6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.
Once again we have a statement of our status quo—position or standing in Christ.
in the Beloved [Jesus Christ].
God loves Jesus. He is the “Beloved.” The verb “Beloved” is in a tense in the Greek that means the Father loved the Son in the past and He persistently loves Him into the present (perfect tense). God has always loved the Son and He will continue to love Him. The Father’s love for the Son is permanent.
The word “in” shows where God places the believer’s location. We are in the sphere of Christ, the Beloved. God’s acceptance of us is in the circle of His Beloved Son. Jesus is the object of God’s love. God associates our acceptance to Him with the Son of His love. Since God loves the Son and believers are in Him, we are the objects of His love.
PRINCIPLE:
Christians are caught up in God’s love for His Son.
APPLICATION:
Christians are a God-blessed people. We should be grateful for this. We cannot compute how much the Father loved His Son. That love must have had great magnitude. Yet He struck down His Son for us (Ro 8:32). By doing this He satisfied His just claims against our sin.
What we have in Christ rests completely on His work and not on our own wobbly efforts. The emphasis of Ephesians 1:3-6 is upon God’s choice, God’s love, and God’s grace.
The more we appropriate positional truth, the more nobly we will be able to carry ourselves. If we do not know our status quo with God, we cannot know what He expects of us. We will not know what conduct He anticipates for us.
When we look back on why God should bless us, it is simply because of His grace. That is why we should be grateful for His grace.
If everything were sunshine, there would be nothing but desert. A battery requires both a positive and negative pole. If both poles were positive, the battery would not start our car. We need adversity and blessing. Both are in God’s design for our lives. We can praise God for His grace in adversity. He gives both the test and how to deal with the test (1 Co 10:13). We know, we do not guess, that everything works together for good (Ro 8:28).
God baptized us into the Spirit the moment of our salvation (1 Co 12:13).
Thankyou for all your hard work! I do have a question. I believe acceptance is a spiritual blessing in Heaven in Christ. I believe you do to with your statement of “circle of the beloved statement””. But is Eph. 1:6 about us being blessed with the spritual blessing of grace in heaven or acceptance? If grace where in Eph. 1:3-14 or the bible would support acceptance in heaven”
David, we become accepted at the moment of our salvation. See a summary of this issue here: https://versebyversecommentary.com/articles/doctrine/thrity-three-things-accomplished-at-the-point-of-salvation/
here is my real question. I believe the word “accepted” in the KJV of Eph 1:6 is so important I do not understand how most versions (NIV,etc) of this verse can leave it out. That is most
people when they read “graced us” are gong to miss that this means “made accepted”
David, the NIV is not a good translation for Bible STudy because it is a “dynamic” translation, whereby they add and take away words for the sense of the meaning.