From the MLJ Archive

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: Now I should like to call your attention this morning to the last three words in the sixth verse of the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians. The Epistle to the Ephesians, the first chapter, the sixth verse, and the last three words: "In the beloved." "In the beloved."

Let me read again this magnificent statement which the apostle makes here, beginning at the third verse: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: according as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved." Now here we are looking immediately and directly into what is the great theme of salvation through Jesus Christ our Lord.

It's one of those great and magnificent summaries of it all. It's the purpose, it's an explanation of the purpose. It's an outline of what God planned and what God had in his mind and what his idea is with respect to us. Now all this, as we know, has actually been put into operation, it's taken place, and we are reminded on a Sunday like this of the great beginning of that in the actual realm of history, namely when the Son of God actually came into this world and was born as a babe and laid in that manger in Bethlehem. That is the glory of this salvation as we have it outlined in the scriptures. We are given the facts, plus the explanation, the meaning of the facts. Now facts are very important, but facts in and of themselves are not sufficient.

A number of people may look at the same facts and may interpret them in a different manner, so that it is essential to our salvation that we should know something of the meaning and the significance of the facts, as well as of the facts themselves. There are many, for instance, who no doubt during these coming days will consider certain facts but they'll sentimentalize them. They won't draw any great doctrinal deductions from them. It'll be something purely emotional without any intellectual content. And they will find a certain amount of emotional release, but they will never know the power of God unto salvation.

So that I say, nothing is more important than that we should always take together with the facts, the interpretation of the facts. And that is the thing that makes the scriptures so unique and so vital to us, that they always combine the exposition, the explanation with the statement of the facts, and we must never separate the one from the other. Well now, here I say that the apostle is giving us one of these great summaries of this salvation. And as we were pointing out last Sunday, the thing that he emphasizes is this: that we must always begin to think about it in terms of the glory of God. It is all to the praise of the glory of his grace.

God's glory. You remember how the apostle in writing to Timothy puts it like this: he says that he's been privileged to preach what? Well, the gospel of the glory of the blessed God. And if we don't think of these events—Christmas, Easter, Good Friday, every event—in terms of the glory of God, we're not looking at it properly and we are bound to go astray somewhere. We shall become introspective and live on our own feelings, or we shall become selfish in our desires, we shall look for certain benefits only. The way to look at salvation is to look at it in terms of the glory of God.

And you remember the apostle has been putting it like this: God has revealed his glory, his own glorious person and nature in this great redemption. And still more amazing, he tells us that he's done it in and through us. You and I are to be to the praise of the glory of his grace. Well, what has he done? Well, says the apostle, he has chosen us before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before him in love. Not only that, he has chosen us and predestinated us to the adoption of children. We are made holy, we are made sons. Yes, but you remember that he rises even above that. He goes on to point out that he has called us to be to the praise of the glory of God's grace.

Now then, those are the statements that he's made. And you remember that he emphasizes in this sixth verse the extraordinary privilege that is thus ours. He says, "To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted," wherein he hath greatly or highly favored us. You remember we looked at that last Sunday morning. The teaching is that as he chose Mary of all the possible women in the world to bear his son in her womb, so he has chosen us, that Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith; Christ in us, the hope of glory. We are highly favored. There is no greater favor, there is no higher privilege than this. And here we are told by the apostle that God has chosen us for that extraordinary privilege and favor.

Now then, the question that arises is, how has he done this? And the answer is given in these three words: "In the beloved." It is all in Christ. Every blessing that man ever enjoys from God is always in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. Very well then, we can put it like this, can't we? If the whole of redemption is a manifestation of the glory of God, we are entitled to say that God's glory is revealed ultimately and finally and most completely in and through the Lord Jesus Christ. Then we ask, how is that the case? How does that happen? And here the answer is the very term that the apostle here employs. It's all come about, he says, "In the beloved."

But here at once we are bound to think. Why do you think the apostle used this particular term? Those of us who've been working through these first six verses during the last twelve Sunday mornings, we have noticed constantly the way in which the apostle goes on repeating the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. For instance, he mentions him twice in the first verse. He says, "Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ," that's the most important thing about me, he says, that I'm an apostle of Christ, "by the will of God, to the saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus." There he is mentioned him twice in that first verse. Then he mentions him once in the second verse: "Grace be to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ." Paul rather enjoyed bringing in the name. Nothing gave him greater pleasure than to refer to the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And then you find it twice in the third verse: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ." He can't leave him alone, he keeps on bringing in the name: Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ, and so on. And then he mentions him again in the fourth verse: "According as he hath chosen us in him." He's so afraid that we'll forget him or leave him out in our thinking, he keeps on mentioning him in this way. And there again is the name in the fifth verse: "Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself." Now there you see he keeps on using the name in that way, but here suddenly at the end of the sixth verse, instead of saying, "To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the Lord Jesus Christ," he says, "Whereby or wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved."

Now why does the apostle vary his term? We can be quite certain that it wasn't accidental. This man was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and nothing that he does is accidental. He's been using the phrase Jesus Christ or the Lord Jesus Christ or in Christ, but suddenly he says in the beloved. Now why? Well, I am suggesting to you that he does it because he is anxious to bring out in its full force and intensity what is after all the most wonderful thing of all about this great salvation of ours. It's a marvelous and a wonderful thing that you and I are made holy. It's a marvelous thing that we are made and by adoption the sons of God. It's almost incredible, but it's true to say that it is through you and myself and people like us that God is even going to show the principalities and powers in the heavenly places his manifold wisdom. It is by the church he's going to manifest the glory of his wisdom. Well, we've been told all that.

Ah, yes, but the most wonderful thing of all, I say, about this salvation and about this redemption is the way in which he's done it. And he has done it all, says the apostle, having reached the topmost height of his climax, "In the beloved." Very well, let's look at this wonderful term for a moment and see what it's got to tell us. Let's observe its emphasis. And as we look forward during these coming days to the celebration on Christmas day especially of this unique and vital climactic event in the entire history of the human race, let us do so in the light of this statement here. Here's the key that leads us into the whole mystery of the incarnation and all that God has done in his son, in the beloved. What's it tell us?

Well, the first thing it tells us, of course, is about the person of the Lord. The person of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is why Paul instead of saying the Lord Jesus Christ says in the beloved. What's it tell us? Well, it's just his way of telling us that the Lord Jesus Christ is God's beloved Son. God's only begotten Son. Of course, that is the whole of Christianity. That's the thing that makes Christianity unique and separate and different from everything else. It's not man rising up to God, not man trying to find God, it's God doing something in his beloved Son, the only begotten Son of God.

It is the term, of course, that is always used in order to emphasize that. Do you remember what happened at our Lord's baptism? You remember the voice that came from heaven and said, "This is my beloved Son," or "This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased." And do you remember what happened on the Mount of Transfiguration? You see, every time the veil of heaven, as it were, is drawn back a little and man is given some glimpse of the eternal glory through the Son, this is the term that's used. It happened there at the baptism, it happened in the same way on the Mount of Transfiguration. The voice again spake from heaven and said, "This is my beloved Son, hear him." Listen to him, he's my beloved, this uniqueness of relationship.

And indeed, you remember that our Lord himself used the term in his parable of the wicked husbandmen. He points out how the master had sent various servants to that vineyard in order to try and plead with those husbandmen to do their work properly and to warn them and so on, but they took them and they killed them all, and then the lord, the master, says to himself, "I will send my beloved son." Him, he says, they will respect, him they will honor. So he uses the term himself in describing himself in that parable, knowing full well that it is the term that his heavenly Father habitually and characteristically uses with respect to him, the beloved. In other words, your redemption and mine has been worked out and achieved through the only begotten Son of God.

That's the statement. We have seen that you and I become sons by adoption, he is son by eternal generation. He is one with the Father, one substance, indivisibly, the only begotten of the Father. The others are adopted, but he is begotten of the Father, coming eternally out of the Father, one with the Father, indivisible, inseparable. Now the term beloved conveys all that to us. And the apostle clearly used it deliberately in order to bring out that aspect of the truth and to emphasize it. The beloved is none other than the substance of the eternal substance God, the eternal Son. And of course, because of that we understand this. You and I, as the result of being made holy and our adoption as sons and so on, do live and exist to the praise of the glory of God.

And there is no question at all that the world is to see something of the glory of God in us and through us. Yes, but the way in which God's glory is manifested in its greatest fullness and intensity is in the person of this Son, the beloved. Listen to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews putting it: "God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds." Then listen: "Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high."

But these are the words: he is the brightness of God's glory. He is the express image of God's person. That is the character, that is the person of the Son of God. And what we are told here is this: that our redemption has been achieved and made possible because God has sent into this world this beloved, this brightness of his own glory and the express image of his person, the outshining, the effulgence of the glory and the majesty and the brightness of God himself. There it is, it's all in him. So it is not surprising, is it, that John should have said in the prologue of his gospel, as we saw in the reading at the beginning in the fourteenth verse, "And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." Yes, says John, we've seen it. Though he came in the likeness of sinful flesh, though he humbled himself and took upon him the form of man and of a servant, we beheld his glory, the shining forth of it. They saw it on the mount, they saw it in other places, they saw it after the resurrection.

He is the fullness of God's glory. So that you see, as we consider this great statement in these verses and as we are thinking about the glory of God as it has manifested itself in the redemption of men, we must never forget that this is the highest point of all of the manifestation of this glory: that God himself has come in the Son, that in the Son dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, that he is, as it were, the incarnation of God, God himself, the word made flesh. And all that is conveyed to us by this term.

But over and above all that, we must emphasize this aspect. The Son is not only the only begotten, he is not only the express image of his person, the brightness of his glory, because of that and because of this relationship, he is one whom the Father has loved from all eternity. The beloved. Yes, God loves us, but not in that way. Here is one whom God has loved from all eternity, there was never a beginning to it. He is the beloved, the one apart, the one who has the whole of God's love and has always had it, the one on whom the whole of God's love and affection are centered and in whom they dwell. The beloved. There is nothing greater that can be said than that. There is no term that expresses so perfectly and so completely the relationship between the Father and the Son as this very expression, the beloved.

So, my friends, as you think of the babe of Bethlehem, remember who he is. As you think of the whole meaning of the incarnation, remember who it is that God sent forth; his Son, the beloved, the eternally loved one. It is he who has come into the world in order to save us. Very well then, there is the first thing that we deduce. But let us go on to something else. Let us look at this term for a moment as it is a measure then of the Father's love toward us. The apostle has been emphasizing here, as he emphasizes everywhere and as the whole Bible emphasizes, that our salvation is the result only of the love and the grace and the mercy of God.

Ah, yes, but if you want to know anything about the love of God, you've got to understand something about this person. And that is why you see those who claim to believe in the love of God without believing in the Lord Jesus Christ are finally simply displaying their own ignorance of the love of God. There are people who are foolish enough to say that they can't believe truly in the virgin birth and the incarnation, and they can't believe especially in the atonement and the punishment of sin, because of their belief, they say, in the love of God. But that, I say, is just to display their own ignorance of the love of God. If you want to know something about the love of God, you've got to see it in what has happened in the Son of God, in the beloved. It's there you measure the love of God truly. Look at it like this: the very fact that God ever sent him into this world is an astounding thing in and of itself. We can't conceive of these things, can't we? Our minds are too small, they boggle at the very concept.

But here is the truth. Without beginning, from eternity—you see, we can't even take that in, it's beyond us already, we are in time and we are finite and our minds are too small—but there was never any beginning to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. From eternity to eternity. There in eternity—I can't use other language, but there it is, in eternity—the Son was in the bosom of the Father. Did you notice that extraordinary term of John in his prologue? The eternal Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. Well, there he is, eternally in the bosom of the Father, enjoying that unmixed and perfect bliss and love and holiness and glory of heaven and of eternity.

And yet the astounding thing that our salvation tells us is this: that God sent him forth. When the fullness of the times was come, God sent forth, sent him out of that, as it were sent him out of his own bosom, sent him out of heaven and out of the glory and the radiance and the glory and the magnificence of it all, sent him forth into the world. It was the Father who sent him. God so loved the world that he gave, yes, and he gave him in this sense: that he gave him to the incarnation. He sent him out. There you begin to measure this eternal love of God: that it is his own beloved only begotten Son that he sends forth upon this terrible task and for such terrible people. Are we not entitled, in terms of our Lord's parable of the wicked husbandmen, to say that God the eternal Father said to himself as he sent him forth, "They will reverence my son"?

He'd sent his servants, he'd sent his prophets, he'd sent his leaders, but they'd been rejected and they'd been put to death and their message had been ignored. And now comes the time when the eternal Father says, "I will send forth my son, my beloved son, I'll send him to them." And our Lord's own terms are, "They will reverence my son." I wonder whether the eternal Father said something like that. However, we know that he sent him forth. And if we are to have some conception of the love of God, we must now run through our four gospels in our minds and imaginations and think of the eternal Father looking down upon it all and observing and watching what was happening to his beloved Son. Every parent in this congregation, I'm certain, is able to do what I'm suggesting. You send your children out on the voyage of life and you watch them, you keep your eye upon them. You see the storms and the billows coming, and you're watching, watching with an anxiety, watching with love, trembling for them, fearful for them, and so on. Multiply that by infinity, and the eternal Father hath sent his Son into the sea of sin and of this world, and he watches.

He observes what's happening to his beloved. There's the love of God. He sees men reviling him. He sees men laughing at him. He sees men taking up stones to throw at him—his beloved! The God who made the world out of nothing and who could smash it in a second, who could take the men and the stones and the rocks and cast them into the sea, he just looks on and watches the world refusing the beloved and persecuting him and hurting him and wounding him. He sent him to his own things, and he watched and he observed as his own received him not. There's the measure of the love of God. So that as you read the story, remember it's the beloved you're reading about and that the Father is looking at his beloved. But let us hasten on to the most astounding thing of all.

There I see him staggering up Golgotha. There I see him nailed to the tree. And the Father is still looking down upon it all. The beloved, finally rejected, despised of men, spat upon, scourged, hated, reviled, nailed to the tree. The agony, the suffering, the shame. The Father looks at his beloved. And if you want to know anything about the love of God, says the apostle Paul in his eighth chapter in the Epistle to the Romans, he says this is it: "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all." That's it. He didn't spare the beloved. Though he had loved him with that eternal love from all eternity and with all the intensity of his holy eternal nature, though he is the beloved, he didn't spare him.

He spared him no suffering. He laid upon him the iniquity of us all. He struck him, he smote him with those stripes. He that spared not his own Son. He didn't spare the beloved. Why? That you and I might be forgiven. Thou didst not spare thine only Son but gav'st him for a world undone, and freely with that blessed one, thou givest all. My dear friends, if you and I want to know anything about the love of God, we've got to start with this term, the beloved. It was to the beloved he did that. He made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. He made his beloved sin and a sin offering for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

But come, let us look at it like this: let us look at this term for a moment as it is the measure of the Son's love. There we've been looking at it as a measure of the Father's love, let's take it from the other side, the measure of the Son's love. We mustn't compare, it would be wrong, it would be foolish to compare. And yet you know there is a difference between a father and a son. And the Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God eternally, and sonship is sonship in him. So that I say you can look at his love and what it meant to him. Try for a moment to think of the self-emptying in terms of this word, the beloved.

In the bosom of the Father from all eternity and enjoying that unmixed and perfect bliss, he decides to come out. He through whom all things were made and by whom all things consist, the everlasting word, the word of God, the express image of his person and all that, he humbles himself. He divests himself of these insignia, these signs of his eternal glory. He says, "Here am I, send me. I'll become a man, I'll take unto me human nature. I'll leave beside and alone the prerogatives of my position and my unique relationship. Take me, send me." And he entered into the virgin's womb. It's the beloved who's there, going through the whole process of development as an embryo. It's inconceivable, it's baffling, but it's true. It's the beloved who's there.

And then the time comes that he's born, and they put him in that manger. Who is that helpless infant? The beloved. The one on whom the love of God has been poured without end knows something about weakness and helplessness. Follow the story through the suffering, the misunderstanding, the contradiction of sinners. He spent eighteen years apparently quite unknown, indeed until the age of thirty and misunderstood, not known. There he is! The one who'd experienced all this fullness of God directly in love, as it were, has now humbled himself and put himself into such a position that he knows what it is to be lonely and to feel a sense of desertion and to meet the contradiction of sinners. He who made all is suffering at the hands of the very people whom he's made. The beloved. That's his love.

And then all the despising and the persecution that followed. We don't understand it except in the light of this term. How glad we ought to be that the apostle didn't say the Lord Jesus Christ here but said in the beloved. He knows how easily we forget these things, how easy it is to take them for granted, to celebrate your Christmas and think you know all about it and yet miss the glory and the significance of it all. But he wants us to remember. He says it's the beloved who's gone through all this. And the height of the paradox, the thing that no human mind can encompass is this: that when you stand there at the foot of that cross and listen, you hear these words being uttered: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Everybody else has forsaken me, my disciples have fled and have left me. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Who utters that cry? It is the beloved. The one who had basked in the sunshine of the eternal love from eternity without intermission, he reaches a point wherein even he has lost sight of the face and the smile of his Father. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" It's the beloved who experienced that. And he experienced it for you, for me. If he hadn't, we wouldn't be saved, we wouldn't be forgiven, we wouldn't be Christians, we wouldn't be children of the second birth. The beloved came down to that. And his very body was buried in a grave and a stone thrown over it, he descended into hell. The beloved. He went into the lowest parts of the earth, he who'd made everything out of nothing, for us and for our salvation. You know nothing about the love of the Son of God unless you realize the full context of this term, the beloved.

It is only as we realize who it is who's suffering that we realize the depth and the intensity of his love toward us. And then that brings me to our last thought this morning: this term "the beloved" as it tells us of our relationship to God. So far we've been dealing with his relationship to God. Now let us end, and I'm certain that this is the thing the apostle wanted us to learn finally, is the term as it expresses our relationship to God. Listen, listen to the steps. Let's climb with the apostle from rung to rung as he takes up this tremendous ladder. We are called, we are chosen to what? Holiness. Sonship. To the praise of God's glory. Yes, even higher.

Is anything higher possible? It is, and it's all in this word, it's this: to be loved of God even as his Son was loved by him. Have I gone too far? Do you think that I'm exaggerating? Have I suddenly given rein to my imagination? Am I going beyond the scripture? I'm not. Listen to this: they are the words of the Son himself in his high priestly prayer in the seventeenth of John in the twenty-third verse: "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me," and then the most astounding thing that's ever been said, "and hast loved them as thou hast loved me."

I confess quite frankly that if it were not there in that twenty-third verse of the seventeenth of John I wouldn't believe it, but it's there. The truth about the Christian, the truth about the one who is in Christ is this: because he's in Christ and adopted as a son in the beloved, God the Father loves us as he loved him! In the same way, as thou hast loved me. You see that's even beyond sonship. That is that intimacy of communion and of love which we share with the Son himself. It isn't a mere rank, it isn't a mere position. It isn't merely that we've been adopted legally. No, no. The Father now loves us as he loved the Son himself. Staggering, stupendous. But this apostle Paul had understood it, because I observe that he not only says it here, but he says it elsewhere. Listen to him saying something like this in the Epistle to the Colossians in the third verse, in the third chapter and the twelfth verse. He's making an appeal for ethical conduct and morality and behavior, and this is how he puts it: "Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies," etc., etc.

But you notice how he describes us: "Put on therefore as the elect of God," yes, "holy," perfectly true, but still more marvelous, "beloved." We are the beloved of God. That is the ultimate height of our salvation and redemption: that the Christ who came down from the glory to earth and went down into Hades has risen and has taken us up with him, and he's put us there and we are loved as he is loved, holy and beloved. He says the same thing to the Thessalonians in the second epistle in the second chapter and the thirteenth verse: "But we are bound to give thanks always to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord." There it is. You're not only brethren, but you're beloved, or beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the spirit and belief of the truth. Are you convinced, are you satisfied? Do you realize that that is the ultimate of salvation?

It is because we have everything that we have in the beloved that we become the very beloved of God. God loves the Christian as he loved the Son. We share that love, nothing less. We know something of how he loved him. My dear friend, it's like that he loves you. Have you ever been tempted to think that God isn't fair to you? That God's dealing rather harshly and unkindly with you? Have you felt like grumbling and complaining and saying, why? Oh, never say that again. That's the most terrible thing you can ever say. Whether you understand what's happening to you or not, this is the truth: in Christ, because he is the beloved, you are the beloved of God also. Holy and beloved. Brethren beloved of God. Well, that's the mystery, the marvel, the wonder of it all. The Son of God became the son of man, as Calvin put it, that the sons of men might be made the sons of God. Yes, I add, and beloved of God. Amen.