1:3-6
We noticed earlier that these three sections of 1:3-14 follow a trinitarian pattern. This first section focuses attention on God the Father and his activity of “blessing” (equipping) and “predestining” (reassuring). God’s blessing/equipping is complete, preparing us for whatever we face in living as his people. Heaven’s storehouse of blessing is open and empty – God has given his all to us!
And he has given his all to us “in Christ” or variants (vv.3, 4, 6; 11 times in 1:3-14). “In Christ” is Paul’s favorite way to describe our life as God’s counter-revolutionary subversives. Jesus Christ is now the environment is which we live. He is the beginning and end of all we say or do. Jesus Christ is the one through whom we come to know God and grasp who God is and what God does. In connection with him we share in God’s Trinitarian life of communication, communion, and community. We participate in the “mystery” of God’s gracious plan for his world in him. In him, with him, through him, a whole new world opens us to us, a new reality that reconfigures everything we see and re-values everything we cherish.
God gives us these things “in the heavenly places”. The location of “the heavenly places” on the map of Paul’s first century Jewish way of viewing the world is less important than its significance. For Paul this phrase seems to indicate the place of Christ’s victory (see 1:20). From the start we see him in his victory, as world ruler, the Lord!
In the same way (“just as,” v.4), God also “chose” us “in Christ”. Before time began, that is, before creation itself, God set his love on us and claimed us as his own. Like Israel of old, God called us to be his people, the very people he will use to spread his blessing everywhere else. Being chosen, or elect, is not for privilege, you see, it is a summons to service. “Many are called but few are chosen,” said Jesus. But the few chosen are chosen for the sake of the many called! With great privilege comes great responsibility. Or to use my preferred imagery, the church is God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement sent to liberate the rest of creation still in thrall to the forces of sin and evil.
The way this happens is that God has chosen us to be “holy and blameless”. “Holy” speaks to our distinctiveness or difference from the world around us. Counter-revolutionaries by definition represent a different way of being or living from what is considered the status quo. Without this distinctiveness, any alleged counter-revolution is simply a play for power and control of the status quo.
“Blameless” suggests the quality of our distinctiveness. It is a word pointing to the temple and its sacrificial rites. Animals presented for sacrifice must be “blameless” or “spotless”. To offer ourselves to the world as God’s subversive counter-revolutionary movement requires of us as well a fitness to show and tell the world what God intends for it. This is not our doing, as Paul stresses here; this is what God has chosen us for. We are what he has made us. And we must live out of that choseness, becoming what we are in Christ that the world may come to know God.
Grammatically, the “in love” at the end of v.4 can go either with what precedes it (being holy and blameless before God) or what comes next (being chosen for adoption as God’s children).[1] Nothing in the context or general tenor of Paul’s thought in Ephesians rules out either option. The “in love” works well either way. So let’s take it with both, since the phrase does no injustice to either. We stand “holy and blameless” before God because God loves the world. And from eternity God determined to have a people whose life would bear witness to his love in the world. As well, God in his love for us has destined us to be his children, his family, adopted brothers and sisters of his Son Jesus Messiah (Rom.8:29ff.). In both cases, God’s love is the determining factor for our identity and mission.
This phrase “in love” plays a prominent role in Ephesians. Here, as we have seen, God’s love determines the identity and mission of his subversive counter-revolutionary people. Who we are and what we do are gifts of love and to be practiced “in love”. In 3:17 our lives are “rooted and grounded in love”. In 4:2, our capacity to bear with one another takes place “in love”. A crucial aspect of bearing with one another is “speaking the truth” and this too happens only “in love” (4:15), as does the overall growth of the body of Christ (4:16). Finally, we are to “walk” (one of our three posture images) “in love” after the fashion and in the power of the sacrificial love of Christ for us (5:2).
Most of these references occur in the “walk” section of Ephesians. This section, you will recall, deals with membership in the body of Christ. It is here, Paul wants to emphasize, that we experience and acquire the habits and practices that make us the people God wants us to be and the world needs us to be.
The significance of this “first stanza” of this long sentence for God’s “Subversive Counter-Revolutionary People” is this: God the Father lavishes (v.8) on his people everything needed to enact his counter-revolution (vv.3-4). He also reassures them that the counter-revolutionaries he has called them to be and the struggle he has called them to engage is rooted in his eternal love and choice of them. Thus they can rest assured that their effort will not be in vain and their trust in their God will not be disappointed!
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