What the great Welsh preacher D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones called “The Great Adversative,” the apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 2:4, “But… God.” Paul writes about God’s offer to reverse the curse, to reverse our eternal destination, because of His great love for us. Jesus on the cross has provided a “way of reconciliation,” which is the title of Lloyd-Jones’ book of sermons on Ephesians 2. (Yes, a book per Ephesians’ chapter!) Amazing
From page 59. “We now come to look at two wonderful words– ‘But God’. These words obviously suggest a connection with something that has gone before. The word ‘but’ is a conjunction, and yet it suggests always a contrast; and here we have the conjunction and the contrast.” Read Ephesians 2:1-3 for the contrast.
Lloyd-Jones continues. “With these two words we come to the introduction to the Christian message, the peculiar, specific message which the Christian faith has to offer to us. These two words, in and of themselves, in a sense contain the whole of the gospel. The gospel tells of what God has done, God’s intervention; it is something that comes entirely from outside us and displays to us that wondrous and amazing and astonishing work of God which the apostle goes on to describe and to define in the following verses.”