Ephesians 1:2 NLT
May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace.
Ephesians 1:3-6 NASB95
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, [4] just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him in love, [5] having predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, [6] to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. Even before mankind’s fall into sin, the Father’s plan was that we would be “grafted into the Sonship of Jesus” so that in union with “the Beloved,” we would have Jesus’s holy and blameless love relationship with Him. In the first fourteen verses of the first chapter of Ephesians, the phrase “in Christ” is used ten times, and in verse four, the phrase “in the Beloved” is used. Because of the incarnation, there will be forever a human in the Trinity. Though God, Jesus is also forever human, and this human God is holy and blameless in His face-to-face love relationship with the Father. Because of our union with Christ, we are seated in the heavenly places with Him as holy and blameless before the Father as He is. Jesus is the Beloved Son, and having been grafted into His Sonship, we participate in His belovedness. We don’t just have a positional relationship of holiness and blamelessness before the Father; we have Jesus’s holy and blameless “love” relationship with the Father. All of this because of the riches of the Father’s grace that has been lavished upon us. This was God’s plan of salvation for mankind before mankind ever fell. What an amazing plan! Only the “wisdom, insight,” and love of our Heavenly Father could have envisioned such a thing. His answer for our lostness was to place us in “the Beloved,” that we, too, in His presence might be “the Beloved” forever.