Sermon outline, August 14

INTRODUCTION
What are we up to in Moscow? The simple answer is that we are embarked on an experiment in Christian culture. Ephesians teaches us how we are to do this.

THE TEXT
“Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints who are in Ephesus, and faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, . . . ” (Ephesians 1:1-23).

EPHESIANS AND CHRISTIAN CULTURE
Is Paul interested in helping the Ephesians form a Christian culture? Yes. A “culture” is a way of life pursued shared by a particular group of people. A culture includes beliefs about how the

world works, the symbols that embody those beliefs, the corporate habits that the group engages in, the moral rules that they live by and the ways those rules are enforced.

As we’ll see in future studies, Paul is very interested in forming Christian culture within the Ephesian church. He wants the Ephesians to share certain beliefs about God and Christ (1:18; 3:15-19), about the course of history and its conclusion. He emphasizes that the church is a certain kind of people, bound together through Jesus and not by blood or ethnicity (2:11-22), and he points to baptism as one of the symbols of that unity (4:5). He spends a lot of time explaining how Christians are supposed to live in their relations with one another (4:17-5:21), a “walk” that is supposed to differ visibly from the “walk” of other groups of people (4:17-19). Christian marriages, families, and economic activities are formed Christianly and are to manifest Christian virtues (5:22-6:9). He ends by emphasizing that Christian efforts to form Christian culture put us in conflict with powerful forces of the world that promote a different way of life (6:10-20).

GOD
For Paul, the Christian way of life depends ultimately on the work of God, and on Christian beliefs and confessions about God. Culture is shaped by what is beyond culture. Ephesians 1 is one of the great passages in Scripture about God’s sovereignty and rule over all things, and is beloved among Reformed Christians. Paul emphasizes that our salvation depends on God’s choice, made before the world ever was (1:4), and Paul uses that unpopular and contested word “predestine” (1:5). For Paul, God’s choice and predestination does not pertain only to our salvation, but to all things. God’s purpose is to “sum up all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things upon the earth” (1:10). God not only chooses His people before the foundation of the world, but also “works all things after the counsel of His will” (1:11).

THE GOD OF JESUS
But Paul does not celebrate God’s sovereign rule and power in abstraction from the way God uses His power. He chose us before the foundation of the world so that we would have access to His presence, as a holy and blameless people (1:4). God predestines us to receive the “adoption as sons” (1:5), that is, that we might be the true Israel and the true Adam that God intended humanity to be from the beginning.
Most importantly, for Paul, God is never simply a generic deity; a god who is simply powerful and all-controlling is an idol. Too often, Christians have been implicitly Unitarian. This happens not only when we fail to emphasize that God is Triune, but also when we fail to recognize that God’s character is revealed to us in Jesus. We can talk Trinity until we run out of breath, but if our Trinitarian God is a collection of three Allahs, our theology is not really Christian.

Paul cannot speak about God except in relation to Jesus Christ, who is the revelation of God. For Paul, God is Father because He is “Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1:3). Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is not that they would know a God who is blank, faceless power, but the “God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory” (1:17). Paul wants the Ephesians to know God’s power, but specifically that power is the power that raised Jesus from the dead (1:20), the power of God that triumphs over all death and evil. Historically, the church’s groping recognition that God is Triune arose out of their convictions about Jesus. The doctrine of the Trinity is allows us to say, when we see Jesus, “God is like that.” As N. T. Wright has said, to say that Jesus is God is to make a remarkable statement about Jesus, and it is also to make an astonishing claim about God.

ALPHA AND OMEGA
Paul is God-centered, and for Paul that means He is Christ-centered. From the beginning of history to its end, Paul sees nothing but Jesus. Before the world was, God the Father had chosen us in Him (1:4), in Jesus Christ, so that the Father loved us before we existed because He saw us in His Son. Jesus is the means by which the Father’s plans are realized: We reach our predestined end of being sons of God “through Jesus Christ” (1:5), the Father’s favor comes to us “in the Beloved” (1:6), and redemption and forgiveness come to us “through His blood” (1:7). Jesus the Crucified is the Last Adam exalted above all authority and power and dominion, above all human rulers and kings, above Caesar and Caesar’s lackies.

And Jesus is the goal toward which we are heading. God chose us to be holy, as He is holy; to be sons as He is the Son (1:5); to sum up all things in Jesus (1:10); and to set our hope for the future solely on Christ (1:12). We were with Jesus as we set out on our journey, and He has already arrived at our destination, to await us there.

PLEDGE OF INHERITANCE
For Paul, our destination is not wholly future. In some important sense, we have already arrived, and are already what we will someday become. Paul describes the Spirit as a “pledge” (Greek, arrabon) of our inheritance. The Greek word refers to a down payment that is both part of the principal and a pledge of future payment. Through the Spirit, we have already received the adoption as sons that we will receive more fully in the future. We are already holy, “saints” (1:1), already enlightened in the knowledge of God. Through the Spirit, we already know the power of Jesus’ resurrection (1:19).

The Christian culture that is formed in the church anticipates the order of the new heavens and new earth. Because the Spirit is given to us, we live the life of the resurrection now. Only through the Spirit of the Risen Jesus can we begin to live as we shall live throughout eternity.