"Which grace He bestowed on us, in the Beloved One: In whom we have the redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, According to the riches of His grace: Which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, making known to us the mystery of His will, According to His good pleasure: Which He purposed in Him, for dispensation in the fulness of the times, _Purposing_ to gather into one body all things in the Christ-- The things belonging to the heavens, and the things upon the earth--yea, in Him, In whom also we received our heritage, as we had been foreordained, According to purpose of Him who worketh all things According to the counsel of His will,-- That we might be to the praise of His glory."[33]
EPH. i. 6_b_-12_a_.
The blessedness of men in Christ is not matter of purpose only, but of reality and experience. With the word _grace_ in the middle of the sixth verse the apostle's thought begins a new movement. We have seen Grace hidden in the depths of eternity in the form of sovereign and fatherly election, lodging its purpose in the foundation of the world. From those mysterious depths we turn to the living world in our own breast. There, too, Grace dwells and reigns: "which grace He imparted to us, in the Beloved,--in whom we have redemption through His blood."
The leading word of this clause we can only paraphrase; it has no English equivalent. St Paul perforce turns _grace_ into a verb; this verb occurs in the New Testament but once besides,--in Luke i. 28, the angel's salutation to Mary: "Hail thou that art highly favoured (made-an-object-of-grace)."[34] If we could employ our verb _to grace_ in a sense corresponding to that of the noun _grace_ in the apostle's dialect and nearly the opposite of _to disgrace_, then _graced_ would signify what he means here, viz., _treated with grace_, made its recipients.
God "showed us grace _in the Beloved_"--or, to render the phrase with full emphasis, "in that Beloved One"--even as He "chose us in Him before the world's foundation" and "in love predestined us for adoption." The grace is conveyed upon the basis of our relationship to Christ: on that ground it was conceived in the counsels of eternity. The Voice from heaven which said at the baptism of Jesus and again at the transfiguration, "This is my Son, the Beloved," uttered God's eternal thought regarding Christ. And that regard of God toward the Son of His love is the fountain of His love and grace to men.
Christ is the Beloved not of the Father alone, but of the created universe. All that know the Lord Jesus must needs love and adore Him--unless their hearts are eaten out by sin. Not to love Him is to be anathema. "If any man love me," said Jesus, "my Father will love him." Nothing so much pleases God and brings us into fellowship with God so direct and joyous, as our love to Jesus Christ. About this at least heaven and earth may agree, that He is the altogether lovely and love-worthy. Agreement in this will bring about agreement in everything. The love of Christ will tune the jarring universe into harmony.
1. Of grace bestowed, the first manifestation, in the experience of Paul and his readers, was _the forgiveness of their trespasses_ (comp. ii. 13-18). This is "the redemption" that "we _have_." And it comes "through His _blood_." The epistles to the Galatians and Romans[35] expound at length the apostle's doctrine touching the remission of sin and the relation of Christ's death to human transgression. To _redemption_ we shall return in considering verse 14, where the word is used, as again in chapter iv. 30, in its further application.
In Romans iii. 22-26 "the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" is declared to be the means by which we are acquitted in the judgement of God from the guilt of past transgressions. And this redemption consists in the "propitiatory sacrifice" which Christ offered in shedding His blood--a sacrifice wherein we participate "through faith." The language of this verse contains by implication all that is affirmed there. In this connexion, and according to the full intent of the word, redemption is _release by ransom_. The life-blood of Jesus Christ was the _price_ that He paid in order to secure our lawful release from the penalties entailed by our trespasses.[36] This Jesus Christ implied beforehand, when He spoke of "giving His life a ransom for many"; and when He said, in handing to His disciples the cup of the Last Supper: "This is my blood, the blood of the covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." Using another synonymous term, St Paul tells us that "Christ _bought us out of_ the curse of the law"; and he bases on this expression a strong practical appeal: "You are not your own, for you were bought with a price."[37] These sayings, and others like them, point unmistakably to the fact that our trespasses as men against God's inflexible law, apart from Christ's intervention, must have issued in our eternal ruin. By His death on the cross Christ has made such amends to the law, that the awful sentence is averted, and our complete release from the power of sin is rendered possible.