This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I delivered this message at Spring Creek Bible Church on October 15, 2017. It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
I’ve been asked to speak on how we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ, which Paul describes in Ephesians 1:3. It’s a daunting topic—we couldn’t possibly list every blessing we have in Christ in our brief time. I considered going topical, surveying major blessings across the New Testament, but the more I meditated on this passage, the more I became convinced that the best way to serve us tonight is to help us understand this marvelous text at the opening of Ephesians. Our text is Ephesians 1:3–14 (beginning at verse 1 to set the stage): “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world….In love he predestined us for adoption….In him we have redemption through his blood…making known to us the mystery of his will….In him you also, when you heard the word of truth…and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance…to the praise of his glory.” Father, thank you for this amazing text and what it reveals about who you are and how richly you’ve blessed us in Christ. Stir our minds and hearts to think and feel rightly about you, for your glory and our blessing. In Jesus’ name, amen.
A Text to Marvel At
This text is remarkable on many levels. In Greek it’s a single sentence—the longest in the Bible—beautifully structured (some think it may have been a hymn). It’s thoroughly Trinitarian, with Father, Son, and Spirit working together for our salvation. It has a strong emphasis on union with Christ—the phrase “in Christ” or “in him” appears eleven times. It’s a rich exposition of the multifaceted gospel, serving up so many aspects in twelve compact verses. It’s saturated with God’s sovereign grace, focused throughout on his glory and praise—a richly God-centered text our day desperately needs. And it centers on God’s eternal plan and purpose (words like purpose, plan, and will are sprinkled throughout), showing his sovereign execution of a wise plan that brings together heaven and earth, Jew and Gentile. If I accomplish one thing tonight, I hope it’s to whet your appetite to dig into this text for yourself—give it a week or a month, individually and as a family.
The Need It Meets
Every passage of Scripture is God’s gracious word to some need we have as fallen people—“all Scripture…is profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training” (2 Timothy 3:16). What does this passage remedy? One possibility is division: the major theme of Ephesians is the unity of the church in Christ, which may imply the churches faced dissension—natural as the people of God transitioned from Jews to a mixture of Jew and Gentile on equal footing—and this text lays a theological framework for that unity. Another is suffering: Paul writes from a prison cell (around AD 60, in Rome), telling us in 3:13 that he is suffering, so he wrote this encouraging letter in part for himself—a lesson that meditating on and praising God for our union with Christ is a wonderful remedy for the hard times we face.
But the primary need this passage meets, I’d suggest, is that we don’t praise God as he deserves—we don’t take his glorious grace seriously enough. Paul’s prayer that follows (vv. 15–23) confirms it: he prays that their eyes would be enlightened, so that they might be “to the praise of his glory.” Isn’t this part of our universal fallen condition—a failure to be enraptured with God’s glory as he deserves? We’re more often taken up with sports, work, technology, family, and relationships than with God and his glory; our affections for him are weaker than they should be, and we grow so familiar with this glorious gospel that we lose our sense of awe. Sanctification is, in part, the removal of the blinders that keep us from seeing and savoring God’s glory in Christ, and Ephesians 1 is a means to that end. An illustration: when did you last look up and stand in awe of Mount Baker on the horizon? Most of us ignore it—it becomes common scenery—yet when family visits (my folks come in two weeks), they marvel, because they don’t see it every day. How do we recover the awe? Set aside time, drive up, and take it in—and you can’t help but be struck by its majesty. That’s what Ephesians 1 is for us. Is your heart dull to the glory of God and his grace, your life full of lesser things? Come with me tonight on a trip into the heavenlies, and consider the splendor of God’s glorious grace in Christ.
Four Questions from Verse 3
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” It seems straightforward, but pondering it raises four questions: What does it mean to bless God? What are these spiritual blessings? What are the heavenly places? And what does it mean to be in Christ? First, to bless God. Modern translations often render the opening word “praise” (the NIV has no instances of “blessing God,” replacing them all with “praise”), because we don’t talk of blessing God today—but the concepts are equivalent. The Greek word combines a prefix meaning “good” with a root meaning “to speak”—it gives us our word “eulogy,” to say good things about someone—so to bless God is to speak of his goodness and greatness to him. Notice Paul fronts the word—“Blessed be the God and Father”—for emphasis (there’s no verb; it’s implied): God is worthy to be praised. The root occurs three times in this verse: the One worthy to be blessed blesses us with blessings. Of course, we don’t bless God the way he blesses us—when we bless him, we praise his goodness (we don’t improve him); when he blesses us, he extends his goodness to us (he does improve us)—yet both share the core idea of speaking good.
Second, “every spiritual blessing.” The immediate blessings Paul has in view come in verses 4–14, but there are more throughout Ephesians and the whole Bible. Most commentators argue that “spiritual” here isn’t set against “physical”; rather, it refers to blessings that come from the Holy Spirit—which means verse 3 already hints at the Trinity: the God and Father blesses us with every blessing from the Spirit, in the heavenly places, in Christ. Third, “the heavenly places.” This phrase occurs only five times in the Bible, all in Ephesians, so it’s worth surveying them. Here in 1:3; then 1:20, where God seated Christ “in the heavenly places…far above all rule and authority”; 2:6, where God “raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus”; 3:10, where through the church God’s manifold wisdom is made known “to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places”; and 6:12, where our struggle is “against…the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Put together: the Father is there, Christ is there at his right hand, we are seated there with Christ, and spiritual beings—good and evil—look on as God’s eternal plan unfolds. This is the realm in which God blesses us in Christ. Though physically we’re still on earth, there’s a real sense in which we’re in the heavenly places enjoying these blessings now, in part—and one day fully. That ties into what theologians call inaugurated eschatology, or the “already but not yet”: something is true of us now that is not yet fully here, and one day the two will come together, when heaven and earth, Jew and Gentile, positional and physical, are all united in Christ.
Fourth, to be “in Christ.” This is a crucial theme here and throughout Paul—no series on our identity in Christ would be complete without it. It occurs eleven times in these verses: we are faithful in Christ (v. 1), blessed in him (v. 3), chosen in him (v. 4), predestined through him (v. 5), given grace in him (v. 6), redeemed in him (v. 7), and so on through being sealed in him (v. 13); read on in Ephesians and we died, were raised, and were seated with Christ. Many call union with Christ the most comprehensive concept for grasping the gospel—the Westminster Larger Catechism defines it as “the work of God’s grace, whereby [the elect] are spiritually and mystically, yet really and inseparably joined to Christ as their head and husband.” Others call it “theological shorthand for the gospel itself,” “the central New Testament description of the Christian identity,” and the truth than which “nothing is more central or basic.” We tend to think of it individually—true and good—but our individualistic Western culture can blind us to the larger corporate aspect Paul has primarily in view: his focus is on our union with Christ as it calls the church to unity, especially between Jews and Gentiles. All the Ephesians metaphors reinforce it—Christ has one body of which he is the head, one building of which he is the cornerstone, one household, one church that he loves as a husband loves his wife.
Now to verses 4–14. Notice that the refrain “to the praise of his glory” recurs three times—in verse 6 (“to the praise of his glorious grace”), verse 12, and verse 14—tying the passage together around praising God for his glory. And it’s no accident it comes three times: each of the three sections focuses on one member of the Trinity. In verses 4–6, the Father chooses and predestines us to adoption; in verses 7–12, the Son redeems and forgives us and reveals the mystery; in verses 13–14, the Spirit seals us as the down payment of our inheritance. It’s beautifully Trinitarian—the triune God coming together to richly bless us in Christ.
The Father Planned Our Salvation (vv. 4–6)
Three things. First, the Father chose us in Christ. Does that mean he chose us to one day be in Christ when we believe? Yes—but there’s also a sense in which we were viewed in Christ at our election. Second Timothy 1:9 says grace was given us in Christ “before the ages began.” I wouldn’t say we were united to Christ before we existed, but there was some connection to him even then—just as we were, in some sense, in Adam (we sinned in Adam), so the second Adam’s work benefited us before we were born. There are, in fact, several stages of union with Christ: one reaching back into eternity; one at his death, burial, and resurrection (we died, were buried, and were raised with him); one at our conversion (what we usually mean by union with Christ); and one yet to come at glorification, when the already and not yet become one. Salvation at its most fundamental level is union with Christ. And election here is to holiness—“that we should be holy and blameless before him”—with an already-and-not-yet aspect: we are holy and blameless in his sight now, positionally, and are becoming more holy practically, until one day we stand in his presence completely free from sin.
Second, the Father predestined us to adoption as sons through Christ. Election and predestination are closely related—election has us (its objects) in view, predestination our destiny. What he predestined us to is adoption, which involves both our privileged position as God’s sons and our likeness to God: as Romans 8:29 says, we were “predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” God’s aim in predestination and adoption is to restore us to his image and make us like Christ, so that Jesus might be preeminent among the millions of his likenesses, little mirrors radiating the praise and glory of God. Third, in verse 6 the Father graciously gave us grace in Christ. The Greek literally says he “graced us with grace in the Beloved”—verb and noun bundled together—stressing the utterly free nature of his gift; and note the link between “in the Beloved” (v. 6) and “in love he predestined us” (v. 5): God loved us and appointed us to be his sons, then gave us grace in the Son he loves, bringing us into the family to share in the very love God has for his beloved Son.
The Son Accomplished Our Salvation (vv. 7–12)
First, we have redemption and forgiveness in Christ. “Redemption” is a Christian word to us, but in Paul’s day it was everyday speech, meaning to buy something back. As D. A. Carson notes, slavery was common partly because there was no bankruptcy: if you fell into financial ruin and had no wealthy relative to help, your only option was to sell yourself to your creditor—anyone of any race could end up enslaved. But a relative could come and redeem you—pay your debt and set you free. That’s the picture: we were in bondage to sin with no way to free ourselves, and Christ redeemed us by his precious blood; and that same payment secured our forgiveness—our debt wiped clear, we’re no longer guilty. Second, the revelation of God’s plan (vv. 8–10). The biblical “mystery” is something formerly concealed and now revealed, and the gospel is the great mystery—how God would win the cosmic battle against Satan. From the fall onward the evil one schemed to thwart God’s plan; the Old Testament saints didn’t fully grasp it, nor the angels, nor even the disciples—and the spiritual forces of evil thought that by killing Jesus they’d won (had they understood, Paul says, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory). This is the mystery Paul means, and the heavenly hosts look on in amazement at what God has done through the church (3:10). Third, we are God’s inheritance (vv. 11–12). The word here (different from “chose” in v. 4) relates to “inheritance” in verse 14: God has made us his portion, his people—“the LORD’s portion is his people” (Deuteronomy 32:9), a privilege that now belongs to the whole church. Note the shift from “we” (vv. 11–12, Paul and the Jews) to “you” (vv. 13–14, the Gentiles)—not that some blessings are only for Jews and others only for Gentiles, but that all these blessings are now for the whole church, Jew and Gentile, one in Christ.
The Spirit Ensures Our Salvation (vv. 13–14)
Two points. First, the Spirit as seal. We receive the Holy Spirit as a seal—a mark of authenticity and ownership. Just as an ancient document was sealed to show it was genuine and belonged to the owner, the Spirit within us marks us as God’s own; we belong to him, stamped with his mark—and there’s security here too, for what he has sealed no one can take away. Second, the Spirit as down payment. The word means a payment of part of a purchase price in advance—a deposit, a first installment, a pledge—so God gives us the Spirit as a guarantee of what’s to come. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: as amazing and real as all twelve verses are, they’re only the beginning; the best is yet to come. We’ve been redeemed, yet we still await “the redemption of our bodies”; we’ve been adopted, yet Paul says in Romans 8 we look forward to our adoption—already, but not yet, one day to come together. The Spirit is the seal and down payment marking us out as God’s possession and giving us confidence that all he has promised will come to pass. What a glorious day awaits all who are in Christ.
Let’s close in prayer. Father, thank you for this rich text. May its truth sink deep into our souls; may your Spirit implant its glories in our minds and hearts. Fortify us with this passage against all we may be going through, or about to go through, in your wise providence. Ravish us with your glorious grace over and over, and keep us from being enthralled with lesser things. In Jesus’ name, amen.