Ephesians 1:7-12

1:7-12

V.6 ends with the phrase “in the Beloved,” who is, of course, Jesus Christ.  He is the Son beloved by the Father.  In him, we are adopted into God’s family and are God’s beloved as well.  The next stanza of this sentence focuses on all that Christ is and means for us and for the world.

The rich grace (v.7) we have received includes forgiveness, redemption, wisdom and insight (v.8), knowledge of the mystery of his will (v.9), and an inheritance (v.11).  Forgiveness and redemption are related to Christ’s “blood” (v.7).  This seems shorthand for Exodus imagery.  The blood on the doorposts signaled the angel of death to “pass over” Israelite homes in Egypt on that first Passover night.  The life of the sacrificial animal is in its blood (Lev.17:11) and the blood signifies a life given for the sake of others.  Christ’s life, given for us, brings forgiveness and redemption to us.  Liberation from the internal oppression of sin over us and external oppression from the devil and the powers are gifts of grace God has lavished on us (v.8).

Like the phrase “in love” which could go with either the end of v.4 or the beginning of v.5, “with wisdom and insight” (v.8) can go with either what precedes or follows.  These can be numbered among the gifts God has “lavished” on his people (see Paul’s prayer in 1:17 and The Common English Bible).  Or it can introduce v.9 as it does in the NRSV:  “With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us . . .” (also NIV and NASB).

As gifts, “wisdom and insight” suggest God has enabled us to rightly discern and practice the freedom we have been given.  As we will see, we need to celebrate our liberation from all that binds us AND discern that for which we have been liberated.

Perhaps here is the place for a word on “freedom”.  In our culture, freedom has been debased to refer simply to what I call freedom from.  We want to be free from constraints, hindrances and limitations – free agents.  To be and do what we want is for us the essence of liberty.

Freed from our oppressors, we are freed for God.  This is the message of the first exodus and it is also the message of Christ’s new exodus.  Freedom in its full biblical sense does not mean that those freed are now free agents making their own decisions and pursuing their own course of life.  Rather, freedom is to give oneself to God to serve him with glad and grateful hearts.  As the PC(U.S.A.)’s A Declaration of Faith puts it:  “To worship God is highest joy.  To serve God is perfect freedom” (ch.1, par.7).

If we take “with wisdom and insight” as introducing the next thought, they refer to the manner in which God conveys to us his strategy for redeeming and reconciling all things.  This is the third main activity of God in this opening section of Ephesians.  Remember, God blesses (equips), God predestines (reassures), and here he “makes known . . . the mystery of his will” (strategizes).  We can never say that we do not know what God is doing.  We’d have never figured it out on our own, that’s true.  But God has told us what he’s up to, how he’s “administering”[1] the “mystery.

And his strategy is to “gather up all things in (Christ), things in heaven and things on earth” (v.10). Jesus Christ is the centerpiece of God’s strategy and the center point of all creation and redemption.  In him everything else in all creation will find its proper place.  Note well, Paul says all things, not just all people.  Everything in the cosmos disordered and disrupted by sin and the fall Christ will set right again (Col.1:20).  Creation will be renewed and restored as the eternal habitation of God and his people.  Heaven and earth will be reunited.  God’s glory, which is humanity fully alive, will flood the new creation.  Everything finds its “Omega Point” in Christ!

Paul’s talk of God’s endgame naturally leads to the idea of “inheritance” in v.11.  But whose inheritance is he talking about?  Ours, God’s, or both?  This is another case where Paul uses language that can legitimately be taken in more than one sense.  And again, there’s no reason why we have to choose between them.  It makes sense to see this inheritance as another of God’s gifts to his people.  That’s a common biblical thought and the language is used that way in the Old Testament.  But it can also be used of Israel as God’s inheritance (Deut. 9:29; Zech.2:12).  Most translations take the former sense (our inheritance).  Today’s English Version, however, takes the latter sense:  “God chose us to be his own people”.[2]

In fact, Irenaeus’ definition of the glory of God, “The glory of God is humanity fully alive – and life consists in beholding God,” catches both aspects of Paul’s notion of inheritance.  And both aspects are important.  However the notion of humanity fully alive as God’s inheritance is crucial and less recognized than that of our inheritance from God.  So I want us to reflect a bit more on it.

Imagine that God were to give himself a gift, and that that gift was us!  This is what it means for God to have an inheritance.  This is, in fact, just what Paul prays for in 1:18:  “so that . . . you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among (or “in”) the saints”.  Again Paul seems to think that we, God’s people, are the inheritance God himself will come into at the end.

What does that do for your sense of identity as a member of God’s subversive counter-revolutionary people?  To know we are the point people God intends to use to achieve his “eternal purpose” (3:11)?  Even more than that, to know that we are the gift God is giving himself for all eternity?  Feels a lot different than if we only see ourselves as forgiven sinners, doesn’t it.  Scot McKnight has recently used the terminology of “Good Friday Christians” and the “Easter Christian Life.”[3]  The former emphasizes Jesus’ death for the forgiveness of our sins.  The tendency in this way of thinking is to see ourselves primarily as forgiven sinners.  But “what difference does the resurrection make,” McKnight asks?

An “Easter Christian Life” is all about new creation, about living now as the people we were created to be.  It’s about living the “life of the age to come” (the meaning of John’s “eternal life”) now in the midst of a still-not-yet-fully-redeemed-world.  Or, in the language I am using, being a “subversive counter-revolutionary people”.  As we live the life of God’s new creation in the midst of creation-distorted-by-sin we subvert the ways and mores of that distorted creation and spearhead a counter-revolution to undo the effects of the primal revolution initiated by our first parents in the Garden of Eden.

We are to see ourselves, then, primarily as Easter or New Creation Christians.  That this is Paul’s view is clear from 2 Cor.5:17:  “So then, if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation.  The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived.”[4]  We are the people who already live “in Christ” in the way that all reality will live “in him” one day.  God’s people are the vanguard of the future that has already dawned in Jesus Christ.  Thus Paul admonishes his readers later in this letter:  “Therefore it says, ‘Sleeper, awake!  Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’” (Eph.5:14).  We are those who live in the light of the reality of Christ’s resurrection.

Are we primarily sinners in need of forgiveness or those called to God’s new creational subversive counter-revolutionary movement?  Our inheritance (to live with God in his new creation) is also God’s inheritance (to have a people to live with in his new creation)!  Let’s face it – God has given himself us as his inheritance. And we ought to live like it! 

This does not mean we are triumphalistic, believing we are worth more or morally superior to others.  On the contrary, to live as God’s inheritance, those people who look enough “like” God for others to notice, entails a humble witness to others that takes the shape of the cross.  In a world still-not-fully-redeemed, resurrection living - that other-focused, sacrificial servanthood that Jesus practiced - will always end up on a cross, figuratively if not literally.  The hymn “Lift High the Cross” captures this nicely in what is in effect the “battle-cry” of God’s subversive counter-revolutionary people:

Come, Christians, follow where our Savior led,
our King victorious, Jesus Christ, our Head.

Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim
till all the world adore his sacred name.[5]

Paul will spell all this out in greater detail in the “Walk” section of this letter.

          All that we have considered in this section comes to us “in Christ” (vv.7, 9, 10, 11).  Yet all of this comes through God’s “wisdom and insight” (v.9) and his “purpose . . . counsel and will” (v.11).  The God who “makes known,” or strategizes, shares his strategy with us.  He lets us in on what he is doing.  This insight into God’s plan and purpose is a profound gift for a subversive counter-revolutionary people.  We are not just “grunts,” pieces for the general to move around to serve his purposes, fodder for the enemy in the struggle.  We are confidants (Jn.15:15).  This is our struggle too.  We are in it together with God.

          God has done all this blessing, predestining, and strategizing in order that his people, the Jews, might be his subversive counter-revolutionary people.  Not all the Jews responded, however.  But those that did, “the first to set (their) hope on Christ,” were enabled to be that people, the nucleus of that people, whom God will use to bless the rest of the world (“might live for the praise of his glory,” v.12).

---

[1] Yoder-Neufeld suggest this as capturing the dynamic sense of the noun oikonomia used here.  This mystery is not merely a static plan unfolding mechanically according to pre-written script.  Rather God himself is actively involved in its unfolding, its administration.  This is the difference between biblical faith and Enlightenment Deism (Ephesians, 50).

[2] Yoder-Neufeld, Ephesians, 52.

[3] ^{Scot McKnight, “What Difference Does Easter Make?” at his blog “The Jesus Creed” (http://www.patheos.com/community/jesuscreed/category/resurrection/)}

[4] Common English Bible.  This does not in any way slight or diminish Christ’s death for our sins.  Without that we could never become New Creation Christians.  To remain “Good Friday Christians,” though, would be to settle for less than that for which Christ ultimately died!

[5] http://www.hymnary.org/hymn/PsH/373