The Eternal Purpose in Christ
‘’According as He hath chosen us IN Him before the foundation of the world.” — Eph. i. 4.
” Being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will; that we should be to the praise of His glory, who first trusted IN Christ.” — Eph. i. II, 12.
“According to the eternal purpose which He pui*posed IN Christ Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him.” — Eph. iii. 11, 12.
¥BiS&’^ revert in this meditation to what in point of ’ theological sequence ’ might appropriately occupy an earlier part in the Volume. But neither is it without design that the subject is placed in its present position. The traveller pauses at times to take a retrospective view of the distant receding landscape. So let it be in our contemplation of the Apostle’s favourite inscription in its connection with the eternal purpose IN Christ before the foundation of the world.
The cluster of motto-texts are again taken from his encyclical letter. In each of them, with significaDt repetition, occurs the monogravi or its equivalents. They lead us back in thought before the birth of the creation. Passages — vistas of light — are disclosed to us in these far-off cycles and eras, when the Trinity in Unity dwelt alone in the sublime solitudes of eternity. They record the earliest movements of divine love and mercy towards the lost and fallen, ere the trance of that eternity was broken by any manifestation of Almighty power: — Creation still slumbering, so to speak, as a thought in the Infinite Mind. Note well, in these diverse passages, the specific terms in which the Believer’s Title-deeds — thus laid up in the archives of heaven — are formulated: “In Him,” “in Christ,” “in Christ Jesus.”
We have here, then, represented to us (using the symbol of human language as the only possible expositor of transcendental mysteries), the covenant entered into by the adorable Godhead. The members of the whole Church of which Christ is the Head; in other words, the names of His elect people, were inscribed in the Great Volume of the divine decrees, “while as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest part of the dust of the world” (Pro v. viii. 26). Of these He could say, “In Thy Book all my members were written when as yet there was none of them.” This purpose of electing grace IN Christ Jesus is everywhere represented as originating with the Eternal Father. Specially is it so spoken of by the lips of “the Faithful and True Witness.” Hear the opening utterances of His intercessory prayer (that portion of Holy Writ we have so often quoted, but which stands alone in its inestimable preciousness, not only as being a divine Cardiphonia, — an unfolding of the very heart of Jesus, — but a revelation of the Father’s will and purpose). “As Thou hast given Him power over all liesh, that He might give eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him” (John xvii. 1 2); “Thine they were, and Thou gavest them Me” (ver. 6). It was the Father’s eternal love that first opened the floodgates of mercy. It was the Father’s eternal love which first set the stranded vessel floating on the waters. It was His arm which “laid help upon One that is mighty.” It was the Father’s voice which said, “Deliver from going down to the pit, I have found a ransom” (Job xxxiii. 24). Beautiful are the words of the Saviour in one of His great sermons by the Sea of Galilee, regarding this originating love of the Father. With a divine self-abnegation He says — “For I came down from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that sent Me” (John vi. 38).
(2). But, while “God so loved the world that He gave; ‘* let us proceed to mark, in this interchange of Covenant-mercy, the voluntary consecration of the Son for the redemption of the world: — although even in His acceptance of the Suretyship, there is a recognition of the Father’s antecedent love — “Then said I, Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do Thy will, 0 my God” (Ps. xl. 7, 8). Not the less interesting, however, is the alacrity with which the adorable Redeemer responded to the Father’s will. He, as the Eternal Son, infinitely independent and self-existent, rich in all the plenitude of the divine perfections, was incapable of any accession to His underived ineffable glory; or rather, that glory was susceptible of no expansion, nor enlargement. He was “heir of all things.” He “made the worlds.” All space was His dominion. Creation was His Palace; the universe His Temple. Yet He tells us the spot in His vast illimitable Empire in which He mainly rejoiced: “Rejoicing in the habitable parts of the earth, and My delights were with the sons of men” (Pro v. viii. 31). And when these lofty purposes came to be fulfilled and consummated, what does He represent as being still His chiefest joy? It was the same as it had been in “the ages of the ages;” — “The glory which Thou gavest Me, I have given them” (John xvii. 22). The intercessory prayer reaches its climax and conclusion thus, “That the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them” (John xvii. 26).
Who dare speak of contrariety between the will of the Eternal Father and Eternal Son, when we listen to such an amazing declaration as this — “Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life” (John X. 1 7). John, in after times, speaking in the name of the whole brotherhood of saints, anticipates and repudiates the false theological dogma that would either question the spontaneity of the Father’s love, or represent that WTipurchasable love as being purchased and secured through the intervention of the Son — “We have known and believed the love which God hath to us” (i John iv. 16).
(3.) Once more: — In this purpose of grsice we have the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the ever-blessed triune Godhead, conjoined with the Eternal Father and the Son in thoughts of unutterable love. “The Spirit of God,” we read, “moved on the face of the waters.” He brooded over elemental chaos, when the Omnipotent fiat went forth — “Let there be light!” He would thereby symbolise and proclaim His interest in the world about to be redeemed. It was “through the Eternal Spirit” that Christ “offered Himself without spot to God” (Heb. ix. 1 4). Moreover, it is He who carries on, and carries out, these great purposes of electing grace in the spiritual illumination and regeneration of every redeemed soul, and in imparting a capacitating meetness for the heavenly inheritance. We are “changed into the same (divine) image from glory to glory, hi, the Lord the Spirit” (Margin, 2 Cor. iii. 1 8). In words which immediately follow the second of our motto-verses, we have the entire work of the Holy Ghost very specially interweaved, so to speak, with the Apostle’s monogram, and in conjunction, too, with the believer’s predestination — “In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also, after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of His glory” (Eph. i. 13, 14).
Mysterious indeed, and unfathomable to our finite capacities, is this great doctrine. Yet how often our Apostle refers to it! Even in the closing salutations of a letter, we found he cannot resist the allusion — “Salute Eufus, chosen in the Lord, and his mother and mine.” God’s eternal purpose and calling formed, in words already quoted, an incentive to him in running the Christian race — “I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God IN Christ Jesus” (Phil. iii. 14). The same sublime theme seems to have occupied his latest thoughts. In the final letter penned in his Roman dungeon, he thus writes — “Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling,... according to His own purpose and grace, which was given us in Chkist Jesus before the world began” (2 Tim. i. 9).
Need we wonder that he thus fondly clings to that transcendent truth! He truly felt it was the strongest, the most inviolable, safeguard of his security, a very “anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast.”” In hope of
Romans xvi. 13. We previously referred (chap, ix.) to this verse. “We may here further remark, that there is surely a special and touching epigrammatic beauty in its complimentary sequence — “his mother and mine.” As Barnes briefly paraphrases it — “His in a literal sense; mine in a figurative,” It recalls a yet more touching and tender saying — ““Woman, behold thy Son; Son, behold thy mother” (John xix. 26, 27).
eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised he/ore the world began “(Titus i. 2). In the comprehensive charter of the believer’s privileges contained in his 1st Epistle to the Corinthians (chap. iii. 2 1), he asserts, “All things are yours.” Why? “Because,” he adds, “ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.” Each Person in the Divine Trinity, indeed, may be regarded as having given the solemn pledge, — “They shall never perish.” Against the Church (with its chief corner-stone laid in everlasting ages, reared in this “unison of the Eternal purpose “) the gates of hell shall never prevail. Every individual believer can say, “He hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and sure” (2 Sam. xxiii. 5). “The covenant,” are the words of our Apostle, “was confirmed before OF GOD in Christ” (Gal. iii. 17). Well may he speak of it in his Ephesian Epistle (chap. i. 1 8): — “That ye may know what is the hope of His calling, and what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.” In the firm grasping of this doctrine we are necessarily filled with all joy and peace in believing. Not in a restricted, but in its amplest spiritual meaning, as applied to every member of the Church of Christ, “He that is called IN the Lord is the Lord’s freeman” (i Cor. vii. 22).
Connecting the Apostle’s monogram specially with the Second Person in the Holy Trinity, how peculiarly that Book of Election — that covenant roll, “sealed with seven seals,” is in the keeping of “the Lion of the tribe of Judah! “(Rev. v. 5). To revert to Paul’s simile previously dwelt upon, we are “rooted IN Christ.” “The root of that Tree is stronger than the foundations of the earth.... The same love that He had to thee, when He gave thee to His Son; the same love He has to thee now, infinite, unchangeable “{Evans).” Who shall “(who can)” lay anything to the charge of God’s elect.” “We are in Him that is true “^ (i John V. 20). Oh, how well to know and believe, that it is not on our own fitful frames and feelings and capricious emotions our eternal well-being depends, but that Christ’s everlasting interest in its, is the ground of our present and everlasting interest in Him.” The gifts and calling of God are without
‘In Him that is truth.’ “We have here (and also in one of the opening pages of this Volume) quoted from the First and earlier Epistle of the Apostle John. In his Third Epistle (which we have the strongest ground for believing was written in his extreme old age, and therefore containing the last utterances of this honoured and beloved disciple), we find the following saying — “I have no greater joy, than to hear that my children walk in truth” (3 John 4). Among the cherished Valedictory words of his Divine Lord, and which he alone of the Evangelists records, there is a well-knoAvn golden sentence which could not fail specially to linger in his ears, — the ever-memorable — *’ I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life “(John xiv. 6). When, therefore, in conveying what may be called his farewell messages and benedictions to his “beloved Gains” (and through him to the ages and churches of future Christendom), he asserts, that “he has no greater joy than to see his children walking in truth”; — (possibly, at least, his meaning) walking in Him who is Himself the Truth Incarnate, — may he not be regarded as, with his latest breath, echoing and emphasising the In Christo of his great Contemporary?
I am indebted for the substance of this thought, to a suggestive discourse of my friend Dr. Plumptre’s, I heard as these pages were passing through the press.
repentance.” Here is the history of that calling: — “God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together vnth Christ (by grace ye are saved)” (Eph. ii. 4, 5).
“All that the Father giveth Me,” are the words of the divine Kedeemer Himself, “shall come to Me.” He is standing with a wealth of glory in His hand, and the hoarded love of Eternity in His heart, and saying, “It is not the will of your Eather which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish” (Matt, xviii. 14). If that be His Father’s will, what is His own? “Him that cometh unto Me I will in no wise cast out” (John vi. 3 7). “Father, I will that they also whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory” (John xvii. 24).
That doctrine of election, — the purpose of God to His people in Christ Jesus, before the world began, (which, inscrutable as it is, runs, as we have seen, like a golden thread through the warp and woof of divine revelation), will reappear on the lips of the enthroned Judge and Heavenly King. On the Great Day — “the day of His espousals, the day of the gladness of His heart “— He is represented as saying —” Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared
In some MSS., indeed, it is the Apostle’s monogram (iv): but for this there is not sufficient authority: although the meaning in the passage is ti.e very same. for you from the foundation of the world” (Matt. xxv.
With no words can we more appropriately close this meditation than those of our Apostle in 2 Thess. i. 11,12: — “Wherefore also we pray always for you, that our God would count you worthy of this calling, and fulfil all the good pleasure of His goodness, and the work of faith with power; that the name of our Lord Jesus Christ may be glorified in you, and ye IN Him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.”