{"author":null,"canonical_references":[],"database_sha256":"8cfbe7284c6936871d57c02dc6aa63ebbdfd4722422d539dd9f716e46e91112e","date_end":null,"date_start":null,"edition_year":null,"id":"sermonindex-ecf-4224","native_reference":{"book_number":560,"chapter_from":1,"chapter_to":1,"system":"MyBible module coordinates (mapping unverified)","verse_from":9,"verse_to":9},"public_import_allowed":false,"record_kind":"verse-keyed-module-record","review_required":["English edition and exact text","author/work attribution","dating","verse mapping and citation kind","reuse and attribution","split author quotations and deduplicate"],"review_status":"unreviewed","source_html":"<p><b>Ambrosiaster</b>: The pleasure of God, whose counsel cannot be changed, was to show in Christ the mystery of his will. This happened at the time when he chose that he should be revealed. Now his will was this, that he should then draw close to all who were in sin, either in heaven or in earth. God gave Christ to bring believers the gift of forgiveness of their sins through faith in Christ.<br/><i>— EPISTLE TO THE Ephesians 1.9.1</i></p><p><b>Cosmas Indicopleustes ((quoting John Chrysostom, Commentary on Ephesians))</b>: According to his good pleasure, he says, which he purposed in him; that is, He longed for this, He was in throes, as one may say, to bring forth this mystery. And of what nature is this? It is that it is His will to set man on high, and this He desires with a view to a dispensation of the fulness of the times to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth.<br/><i>— The Christian Topography, Book 10</i></p><p><b>Gaius Marius Victorinus</b>: The whole of this wisdom and prudence consists in knowing Christ and through Christ understanding and seeing God. For whatever remaining wisdom there is in the world and whatever other wisdom of this kind there may be outside it, all wisdom and prudence is nonetheless empty, worthless and wretched without Christ.<br/><i>— EPISTLE TO THE Ephesians 1.1.8</i></p><p><b>Gaius Marius Victorinus</b>: Not only has God a will, but the intention of his will is expressed in Christ. Hence all things are done through him. There is nothing in the mystery that is not done through Jesus Christ.<br/><i>— EPISTLE TO THE Ephesians 1.1.9</i></p><p><b>Jerome</b>: The Stoics also hold that there is a distinction between wisdom and insight. They say, \"Wisdom is the knowledge of things divine and human, insight only of that which is mortal.\" According to this distinction we might apply Paul's term wisdom to the invisible and visible and insight only to the visible.<br/><i>— Commentary on Ephesians 1:9</i></p><p><b>Jerome</b>: Some attentive reader might object: \"If Paul knows in part and prophesies in part and now sees as through a glass darkly, how is the mystery of God revealed either to him or to the Ephesians \"in all wisdom and insight?\" … It is not that they by themselves have learned this mystery \"in all wisdom and insight,\" but God \"in all wisdom and insight\" has revealed the mystery to us, so far as we are able to grasp it.<br/><i>— Commentary on Ephesians 1:9</i></p><p><b>John Damascene</b>: Thus for us alone the grace of Christ has been set aside for knowledge; and that for the unenlightened it cannot be comprehended.</p><p><b>John Damascene</b>: For His favor was upon her good works before the ages, as well as on her and for a long time, for that which was foreordained has come, and has been greatly accepted.</p><p><b>Origen of Alexandria</b>: We must examine the possibility that predestination and purpose differ so that purpose is presupposed in predestination. Thus, as it were, the predestination is in the thought of God and the purpose unfolds in accordance with things predestined, so that then they become realities and actualize the predestination.<br/><i>— EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS</i></p><p><b>Tertullian</b>: Now, to what god will most suitably belong all those things which relate to \"that good pleasure, which God hath purposed in the mystery of His will, that in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might recapitulate\" (if I may so say, according to the exact meaning of the Greek word ) \"all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth,\" but to Him whose are all things from their beginning, yea the beginning itself too; from whom issue the times and the dispensation of the fulness of times, according to which all things up to the very first are gathered up in Christ? What beginning, however, has the other god; that is to say, how can anything proceed from him, who has no work to show? And if there be no beginning, how can there be times? If no times, what fulness of times can there be? And if no fulness, what dispensation? Indeed, what has he ever done on earth, that any long dispensation of times to be fulfilled can be put to his account, for the accomplishment of all things in Christ, even of things in heaven? Nor can we possibly suppose that any things whatever have been at any time done in heaven by any other God than Him by whom, as all men allow, all things have been done on earth.<br/><i>— Against Marcion Book V</i></p><p><b>Tertullian</b>: The apostle, too, writing to the Ephesians, says that God \"had proposed in Himself, at the dispensation of the fulfilment of the times, to recall to the head\" (that is, to the beginning) \"things universal in Christ, which are above the heavens and above the earth in Him.\" So, too, the two letters of Greece, the first and the last, the Lord assumes to Himself, as figures of the beginning and end! which concur in Himself: so that, just as Alpha rolls on till it reaches Omega, and again Omega rolls back till it reaches Alpha, in the same way He might show that in Himself is both the downward course of the beginning on to the end, and the backward course of the end up to the beginning; so that every economy, ending in Him through whom it began,-through the Word of God, that is, who was made flesh, -may have an end correspondent to its beginning.<br/><i>— On Monogamy</i></p>","source_html_sha256":"8fae1bf37c55536e51ee57698f77502693a03236e22f37e6bf3709fe5aa38fb9","source_module":"ECF","source_row_id":4224,"source_url":"https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/ecf/","text_sha256":"37522dc123797de2b2fd9055cf476ddcd009034e3ea4ffba30950d3a0ca71487","translator":null,"work":null}