Ephesians 2:4
But God, being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us,
But God, being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us,
We start a set of four verses of where Paul is telling us what is different now that we are believers.
And what prompted everything is that we are recipients of the mercy of God. We need to pay attention to idea of the riches of the mercy of God.
He is rich in mercy and loves us with a great love. Isn’t that amazing? We are not getting the leftover of God’s love, mercy, or His grace.
Let’s recap what we have in Christ:
- Every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 1:3)
- God's freely bestowed grace (Ephesians 1:6); Ephesians 1:7 talks about the riches of His grace and verse 8 tells us that He lavished that grace on us
That he freely did it means you cannot even remotely trace it to anything except the unencumbered divine choice.
The focus verse is the first verse where the "mercy" is mentioned. Mercy is about what God has overlooked.
And we have mercy paired with love. Mercy is the action, love is the motivation.
We are not going to receive mercy except for the fact that God is love.
Later on in this book Paul would turn his focus back on love and pray about it (Ephesians 3:17-19).
Not that God would love us the more, but rather that we would be rooted and grounded in that love.
The love of God towards us in this verse cannot be greater than it is. It is maxed out love that God has for us; in our language it means madly in love.
In another place we were told that God loved the world in this way, that (madly in love) He gave His only son for us (John 3:16). Madly in love is about intensity. That is it. I call it God's maxed out love. If we want to measure that love, that is the measure; meaning it has no measure.
And we should not forget the turn of phrase that began this verse, "But God…"
Before this verse, we were told about how depraved we are, how we were being ruled by the ruler of the spirit that is now energizing the sons of disobedience.
That is why Jesus told some people, "You are from your father the devil, and you want to do what your father desires. He was a murderer from the beginning" (John 8:44).
The point is that we mirror the desire of the ruler of the spirit now energizing the children of disobedience. That is why we are not doing what we want. We are doing what that spirit wants. We are mirroring its desires and carrying them out.
Before this verse, we were told that we are dead in our offenses and sins (Ephesians 2:1).
Somebody may ask, why didn’t God just have mercy on Adam and Eve? Didn’t He love them?
This is my answer:
If He did that, then the rebellious spirit(s) aka the devil would have accused God of partiality. And justice is integral to the character of God (Psalm 89:14). He would not and cannot be accused of being unfair.
For example, the devil accused God of bribing Job to like him, so God allowed him to afflict Job.
God couldn’t just say, "shut up," to the devil, a credible accusation against God has been leveled and whatever Job experienced was about vindicating God, nothing more, nothing less. And Job was later compensated for that.
Someone else might say, why choose to save some and not others?
This is my attempted answer:
That is where God displays his unsearchable wisdom (Romans 11:33). He chose us, not everyone, in Christ before the world began.
It’s not about fairness or unfairness, it is about divine choice. The divine prerogative. What makes God, God; part of His distinctive as God.
Paul did not think of himself as deserving of the mercy of God, considering how he persecuted the church (1 Timothy 1:13, 16).
It’s not true mercy and love if it is divorced from choice.
How would we know the mercy of God except with the background of what happens if someone is on the opposite side of that?
How would we appreciate the grandness of the love of God except we see examples of what happened when someone is on the other side of it.
As it is written, "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated" (Romans 9:13), so that it is a matter of divine choice, not any qualification that the accepted one has or does not have.
The “us” used in this verse is a particular “us.” It’s not everybody.
That is hard for some people to swallow, but that is the truth.
Just as I mentioned before about the healing of the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda, where one man, without any explanation, was chosen to be healed among many.
And even with the story of the children of Israel, God chose them from among the other nations, not because of any particular reason we can outline, but as an act of divine prerogative (Deuteronomy 7:7–8; Amos 3:2).
It’s the same story of divine choice that consistently casts God as the determinant that is not determined. That is the way it has to be, that is the way it has been and that is the way it will be.
When all is said and done, the answer remains a mystery in my opinion. We may not really be able to fully peer into the grandeur of the mind of God concerning this matter.
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