Cap. 5 Mem. 2 Scripture elect Resp close: Accepted-in-the-Beloved and Eph 2 show justification begins at faith

Nor does the clause “he had us accepted in his beloved Son” block this (Ephesians 1:6). The Greek verb ἐχαρίτωσεν seems to point to the present state of the elect already regenerated, more than to God’s eternal purpose. So Beza renders it, “he freely makes them gracious to himself”—that is, he has now freely justified believers and admitted them into the state of actual reconciliation. If someone reads that acceptance as God’s eternal love embracing the elect not yet born, then the acceptance names the purpose of communicating his goodness, not the act of communication itself—as was already answered from Aquinas above. Beza also notes rightly in his comments on verse 5 that the elect obtain wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption freely through faith in their own time. They were not, then, justified, sanctified, or reconciled from eternity, though they were elect and predestined from eternity (Ephesians 1:5). No one taught this more clearly than the Apostle himself. The very people he called elect before the world’s foundations were laid he also shows were by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), and long remained without Christ, aliens from Israel’s commonwealth, strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope, and without God in the world. Then, in Christ Jesus, those who were once far off were made near when, through Christ’s blood grasped by faith, they were reconciled to God (Ephesians 2:12–13 and following). If we trust Paul, then—however eternal human election and predestination are from God’s eternal love—their justification and reconciliation are not to be called a mere manifestation or unveiling when they believe in Christ. That is when they first come to be and are constituted.