Introduction to Ephesians
Notes
Transcript
18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, 19 speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord,
1 Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, 2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. 3 That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither— whatever they do prospers. 4 Not so the wicked! They are like chaff that the wind blows away. 5 Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous. 6 For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction.
Opening prayer
Before I begin, I want every person to have a Bible so they can read and re-read the book of Ephesians. Today I am going to give a fly-over view of the book, but it will be most beneficial to read this outside this setting to familiarize yourself with what Paul wrote so that when we meet here for the preaching we gather so much more from the text.
This book of the Bible we call Ephesians, is actually a letter Paul wrote to the Church in Ephesus.
Ephesus was a city of around 250,000 people
Location of the temple to the goddess Diana -one of the 7 wonders of the ancient world -
Located in modern Turkey
The church was started by priscilla and Aquilla (friends of Paul)
Paul himself was pastor of the church for around 3 years.
Paul was writing this letter from prison (where he was being held for being a Christian)
It was written to the church around 60 AD.
Was very likely written with the intention that it be passed around to all the churches, not just the one in Ephesus.
One of the greatest places where we see the teaching of how people can be made alive spiritually, forgiven by God, and what it is to participate and live in the family of God as a Christian.
Luther says of the Epistle to the Romans that it is ‘the most important document in the New Testament, the gospel in its purest expression’,
This is true, but we must add that if the Epistle to the Romans is the purest expression of the gospel, the Epistle to the Ephesians is the most majestic expression of it.
The Bible is God’s book
The Bible is God’s book
A. The Bible is a revelation of God, and our thinking must always start with God.
· Much of the trouble in the Church today is we are so subjective, so interested in ourselves, so egocentric. That is the error of this present age.
o Smart Phones and technology, instead of streamlining our lives, has trapped us in the stream.
o Social media and the overwhelming wealth of information and entertainment have numbed our consciences and dulled our senses at a high cost.
o Play today; pay tomorrow is the way to go.
1 Cor 15:32 and Is. 22:13 “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
o In Both places, you find this it is in the negative sense. One, God’s judgment for sin is coming; the other, if there is no resurrection, then it would be hopeless, eat and drink because death is coming. HOPELESS
o Why should a nation that has so much be full of unsatisfied, depressed, and lonely people?
o Why is the suicide rate so high when we have so much to make us comfortable?
Summary: Having forgotten God, and having become so interested in ourselves, we become miserable and wretched, and spend our time in things that lead to depression and hopelessness.
B. The message of the Bible from beginning to end is designed to bring us back to God.
· Not just to the knowledge of God, but to humble us before God, and to enable us to see our true relationship to Him.
o This is the great theme of this Epistle; it holds us face to face with God, and what God is, and what God has done;
o it emphasizes throughout the glory and the greatness of God—God the Eternal One, God the everlasting, God over all—and the indescribable glory of God.
What you will see is just how glorious and grand God is. Having the right view of God is important because it will affect how you praise and worship Him.
o If God is just the “Big guy in the sky”, or “The big man with a plan,” then you have most likely never encountered the God of the Bible.
o A low view of God brings with it a low level of reverence. God in the lower state becomes nothing more than a heavenly vending machine or a tow truck to get you out of a ditch when you are in trouble.
In this book of Ephesians, the glory and greatness of God appear constantly in the various phrases which the Apostle uses. Here are examples:
· ‘Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will’;
· ‘having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself’;
· ‘in whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.’
Memorize: God, the eternal and everlasting God, self-sufficient in Himself, from eternity to eternity, needing the aid of no-one, living, dwelling in His own everlasting, absolute and eternal glory, is the great theme of this Epistle.
We must not start by examining ourselves and our needs microscopically;
· we must start with God, and forget ourselves.
· In this Epistle we are taken as it were by the hand by the Apostle and are told that we are going to be given a view of the glory and the majesty of God.
But not only so, we are at once face to face with the sovereignty of God.
1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To God’s holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus:
No doctrine in the whole Word of God has more excited the hatred of mankind than the truth of the absolute sovereignty of God.
Charles Spurgeon
Think of the terms which we find constantly running through the Scriptures, the great words and expressions of true Christian doctrine and theology. How little have we heard of them in this present century with our morbid, pre-occupied subjectivism! how little have we been told about the glory, the greatness, the majesty and the sovereignty of God! Our forefathers delighted in these terms; these were the terms of the Protestant Reformers, the terms of the Puritans and the Covenanters. They delighted to spend time contemplating the attributes of God.
IN THE FIRST VERSE!!!
Note how the Apostle comes to this point at once. ‘Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God’—not by his own will!
· Paul did not call himself
· the Church did not call him
· it was God who called him.
He is an Apostle by the will of God. He states this very explicitly in the Epistle to the Galatians 1:15
When it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb.’
1 Listen to me, you islands; hear this, you distant nations: Before I was born the Lord called me; from my mother’s womb he has spoken my name.
5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
There is always emphasis on the sovereignty of God, and as we proceed in our study of this Epistle we will find it standing out in all its glory everywhere.
· It is God who has chosen in Christ every one who is a Christian;
· it is God who has predestinated us. It is a part of God’s purpose that we should be saved.
· There would never have been any salvation if God had not planned it and put it into execution.
o It is God who ‘so loved the world’,
o it is God who ‘sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law.’
o God is the one who planned the crucifixion before the founding of the world.
It is all of God and according to His purpose. It is ‘according to the counsel of his own will’ that all these things have happened.
Ephesians tells us throughout that we should always contemplate our salvation in this way. We must not start with ourselves and then ascend to God; we must start with the sovereignty of God, God over all, and then come down to ourselves.
Sister Green always told her alcoholic son that he needed to clean himself up so he could start going to church. She had it backwards!
God controls everything, the time element in particular. As you read through your Old Testament have you ever wondered why it was that all those centuries had to pass before the Son of God actually came? Why was it that for so long only the Israelites, the Jews, had the oracles of God and the understanding that there is only one true and living God? The answer is that it is God who decides the time when everything is to happen, and so He reveals this truth which had up to this point had been secret. This is but another illustration of the sovereignty of God.
He determines the time for everything to happen. God is over all, controlling all, and timing everything in His infinite wisdom.
RELEVANT FOR TODAY!
In the time we live I know of nothing which is more comforting and reassuring than to know that the Lord still reigns, that He is still the sovereign Lord of the universe, and that though ‘the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing’, yet He has set his Son upon his holy mount of Zion (Psalm 2). A day will come when all His enemies shall lick the dust, and become His footstool and be humbled before Him, and Christ shall be ‘all and in all.’
Thus the sovereignty of God is emphasized in the introduction to this letter and repeated throughout because it is one of the main doctrines that, if left out, would leave us not really understanding our Christian faith.
Where the sovereignty of God is denied there will be no holy awe of him.
Arthur Walkington Pink
Then, having said this, the Apostle proceeds to deal with the mystery of God, His greatness and the majesty of His sovereignty. The word ‘mystery’ is used six times in this Epistle to the Ephesians,
9 he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ,
as if they could comprehend them with their understanding.
We should never do so. If you start imagining that you can understand the mind and will of God you are doomed to failure, for these are mysteries with which no mind of man can ever cope. ‘Great is the mystery of godliness’; no one can understand it.
And if you try to understand God’s ways with respect to man and the world I assure you that you will find yourself so overwhelmed that you will become miserable and unhappy.
33 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! 34 “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” 35 “Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them?” 36 For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.
! He is infinite and eternal, and we are finite and sinful, and cannot see and understand.
If ever you feel tempted to say that God is not fair, I advise you to put your hand, with Job, on your mouth, and to try to realize of whom you are speaking.
Surely to object to the mystery is almost to deny that we are Christian at all.
Is there anything more wonderful, more entrancing, more glorious than to contemplate the mysteries of God?
I trust that as we but approach these great themes you are already filled with a sense of divine expectancy, and long to go further and further into them. One of the most wonderful aspects of the Christian life is that in it you are ever going on. You think that you know it all, and then you turn a corner and suddenly see something you had not known before, and on and on you go.
That is why the Apostle writes about ‘the riches of his grace’; it is the glorious mystery which He has been pleased to reveal to us by His Holy Spirit. But God forbid that we should ever imagine that we shall be able to understand it all in the sense of fully comprehending it.
My concern is not only to increase our intellectual knowledge of God, but to unfold ‘the mystery’ of His ways, in order that we may look at it, and worship Him, and confess our ignorance and smallness and frailty, and thank Him for the mystery of His holy will.
The next theme is the grace of God; and this word is used thirteen times in this Epistle. The Apostle keeps on repeating it.
In the second verse he starts with it:
2 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
This is the theme above everything else that is developed in this Epistle—God’s amazing grace to sinful man in providing for man’s salvation and redemption.
‘The grace of God’; yes, and the abundance of it in particular—‘the riches of his grace.’ That idea is found here more than anywhere else—In this Epistle we are given a glimpse into the riches, the abundance, the super-abundance of God’s grace towards us.
Most of us are fascinated by wealth and riches. We like looking at things made of gold, priceless jewelry, yachts, cars, mansions, island retreats, and the list goes on and on.
We talk about the richest of the rich, like Elon Musk, and will brag about how rich we are as a nation. We are inspired to jump in and get our piece of the pie of wealth made available to all who are willing to work hard.
I repeat, then, that the supreme object of this Epistle is to lead us in, and give us a view and a glimpse of the riches, the super-abundant riches of the grace of God. It all starts with God, God the Father who is over all.
Then we move on to what invariably comes next in all the letters of this Paul,
2 Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
the Lord Jesus Christ. ‘Grace be to you, and peace, from God our Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.’
In the first verse Paul tells us at once that he is ‘an apostle of Jesus Christ.’ It sounds almost ridiculous to have to say it, and yet it is essential to emphasize that there is no gospel and no salvation apart from Jesus Christ.
It is necessary because there are people who talk about Christianity without Christ. They talk about forgiveness but the Name of Christ is not mentioned, they preach about the love of God but in their view the Lord Jesus Christ is not essential. It is not so with the Apostle Paul; there is no gospel, there is no salvation apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. The gospel is especially about Him. All God’s gracious purposes are carried out by Christ, in Christ, through Christ, from the beginning to the very end. Everything that God in His sovereign will, and by His infinite grace, and according to the riches of His mercy and the mystery of His will—everything that God has purposed and carried out for our salvation He has done in Christ. In Christ ‘dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily’; in Him God has treasured up all the riches of His grace and wisdom. Everything from the very beginning to the very end is in and through the Lord Jesus Christ.
There is no Christian message apart from Christ.
We are called and chosen ‘in Christ’ before the foundation of the world, we are reconciled to God by ‘the blood of Christ.’ ‘In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace.’
We are all interested in forgiveness, but how am I forgiven? Is it because I have repented or lived a good life that God looks upon me and forgives me? I say with reverence that even the Almighty God could not forgive my sin simply on those terms. There is only one way whereby God forgives us; it is because He sent His only begotten Son from heaven to earth, and to the agony and the shame and the death on the Cross: ‘In whom we have redemption through his blood.’ There is no Christianity without ‘the blood of Christ.’ It is central, it is absolutely essential. There is nothing without it. Not only the Person of Christ but in particular, His death, His shed blood, His atoning substitutionary sacrifice! It is in that way, and that way alone, that we are redeemed. In this letter, Christ is shown to be absolutely essential. We shall find it to be so as we come to the details. He is everywhere, He must be. We are chosen in Him, called by Him, saved by His blood. He is the Head of the Church as this first chapter reminds us. He is ‘far above all principality and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come.’ He is
· ‘the Head of the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all’; and
· He is at the right hand of God with all authority and power in heaven and on earth.
· Jesus, our Lord, is supreme; He is the Son of God, the Saviour of the world.
That is going to be our theme. Are you beginning to look forward to it—to look at Him, to gaze upon Him in His Person, in His offices, in His work, in all that He is and can be to us?
10 to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.
We find it in the tenth verse: ‘That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth; even in him.’
Here we see God’s purpose. The Apostle goes on to tell us that this purpose has ever been necessary because of sin. In the second chapter we shall find that he tells us about the problems that harass the mind and the heart of man, and how they are due to the fact that ‘the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience’, is controlling fallen man. He tells us that God’s plan of redemption is necessary because of the Fall of man, and how that was preceded by the fall of that bright angelic spirit called the Devil, or Satan, who has become ‘the god of this world’, ‘the prince of the power of the air.’ This terrible power is the cause of the enmity and the plight and the havoc that has been characteristic of the life of the human race. The modern world is divided into rival factions, the ancient world was in exactly the same case. There is nothing new about this, it is all the result of sin and the devil’s hatred of God. It is the result of the loss of man’s true relationship to God. Man sets himself up as God and thereby causes all the disruption and confusion in the world. But we are shown how at the very beginning, even in Paradise, God announced His plan and began to put it into practice.
· The Old Testament is an account of how God began to work it out.
· First of all He separated unto Himself a people called the Hebrews, later known as the Jews.
· He called a man named Abraham and turned him into a nation. There we have the beginning of something new.
· But then there was great rivalry between the Jews and the Gentiles, so one of the major themes of this Epistle is to show how God has dealt with this matter.
· The great theme here is that He has revealed Himself not only to the Jews but also to the Gentiles;
· Everything shall be united together and made one in Christ. That is one of the major themes of this Epistle. At first Jews only, then Jews and Gentiles, then all things. And all is to be done ‘in and through Christ.’
That, in turn, leads to the other major theme, which is the Church. God’s purpose is seen most plainly and clearly in and through the Christian Church, His great purpose of bringing together all nations in Christ. In her are found different people, different nationalities, coming from different parts of the world, with different experiences, different in appearance, different in psychology and in every conceivable respect; yet all are one ‘in Christ Jesus.’ This is what God is doing, until finally there shall be ‘a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness’, and Jesus shall reign ‘from shore to shore, till moons shall wax and wane no more.’
Nothing is more uplifting and wonderful than to see the Church in that light, and to see, therefore, the importance and the privilege and the responsibility of being a member of that Church.
Chapter 4 Practical Application
It is because of this that we must live the Christian life; and so in chapter 4 and to the end of the letter Paul emphasizes the ethical behaviour which is expected of Christians because they are what they are, and because that is the plan of God, and they must manifest His grace in their daily life and living.
There, then, we have taken a very brief view of the great themes of this Epistle. Let me summarize them in a simple, practical manner. Why am I calling your attention to all this? It is because I am profoundly convinced that our greatest need is to know these truths. We all need to look again at this glorious revelation, and to be delivered from our pre-occupation with ourselves.
o If we but saw ourselves as we are depicted in this Epistle; if we but realized, as the Apostle expresses it in his prayer in verses 17–19, that we are to know ‘what is the hope of our calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power’, what a difference it would make!
· Are you a miserable, unhappy Christian, feeling that the fight is too much for you? and are you on the point of giving up and giving in?
o What you need is to know the power that is working mightily for you, the same power that brought Christ from the dead. If we know that we are meant to be ‘filled with all the fulness of God’ we should no longer be weak and complaining, we should no longer present such a sorry picture of the Christian life to those who live round and about us. What we need, primarily, is not an experience, but to realize what we are, and who we are, what God has done in Christ and the way He has blessed us. We fail to realize our privileges.
Our greatest need is still the need of understanding. Our prayer for ourselves should be the prayer of the Apostle for these people, that ‘the eyes of (our) understanding may be enlightened.’ That is what we need.
· In this Epistle ‘the exceeding riches’ of God’s grace are on display.
o Let us look at them, and let us take hold of them and enjoy them.
· Above all, and especially at a time such as this, how vital it is that we should have some new and fresh understanding of God’s great plan and purpose for the world.
· With nations at war, economies crumbling, manufactured viruses being released on humanity, climate hysteria, race-baiting division, sexual perversion and confusion - with the whole world wondering what its future is to be, and what the outcome of our present troubles is going to be, with men at the end of their wits, how privileged we are to be able to stand and look at this revelation, and see God’s plan and purpose behind it all and beyond it all. It is not to be brought to pass through statesmen but through people like ourselves.
, I want every person to have a Bible so they can read and re-read the book of Ephesians. Today I am going to give a fly-over view of the book, but it will be most beneficial to read this outside this setting to familiarize yourself with what Paul wrote so that when we meet here for the preaching we gather so much more from the text.
· The world ignores it, and laughs and mocks at it; but we know for certain with the Apostle that
18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, 19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church,
‘all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come’, have been set beneath Christ’s feet. The Lord Jesus Christ was rejected by this world when He came into it; they dismissed Him as ‘this fellow’, ‘this carpenter’; but He was the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, the King of kings, the Lord of lords, the One to Whom ‘every knee shall bow, of things in heaven and things on earth, and things under the earth.’ Thanks be to God for the glorious gospel of Jesus Christ, and for ‘the riches of this grace’!