We are continuing our series entitled: “General Electric Power Company”. You might well wonder: what does General Electric Power Company have to do with the Bible? It is an acronym and mnemonic device to help Bible readers remember the order of four of Paul’s letters: Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians, G.E.P.C. At the beginning of the year, we looked at Galatians and talked about “Plugging into the Power of Grace”. Now we are going to investigate Ephesians and how to “Plug into the Power of Love”. So, listen for God’s word to you from Ephesians 1 as we begin to explore this wonderful letter together…
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
To God’s holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Author
Who is the author of this letter? The author identifies himself as Paul and the early church universally recognized this letter as an authentic one from Paul. Nonetheless, several modern scholars have questioned Pauline authorship of this letter. The issues that modern scholars note mainly fall along two lines…
- In Ephesians, many of the sentences are very long, unlike the commonly short and energized sentences of Paul’s undisputed letters. For example, Ephesians 1:3-14 is one sentence in Greek, as is Ephesians 1:15-23.
- Differences in subject matter include the emphasis in Ephesians on “the church” and the so-called “household codes” featured in Ephesians 5 and 6.
While these differences between Ephesians and Paul’s undisputed letters are significant, I do not find these differences sufficient to doubt Pauline authorship. No less a scholar than Markus Barth concluded:
The apostle Paul himself wrote the epistle to the Ephesians from a prison in Rome toward the end of his life. Paul addresses not the whole church in Ephesus but only the members of Gentile origin, people whom he did not know personally and who had been converted and baptized after his final departure from that city. The strange diction occasionally found in Ephesians stems from hymns and other traditional materials that are quoted in this epistle much more frequently and extensively than in the earlier writings of Paul. Ephesians represents a development of Paul’s thought and a summary of his message which are prepared by his undisputed letters and contribute to their proper understanding.[1]
As he does in some of his other letters, Paul here calls himself an apostle. The word refers to one who is sent. Paul saw himself as being sent by none other than Jesus Christ whom he met in a vision on the road to Damascus.
Furthermore, Paul notes that he is an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God. “The will of God” is an important concept in the letter to the Ephesians. The exact phrase is used only one other time in this letter, in the final chapter, but the concept is important throughout. As we proceed through our examination of chapter one, especially, we will be talking a lot about the purpose of God which is another way of saying “the will of God”.
As a pastor, I have often been asked, “How can I know God’s will?” To which I often respond, “You have met him. I am the Will of God!” But all kidding aside, it is an important question. And I think that ultimately, we do know the will of God through meeting a person, not through meeting me, but through meeting God’s Son, Jesus Christ. And one of the main ways we get to know Jesus, is through reading about him, and reading his words in Scripture.
Recipients
Who are the recipients of this letter? Paul addresses this letter: “To God’s holy people in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus.”
Thus, Paul tells us four important things about the recipients. First, he calls them God’s holy people. It is one word in Greek: ἁγίοις (hagios) and it means “to be set apart”. This designation is true of us as well. We are set apart to belong to Jesus Christ.
Second, Paul tells us that the recipients are “being in Ephesus”. It is important to note that these words are missing from some of our best and earliest manuscripts of this letter. This may then have been a circular letter that included Ephesus, or the letter may have been written from Ephesus to other churches around the area. The author’s use of the word “church” in this letter also suggests a circular letter. In Paul’s undisputed letters the word “church” always refers to a specific local church. In Ephesians the word seems to refer to what we might call the church universal.
Third, Paul calls the recipients of this letter “faithful”. Normally we think of this word as referring to “persons who show themselves faithful in the transaction of business, the execution of commands, or the discharge of official duties.” And the word is used in that sense in the New Testament.
But more importantly, in this instance, I believe the word “faithful” means one who trusts in God and in his Son, Jesus Christ. The one who is faithful is literally filled with faith, and that faith, as we will see in Ephesians 2, is a gift from God.
Fourth, and perhaps most important, Paul tells us that the recipients of this letter are “in Christ Jesus”. Paul uses the words “in Christ” thirteen times in this letter. One might argue that it is Paul’s most important concept in this piece of correspondence. If we are “in Christ” then everything else in life flows from that.
One key question, of course, is: how do we get to be in Christ? When we get to chapter two, Paul will explain how we get to be in Christ through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and through our trusting in him. We end up in Christ through faith.
William Barclay says that every Christian lives a double life. By that he means that every Christian has two addresses: one human and one divine. Paul’s recipients lived in Ephesusand in Christ. The same is true of us. We may live on Cape Cod, but we also live in Christ. We are dual citizens of heaven and earth.
Greeting
After Paul introduces himself and addresses his recipients, he greets them in his usual fashion: “Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
This greeting unites two great biblical words, one characteristic of the Old Testament and one of the New. Grace is the word most characteristic of the New Testament. The word is Χάρις in Greek. When we examined Galatians earlier this year, we saw how this was the one word that really summed up the whole of that letter. Χάρις is a feminine noun from the root word xar which means “favor, disposed to, inclined, favorable towards, leaning towards to share benefit”.
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Sometime ago I came across a lovely photo of my friend Douglas Gresham as a boy with his stepfather, C. S. Lewis… I love the way that Doug and his stepfather are leaning into each other in this photo. It gives us a picture of what God does in relation to us, his children. He leans into us. He shows his favor towards us. God is always leaning towards us to share benefit. And the favor that God bestows on us is undeserved because of course none of us have been the perfect children. Sometimes we have rebelled. Sometimes we have run away from our heavenly Father. And even if we have not rebelled or run away, we have all failed to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. And we have failed to love our neighbors as ourselves. But God loves us anyway. And that’s grace.
The second key word that Paul uses in his greeting is peace, εἰρήνη. This Greek word has behind it, in Paul’s thought, a very important Hebrew word, shalom. Shalom is not simply the absence of conflict. Shalom means full health in all dimensions: physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual.
So, in this greeting, Paul is wishing for the recipients of this letter (and that includes us), all the best of God’s blessings summarized both in the Old Testament and in the New. And he is wishing us, or one might say, “blessing us” with this grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now, why does Paul mention the Father and the Son but not the Holy Spirit? Has he forgotten something? It seems unlikely that Paul has simply forgotten to mention the Holy Spirit. After all, this greeting in Ephesians is the same one Paul uses in almost all his letters. (See Romans 1:7; 1 Corinthians 1:3; 2 Corinthians 1:2; Galatians 1:3; Philippians 1:2; 2 Thessalonians 1:1; 1 Timothy 1:2; 2 Timothy 1:2; Philemon 1:3.) And Paul certainly mentions all three persons of the Godhead together in other places, most famously at the end of 2 Corinthians where he says,
May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Furthermore, Paul mentions the Spirit no less than thirteen times by name in this letter, beginning with his opening prayer which lasts from chapter one, verse three to verse fourteen. Paul mentions the Holy Spirit in the last two verses of the prayer where he says,
When you believed, you were marked in him [that is in Christ] with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.
So, there you have all three persons of the Godhead in two verses: the Spirit, Christ, and God the Father. We will examine this prayer in more depth next Sunday.
Considering all this evidence leads me to think there is something different going on with Paul’s greeting that leads him to focus on God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ exclusively. What I think Paul is doing is this: in the context of the first century world where many gods were worshipped, Paul wants to distinguish for his readers which God he is talking about. Paul tells us that the true God who deserves our worship is the father of the Lord Jesus who is the Christ, the Messiah, the one true king. Tom Wright explains…
[Paul’s God] is not the same as the gods and goddesses of the pagan world. He isn’t just a divine force, a vague influence or energy loosely known as ‘the sacred’. He is the God who made the world, and who has now made himself known in and through Jesus. As far as Paul is concerned, any picture of God which doesn’t now have Jesus in the middle of it is a distortion or a downright fabrication.[2]
As I have pointed out before, what many of us, I think, tend to do, is that we have a picture of God in our minds, and then we try to fit Jesus into that picture. But that doesn’t ultimately work. What Paul and the rest of the New Testament challenges us to do is to start with Jesus and allow him to shape or re-shape our ideas of God from top to bottom and from the inside out.
As Wright points out, Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 1:3-14 is filled with the story of what God has done in Jesus the Messiah. The key word we are focusing on in this series on Ephesians comes up twice in this opening prayer. Paul says…
In love he [God] predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.
As we will explore in greater depth next week, Jesus is the chosen one whom the Father loves, and when we are in Christ we get in on that love.
The kind of love that Paul talks about in Ephesians was, in a way, something new on the world scene. The first Christians had to come up with a new word to describe it and that word was agape. We will speak much about it in our time studying Ephesians together. But for now, I want to leave you with a picture of what agape is like. Agape is, I believe, well-illustrated by Malcolm Muggeridge’s book Something Beautiful for God, the story of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Muggeridge went to Calcutta as a correspondent for the Times of London to do a newspaper story about this remarkable Albanian sister and her Home for Dying Destitutes. In the book Muggeridge compares Mother Teresa’s approach to people in need with his own response…
I was being driven one evening in my car when my driver knocked someone over—something as easily done then as now, with the crowded pavements spilling over into the roadway. With great resourcefulness and knowing the brawls that could so easily develop when a European car was involved in a street accident, my driver jumped out, grabbed the injured man, put him in the driving seat beside him, and drove away at top speed to the nearest hospital. There, I rather self-righteously insisted on seeing that the man was properly attended to (as it turned out, he was not seriously hurt), and, being a sahib, was able to follow him into the emergency ward. It was a scene of inconceivable confusion and horror, with patients stretched out on the floor, in the corridors, everywhere. While I was waiting, a man was brought in who had just cut his throat from ear to ear. It was too much; I made off, back to my comfortable flat and a stiff whisky and soda, to expatiate through the years to come on Bengal’s wretched social conditions, and what a scandal it was, and how it was greatly to be hoped that the competent authorities would… and so on…
I ran away and stayed away; Mother Teresa moved in and stayed. That was the difference.[3]
Agape moves in and stays. That is what Jesus Christ will do in your life, if you let him. He will move in and stay. And your life will never be the same again…
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