Reflections From Ephesiansಮಾದರಿ

What a wonderful epistle Ephesians is; it is one of my favourites. It is full of revelation about our position in Christ, and our unity in and through him; it includes remarkable insight into what the church is, and plenty of advice about how to live in love, keeping in mind how we are to live is a response to what God has already accomplished for us in Christ.

Having read Verses 3 through 14, you may have missed the fact that there are no full stops in the original Greek text. It is as if Paul was so taken by what he was saying that he didn’t have time for breath. It truly is a breathtaking vision.

Verse 3 states, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” Paul goes on to enumerate these spiritual blessings. They aren’t left up to our imagination. He includes being chosen before the foundation of the world to live in holiness, being freely given his glorious grace, receiving redemption through his blood, being made aware of our inheritance, been given wisdom and insight to see Christ as the one who everything will find its place in, and the list goes on.

All of these, Paul calls, spiritual blessings. They are eternal, therefore not temporal and perishable; they are conveyed by the Holy Spirit and go to the core of our needs: deep and permanent belonging, forgiveness of sin and guilt, and a future with hope. Nothing on this earth can provide these - they are spiritual by nature.

We, in the West, are prone to see blessings largely in tangible terms. But we do ourselves damage if we see blessings as primarily earthbound. It is incontestable that throughout church history, many Christians have had very little and/or been impoverished because of their faith, but no Christian has ever been bereft of the spiritual blessings we have in Christ, of a magnitude and power that far exceed wealth, power, and privilege. These we all share; in this we are all one.

Some appeal to Abraham when defining blessings, in that they interpret the promise to Abraham for his descendants (us) to be blessed as, in good part, being wealthy like he was. But Paul does not concur. He interprets the blessings of Abraham as the gift of the Holy Spirit. “In order that in Christ Jesus the blessings of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” Galatians 3.14 What greater blessing could we possibly receive than the Holy Spirit of God - something rare in the OT era, but the inheritance of every follower of Jesus.