Macarthur's Commentary on Ephesians 1:4

[Guest]

Wrong. "In Him" does not indicate contigency. Where is your exegesis of the actual passage that indicates this contingency? Where is faith even in view in 1:4?

bshow, if your interpretation would remain the same if the phrase "in him" was never written in 1:4, then it is you that is to be faulted for eisegesis. Could you please tell me what significance the phrase "in Him" has to the choice, if any, and how would your explanation be affected if "in Him" was never written? Perhaps a better word for contingency would be qualify, and to say that God chose us (the grammatical object) in Him (a qualification of his choice), which is the saint's new cosmic address, as he is no longer in Adam.

Where is "body of Christ" in 1:4? Where is "conditioned on faith" (or on anything for that matter?) This is why I accuse you of eisegesis, because you import your prior philosophical commitment into the passage and reinterpret it in light of the passage, without grammatical support *in the passage itself.*

Sorry friend, but I fail to understand what philosophy I've imported into Ephesians 1:4. Biblical philosophy, perhaps. Or, do you have in mind that I start out with a philosophical notion of libertarian free will, and then seek to find it in Scripture? If that's the case, I'm afraid you need to get Roger Olsen's Arminian Theology and read chapter 4 and 6 twice! Do you not think that God chose the us, us = body of Christ? You are right. I submit that where it says that God chose us in Christ, it means that God chose us in union with Christ. That is to say that God did not choose us apart from Christ. But, when reading Ephesians 1:4, I admit that the text does not tell us how or when this “union” came into existence. So, the question then becomes, "what must one who is in adam do to get in Christ". Would not the answer to latter question "what must one do to be saved" be the same answer to the former?

[Guest]

Just as with Acts 13:48, you guys can't agree on what it *does* mean, only on what it *cannot be allowed* to mean. Hmm....

I wouldn't say we only agree on what it *cannot be allowed* to mean -- just, that it doesn't *have to mean* what you think it means.