Without blemish
“even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, for us to be holy and without blemish before Him in love,” Ephesians 1:4
Without blemish – In Greek, negative word constructions are sometimes made up of two combined parts. It is something like our English “un-” as in “unfit” or “ungrateful”. In Greek, just like in English, we need to know what the root word means before we can understand its negative. So the root word momos in Greek conveys the concept that something is wrong, that the subject is defective or impure and therefore unworthy of sacrificial offering. We could substitute the idea of being spotted, unholy or condemned. In this verse, Paul adds a single letter to the beginning of this Greek word, an alpha (a). It makes all the difference in the world because now the verse says that we are to be unblemished, un-spotted and un-condemned.
How is it possible for us to suddenly become pure? After all, it takes very little reflection on our lives to see how far from the mark of perfection we have wandered. If there were ever a case of something unworthy of sacrifice, it would be us. We are about as unfit as anything could be. Most of us have spent years covering or uncovering our past “spots”. But here is Paul, affirming that even before the foundation of the world God planned for us to be without blemish. There can be only one answer to this question. God must have made a way for us to take on the perfection that we so clearly lack. In good Greek logic, this can only mean that God has to do whatever needs to be done. After all, you cannot get perfection from imperfection anymore than you can create something from nothing. For the Greek audience of Paul’s day this idea was just as startling as it should be to us. Think of the last time you wanted to mix some paint. How can you get pure white from any combination of other colors? No matter how many colors you mix together, the result just keeps getting darker and darker. The only way to get pure white is to take all the other colors out. So it is with our lives. We might start innocent, but very soon we are mixing up some pretty big doses of “dark” into our base color. And the result is a muddy mess. Only God can remove all of those polluting colors and give us back the pure white start.
And the most amazing thing is that Paul says that this is exactly what He planned to do from before He created the world. All along God intended that we should be made pure again, that we should be un-condemned and be without blame. He had it all figured out before we started our first finger painting. How? Paul tells us in Romans 8 – there is no condemnation for those who are found in Christ Jesus.
