God's Spiritual Blessings

Bible

Ephesians 1:1–14 NLT

1 This letter is from Paul, chosen by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus. I am writing to God’s holy people in Ephesus, who are faithful followers of Christ Jesus. 2 May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace. 3 All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. 4 Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. 5 God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. 6 So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. 7 He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. 8 He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding. 9 God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ—which is to fulfill his own good plan. 10 And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth. 11 Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan. 12 God’s purpose was that we Jews who were the first to trust in Christ would bring praise and glory to God. 13 And now you Gentiles have also heard the truth, the Good News that God saves you. And when you believed in Christ, he identified you as his own by giving you the Holy Spirit, whom he promised long ago. 14 The Spirit is God’s guarantee that he will give us the inheritance he promised and that he has purchased us to be his own people. He did this so we would praise and glorify him.

Introduction to Ephesians

Today we are starting a new series on the book of Ephesians. So to properly understand what we’re reading, we need to answer the following questions:

Who wrote the book of Ephesians? Who was it written for? Why was it written? When was it written? And what sort of book is it (what is its literary genre)?

The author of Ephesians was the apostle Paul, author of many of the other letters in the New Testament. Ephesians was most likely written at the same time as Colossians and Philemon, and sent via Tychicus (see Eph 6:21), probably during Paul’s imprisonment in Rome from AD 60-62. Most scholars agree that Ephesians was written to the church in Ephesus, who Paul had earlier spent two years with, and the lack of personal greetings in Ephesians is because there were too many people to single out. Many believe that Ephesians was written in a way to encourage sharing with other churches in the region (remember this is the region of Asia-minor, now Turkey, which we are familiar with from the Letters to the Churches in Revelation). And finally, Ephesians seems to have been written as an encouragement to the church to grow to the next level. Paul talks a lot about reconciliation and love in the letter, and it presents a powerful vision of the church at work in the transformation of the world.

So that’s Ephesians.

Introduction to the Spiritual Blessings

I’m going to skip Paul’s greetings in verses 1 and 2, which are pretty standard, and dive right into the first section of the letter, where Paul unpacks a range of spiritual blessings from God.

This section, from verse 3 to verse 14 is one long, complex sentence in the original Greek. Because of this complexity, there are various ways that it can be interpreted. You will notice that different English translations will give subtly different interpretations in this passage, so I’ll be mostly using the ESV which keeps things as open as possible.

Ephesians 1:3 ESV

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,

In verse 3, Paul introduces his subject: God and his spiritual blessings. Now, before we can go any further, I’m going to have to understand a word here that often confuses me. I’m guessing it will have confused some of you, too. That word is “bless” or “blessing.”

You can see in this verse that Paul is blessing God, and saying that God has blessed us. I can understand how God can bless us, but how can we bless God? What does he not have that we can provide? As it turns out, nothing. When the Bible talks about blessing God, or God being blessed, it is recognising all the good things that God both is and possesses. To say “God almighty, blessed be he,” is to make a statement about God’s goodness and greatness.

In contrast, when human beings are blessed, either by God or by another person, there is a transfer, or a request of a transfer, of good things from God to the human beings. So if I say “bless you,” I am saying, “I pray that my good God, abounding in good things, will grant some of those good things to you.” It’s the opposite of cursing someone.

So: God is blessed because of what he already has, we are blessed in order to receive good things from him. Make sense?

Now, Paul is talking about “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” What are "spiritual” blessings?

Remember the blessings and curses for Israel in Deuteronomy?

Deuteronomy 11:26–27 ESV

26 “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: 27 the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today,

Since Israel was a physical kingdom, they received physical blessings. But the Kingdom of God, of which we are members, is a spiritual kingdom. So we receive spiritual blessings. Ultimately, as Paul explains in 1 Corinthians, we will receive a spiritual body.

1 Corinthians 15:44 ESV

44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.

But Paul is here talking about the spiritual blessings that we receive now, or have already received. What are those blessings? Let’s read on.

Section 1 - God the Father

Now, the first blessings are from God the Father. The first part of Paul’s long sentence of praise refers to the work of the Father, that’s verses 4 to 6.

Ephesians 1:4–6 ESV

4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love 5 he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, 6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

There are possibly two blessings in here. Let’s unpack them.

Blessing 1 - Chosen

The first blessing is that we were chosen by God to be holy and blameless before him. In other words, God chose us in order to set us apart (that’s what holy means) and cleanse us of our sins (eventually, that’s the life-long process we call sanctification—transforming us into people who agree wholeheartedly with God’s purposes).

But what is this stuff about God choosing us before the foundation of the world? This refers to God’s eternal plan for us. Even before the world was created, he had already chosen us to be his people, to stand in his presence. People often ask the question, “Would you still be a Christian if you’d been born into a Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist society and home?” The answer to that, according to Paul, is “Yes, of course. Because God chose me from before the creation of the world.” Our status with God is based on his choice, and God is not fickle.

Now you may wonder how this fits in with our own choice. Doesn’t our response to God in faith matter? Well, yes it does, and in this same sentence, down in verse 13, Paul explains how our choice is something the Holy Spirit waits on.

Ephesians 1:13 ESV

13 In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit,

We need to hold these two perspectives in tension. Especially when we look at the next blessing.

Blessing 2 - Adopted

In verse 5 we read that God has “predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.” Let’s work through this.

First, let’s finish our discussion of God’s will and ours. Here we learn that God predestined us for adoption. "Predestined” is just another way of saying that God lovingly decided this before the beginning of time. I should point out that God doesn’t just randomly choose people. He doesn’t go through the human race counting, “Christian, non-Christian, Christian...”

God adopts us because he wants to, because he has chosen us. But what does it mean to be adopted by God? Under Roman law, familiar to Paul and the Ephesians, the father of a household had absolute power. He owned even the lives of his family, so he could kill one and not be guilty of murder. So to adopt someone required their “natural father” to sell them (as slaves, basically), not once, but three times. The third sale would signal a final break, and the adopted child would then become the legal child of the adopting father, with exactly the same status as a natural child.

When we are adopted into God’s family, we cease to be Satan’s possession, Satan is our “natural father,” and we become God’s possession, his child. We have the same status, as far as possible, as the natural son of the family, Jesus. How amazing is that? We’ll enjoy heaven and earth with God forever, as part of the divine family, not just a creature.

When we think about our Christianity as just a worldview, or a perspective, or a Sunday afternoon activity, we are completely forgetting the massive, universal importance of our status as the children of the God of all! We are joint heirs with Christ who will rule the nations, and we’ll sit on the throne with him, as it promises in

Revelation 3:21 ESV

21 The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne.

This section concludes with the purpose of these blessings: to glorify God. God’s incredible mercy and generosity, in choosing to adopt these creatures who have turned away from him into the family of the Trinity can only result in praise for God, as found in the scenes of heaven in the book of Revelation.

Section 2 - Jesus Christ

And with that praise, we move into the second section of Paul’s outpouring of praise, the section about Jesus Christ, the son of God.

Blessing 3 - Redeemed

Immediately we read that Christ has redeemed us through his blood, forgiven us our trespasses according to the riches of his grace. This incredible gift of redemption is the third spiritual blessing. Jesus death on the cross, paying the price that we should have paid for our rebellion against God, allows us to stand before God. It allows us to be adopted. Jesus is the way through which we can come to the Father. Without Jesus’ blood we are trapped in our rebellion, we don’t even want to look for God.

Romans 3:11 ESV

11 no one understands; no one seeks for God.

It’s hard for us to understand the significance of Jesus’s sacrifice. We are so used to buying things with money that the idea of buying something with blood is completely foreign to us. The only inkling our society has of that is the freedom that soldiers have bought by their blood. But this is such a pale, pale imitation of Jesus’ work—soldiers have their own selfish motives, they don’t really know they are going to die, and they would rather lay down the enemy’s lives than their own. Jesus became a human being with the full intention to die for us.

That’s love!

Blessing 4 - Informed

Now, because we are adopted, joint heirs with Christ, shouldn’t be let in on the family secrets? Shouldn’t we get to know what’s going on, what’s planned? And guess what? We are!

Ephesians 1:9–10 ESV

9 making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

We are let in on the mysterious plan that God has been working towards since he created the world: to reunite everything under Jesus. We have just been learning about this plan, laid out in the Revelation of John. And at its end, we find Jesus ruling a remade universe:

Revelation 22:3 ESV

3 No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.

This destiny is not just a fun fact. It’s not some knowledge that we should keep squirreled away in some mental compartment, like how to change a tyre or do complex arithmetic. This knowledge should inform every single decision we make.

For example, in my personal opinion, this sadly means that Christians can never justify buying a new Ferrari (or probably even an old one). The Ferrari will soon burn and no amount of burn-outs will outweigh the opportunity lost to use our wealth for more permanent purposes, as Paul says to Timothy:

1 Timothy 6:17–18 ESV

17 As for the rich in this present age, charge them not to be haughty, nor to set their hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. 18 They are to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share,

Blessing 5 - An inheritance

Now the next verse is where interpretations differ. The ESV says:

Ephesians 1:11–12 ESV

11 In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, 12 so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

but the ASV (American Standard Version) says:

Ephesians 1:11–12 ASV 1901

11 in whom also we were made a heritage, having been foreordained according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his will; 12 to the end that we should be unto the praise of his glory, we who had before hoped in Christ:

You see, the Greek word for an inheritance can be interpreted in various ways. Either we receive an inheritance from God (presumably our salvation) or we become God’s heritage, God’s possession. I think we are God’s heritage. And, as we saw earlier, God’s choice of us brings him glory. The fact that this choice is not merely theoretical, but present in history as the church, brings even greater glory.

The mere existence of the church, God’s redeemed people, brings him glory and praise! Praise God!

Section 3 - The Holy Spirit

And with that repeated song of praise, we move into the final section which deals with the Holy Spirit.

Blessing 6 - Sealed

Now the perspective shifts a little. The role of the Holy Spirit in the work of God is much closer to us. The Holy Spirit dwells in us. And so in this section we see things more from our perspective, rather than from the Father’s or the Son’s.

Ephesians 1:13–14 ASV 1901

13 in whom ye also, having heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation,—in whom, having also believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, 14 which is an earnest of our inheritance, unto the redemption of God’s own possession, unto the praise of his glory.

The sixth blessing is the seal of the Holy Spirit. You might remember the idea of seals from the book of Revelation. We’re not talking about the marine mammals. In the New Testament, the primary meaning of a seal, especially one placed on a person, is as a mark of ownership. So the Holy Spirit marks us as belonging to God (which itself was the fifth blessing, remember).

You’ll notice in verse 13 that it is when we hear the word of truth, the gospel, and so believe in Jesus, that we become God’s possession. This is our part of the process. God may have chosen us from before the beginning of time, but we still need to hear the gospel and believe.

And that implies that, as Jesus tells us, we need to share the gospel:

Matthew 28:19–20 ESV

19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Blessing 7 - Guaranteed

And now we come to the final blessing. The Holy Spirit is also our guarantee, the down-payment on God’s investment in us. Because we have the Holy Spirit we can be sure that we will eventually come fully into God’s temple. We may intellectually know God’s plan to make everything his temple, governed and owned by Jesus, but the Holy Spirit is a present, experienced reality that constantly reassures us that this future is coming true.

Too often we think of our faith as based on our own intellectual strength, or the strength of our will. We think that we can cling to God by reassuring ourselves that Jesus really lived, died, and rose again in history. And therefore we can trust in Jesus coming again. And it is important to understand and believe these things. But we have more: we have the Holy Spirit living in our hearts. He can encourage us. He can equip us. He can strengthen our faith and straighten our walk. Don’t forget to rely on the Holy Spirit.

And finally, once again, Paul ends this section with us standing before God, as his inheritance, and so bringing glory to God. The church brings glory to God.

Takeaway

So what can we take away from this complex, deep, powerful passage?

First, that the trinity, the three persons of God in one godhead, are all intimately involved with us. No part of God stands off aloof, disinterested. God is deeply and uniformly loving.

Second, these seven blessings should encourage us in our faith. Our faith is not just some fragile psychological phenomena. Our position with God is not precarious. Remember, we are:

Chosen

Adopted

Redeemed

Informed

An inheritance

Sealed

Guaranteed

Given the awesome weight of all that, our Christianity should be the one thing that defines who we are, how we live, how we talk, what we do. Our job wasn’t chosen for us from before the creation of the world. We aren’t adopted by our friends. None of our family has knowingly and willingly laid down their life to redeem us. No scholar has informed us of the secrets of our future. No investor has bought us as their inheritance. No company else has sealed us with their name. And no government has given us the power of God in our hearts as a guarantee of our future.

God alone has done that.

Let’s praise his glorious name!