Reverend Patrick Erickson
Pastor of Peace Lutheran Church
FATHER, SON, AND HOLY GHOST
REJOICE THAT YOUR NAME IS WRITTEN IN HEAVEN
(Ephesians 1:3-14)
When Jesus sent out His twelve apostles He gave them these orders, "Take nothing for the journey except a staff--no bread, no bag, no money in your belts. Wear sandals but not an extra tunic" (Mk 6:8-9). Is that it? Other than the staff in their hand, they were to take nothing but the clothes on their back and the sandals on their feet?
Well, not quite. Jesus sent them forth with His Word and the authority and power to preach the kingdom of God and entry therein through repentant faith. And, if we include the longer directives in the parallel passages in St. Matthew and St. Luke, they took along as well His commission to heal every infirmity, raise the dead, cleanse lepers and drive out all evil spirits.
God would see to their needs. He would protect and sustain them. He would also deal with those who treated them inhospitably. He would shake these guilty parties out of His kingdom as His apostles shook the dust from their feet in protest against them. Indeed, "it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment" (Mt 10:15) than for these offenders. (And there are plenty of them today!)
For their part, the Twelve were to trust God and depend on Him exclusively. And God did see them through and blessed their service. And later, after He dispatched the seventy-two and likewise fostered their ministry and crowned their efforts with success and they returned with joy to report, "Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name" (Lk 10:17), after reminding them that He Himself had overcome the prince of demons, having brought about his downfall and seen him fall like lightning from heaven, Jesus sobered His disciples up with these sobering words.
"Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven" (v 20). The same goes for you and me--we who have submitted to the Holy Spirit and are subject to Him through the same faith He has called forth and preserves by the same Word whereby He calls and sends us. Rejoice that your name is written in heaven!
St. Paul discusses the ramifications of this in his Letter to the Ephesians, chapter one, verses three through fourteen. Because we are among the saints justified, forgiven and reconciled by the Father for Jesus' sake, because in calling us by God's Word the Holy Spirit has called forth the faith by which we believe in God and take hold of His inestimable gifts, we rejoice that God has written our names in heaven, writing His name upon us, making us and marking us His, and that the Holy Spirit has made us subject to God.
Hence, St. Paul greets us, "Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph 1:2). God's having written our names in heaven and elected us to salvation and eternal life from all eternity begins with Him and His gracious disposition toward us finding expression in His gracious behavior.
This being the case, in the Psalms the psalmist petitions God, to begin with, to give and sustain life (Ps 119:88; 86:16) without which none of His salutary acts are possible, and then to hear prayer (4:1), to heal (6:2), to redeem (26:11), to establish (41:10), to pardon (51:1) and to save (109:26).
Appeal is made on the basis of God's love and will as manifested in His Word and testament and embodied in His conduct, His specific deeds. When God shows grace, thanks is forth-coming (5:7; 106:45). Much ado is made of it and it is remembered (94:18; 21:7; 59:10), pondered and adored. Parallels to grace are salvation (13:5), mercy (25:6), righteousness (36:10), redemption (130:7) and faithfulness (36:5). Miracles, signs and wonders abound where grace is (107:8).
Joy and praises spring forth from this fertile earth, this fecund furrow, this rich topsoil and richer bottomland, this common ground (31:7; 138:2) on account of grace. The round earth, like a pregnant womb, is full of it (33:5). It mounts up to heaven (36:5). It endures forever (89:2). And inasmuch as it is everlasting, if death seems to hem grace in (88:11), it bursts the seams. It is better than life itself! (63:3).
That is because, insofar as God is the Alpha and Omega, the source and substance of grace, He appoints it, sends it and Himself comes with it. Oh, it is most becoming, this divine thing called grace! Therefore, besides remembering and pondering it, we must as zealously yet piously wait for it (106:7; 48:9; 33:18).
In both the Old Testament as it anticipates fulfillment and the New Testament where it achieves fulfillment in Jesus Christ grace characterizes the Gospel--indeed, the Gospel is grace, grace active in love--as it entails the proclamation and bestowal of grace through the faith God thereby gives--the faith which appropriates all the gifts of grace summarized as forgiveness, life and salvation in those whom God thus justifies and reconciles on His Son's behalf for the sake of His atoning sacrifice.
Grace is proclaimed and conferred in the Gospel, then, because it is actualized at the cross (Gal 2:21) and embodied in the crucifixion and the Crucified. This grace is shown to sinners (Rom 3:23-24) who are saved by grace alone. Therefore it is the sum total of salvation (2Cor 6:1), the whole ball of wax. Consequently it is absolutely exclusive--as all-exclusive as it is all-inclusive.
There is neither more nor less of grace anymore than there is more or less of God. You either have it as God's free gift through God-given faith or you don't, having refused it and rejected God. It is either-or, black or white, not both-and. The corollary to this, the flipside of grace alone incarnate in Christ alone, is the faith alone He alone gives, not faith-and-works.
For if salvation is by works, it is no longer of grace. Otherwise grace is no longer grace but just another work. "Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ", Paul greets us. Indeed, peace to you, inasmuch as by His grace God has established His covenant of peace between Him and you, removing the obstacle of your sin by forgiving it and justifying and reconciling you.
Yes, God has forged His peace treaty with you, ratified by His Son's death and signed in His blood. Grace and peace to us dear saints, indeed, we blood-bought sinners! Rejoice, for our names are written in heaven! "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Eph 1:3).
Because He is His only-begotten Son, because He came from the Father "full of grace and truth" (Jn 1:14b), because in Him is life and light--our life and light, yours and mine--because He came to us and became one of us, one with us and for us, and made room in us for Himself and made us His very own, to us, to you and me He gave the right to become the children of God.
Because He is God's native Son He gave to us the high privilege of being God's naturalized children, adopted by God, born of Him anew. Grace to us and peace be multiplied from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Our names are written in heaven. Rejoice! "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."
In Christ's exaltation--His resurrection, ascension and eternal session at the Father's right hand--and in the believer's union with Him and incorporation as His bodily member through the Sacrament of Baptism, ultimate issues are at hand--issues that ultimately end in salvation and life everlasting in union with God but that are already a present possession in Christ.
So that, by virtue of his merger with Christ, heir and treasury of all Christ has bequeathed him, even now the believer is virtually one with Christ where He is enthroned with the Father and Christ is one with the believer here and now and hereafter, everafter.
At stake are God's eternal and final purpose, writes one commentator, "and the titanic conflict between God and the powerful spiritual forces arrayed against him--a purpose and a conflict that come to focus in the history of redemption" and to fruition in the drama of salvation. Come what may, come to grips with that!
"Here (v 3) Paul asserts that, through their union with the exalted Christ, Christians have already been made beneficiaries of every spiritual blessing that belongs to and comes from the heavenly realm." Christ, having been elevated to that realm and seated over all other entities, "rules over all for the sake of the church. Those who have been 'made alive with Christ' share in Christ's exaltation and enthronement in heaven" (Concordia Self-Study Bible).
Praise be to God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ! "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world" (v 4). Our divine election from all eternity by God's sovereign, dynamic, proactive choosing is underscored here in our text in the Apostle Paul's very word choice and grammatical progression.
First, God the Father appointed us in Christ to be Christ's and His own, to be one with them where they are, before the world's foundation. It is for this that Jesus prayed on the night he was betrayed, "Father, I want those you have given me", those who have believed, those who do believe and those who ever shall through the message of the apostles and prophets, to be one through this means, one with the Father and Son and one with one another in them, just as the Father and Son are one with each other and them.
But this is more than a wish. It is His will! "Father, I will that those you have given me be with me where I am, and see my glory," the glory of the sole-begotten One who is one with the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, "who came from the Father, full of grace and truth."
Oh, to see that glory, the glory the Father has given His Son because He loved Him before the world began--to bask in it and share it because in Him He has given us a share, because He willed it, He who before His Passion prayed, "not My will, Father, but Thine be done"! Because it is His last will and testament bequeathed to us and we are His beneficiaries and heirs, it is done! Share and share alike.
From the utter fullness of His grace we have received grace upon grace. All of us have, have-nots no longer. Praise be multiplied! Before the world came to be, God the Father chose us in God His Son "to be holy and blameless in his sight."
And don't forget how we came to be this way. To paraphrase Paul's words in chapter 5, Christ so loves us as His bride that He gave Himself up for us to make us holy, cleansing us by the washing with water through the Word to present us to Himself as a radiant bride, stain-free and wrinkle-free and without any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
And, lest we get the big head from being holier than thou or despair because we know only too well that of ourselves we are anything but holy and blameless or even stain-free and wrin-kle-free but badly in need of a spot remover and a permanent press, let us recall--and in recollecting, rejoice--that holiness and blamelessness are the fruit, not the basis, of God's choosing.
The basis, indeed, the holiness and blamelessness, is Christ. The ground of our being, the ground of faith and the base of operations, our saving face, is Christ and Christ alone--and God's having chosen us in Him.
In the depths of Love, Deep calling to deep, the depths of the deity calling those in the depths of sin and despair and woe, God the Father "pre-destined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ," not via our own devices, hand-held or otherwise, as though we co-opted Him when He opted out, but "in accordance with his pleasure and will" through His bringing us into accord with Him and not according to our misconceived merit, we misfits, but "to the praise of his glorious grace"--no self-adulation here--"which he has freely given us in the One he loves" (vv 5-6). No self-promotion either--up with people. Nonsense, up with Jesus!
Up, up, up and away. Far and away the best flight plan. Far and away the best flight path. Upward bound all the way. "In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins" (v 7). Notice the progression. First, redemption wherein Christ freed us from the bondage of sin and its curse by becoming a curse and paying our ransom with His own blood.
On His recognizance God our Father forgives us our sin, justifies and reconciles us "in accordance with the riches of [his] grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding" (vv 7-8). Rejoice, rejoice, believers! Rejoice that your names are written in heaven where Jesus is at the Father's right hand, His right-hand Man and ours, and where we are with Him, in Him, and ever one with both. Amen.
- Pastor Erickson