He Hath Made Us – His Work, Not Ours.

Passage: Ephesians 1:6

“…to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”

As always, the small things in the Bible are sometimes the most profound.  The verb, “accepted” is in the passive voice and is a perfect participle.  As we have noted before, a participle is kind of like a verb that is acting like a noun.  Here, we see the verb, accepted, acting as if it were a noun and could be translated “the ones having been accepted”.  The perfect tense, as we have seen, is kind of the past tense that indicates that the action was accomplished in the past at some time (it is not particular about when or how) and that the result of that past action abides now, in the present.  It could be described as indicating a “state of being”. 

The passive voice means that the ones in view are the recipients of the action, and not the doers of the action.  We, the believers in view, are not the ones doing or causing the accepting, but are the ones receiving the accepting.  That is significant here and is precisely the point that we wish to make.  It is not we who, honestly thought of, are doing the accepting of God.  Rather, we are the ones who are in the state of having been accepted by God. 

Some might argue that it is we who have caused, or facilitated that acceptance by God, by means of our believing in the Gospel.  But this is not permitted by the verb in question, when we think of the overall context of the verse.  What Paul is pointing out to us is that the accepting went on in the past.  The abiding result of that past acceptance is that we are now in the state of being accepted by God now.  But it is not our present actions that make us accepted, or that qualify us to be accepted by Him.  That acceptance has its root and foundation in the past.

Again, some might argue that that foundation is in the past, but that it is our past choice of Christ as Savior that qualified us for acceptance in the present.  Yet we must see that this cannot be either.  Paul wrote this long before you or I was ever even thought of.  He asserts that all of the elect we accepted in Christ in the past, at the time he was speaking!  He ties the acceptance of God to the acts of God in electing and predestinating us which, the text asserts, took place in eternity past.  So, it is clear that our acceptance by God could not be dependent on our own acceptance of Him.

If, as we have seen, this acceptance is rooted in the past, then the work that underlies that acceptance must be God’s work, and not our own.  Some might say that this is belaboring a point, but it is an important issue.  Many think as if their station before God as being tied to their own actions, from their acceptance of Christ, to their own obedience on a daily basis.  It is crucial that we all understand that, at the root, it is not so.  Our acceptance before God is rooted and based in God’s work by means of His own Son, Jesus, and that work alone.

The Dative case is the instrumental case in Greek.  It is the case of the indirect object. The dative case shows that a noun or a pronoun is indirectly affected by the action of the verb.  This further underscores the idea that we are putting forward here.  The subjects of the sentence, the elect believers, are the recipients of the acceptance of God, but in an indirect fashion.  It is not through their direct activities, but indirectly, though the activities of another, that they receive the grace of acceptance by God. 

Ultimately, He has made us accepted in the Beloved (Jesus Christ) by the might of His own strong right arm, and not by our own efforts and actions.  It is true that we did receive Christ, but the fount of our acceptance by God is not in our response to His grace, but in His own decision to redeem us.  It is by His work, and not by our own.