Park Cities Presbyterian Church (PCA)

Secrets from the dawn of time

by Skip Ryan

September 12, 1993

Ephesians 1:3-6

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Listen to the audio of Secrets from the dawn of time

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.”

Journalists often rely upon other sources to give them background to important stories. This background is sometimes called “deep background”; it is material not immediately relevant or germane to the particular issues of the story itself, but it provides the kind of information without which the story would hang in midair without focus or point. You may recall that during the Watergate scandals, as Washington Post journalists Woodward and Bernstein began to uncover the deep truths about that situation, they had a person known as “Deep Throat” who provided important background information that they needed to piece together the facts involved.

Deep background is very important in order for us to understand issues the way they really are. In his famous Narnia stories, C. S. Lewis speaks about secrets from before the dawn of time. Lewis talks about those things which we might call “deep background” to our lives and to the truths about who we are and what it means to be Christians.

There are certain truths that we don’t live on the edge of every day— truths that don’t necessarily occupy us day in and day out. They are not the immediate concerns of our Christian living, but they are profound and deep truths that are in the deep background. Without them we can’t always make sense of all the current events of our lives. Only with the deepest of backgrounds can we fit the incoherent pieces of our lives into a whole.

Chosen in love

Ephesians 1:4 is the deepest possible background Christians can know about their lives. It is profoundly important as it puts in proper perspective and lifts up on the stage of the current events of our living the things that we need to know about ourselves. The deepest and most important secret from the dawn of time is that we were chosen by God before the foundation of the universe to be holy and blameless before Him in love. In love and out of the richness and the wonder of God’s gracious love, He not only knew us, but He also purposed to draw us to faith in His Son. God made that intentional love decision directed toward you and me before the dawn of time.

God’s choosing is summarized in the experience of one Christian: “Once, when I was sitting in church, I was not thinking very much about the preacher’s sermon because it wasn’t very good. The thought struck me, ‘How did you come to be a Christian?’

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘I sought the Lord.’

“‘But how did you come to seek the Lord?’

“The truth flashed across my mind in a moment. I should not have sought Him unless there had been some previous influence in my mind to make me seek Him.

“‘I prayed,’ I thought, but then I asked myself, ‘How came I to pray?’

“‘I was induced to pray by reading the Scriptures. ‘

“‘How came I to read the Scriptures? I did read them, but what led me to do so?’

“And then in a moment I saw that God was at the bottom of it all and that He was the author of my faith.”

I believe that every Christian comes to a point in his or her life when he or she thinks about these deep things and begins to realize that God is at the bottom of it all. The thought that God chose us in Christ from before the foundation of the universe is a great massive hunk of raw truth that a lot of Christians choke on, yet this passage is shown to be true resplendently in the whole of the New Testament, not just in Ephesians 1.

This passage is not simply controversial, but it is, in fact, the deepest nourishment to our souls. If we come to really grasp what it is that God means by declaring to us that He knew us—indeed chose us in Christ from before the foundation of the universe—we will be the richer for it. The deepness of our Christian lives will be enhanced enormously by the deep background, by the secrets from the dawn of time, and we will find that this truth, on which some people choke, is actually sweetness to our taste, deeply filling of our hunger and profoundly satisfying to our thirst.

Sometimes the things which appear to be the most controversial—the ones which our human minds have the most difficulty grasping, the ones where God is God and we are us and somehow we can’t understand the thoughts and the mind of God—become the building blocks of our soul. Let your thinking go from head to heart and back to head. Build your life on the solid rock of God’s truth about who you are and who He is, and then you will be deeply satisfied.

Objections to election

This doctrine of God’s choosing specific people to be drawn to Himself in faith in Christ troubles some people for at least three reasons.

First objection: If God chooses us, as this verse and much of the New Testament declares that He does, then it would appear, at least initially, that the value of human choice is compromised, maybe even destroyed.

That is not what happens. Being chosen by God doesn’t destroy our choice. In fact, it gives a capacity for choosing that we did not have before.

Before being made alive by God’s sovereign grace, before He chose us and before He quickened us with the life of His Spirit in us, we had a human will. But it was not as some describe it. It was not a “free” will. The notion of absolutely free will is not in your Bible. The Bible says that before we know Christ our wills are not free at all. Before we are touched by the grace of God and before we come to know ourselves as chosen by God, our wills are in bondage. We are not those who would neutrally choose God. Some people say that they are “neutral” free-will people, and God somehow presents Himself to us or someone presents the truth of the gospel to us, and in a neutral sort of way they choose God. But we would never choose God in and of ourselves. Our wills are bound to sin and death. We are dead in our trespasses and sins, Paul says in Ephesians 2:1.

There is a certain sense in which you could say that our will was free—in the sense that it was free within the boundaries of our nature. Was the Gadarene demoniac who ran among the tombs free? Yes, he was free to run around without clothes on and scare people. He was free to scream and terrify. He was free within the bounds of his nature, but was he free to sit clothed at the feet of Jesus listening to the Word of God? No. He wasn’t free to do that until God, by His grace, touched him and made him alive and changed his nature. Then, in that new nature, he had different boundaries and he was free to be a human being in a way he simply wasn’t before.

Apart from God’s choice we would choose not to know God. That may be a startling fact for some of you. But apart from the facts that God would reach out and touch us, know us from all eternity, and draw us to Himself, we would not choose God! We would... dare I say it? We would hate God. We would hate Him! Until our lives are quickened by God’s Holy Spirit, we do not love God. We want to put distance between ourselves and God. God is terrifying. God is unfamiliar. God is threatening. But when God comes to us in the wonder of the grace of the gospel, when God touches our lives with the truth of Jesus and His cross and what He did for us at Calvary, when we begin to see what the love of God did from all eternity, and that it wasn’t just God’s arbitrary grace in eternity, but His love out of all of eternity that drew us to Himself—when we begin to see all that, our hearts get warm towards God in a way they could never be before!

George Whitfield, the 18th-century preacher, was one of the greatest preachers in the history of the church since the Apostle Paul. He said, “Man has a free will—to go to hell! But none to go to heaven until God works in him.”

When we were made alive in Christ we received a new nature, and along with it we received new affections, new desires, new ambitions. The world of God opened up to us in a way that was never true before, so that God, who was before irrelevant and fearful to us, became desirable. We had a new capacity for choice, and in accordance with our new natures we then chose God. God’s choosing you doesn’t limit your freedom. It’s the only real foundation for it.

Second objection: It appears that God’s choice of some means that He does not choose others.

Is it fair? How could God choose some and not others? This question comes from a failure to understand the real condition of our hearts. In light of the real meaning and the real depth of sin, if God were fair, every human being would be condemned. If God were fair, none of us would be saved; none of us would be drawn to Him.

Some people have an arrogant presumption that they deserve God’s favor, that it is God’s business to forgive. What’s God for, after all, but to forgive me! That’s why He exists! I hope you sense the presumption of that thinking. Some people don’t overtly acknowledge this attitude, but it nevertheless lies in the background—God is there for me!

The reality, dear friends, is that we are there for God, and it is God who has said and declared the truth that every one of us deserves to be condemned by virtue of the sin in our hearts! The whole testimony of the Bible says that we don’t deserve God’s favor. We deserve His judgment. The problem is that we haven’t wrestled deeply enough with our heart’s darkness. We haven’t seen how deep and unfathomable is our rebellious streak of independence. It’s not fairness we want from God. If He were to give us fairness we would not draw our next breath. No, what we want is not fairness; we want mercy.

The question “How could God choose some and condemn others?” contains an untrue assumption; namely, that God condemns some people. In fact, people are not condemned because they are not chosen. They are condemned because of their heart’s sin. It is our sin that condemns us, not the fact that we’re not chosen. It is wrong to conclude that by choosing some God is condemning others. It overlooks the fact that the whole of the human race is already condemned. We all are born in sin. We all live in sin. We deserve the righteous judgment of God, and all of us will be judged one day except for God’s sovereign choosing.

Paul Settle illustrates it this way: sometimes we think of election as every human being sitting on a fence. On one side of the fence is condemnation, and on the other side of the fence is salvation. God comes along and pushes some people off the fence that way and pulls some this way. That is an inaccurate understanding of what is going on. It is not that people are on the fence. We are not neutral. Guess where we are, all of us? We are already way over on the other side of the fence where a destroying fire is raging. God, by grace, takes some out of that fire.

I know a family in Charlottesville, Virginia, who have four children of their own and 14 adopted children. Do people say to them, “It’s great that you adopted 14, but what about all the others you could have adopted?” The amazing thing is that God reaches over that fence into that fire and grasps any! And the most amazing thing of all is that God goes over the fence Himself in the person of His Son and bears the wrath and condemnation which they deserve in order to rescue some out of that fiery pit!

This question of fairness, my dear friends, is a little bogus. We have the very American idea of fairness: that everyone is given an equal chance. This is patently not true, even in our casual observation of things. Our chances are determined by many things, and some of them seem quite unfair: our upbringing, our natural gifts or lack of gifts, opportunities or lack of opportunities, inherited wealth or lack of inherited wealth—we have no control over most of these things. The American idea that everyone sort of stands equally is simply not true to fact.

Do you know what’s helped Barbara and me understand this? It’s having our little Bekah. What is fair about having a disabled child? Dear friends, if we measure fairness by some American standard, every one of us is going to get off the train at one point or another.

Third objection: A God of love could not choose only some for salvation. Verse 4 appears to contradict certain things we believe to be true about God; things like “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16), or “God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Peter 2:4). How can God love all people and desire all men to be saved, and yet choose only some for salvation? That’s an honest question that we bring to this text and to texts like it. We need to be able to allow Scripture to say two different things that we can’t totally reconcile, and we need to live with the tension. Maybe a better word is that we need to learn to live with the mystery. We can’t figure it out.

Nineteenth-century Presbyterian theologian Robert L. Dabney wrestled with these truths. He wrote about Chief Justice Marshall’s book entitled The Life of George Washington, in which Marshall tells the story of a certain Major André. Major André was in Washington’s revolutionary army and he did some treasonous act deserving of death. It was Washington’s lot to have to sign the death warrant. Unfortunately for General Washington, he knew Major André well and liked him very much. Marshall says perhaps on no occasion of his life did the Commander-in-Chief obey with more reluctance the stern mandates of duty and of policy. Dabney says Washington’s compassion for André was real and profound. Why did he sign the death warrant?

Dabney says, “Washington’s determination to sign the death warrant of André did not arise from the fact that his compassion was slight or faint, but from the fact that it was counterpoised by a complex of superior judgments of wisdom, of duty, of patriotism.” The pity was real, but it was restrained by other very important motives. Dabney’s point is this: the absence of God’s determination to save all does not necessarily imply the absence of compassion. God has real and deep compassion for perishing sinners.

There is a genuine inclination in God’s heart to spare those who have committed treason against His Kingdom. This is the sense of passages like “God is not willing that any should perish” or the sense behind the idea that Jesus weeps over Jerusalem. God weeps at the lost, but He is governed in the depth of His wisdom by a plan that no ordinary human way of deliberation can conceive.

Can there be a noble and a great heart, even a divine noble and great heart, that has sincere compassion for a criminal that is nevertheless not set free? God loves the lost sinner. God has chosen some. Those two statements need to stand there before us, unreconciled, both true. John Stott puts it this way: “Scripture nowhere dispels the mystery of election, and we should be aware of any who try to systematize it too precisely. The doctrine of election is a divine revelation. It is not human speculation.”

Benefits of God’s choosing

I haven’t done my job until you begin to like this truth—until you begin to say, “This is a positive and wonderful thing to know!” Verse three says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” What is the first spiritual blessing He mentions? It is that He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world. So election is a blessing! It’s good! It’s true! It’s positive! It is healthy for you to know it and embrace it! Why? What are some of the benefits of being chosen by God?

First benefit: God’s choosing eliminates boasting and causes us to celebrate God’s glory. Some say just the opposite is true—that it’s the height of arrogance to say that we have been chosen from before the creation of the world. But we are not Christians because of our abilities or character or anything we have done! This is what Ephesians 2:8–9 tells us: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”

This is where Bekah becomes our teacher again. She teaches Barbara and me the folly of boasting before God. Bekah may never do the right thing. No, if I were counting on Bekah’s ability or character to get her into heaven, I would have to despair. If I were counting on her ability to make a choice, she might never make a choice or have the capacity to make one. For our family, Bekah is the closest illustration we know of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:27–29: “But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the things which are despised, God has chosen, the things which are not, that He might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God.”

It is written, “He who glories, let him glory in the Lord.” In what do you glory? Boast? Praise? We’re either going to boast in one of two things, our abilities and our character or in God’s ability and character. If you want to know what’s in a man’s heart, find out what he praises.

We like to praise an athlete or our son or daughter who does well in school or does a good job in this or that, and that’s a wonderful thing to do. But the question is , “What evokes our deepest praise?”

That which deserves the affection and praise of your heart is God’s glory—that God, in His glory and in His wonder and in His grace, has purposed to love you from all eternity.

Boast in God. Boast in God’s glory! Do that and you will find your Christian life lifted up to another level altogether! Boast in the greatness and wonder of God, and you will discover something that may have been missing all of your life. Maybe some of the loose ends, maybe some of the pieces that aren’t working, maybe all the business of what it means to be a Christian will begin to fall in place for you. God is great! God is good! God has known you and loved you from all eternity! Thank you, Lord!

Boast in God! Exalt your God! Praise Him! And you know what? You won’t boast in yourselves, and you’ll be on the way to knowing what a real Christian is.

Second benefit: God’s choosing gives assurance of our salvation. If salvation were dependent on our choice, then what happens when we have a bad day? What happens when we want to take our choice back? What happens when we don’t feel like being Christians today? What happens when we get up on the wrong side of the bed or we’re mad at God? In that case, our salvation would be as unstable as we are. No, God’s choosing is the guarantee that God not only invites people to be saved; He actually saves them.

Third benefit: God’s choosing leads to holiness and blamelessness, or, in other words, to growth and character. He says that before the foundation of the world we were chosen, that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

Some say, “If I’m chosen by God, then I’m saved, regardless of what I do; therefore, I can just live however I want. It doesn’t matter how I live.” That is exactly the opposite of what is true. Such a person may not be chosen at all, because when God does choose us, His choosing is revealed in us in the form of a new heart with new ambitions, with new desires, with a new way of thinking about our lives. We begin to think of ourselves differently. Colossians 3:12: “Therefore as the chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on tender mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering...”

Do you know how to tell a group of chosen people? It’s by the way they treat each other. How do we know we’re chosen? By the way we treat each other. Do I treat you bombastically? Do I demand my rights? Or do I treat you with tender mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering, as the chosen of God? Being chosen means we are new people.

Fourth benefit: God’s choosing permits reaching out to those without Christ. Some say just the opposite. They say, if God has already chosen, there is no point in doing anything. That is not biblical teaching; that is fatalism. God has not only chosen the end, He has also chosen the means, and He has appointed as His means our telling people, our praying for people, and then our going to tell them the truth. In the heart of God’s chosen man or woman is a growing holy hunger for those the Lord has known from all eternity, to find that lost one whom God has known.

Fifth benefit: God’s choosing is the assurance of His love. The little phrase “in love” is really a summary of what is said in many places in the New Testament. Many times the love of God is conjoined with God’s choosing. God chose us in love. In taking two verses from 1 and 2 Thessalonians and putting them together, we read this: “For we know, brothers, that you are loved by God, and that He has chosen you; but we ought always to thank God for you, brothers, loved by the Lord, because from the beginning God chose you to be saved.”

There is a desperate need in the human heart to be assured that it is loved. This deep truth, this deep secret from the dawn of time, assures us of God’s love. The riches of God’s mercy are given to us not because of some infinite value of the human soul but because of the love of God for us in Christ. “No man is loved by God except in Christ,” John Calvin said. “He is the Beloved Son in whom the love of the Father perpetually rests and then diffuses itself to us, so that we might be accepted in the beloved.”

If you understand the deep secret from the dawn of time, you don’t plunge yourself into the mystery at the point of creation. You don’t say, “Well, let’s just go back before the dawn of time and figure out how God knew me, how God loved me, how God chose me.” That leads to nothing but speculation. You don’t go to the dawn of time, but to the cross of Calvary, where Jesus bled and died. You go to where the secret of all the ages is revealed—at the cross. That is the place where we see the love of God shown to us in His Son. The kindness and love of God has appeared in Christ and, particularly, in His death for us.

God so loved the world. He loved the world which slew the babies in Bethlehem. He loved the world which crucified His Son, and He did so that the world might receive the benefit of that death. Dear friends, take all of your questions about God’s choosing to the cross. What you see there is that God has made the choice of the One Man to bear the sins of those whom He has loved from the dawn of time.

When Martin Luther was questioning God’s choosing, John Staupitz, Luther’s confessor and teacher, told Luther to “find himself in the wounds of Christ,” and then this choosing would be “inexpressibly sweet.” Find yourself in the wounds of Jesus. Find yourself in His giving of His life for you. Find yourself at the cross of Calvary. Don’t speculate about whether you are in or out. Instead, flee to the cross and believe that God’s Son died for you there. Seek the Lord where He may be found. Seek Him at the place where He has promised to reveal Himself to your heart. Seek Him at a garbage dump outside of Jerusalem.