Ephesians: A Brief Paraphrase

(Note from Alan: Lately our small fellowship group has been reading and discussing Paul's letter to the Ephesians.  The letter is a beautiful summary of how Paul understood God's redeeming work in Christ and through the church.  After reading it numerous times in both English and Greek texts, outlining it, pondering it, consulting commentaries, and trying to teach it, I felt I had still not plumbed its depths.  So as a devotional as well as intellectual exercise, I decided to paraphrase it section by section.  My goal was to highlight the essential ideas while paring it down to around 1/3 its original length.  If I've been successful, the reader will be able to more readily follow the sequence of Paul's thought and grasp his core message as God's apostle.)

From Paul, God’s messenger—to the Christ followers in Ephesus:  May the Lord be with you!

Praise, praise, PRAISE to God for the rich inheritance he has bestowed on us!  Before time, God graciously chose us to reflect his holiness in love.  He predestined us all—whether Jew or Gentile—for adoption into one God-oriented family.  This heavenly treasure is given in Jesus Christ who paid the price for our sins and revealed God’s eternal plan to gather up the pieces of a broken universe while reconciling everything to God.  The Holy Spirit among us here and now is the down payment on God’s certain promise of a new creation.  It’s coming for sure.  Alleluia!

I’m so thankful that you all continue to trust Jesus and love each other.  I pray that you will come to know Jesus even better.   May your eyes be opened to see the glorious destiny of your calling to be “the body of Christ”— that incarnational space where Christ “the head” still manifests himself to the world.  God showed his sovereign might by raising Christ from the dead and giving him complete dominion over everything on our behalf.  May you together experience that same immeasurable power, bequeathed to us who believe, in the Christ-filled fellowship of faith.

Here’s how it works:  We were all once controlled by forces that separate us from God in a state of spiritual death.  The ways of the world, the desires of our mortal bodies, and the tyranny of the Devil incarcerated us in a prison of perpetual self-gratification.  We had no more power to liberate ourselves from this iron coffin than a corpse.  But God rescued our accursed humanity by raising us with Christ and restoring us to a place of honor right next to God himself.  By grace, Christ set us free to reflect the goodness of God again.  This fabulous reversal is a pure gift from God, not because of anything we have done to deserve it.

So you “outsiders” must remember that though you were once aliens to God and his special people, you have now been incorporated into a new, inclusive “Israel” by the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.  Christ has broken down every earthly barrier that separated races and religions.  Through him we all have access in one Spirit to the Father.  No more strangers!  Now we are fellow citizens in the City of God where peaceful unity has replaced judgmental hostility.  Christ is the cornerstone of this re-gathered humanity, ever expanding as we are built together into a holy temple where God himself dwells.

(I, Paul, am in prison on behalf of you “outsiders.”  God revealed to me his eternal purpose to make Gentiles fellow heirs with Jews of all the messianic promises.  That’s why I preach the inexhaustible riches of Messiah everywhere and try to enlighten everyone about God’s secret plan to make Jews and Gentiles members of one body.  The “powers that be” will be awed by God’s wisdom when they see all you folks from disparate and once alienated cultures flourishing together in Christ’s new society.   I don’t mind suffering for this glorious revolution, so don’t worry about me.)

Here’s what I ask from the Father above, whose forever family spans heaven and earth:  Grant us your Spirit’s power to change us from the inside!  Send the crucified and risen Christ to dwell in our hearts through faith; keep us firmly connected to him.  Help us comprehend the incomprehensible dimensions of Christ’s self-giving love as he stands and serves among us.  We yearn for every bit of the treasure God has in store for us.  O God, you can do more than we ask or imagine!  You are made famous by your powerful deeds of love in Christ and in those he calls to live together!  It is absolutely true!

Brothers and sisters, this prisoner for Jesus is pleading with you to live up to your call by patiently bearing each other’s burdens with a gentle, sacrificial spirit.  Hold on firmly to what you’ve already been given—one body, one Spirit, one God and Father of all.  The heavenly Jesus speaks to us through prophets, pastors and teachers.  Such gifts build up the body of which he is the head by preparing us to serve each other.  The goal is complete unity in and with God’s Son, ever growing toward full Christlikeness.  Don’t fall for the world’s lies and distractions.  Instead, trust Christ to keep your fellowship vibrant with life-giving love.

Keep far away from the dark and empty path you once followed when you were shut off from the living God.  That world of false promises is preoccupied with sensuality and greed, but not you!  You now follow one who is the real thing—Messiah Jesus.  He is the New Man, the True Man who reflects God’s image.  Fling off the old strait-jacket of self-destruction, and imagine how the world can change when you put on the wings of Christ.  Get rid of the acids that corrode your life together—lying, stealing, bad-mouthing, hating—and replace them with the glue of truthfulness, generosity, kind words, and mercy.  Forgive each other as God forgave you. Yes, mimic God and give yourselves away through love just as Christ did.

Don’t be deceived by those who want to pull you back into behaviors that bring divine judgment upon the world.  God’s new society has no place for sexual immorality or piggish grasping.  Don’t even joke around about things that incur God’s displeasure.  You’re not in that dark night anymore; you’re living in the Christ-light of everything that is good and true.  If you let his righteousness shine, the benighted will awake from their living death and join you in the brightness.  So let your relationships ever display God’s wisdom in contrast with the world’s foolishness.  Enliven your love-feasts with the Holy Spirit (and go easy on the wine).  When you gather, rejoice with hymns to Christ.  Be thankful to God for everything.

Husbands and wives, as you humbly serve each other in marriage you are a model of Christ’s love for his people.  In marriage, “the two become one,” just as Christ is united with his body, the church.  Husbands, love your wives.  Wives, respect your husbands.  Offer yourselves fully to one another in mutual submission just as Christ gave up his life to save the ones he loves.  The husband is head of the home as Christ is head of the church and so bears the added responsibility of leading the way in self-sacrificial love, just as Christ did.  (Marriage is a deep metaphor for Christ and the church.  He is truly one with us in a common humanity, which he raised from corruption and purified by his sacrifice.)HH

Everything in your households should reflect the peace and goodness of Christ.  Children, God will bless you if you obey your parents.  Parents, don’t be harsh with your children, but teach them the way of Jesus.  Servants, respect your masters just as you do Christ.  Christ is really the one you are serving, and he will reward everyone for the love they show, whether rich or poor.  And masters, treat your servants fairly, without coercion, because everyone must give account to the ultimate Master who shows no favoritism.

Finally, be strong in Christ’s mighty power.  The battle is raging all around you, not against merely human adversaries, but with entrenched powers of this dark world and the demonic spiritual forces that motivate them.  Put on God’s full armor, so that when attacked you will have courage to stand in solid formation.  God himself is your protection—his truth, righteousness, and peace.   Lift high the united shield of faith to extinguish the fiery arrows of Satan.  God’s salvation is your shared helmet and his promises are the sword you wield together against the enemy.  As you march onward, keep praying for everything and everyone.  (Pray for me also, that I might continue to fearlessly proclaim the good news, even though I am in chains.)

God bless you, dear brothers and sisters in Christ.  Our heavenly Father will grant you grace and peace.

The Church--Vanguard of a New Humanity (Notes on Ephesians 1)

The small, struggling communities of Jesus-followers in and around Ephesus receive a letter from the famed apostle Paul.  Writing from his imprisonment in Rome, Paul tells the Ephesian Christians that their humble gathering is the vanguard of a restored and reconciled humanity!  And furthermore, the new society which they are forming is exhibit #1 of God's almighty power!  Such is the expansive vision of God's purpose for the Church set forth in the NT book of Ephesians.  At the start (v.1), Paul asserts his God-given teaching authority as an apostle, an official messenger, of Christ Jesus “by the will of God.”  God himself stands behind this surprising manifesto.  The letter is sent “to the saints in Ephesus, the faithful in Christ Jesus,” who, small and inconsequential as they may feel themselves to be in a hostile world, are actually at the center of an astounding plan of God that involves the entire universe.

Ephesians begins with a call to worship, an explosion of praise that might well serve as a litany for the churches reading Paul’s letter.  The initial words “praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 3) are followed by a recitation of how God the Father chose us, God the Son redeemed us, and God the Spirit sealed us—each unfolding step of God’s saving mission punctuated with a cue to the congregation—“to the praise of his glory!” (vv. 6, 12, 14)  The Christian life is marked with joy and gratitude because we have experienced God’s grace.

Note Paul’s total concentration on the powerful, purposeful activity of God.  All the active verbs in vv. 3-14 refer to God:  It is God who blessed us, chose us, predestined us for adoption, lavished grace upon us, and revealed to us his hidden purpose in Christ.  Humans, on the other hand, are characterized solely with passive verbs:  We have been redeemed, obtained an inheritance, been predestined, heard the word of truth (the ear is a passive receptor), and been sealed with the Holy Spirit.  As Spurgeon said, salvation is “all of grace.”

The expression “in Christ” or “in him” is used repeatedly (12 times) and points to a key concept in Paul’s gospel.  God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world.”  “In him we have redemption through his blood.”  “In him we have obtained an inheritance.”  For Paul, this means more than simply saying salvation has come to us through Christ.  Paul sees Jesus as the second Adam, whose obedience to God secured eternal life for the whole human race, just as the first Adam’s disobedience brought death upon the whole race (see Rom. 5:12-19).  God chose him before creation, God perfected him through obedience unto death on the cross, and God raised him from death as a vindication of his faithfulness.  To be “in Christ” means to identify ourselves with Christ as the representative head of a new humanity, a kind of “corporate personality” in which the whole Christian community is included.  We are chosen not because we are worthy, but because Christ is worthy, and because we are united with him through faith.

Note the ultimate goal of divine election (v. 10).  “God chose us in him . . . as a plan . . . to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”  Although God elects particular individuals, he elects us to become part of a reconciled and reconciling community that will eventually include “all things” in heaven and earth.  The “spiritual blessings” given us in Christ (to be chosen, accepted, and forgiven) are not ends in themselves.  They are part of God’s master-plan to bring everything in the universe back into oneness.  “Election,” “adoption,” and “redemption” are divine actions that draw us individually into God’s predestined, ultimate purpose of “unification.”  Our glorious inheritance from God is a reconciled universe in which every vestige of hatred, division and greed will have been banished and all created beings will live in harmony with each other and their Creator. 

This new creation is not yet fully realized, but God gives the Holy Spirit as a pledge of what is surely coming (vv. 12-14).  The Holy Spirit is not a personal allowance to be cashed in privately, but a communal treasure to be shared between “we who were the first to hope in Christ” and “you [who] also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth.”   The gift of the Spirit is a foretaste of God’s universal intention, like a volcanic island of love rising within the raging sea of a fallen world, destined to expand until there is no more sea.  The tangible shape that the Holy Spirit takes in the world is the Church.  “In Christ you [plural] were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit.” 

So Paul prays (vv. 15-23) for his readers' spiritual eyes to be enlightened that they might know “the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints” [i.e., a corporate reality].  Let’s remember that Paul addresses this letter to “the saints who are in Ephesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus,” a community grounded in this world, not in some ethereal world to come.  This here-and-now community, writes Paul, is a demonstration of God’s “incomparably great power for us who believe” (v. 19).  The down payment of our inheritance comes in the form of “the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way” (v. 23).  The Spirit of the risen Christ indwells the Church so fully that we can say the Church is actually “Christ existing as community” (Bonhoeffer).  This miracle of reconciliation we call “Church” is the most stunning demonstration of God’s “mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms” (v. 20).   Jesus is the second Adam, and the new humanity is rising in him. 

At this point let's consider more specifically the connection between Christ’s resurrection and the new humanity that takes concrete form in the Church.  Death is the enemy that fractures the human spirit and the human community.  The human quest for fulfillment is continually dashed on the jagged rocks of mortality, alienating us from ourselves and from each other, as lust, greed and violence are inflamed by the futile drive for self-preservation.  Although decreed and permitted by God as a divine judgment, death is really the domain of the Devil, the realm where he exercises his limited and sinister power.  This is undoubtedly what Paul has in mind when he says that the risen Jesus is reigning with God “in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (vv. 20-21; cf. “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,” 6:12).  Jesus has conquered death, and death has been stripped of its intimidating power over those chosen, adopted and redeemed in Christ.  We now reign with him, we experience his risen life, and the once-compulsive need to secure our own place in the universe is falling away like a putrid corpse.  The death of the old grasping self makes way for a new humanity—the body of Christ— to rise with their living Head as a community of mutual, self-giving love.

The Problem with Churchless Christianity: Why Justin Bieber and Andrew Sullivan are Wrong, Wrong, Wrong about the Church

Justin Bieber was recently spotted on a California beach sporting a new tattoo on his left calf: the sorrowful face of Jesus Christ.  But the pop star says he has no need for the church. “A lot of people who are religious, I think they get lost. They go to church just to go to church,” he says in a cover story for an entertainment magazine. “I’m not trying to disrespect them . . . but for me, I focus more on praying and talking to Him. I don’t have to go to church.”

Now comes a Newsweek cover story (April 2, 2012) with a hipster Jesus walking in Times Square and the headline:  FORGET THE CHURCH—FOLLOW JESUS.  Subtitle: “Christianity has been destroyed by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists.”  Ignore the church, writes Andrew Sullivan, and embrace Jesus.  OK, let’s all agree that the institutional church is broken and compromised, but can we really afford to “forget it”?

What about “church-less” Christianity?  Can we really follow Jesus in private—like working out with a personal trainer, and never being part of an athletic team?  Is Christian faith like getting personal psychotherapy, or more like the give and take of a 12-step recovery group?  Is it like sitting at a table for one, or like attending an exuberant dinner party?   

The personal aspect of faith is vital and foundational.  God does desire to speak to us directly and intimately.  But—when we look at the Bible we discover that God’s saving purpose in the world is intensely communal.  In fact, God’s goal is a reconciled human race, a new society where all God’s divided children are drawn back together into one.  This is happening, and can only happen, through the social miracle we call “church.”

Distinction:  Church in the biblical sense does not mean “religious ritual” or “bureaucratic tyranny.”  Whatever communal practices we engage in under the umbrella of “church” have only one purpose—to re-connect us with our Creator and with one another.  Mindless ritual for ritual’s sake is what many people reject when they say that church is irrelevant.  But being called together by God’s Spirit, getting healed of our lonely and fractious egotism and receiving adoption into a secure and loyal family—this is relevant to our most basic human needs.  Coercive domination is not what church is about either.  Rather it’s about learning how to serve one another.

The Bible begins with the statement that God created us in his image and after his likeness.  “God is love,” and so our destiny is to flourish in the environment of divine love and to reflect that love to each other.  “It is not good for man to be alone,” God says.  He creates Adam and Eve in such a way that they must depend on each other to find fulfillment.  God could have created us to reproduce asexually via fragmentation (like worms and fungi) or parthenogenesis (like certain plants and fish).   Sexual inter-dependence is a sign of God’s design for families, communities, nations, and the entire human civilization that will flow from the union of Adam and Eve.  Human beings were not created to be self-sufficient.  We need one another.

But God’s purpose to create a human community that reflects his image has been frustrated by a chronic turning away from the divine source of our life.  Starting with Adam, our desire to be autonomous from God has turned history into a horror story of hubris, greed, violence and division.  The Bible reveals God’s repeated interventions to rescue the human race from self-generated chaos.  God breaks into history and reveals his gracious promise of a new world through the “covenants” he enacts with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and David.  These covenants are always social and holistic in nature, restoring God’s presence to the land and the community.

Salvation is a social event.  In the Bible story, God is not just transforming individuals.  He is redeeming the creation, setting in motion a social and cultural renewal that will eventually embrace all nations.  Throughout this history Israel is called as God’s chosen people to bear witness to a new way of being human.  God’s election of a special people is for the purpose of giving the world a public model of human wholeness—what the Hebrew prophets called “shalom.”

At last, Jesus comes as the ultimate revelation of the divine image.  A new covenant.  God with us.  Love incarnate.  He re-connects alienated men and women with God through forgiveness and healing.  And he re-connects broken people to one another by forming a community whose ultimate value is love—to love God with one’s whole heart, and to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. Christ’s revolution of love was opposed by the political and religious powers of his age.  The forces of chaos would not roll over without a fight.  Christ died for love.  But love conquered when God raised him from the grave.

What is Jesus’ legacy?  The Son of God did not leave behind a system of religious philosophy.  He didn’t write anything.  He created a community, an assembly (Gk. ekklesia) founded on himself and propagated through the witness of twelve apostles.  The old age of human disintegration is judged and destroyed on the cross.  The new humanity is raised up with Jesus on the third day.  As risen Lord, he promises to indwell this community, “Christ in us the hope of glory.”  That is why, throughout the New Testament, salvation is represented by such corporate images as “the family of God,” “the body of Christ,” and “the fellowship of the Spirit.”  Salvation is a social event.

Jesus also left behind spiritual practices we call sacraments.  Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are material signs of his death and resurrection.  Like a powerful magnet, the sacraments attach us to Christ’s self-giving love which all creation is predestined to reflect.  These are not meaningless rites, but tangible assurances of our incorporation into God’s new creation.  Church is the earthly fellowship that participates in Christ’s death and resurrection.  Ancient church buildings were built in the shape of a cross to represent the sacramental reality that we are gathered into the heart of God’s suffering love—embraced by a love that will not let us go.

So what’s wrong with the idea of “church-less” Christianity?  First, we need to remember that commitment to Christ, no matter how sincere, has a way of evaporating if not reinforced by the communal channels of God’s grace which bind us together in Christ’s body.  Only a new covenant community created by the Holy Spirit is able to fulfill God’s plan for a new society of recovering autocrats and egotists, a counter-culture of grace that resists the violence and greed so ingrained in human nature and human history. 

Second, consider this parable on the difference between heaven and hell.  We imagine that the hungry inhabitants of hell are seated together around a table of magnificent bounty.  Unfortunately they are separated from the feast by an impassible moat.  Each resident of hell is provided a spoon with a handle long enough to reach the table, but the handle is so long that it is impossible to return any food to a person’s own mouth.  This is their torment day and night—to smell and see a scrumptious meal, but without ever being able to taste it.  Turning to heaven, we are surprised to see that it offers precisely the same accommodations.  The residents there are also separated from the feast by a wide chasm and provided with spoons with handles long enough to reach the table but too long to return any food to their own mouths.  The difference, however, is that in heaven the saints are feeding each other.

The church is the foretaste of such a heaven—“thy kingdom come, on earth as in heaven.”  Salvation is a social event.  As the body of Christ, we are “members of one another.”  We cannot live alone.  We cannot get to heaven alone.  To follow Jesus is to be united in a spiritual fellowship shaped by Christ’s death and resurrection, intertwining one another as the earthly branches of a heavenly vine.