The Ultimate Win-Win

Ephesians 1:12

Today we are going to look at verse twelve of Ephesians chapter one. This verse shows us once again what God’s purpose is in choosing us, predestining us to be His adopted children, and giving us His marvelous grace and great inheritance. This purpose is His glory.

We can see this in verse twelve which says, “that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory.” We saw last week that the inheritance that He has given to us as His adopted children was according to His will. He decided to predestine us to be His. It is not by merit or effort, but by grace and love that we have an inheritance in heaven. He chose; He predestined.

This verse shows us that His purpose for this predestining is to glorify His name. He did it so that He will be magnified for His graciousness and His holiness. He did it so that He may be exalted as our only hope, as our Saviour. He did it so that He would be praised for His sovereignty and power, and His ability to work all things out the way He wills. He did it for His glory.

We saw this also in verse six and in the article For His Own Glory. We concluded in that article that He needs to be pointing everything back to Himself because He is the ultimate, supreme, holy One. If He did not glorify Himself then He would not be holy.

What we see in this verse is that when we get saved, when we put our trust in Christ, this gives Him glory. It is the praise of His glory. He is already fully glorious, but when we are saved it praises, or lifts up, His glory. It makes His glory known.

John Piper wisely points out that we do not make His glory seem bigger then it really is, but we see more clearly how great His glory is. He likens our magnifying to a telescope rather than a microscope. We do not magnify His Name like a microscope, making a small thing look huge, we magnify like a telescope, seeing more clearly the beauty and glory of Him. As I said, He is already fully glorious, and we cannot do anything to make Him more glorious, but we can make His Name more clearly known. This is something He does for us when He saves us. He predestines us according to the counsel of His will for the praise of His glory.

Being used by Him to magnify His Name is a great privilege. That is why the disciples were so honored to be beaten for His Name (Acts 5:41). They knew and understood that they were glorifying God’s Name by being beaten for their obedience to Him. They understood their ultimate goal was to glorify Him, and they were able to do it by being beaten for Him. They magnified His Name through their beating and were honored to be regarded as worthy of being beaten.

The beauty of this verse is that God does all of these things for His own name and yet also works it out so that we also benefit. God gets the praise of His glory by saving us and yet we get eternal life and receive the gift of getting to call Him our Father, God, and Friend. It is the ultimate win-win.

I hope that we will remember that it is a gift to be able to honor our Father, our Saviour, through our suffering. We are privileged to have the opportunity to glorify Him through our trials. We are honored to be His adopted children and bring about the praise of His glory simply because He willed it. He truly is a God worthy of all honor and praise and One who gifts us with the opportunity to give Him that honor and praise.

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