Ephesians 1:3 - Every spiritual blessing

1:3

The letter proper begins with a declaration of the greatness of our God. In the Greek v3-14 comprise one lone sentence, the English versions break this up, and almost certainly fail to capture the poetic nature of the text. “Praise to be to God ..” This has to be the starting point of any proper understanding of the nature and purpose of the church. If, as we all too often do, start from a man-centred perspective then we will have a very skewed and mistaken vision of the church. The New Testament usually refers to God as the Father of Christ. God has blessed us in Christ. There is no other basis for our blessing except in Christ. If we think all mankind are blessed then we are wrong. In fact, without Christ we are under a curse from God, judgement from God. Later (2:3) Paul will say that we are by nature objects of wrath. That is our state without Christ, but in Christ we are blessed because Christ became a curse for us (Gal 3:13).

And we are blessed with “every spiritual blessing” in the “heavenly realms”. Central to understanding this is a worldview that there is a spiritual realm, the world is not purely physical. There are two key mistaken worldviews. The one most prevalent in our age and part of the world is that the world is purely physical, a materialist worldview. The other, and one that was quite common in Paul’s day among the Greeks, was to see the physical and material as separate, and even to see the material world as evil and something we needed to be rescued from. This was the basis for Gnostic type ideas. The Bible presents a very different worldview. There is a spiritual realm and a physical/material realm, and the two are intrinsically linked. We are favoured by God in the spiritual realm. “heavenly realms” translates one Greek word literally translated as “heavenlies”. “heavenlies” gives far too nice a picture of what Paul it talking about. For we see in Ephesians that the “heavenlies” are a place of spiritual conflict (see Eph 6:12). We also think of “blessings” as being “nice”. Paul is talking about something altogether more serious. His purpose in the letter is to equip the church for spiritual warfare! Talking about spiritual warfare can make some nervous. This happens for various reasons. One is that some, probably we charismatics are the most guilty, can very flakey on this matter and say and do a lot of nonsense. We can think it is somehow not related to the real world, or it sounds too scary. We should not fear, and we should not ignore spiritual warfare. On the point of flakiness and unreal criticisms, let’s look at what Paul says. First, he is absolutely convinced that there is a spiritual war to be fought, so we had better not ignore it! But then look at the letter, the second half in particular is full of down to earth practical instruction on how to live. Our relationship to the world, day to day life within the church, family life, work life. Spiritual warfare is an intensely practical business! At the same time, in one sense we are right to be scared, or rather to realise how serious the situation is. On a daily basis people’s lives are ruined. There is a real battle to be fought, and Paul’s teaching in Ephesians helps us to fight that battle, both for our own sakes, and for the sakes of others.