Editor's note: In The Vision of Ephesians, well-known New Testament scholar N.T. Wright offers an accessible introduction that opens the text in a way that helps what may seem dense and allusive become clear, fresh, challenging, and encouraging. Wright works through the letter in nine sections, exploring both apocalyptic insights and bracing challenges for the church, whether in the first century or the twenty-first. Enjoy this excerpt.
*
Ephesians 1:3–14
Like the doorway into a grand house, the introductory paragraph in Ephesians 1:3–14 gives us multiple clues about the building we are entering. These twelve verses form a single sentence in the Greek, though it’s been broken up into bits in most editions and translations. Even Paul, I think, would find it hard to say them in a single breath. But that’s how we should think of them: a combined, glorious shout of praise, incorporating the whole biblical story, the whole narrative of redemption, the disclosure of the saving purposes and works of the creator God, now revealed through the son and the spirit.
One of the frustrating things about writing, as opposed to playing music or painting, is that you have to say everything in sequence, one thing after another. It’s physically impossible to say two words at the same time. But this remarkable opening sentence deserves to be heard like a huge musical chord, played on full orchestra, with all its notes meaning what they mean in relation to all the others; or it could be seen like a single vast canvas with every form and colour contributing to the whole effect. So, even though we read it sequentially, line by line, word by word, we should constantly remember that it is a single whole.
Blessing God
The sentence opens with the summons to ‘bless God’: literally, to speak good of Him, eulogētos. The ancient world knew about praising the gods for their power and superiority, but the ancient
Israelites ‘blessed’ Him because He had blessed them. Thanksgiving and praise form the backbone of Israel’s traditions of worship, particularly in the Psalms, reflecting the intimacy of relationship and the overarching note of gratitude.
When God’s ancient people praised Him, they did so again and again by telling the story of His mighty acts: His acts in general, in creation and providence, but more particularly His acts on behalf of Israel, and specifically for His redemption of His people from Egypt. They praised God by rehearsing all that He had done. Indeed, the public reading of scripture, such as we do in our own worship services, has as its primary purpose not informing the congregation of this or that slice of history, though that’s a by-product, but displaying what God has done as itself an act of praise and worship, and as itself calling forth further praise and worship. That’s how this majestic opening paragraph – this opening sentence! – is meant to work. Paul wants the members of the young churches in western Turkey, to whom he is writing this circular, to be above all else people of praise. Everything else would follow from this.
First and foremost, the followers of Jesus are to thank and bless God because (verse 3)
He has blessed us in the Messiah with every spirit-inspired blessing in the heavenly realm.
Here, right away, it’s so easy for us Western Christians to go astray and to hear these words about the ‘heavenly realm’ in a thoroughly Platonic sense.
Paul is not contrasting ‘spiritual blessings’ with ‘material blessings’. Nor does the reference to the heavenly realm mean that the earthly realm is now irrelevant or to be left behind. As we shall see in verse 10, God’s plan always was and is to bring together in the Messiah all things in Heaven and on earth. The reference to the spirit-inspired blessings in the heavenly realm in verse 3 points to the fact that the Messiah’s people now share His life in all its dimensions, with their continuing earthly existence suffused with the reality of Heaven, as an advance sign of what God intends to do with the whole cosmos in the end.
There is, in fact, a danger, here and in the following section (verses 15–23), that we think of ourselves as now basically ‘in Heaven’ in a very different sense from Paul’s. We are inclined to take it to mean that, in some way or other, we’ve already ‘made it’, we’ve already ‘arrived’, so that the ongoing life of earth is now more or less irrelevant. However, as we’ll see towards the end of chapter 6, what it means is that we have been given this new multidimensional life so that we may share the Messiah’s ongoing battle against the dark powers, aimed at completing in the end the victory already won on the cross. We shall come to that in due course, but it’s important to head off misunderstandings right away.
Called and Rescued
At the heart of this opening shout of praise is the retelling of the story of Israel, focused particularly on the exodus. The passage is so dense that we could easily miss this in the flurry of statements about what God has done, but it’s actually quite clear – and it resonates, of course, with the scriptural tradition of retelling the story, and with the Judaean liturgical traditions, particularly Passover. Above all, it reflects something that all the early Christians were more aware of than we tend to be: that
- Jesus Himself chose Passover, the exodus-festival, as the moment to draw His public career to its climax; and that He used a new version of the Passover meal, the exodus-meal, to explain to His followers what His death would mean and how they could continue to share in that meaning.
When the Judaeans of Paul’s day longed for freedom from pagan oppression, they remembered Passover and prayed that God would do it again, in a great new exodus. Paul now believes that God has done it again: that
the new exodus and the new Passover have happened in and through Jesus.
So he weaves together the many strands of narrative into this single act of praise. As with all Paul’s theology, the whole life, tradition and particularly vocation of Israel has been focused on to Israel’s Messiah, the crucified and risen Jesus, and is now taken forward by the Holy Spirit.
It makes sense, then, to follow through the sequence of this act of praise in terms of the story of Israel. Verse 4: God’s choice of Abraham, the childless nomad who was to inherit the world, is now focused on God’s choice of a people who are to take forward His plan, a people not only from Abraham’s physical family but also consisting now of all the Messiah’s people, all those ‘in
Him’. Remember that in some Judaean (and biblical) thinking the Messiah represents Israel; but now, people from every nation are summoned to follow this Messiah, and can thereby be joined to this family. That’s the point Paul makes again and again in these opening chapters.
As we know, Abraham’s family ended up in slavery in Egypt; but God declared to Pharaoh that Israel was His son, His firstborn.1 That is a vital element in the story. So here Paul declares, in verse 5, that we have been marked out for this status of sonship. In Deuteronomy, God reminded the people of Israel over and over that they had been rescued, and were being protected and guided, because of His love; likewise, Paul here celebrates the rescuing grace of God poured out through Messiah Jesus, who is the ultimate ‘beloved one’ (verse 6).
The covenant love of God for Israel is focused on the Trinitarian love of the Father for the Son – which then opens up to include all those who belong to the Son.
In particular (verse 7), this has resulted in redemption. That is one normal translation of apolytrōsis, which I’ve rendered here as ‘deliverance’. Far and away the most frequent specific reference of apolytrōsis in the Greek Bible is God’s redemption of His people from Egypt. The word can often carry the associations of someone buying a slave in the marketplace and then setting them free. But in the Bible, that generalised metaphor regularly looks back to the very specific slave-shop of Egypt, and to God’s act of rescuing His people and thereby giving them freedom, a freedom through which they will declare and embody his rescuing grace.
Thus, creation and liberation – Genesis and Exodus if you like – come to fresh fulfilment in the gospel events of Jesus’ death and resurrection. We are redeemed through His blood (verse 7): there we have the Passover message, though now interpreted with the rescue from exile superimposed upon the rescue from Egypt. Notice, here, how the original exodus and the second exodus, promised by prophets such as Isaiah, work together. Th e original exodus was not in itself an act of divine forgiveness as such. Israel’s slavery in Egypt had not come about through Israel’s sin. But the prophets who interpreted the Babylonian exile knew perfectly well that that disaster had indeed been the result of Israel’s sin. So, when they spoke of the ‘new exodus’ of liberation from Babylon – which is the great theme of much of Isaiah and also of Jeremiah and Ezekiel – they knew that this second-time-round exodus had to be a dealing-with-sin exodus.
Hence, the mention of blood. This is, more specifically, the sacrificial blood to cleanse and purify the people so that God could come again to dwell with them. When Jesus did and said things which were designed to resonate with the Passover theme, He was evoking this whole double tradition: rescue from slavery and deliverance from sin and its effects. The layers of biblical history and meaning are superimposed on top of one another, confronting us (as in verses 7–8) with the wealth of God’s grace, lavished upon us.
This, says Paul, opens up the great age-old secret of the creator’s purposes and lays it out before us. The ‘secret’ (verse 9), often translated the ‘mystery’, is one of the great themes of Ephesians, as we’ll see in chapter 3 particularly. So, too, is the ‘wisdom and insight’ (verse 8) which Paul declares is now given to God’s redeemed people.
In the original story, the redeemed people of Israel, rescued from Egypt, are then brought to Sinai, where they are given the torah as God’s way of life for His freed people. In the Judaean world of Paul’s day, some thinkers had associated torah with the notion of ‘wisdom’, fusing them together into a single great design for human living, a life that would bring God glory. So here, Paul declares that God has made known to His people the secret of His purpose ‘with all wisdom and insight’. The redeemed and freed people are given God’s own wisdom to be their new torah, to enable them to become truly human beings. That way of looking at the church’s vocation goes all the way back to Exodus (the idea of the royal priesthood in Exodus 19:6) and comes to us shaped further through Isaiah 40–55. There we read that the call of Israel, and the rescue of God’s people from Babylon, had come about specifically so that the God of creation and covenant might be praised and glorified in the wider world – a theme emphasised many times in the Psalms as well (e.g. Psalm 67). All this together explains why Paul, bringing this long tradition into fresh focus around Jesus, can now say that God’s work in the Messiah – to call, foreordain, adopt and rescue a worldwide people – gives God delight and praise.
Putting it like that seems a lot to take on board. But it’s only really the beginning. All this rich and dense evocation of Genesis, Exodus and other biblical writings is aiming at a purpose which has been largely forgotten in Western Christianity, though in fact it sets the tone for everything else. This, as stated in verse 10 (RSV), is God’s plan for ‘the fulness of time’, the plērōma tōn kairōn.2
God always had in mind that one day Heaven and earth, the twin halves of the original good creation, would be brought together into one, summing up all things in the Messiah, the truly human one.
This is the fulfilment both of Genesis 1 and of Exodus 40 – the bookends of the first two books of the Bible – since, in Exodus 40, the tabernacle is constructed as – yes! – the small working model of the new creation, the sign that Israel’s God has not abandoned His people.
The creator God is not allowing creation to fall apart.
Now, just as John says that the Word became Flesh and tabernacled in our midst,3 so, in the Messiah, Genesis 1 and Exodus 40 have come true, summing up in him the whole cosmos, Heaven and earth together. As I hinted in the first section, for much of the Christian tradition it has been assumed that the point of Christianity was that our ‘souls’ could ‘go to Heaven’ after our death. Many people have read Romans and Galatians with the assumption that this is what they’re really talking about, even though neither of them mentions the ‘soul’, and neither of them suggests that our ultimate destiny is ‘Heaven’. If Ephesians had been given its due, we might have been directed back to the event which is really the climax of the exodus-story, namely the construction of the tabernacle, and the coming of God’s glorious personal presence to dwell within it. The tabernacle, the vulnerable but beautiful joining of Heaven and earth, was a small but rich symbol of God’s purpose.
- God had brought His people out of Egypt so that they could be the tabernacle-bearing people, the people in whose midst God’s plan to bring together Heaven and earth into one place was to be symbolised.
So here, in verse 10, one of the most important lines in the whole letter, Paul declares that the point of it all was that eventually God would sum up in the Messiah the whole cosmos, everything in Heaven and on earth. That evocation of tabernacle and temple will become explicit in Ephesians chapter 2. Paul here celebrates this as the climax of the story of the new exodus, the Jesus-shaped Passover narrative which is now the heart of Christian praise.
1 Exodus 4:22.
2 This is similar to Galatians 4:4, except that there Paul uses the word chronos to indicate time moving forward to the completion of God’s purpose, rather than, as here, kairos, indicating the special ‘moment’ that God had in mind all along.
3 John 1:14, literally translated.
Excerpted with permission from The Vision of Ephesians by N. T. Wright, copyright The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
* * *
Your Turn
The new exodus and the new Passover have happened in and through Jesus. That’s reason to celebrate and worship Him for all that He has done to rescue and redeem us! ~ Devotionals Daily