Ephesians 1

Notes.Division 1. (Ephesians 1:1-14.)God’s purpose in Christ as source of all blessing to us and Head of all things. As already said, in Ephesians we have, first of all, our individual blessing, and this in its highest character; the fruit, also, of God’s purpose in Christ towards us, which is the display of Himself in His own nature; and not simply even for “the glory of His grace,” but in result for “the praise of His glory.” The apostle announces himself at the outset as an “apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God.” He is acting in his divinely commissioned place, to declare that which, as elsewhere we find him saying, is the completion of Scripture truth, and the declaration of mysteries hidden from ages and generations and now revealed. He writes to the saints at Ephesus as to “the faithful in Christ Jesus.” We have already seen that Ephesus evidently has in the New Testament a representative place with regard to the Church at large. We are here, therefore, to have the full church character given to it; yet he writes not to the church at Ephesus, but to the saints as individuals. The individual blessing comes first, and must come first. We are members of Christ only by the gift of the Spirit, but we must be first prepared of the Spirit in order to receive this gift, the temple that He is to inhabit must first be built. He could not seal flesh, nor man in sin.

The bride of Christ, as already said, must be of the kindred, and therefore we have that here which first of all links us with the essential blessing of all the saints before. The “faithful in Christ Jesus” may make us realize in the Ephesians a condition of soul which prepared them to receive the truth which was now to be communicated.

It is plain that in the case, for instance, of the Corinthians or of the Galatians, he was hindered by the condition of soul in those to whom he was writing. In Corinthians he does, indeed, give us the Church as the body of Christ, but he does not carry us up to the heavenly places, but simply develops the practical working of the church on earth. Here he is unhindered. It is a point to be well understood by us that we cannot learn scripture truth as we might learn any other, that there must be a condition of soul corresponding to the truth revealed. There must be hearts open to receive and to take the impress of the truth revealed. There must be a state towards God of those who are whole hearted in their desire to be subject to His mind. To these he begins with his usual salutation: “Grace be to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.”

1. He begins, then, with the praise which fills his heart as he thinks of that which is the portion of the saints. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.” It is the Father’s will, the Father’s love to which all is referred here; Christ the One in whom there is the accomplishment of this. “The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” suggests, as the Lord has taught us, our own twofold relationship to Him as that. “The God of our Lord Jesus Christ” implies the Man Christ Jesus down here in the place of weakness, to work out His will, to whom God must be God, who walks in the path of faith like no other man, only in the perfection which belongs to Him; but then His God is His Father, and, as this, our Father also, although there is a peculiar sense, of course, in which, as the “Only Begotten Son” He fills such a place. As the “Only Begotten,” He is alone and must ever be alone. As the"First Born," He is in necessary connection with others who are not merely naturally but spiritually born. Thus, the Lord says in His message through Mary Magdalene, “I ascend unto my Father and your Father, unto my God and your God.” It has been often noted that the Lord does not say here to our Father and to our God. He preserves, as a matter of necessity, the peculiar place which is His, and yet He brings us by virtue of what He is, into relationships which are characterized by His relationship. “My Father” and therefore “your Father;” “My God” and therefore “your God.” God has One now in whom He can perfectly reveal Himself.

In the Old Testament He was the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob. These three, as we have seen in the book of Exodus, are those specially chosen, as, in the place they fill, giving us to know God in a distinct way.

In the God of Abraham, in fact, we see the Father, just because and as in Isaac the one yielded up to death and yet brought out of it, we see the Son. The God of Jacob gives us, on the other hand, the thought of the Spirit. Jacob transformed into Israel is the typical presentation of the Spirit’s work. Thus God had in some way identified Himself with these three men, but now there are and can be none associated with Christ after this manner. He is the One in whom God is displayed and He displays Him fully and perfectly. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is God perfectly revealed, and it is He who “hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.” Notice how we are entitled, therefore, to go back through all the Old Testament scriptures and to claim every spiritual blessing that we find there as our own.

We do not take them from those to whom they belonged. Those blessings declare the character of God who is now revealed to us and who has blessed us in Christ.

No character of blessing, therefore, can be wanting to us. If God says to Joshua: “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee,” we may, as the apostle tells us, claim that promise fully, although there could scarcely perhaps be one which might be considered more incidental to the peculiar place which Joshua occupied. But “all spiritual blessings” then are ours, only that the sphere to which they belong, with which they connect us, is heavenly and not earthly. There is no conflict, therefore, with Israel’s blessings; although, surely, their highest blessings must be spiritual also, but they are in earthly places, not in heavenly. Christ is the storehouse of these blessings for us. He is the One who by His work in our behalf justifies their bestowal.

Nay, we may say, even necessitates it, for the moment we see Christ as Man here upon earth, the fullest blessing of man is certainly implied for him. “If God spared not His Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” “All spiritual blessings” then are ours. We only need faith to claim them and enjoy them.

Unbelief may, alas, make us poor still, shaming the One whom we should glorify by the manifestation of the blessing that is ours. Nevertheless, the blessings abide permanently for His people, and it is, of course, impossible that for any of these there could be the final loss of that which is thus secured; but this makes the apostle look back to eternity before ever the world was, to that will of God to which we owe our all. He has chosen us in Him before the world was. This world, so large and important as it is often in our thoughts, yet is after all that which has, as it were, come in by the way, and is a step in order to His fulfilment of these eternal blessings; but the first thing that we find here is that we must, therefore, be according to His own nature, and here, too, the guard of His holiness is first named: “That we should be holy and without blame before Him” -then His full character -“in love.” We must answer thus to what He is if we are to be blessed at all. It is not, therefore, said here, “According to the good pleasure of His will.” That comes in the next place when He speaks of our predestination, our appointment to the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself. There it is His will merely to which we owe this.

If He had servants of His power, they must answer to His nature; not, of course, that He cannot overrule the evil which has come in through sin and make sinful men the instrument of His pleasure, but this is not in question here. It is that which comes from His own heart, not that which displays His power merely, and thus there must be what corresponds to what is in His own heart.

Because of what we are, this is to the praise of the glory of His grace. It is grace and grace alone that can bring into the highest place, and this grace has been shown us in the Beloved. The apostle does not say in Christ simply here, but wants to make us realize the fulness of delight which God has in Him in whom we are accepted. Thus the result must be the praise of the glory of His grace. Suited it is that those creatures of His who are to find the very highest place with Him are those thus redeemed from sin. It makes the place itself the display of what God is in a way which nothing else could do.

If God is acting in grace, if He is free to show out what is in His heart, then it is what is due to Himself, we may say, that He will manifest, not what is due to us or to any of His creatures, but due to Himself, and thus the fullest blessing must result from it. Christ, “the Beloved” is, as we know, the pledge of all this. 2. He points out now, therefore, the grace side of things. In Christ we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. Let us notice that He does not speak of justification here nor in the epistle anywhere. It is not the suited term, although one peculiarly Paul’s, but as another has said: “God does not justify His own work,” and we are looked at here in that character. Yet there must be redemption, the taking out of the condition in which we were as sinners in the power of that blood shed, which was the necessary price, but therefore the forgiveness of sins is according to the riches* of His grace.

It is not mere forgiveness, as it were. There is the overflow of goodness in it; and it is added that according to this “He hath abounded toward us now in all wisdom and intelligence.” He has come out to make known to us that which is ours that we may enjoy it according to His mind.

He does not reveal what He would not have us enjoy, but He has not merely revealed to us that which is our own blessing, we are made to know the fulness of His purpose which has Christ as its Object. He has made known to us “the mystery of His will,” that is the secret of it not hitherto declared, “according to His good pleasure which He hath purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might head up in One all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth.” This large and general purpose we do not find, therefore, in the Old Testament. Christ is the glorious King of Israel, the Ruler of the nations of the earth, but the promises of the Old Testament do not go beyond the earth; they belong, as Romans has told us, to Israel, to the apostle’s kindred according to the flesh. Here we have what is much wider. Christ is to be Head over all, the fullest security of blessing to all, that could be. All things are to be in His hand when, in the wisdom of God, the time has arrived for Him to put forth His hand and take them.

Even now He sits upon the Father’s throne, but there, as is clear, in retirement in a certain sense. He has had necessarily to come down first into the lower parts of the earth to the death of the cross, in order that God might be glorified with regard to everything and perfect power over sin might be realized, it might be no barrier to blessing any more.

Thus we can understand that at His first coming, Christ could not take the power which was His. The secret of the present delay has to do with us. He is gathering, as we shall see, a people who are to be trained in His school upon earth, in order to inherit with Him that which in grace He shares with them. Thus, the delay has respect to us, is in our behalf, and the whole truth as to the Church comes in in this place. So the apostle goes on immediately to say therefore that, “In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of Him who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will, that we should be to the praise of His glory who first trusted in Christ.” If He speaks of Christ’s inheritance there must be the coheirs, and that is what, during all this time of patience in which evil is so prevalent and good seems almost to be baffled, God is working out by it all that needed discipline which is to make us, as exercised with regard to good and evil, participators in the mind of Christ and instruments in His hand finally. How wonderful a purpose this that we should be not merely to the praise of the glory of His grace, but “to the praise of His glory.” The praise of the glory of His grace contemplates the low, sinful estate of those whom He raises up to manifest it in, but “the praise of His glory” contemplates the wonderful condition into which they are brought and seated with Christ, and here he shows us that those in Israel who through grace have anticipated what will be the faith finally of the nation (“we who first trusted in Christ”) are to find an infinitely greater blessing than anything that they have lost through Israel’s failure.
3. He now turns to the Gentiles, as these Ephesians were. The “we” and “ye” all through the epistle, as we have seen in Galatians also, mark out the difference. In whom therefore," he adds, “ye also trusted after ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.” The Gentiles come in on equal footing with these Jewish first-fruits, and they have, in consequence, by that Spirit which is theirs, the Holy Spirit of promise, the seal of that condition of sonship, which is the pledge that they shall be heirs also. It is “the earnest of our inheritance till the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise,” again, “of His glory.” He is now the earnest. Necessarily, that character will cease when we have the inheritance itself: not the seal of the Spirit itself, which a loss indeed, if it were possible to us, but it is, of course, only in this way that the habitation of God abides for eternity.

God will not give it up. Let us notice that the seal of the Spirit is simply that which is put upon faith in Christ, and that the “after that ye believed” is really too strong.

It implies no necessary interval. “In whom having believed, ye were sealed.” The sealing marks us out for God, but it is that also which, as doing this, brings in God to preserve that which is His own, and thus it is the assurance of absolute security. We are in a world in which our feebleness is, alas, continually manifest. It is God’s grace, therefore, that thus takes upon Himself, as we may say, the responsibility of our being brought through. In the Spirit which He has given us He has pledged Himself to this; so Peter also, having told us that we are “begotten again to an inheritance, incorruptible and undefiled, reserved in heaven,” adds that “we are kept by the power of God through faith unto (final) salvation” (1 Peter 1:3-5). Here is the power of God in the Holy Spirit of power, the One who, as we have seen dwells in the very bodies of the saints, in order to make good there, in that which is the very sign of our weakness and which as yet does not share in the blessing of redemption, the purpose of God. Let us notice again the peculiar expression here: “redemption of the purchased possession,” which, of course, means our inheritance; but thus our inheritance needed to be purchased and needs to be redeemed. This is the first time that we have come to such an intimation. We have what is similar in Colossians, “the reconciliation of things in earth and things in heaven” (Colossians 1:20), and in Hebrews 9:23 the heavenly things are seen as having to be purified by sacrifice, This is a mystery to many, the thought of “things,” not simply persons needing the work or Christ in order that God’s purposes may be fulfilled as to them; but in fact, everything has waited for the glorification of God as to sin to be accomplished. Satan himself is thus in the heavenly places, not cast down, and when we look forward to the actual time when this shall take place, as the book of Revelation declares it to us, we find that the completion of God’s victory over evil has waited and still waits for His purpose towards man to be fulfilled. Whatever we might think, the nature of God is such that there could not be tolerated the smallest question as to what He is. Sin has raised questions which must be fully met and answered, which the work of Christ has met, before God could lay hold even of the heavenly places themselves, in which we know sin has been, to renew them according to His eternal purpose.

There is no question, of course, of the purification or reconciliation of the fallen angels, yet even so judgment alone upon them could not sufficiently vindicate Him. He cannot, in fact, be vindicated by judgment merely.

Judgment may show His righteousness, but not His heart, and the question has gone deeper than with regard to righteousness. Christ’s work alone has shown, not merely His holiness with regard to sin, but His love also and thus still there is a certain delay of the fulfilment of His purpose which has been already spoken of.* He is free now to work out the restoration which is in His mind. Thus, as we have seen in Romans, the groaning creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God, and the possession which is ours in the heavenly places needed that purchase price to be paid for it, not because of those who were to be put in possession, but because of the question which sin has raised even there. The purchase is completed, but the redemption remains to be accomplished yet. “Purchase” and “redemption” are very distinct things, although the same work is necessary in each case but redemption is the actual bringing out of the evil condition which, we may reverently say, the purchase gives God title to do. If we look on to the twelfth of Revelation, we shall find there that when the man child is taken up to heaven, the dragon and his angels are cast down. That is the redemption.

The man child, no doubt, includes both the One who is to rule all nations with a rod of iron, and those also who are expressly promised to share this power with Him (Revelation 12:16-17). Thus, during all the time in which we wait, the Spirit of God, the Witness of the glory of Him whose work has been accomplished, is here for the guarding of the fulfilment of these purposes of blessing. \

Ephesians 1:15-2

Division 2. (Ephesians 1:15-23; Ephesians 2:1-10.)Our participation with Christ in God’s work beyond death. We have had, then, the general outline of God’s purpose in Christ, not merely towards us, but embracing the subjection of all things to Him. We are now to see how He has, in fact, taken us up to link us with Christ for the fulfilment of blessing.

1. It takes the form. of a prayer from the apostle’s heart in behalf of those whom he is addressing. He longs for them and for us that we may have the spirit of wisdom and revelation with regard to all these things. In fact, how much has been hidden in this way through the lack of response on the part of God’s people to these wonderful communications! He has heard of their faith in the Lord Jesus and their love to all the saints. He gives thanks, therefore, for them, but that is not enough.

He realizes that they are yet in a world in which Satan is busy, as by and by he will more fully show, to deprive the people of God of that which, in their knowledge of it now, would be power for them to glorify God in the scene through which they are passing. It is here, in fact, in the entering into these purposes of God, that the Christian character is practically acquired, and the Christian intelligence alone fully gained.

It is no wonder, therefore, if here should be the sharpest possible contention, and that here the apostle should be in prayer that God’s people should lose nothing of that which He has designed for them. Accordingly, the prayer is to the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, the One who has purposed all this, and the One to whom belongs the power alone to accomplish it. He prays that this God may give them the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the “full knowledge,” (as it should be) of Him. The deepest, sweetest character of the revelation of these things is that it gives the knowledge of Himself. For this we need, as he explains directly, the “eyes of our heart” to be enlightened. It is “heart,” not “mind,” for in the heart such eyes really are.

It is not mere intelligence that can possess itself of these things. It is not any brightness of mind merely, as people would say.

It is the heart for what is revealed that will lead to right intelligence as to the revelation. Could God possibly reveal these things with all their announced value for the soul, so that a human heart would kindle with desire to possess itself of them, only to find that the faculty had been denied of obtaining that which was sought for? How impossible to think of it! God’s people deprive themselves of what is the inheritance of every one of them, and they must, of necessity, connive at their being robbed of it, in order not to know. The Spirit of revelation, the Spirit of wisdom, the Spirit of understanding is in them already,and,as the apostle pictures it, it is the Spirit that searcheth the deep things of God. Can He do it in one and not in another?

Or, if He be pleased still to have special human instruments, does He mean by that to deny the possession of the truth to any who seek it? Certainly, it would be impossible to think so.

The apostle prays, therefore, that they might know what was the hope of this calling of God, that is, of all that, in fact, is hailing us from those blessed scenes which God is opening up to us, and that they might know what the riches are of the glory of His inheritance in the saints. It is God’s inheritance. No possession of it on our part could possibly deprive Him of what is in it, and how little would it be true inheritance if we did not inherit it with Him! It is God that inherits what is His, but it is the saints whom He puts in possession, just as He puts Israel in possession of the land which, nevertheless, He reserves as His, and which, therefore, cannot be taken away from Him. “The land is Mine,” He says: “ye are strangers and sojourners,” -guests therefore, as such, thrown upon the goodness and liberality of Him who, as such, is entertaining them, -“ye are strangers and sojourners with Me.” We inherit after the same manner: a blessed thing to know that it is not the inheritance of a lost Father, but the inheritance of One who dwells with us in it, that belongs to us. But He desires that we should know also the greatness of His power which is working towards us with regard to these very things, according to the working of the might of His strength. How He multiplies words that we might realize the energy that is at work, a power in which He has wrought in Christ; for the work done in Him is done for us all, and the good of it belongs to us all.

God has raised Christ from the dead then, and seated Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places. The work is perfectly accomplished, and He only awaits the full answer to it on the part of God.

The present answer is only the pledge of the full carrying out of all. His place is already above every principality and power and dominion and every name named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come. He has put all things under His feet. Here it is the One then who has in His own hand the fulness of blessing for us, and this accomplishment already with regard to Him must have its present bearing upon our condition also, even while we are here in the world. God has given Him, in fact, to be Head over all things to the assembly which is His body, -Head over all things, which is that inheritance itself of which Paul has been speaking. He is Head in the full power of such a place to the assembly.

All that is implied by the place He has, implies the blessing which is to be to the Church, united as it is to Him now in the nearest way that could be attained -His body; the apostle does not hesitate to add “the fulness of Him who filleth all in all.” What things to bring together! Here is One who is possessor of divine fulness; no other could fill all in all, and yet the body is His fulness.

He is not complete without it. In God’s thought and purpose, Christ would be incomplete if His body had not its place too; how near and wonderful a place, -“His body,” filled with His love, energized with His mind, working out His thoughts as our bodies work out the thoughts and purposes of our minds! It is in resurrection, of course, that He becomes this Head. It is a human Head, blessed be God, though He be much more than human. That is the fitting Head to this human Body. Thus, the Church could have no existence until after He had risen from the dead.

Search throughout the Old Testament, you will find nowhere the first hint, even, of any company of people as the body of Christ. You will find saints put under Him for blessing, you will find His rule over man, but such a relationship is to be found nowhere, such a relationship could not, in fact, exist until Christ as Man had risen from the dead and become, therefore, the fitting Head for such a body.

Then the body itself must be brought into being, and thus the descent of the Spirit follows the ascent of Christ to the throne of God. 2. The apostle carries us back now to what, alas, was our previous fellowship. We have been called to the fellowship of Christ, but how good for us to look back and see what He has called us out of. “And you,” he says, “hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins.” This is the first time in the epistles that we find such a statement with regard to man’s condition. The epistle to the Romans speaks of our being under death as the penalty upon our sins. It speaks of our being dead to sin as the effect of the new place of identification with Christ in His death, which God has given us; but now there is something more than this. It is man himself who is dead. That state, impracticable of help to any except God, is his. There is no possibility of self-help.

There is no possibility of working out of that condition. No work is conceivable in such a state. This death is Godward. There is not anything which for Him constitutes life at all. He says that this is not a condition of irresponsibility, however, but the reverse. It is “in trespasses and sins” that men are dead; active enough, fully active in this character in which the epistle to the Romans has spoken of them, but dead as to the hopelessness of it, as to the total absence of all response to God which it implies.

Activity there is enough, “in which ye once walked,” he says, “according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power,” or authority, “of the air, the spirit which now worketh in the sons of disobedience.” This is what gives its character then to the course of this world, age, as it is literally, as we have seen; the whole period characterized by that which is away from God, and with the ruler over it who, as the ruler of the power of the air, is exhibited to us as having that complete control of the earth which the heavens have for fruitfulness or for disturbance. This ruler is the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience.

They are marked out as the sons of disobedience, as that which gives him title to the power which he manifests over them. How complete is this apostasy, then, from the blessed place in which God created man to be at the beginning, the one with whom He had come down to walk as with a friend. Nor was there any who did not share this place. “Among whom we also,” he adds, we Jews as well as you Gentiles, “all once had our conversation in the lusts of our flesh.” We had our common fellowship, terrible fellowship indeed, “in the lusts of the flesh, fulfilling the wills of the flesh and of the mind;” that is, the grosser or the more refined and spirit part of our nature, both alike evil and away from God. Thus we were “children of wrath by nature even as the rest.” The Jew is in no wise exempt, but, on the contrary, as being in this condition in spite of all the blessing and privilege which God had bestowed upon him, is only, if possible, in a greater depth of evil than the Gentile. Such is man’s condition, then. 3. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love wherewith He loved us even when we were dead in sins,” -that is where God’s love lays hold upon us, not when there has been something right in us, not when we have begun to waken up and respond to the love which greets us from Him, but simply out of His love itself. “He has quickened us with Christ,” and “by grace it is that we are saved,” he adds in parenthesis. grace surely. He has given us life when in that condition. There is no condition possible between death and life, no life which could be true life except by His gift for those so fallen, so that here His love met us, doing the whole work from the beginning, quickening us, as he says, with Christ. He looks at it all as part of that same work which brought Christ up from the dead. As to the point of time, of course, we are individually quickened and brought up, but as to the character of the quickening, it is this from its being part of that redemptive work which is the fruit of His intervention for us. It is a life which, in fact, is the life of Him with whom we are quickened.

It is a life which makes Him to be the “Firstborn” among human brethren. Christ is looked at here, of course, as the Representative of His people, not, therefore, in the title which belongs to Himself personally, but in that which He had earned by the work to which He stooped.

Thus it is all part of the same work. We are with Him in character by virtue of this quickening. Our condition is changed into the total opposite of what it was, and not only is our condition changed, our position is changed. He has “raised us up together.” Quickening and resurrection are different things. Quickening is communication of life. Resurrection is the bringing of the life into the place of the living. Christ’s resurrection has, in fact, given us this new place before God, as Romans has already taught us to say that we were justified by His resurrection. As His people, although justified now of course, when we become His people and not before, yet we look back to that resurrection of His which was the public sentence of God with regard to this.

He has delivered us from every charge that could be made, from every question against us, by the resurrection of Christ. He has given us, therefore, a new and unassailable position in the One whom He has raised up. “He has raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ.” Notice the difference. He does not say with Christ" now any more. He is thinking simply of the representative character of Him who is seated in the heavenly places for us. We are actually quickened, we are actually raised up, we belong no more to the dead, whether as to the condition of our souls or as to the company in which we are.* We are actually quickened and raised up, but we are not actually sitting down in the heavenlies. We are virtually and representatively sitting there in the One who is before God for us.

Thus we reach, as has. been said before, the height of Christian position. The epistle to the Romans has involved this already, for “in Christ” means the same thing there as here, but it is here put in the fullest and strongest way, it is developed in such a way as to make it practically a new thing for us.

We would not be entitled to infer such things except we had divine warrant for them, but here we have the warrant. God has made us to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ. Now comes the display of His glorious purpose as to this. It is “that He might show forth in the ages to come the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.” We need not be surprised then that the place should be such a place of wonder! If God is going to show that which is indeed the fruit of Christ’s work and the display of the full purposes of His heart, it will be surely true that the fullest blessing possible is necessitated for this. God is acting, as it were, though only grace could say so, on His own account; but then with regard to us it is grace and nothing but grace.

He adds that all the way through here: “For ye are saved by grace, through faith”; and as if that were not enough, he adds, “and this not of yourselves:” that is, as surely is meant here, the faith itself is not of us. It is not of us, but it is God’s gift.

There is no principle of works, therefore, that any one may boast; nay, if you talk of works, we are His workmanship, and in such a way as He worked at the beginning in creation itself. We are His new creation, “His workmanship created in Christ Jesus.” Here is what brings us, of course, into that scene of which the epistle to the Galatians has spoken to us. It is God’s work in us that has accomplished this, and “He has created us unto good works,” such works “as He has afore prepared that we should walk in them.” He has given us a nature which will be fruitful in us after the manner that He desires. He knows what He is doing and His purposes cannot fail of accomplishment. Thus, poorly (if we look at ourselves,) as we may rightly think of ourselves, the glory to come will display the full accomplishment of all that He has had in His heart to do; and the brethren of Christ will be such as even in this way He will not be ashamed to call His brethren. \