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And when you heard the word of truth (the gospel of your salvation)—when you believed in Christ—you were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit,
It would have been amazing for this group of Gentiles, who might have been told that being uncircumcised means that they are unclean, to learn that God, the same God of the Hebrews, who rescued the children of Abraham from bondage in Egypt, has chosen them in Christ before the world began (Ephesians 1:4), that they were not an afterthought.
That is the gospel. That is the good news to the poor, the spiritually destitute. (Luke 4:18)
That is the message that Jesus sent people to proclaim to the ends of the earth. The God you did not know knows you; the God you have not met knows your name, loves you!
So Paul here said, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.
For someone to hear, someone else has to preach, and the message is not just anything.
It is not:
Come to Jesus, and your husband will love you.
Come to Jesus, and you will get that contract.
Come to Jesus, and you will be able to pass your exams.
It is:
Come to Jesus so that you can be rescued from the impending wrath. (Romans 5:9)
But that is a negative message.
The positive message is also powerful:
Come to Jesus so that you would be marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit, so that you will receive the gift of redemption and the forgiveness of sins. (Ephesians 1:13-14)
Come to Jesus so that you can enter into all the blessings in the spiritual realm. (Ephesians 1:3)
Come to Jesus so that you can have adoption as his legal heir. (Ephesians 1:5)
All those are good things. The confusion comes when people want to say you should not preach hellfire, not preach that people should receive Jesus so that they will not experience the wrath of God, in the name of grace.
They forget that the outcome of the message of judgment that was sent to Nineveh in the book of Jonah shows that it was a message of mercy, of love, and grace.
Grace does not have to be one thing. When Jesus said someone should not sin so that something worse would not come upon him, is that not grace? (John 5:14)
Therefore, although God has overlooked such times of ignorance, he now commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has set a day on which he is going to judge the world in righteousness, by a man whom he designated, having provided proof to everyone by raising him from the dead." (Acts 17:30-31)
So here is Paul preaching to a people steeped in idolatry, and he preached about the coming judgment. Preaching about the coming judgment is the message of grace. Some believed, as we see in Acts 17:34.
If Noah had told people that there was a coming flood and they should come with him to the Ark, would that not be grace?
Those who speak this way, who say there should not be the preaching of hellfire and judgment, that it is not attractive, are wrong.
In summary, the one who, so to speak, preaches the grace and mercy and love of God should not despise the one who preaches judgment, maybe learn from him; and the one who preaches judgment should not despise the one who preaches love and grace.
God's judgment on one gives meaning to his outpouring of love to others.
Some want to say that if we do not preach hell, people will not fear God, and the other group says that if we preach grace (a narrow definition of grace in my opinion), then people would not take their relationship with God as seriously as they should.
I believe those two camps are missing the mark in some ways:
Look at this:
But you are willing to forgive so that you might be honored. (Psalm 130:4)
The Hebrew word translated as "honored" can also be understood as "feared."
And Jesus said a woman who was forgiven much loves much (Luke 7:47)
Is that not what we want: for people to love much, to have an attachment to God that nothing can shake? Is it something for Jesus to say that forgiveness correlates to love?
And to those who say that the message of judgment means people would not love, but fear God, what is wrong with the fear of God? To have a message that, even if only slightly, means we should dampen the fear of God is completely wrong. A wrong understanding of God is bad, but the fear of God is good.
Paul said, "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." That communicates the fear of God. (Ephesians 4:30)
The problem comes when
Christians are made to think that they are going to lose their salvation (in the name of a judgment message), or
Christians who are told they can do anything (in the name of no judgment message)
That is why Christians need to hear the message of judgment, too, because we would individually stand before the judgment seat of God to receive the reward for what we have done in the body (2 Corinthians 5:10).
And Christians need the message of grace because we can do nothing by our own strength (John 15:5).