Misunderstanding Paul – 11 Ways We Take Paul Out of Context

[0:00] There is a pattern in how we misread Ephesians. And once we see it, we can't [music] really unsee it. We're taking a first century Jewish letter written to congregations in Asia Minor about God's plan to reconcile hostile peoples through the Messiah. And then we read it as if it's like a handbook for 21st century Christian individuals trying to get to heaven when they die or something. And it even comes down to like misunderstanding the words. We turn predestination into a debate about who God picks for salvation. We turn heavenly places into the afterlife. [music] We turn spiritual warfare into private demon combat. We turn the one new humanity into personal conversion stories. And in the process, I hate to say it, but we completely miss what Paul is actually saying. The wild thing is that Paul is describing a cosmic project

[0:49] where God defeats hostile spiritual powers by creating a unified multithnic community that proves the age to come has already started. [music] We've covered this in the previous videos in this Ephesians series. So, if this is all [music] brand new to you, you can go back earlier into this series and into the other videos for a deep dive. But in those videos, we discovered things like the church is the new [music] temple where heaven and earth overlap. Ethnic reconciliation is the evidence that the resurrection is real and every act of unity exposes the powers that thrive on division. So today we're going to do something a little bit different. My project is to try to show you 11 places where we've been misreading Ephesians by importing our theology onto Paul instead of letting Paul be himself and speak on his

[1:38] own terms. For each one, I'm going to name the problem, the misconception that we've inherited, and then give you the solution, what the text actually says when we read it in its original context. This is going to move fast. 11 thorny issues, problem and solution, one after another. And by the end, Ephesians is going to look completely different to you. So, let's start with the one that causes most of the arguments. It's right at the top in Ephesians 1, and it has to do with that simple, easy to understand idea of predestination. What could possibly go wrong starting here? Right? So, we're starting with the one that causes the most theological fist fights. But here's the problem. When most Christians hear predestination in Ephesians 1, they immediately think of Paul talking about God essentially sitting in eternity past with a cosmic clipboard picking individuals for heaven

[2:26] and damning everyone else to hell. Calvinists say God chose some for salvation. Or Armenians say that God forneew who would choose him. And both sides of that, you know, one each side of the same coin really treat this passage like it's answering the question, how does God pick who gets saved? But that is a 16th century debate that we are copying and pasting over a first century Jewish letter. It is not what Paul had in mind at all. Paul is writing to people who already know the story of Israel. And in that story, election is corporate and vocational. God chose Abraham and his family to be the means of blessing for all families on earth. That's from Genesis 12. The whole point of Israel being chosen was so that through them the nations would be rescued. Election was never about

[3:13] extracting individuals to heaven. It was about one family being set apart to serve the world. And Paul is saying that plan has now been fulfilled in the Messiah. So there's a couple of really thorny bits of language here that people get tripped up on. Kind of really starts here in verse four. Just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before him in love he predestined. There's that word. And so let's unpack this a little bit. Paul is saying that that plan has now been fulfilled in the Messiah. Look at how Paul talks in Ephesians 1. He keeps saying in him in Christ chose us in him. All of these different phrases and they're extremely important. We were chosen in him before the foundation of the world. Now there's a later question we'll get to about the we. Who is we? But for now, the whoever makes up that

[4:01] group Paul is talking about of which he seems to include himself, they were predestined in him to be adopted as sons. The Messiah is the chosen one. And if you are united to the Messiah, you share in his chosen status. This is corporate election. Paul is describing God's plan to create a people in the Messiah who would fulfill what Israel was always meant to be. So when Paul says God chose us before the foundation of the world, he's talking about God's eternal plan to bless the world through the Messiah. He's describing the plot of scripture, not a divine sorting hat or a sorting algorithm. Other tremendously important aspects of this passage here are the words themselves. Okay, so chose us in him before the foundation of the world. Some people um kind of want to talk about this before the foundation of the world. Um that's provable kasmu in the Greek. Again, I would say he chose

[4:49] us in him. It's not he chose us before the foundation of the world. He chose us in him. Whoever finds themselves in him finds themselves a member of the chosen status being a member of the chosen one, the Messiah. But then this is also really interesting. Predestined predestined doesn't is not a necessary facet of the definition that it be some kind of eternal status. It's an eternal status change whereby your end destination is set ahead of time irrevocably. It's not that. What it is is that your destination trajectory has been set ahead of time. It's a trajectory word such that when I get on an airplane and I'm going to go fly to Universal Studios in Florida because that's my family's favorite vacation destination. When I get on that plane, I am predestined for Florida. The

[5:37] destination has been set ahead of time. By the time I get on the plane, the end of that trip has been decided already. Now, it remains to be seen what happens on the flight, but my destination has been set ahead of time. Now, what's interesting here, people might hear that and say, "Okay, well, but if if it's not a certain destination, then how can we be confident that God is able to bring about his plans and purposes at all?" Look at what it says. We are predestined for. He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to himself. Now, that's interesting because a lot of people hear adoption and they think, "Oh, the moment I was saved." But that's not how Paul uses that word either. Paul says then in Romans 8:23, not only that, he says, "But also we ourselves having the first fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves grown within ourselves waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters,

[6:27] the redemption of our body." So he's being very very careful here. There's a way in which Paul uses this word and it doesn't it's not salvation itself. It's not the moment at which you accept Christ as your savior and you receive eternal life. It is the fulfillment of that eternal life in the redemption of your body. And so that means that it's something that we're all still waiting for. So for Paul back here to say he predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to himself according to the good pleasure of his will. He's talking about an event that is yet future for all of us. But it's promised for those of us who are in Christ. So of course God is bringing this about for all who are in Christ, who are in him. The end of their story, the trajectory on which they are headed, the destination towards which they are moving is adoption as sons and daughters

[7:15] through Jesus Christ to himself. It's not a discussion about who was picked for that fate before the foundation of the world. It's a discussion of who being in Christ, who was chosen before the foundation of the world. What is it that they're going toward? What are they moving forward to? So, that's our first problem. Our next problem is what are the heavenly places? And oh boy, have we heard this phrase before. So it occurs twice here in Ephesians 1, but then it's going on in Ephesians 2 as well. But blessed be the God and the Father of Lord, our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. In Christ. Interesting. I mean, it's more than interesting. This is mind-blowing. We are given every spiritual blessing that is in Christ in the heavenly places. That's wild. But then, how is it how else is it used? This is in the unbelievable prayer at the end of Ephesians 1 that I want to do an entire

[8:02] separate video about. out. It's incredible. But Paul is in the middle of a a prayer what he's praying for these people to experience and they need some kind of like a fresh infusion of spiritual power to understand. And he says this, "These are in accordance with the working of the strength of his might which he brought about in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places." Okay, so that's a this is for one thing, this is present language, right? But then again, we skip ahead to Ephesians 2 and appears again seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Ephesians 3, it's again, now this is interesting that the multifaceted wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. So you hear that phrase and you might just assume that Paul is talking about the afterlife. You know,

[8:50] like where Christians go when they die, heaven place with clouds and harps and streets of gold and all that. That's how a lot of us have been trained to read it. But Paul is saying something weird. It's different. It's not what we would expect. He says God has seated us in the heavenly places right now. And he also says that there are hostile powers operating in those heavenly places as well. That's all the way in Ephesians 6. So if heavenly places means the afterlife, then Paul seems to be saying Christians are already dead and Satan is in heaven. That that doesn't work. So here's here's what Paul actually means. In Jewish cosmology, heaven and earth are distinct but overlapping present realities. Heaven is the realm where God dwells and where spiritual powers, good and evil, operate. Earth is the physical realm where humans live. And the two are not separate complete dimensions. They

[9:39] overlap. This is a huge theme on this channel, as you might have guessed by the name, but it's very important for us to grasp this. A great example of this is the Garden of Eden. That was a place where heaven and earth overlapped. The temple in Jerusalem was designed to be a place where heaven and earth over overlapped. And Paul is saying the resurrection of Jesus has torn open the boundary between these two realms in a way that changes everything. So when Paul says we are seated with Christ in the heavenly places, he's saying that because we are united to the exalted Messiah, we participate now in the reality of the age to come. Even while we are still living in this present age, the future has broken into the present. Heaven and earth are being merged. And that's why Paul can also talk about hostile powers in the heavenly places. These are spiritual beings who oppose

[10:28] God's plan and who animate the systems and structures that divide humanity. We'll get to them when we get to spiritual warfare all the way in Ephesians 6. But for now, you need to recognize they're not in the afterlife. They're influencing earthly reality. And the church by embodying reconciliation exposes their defeat. So, heavenly places describes the cosmic dimension of reality where spiritual forces are at work and where the Messiah now reigns and where the church already participates. Massively important. Now, I want to go through one more major idea in this section of the letter. And this is one that I see Christians trip up on all the time. And it's fair because it's not easy. It's pretty technical to try to walk through. But we're going to go back to Ephesians 1 and 2 and we're going to look very carefully at how Paul uses we

[11:16] and you. Most people, we read things like this, okay? And there's lots of different ways people articulate this and try to parse this out. But we see uh us, right? It was blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we would be holy. Huh? He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Christ Jesus to himself. Okay. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our wrongdoings according to the riches of his grace which he lavished on us. Huh. Interesting. So we got we we us. And then later he says in whom you now you is not a singular you. That's y'all. In whom y'all also if you've never done this before I've got something here that's a treat. You can see the y'all version. The problem is in English you could mean you person or you people and

[12:06] it's the same thing. So, like, hey, do you want to go have lunch? You could hear that as an individual question. Or if I was pointing to or gesturing to a group, hey, do you want to go get lunch? I could be saying the same thing to a whole group of people. The y'all version highlights those plural y'alls, the 's, and turns them into y'all. So, if we go and read online, it really likes going to honestly, it's wonderful because it does go straight to Ephesians 1. But, but here's this now. So he says to the end that we who first put our hope in Christ or in the Messiah would be to the praise of his glory. When y'all heard the word of the truth, the gospel of y'all's salvation, having believed, y'all were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is a pledge of our inheritance to the redemption of God's own possession to the praise of his glory. Interesting. So we have we and we have y'all and us. Now, what's going on

[12:55] there? Most people assume we refers to Paul and the apostles and y'all refers to the ordinary Christians of any mixture of races in which to which they had been ministering that they brought the message of salvation to. So when Paul says here in Ephesians 1:12 that we who were the first to hope in the Messiah, he must be talking about like the apostolic leadership of the first century, right? Well, unfortunately, I don't think it's that simple. If you track Paul's pronoun usage carefully through Ephesians 1:2, you'll see that something else is going on. He says, let's let's look at this phrase, we who were the first to hope in the Christ. Now, what Christ isn't just, you know, you and I hear that and we just insert Jesus's name. Fine, great. And we're right to do that. It's true. But Christo is a translation of a Jewish word that's

[13:44] messiah. And that whole word has a thousands of years long history leading up to this. So we who were the first to hope in the Messiah, who was that? The Jewish believers, the people who were waiting for Israel's Messiah to come. In verse verse 13, he does this shift. In him, y'all also when y'all heard the word of truth, who heard the gospel and believed afterward, gentile believers, the nations. And this becomes way clearer later, but for now, the contention is that Paul is narrating the historical movement of the gospel from Israel to the nations. And then in Ephesians 2 11-22, he's making that explicit. He's very clear about it. Remember that previously y'all, Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by the so-called circumcision, which is performed in the flesh by human hands. Remember that y'all were at that time separate from

[14:32] the Messiah, excluded from the people of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope, and being without God in the world. And he says this, and it's incredible. But now in Messiah Jesus, y'all who previously were far away have been brought near by the blood of the Messiah. For he himself is our peace, who made both groups into one, and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in his flesh the hostility, which is the law composed of commandments expressed in ordinances, so that in himself he might make the two one new person, in this way establishing peace, and that he might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death that hostility. God, it's really hard to explain how insane this is. sound mind-blowing, but I'll do my best.

[15:20] So, it sounds like Paul's pronouns here are tracking the story line. We equals Jewish believers who were first incorporated into the Messiah. Y'all is gentile believers who were later brought in. And now both are equally part of God's people on the basis of trust in the Messiah who brought and reconciled those who were near and those who were far and brought them into one new humanity in him. It's incredible. There's no hierarchy. There's no apostles versus lay people thing going on. There's no none of that. Paul is describing how God's plan to bless the nations through Israel has been fulfilled in a reconciled multithnic community that represents the Messiah who was God's plan all along. And frankly, it will change how you completely change how you read the first two chapters. Paul is telling a cosmic

[16:08] historical story about how the gospel went out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth, bringing hostile peoples together in the Messiah. That's what the the we and y'all is. Now, I'm going to back up a little bit because we have a fourth issue. And this fourth issue is the translation of this passage of salvation by grace through faith. The most famous verses in all of Ephesians 8 and 9. For by grace y'all have been saved through faith, and this is not of y'all's selves. It is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. Here's the problem. People have spent centuries arguing about which part of this verse is the gift. You have heard this argument before if you've spent even 15 minutes online in Christian circles. Is grace the gift? Is faith the gift? Is salvation the gift? Calvinists say faith is the gift that

[16:57] God gives to the elect. Again, Armenians may say that grace is the gift, but faith is our response to the gift. both sides. Again, I would say both sides of the same coin because Armenians are basically just it's a response to Calvinism, which means it makes all of its beliefs in reference to Calvinism. And if you reject those categories in the first place, you may as well not be either one. Separate discussion. But both sides of that coin treat this verse like it's a proof text for their position. Paul is not trying to dissect the internal mechanics of salvation. He's making a much simpler point. You didn't earn this. You can't brag about it. The whole thing comes from God. Here's where the structure of this thing gets mind-blowing. By grace, you've been saved through faith. Now, let's look at these. Grace, kari, that's a feminine singular noun. Faith. Hm. Let's look at

[17:44] that. Interestingly, that's not that's also a feminine singular. The first one was dative. This is genative. I mean, if if we go into the previous verses even, right? So, riches of his grace. I mean, grace here is another feminine singular. His his kindness. No, that's also feminine singular. Interesting. And why does any of that matter? Well, in Greek, if you have a gendered noun, you'll have gendered versions of words that modify that noun. And what's so wild is that and this is not of yourselves. Of God, it is the gift. This is a nominative neuter singular. You might not even be able to see that demonstrative pronoun nominative neuter singular. He's gesturing to the whole thing, the entire salvation reality. So when Paul says this, this whole thing I just described is not from yourselves. It is the gift of God. He's not singling out one component as the gift. He's saying the entire salvation by grace through faith

[18:34] reality is God's work, not yours. And why does Paul emphasize that? Because he's about to tell them that God has torn down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles. Remember that? That was in this earlier chapter or earlier and later part of the chapter. He's about to say this. If anyone could boast about their status before God, it would have been the Jews who had the law, the covenants, and the promises. But Paul says, "Nobody gets to boast. Both Jews and Gentiles are saved by grace and through faith. The source is God and that levels the playing field completely. Your faith, your trust in God is what allows you to be given this insurmountable, uncsurpassable gift of salvation by grace. Because what good would it be if you had faith in something that was not desiring to save you? You could have faith. You could put your trust in

[19:21] something. And if it couldn't save you or didn't want to save you, then you would not be saved. But God has seen fit to arrange things such that those who place their trust and put their faith in Christ and ask him to rescue them are the very ones who are given the grace to be saved by God's grace. The gift that grace is given to you as an enormous gift. The salvation that you did not earn for yourself. You couldn't have earned for yourself. Yet nevertheless, you decide if you place your trust in him or not. He will make his case. He will intreat with you to accept salvation. And if you don't, his heart is broken by but the whole saving project comes from God. So let's stop using Ephesians 2:8 and 9 as weapons in theological debates about the mechanics

[20:10] of conversion. Paul is talking about the source of salvation, not giving us a flowchart. Neither the grace nor the faith is the the gift the whole salvation aspect is the gift. That salvation by grace through faith is available to you at all is an act of generosity and love on the part of God. All you need to do is believe. Now, we're not out of the woods even with Ephesians 2 yet because that leads to our fifth problem. The idea of the one new humanity. Again, we we live in the modern west where everything is about rugged individualism. I even like that. I don't even think all of that is wrong. The problem is it's just not how the Bible was written. So, most people read Ephesians 2 as a chapter about individual conversion. You know, the way that it goes. Verses 1-10 here are all about how we were dead in our sins, but God made us alive in Christ and us

[21:00] individually, right? Um, so we take that as a description of what happens when a person gets saved. And then we skip to chapter 3. But if you keep reading, Paul is not done. In fact, verses 11- 22, which we alluded to earlier, are the whole point of the chapter. Really, Paul tells the Gentile believers to remember. Remember that they were once separated from the commonwealth of Israel. They were strangers to the covenants. They had no hope. But now in Christ, they have been brought near. And here is the key line. We alluded to it earlier. He has made us both one into one body and has broken down, put to death the hostility and broken down the dividing wall. Paul is talking about the barrier between Jews and Gentiles, the most significant division in the ancient world. Let me riff on this for a second

[21:47] because I think it's really hard for us to understand just how transformative and wild this idea was for the people of that time. So, let's let's just kind of sit back and think about this for a second. Jews and the Gentiles of that time, especially in the ancient near east, the first century, had almost nothing in common. They had almost nothing that they could do together, and their worlds did not overlap, especially not in any kind of a a healthy relational way. It just wasn't that way. I want you to imagine for a second that the United States has been taken over by somebody who who completely disagrees with everything that the United States ever stood for. And those people are while not necessarily your slave drivers, they are constantly spitting upon your American identity, trampling you underfoot. They're they're mistreating anybody that they find is an American. Some former Americans have

[22:36] gone and allied themselves with this new occupying power. And what they're doing is they are extracting money from Americans in an extortionary way, punishing them in order to take more money for themselves by taxing them way way way more of their money than than they ought to. You know, it's an extortionary it's an extractionary kind of a process. Those are the tax collectors in this analogy. And just, you know, you're getting crushed underfoot and your view of these people is extremely negative to say the least. your whole way of life and everything that matters to you is just kind of being trampled underfoot and and and mistreated in a really vile and painful way. Not only that, but you being an American, you have a very specific diet. Of course, this is going to break down at some point, but you'll get kind of the idea. Imagine that these people all ate like cockroaches out of a bowl and they just loved it. They

[23:24] engaged in all kinds of practices that just shock your conscience and make you feel just disgusted by their very presence. That's a little bit what like the Jew and Gentile barrier was like. Jews had been occupied by the Romans for a long time by the time the first century comes around. They're on their ancestral homeland, but nothing that they are participating is fully theirs. Everything has to give reference to and deference to the Roman law and Roman way of life. And those Romans, man, do they really love eating pig. If you were a Jewish person, that was not only like disgusting physically. If you saw a pig, you were disgusted by it. is also morally and religiously offensive to you. Someone eating bacon, as much as you and I might love that sort of thing, would have been absolutely driven to vomiting by the very side of it. And

[24:12] what Paul is saying is that in Christ, that hostility, that barrier is what's been broken down so that God has made a new family, a new humanity out of those two groups of people. This is kind of part of what's so baffling to me about all the people in the most recent string of debates who've been having these conversations about interracial marriage as being suboptimal for the body of Christ. Have you read Ephesians? I don't just say this [clears throat] as someone who's married to a second generation Mexican-American who speaks a lot of Spanish in my own household and with my own in-laws who I absolutely delight in. I say this as a follower of Jesus. That's bonkers. someone has missed the point in a major way if they think that interracial marriage is a problem. Buddy, the whole point is that God broke down the most insurmountable

[25:02] barrier humanly speaking to create a new family in the Messiah out of two groups that were now dissolved and unified into one with Jesus as their king and their new standard and guide. I don't know. that some people need to get back to their Bibles, I guess. But not everybody believes the things that they believe because the Bible actually teaches it or because they've gone through any kind of actual training and teaching on it. They just the way that we come to believe things has very little to do actually with the way that we rearrange the mental furniture in our brains. And the better we get at kind of recognizing that, the better. But anyway, this is proof that the resurrection is real. Ethnic reconciliation. Jews and Gentiles worshiping the same God as equals in the same community. That was unthinkable. And Paul is saying it's the evidence that the age to come has already started. So then you are no longer

[25:50] strangers and foreigners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, citizens of God's kingdom, of course, and are of God's own household, meaning brother and sister, with people who were ethnically different from you, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole building being fit together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the spirit. So, Ephesians 2 is not mainly about individual conversion. If you really think about it, it's about God rescuing people from hostility and creating a unified multithnic family. Salvation being corporate, and the goal is not to get individuals to heaven when

[26:38] they die. The goal is to create a reconciled humanity that proves God's plan is unfolding, ultimately culminating in the unification of all things in heaven and on earth, which we've talked about in the past. Paul says is the mystery of his will for the fullness of time to bring all things together in Christ, things in the heavens and things on earth, to bring together all things. Are you seeing it? So if you miss that, you're turning Ephesians into a book about personal spirituality and you completely miss. It's essentially it's kind of scandalous what Paul is saying, especially if you were in that age. It's just bonkers what he's saying in that context. But that's what makes it so beautiful and so mind-blowing. So now we're going to get to issue number six, which is really the church as temple. And it's it's not a building, and we're going to get to that, but that's issue number six. So salvation is about creating a reconciled

[27:26] community. What is that community for? Here's the problem. Most Christians think of church as a voluntary religious organization. It's a place you go on Sundays. It's a building with a worship service. It's a nonprofit with a mission statement. And if you're serious about your faith, you join one. But it's basically optional. That's just not what Paul says. So, if we go to Ephesians 2, again, this passage is doing a lot of leg work in the logic of the letter. So, let's go look at it. We just talked about this passage, right? Let's keep reading. having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the in whom you also y'all also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the spirit. Paul is using temple language. The

[28:13] church is the new temple. And I've got a whole video on this, too. It's kind of one of the old hits, so it might not be something that you've seen, so we're just going to crash course it. Temple is not about building. It's about heaven and earth occupying the same space again. It's about the overlap of heaven and earth. It started with the Garden of Eden where heaven and earth over overlapped perfectly. After the fall, heaven and earth were separate spaces. Human space was fallen and broken and compromised. And God's plan has been to bring them together again and unify them again. You can think of it like a like a big vin diagram where the circles are overlapping. I need to get like see-through plastic circles or something to illustrate this. It's where God's presence dwells. It's where his will is being done. It's where his his work and his plans are being moved forward. So, it's not a building made of stone. It's

[29:02] a living community made of people, Jews and Gentiles together, unified in the Messiah, becoming the place where God lives. And again, we've talked a little bit about this, but in Ephesians 3, Paul says that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God is being made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. The church reveals something to the spiritual powers. What does it reveal? Paul was given the grace to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ and to enlighten all people as to what the plan of the mystery is. So it was once a mystery but is no longer. It was revealed to Paul and then Paul is revealing it to the Gentiles. What is it? It's not even what it is yet. So that the reason this was given to Paul so that he could teach it to the Gentiles is so that the multifaceted wisdom of God might now be made known

[29:49] through the church through the collected community of God's people forming his body and acting as his hands and feet in the world to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. These are not the good guys. This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which he carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord in whom we have boldness and confident access through faith in him. So it reveals that God's plan to reconcile hostile peoples is actually working. The dividing wall is down. The age to come has begun. And the powers that thrive on division and hostility are being exposed as defeated. So the church is not optional. It's not a weekly event. It's the living temple where God dwells. And it's the means by which God is making his wisdom known to the powers, the rulers, and the authorities in the heavenly places. This

[30:37] is the center of Ephesians 1 through3. Everything Paul has been building toward is this image of a unified multithnic community that embodies the reconciliation that the Messiah accomplished. And it's proof that God's plan to destroy and depose evil and then restore and heal and unify everything else is underway. And the first evidence of that is the unification of other human beings along ethnic boundaries. where the powers had been using those tools as division, God is now able to undo that division and make one new restored shield humanity that forms up the citizenry of his kingdom. It is mindblowing. When you miss that, you end up thinking that the church is just, you know, like your personal preferences or convenience or

[31:24] something. But Paul is saying it's a cosmic project. It is the citizenry of God's own kingdom, the members of God's own body gathered together from all places, proving that his project is underway and the victory has already been won and just needs to be implemented. That just blows my mind. I love it so much. Okay, so let's look at the last one for this section. What are the powers? That's issue number seven. We need to talk about the powers. We've talked about this. We just looked at rulers, authorities, all that. Some Christians say the powers are demons. You know, Satan and his minions. So spiritual warfare is about casting out demons and battling with invisible evil forces. Maybe it's part of it. Could be part of it. Probably is part of it. Other Christians say powers are just human institutions. You know, governments, corporations, systems of oppression, that sort of thing. So

[32:10] spiritual warfare is about social justice and structural change. Okay, maybe. And you, by the way, you would need to be very careful about how you go about that project to make sure that what you're calling is evil is not good and what you're calling good is not evil. But the the idea is there. Maybe it's maybe there's some structural and systemic stuff going on too and we need to look into that. Paul holds both together. The powers are spiritual beings whose influence is expressed through earthly systems and structures. So if we look at these back in Ephesians 1 here, here's a little guided tour of how Paul uses the term. He says that Christ is seated above all rule and authority and power and dominion. Right? Right here, which means these are things that exist. Okay, that's good to know. A lot of y'all act as though there aren't other rulers and powers and authorities and dominions as though God is really

[32:58] the only one and that there's nothing whether in line with God's will or even opposed to God's will that even exists in the spiritual realm. That's kind of weird. It's not what the Bible says. Of course, he says Christ is seated above all the rule and authority and power and dominion. So there you go. He is still ruling over it. In Ephesians 2, he says, 'We were once following, you've heard the phrase the prince of the power of the air. Right here, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Uh prince is just ruler, the the aray, the ruler of the authority of the air. In Ephesians 3, we just read, he says that the church makes known God's plan and his wisdom to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. And here's going to be our first foray into Ephesians 6. But he also says, of course, with a lot of connective tissue in between what we just said and what we're reading now, that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against

[33:47] the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places that are at work in this present darkness. These are spiritual beings. They're real. They operate in the heavenly places and they're opposed to God's plan. Again, do you believe that spiritual warfare is an actual category or don't you? But here's the thing. Their influence shows up in earthly reality. They animate the systems and structures that divide humanity. Ethnic hostility, social hierarchies, ideologies of dominance, systems that dehumanize. The these are not just human inventions. A a great example of this that most people would recognize is the sexual revolution in the 60s and 70s. more or less a whole society of people thinking

[34:35] that the good life that what really will lead to them being fulfilled and happy and and life going the way that they always wanted it to go was to just have as many sexual partners as they could possibly have in as many configurations as possible and that that was really the ideal toward which they would strive. And what happened was people with destroyed relationships, destroyed bodies by diseases that were in that created that were created by that kind of behavior destroying one another. Children being born often affected by these same diseases with no parents and creating a whole generation of brokenness and evil and and destruction and chaos being wrought upon the family. There's a spiritual evil. Paul would just be saying, "Man, this is the powers

[35:23] at work. There's spiritual evil at work here. It's animating the beliefs, the minds, the the behaviors of people who choose to partner with those powers. And then it has a a massive effect on the world in the world." So, they're expressions of spiritual powers that thrive on division, destruction, evil, death, and chaos. And the church defeats them by embodying the opposite, by taking up the full armor of God. When Jews and Gentiles worship together as equals, we're going to get to this armor here in a minute, that exposes the powers. When the dividing wall is torn down, that reveals their defeat. When the temple of God is made up of formerly hostile peoples, that makes known the wisdom of God. So spiritual warfare is not just private demon combat, and it can't be reduced to social activism or co-opted by any social activist

[36:12] platform. It's going to be the communal embodiment of reconciliation in the church in a world where spiritual powers thrive on that division on that destruction and that chaos. So every time the church lives out unity and life and love by the spirit, it's engaging in spiritual warfare. And every time the church fractures along ethnic or social lines, it's just feeding the powers and giving in to their war. This is why Paul can't separate theology from ecclesiology. The church is God's chosen weapon that he uses to defeat the powers and to put on display their defeat in the Messiah. And the powers know it. All right. Now, listen. We're halfway through this thing. And if your brain is starting to hurt, maybe that's a good sign because what we're doing here is we're rewiring the way that you've been trained to read the scriptures. Before

[37:01] we tackle the last four issues, I want to tell you about something that's been helping me to process all of this. I created something that I'm calling the Heaven on Earth prayer journal. It's a prayer journal designed to help you make the most of your days living in light of the Lord's Prayer and living in community as disciples of Jesus by putting it all to work. Because the thing is that you you can know good theology, but if it doesn't change how we relate to God and to one another and how we live our lives in the day-to-day, what's the point? So, the prayer journal is designed to walk you through different ways to pray based on what you're learning. And it helps you put your experiences right into the center of the story that God is telling, which is his plan to restore and unify all things in heaven and on earth through Jesus. And just in case you haven't noticed, that's what Ephesians is all about, too. Heck, there are even

[37:49] coloring pages. If you're the kind of person who likes to doodle while you learn, there's so many that I made specifically so that you would have a way of putting this to practice in your life in some of something of a meditative way. And it's all completely free to you as my gift. I'll put the link in the description. I would recommend it to you highly. You'll also get access to like my Facebook group and other ways that we can stay in touch together and even resources for other videos and other sermons that I've curated that I think emphasize how to live our lives every day on earth as it is in heaven. So, I recommend that you download it if that's of even slight interest to you. I made it with a lot of love and I think that you'll benefit from it. Let's finish this. We've got four more issues to get to and they all have to do with misreading church life and Christian ethics. There's a lot to

[38:38] they have a lot to do with each other. So, it's not as though we're going off on some other wild tangent, but we are in the home stretch. And let's talk here about unity versus uniformity. It's a very very important issue. Most Christians think unity means everyone thinks the same, votes the same, agrees on everything, and never disagrees. So when conflict shows up in a church community, people panic. They assume something is broken and they either avoid conflict entirely or they try to just force everyone into the same mold. We all must adhere to this same set of doctrinal statements and if you don't then your salvation is in question. Paul doesn't seem to think that way. in Ephesians 4, which if the first three chapters of Ephesians are all very much focused on things that are true in a metaphysical and and in a in a spiritual

[39:27] sense and then Ephesians 4:1 marks the boundary marker at which now we're going to talk about that as though it's not spiritual anymore. But here's practical instruction for living out that reality that we just learned about in the spiritual realm. So this is right at the very beginning. This is right at the beginning of that passage and right in the beginning of that transition point. He says to be diligent to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. Paul says to maintain unity, not create it. We don't create that unity. The unity was created for us when we were unified in the Messiah. It already exists. The spirit has already created it. Our job is to protect it, to be diligent to keep it. Paul is what that unity looks like. One body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and father of all. The unity is grounded in shared allegiance to the Messiah, not

[40:15] in sameness. Now, how wild then that immediately after establishing that this unity exists and calling us to protect it, Paul talks about diversity. He says Christ gave gifts to the church, apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers, different people with different roles. This whole interesting part here where he's kind of calling back to earlier Old Testament passages. He does that a lot really. But that God gave some gifts to the church. Apostles, the sentout ones, prophets, those who boldly proclaim a word from God. Some as evangelists, the good news people that walk around with the good news on their lips all the time. Some as pastor teachers, shepherds, and those that open up the the Bible and help people to be discipled into the way of following Jesus. And what's the point of

[41:02] all that diversity and all those other gifts and all the measures of grace that are given to the different members of the body? What is the point of that? for the equipping of the saints, that's all the believers in the body of Christ, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ. Holy cow, different people with different roles. And the point is maturity. The church grows up by having all these different voices working together, not by silencing disagreement or making everybody look the same. So unity and diversity go together. The goal is maturity and maturity happens in community. When everyone contributes their particular gift, the body builds itself up in love. But when people are

[41:51] expected to be the same, growth stops. So conflict, differences, even disagreement are not enemies of unity. Uniformity actually in some ways is a larger obstacle because if there's no conflict, frankly, it's going to be a false unity. When you try to manufacture sameness, it's going to be working against the spirit. But when a church community protects the unity that already exists while making room for various gifts, it matures. Which brings us really to issue nine, which is right in this same neighborhood. What are the leadership gifts about? Because here's here's the problem. Most churches read Ephesians 4:11 as like a job description for church hierarchy. There are whole movements built upon this idea that there should still be the fivefold ministry. They say five-fold because you got 1 2 3 4 five is what they view. Five

[42:40] separate roles. Pastor teachers is is one role. So not really the same. Um but they see that all five of these should be present in any healthy church. Maybe it's, you know, sometimes it's apostles at the top, prophets below them, evangelists, pastors, and teachers filling out the orc chart. And everyone else sits in the pews and receives ministry from the professionals to whom they delegate all of their spiritual life and their spiritual work. But that is the opposite of what Paul is saying. We just looked at this. Paul says Christ gave these people to the church, not over it, to it. They are gifts. And what's the purpose of these gifts? To equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ. They exist to equip everyone else for ministry, not to do the work of the ministry itself. Their job is to train the whole body to do the work. They're not there to create a clergy class that

[43:28] does ministry while everyone else watches and passively receives and and doesn't even participate. They're there to activate the entire community. And the goal is that we all attain unity and maturity, knowledge of the son of God, and the fullness of Christ's stature until we measure up to what Jesus is. the whole body growing up together, not a few leaders getting spiritually mature while everyone else stays dependent. >> If your church has a model where a small group of professionals does all the ministry and everyone else is a consumer, that's not Ephesians 4. Paul's describing a church where every member and not a church building and not an organization. Remember that. But he's describing the church as a community where every member is being equipped to contribute. leadership exists. Leadership, not hierarchical leadership, but leading from within to serve that goal, not to hoard ministry

[44:15] opportunities and power for themselves. Now, our 10th issue, it it's kind of a big one. We'll just we'll just lump a few things all in here together. Ephesians 4 and five and six, we said, are kind of the practicals of this. Let's talk about sort of the ethical commands here in the second half of Ephesians. That's our 10th issue, the ethical commands. The problem is that most people are reading Ephesians 4-6 as a list of moral rules. Do this, don't do that. Be a good person, improve yourself. And they treat it like the first three chapters were just about theology and the last three chapters are only about application. But Paul actually doesn't necessarily divide the letter that way. Ephesians 4 starts, I urge you, therefore, to walk worthy, to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called. Walk worthy of your calling, not try to

[45:03] become worthy. You already have a calling. You already have a new identity. Now live like it. Now Paul gives the repeated pattern. Put off the old self and then put on the new self which is in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth. Therefore rid yourselves of falsehood. Speak truth each one of you with his neighbor because we are members of one another. We're parts of the same body. Be angry and yet do not sin. Right? Here's this pattern. Put off the old self. Put on the new self. Put away falsehood. Speak truth. Let the thief no longer steal. Let him labor. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths. Only such as is good for building up. Every command is grounded in your new identity. You are a member of a new human race. You've been transferred from the old creation to the new. So stop living like you belong to the old and start living like you belong to the new.

[45:51] This is identitydriven ethics, not moralistic self-improvement. And Paul very interestingly is not just giving you universal laws that apply to everyone everywhere. He's describing what the new humanity looks like and it's embodied in a context. People who tell the truth instead of lying. People who work and share instead of stealing. People who build each other up instead of tearing each other down. People who forgive because they've been forgiven. This is what it means to be a member of the new heavens and new earth creation community, the church. You embody that new creation. So when we detach chapters 4 through 6 from chapters 1 through 3, we turn Paul's vision into kind of like a moralistic vision. But when we keep them together, we're able to see that ethics flow from who we are in Christ together, not from trying harder to be good. Now, our last one is a bit of a

[46:38] doozy. Number 11 here, and it is spiritual warfare. I want to touch I want to touch on this one more time. When most Christians think about Ephesians 6, they picture an individual believer standing against an army battling against demons. You individual put on the armor of God. You fight the devil. You bind and rebuke and cast out. and spiritual warfare becomes this private individualistic thing where you're constantly worried about demonic attack. But that's not what Paul describes. If we put this in context, Paul has spent five chapters talking about the church as a unified body. He's described how God is creating one new human out of formerly hostile peoples. He's shown how the church reveals God's wisdom to the powers by embodying reconciliation and unity. And then in chapter six, he says, "Finally, be strong in the Lord. Put on the whole

[47:26] armor of God that you may be able to stand. A few things are very, very, very important. Stand. That's the word Paul keeps using. Stand firm. Stand against. Keep standing. Don't stop standing. This is not offensive push back warfare. This is defensive. The church is holding ground. And what are they standing against? The schemes of the devil. Deception, division, the things that fracture the unity Paul has been describing. It's not necessarily going on offense. That's not what Paul's talking about. Maybe he talks about that elsewhere. That's not what's in view here. This is our ability to defend the church against the enemy's uses and the enemy's weapons. Not magic weapons for demon combat. Here's the other thing. Every single one of these commands that is given is not a singular command. It's a plural command. The community is to

[48:16] second person plural take up the complete armor of God. So, second person plural. Y'all take up the singular armor of God. So that y'all may be able I should probably dig up the y'all version for this too, but second person plural to withstand in the day of evil and all things having done to stand. I like reading it uh kind of literally in the interlinear here. So stand therefore, having girded the loins of y'all with truth. But there we go. Second person plural. You see the 2 P there? second person plural. And having put on y'all the breastplate of righteousness, this is a masculine plural. And having shaw the feet of y'all with the readiness of the gospel of peace. Besides all that, having y'all taken up the shield of faith with which y'all will be able to

[49:06] all the arrows of the evil one flaming to quench. It gets really fun to read it like this. I don't know. makes me feel like Yoda or something because English and Greek uh subject verb, you know, the the the subject object verb orders of things don't don't line up in English and Greek. So, it just makes it kind of funny. But these are the qualities that protect a whole [snorts] unified community from forces that want to tear it apart. Truth protects y'all from deception. Righteousness protects y'all from compromise. The gospel of peace, which is an absence of hostility and a presence of lifegiving unity, protects y'all from hostility. Faith protects y'all from doubt and so on. And oh buddy, if you've never learned this, there's another whole world available to you where you might not have gathered where Paul is taking this from. Believe

[49:55] it's 59. Let's read a little bit together here. The confession of wickedness. We'll get to it, but there's just a little bit of background I want to give you. Therefore, justice is far from us and righteousness does not reach us. We hope for light, but there is darkness, for brightness, but we walk in gloom. We grope for the wall like people who are blind. We grope like those who have no eyes. We stumble at midday as in the twilight. Among those who are healthy, we are like the dead. All of us growl like bears and moan sadly like doves. We hope for justice, but there is none. For salvation, but it is far from us. For our wrongful acts have multiplied before you, and our sins have testified against us. For our wrongful acts are with us and we know our wrongdoings. Offending and denying Yahweh and turning away from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering lying words from

[50:43] the heart. Justice is turned back and righteousness stands far away. For truth has stumbled in the street, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and one who turns aside from evil makes himself a prey. Now Yahweh saw, and it was displeasing in his sight, that there was no justice. and he saw that there was no one and was amazed that there was not one to intercede. Hitting pause for a second to say that that's a pretty interesting verse for the open theism discussion, but that's a separate issue. Then his own arm brought salvation to him, and his righteousness upheld him. He put on righteousness like a breastplate, and a helmet of salvation on his head, and he put on garments of vengeance for clothing, and wrapped himself with zeal as a cloak. according to their deeds. So will he repay. Wrath to his adversaries, retribution to his

[51:31] enemies. To the coastlands he will deal retribution. So they will fear the name of the Lord from the west and his glory from the rising of the sun. For he will come like a rushing stream which a wind the wind of the Lord drives. A redeemer will come to Zion and to those in Jacob who turn from wrongdoing, declares the Lord. Isn't that fascinating? It's God who wears the armor. It's the armor that belongs to God. It's the armor of God in that way. And now Paul is saying the church wears it. The church carries forward the work of the divine warrior by embodying the qualities that resist the powers. I don't want you to miss this. This is absolutely titanic. Some of you heard me earlier saying that our job isn't to fight back. We do fight back by not fighting at all. We God, how do I put this? Paul's advice is that we

[52:18] take up the armor of God to stand firm, to stand unified, to be together, to maintain the unity of his spirit in the bond of peace, to not allow for there to be brokenness and and sin and destruction in our midst that keeps us from each other. It's a stance that's defensive. In so doing, we are performing the work that God himself uses to win the battle. Does it make sense? God is the one who is advancing the war. And our part is to stand firm and not be taken down. And if we live in love for one another, that is the apologetic that the watching world needs to see in order to know that Jesus Christ is the one that God sent. So spiritual warfare is about communal love and obedience to God. It's about the

[53:07] church standing firm in unity against the powers that would divide us. Every time we choose reconciliation over hostility, we are engaging in spiritual warfare. Every time we speak the truth instead of deception, we're standing firm. Every time the church refuses to fracture along ethnic or social lines, it's defeating the powers because that's how God ends up winning. And that's why Paul ends the letter with a call to pray for each other, to stand together, because the fight is corporate, not private. And it's about us standing firm so that God advances the battle lines and wins his own war to secure his kingdom. Okay. So, so what now? 11 thorny issues. We've walked through 11 places where we've been reading our theology into Ephesians and over the top

[53:55] of Paul instead of letting Paul tell his own story. Here's what happens when you let Paul be Paul. Ephesians is no longer a book about how individuals get saved and go to heaven when they die. It may involve that story as but it's part of a much larger story. Instead, we're looking at a letter about how God is defeating hostile spiritual powers by creating a reconciled multithnic community that proves the age to come has already begun in Messiah Jesus. Predestination is corporate. We who are in Christ are destined for adoption as sons. And the minute you place yourself in Christ, that destination is set ahead of time. The heavenly places are where the church already participates. The powers are both spiritual and structural. Salvation rescues you from hostility, not just guilt. The one new humanity is the evidence of

[54:45] resurrection. The church is the living temple where God dwells. Unity is grounded in our differences that were given to us as gifts intentionally. Leadership exists to equip everyone. Ethics flow from our identity. The best of the behaviors that the Christian life is designed to create in you have nothing to do with you gritting your teeth and trying. They have everything to do with what God has already done and is already at work in you doing and living out the story that you're living in as a follower of his and a member of his body. And spiritual warfare is the communal embodiment of that reconciliation as we defensively stand against the powers trying to divide us and destroy us. That's the story Paul's telling and it changes everything. Or, you know, maybe that's just me doing

[55:34] engaging in some kind of preacher speak, right? Maybe it doesn't change everything. What does it mean for Monday morning when you get to this stuff? And how do you live this out? It means that every time you choose reconciliation over division, you're engaging in spiritual warfare. Every time you build someone up instead of tearing them down, you're embodying the new humanity. Every time you protect and even fight for unity while making room for that diversity, you're maturing the body of Christ. And every time the church gathers as a multithnic, multigenerational, unified community is revealing God's wisdom to the powers and showing that their days are numbered and God's plan is well underway. You are part of a cosmic project. The church is not optional. It's where heaven and earth overlap. It's where God's presence dwells and your everyday choices either

[56:21] resist the powers or feed into their deception in their lies. That's Ephesians. And if you want to go deeper with this, if you want to live in light of that story, I can't think of a better place aside from the book of Ephesians than to go to the Lord's own prayer over these things where his prayer is that things would be done on earth as they are in heaven. that he that that God would not lead us into temptation or into the test, but instead deliver us from evil. So once again, my recommendation is that you grab your own free copy of the prayer journal to help you process what you're learning and turn this into an actual conversation with God because knowledge is great, but transformation happens when this gets brought into your own relationship with the one who called you and begins to affect and change your daily living. The link is in the description. It's completely free. Go grab yourself a

[57:09] copy. And if you're new to this series, I'm in the middle of this Ephesians thing. I've been doing it for a while. It's taken a long time. Sorry. Thank you for the patience and me getting these videos out. I've really wanted to take my time uh and make sure that I'm studying this very deeply before I just kind of soft roll something out there for you guys. If you want to learn more about this, you can start from the top with this video about how to read Paul's letters without imposing modern categories onto the first century Jewish texts. I hope it blesses you in the biggest way. Further up and further in.