How many of you recognize the name Abraham Maslow? For those who don’t, he was an American psychologist of the last century who was one of the founders of the discipline of humanistic psychology. If you know his name, though, the first thing that comes to your mind probably isn’t “humanistic psychology,” it’s this:
I was taught this as a kid in school—I don’t remember when the first time was—and it made a certain intuitive sense, so I took it on board without really questioning it much. Over the years, as I saw self-actualization becoming an obvious major idol in our culture, my view became more negative, but it didn’t really change until roughly eight years ago when a few things happened in quick succession. One, Christianity Today published an article which did an excellent job of dismantling Maslow’s position. Two, Sara began the online coursework for the Transition to Teaching program. This matters for a reason you’ll understand if you’ve ever heard me talk about her eighteen-year-long war against the yucca on our property—a war which, ironically, I think she may actually have finally won. The people who developed that program were true believers in Maslow’s hierarchy who presented it uncritically as the truth about human nature. That’s the sort of presentation calculated to raise my wife’s hackles, so—since she couldn’t take the war to them directly—she mounted a counterattack in the privacy of our home.
Three, that started me investigating, because once she gets the bit between her teeth, it’s innocent bystanders flee for the hills—and I’m her husband, so I can’t claim that status. It didn’t take long to find an avalanche of arguments against Maslow’s work. One piece in Forbes declared, “Simple, orderly, intuitively sensible, cognitively appealing and offering order out of chaos, the hierarchy of needs has only one problem: it is plain, flat, dead wrong.” That article quotes another excellent one from Psychology Today: “Needs are not hierarchical. Life is messier than that. Needs are, like most other things in nature, an interactive, dynamic system, but they are anchored in our ability to make social connections. . . . Belongingness is the driving force of human behavior.” I like that. I think it’s overstated to call it the driving force of human behavior, but on the whole I’d say it’s probably the biggest one.
The author of that piece is a secular psychologist, so she grounds her conclusion in the dynamics of survival and social development. That’s good as far as it goes, but the truth of her statement is even deeper than she realizes. The need to belong is one of the great driving forces of human behavior because we as individuals were not created sufficient in ourselves. Our limitations and need for others are not the result of our sin, they are a part of God’s good creative work. Humanity collectively was created in the image of God; each of us bears part of his image, and we were made to live in relationship with each other, interdependent on one another, and thus together to reflect his life. I am a necessarily relational being, and so are you. Each of us was created to belong, to God and to other people; apart from that we cannot be who we are.
God has always been on about creating a people for himself; through the death and resurrection of Christ, he is now building a transformed people. Paul’s urgency to speak about that is so great, he starts praying for his readers in verse 15, then wanders out of the prayer in verse 19 and doesn’t finish it until the last third of chapter 3. He starts off telling his audience how he’s been praying for them, but he’s so excited to talk about Jesus, he has to get that out of his system before he can settle down to pray.
He does try, though. Notice the first thing he asks: that God the Father would give them the spirit of wisdom and revelation. He’s not asking the Father to give them the Holy Spirit, because that’s already happened. His request is rather that they experience the Spirit of God as the Spirit of wisdom and revelation. That’s the foundation of everything that follows. Both these words connect back to the first part of this chapter. As we noted last week, the word “mystery” means “something which has formerly been kept secret in the purpose of God but has now been disclosed,” in the words of F. F. Bruce; revelation is that disclosure, the uncovering of the mystery of God’s saving work. On our own, we can’t make sense of the story of Jesus. Any conclusion we might come to about who he was, what he was on about, why he died, or what his death meant will be wrong. It’s only as the Spirit leads us and shows us the truth that we can understand who Jesus is, why he did what he did, and what he accomplished. Thus revelation is necessary for true wisdom, because wisdom is about knowing God’s character and will—including his saving purposes—and letting that knowledge shape how we live, so we act in ways that conform to his character and will.
Why does Paul pray this for the Ephesians? So they would know God. It’s important to be clear about what he means; our modern scientific-capitalist age doesn’t help us here. He doesn’t mean knowing about God. That’s only part of the matter. Remember, the Old Testament uses the verb “to know” to denote sexual intercourse between husband and wife, and that wasn’t a euphemism, it was a theological statement. In the context of a godly relationship, the verb “to know” is used because it denotes intimacy. It means revealing yourself to someone else as they reveal themselves to you; it means setting aside everything we use to cover or disguise ourselves, leaving ourselves exposed and vulnerable, and drawing close to someone other than ourselves as they do the same in return. It’s a relational word, not just an intellectual one.
The ESV renders Paul’s next phrase “having the eyes of your hearts enlightened.” Unfortunately, as the theologian of worship Marva Dawn put it, “we have absolutely ruined the word ‘heart.’ . . . We just use the word ‘heart’ for feelings and Valentine’s Day—never, in the Bible.” To the Hebrews, the source of emotions was the kidneys; New Testament writers thought feelings came from the bowels; but our modern English versions translate the Hebrew kilyah (כִּלְיָה) and the Greek splanchna (σπλάγχνα) as “heart” rather than “kidneys” and “bowels,” respectively. Given current English idiom, you can’t blame them. “My kidneys will exult when your lips speak what is right” would be incomprehensible to modern readers, while “You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted in your bowels”[1] would be downright misleading. All the same, an important distinction is lost. When the Scriptures talk about the heart, they refer to a whole of which the emotions are only a piece.
There are three aspects to the human spirit: intellect, emotions, and will. We think, we feel, and we do—though not necessarily in that order, or with all parts involved. The heart is the nexus of the three. It’s the core and center of the self, the seat of identity, and the place where God’s wisdom is grafted into our souls. It’s the root from which our life grows. That’s why one scholar renders Paul’s words as a prayer for clear spiritual eyesight to perceive and understand God’s purposes. In particular, Paul prays we would know three things. First, the hope into which God has called us—the assurance that the good news of Jesus is real, his promises are true, and everything he said he would do is already certain. However unrighteous we feel now, even if we feel beyond saving, our salvation is sure and our righteousness in Christ is assured. However much death may seem to rule the world now, God has promised we will be raised from the dead in perfected bodies to live eternally with him. However short we fall of the glory of God now, Jesus is coming back, and when he comes, we will stand with him in glory.
Second, that we would know the riches of God’s glorious inheritance in the saints. Note: not the riches of our inheritance in God. This isn’t about what we’re going to get—this is much more wonderful. We are God’s glorious inheritance. We are his treasured possession. I’ve read this passage any number of times, and until the first time I preached on it, I never realized that’s what verse 18 means. That blew me away. I’ve always had my inner Han Solo saying, “Great, kid, God loves you—but don’t get cocky.” That’s not Paul. He’s not worried about it going to my head, he wants it to go to my heart, and yours, completely unfiltered, not toned down in the slightest. He wants us to see this is how highly God values us, not because we’re so all-fired wonderful now, but because when he looks at us, he sees us in Christ.
Third, that we would know the power of God toward us who believe. Belief in magic and spiritual powers was extremely strong in the province around Ephesus. Acts 19:19 tells us when the former magicians in the Ephesian church burned their books of magic, the total value was 50,000 pieces of silver. St. Jerome, writing at the turn of the fifth century, says the culture of the region “was obsessed with demons and magic and was saturated with idolatry.” That belief was strengthened by the strong connection between spiritual and earthly powers. Ephesus was a center of Caesar worship second only to Rome; that paled, of course, next to the worship of Artemis of the Ephesians, whose temple was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but early in the first century Ephesus built a temple dedicated to both Artemis and Caesar. To affirm Jesus as Lord was terrifyingly countercultural. It put you at odds with an alliance of ruthless political authorities and mighty, potentially malignant, spiritual forces.
In response to this, Paul backs up the word truck. He wants his readers to know “the immeasurable greatness of God’s power toward us who believe, according to the energy of the strength of his might.” Power, energy, strength, might, all of it so great, it exceeds all limits and overwhelms any human capacity to understand how great it is. “You’re worried about all these other powers,” Paul says, “but the power of God blows them all away. They are nothing compared to him. If you’re on his side, you have every other power in creation utterly outgunned.”
In talking about this, Paul shifts from praying for his audience to praising God for his power, and particularly for its ultimate demonstration: the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, which have conclusively demonstrated the utter supremacy of Christ. In doing so, Paul is paralleling Hebrews 1-2. God raised Jesus from the dead and seated Jesus at his right hand, which is the place of honor, privilege, and power; this is an allusion to Psalm 110:1, which is also used in Hebrews 1. To drive his point home, Paul backs up the word truck again: Jesus is “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.” As the New Testament scholar Peter O’Brien puts it, “Whatever levels of power there are in the universe, all are subordinate to him.” What’s more, Jesus is far above “every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the age to come.” No one and nothing comes close to him. The powers of this world—political, cultural, spiritual, chemical—are loud and demanding, but there is an end for them, and they fall silent. Whatever they may say, the cross has the final word.
Paul continues to build with the declaration that the rulers, authorities, powers, and dominions are not simply inferior to Christ but are subject to him: God has put all things under his feet and made him head over all things, for the sake of the church. This isn’t talking about Jesus as head of the church—that comes in later—but an assertion of his absolute authority over the whole of creation, and a statement that he holds and wields that authority for the benefit of his people. If this is so, and the church is his body, the conclusion is staggering; as one scholar says, “The church . . . is also in some sense head over all inimical powers, and they lie conquered beneath its feet, just as they lie conquered beneath Christ’s feet.”
This is wonderful and true, but there’s a danger here. Working just from Ephesians, it would be easy to drift into triumphalism, which would lead us astray. That’s where Hebrews 2 is wonderful. In Hebrews we have much the same crescendo, also drawing on Psalm 8, rising to a similar climax—“Now in putting everything in subjection to Christ, God left nothing outside his control”—and then we get this beautiful moment of raw honesty: “Yet at present, we do not see everything in subjection to him.” As my Christian Reformed colleague Scott Hoezee has put it, it’s like the Hallelujah Chorus, building and building and building, and then there’s that pause, that moment of silence before the last triumphant, overpowering “Hallelujah!” . . . and it’s as if the pastor walks out into the silence, stands between the conductor and the audience, and says, “But really, if we’re honest, a lot of the time life pretty much sucks, doesn’t it?”
But. But, says Hebrews, this is not the last word. At present, we do not see everything subject to Jesus—but: we see Jesus. We see Jesus. We see Jesus whose crown of glory is a crown of thorns; who is honored for accepting dishonor; who not only observed our deepest tragedy, he lived it. We see Jesus whom the world trampled under its feet. Hebrews says that’s why God has now put that same world under his feet. We don’t see Jesus distant and glorious, majestic and terrifying, but made like us in every way, bearing every grief and temptation we bear.
Indeed, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, he was tempted far worse than we ever are, because we only go so long and then we break; he never broke. Satan hit him with everything he had, and Jesus took it all and stood fast under suffering far greater than anything we could survive. Of course, he didn’t survive it; his victory required him to accept suffering to the point of death, and beyond—and he accepted that suffering, and so won that victory, for us. He did it to pay the penalty for our sin, which was beyond all our resources and abilities put together to pay. He did it to set us free from our slavery to sin and bring us out from under the dominance of death, which together were a bondage we could never have escaped, no matter how hard we might try. The voices of shame and condemnation roar through our culture and scream in our ears, but as loud as they may be now, they will not have the last word. Jesus shattered their power by his death and resurrection: now and forever, the cross has the final word. This is the victory he won; this is how he won it; this is the Jesus we see, and no other.
And this is the one we follow, and the one to whom (and in whom) each of us belongs. That’s one reason why proclaiming Jesus as Lord is still countercultural. Make no mistake about it, there is no more countercultural statement than “We believe,” in part because all our earthly belonging is geared toward getting what we want or need. As the psychologist I quoted earlier put it, our need for belonging is about being able to kill the wooly mammoth. We might identify with arrogant winners or claim the moral superiority of the victim—we might be Dodgers fans or Angels fans—but those are just different approaches to the same goal, which is getting our own way to meet our own needs. Jesus surrendered his own way to meet the needs of others—us. If I belong to him, am I not called to do the same?
[1] Proverbs 23:16 (ESV), alt; 2 Corinthians 6:12 (ESV), alt.
Photo of the Ring Nebula, Messier 57; artist unknown. Public domain. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, from Wikipedia. License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 International.
