In Christ Before the Foundation of the World

Scripture: Ephesians 1:3–14

Read Ephesians 1:3–14 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms in Christ. For he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world…

(Ephesians 1:3–4a)

One Long Sentence

In Greek, the passage we are about to study is one sentence. Twelve verses. About two hundred words. From its opening blessing of God in verse 3 to its final note of praise at the end of verse 14, Paul writes without stopping. English translators must put periods in for the sake of readers who would otherwise lose their breath. But Paul does not put any in. He opens with the word eulogētos, “blessed,” and the form he then writes is a eulogy in the strict biblical sense: a blessing of God, the same kind of speech with which Israel had long blessed God in its prayers. Paul, who learned to pray as a son of Israel, now blesses God in the language he had learned there, but with a content he could only have learned at the feet of the risen Christ.

There is a structure to the eulogy, and recognizing it will keep us from getting lost. Paul moves from Father to Son to Spirit, and he marks the divisions with a doxological refrain. Three times in these twelve verses he closes a section with a praise of God’s glory. The first refrain comes at the end of verse 6, after Paul has spoken of the Father’s choice. The second comes at the end of verse 12, after Paul has spoken of the Son’s redemption. The third comes at the end of verse 14, after Paul has spoken of the Spirit’s sealing. The eulogy is trinitarian. Father, Son, and Spirit are praised together for the one work of salvation in which they have together moved.

This structure is given to us, and we will follow it. We will treat the Father’s choice in verses 3 through 6, the Son’s work in verses 7 through 12, and the Spirit’s seal in verses 13 through 14. We will pause where the text presses a question, most notably the question of election, which Lutherans have confessed in particular ways and which this passage in particular invites us to address. And we will keep our eye on the small phrase that runs through every verse of the passage like a thread: in Christ, and its variants. By the time we finish, the title of this volume will need no defense.

Blessed Be the God and Father

The eulogy opens with a blessing, and the blessing has three parts that need to be heard.

The first is the act of blessing God. Paul is not asking God to be blessed; he is declaring that God already is. This is doxology, not petition. The first move of the letter, once the address is past, is praise. Before Paul will tell the Ephesians anything else about themselves or about Christ or about their walk, he turns Godward and blesses the One from whom everything has come. This is the order that orders all sound theology. We do not begin with ourselves. We begin with God. The Christian life begins in praise and ends in praise, and everything in between draws its meaning from that frame.

The second is the One being blessed. Paul names Him as the God and Father of Jesus Christ. He does not bless a generic deity. He does not bless the unknown god of the philosophers. He blesses the God who has revealed Himself in the Son. The Father is known to us only in and through the Son He has sent. Apart from Christ, we know that God is, and we know He must be feared. In Christ, we know that He is Father, and we know that we are His. This is the consistent New Testament identification of God, and it will run through the entire letter. The God of Ephesians is the Father of Jesus Christ.

The third is what this Father has done for His people. Paul has just declared God blessed. Now he declares that God has blessed His people. The same word, eulogia, blessing, is given by God to His saints. He blesses them. And the location of the blessing is named twice: in the heavenly realms and in Christ. The second is the one we have already met. The blessings come to the saints in Christ, never apart from Him. The first phrase will recur four more times in this letter, and nowhere else in the New Testament. It does not mean far away. It does not mean future. It means the unseen realm where Christ now reigns, the realm to which the saints have already been raised in Him (2:6), the realm where God’s authority is presently exercised, and where, as Paul will later say, even the spiritual forces of evil still contend (6:12). And the scope of the blessing is total: every spiritual blessing the gospel brings. Not some. Not most. Every. The completeness of the gift is part of its character.

This is the announcement that opens the eulogy. The God who is to be blessed has blessed His people, in Christ, with every spiritual blessing. Paul will now spell out what some of those blessings are.

Chosen Before the Foundation of the World

Paul now reaches back into eternity. The blessings just announced did not begin recently. They did not begin at the cross. They did not begin at the saints’ conversion. They began before any creation existed: before there was a world, before there were saints, before there was anyone to receive any blessing at all. God chose. That is where the eulogy goes first. Whatever else can be said of the Christian life, it can be said only after this has been said: God chose.

The saints in Ephesus are the chosen of God. So are the saints today. So are the readers of this study whom the Holy Spirit has brought to faith through the Word. The choosing is not their own; it is God’s. They did not choose Him. He chose them. Paul is unembarrassed by this, and Lutherans should be unembarrassed by it after him. It is the gospel’s deepest comfort that the saints’ standing before God does not rest on the saints’ standing. It rests on God’s eternal will, settled before any of us was born, that there should be a people who belong to Him in Christ.

Notice three things about this choice.

First, the choice is in Christ. The saints are not chosen abstractly, as if God had selected names from a list and then later figured out how to save them. They are chosen in Christ. The choice and the means of the choice are inseparable. To be chosen is to be chosen in Him, and to be in Him is what being chosen means. Christ is not the instrument of an election that took place apart from Him. Christ is the place in which the election took place. The Lutheran tradition has been particularly insistent on this. We do not look for our election by peering into God’s hidden counsel. We find our election by looking at Christ, and at the Word and Sacraments through which Christ comes to us. If we are in Him, we are chosen. The two cannot be separated.

Second, the purpose of the choice is holiness. God did not choose His people merely to rescue them from condemnation. He chose them for a positive purpose: that they “should be holy and blameless before him in love” (Ephesians 1:4), set apart for Himself, conformed to His character. Holiness is not the cause of election; it is the goal. The order matters. God does not choose those who are holy. He chooses those whom He will make holy. The whole work of sanctification (through Word and Sacrament, through suffering and joy, through the Spirit’s slow and patient labor) is the working out of what was decided before the world began.

Third, the choice issues in adoption. The Greek word is huiothesia, literally the placing of a son. It is a legal word, at home in Roman law, that meant taking someone who was not your biological child and giving them all the rights and standing of a son. The NET catches the legal weight of the word when it renders verse 5 “adoption as his legal heirs.” Paul uses the word elsewhere, in Romans 8 most famously, to describe the standing of believers in Christ. Here in Ephesians the same word appears. The saints are not merely rescued slaves. They are adopted sons and heirs. The Father has placed them in His own household, given them His own name, and made them heirs of His own inheritance. This is not a spiritual figure of speech. It is what has actually happened to every Christian.

And the whole arrangement is “to the praise of the glory of his grace” (Ephesians 1:6). Here is the first refrain, the first hinge of the eulogy. Why has God done all of this? To the praise of the glory of His grace. Not because the saints deserved it. Not because the saints could have earned it. Not because the saints were better than anyone else. For the praise of His grace. God’s glory shines in His grace, and His grace is shown in His choice of an undeserving people for His own. The Lutheran tradition has called this sola gratia, by grace alone, and Paul has given it to us in compact form before he is finished with verse 6.

A Word About Election

The doctrine of election has been one of the most misunderstood teachings in the Christian Church, and a confessional Lutheran study cannot pass over it without an honest word. The misunderstanding has run in two directions, and both directions are wrong.

In one direction, the doctrine of election has been used as a club. Some traditions have taught that God, in eternity, chose some to be saved and others to be damned, that the same will of God that elected the saints to glory also elected the reprobate to perdition. This teaching is sometimes called double predestination, and it has caused untold pastoral harm. Believers reading their own Scripture have been driven to despair, wondering whether they were among the chosen or among the rejected. Pastors have been forced to comfort the dying with hopes that depended on a hidden divine decree they could not see. The Lutheran Confessions reject this teaching directly. The Formula of Concord, Article XI, written precisely to address this question, confesses that the eternal election of God pertains only to the children of God who will be saved through Christ. It does not pertain to the lost as if their loss were predestined. The cause of damnation is sin and unbelief, not God’s hidden will.

In the other direction, the doctrine of election has been emptied. Some traditions have taught that God’s election is merely His foreknowledge: that He looked down the corridor of time, saw who would believe in Christ, and elected them on the basis of the faith He foresaw they would have. This too is wrong. It makes the saints’ faith the cause of God’s choice rather than the fruit of it. Paul will not have this. The eulogy makes plain that the choosing rests on nothing in us. It is “according to the pleasure of his will” (Ephesians 1:5) and “according to the counsel of his will” (Ephesians 1:11). Faith is not the cause of election; election is a cause of faith. The Formula of Concord says that God’s eternal election is a cause of our salvation and of everything that belongs to it (Solid Declaration XI.8). The Spirit who applies salvation to the saints in time was sent by the same Father who chose them in eternity. The will of God is one will, not two competing wills.

So how should the Lutheran read this doctrine? With comfort, not with fear. Election is the gospel’s deepest assurance. It tells the believer that her standing before God does not rest on her own performance, her own consistency, or the strength of her own faith. It rests on the eternal love of the Father, accomplished in the Son, applied by the Spirit. This love did not begin recently. It does not depend on the saint’s continuing strength. It will not fail. The Formula of Concord insists that this teaching, rightly handled, is full of comfort for troubled consciences (Solid Declaration XI). When it is treated as Paul treats it here, as the eulogy of a Father who has chosen a people in His Son, for Himself, before any creation existed, it is comfort indeed. But it is comfort for the terrified, not a cushion for the secure. The same article of the Formula warns against those who reason that if they are elect they will be saved no matter how they live. Election is never a license for impenitence; it is the Father’s promise spoken to sinners who hear His Word and cling to His Son.

Where do we look to find our election? Not in God’s hidden counsel. We are not given access to that. We look at Christ. We look at the Word preached to us. We look at the Baptism poured over us. We look at the Supper given to us. These are the means by which the eternal election reaches us in time. To know whether we are chosen, we do not search our hearts for signs; we ask whether Christ is ours, and Christ is given to us in the means of grace. The question of election is, in the end, the question of Christ. And the question of Christ has a clear answer: He has come for sinners, He has died and risen for sinners, and He is given to sinners in His Word and Sacraments. There our election is to be sought, and there it is to be found.

We move on.

Redemption Through His Blood

Paul has spoken of the Father’s eternal choice. He now speaks of the Son’s accomplishment in time. The transition is seamless. The eulogy moves from before the foundation of the world to the cross of Christ without a break, because the same purpose is at work in both.

The word translated redemption is apolytrōsis, a word at home in the marketplace and at the slave block. It is the release of a captive by the payment of a price. To redeem someone was to buy them out of bondage. Paul says the saints have this redemption “through his blood” (Ephesians 1:7). The price has been paid, and the price was the blood of the Son. This is the language of the cross, and behind it, the language of the Old Testament sacrificial system, where blood was the cost of cleansing and the means of atonement. Paul does not pause to explain how the cross redeems. He simply states that it does. The doctrine of the atonement runs through the New Testament like a river, and Paul drinks from it freely.

What does the redemption consist in? “The forgiveness of our offenses” (Ephesians 1:7). The English “forgiveness” translates a Greek word, aphesis, that means a sending away: the offenses are dismissed, removed, no longer charged against the saint. They are not minimized. They are not overlooked. They are paid for, and so set aside. The offenses are real, and the price was real, and the forgiveness is real. This is the heart of what redemption means. The Christian is not a sinner whose sins God has decided to ignore. The Christian is a sinner whose sins have been atoned for in the blood of Christ, and so are forgiven, and so are gone.

And the source of all of this is the riches of God’s grace, lavished upon His people in abundance. He has not been parsimonious with His grace. He has poured it out beyond measure. The cross is not a measured response to a measured problem. It is the riches of God’s grace overflowing onto a people who could not have asked for it and could not have paid for it. And Paul adds that this lavishing was done “in all wisdom and insight” (Ephesians 1:8): not random or impulsive but the wise and considered movement of God in His good purpose.

The Mystery of His Will

Paul now reveals what God has been about. He calls it the mystery of God’s will. In ordinary English a mystery is something hidden, something we cannot figure out. In Paul’s vocabulary the word mustērion means something that was hidden but has now been revealed. A mystery in the Pauline sense is not a puzzle. It is a secret made known. God has had a purpose all along. He has now made that purpose known, and the place He has made it known is in Christ.

What is the mystery? It is the plan “to head up all things in Christ—the things in heaven and the things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10). The Greek verb is striking: anakephalaiōsasthai, a single word that means to sum up, to recapitulate, to gather into one. It is built on kephalaion, the “sum” or “main point,” rather than directly on the word for “head,” but in a letter that will soon call Christ “head over all things” (1:22), the NET’s “head up” is a fitting rendering, and other translations speak of uniting or gathering; each does its best, but the word is bigger than any of them can carry. God’s eternal purpose is to bring everything that exists (the heavens and the earth, the seen and the unseen, the angels and the nations, the entire fragmented and fallen creation) under one head, and that head is Christ. The cosmic Christology of this letter is not an addition to the gospel; it is the gospel’s full scope. Christ did not come merely to save individual sinners. He came to gather all things under His lordship, and the saving of individual sinners is the central means by which that gathering is accomplished.

This gathering does not mean that every human being will finally be saved. Christ’s lordship over all things includes both the gathering of His Church and His righteous judgment on all who remain in unbelief and impenitence. Paul will soon say that God has put all things under Christ’s feet (1:22), and not all who are put under His feet are there as friends. The Augsburg Confession, Article XVII, confesses that Christ will return to raise the dead, to give eternal life and everlasting joy to believers and the elect, and to condemn the ungodly and the devils to endless punishment. The headship of Christ over all things is the reign of the Savior of His body and the Judge of His enemies.

This is the breadth of the Pauline vision. He is writing from rented quarters in Rome, chained to a soldier. He cannot leave the room. He cannot see beyond his street. But his eyes are on a horizon as wide as the cosmos, and what he sees on that horizon is Christ, bringing all things under His headship, summing them up, holding them together, ruling over them, and head of a body that is finally being made whole. It is a vision that puts the apostle’s chains in their proper place. Whatever the chains can do, they cannot stop what God is doing in Christ.

The Inheritance

Now Paul brings the saints into the picture. The cosmic plan has a place for them. Here the translations differ, and the difference is worth a moment. Paul’s verb in verse 11, eklērōthēmen, is built on the Greek word for a lot or an allotted portion. Many translations take it to mean that we have obtained an inheritance. The NET renders it “In Christ we too have been claimed as God’s own possession” (Ephesians 1:11): the saints are God’s own portion, the people He has taken as His inheritance. Both truths stand in this passage. The saints are God’s possession, and Paul will pray that they know “the wealth of his glorious inheritance in the saints” (Ephesians 1:18). And the saints are heirs: adopted as legal heirs (1:5), with the Spirit as “the down payment of our inheritance” (1:14). They share in what Christ has gained. They are co-heirs with the Son, by virtue of being placed in Him. The inheritance is not yet fully received; it is secured in Christ, awaiting its full disclosure at His coming. But it is theirs. It has been given.

And once again, the foundation of the gift is named: the saints have been predestined according to the purpose of the One who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of His will. The same theme returns. God’s purpose, God’s will, God’s counsel. The saints’ place in God’s household does not fall to them by accident. It comes to them by the determined will of the One who orders all things. That will is not capricious. It is His considered, settled, eternal purpose. The saints can rest in this. Their standing is not a matter of luck or guess.

The phrase about those “who were the first to set our hope on Christ” (Ephesians 1:12) probably refers to the Jewish believers: those who, like Paul himself, came to faith in the Messiah out of the people of Israel, before the gospel went out to the Gentiles in any wide way. Paul will spell this out in chapter two and chapter three. Here he simply notes it: the Jewish believers were the first wave, and their hope in Christ was itself part of God’s purpose, “to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:12). Here is the second refrain. The eulogy turns again, and turns Godward. Whatever has been done (the choosing, the redeeming, the gathering, the claiming of a people as God’s own) is to the praise of His glory.

Sealed with the Holy Spirit

The eulogy now turns to the Spirit, and to the Gentile believers in particular. In Greek the pivotal word is the small word kai, “also”: in Him you also. The NET smooths the phrase into “And when you heard,” but the turn is still plain in the shift from “we” in verse 12 to “you” in verse 13. What was true of the Jewish believers, those who were the first to set their hope on Christ, is now true of the Gentile believers as well. The same gospel has reached them. The same salvation has been given to them. The same Spirit has sealed them. Paul will spend much of chapter two on what this means. Here he simply names it.

Paul describes what happened to them with care: “when you heard the word of truth (the gospel of your salvation)—when you believed in Christ—you were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit” (Ephesians 1:13). Hearing, believing, sealing: that is the order Paul gives. The gospel comes first, by hearing. Faith is worked by the Spirit through that gospel; it is not something the hearer supplies on his own. And the seal of the Spirit is given to those who believe.

The seal is a rich image. In the ancient world, a seal was a mark of ownership: pressed into wax, stamped on a document, branded on a slave or an animal. To be sealed was to be marked as belonging to someone. Paul says the saints have been marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit Himself is the seal. The saints belong to God, and the Spirit’s presence is the believer’s pledge and guarantee of that belonging; Baptism visibly seals God’s promise in water joined to the Word. The Lutheran tradition has rightly seen this seal as connected to Holy Baptism, the sacrament in which the Spirit is given, the name of the Triune God placed upon the believer, and the saint sealed as God’s own. That connection is legitimate, but Paul does not make the seal of verse 13 exclusively baptismal. He ties it explicitly to hearing the word of truth and believing it. The Spirit comes through the Word preached and through the Word joined to water; He is never given apart from the external Word. The hearing, believing, and sealing of Ephesians 1:13 is the very pattern of the Christian’s incorporation into Christ through Word and Sacrament.

The Spirit who has been given to them is also called “the down payment of our inheritance” (Ephesians 1:14). The Greek word is arrabōn, a commercial term meaning a down payment or a pledge: money paid up front that guarantees the rest will follow. The Spirit’s presence in the believer’s life now is the down payment of the inheritance still to come. What the saint has of God now is real. It is not the whole. The full inheritance awaits the resurrection, the new creation, the day when all things are headed up in Christ. But the Spirit who is given now is the pledge that the rest is coming. He is the foretaste. He is the proof.

And once more, the refrain returns: “to the praise of his glory” (Ephesians 1:14). The third time. The eulogy ends as it began. Whatever has been done (the Father’s choosing, the Son’s redeeming, the Spirit’s sealing) has been done to the praise of His glory. The whole of salvation is doxological. The whole of the Christian life is praise.

In Christ

We have come to the end of this one long sentence. Let us pause and notice what we have read.

In Paul’s Greek, by my count, the phrase in Christ, or one of its variants (in him, in the Beloved, in whom), appears eleven times in twelve verses. The NET, for the sake of smooth English, does not always render each one the same way, but they are all there in what Paul wrote. The saints are blessed in Christ (v.3). They were chosen in Him (v.4). They have been blessed in the Beloved, whom the NET calls “his dearly loved Son” (v.6). They have redemption in Him (v.7). The mystery has been set forth in Him (v.9). All things are to be headed up in Him (v.10). They have been claimed as God’s own possession in Him (v.11). They were the first to set their hope on Christ (v.12). And finally, in Him they heard and believed the gospel, and in Him they were sealed (v.13).

Eleven times. The phrase is not decoration. It is the structure. Whatever the saints have, they have in Christ. Whatever was decided for them in eternity was decided in Christ. Whatever was accomplished for them in history was accomplished in Christ. Whatever is being applied to them in time is being applied in Christ. Whatever awaits them at the end is being kept for them in Christ. There is nothing of the Christian’s salvation that exists outside of Him.

This is the meaning of the title that stands on the cover of this volume. In Christ is not a slogan. It is not a tagline. It is the place where the saint stands. To be a Christian is to be in Christ. To lose Christ is to lose everything. To gain Christ is to have everything that this great eulogy has just announced: chosen, adopted, redeemed, forgiven, gathered, claimed, sealed, kept. The Christian is not asked to manufacture any of these blessings. To be in Christ is the gift of the gospel, given through the means of grace, and the one who has been placed in Him is called to live there.

And so the eulogy closes. The saints in Ephesus would have heard it read aloud. They would have heard the threefold doxological refrain. They would have known themselves to be the people whose history Paul was reciting: chosen by the Father, redeemed by the Son, sealed by the Spirit, gathered into the cosmic purpose that runs from before any creation existed to the day when all things are headed up in Christ. They would have known this praise was theirs. So is ours. So we read.

For Discussion

1. Paul opens this passage by blessing God before he says anything else. What changes when our reading of Scripture, our prayers, our lives, begin in praise rather than in petition? What gets in the way?

2. The saints were chosen in Christ before any creation existed. How does it change your view of your own faith to know that your standing before God was decided before you existed? Where does this teaching threaten you, and where does it comfort you?

3. The Lutheran tradition has insisted on reading election only as election unto salvation, never unto reprobation. Why does this distinction matter pastorally? What harm has been done in places where it has been ignored?

4. Paul says God lavished the riches of His grace upon us. When you think about your own life, where do you see this lavishness? Where are you tempted to imagine grace as measured rather than poured out?

5. The mystery of God’s will is to head up all things in Christ. How does this cosmic vision change the way you understand your ordinary daily work, your suffering, your prayers, your worship?

6. The Holy Spirit is described as the down payment of our inheritance, the pledge of what is still to come. What does it mean for you to live now as one who has been sealed by the Spirit but has not yet received the full inheritance? Where in your life is the down payment most clearly felt?

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, blessed be Your name. Before the foundation of the world You chose us in Your Son, and through His blood You have redeemed us, and by Your Spirit You have sealed us as Your own. Teach us to read this gift not with fear but with comfort. Teach us to find our election in Christ alone, where You have given Him to us in Word and Sacrament. Lavish upon us the riches of Your grace. Hold us in the inheritance You have promised. And gather us at last, with Your whole Church, under the One whom You have made head over all things in heaven and on earth, our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we live and to whose glory we give all praise. Amen.

Looking Ahead

Next session we will read Paul’s first prayer in the letter, Ephesians 1:15–23. Having blessed the Father for what He has done in Christ, Paul now turns to ask that the Ephesians may know what they have been given. He prays for spiritual wisdom and revelation, as those whose eyes of the heart have already been enlightened. He prays for them to know the hope of God’s calling, the wealth of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and the incomparable greatness of His power toward those who believe. And then his prayer becomes a confession of what that power did when God raised Christ from the dead and seated Him at His right hand, far above every rule and authority and power and dominion. The cosmic Christology that ended this session continues in the next.

Before next session, read Ephesians 1:15–23 at least twice. Notice the connection between the two readings: Paul is praying that the Ephesians will come to know what he has just announced about them in eternity. Notice also where the prayer ends: with Christ given to the Church as head over all things, and the Church as His body. We will sit with that closing image at length.