I totally agree. I should have expressed my agreement earlier.
Paul’s shift from “we” to “you” in Ephesians isn’t meant to divide Jews and Gentiles into separate covenant categories—it’s his gentle way of celebrating how God brought two very different groups into one family through Christ. When he says “we,” he’s speaking as a Jewish believer who first hoped in the Messiah; when he says “you also,” he’s joyfully acknowledging the Gentile believers who later heard and believed the same gospel. The choosing he describes is personal and “in Christ,” not a national covenantal status, because both groups were spiritually dead and both were made alive the same way—by grace. Paul’s whole point is that God didn’t just make a covenant with Israel; He created one new humanity in Christ, where every believer, Jew or Gentile, stands on equal ground as God’s chosen and adopted children.
The point is that the passage is
NOT at all about God chosing particular selected individuals for spiritual salvation.
1) Israel’s election to service and to be a holy nation was a well established and familiar concept in the Old Testament Scriptures;
2) the Scriptures to which Paul was alluding can be found in Deuteronomy
3) it is this Old Testament concept of election that is in view in Ephesians 1.
As well as to your statement about the verb tense, I will go with an excellent Greek scholar.
The aorist active participle proorisaV(“having predestined us”) modifies the verb ezelezato(“he chose us”) and further explains what it means.
It implies a determined choice before hand or in advance.
Based on the nature of the verb predestined and of the following modifying phrases, we take this as an ingressive aorist.
The aorist tense may be used to stress the beginning of an action or the entrance into a state. Unlike the ingressive imperfect, there is no implication
that the action continues.
This simply left unstated. The ingressive aorist is quite common.
Wallace, Daniel B. Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, Zondervan, 1996
The predestination of Israel to be God’s chosen people was according to His good pleasure.
And again this election was to service.
They were His children in a covenantal sense, but
NOT necessarily in the New Birth sense... meaning each one had to exercise faith and belief to be spiritually saved bu the future coming of the Messiah
The End.
#Scholarship and Context Refutes TULIP
