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Claiming Our Inheritance

Rev. Dr. Doug Pratt — June 20, 2010
 

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Ephesians 1:1-8 (NIV) 

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,To the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus: ²Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. ³Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. ⁴For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love ⁵he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will – ⁶to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. ⁷In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace 8that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding.

Ephesians 1:1-8 (NIV)

Introduction to Ephesians

The next couple weeks I’m going to base my messages on the opening chapter of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Ephesus, the place where the letter was addressed, was a large city in the eastern half of the Roman Empire where Paul served as pastor for several years. When he wrote this letter he had moved on to the capital city of Rome. This relatively short letter is actually intended to be a quick summary—a bit of a “Cliffs Notes” version—of all the key points of his teaching and preaching to this congregation during the years he spent with them. I suspect that the church’s elders or the new pastor had contacted Paul and asked him for this, and he is obliging—trying to squeeze everything into a small space to be a pocket version of Christianity 101.

Breaking down “the complex”

Paul was obviously a genius, and an absolute expert in the fields of theology and philosophy. Complicated and even mind-boggling concepts came easily to him. He could grasp them all completely. But most of us, when we read this letter to the Ephesians, struggle to understand it. This is a natural response to anything that is very complex, with lots of “moving parts”—and it shows the difference between the experts and the laypeople. Here are a few comparisons.

One of the sports channels produced a show one fall that featured a veteran NFL head coach explaining the complicated plays that pro teams use in the fast-paced game that has become America’s favorite spectator sport. At one point, film of an actual game was shown; taken with a wide-angle lens, it captured the entire field during a long pass play that resulted in a touchdown. Often when we watch a football game on TV the camera focuses on the quarterback, and then when he throws a pass the camera follows the ball into the hands of the intended receiver. But this particular angle showed 22 men moving very rapidly in real time, all over the field, and it was a blur to the untrained eye. The coach, however, with his deep knowledge of the game, could grasp it all in a single glance—and could see instantly which players were making mistakes in their assignments and which players were making the correct moves. Then he slowed the film down and ran it again and again, pointing out with a computerized telestrator where the key moves were and diagramming how it all happened. Only then could those of us with untrained eyes understand it all.

I had a similar experience while watching a golf tournament on TV. The typical professional golfer’s swing is a blur of rapid activity with lots of moving parts; the club head can move at up to 120 miles per hour. I have a hard time noticing the details of the swing (which is probably why I have a hard time correcting my own flaws when my swing gets out of balance and rhythm). But on this particular broadcast one of the leading teaching pros slowed the action down to super-slow and pointed out all the little details of stance, spine angle, swing plane, takeaway, hip movement and weight transfer—again using computer graphics to explain it all. A professional can see all these tiny details at once, but a layperson can’t.

Compare this to my experience a couple years ago when Director of Sacred Arts Jeff Faux explained in minute detail some of the dimensions of the very complex oratorio called Messiah, by George F. Handel. When most of us listen to a symphony, opera or oratorio with a huge orchestra and choir, we hear all the sounds blended together. But gifted conductors like Jeff can pick out individual parts, individual lines of melody and harmony, and can even hear individual singers.

Key truths in our text

In any complicated human endeavor with lots of moving parts it takes a real expert to track them all and grasp how they interconnect. And that is what is happening in Ephesians chapter 1. Most of this chapter consists of a single sentence (202 words long in the original language!) with all kinds of adjectives and verbs and dependent clauses and prepositional phrases. Reading Ephesians 1 for the first time can feel a bit overwhelming—like watching a football play or a golf swing, or listening to a symphony. To fully understand it, we need to “slow it down” and break it into its separate parts. And that’s what I’m going to try to do in the next few minutes. I’ll try to take the role of a football coach explaining what each person’s assignment is on a given play, or the role of an orchestra conductor reviewing the part each instrument should play.

After his usual greeting in verses 1 and 2, Paul launches into his marathon run-on sentence beginning in verse 3. From here through verse 8 we learn four significant truths about what it means to be a Christian.

1. We have been blessed.

2. We have been chosen.

3. We have been adopted [into God’s family].

4. We have been redeemed [from slavery to sin].

Truth #1: We have been blessed.

Right away we are introduced to one of the key phrases and themes of Ephesians: the concept of being “blessed in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” That term—“the heavenly realms”—has been interpreted by some to mean only the experience after death, when Christians are in a spiritual way united with God and freed from the mortality and corruption of their earthly bodies. But if this were true, then all those blessings would still be in the future—not yet available to us. That doesn’t fit with the tense of the verbs Paul uses here, for they all refer to things that are completed already. We “have been blessed,” not “we will be blessed.” So clearly this phrase “the heavenly realms” cannot refer only to what lies waiting for us after we die.

When we look at the other places in this letter where Paul uses the term “heavenly realms,” we realize he is talking about the invisible spiritual realities of life right now—the things that happen inside us, in our minds and emotions and wills. In the final chapter of this short book the Apostle describes the “spiritual armor” we are to put on daily and use in our continual struggle against sin and temptation “in the heavenly realms.” Therefore we can conclude, going back to chapter 1, that Paul is describing to us the present realities that Christians are meant to experience. A partial list of the spiritual blessings available to us: forgiveness and cleansing from any guilt and shame we feel, an inner peace and assurance that the Lord is with us, a confidence that His power and grace will be sufficient for whatever challenges we face, and a guarantee that this life is not “all there is,” but just the start of eternity. Those are among the “heavenly” (or spiritual or invisible or intangible) benefits you receive right now, if you are a believer in Christ.

Truth #2: We have been chosen.

Not only are we chosen, but we have been chosen since before the beginning of time. This teaching of scripture (found here and in many other places throughout the Bible) is one that brings us comfort but also puzzles us. It comforts us because we feel secure and special. We are not accidents. God has loved us before we ever existed, knew us personally, and desired to have a relationship with us. Just as an expectant mother or father eagerly awaits the birth of a son or daughter, and prays for them and loves them unconditionally even before they emerge from the womb, so God has always had us in His mind and heart.

But what puzzles us is this question: Does God choose everyone or only some? This reflects the tension within the Biblical message. There are many passages that speak about every person being welcome and invited. Whoever comes to me, God says repeatedly, will receive my love and grace. And yet we have other passages, like this one, that imply God already knows who will come, even that He prompts and leads and works within some but not others. This is one of those staggering paradoxes that stretches our reasoning abilities beyond their limits.

On a practical level, the best approach for a church and for individual Christians to take is to feel grateful and secure in our own belonging to Christ, and yet to be continually and winsomely inviting and appealing to others to also come to Him—that they, too, might experience all His spiritual blessings.

Truth #3: We have been adopted.

The image of adoption into a family to which you have no natural or blood rights has been a stirring and cherished one for Christians through the ages. Some of us here have been adopting parents; others have been adopted children. When parents choose to adopt a child, there is nothing in that child that can ever claim or think that they deserve the adoption. It is all by the gracious will of the parents, in choosing to welcome that child into their home and provide all the blessings of their family to that child. Sometimes parents adopt because they have been unable to have biological children and they feel a sense of emptiness or void. But God has no lack of fulfillment, no inner need to include us in His family. He does it all out of selfless and sacrificial love.

Very rarely in the modern world does an adoption occur other than for an infant or young child. There were some dramatic instances in the ancient world of the adoption of adults—usually a person of lower class was brought into a highly-ranked or noble family. In the 19th century novel Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace (made into a classic movie starring Charlton Heston) we follow the story of a young Jewish man whose life intersected with the life of Christ. At one point Ben-Hur is wrongly convicted of a crime and sentenced to service in a Roman galley—rowing an oar on a warship. The ship is engaged in a sea battle, and is rammed by the enemy and sunk. Ben-Hur, afloat on a piece of flotsam, saves the life of another man floating in the sea—who happens to be the captain of the ship, the commander of the naval forces, and a Roman of great wealth and influence. In gratitude, that captain actually adopts Ben-Hur into his family and makes him an heir. Ben-Hur then journeys back to his homeland (now as a wealthy and powerful Roman citizen) and has his life changed by an encounter with Jesus.

It’s an exciting story, and one with spiritual power. And it reminds us of how dramatically a life can be changed through adoption. This is what God has done for us: we have been made part of His royal family.

Truth #4: We have been redeemed.

To grasp this, we need to explore deeply the meaning of the actual words found in Ephesians. The standard generic word for “redeemed” in the ancient language of the New Testament referred to an ordinary commercial trans-action. You or I would go to a bakery and “purchase” or “redeem” a loaf of bread for a few coins; we would go to the local chariot dealer and “purchase” or “redeem” a shiny new chariot to park in our driveway using cold hard cash. We would thus have made an exchange of one asset for another. It’s what our entire free-market system is based upon. But the word Paul uses here was a special one, a variation on the standard procedure of market economics. It refers to that process of purchasing a slave in the slave market or from a slave-owner, and then giving that slave their legal and permanent freedom. In effect, slaves were “purchased out of” or “redeemed” from their hopeless condition into a whole new life.

This term is loaded with meaning and implications for the reality of mankind. Though we may think of ourselves as free men and women, living in a free country and not under the control of anyone, yet in a spiritual and moral sense we are all slaves to sin and guilt and the looming prospect of death. We are in the cruel chains of the Evil One who temporarily conquered this world. But Christ has paid a vast and staggering price to buy our freedom. The cost was His own blood—far more valuable than all the money in all the bank accounts in the world. Bill Gates doesn’t have enough money to purchase you or me from sin; nor does Warren Buffet or the King of Saudi Arabia. Only Jesus Christ, by His blood, can pay the astronomical price to redeem our souls.

These are four of the great truths presented to us in the opening sentence of Ephesians. They roll off the pen of Paul, and each one is profound and significant and of great importance. All of them help us to grasp what a privilege it is to belong to Jesus Christ. Next week we will press on further, and learn more about what He has done for us, and what we have available to us.

Blessed beyond imagining

This story is told by Dr. Harry Ironside, longtime pastor of historic Moody Church in Chicago, in his book on Ephesians. This account obviously dates back to the beginning of the 20th century—a time before you could “google” everyone and learn all about them, before governments maintained massive databases on every citizen and immigrant, and before a person’s economic activity could be tracked moment-by-moment by credit card and phone records. It was a time when a person could literally disappear.

A young Scottish man followed in the path described by Jesus in the parable of the Prodigal Son. He decided he wanted to get away from his large extended family of farmers and landholders in the Highlands. He secretly slipped away from home and bought passage to America. He kept heading west, and finally settled in a small cabin he built in the wild foothills of the Rockies in Montana. There he lived for more than a decade, completely self-sufficient: hunting, trapping, and drawing water to drink and bathe from the stream by his cabin. It was a hard life, and a lonely one. At times he wondered what he was missing back home. No one in Montana knew who he really was, and his family had no idea where he had gone.

Then his parents died within a year of one another, and subsequently both of his older brothers died as the result of a flu epidemic. Soon after that a wealthy uncle (his mother’s brother, with no children of his own) also passed away. The courts determined that the entire fortune, including a vast manor house, extensive grounds and a big bank account, should pass to the youngest son of his only sister—if he could be found. A dogged private investigator was hired by the courts, and at last he managed to track down the heir in his mountain cabin in Montana. This man, having lived in poverty for all these years, was stunned when he was given the news of his good fortune: he was now blessed beyond his imagining. As he started hiking towards the nearest town where he could catch a train to start his return journey to his homeland, he passed a cattle rancher who asked him who he was and where he was going. He told him his story, and then proclaimed: “I’m going to claim my inheritance.”

That’s what Paul invites us to do in Ephesians: to claim the wonderful and overwhelming inheritance that is ours in Jesus Christ.