The first chapter of Ephesians is one of the passages in the Bible that raises the difficult question of free will versus predestination. Do people choose whether to follow Jesus, or does God decide who will become Christians?

One of the first issues that needs to be resolved in this chapter is: Who is “we”? Paul said, “In him we were also chosen, having been predestined” (Ephesians 1:11). Does “we” refer to Paul? Paul was directly called by Jesus in Acts 9, transforming him from an opponent of Christianity to an evangelist. God declared that Paul was “my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel” (Acts 9:15). After being blinded by a light from heaven, hearing Jesus speak to him directly, and then being healed, Paul had overwhelming proof that Jesus was the Son of God. God gave Paul such a dramatic conversion in order to carry him through the trials that he would later endure. But could those same trials have deterred Paul from agreeing to follow Jesus? Could Paul have refused to heed the evidence and rejected Jesus? Perhaps, but he would have known that was foolish. Paul understood that he had been personally and miraculously called to follow Jesus, a conviction that drove him forward for the rest of his life. Paul certainly qualifies as one of the “we.” And yet, if Paul was referring only to himself, he would likely have said “I” and not “we.”

Could the “we” refer to the Jews and/or Jewish Christians? God called Abraham and the children of Israel to be His chosen people. They did not seek God, but God chose them. Could they have refused? Well, we know that many Israelites and many Jews later rejected God’s call and fell away. Paul said that the “we” were “the first to put our hope in Christ” (Ephesians 1:12). That could refer to Jewish Christians, who were Jesus’ first followers. Or it could refer to the first generation of Christian believers.

Could the “we” refer to all Christians? Possibly, but after saying that “we” had been chosen by God, Paul said to the Ephesians, “You also were included in Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). The Ephesian Christians were not originally part of the “we,” but they were later included when they believed in the gospel of salvation. If the Ephesian Christians were later included in the “we,” then so are we even later Christians.

So, what does it mean that God “chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Ephesians 1:4)? Does that simply mean that before the world was created, God knew that people would sin and so He planned to send Jesus to save sinners? Or does it mean that God chose individual people to follow Him and be saved? Did God predestine our fate before we were born, or do we have free will to choose or reject God’s call to be saved?

In The Parable of the Wedding Banquet (Matthew 22:1-14), Jesus told a story about a king sending his servants to bring those who had been invited to the wedding banquet of his son. When they all refused to come, the king sent his servants to bring “all the people they could find, the bad as well as the good” (Matthew 22:10); that sounds like a church composed of “sinners saved by grace.” Jesus concluded this story by saying, “Many are invited, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:1-14). Jesus told this story when He was in Jerusalem preparing to die on the cross. The story could thus refer to the Jews refusing to accept Jesus and God therefore calling gentiles (through His servants, the apostles and preachers such as Paul) to be His new chosen people. This appears to be teaching that God calls many (or all) people to follow Him, but most of them refuse. However, in the similar Parable of the Great Banquet, when those originally invited refused to come, the owner of the house sent his servants to bring in “the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame” from the town, and when there was still room, he sent his servants to go even farther, to “go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in” (Luke 14:21-23). So, people must have free will if they can refuse to come to God’s banquet, but God must predestine them since He “compels” people to come in.

I am not sure that God or Paul meant for the first chapter in Ephesians to spark a long theological debate. What point was Paul trying to make? I think he was trying to show the Ephesian Christians what a great privilege they had received. He was trying to spark gratitude. Like Paul, the Ephesian Christians would have had no chance to reject Jesus unless God had sent His servants to preach the gospel of salvation to them. They could take no credit for their salvation because it was God who planned everything, sent Jesus to die on the cross, and sent preachers to bring the good news to them. Therefore, like the Ephesian Christians, we should be overwhelmed with amazement and gratitude that God has blessed us, that God has chosen us, that God loves us, that we have been adopted as God’s children, that God has redeemed us through the blood of Jesus, that God has forgiven our sins, that God has lavished grace on us, and that God has “made known to us the mystery of his will” (Ephesians 1:3-9).