The Father-Heart of God and Christian Obedience
In January 2021, both of my parents died of COVID, just 48 hours apart. When I officiated their funeral, I read Ephesians 5:22 and 25: “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord…Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.” In my parents’ almost 56 years of marriage, they faithfully sought to obey Paul’s words in sickness and in health, and they did so even unto death. So, the question I asked at their funeral was: What enabled them to faithfully obey these two verses? In other words, what fueled my parents’ Christian obedience?
If we are not careful, we can lift verses like these right up out of Ephesians and say all kinds of wonderful and important things about them, and yet neglect the larger teaching of Ephesians which serves as the subterranean fountain that gives life to all Christian obedience. To use another metaphor, there is a text that functions as the sun around which every exhortation in Ephesians actually orbits.
How can husbands look at what is commanded of them in Ephesians 5:25 and not feel it as a weight that crushes them? Think about it. Can you think of a more weighty responsibility than husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church? I can’t. So, what will keep husbands from being crushed by what is expected of them? If we can discern Paul’s answer to this Ephesians 5:25 question, we can also apply it to every command in Ephesians.
I believe the answer to our question is found in the opening verses of the main body of Ephesians. Verses 3–6 of chapter 1 read:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
The Father-Heart of God
Anytime we read a text like Ephesians 5:25, we need to read it with an eye on Ephesians 1:3–6. Paul did not open his letter to the Ephesians in this way only to have us forget its significance once we get to chapter 5. He doesn’t put the Father’s generosity to us front and centre only to see us lose sight of it by the time we get to what Ephesians requires of us as Christians. Paul’s stress upon the generosity of the Father is not merely the introduction to his epistle. It’s the fountain that serves as the life-giving source of all Christian obedience.
The Object of His Joy
He has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (v. 3). When we read the word “blessing,” I believe Paul intends for us to hear an echo of Genesis 12, where the LORD says to Abraham, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (vv. 1–3).
God’s promise of blessing to Abraham is never far from Paul’s mind. In Galatians 3:7–9, Paul writes, “Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed.’ So then, those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.” According to Paul, God’s words to Abraham in Genesis 12 were a pre-proclamation of the gospel.
One of the major themes in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is the bringing together of Jew and Gentile to create one new humanity in place of the two (2:14–16). The old, dead humanity, consisting of Jews and Gentiles, is made alive together into a new humanity—one that was raised up with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly places (2:5–7). So, when Paul tells us that the Father has blessed us with every spiritual blessing, he is first intending for us to see the Father’s generosity toward us, in that he has already united us to the One who in himself created this new humanity to replace the old (v. 15).
If I were to ask you what the climactic act of creation week was, you would certainly answer that it was God’s making man in his own image (Gen. 1:26–27). In his classic book Old Testament Theology, Gustav Friedrich Oehler provides a wonderful insight into the significance of that definitive act:
In all His creating God approves the works of His hands; but still the creating God does not reach the goal of His creation until He has set over against Him His image in man. From this last fact it is plain that the self-revelation of God, the unveiling of His being, is the final end of the creation of the world; or, to express it more generally, that the whole world serves to reveal the divine glory, and is thereby the object of divine joy.
If it is true that humanity in the beginning was the object of divine joy, how much more joy does the Father experience now as the Father of the new humanity which was created in Jesus Christ himself? If ever you doubt the Father’s generosity toward you, just look around when you gather each Lord’s Day for corporate worship. Incredibly, you are looking at the new humanity, of which you are a member.
Have you ever thought about the gathered church like this? Whenever the church gathers to worship, the Father’s joy is set upon you, both the corporate you and the individual you. The Father is not indifferent toward you. He’s not thinking, “Well, of course you and the others should have gathered here today. After all, you are only doing what is expected of you.” No, whenever the new humanity—the church—gathers to worship our triune God, they (you!) are actually the very object of the Father’s joy! All of this and more is contained in the phrase “every spiritual blessing” (v. 3). Such is the Father’s heart toward his people, which also means toward you.
The Object of His Love
So much could be said about the opening phrase of Ephesians 1:4 (“even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world…”) to elicit from us the wonder of being the object of the Father’s love, but let’s drop our eyes down to verses 5 and 6 in order to explore his love in all its adoptive wonder: “[The Father] predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.” The Father did something very particular through Jesus Christ, his Beloved, in order to bring us “to himself.” Do you see what that is? In order to bring us to himself, the Father predestined us for adoption as sons.
We were predestined to this end before time, and we were brought to this end in time through Jesus Christ, the Beloved. By referring to the Son as “Jesus Christ” and “the Beloved,” Paul tells us that when the eternal Son of God became man, he ushered his infinite, flawless communion with the Father into the very depths of our sin, pain, and suffering (see Mark 14:36), not impersonally, but in a profoundly personal manner.
In Galatians 4:5, Paul tells us that the Son became man to redeem us for this purpose: “so that we might receive adoption as sons.” Redemption unto adoption: that’s what Paul tells us. Redemption was not the Father’s ultimate objective—adoption as sons was. But the way unto adoption was through redemption. That’s what Paul says when he elaborates in Ephesians 1:7, immediately after referring to adoption: “In [Jesus Christ, the Beloved,] we have redemption through his blood.” If I may put it this way, the Father was so determined to bring us to himself as sons that he did it the only way it could be done: through the shed blood of his Beloved Son.
In The Christian Doctrine of God, Scottish theologian T. F. Torrance puts it like this:
Through the coming of Jesus Christ into the world as the only begotten Son loved by the Father, the Love which flows eternally between the Father and the Son in the Holy Trinity has moved outward to bear upon us in history and is made known to us above all in the sacrificial love of Jesus in laying down his life for us.[1]
Adoption as sons through the blood of Jesus does not just tell us how the Father brought us to himself; it also tells us how profoundly loved we were and are. Paul tells us that we were loved like this in the past so that we will also know that we are still loved like this in the present.
It’s not that we once were the object of the Father’s love and now we are just tolerated. No, Paul gives us Ephesians 1 so that we assuredly know that we are still as much the object of the Father’s love as we ever were. Nothing has changed. Nothing can change. Do you know how we can be sure that this is actually the case? Because Paul says that the Father did this “to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved” (v. 6). It’s all grace! No obedience earns it (except, of course, Jesus’ vicarious obedience!), and no disobedience un-earns it. You are forever the object of the Father’s love just because that’s what he wants you to be, and that’s glorious grace!
Christian Obedience
At the beginning of this article, I wrote that if we are not careful, we can lift a text like Ephesians 5:22 and 25 (addressing wives and husbands) right up out of Ephesians and say all kinds of wonderful and important things about it, and yet neglect the central text which serves as the subterranean fountain that gives life to all Christian obedience. Do you know what keeps all of Paul’s commands in Ephesians 4–6 from being burdensome— burdensome to wives and husbands, fathers and children, and to all who belong to “the household of God” (2:19)? It’s the Father-heart of God.
Yes, the Father has eternally loved his only begotten Son. But what makes the gospel such good news for us is that the Father has graced us with every spiritual blessing— chief of which is our adoption as sons to himself—“in the Beloved” (1:7). The gospel transforms obedience.
What makes obedience Christian obedience is the heart of the Father towards us through Jesus Christ. We obey not in order to win the Father’s approval and affection; we obey because the Father’s heart is already and forever set upon us, as fully set upon us as it is set upon his eternal Son.
So, when you get to Paul’s imperatives and exhortations in Ephesians, don’t lose sight of the Father’s love for you. Actually, why don’t you do more than just not lose sight of it? Let the Father’s unending affection for you be the lens through which you read all that is required of you as a Christian. The Father’s love really is the fountain of all Christian obedience (Ps. 36:7–9).
This was originally published in Reformation Fellowship Magazine 2 (November 2021), 20–23.
[1] The Christian Doctrine of God: One Being Three Persons (Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark International, 2001), 16.
