THE FIFTH IN A SERIES OF MESSAGES ON EPHESIANS FOR BBCMP, DELIVERED 2/10/13
PM
BLESSED BE GOD
EPHESIANS 1:1-14
INTRODUCTION
Now
the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
liberty. But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the
Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by
the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Corinthians 3:17-18)
And then last time we followed
through with that thought in that this is also a book about GOD, particularly
as He is revealed to us as a Holy
Trinity. Paul repeatedly affirms the
Triune God. In the book of Ephesians, each
person of the Godhead will be affirmed and praised and recognized for their
work in the grand scheme of redemption.
But then
you should notice that after Paul mentions “God” in both v. 2 and v. 3, he
follows that with “The Lord, Jesus Christ”.
Now as I said before, whenever we say God, if we understand the meaning
of that word properly, we know that the Lord Jesus Christ is included.
And
yet, here Paul makes two affirmations concerning the Godhead right beside one
another
·
Grace be to you, and peace, from God our
Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
·
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places
in Christ:
·
Verse
2 names God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ as equals in the bestowing of
Peace to us
·
Verse
3 emphasizes that God the Father is not only our Father, but also the Father of
Jesus Christ, Who is also God.
There
is no contradiction there, but there is a tension. The Son of God was so from
eternity. God, having life in Himself
has always communicated that life, even before He made any other living
things. The Father communicated the full
and undiminished essence of His own divinity to the Son, not by creating Him,
but by being, ontologically, His Father.
It was not an
act, but a relationship. It’s a great
mystery that boggles the imagination to try and develop a suitable explanation
or illustration. And yet we are
comfortable accepting it and believing it because God’s Word teaches it, and
therefore it is undeniably so.
But
there came a point in time at which the Eternal Son, Eternally begotten of the
Eternal Father became the God man, and at that point in time He became also JESUS. Jesus is His human name. His proper full name, the name which declares
the most about Who He is, is the one Paul uses right here – the Lord
(Sovereign) Jesus (Savior) Christ (Seed of the Woman, Messiah, Anointed).
Now
Paul could have simply said “Grace be to you, and peace, from God our
Father” and left out the rest of the sentence, and have been perfectly
correct. But under the inspiration of
the Holy Ghost, he includes the words, “and from the Lord Jesus Christ.” Clearly
there must be something about the part that The Lord Jesus Christ had to do
with this that Paul does not want us to overlook at this point.
I think
that he lays out these doctrines in this way because it is only through the
Lord Jesus Christ that we have access to God.
And so what we have here is the believer’s union with Christ. The book of Ephesians is
a very popular book. It’s one of the
most beloved, especially by the most mature, and the deepest of Christians. And it is the book that discloses for us most
fully our union with Christ.
We
should remember that it is possible for us to gain access to God only because
of our union with Christ. And we are able to be united with Christ
because He became united with us, by becoming one of us. And now I’m speaking about the
incarnation.
That’s
how this book rolls, by the way. Paul opens up a
thought, which leads to another, and then another, and the tapestry just keeps
growing.
God the
Father granted us grace and peace, of that we can be certain. But without the incarnation of the Son, He
would not have. There would have been no
means to do so. All we could have
expected and experienced would have been judgment.
This is
really something marvelous. Look at Rom.
3:23-26
For
all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
This
means we are doomed for hell, dead in trespasses and sins, deserving of eternal
suffering in agony because of our sins.
Being
justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood,
to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through
the forbearance of God;
There’s
that grace once again. It is available
because the Father set Christ Jesus forth to be a propitiation. Through faith in His blood, repentant sinners
that believe the good news have their sins remitted.
To
declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just,
and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
If God
was to leave sin unpunished, He would not be just in doing so. He would Himself be unrighteous, and that
simply cannot be. But if He required
payment from the guilty, He could not spare any. The only way to solve the dilemma was to take
the punishment upon Himself. And in
order to do that, God must become the God/Man, must assume humanity to Himself,
and that is what we are supposed to be celebrating at Christmastime.
Without
the Eternal Son of the Eternal Father becoming joined to humanity, humanity
could not be restored to their original state of communion with God. But because of The Lord, Jesus Christ, the
barrier between God and man is removed.
We couldn’t come up to Him, but He could come down to us.
And this is, I believe, the reason
why so many believers have come to adore the book of Ephesians – why so many
claim it as their favorite book of the Bible.
Not because it teaches us to pray, or about the Trinity, or missions, or
family life, or spiritual warfare. It is
because this is the book that speaks most clearly and forcibly and ecstatically
about the most blessed truth in all the Word of God - our union with Christ. Everything that the Triune God had planned to
do for us, from before the foundation of the world, was delivered in The Lord Jesus Christ. If the Father gave it to us, He gave it in
Christ. If He did it for us, whatever
“it” is, He did so in Christ.
And
at this point, things become a little more knotty. I’ve discussed whether or not v. 3-14 is or isn’t a
prayer. It is without a doubt an
outburst of praise. Whether that praise
is offered in prayer or by some other means is open to discussion as far as I’m
concerned. It works either way. But
that’s not what the fuss is over. The
fuss is over the stuff in there that has to do with God’s choosing, and His
foreknowledge, and His calling, and purpose, and predestination.
I’m not eager to get into any kind of controversy over what
Paul has written here. I don’t really
think Paul intended to either. His
purpose wasn’t to send us home to draw charts and timelines of the "ordo salutis" and assemble our
debate teams. It was to stir us up to
praise.
If you
think that you only have cause to praise God if you get a shiver in your liver,
you are too much driven by your senses.
The word that describes that is “sensual”, and it isn’t a
compliment. What
Paul is praising God for here is God’s actual work, not his own
feelings about it, or as a result of it.
Now this is important. God sent
Jesus to die on the cross for your sins.
The Holy Trinity planned that from before the foundation of the world. You got in on it because of the things that
Paul enumerates here. That is all worth
praising God for, no matter how you feel at the moment. But not
everybody sees it that way. They’ll
praise God if they get a really special religious tingle. But they stubbornly refuse to just go ahead
and pronounce praise to God, feeling or no feeling, for His objective work,
outside themselves in time and space. That’s
a worse sin than you want to believe.
What is wrong with us that we can find it in ourselves to praise God
because we have some kind of feeling, but we have no inclination to praise God
for His eternal plan and purpose?
Obviously,
we don’t because we just don’t feel like all that is about, well, US. God’s foreknowledge, and calling and election
– those are about God. He’s out there by
Himself before time space and matter.
But what really matters isn’t that.
What really matters is how ecstatic we can feel when we’re having a
worship experience. It needs to be more
about “us” and about how we feel, and then we’ll praise God.
We’ll
even do some “praise God” pump priming in order to get the feelings going. We’ll kinda go all limp and almost trance
like, and sway and let the speaker whip us into a frenzy, if we can get a
feeling out of it. But if we can’t, we
say that the place is dead or the meeting is dead. That may be true, but what is dead for
certain is you, because you can’t do anything unless you have a feeling to carry
you along. I used
to ride that train, but I got off it.
And as
for all that stuff that Paul praised God for – well, it’s hard to get Baptists
to be comfortable with just the words.
It’s nearly impossible to get them excited over them. They’re afraid they might go hardshell or
something. So
instead of praising God for what Paul clearly praised God for, they prefer to
hide from it and pretend Paul never said it.
Or else they argue about it.
What a shame.
Because to get under these truths is to praise God for them and to
praise God for them with a grateful heart is to be changed by them. Working with these doctrines discussed from v. 3 to v.
14 will do the following things for us.
1. It will fix in our
minds WHO is the most important person in all reality.
2. It will fix in our
minds WHAT is most important in all of reality.
That would be the glory of God.
3. It will fix in our minds WHY - that is, for what purpose, we exist.
- GOD IS THE ULTIMATE BEING
That
is, HE is the most important person in reality, in existence. Notice I didn’t say “in all the world” or “in
all of creation”. He’s not part of His
creation. God and His creation are
separate. It belongs to Him;, not the
other way around. And yes, that’s an
important distinction. And it’s just
part of it
And
what Paul says here about these dreaded doctrines reminds us that while we may
not fully understand them, or be able to connect all the dots, God is clearly
in control of what is going on, and we are in His family by His choosing and
according to His plan and by His will, and He isn’t ever going to forget about
us or leave us on our own.
He has
too much invested in us for anything like that to happen. He has from before He made the world. Knowing this is how I am able to say, “I
don’t know what God has planned or how He is going to work things out, but He
is, and in the meantime, I’m going to trust Him.
O, I’m
seeking Him, and I’m praying often and earnestly to Him. And I’m concerned to do His will as well as I
can, sinner that I am. But I don’t worry
that I have to measure up to some level of perfection in order for God to do
something. If it depended on that, He
never would have used me or taken care of me or done anything with me in the
past.
So I watch,
and pray and wait. When you’ve worked
all you can, and given all you can, and prayed all you can, and done your best
at the things you have to do, and added fasting to that, what’s left? Waiting, and trusting.
Looking
around me at the current state of the Church, it seems that this is something
that professing Christians need to remember. I guess Pagans and atheists
need to know it too, but they can’t even hear it. But Christians these days are so Narcissistic. They would affirm it, but they don’t seem to
see how it applies. I’m not
saying they don’t ask God for things.
I’m saying they don’t know how to wait and trust when He doesn’t do what
they ask.
Some
wag put it this way - The first principle of theology is “There is a
God”; and the second principle is “You are not Him.” Hohohohehehehahaha. But what does that mean?
It
means that when we are going through a really rough time, and we get thinking that
the most important thing in the world is getting out of it, and that the most
important thing to God should be to help us get out of it, we’re not thinking like Christians.
Knowing,
and remembering the things that Paul put down here keeps us in our place –
humble enough to not expect Him to raise us up to glory in front of our
critics, and secure enough not to despair that He’s going to take away
everything and let us die in poverty and disgrace because the brethren think
we’ve made a few mistakes.
Just
remember, the first question that we need to ask when we open up the
Bibe is ‘What does this teach me about God?’ Because God is more important than
anything, and this prayer reminds us of that.
2. THE
GLORY OF GOD IS THE ULTIMATE OUTCOME, or OBJECTIVE
We tend to think, whether we admit it or not, that
the best thing that could happen would be that our suffering ends. The same goes for tests of faith, trials,
hard challenges. If we are a bit more “spiritual” we might think that
the most important thing would be for us to “make it through”
That’s much better, for sure, but it’s not really
sufficient. The truly best thing that
could happen would be that God would be glorified. The martyrs were not failures who lacked
faith, or horrible failures that God was punishing. They were ordinary Christians under
extraordinary pressure, in whom God was glorified.
And our thinking isn’t much different when it comes to
what we like to call “blessings” What is
most important about them? That we enjoy
them? That they continue? That they start when we expect them? That they increase? No. It is that God
be glorified in those things too.
Therefore;
3. THE ULTIMATE OUTCOME OF THE GLORY OF THE ULTIMATE BEING SHOULD BE OUR ULTIMATE GOAL
The devil is working overtime to make sure we don’t
believe that the glory of God is worth living for. His lying prophets are saying all the time,
that if you follow God, it will all go well for YOU. And then when it doesn’t you think God is a
liar. Or else he’ll convince you that
following God is too costly, and that he can show you a much better
time. Maybe so.
But
we shouldn’t care. If we commend
ourselves to God continually, we will know His lies to be just that.
4. THAT BEING WHO IS ULTIMATELY PRAISE-WORTHY IS
AS PAUL DESCRIBES HIM HERE – TRIUNE, AND SOVEREIGN
And that will have to be taken up next time.
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