As we move into the letter of Paul which we know as the letter to the Ephesians, we should begin by saying it probably wasn’t a letter to the Ephesians—not specifically. For one thing, from the oldest manuscripts we have, there’s good reason to think the words “in Ephesus” in 1:1 aren’t original to the text. For another, Paul founded the church in Ephesus and then spent three years there, his longest documented stay with any one church. He’s imprisoned in Rome following his arrest in Jerusalem; consider that on his way to Jerusalem for that fateful visit, he had the ship sail past Ephesus to Miletus and then sent a message to the elders of the Ephesian church to meet him there. He couldn’t just sail past them without saying goodbye, but he knew if he stopped there, it would take him weeks to tear himself away again. Yet with all that affection and all those strong relationships, there are no personal comments in the letter and no references to specific situations in the Ephesian church.
I believe, as many have for centuries, that this was actually a circular letter which was sent to all the churches in the Roman province of Asia, which occupied the western part of the Anatolian Peninsula, what we now know as Turkey. It seems to have been inspired by the issues Paul was addressing in his letter to the church in Colossae, with which Ephesians shares a great deal of material, and one of the earliest lists of New Testament books references it as the letter coming from Laodicea which Paul mentions in Colossians 4:16. The subject and concern of this letter is the unity of the church as the body of Christ; Paul takes his language from 1 Corinthians, where he tried to help the Corinthian believers understand their unity in Christ, and broadens it out to apply it to the whole church in every place and culture and language. As the great New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce summarized it, Colossians lays out “the role of Christ as Lord over the cosmos”; this is how Paul counters the false teachers in Colossae. Ephesians takes it a step further, asking what this means for our understanding of the church as the body of Christ.
Paul generally serves two purposes in the introductions of his letters. First, he establishes his authority—why anyone should care that he’s writing to them. Second, he defines his audience—he doesn’t just name his audience, he tells them who they are. Thus, for instance, 2 Timothy is addressed to “Timothy, my beloved child.” Paul’s introduction in this letter is generic. He identifies himself as “an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God”; this is his default self-description because it establishes three core realities of his life and ministry. One, he belongs to Jesus. In some letters he intensifies this by naming himself as “slave of God,” using an Old Testament title which was widely applied to Moses, David, and the prophets; here, as most often, he uses the word “apostle” to signify himself as Jesus’s messenger, his herald, his ambassador. This title is important because, two, it also establishes Paul’s authority: he has been authorized by Jesus to speak on his behalf. Three, this is nothing for which Paul claims any credit—it’s nothing he earned and not the result of his own initiative, it’s all down to God.
As for his audience, Paul says three important things about them as well. One, they are saints: they are people whom God has set apart as his own. As Eugene Peterson observed about 1 Corinthians, Paul is addressing his audience from a perspective of health. Whatever issues and struggles they might have, the first and deepest truth about them is they are people whom God has chosen and redeemed. Two, closely connected with this, they are believers—they are defined by their faith in Jesus Christ. You can also translate that as “faithful,” as the ESV does; that would make sense if Paul were distinguishing between those in a church who were holding fast to the true faith and those who had abandoned it, but that isn’t the case in this letter. Three, these believers are “in Christ Jesus.” This is not specifying the object or focus of their belief; that would obviously be a true statement, but there’s more going on here. These believers, Paul emphasizes, were united with Christ (and thus, importantly, with each other) in his new life.
Now, as we turn to look at the rest of our passage this morning, it’s worth noting that verses 3-14 are one long sentence in the Greek. Ephesians is more formal and less combative than many of Paul’s letters, given its purpose, but it’s still Paul, he presumably still dictated it to a scribe rather than writing it by hand, so the run-on sentences and the sentences left unfinished while Paul goes off on a tangent are still part of the picture. I think that’s especially true when he gets really excited about something, which is the case here. This is a long statement of praise to God for delivering and providing for his people again and again and again, which is a topic we can count on to get Paul fired up.
In articulating these acts of deliverance and provision, Paul shows us all three persons of the Trinity in action. The work of God the Father begins in verses 4-5 with predestination: God chose us. God chose us, first of all, in Christ. You might remember last month I quoted Christian counselor and writer Dr. David Powlison: “The gospel says, ‘God accepts you just as Christ is. God has “contraconditional” love for you.’” Thus God’s choice of us is not dependent on us being good enough to meet a certain standard, nor need we fear him ever rejecting us, because whatever we might do, who Christ is will never change. Second, God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. Within this world of time as we know it, if you belong to God, there has never been a time since he first said “Let there be” that you did not belong to him. His work in you cannot possibly be more certain of completion, because he finished it long before you ever started.
Of course, to say God chose us is not to say enough; even being picked last for whatever game in gym class is still being chosen. Our assurance is that he chose us in love. We didn’t earn his choice by passing his test; who earns love? At the same time, he didn’t choose us for no reason. His choice was not random or senseless, it was according to the purpose of his will. He didn’t choose us for any reason we would come up with, as Deuteronomy 7 makes clear; we will never know his reasons for choosing us; but his nature, his very being, is love, and true love is not capricious. This is another reason to trust that God’s choice of us is unchanging and unchangeable, for he is perfect love and therefore, Moses declares, perfect faithfulness.
Further, Paul tells us, God the Father chose us for adoption as his sons. We were separated and estranged from him by our sin, but he ended that separation, brought us fully within the circle of the love of the Trinity, and united us with Jesus, his only-begotten Son. By his grace alone, he set us apart for himself, took away our guilt and shame, and made us . . . what, exactly? There are two aspects to this. One, he made us his children; two, he made us his heirs. This is the point of the word “sons.” It’s not about gender, it’s about formal status. In that place and time, inheritance was hard-locked to gender. Children were powerless and had no status, and thus were considered insignificant and unworthy of your time and attention unless they happened to be yours and were thus your retirement plan. Sons were heirs and thus were going to be significant in due time. When modern translations use the word “children” instead, they get the gender part—the part which everyone sees—absolutely correct, but they fail even to notice the status part. This weakens the punch of this passage and loses the connection from v. 5 forward to vv. 11-14.
In verse 7 Paul turns his focus to Jesus Christ and his work of redemption, highlighting four facets of that work. One, redemption entails the forgiveness of our sins. We need to be clear on what this does and doesn’t mean. Forgiveness doesn’t mean the evil we’ve done no longer matters, and it doesn’t mean we magically escape the consequences of those evil deeds. It isn’t being let off the hook, nor is it a “get out of jail free” card. Sometimes we might have those consequences eased, or even lifted; sometimes, but not very often. Forgiveness is the closure of the relational breach between us and God, the healing of that estrangement. It doesn’t mean our sinful actions have no earthly consequences, but it does mean those actions and the sin nature of which they are the poison fruit are no longer counted against us. The price they require has been paid, and it has been paid in full.
Two, the first aspect Paul names, that price has been paid through the blood of Jesus. Our sophisticated modern world considers blood sacrifice barbaric and pointless. If something’s forgiveable, you should let whoever did it earn your forgiveness and then forgive them—that’s just how it works. When it comes to God, the matter is summed up in the last words attributed to the German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine: “Of course [God] will forgive me. That’s his job.” Perhaps because of that deathbed comment, a more cynical version is also attributed to Heine: “I love to sin; God loves to forgive. Really, the world is admirably arranged!” Most of the time, we fail to think it through: the destruction we wreak on ourselves, those around us, and the natural world is in service of the power of death, and it must be paid for—it must be made right somehow. It demands a sacrifice. The fact that the blood sacrifices of our current age are metaphorical—canceling, doxxing, and so on—doesn’t change their essential savagery, nor do they always stay metaphorical; people have been driven to suicide by online abuse. The good news of Jesus is not that sacrifices are not necessary, it’s that he gave himself as the infinite perfect sacrifice and so the price for all our evil has been paid in full.
Three, this is all according to the riches of his grace. Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross by his own free choice; no one forced him to agree to be crucified, no one wheedled him into doing it, and it was not done to him against his will. He gave his life freely for our redemption, not once we’d earned it, but though we never could. Because of this, the redemption he won for us is not temporary, it’s not contingent, it’s not something we can lose through bad luck, bad timing, or carelessness, it’s not even something we can reject and abandon—it is, four, a permanent reality. It’s an accomplished fact: we have been saved. It’s our present possession: we are being saved. It’s our future hope: we will be saved. This, as Paul will say in the next chapter, is not our own doing and nothing for which we can take credit, it’s all God from first to last.
Paul goes on to say that having saved us by grace alone, Jesus lavishly poured out the riches of God’s grace on us. There’s a lot here. First, he gave us spiritual gifts of wisdom and insight. Insight is the ability to see and understand truth, and especially truth that isn’t obvious at first glance. Wisdom is the ability to integrate truth with life so it doesn’t just ride around in the back of your mind, it changes your attitudes, your decision-making, your priorities, and the ways you relate and respond to the people around you. If truth is a really good pair of shoes, wisdom is putting them on your feet—and getting them on the correct feet.
These gifts are important for what follows in verses 9-10; these verses are loaded, as verse 10 gives us the central focus of this book. It’s important to note that Western culture of the last couple centuries leads us astray a little on verse 9, in giving us the mystery story as a literary genre. Whether you think in terms of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe, CSI, NCIS, or most recently Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, the nub of the thing is the same: there’s something unknown that needs to be known—most often “who killed Person X?”—and it’s up to some person or group of people to identify clues, follow them, and assemble them correctly to figure everything out. This is not what Paul means. As F. F. Bruce summarized it, in the New Testament, the word “mystery” means “something which has formerly been kept secret in the purpose of God but has now been disclosed.”
In this case, the mystery is God’s plan to unite all things in Christ—all things, across the whole of creation, heaven and earth alike. This means bringing down the spiritual powers which are in rebellion against God and setting people free from their influence; it also means divine unity in the church—unity with God in Christ, and therefore unity with one another. The unity Paul has in mind is not unity which denies our differences, or plays them down, or ignores them, nor is it a limited unity which only applies where we completely agree, nor is it even unity in spite of our differences. It is, rather, a unity in the midst of our differences, which engages our differences in the love of Christ, the grace of our salvation, and the bond of peace. This is, obviously, something which can only be produced supernaturally by the Spirit of God. It’s completely counterintuitive and countercultural. That’s why Paul had to write a whole letter about it.
Paul also has a few specific things to say about the work of the Holy Spirit. In Jesus we have become sons of God, which is to say children and heirs; as heirs, by definition, we have an inheritance, something which is already ours which we do not yet have. (You might recognize that already/not yet language; I know I’ve been talking about it lately, but I’m not sure if I’ve done that here or just in the homily for Lydia’s wedding.) How can we know our inheritance is sure, that it truly is already ours? The Holy Spirit in us is our guarantee of our inheritance—you might even say the down payment. The Spirit, who is the life of God in us, is sealing us in Christ for the day of redemption, and the seal of the Spirit is unbreakable.
So then, if all this is true—and it is—who am I? What does this passage tell me about my identity and the meaning of my life? First, it tells me I am one whom God has chosen, as is anyone who is alive in him. I’ve had a bit of a thorny relationship with this truth over the past number of years. There’s a song we did fairly often at Valley Springs, one Hillsong released a while back, called “Who You Say I Am,” which declares in its bridge, “I am chosen, not forsaken, I am who you say I am; you are for me, not against me, I am who you say I am.” That has not always been easy for me to sing, and I’ve sung it many times struggling to believe it. I sang it anyway, aspirationally, because I knew it was true even when I didn’t feel it to be true. Whether I feel it or not, whether it looks like I think it should or not, I am one whom God has chosen. He didn’t choose me because I earned his choice, he chose me in my utter unworthiness because of his great love and grace. That’s hard luck on the ego, which is why legalism is an ever-recurring temptation; the ego wants to believe we earn our salvation because then it can swell with pride. God’s choice . . . doesn’t let me do that. What it does do, though, is free me from having to carry the weight of my salvation. Jesus already carried that, through the streets of Jerusalem, on his way to Skull Hill.
As such, second, I am one whom God has delivered from sin and death. Some of that is present reality: I have been redeemed, bought back, from the power of darkness, and am no longer subject to the ultimate penalty for sin, the final death. My eternal salvation is assured. Much of my deliverance is future hope, still unfolding in my life: I am no longer a slave to sin, it no longer has power over me, but it still has power in my life—because I keep giving it that power, handing back to it what Jesus stripped away. In myself, I’m that sort of fool; but I have the Spirit of God, the spirit of wisdom and insight, within me by the grace of Jesus, and so my folly is being redeemed and undone—slowly, far more slowly than I often wish, but no less certainly for all that. And finally, as we’ve talked about, I am a child and heir of God. To go back to the song I mentioned a few moments ago, the chorus proclaims, “In my Father’s house there’s a place for me; I’m a child of God—yes I am.” All these things are true of me regardless of anything else. If you are in Christ, they’re true of you, too. Not even the sunrise is as certain.
Photo: “Alcoholic Insomnia” ©2007 Kristaps Bergfelds. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.