gave

This week we  begin worship with:

John 1:12-13

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to

become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the

flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

All the events in this verse are past tense: receiving, believing, giving, and becoming.  In His Gospel, John is narrating events that have occurred.

God is eternal, and we speak of His actions as having occurred in eternity-past.  His sovereign will has already occurred.  To align that timeline to that of man is a futile effort.  God's actions do not occur before or after man's actions, because God is not constrained (as we are) by His creation that we call time.

At the center of the verse is the phrase "to become" (ginomai), while that sounds like something that will occur in the future, while it sounds like something that is a process, the Greek tense describes a point in time (not a process) whose tense is borrowed from the prior verb "gave" so as to make it complete.

So the understanding here is that we were given the right in eternity past, but we became God's child as we receive and believe at the point God's sovereign will unfolds.

May God be praised that He has so willed.