship and love you more. Lord, help us rest in the truth that you are infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, and that we will not fully understand any doctrine about you, and yet you have revealed enough of yourself and of your Son to lead us to salvation. And so, Lord, we pray today that we would leave here better worshipers and better lovers of you. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
But as you go, I do leave you with this Trinitarian blessing this week.
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen! Come Lord Jesus!
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