Ephesians 1- Andy's thoughts

Introductory ideas
I realize that there may be a few things that would be helpful to know as we go through this book and that there may be a few questions that people have. So here is some preliminary information that I hope will make reading Ephesians more helpful.

• Where is Ephesus? Ephesus is a port city on the west coast of what is now Turkey. At the time it was in a region called Asia.
• When did Paul write this? Like most of the New Testament this was written in the second half of the first century A.D. Traditionally, this is grouped in what the early church called the “prison epistles.” This meant that it seems like the letter was written when Paul was in jail for his faith towards the end of his life.
• Who are the Ephesians? In Paul’s day, this was part of the Roman Empire but had significant Hellenized (Greek) cultural roots. The city was famous for its massive statue to the Greek goddess Artemis (also known as Diana in Roman mythology). This statue was one of the wonders of the ancient world and there were a lot of businesses that profited from the sale of Artemis related merchandise.
• Major themes to look for- love, God’s plan, unity, and relationships
• Ephesians in the rest of the Bible- The city of Ephesus is also mentioned in Acts and in Revelation. In Acts 18-20, we read about Paul’s time in Ephesus. He had spent over two years there establishing and building up the church there. His preaching about Jesus eventually so affected the city that a riot broke out by the tradesmen, who made Artemis merchandise because they felt threatened by this “new god.” In Revelation, Ephesus is one of the seven churches that receives a letter of warning and encouragement. They are told that they have forgotten their first love.

Spiritual Blessings
Verses 3-14 contain a great section that describes the work of God in meticulous detail. There is a definite Trinitarian structure to this description. God the Father loves us and chooses us to be his children. God the Son purchased our freedom with his own blood and has redeemed us. God the Holy Spirit seals us as a guarantee of our divine inheritance.

There are loads of ideas that could be unpackaged here- predestination and free will, redemption, the relationship of Jews to Gentiles in the eternal plan of God- just to name a few. I’m not going to elaborate much on these, but I will say a few things just as a brief introduction to these broad topics.

Predestination- This is a term that gets thrown around theological circles and is worth explaining. (Philosophers are more comfortable with the term “determinism” because it allows them to have a similar discussion without committing to a belief in God or a god.) Essentially, this term refers to the plan of God to set the world to rights. (yes I’m stealing N.T. Wright’s British-y phrase because I like how it sounds.)

In this chapter of Ephesians, Paul describes how God had planned out our place in the family of God before the creation of the world. (I’m saying “our” because I believe that what Paul said to the church in Ephesus two millennia ago is still applicable to believers today). Paul says that God’s intention to love us is something worthy of being praised.

There are some who take the discussion of predestination/ determinism much further by debating the implications of its meaning. They might discuss how can people have free will if God has already predestined us? They might discuss how can God hold people accountable if he has already predestined us?

These are truly fascinating questions to ponder, questions that I don’t really give a hoot about at this season of my life. I spent the better part of a decade trying to wrap my brain around these thoughts and have come up with some satisfying and some unsatisfying ideas. The only one I will share for now is this one. While the existence of predestination and free will may seem contradictory to us in our finite human understanding, it is entirely possible for no such contradiction to exist to God.

Consider an illustration from the fun world of math. If two lines continue forever and never touch each other and have the same slope, what do we call them? Parallel. However, there can also exist two lines that continue forever without the same slope, don’t touch and are not parallel. These would be “skew.” In order to have skew lines, I need to be working in three dimensions. If I viewed skew lines two dimensionally, they would appear to cross even though in (the fuller 3-D) reality they do not cross.

Just as there are concepts that appear contradictory to our minds now, I have to hold to the notion that I am limited by my linear movement through time and space. I trust that God is not so bound by these constraints. Therefore, concepts of predestination and free will, though seemingly paradoxical, can in theory be consistent when viewed from a perspective beyond our dimensional limitations.

Redemption- I will keep this explanation much shorter. To redeem can mean either to buy back something that belonged to you originally, or it can mean to free someone from a debt. While today redemption refers more to glass bottles that can be returned in certain states or items in a pawn shop, in Paul’s day redemption was more commonly a reference to the economics of slavery.

In the Old Testament, there are numerous uses of the words redeem or redemption or redeemer. Boaz was a kinsman redeemer for Ruth, Job declares his hopeful belief that his redeemer lives, Moses tells the Israelites that the lives of the firstborn children have been redeemed, and Isaiah points Israel to the eventual redemption of the nation.

When I think of the implications of redemption, I think about this- Jesus is telling us that we are worth something in the economy of God. He has bought us at the price of his own life thus establishing our value. And while I know that he is infinitely overpaying, that is the lavishness of grace. By telling us that he is our redeemer, God is also giving us hope. He is pointing us to a future day when all of us will be fully redeemed when Christ returns.

The role of the Jews and the Gentiles in the family of God- this is a topic that I will come back to later in the book. For now, I will just point out that the early church was a mix of Jewish Christians and Gentile (non-Jewish) Christians. As a Jew who was called to minister to Gentiles, Paul was very aware of the tension that these two groups felt. Throughout the book, there will be further discussions about the goodness of God in bringing these two formerly disparate peoples together.

Spiritual Wisdom
I love the prayer that Paul prays in verses 15-19. I think that we should all be regularly praying this same prayer for one another. I think that our culture preys upon our insecurities and teaches us to be self-loathing. Advertising makes billions of dollars so that companies can make trillions of dollars by making us feel like we are lacking those things which will make us whole, beautiful, and satisfied. Rubbish!

This prayer reminds us that we already have the riches of God’s glorious inheritance among the people of God as well as the immeasurable greatness of the power of God. I don’t think a new product from Apple is going to top that. This prayer points us toward the future so we can gain a sense of eternal perspective. From this perspective we see far down the road and see that the things in our life which seem so big and so pressing are actually not so big.

Application:
Will we commit to praying this prayer for spiritual wisdom for someone for the next seven days?