God moves in a mysterious way,
His wonders to perform.
He plants his footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.
Deep in the dark and hidden mines,
With never-failing skill,
He fashions all his bright designs
And works his sov’reign will.

So God we trust in you.
O God, we trust in you.
When tears are great and comforts few,
We hope in mercies ever new,
We trust in you.

— From “God moves in a mysterious way,” by William Cowper (1774)

The Glory of Christ in the Church

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has conferred on us in Christ every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms. 4 Before the foundation of the world he chose us in Christ to be his people, to be without blemish in his sight, to be full of love; 5 and he predestined us to be adopted as his children through Jesus Christ. This was his will and pleasure 6 in order that the glory of his gracious gift, so graciously conferred on us in his Beloved, might redound to his praise. 7 In Christ our release is secured and our sins forgiven through the shedding of his blood. In the richness of his grace 8 God has lavished on us all wisdom and insight. 9 He has made known to us his secret purpose, in accordance with the plan which he determined beforehand in Christ, 10 to be put into effect when the time was ripe: namely, that the universe, everything in heaven and on earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ.

— Ephesians 1:3–10 (REB)

There is a question that haunts the Reformed tradition, and if you have spent any time in the Presbyterian church, you have probably felt its shadow. The question goes something like this. When I look at Jesus Christ, the Christ of the gospels who weeps over Jerusalem and teaches us to call his Father our Father, am I seeing God? Or is there, behind the merciful Christ, another God, the God of eternal decrees who has already decided who is in and who is out before any of us draws breath?

It is an old question, and it has driven good people to despair. It drove the poet William Cowper into madness, and it has driven countless quieter souls into the same shadows. I suspect it has, at one time or another, troubled most of us. The trouble may not come in those exact words. It comes more often as a low and persistent anxiety about whether the God we trust on Sunday morning is really the God who is running the world come Monday.

Paul wrote to the Ephesians as people who knew this anxiety from a different angle. They were Gentiles. They had grown up outside the covenant of Israel. They had every reason to wonder whether the God of that covenant had ever had any thought of them at all, or whether they had been pulled into something not really meant for them. And to these people, to outsiders unsure of their place in God’s story, Paul writes the most extraordinary words: “Before the foundation of the world he chose us in Christ to be his people.”

Hear that again. Before the foundation of the world. Already chosen, before Christ came in the flesh. Already chosen, in a decision that runs deeper than time itself.

I want to exercise some caution here, because the church has often heard this passage and immediately rushed to a question Paul is not really asking. We hear “before the foundation of the world he chose us” and we want to know who is in and who is out. The question feels urgent. We want to draw the circle and find out which side of it we are on.

Paul has different concerns. Paul is interested in the One who stands at the center of the circle. “He chose us in Christ.” The choosing, whatever else we say about it, happens in Christ and through Christ. Which is to say: if you want to know what God decided before the foundation of the world, you can put away the séance equipment and the theology degree. You need only to look at Jesus.

This is, I think, the most important thing to be said about Christian election, and it is the thing the Reformed tradition has not always managed to say clearly. There is no hidden God. There is no secret divine policy lurking behind the God we meet in Jesus Christ. The face of Christ on the cross is the face of the eternal God who endures from age to age. What you see in Christ is what God is, all the way down.

Karl Barth, the Swiss Reformed theologian who probably did more than anyone in the twentieth century to recover this passage for the church, put it something like this: when God determined, in eternity, who God would be, God determined to be no other God than the God who comes to us in Jesus. That decision is something God has done as God. God’s eternal being and God’s eternal love for us are one thing, and there is no other thing hidden behind them. To be God, for the God who actually exists, just is to be the God who is for us in Christ.

If that is true (and I believe it is), then several pastoral consequences follow, and they are the reason this is good news for Monday morning.

The first is that you can stop looking over Christ’s shoulder. There is nothing there. There is no other God whose verdict on you might cancel out the verdict Christ has already pronounced. When Jesus says to the woman at the well, “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give will never thirst,” he is speaking as the God who has already, before the foundation of the world, made up his mind. The mercy of Christ is the mercy of the eternal God. The welcome of Christ is the welcome of the eternal God. There is no Plan B, and there is no fine print.

The second consequence is that suffering does not require us to posit a hidden God with different plans. I mean your suffering. I mean the suffering that comes to you and to those you love and that sometimes seems to make a mockery of every word a preacher says about God’s love. Paul says, four verses later, that “in Christ our release is secured and our sins forgiven through the shedding of his blood.” The God who chose you before the foundation of the world is the God who, in time, hung on a cross. The eternity of God’s love is expressed in the suffering of Christ. God decided, before there was a day at all, that God would not be God without taking suffering into himself.

I want to be careful here, because this is quite delicate. Let me state it directly. The God who meets you in your suffering is the very God you have known in the gospels. The God who meets you in your suffering is the God whose name is Jesus and whose decision in eternity was you.

The third consequence is the one Paul reaches for at the end of our passage, and it is the one I find most stunning. Paul says God’s “secret purpose” (and the Greek behind that word stretches toward “mystery,” the great open mystery of the gospel) is “to be put into effect when the time was ripe: namely, that the universe, everything in heaven and on earth, might be brought into a unity in Christ.”

Whatever it is that God decided before the foundation of the world, it is large enough to include creation itself. The God who chose us in Christ chose, in the same act, to gather all things into Christ. Predestination, in Paul’s mouth, has become a way of describing the scope of God’s intention, which is total.

This is why Reformed Christians, of all people, should be the most hopeful people in the room. If our election is grounded in Christ, and Christ is the one in whom all things are gathered, then the God we worship is in the business of recapitulation, of bringing the whole story home.

This also reframes the purpose of the church. We are people who have been told, in our baptism and at table, what God decided before the foundation of the world. We have been given the staggering vocation of bearing that news to a world that still imagines God as primarily one who withholds. When we welcome a stranger, when we refuse to draw the circle smaller than Christ has drawn it, we are living inside Paul’s “secret purpose.” We are practicing the shape of the recapitulation that God has already accomplished in Christ and will one day make plain.

The God who has chosen you in Christ has settled the matter. The God who has chosen you in Christ has already, in eternity, in the depths of God’s own being, said yes to you. That yes is the very thing that makes God who God is.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has conferred on us in Christ every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.

Amen.