Ephesians 1:13-14

1:13-14

          This third and final section of our one long sentence is (mercifully) the briefest, but not for that reason any less significant.  The first thing we notice is the change in pronouns.  From “us” and “we” Paul turns to “you”.  In Christ, Gentile believers, have been marked by the Holy Spirit as belonging to God (“sealed”) and thus a part of God’s subversive counter-revolutionary people too (v.13; Col.2:11-12).  This points ahead to ch.2 where Paul unveils the importance of this move for understanding and living into that “mystery” God has made known to us.

          All that Paul has said earlier about Jewish Christian believers can also be said about Gentile Christian believers (that’s us, friends!).  All the equipping, reassuring, and strategizing to which they are privy, we too are privy.  Baptism initiates us into this new relationship.  In the early church the gift of the Holy Spirit was believed to be given with baptism.

          The Spirit, who is the chief divine actor in this section, is not only a gift of God’s “promise” (v.13) but also the “down payment” (“pledge,” v.14) guaranteeing the full realization of the inheritance.  The presence of the Holy Spirit assures us that we will fully realize our calling and blessing of being “God’s own people” (v.14).  This, you will have guessed by now, means that being God’s subversive counter-revolutionary people is not a temporary or simply strategic matter.  To be this people is both our duty today and our destiny tomorrow.  To be a subversive counter-revolutionary movement is the form being God’s people takes in a fallen world that resists and revolts against God’s design for it.  In the new creation, however, everyone will act in accord with that divine design and the subversive counter-revolutionary aspect will no longer be needed.  It will simply be life as God desires.

          Now we have the whole picture in front of us.  To God’s people, Jew and Gentile believers together in one people, God the Father has equipped, reassured, and shared his strategy for achieving his dream, his “eternal purpose” (3:11), with this people.  Spiritual blessings sufficient for every need, adoption as children in God’s family, forgiveness, redemption, insight into God’s “mystery” (his plan) to gather all things together in Christ, and the inheritance we have and are for God are among these gifts.  God the Son has come, lived, died, been raised and thus made real God’s climactic and decisive move in his plan.  As the risen and living One, we live “in him” and experience all God has and has called us to “in him”.  God the Spirit implements the outworking of this plan by drawing both Jew and Gentile into that people who prefigure and are a prototype of the life to come.  As such the Spirit forms this people into a subversive counter-revolutionary movement for demonstrating and challenging a rebellious humanity to come home to their Father and Creator.  All of this, in each and every aspect, is “to the praise of God’s glory”.  Or as Irenaeus has taught us, “the glory of God is humanity fully alive, and life is beholding God.”

          We noted earlier that the catalyst of a great movement is a “white-hot faith”.  Such a faith requires a BHAG – a big, hairy, audacious goal – to aim towards and motivate such faith.  I have argued that this first section of Ephesians, this blessing of God, serves as an expression of gratitude to God and also an articulation of the BHAG that generates “white-hot faith” in God’s people.  I also suggested that with this BHAG Paul also claims that we have a BHAG God – the biggest, hairiest, most audacious God ever.

          With this the stage is set for the “making of a subversive counter-revolutionary” people to begin in earnest.  Paul starts this journey with prayer and it is to this prayer that we turn.