À la Louange de Sa Gloire — One Sentence, Three Stanzas

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — One Sentence

Before anything else, a fact about the shape of this passage that no English translation can show.

In Greek, verses 3 to 14 are a single sentence. Unbroken. Around two hundred words. One of the longest in the New Testament.

Every full stop in the English is a translator's mercy. Paul does not supply them. He begins Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and then simply does not stop.

Which is itself part of the meaning. This is not an argument being constructed. It is a man who has begun to bless God and cannot find a natural place to pause. Every clause opens onto another one — chosen, adopted, accepted, redeemed, forgiven, told the mystery, given an inheritance, sealed.

The grammar is out of breath.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Three Stanzas and One Chorus

The long sentence is not shapeless. It falls into three movements, and each one ends with the same line.

Verses 3–6 — the Father chooses and adopts. Ending: to the praise of the glory of His grace.
Verses 7–12 — the Son redeems and gathers. Ending: to the praise of His glory.
Verses 13–14 — the Spirit seals and guarantees. Ending: to the praise of His glory.

Three stanzas, one chorus, sung three times. À la louange de sa gloire.

Which tells you what the passage is for. It is not primarily a lecture on election, though people have fought over it as one for centuries. It is a hymn. And the refrain says who it is about.

Every stanza is full of things done to us — and every stanza ends by pointing away from us.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Eleven Times "In Him"

Count the phrase. In Christ. In Him. In the Beloved. In whom. It occurs about eleven times in these twelve verses.

Nothing in the passage happens anywhere else. The blessing is in Christ. The choosing was in Him. The acceptance is in the Beloved. The redemption is in Him. The inheritance is in Him. The sealing is in whom.

Paul is not describing a set of benefits that were sent to us. He is describing a location we were put into.

Which is the same grammar Le met on the eleventh of August, in the same letter. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus. And her own words that morning: the "I" is relocated.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Word Spoken to Mary

Verse 6 contains a rare word, and its other appearance is worth knowing.

He made us accepted in the Beloved. The Greek verb is echaritōsen — built directly on charis, grace. It means something like He graced us, He made us objects of favour. The Segond has sa grâce qu'il nous a accordée — the grace He has granted us.

That verb appears only twice in the whole New Testament. Here — and on the lips of the angel Gabriel, speaking to a young woman in Nazareth. Rejoice, highly favoured one.

The word the angel used of Mary is the word Paul uses of the church at Ephesus.

Which needs saying carefully, because it is not a claim about anyone's standing. Mary's calling was hers alone. But the verb is not — and Paul chose it deliberately. Whatever favoured means, it is not a word reserved for the extraordinary.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Adoption Was a Legal Act

Having predestined us to adoption as sons. À être ses enfants d'adoption.

Paul is writing to a Roman city, and adoption in Roman law was a formal legal procedure, done before witnesses. An adopted son took the father's name, entered the father's estate, and held the full legal standing of a natural heir.

And it could not be undone. A Roman father could disinherit a natural son. An adopted son had been chosen, and the choosing was on the record.

Which is why Paul reaches for adoption rather than birth. Birth happens to you. Adoption is decided about you — and the decision is what makes it secure.

Le read the other half of this on the eighteenth of August. Concitoyens des saints, gens de la maison de Dieu. Members of the household — and this morning, how they got in.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Sealed for the Journey

A seal in the ancient world did three things at once. Pressed into wax on a document or a bale of goods, it declared ownership — whose mark this is. It declared authenticity — this is genuine. And it gave protection in transit — an unbroken seal proved nothing had been tampered with along the way.

All three matter, and the third one is worth pausing on this morning.

A seal is for goods that are travelling. Nothing sitting safely at home needs one. The seal exists for the part of the journey where the owner is not physically present.

Which is a fair description of this stretch of life, and a very fair description of this year for one household in particular. Vous avez été scellés.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Down Payment

Then the word for what the Spirit is. The Greek is arrabōn, and the Segond keeps the commercial sense exactly: un gage — a pledge, a deposit.

An arrabōn was a first installment that legally committed the buyer to complete the purchase. Not a sample. Not a token of something else. The first portion of the very thing being paid.

Which changes what the Christian life is being called. The Spirit is not a substitute for what is coming while we wait. He is the opening installment of it.

The difference matters. A photograph of a house is not the house. But a first payment on a house is the same money as the last payment. Whatever is being enjoyed now is not a different substance from what is promised — only a smaller portion of it.

And the word survived. In modern Greek, arrabona is the word for an engagement ring. Which is a fair picture of the whole arrangement: something real, given now, that would be meaningless unless the rest were coming.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Whose Inheritance?

Verse 11 has a genuine difficulty, and it should be named rather than smoothed over. In Him also we have obtained an inheritance.

The Greek verb can be read two ways, and translators divide. Either we were given an inheritance, or we were made an inheritance — that is, God's own portion. The Segond takes the second road entirely at verse 14: la rédemption de ceux que Dieu s'est acquis — the redemption of those God has acquired for Himself.

And this letter says both, elsewhere and plainly. Le read the other side on the fifth of August: the riches of the glory of His inheritance IN THE SAINTS. The note that morning was that the inheritance is His, and we are it.

So the ambiguity is not a problem to be solved. It is the truth being said from both ends. We receive an inheritance. We also are one.

Which sits beside the psalm Le read on the twentieth of August, on the morning the apartment papers were signed. O Lord, You are the portion of my inheritance. L'Éternel est mon partage. She has now read it from both directions within three weeks.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Gospel of the Grace of God

Le's phrase is Paul's own, and he used it once, in the most serious sentence he ever spoke about himself.

At Miletus, saying goodbye to the Ephesian elders — the very church whose letter she is reading — he said: none of these things move me, nor do I count my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy, and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.

That is where the phrase comes from, and he is a man on his way to prison when he says it.

And Le's other word — obedient — is also Paul's own. Before Agrippa he said: I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.

Which is a very restrained way to describe thirty years of beatings, shipwrecks, prisons, and walking. He does not call it sacrifice or achievement. He describes it as the absence of a refusal.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Man Who Had Done the Condemning

Le puts two of Paul's sentences together, and there is something in the first one that only he could have written.

There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus. Il n'y a donc maintenant aucune condamnation pour ceux qui sont en Jésus-Christ.

Paul is the man who had done the condemning. He says so himself before Agrippa: many of the saints I shut up in prison... and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. He had sat on the side of the room that condemns.

And the Spirit gave him the sentence that closes that door permanently — for everyone, including him. The French is absolute: aucune condamnation. Not less. None.

It is worth remembering who was writing the words accepted in the Beloved earlier on this same page. A man who had held the coats while Stephen was stoned. Nobody had more reason to marvel at the word grace, and nobody used it more.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — "I Am Persuaded" Is Passive

Le's other phrase deserves its own look, because the Greek carries two things English hides.

First, it is passive. Pepeismai does not mean I convinced myself. It means I have been persuaded. Something did it to him.

Second, it is a perfect tense — which in Greek means something happened and the result still stands. I was persuaded, and I remain so. Not a mood worked up that morning. A settled state left behind by an event.

And there is a detail worth having. Peithō is the ordinary word for persuading — in a market, in a courtroom. Paul uses it of his own work: knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade men. So the man whose whole occupation was persuading others describes himself, in the passive, as one who was persuaded. He never claimed to have argued himself into it.

Which matters for what Le has just said. She is not borrowing Paul's confidence — that would be leaning on a man. She is being persuaded by the same One who persuaded him. Same agent, different century.

And note how it comes. Paul's list is not theoretical: death, life, things present, things to come. He had been stoned and left for dead at Lystra before he wrote it. The conviction was not reasoned into place. It was worked into him by the very things on the list.

Which is why Le's own sentence — this time of change is inspiring me to new heights in my faith — is exactly the right report. The change is not the obstacle to the persuading. It is the instrument of it.