There is much that can be implied by this phrase "...by the will of God,". First, we need to understand that this is a primary concern of the Bible. The idea that God's will is the determining force in the universe is one that is key to understanding the Scriptures. God is sovereign and He has yielded that sovereignty to no other being. There is no other God but He. His control is absolute and comprehensive. Nothing escapes His hand and nothing surprises Him or catches Him off-guard, forcing Him to "regroup" and take another path. His knowledge of the future is complete and determinative, meaning that it cannot be found later to have been in error.

This is not to say that this idea is easy to understand. Not is it easy to relate to all of our concepts and understandings of how things are and how they work. This is the first hint of such sovereignty in this book. It introduces us to the supremacy of God's will over that of man's. Look at what Paul is saying here. We certainly can understand that Paul heard Christ's voice on the road when he was redeemed. Acts tells us that he heard and he submitted to that voice, obeying Christ and doing as he was told to do. He received the Christ he had been persecuting and trying to destroy. It is fair to say that he exercised his will and obeyed from the heart according to the Gospel he heard from the very lips of Jesus Christ Himself.

Yet, see what he says about his Apostleship. Was he an Apostle by his own will? Was he an Apostle because he wished to be? Was he an apostle because of the church's desire, or because of some group of individual's desire for it to be so? Does he credit his own choosing or his own volition as what made him an Apostle? No, obviously he does not. He understood that he was an Apostle because Christ chose Him, not because of his involvement in the matter. Now, again, we wish to emphasize that he did choose. But for Paul, and for all of us as believers and servants of this same God, our choice was a secondary cause for our redemption and service, whereas God's choice of us was the primary cause.

Let me explain a bit further about this as it will be helpful in the next verses. All events have causes. In our universe, nothing happens without an adequate or "sufficient" cause for its occurrence. Without such a sufficient cause, nothing happens, however minor or insignificant. Now, that being said, the Sufficient cause is not always the direct cause of things. Sometimes, things are directly caused by an agent of the Sufficient cause. Think of a small company. The employees of the one owning the company are the ones who actually do the work of the company. However, without the owner, no work would be done at all. The employer is the sufficient cause, while the employees are the instrumental cause of the work accomplished. They did it, no less than in any other sense, but the employer is the one ultimately responsible for it being accomplished. There are other kinds of "causality" that we could discuss, but this is sufficient for the present. God is the sufficient cause for our salvation and causing. Without His "prevenient" action (an action occurring before another action), neither salvation nor an individuals call to service would have occurred. This is not, however, to discount the secondary, in this case, the instrumental cause. God not only ordains what will happen, but how it will happen as well. In this case, God called Paul to be an Apostle, making that Apostleship certain. Yet, He also willed that Paul receive that Apostleship, which Paul did with full consent of his will and cheerful agreement.

Admittedly, it is difficult to reconcile this with our ideas of freedom and individual sovereignty. We will talk more of these ideas as we move forward in this chapter of Ephesians, with the hopeful result that it will become clear to us. One thing here is certain, Paul saw God as the one Who's will was the determining factor in his Apostleship. We will explore these ideas more fully in later verses.

One thing must be maintained, however. The truth of God's Sovereignty is not a contradictory doctrine to the rest of what the Scripture teaches concerning the doctrine of Salvation. The Scripture clearly, for instance, teaches that man is responsible for his condition and his rejection of God's grace. That truth must be maintained along with the truth of Sovereignty we have now begun to discuss. To sacrifice one for the other is to commit a great atrocity on the Word of God and must be avoided at all costs. We will strive to be fair and to maintain and honor the doctrines of the Scripture.