Paul’s Prison Letter That Threatens Every Power Structure

[0:00] A man sits chained in a Roman prison writing about cosmic victory. Paul the Apostle is literally imprisoned by the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. And yet he's dictating a letter about how Jesus has been seated a far above all authority and power and dominion. The irony is almost laughable on its face. Except Paul isn't laughing. He is deadly serious. Because what Paul is writing in that prison cell might be the most comprehensive vision of reality ever put to paper. It's called the letter to the Ephesians. And if you're very confident that you know what it's about, it's very likely you're missing some things that are very important. Because this book, this letter that Christians love to quote for personal encouragement was actually written as a cosmic manifesto that was designed to

[0:48] oppose and terrify the powers that be with a cosmic vision that Paul received directly from Jesus himself. In fact, Paul calls this letter to the Ephesians an apocalypse. And he doesn't mean the end of the world by that term. We're going to have to redefine some things as we actually crack open this letter and study it. But what he means is the unveiling of what's really going on behind the scenes of everything that you can see with your own two eyes. And what's really going on is that God is in the process of completely rewiring reality as we know it. Not just your heart, though that's included. Not just the church, though that's the beach head, but literally everything. Heaven and earth are being fused back together in Jesus Christ. So again, Paul writing this from a prison cell is just dripping with irony. He wrote this chained to a

[1:37] Roman guard. The empire thinks they've contained him, but Paul knows better because what he's describing in this letter can't be reduced down to spiritual theory. Because Paul has written this to be the Christian community's guide for living in light of the revealed reality of Jesus as the king of the universe, the apocalypse, we might say, of the crucified and risen king of the cosmos. and it shows us how to live out the reality of God's eternal purpose which he completed in the sun which is the unification of heaven and earth in him. This letter contains within its pages the potential to take ordinary people and make them into agents of cosmic renovation. It has revolutionary insights for race relations, for marriage, for your work, for all of your other relationships. And the church can become heaven's invasion force on earth. And if we just allow

[2:26] ourselves to be defamiliarized, to look past all the bibly language that we're used to when we open up the letter to the Ephesians and we put it in its context and really try to inhabit that time and space when we read its words, it could completely change the way that we view reality itself. So this video is going to be something of an overview of sorts as we crack open the letter to the Ephesians and see what Paul had to say to the church community at that time. So let's dive right in. So, what exactly did Paul see in this apocalypse that landed him in prison? What vision was so dangerous that the Roman Empire felt threatened enough to chain him up? Paul actually gives us the best framing of his letter all the way back in Ephesians 3, which as you'll know comes after Ephesians 1 and 2, but he sort of lays out his mission statement and what it is that he says he's doing, what he thinks

[3:14] he's doing. And he says it this way. For this reason, I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus, for the sake of you Gentiles, interesting. And we're going to have to pull on that thread and see what he says in the previous two chapters. By revelation there was made known to me the mystery as I wrote before briefly. So what is he talking about? Chapters 1 and two. He's revealing a mystery in chapters 1 and two that we're going to have to go and open up to see what he means by that. Now the word mystery is this Greek word here muststerion. And it doesn't mean like a detective trying to go and figure out what's going on and you know solve a mystery like that. It means something that was unknown previously that is now being revealed. Meaning this is literally new information that did not exist prior to the revelation of this mystery. And we're going to unpack what the revelation of that mystery was back in chapters 1 and two in a minute here.

[4:03] But he says by referring to this literally when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ which in other generations was not made known to mankind as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets in the spirit. He applies it in a specific way that we're going to unpack in later videos. But then he tells us that all of this is in pursuit with or in accordance with the eternal purpose which he carried out in Jesus Christ our Lord. So all of these words tell us some pretty important things that are going on in the letter to the Ephesians that if we're not careful, we'll just blow right past it. And this is where I want to start. That word revelation is the Greek word apocalypsis. And it actually is the word apocalypse literally. You can hear it. Apocalypsis. Apocalypse. Now, we've been conditioned to think that that means cosmic disaster, the end of the world, the plagues and destruction of the

[4:51] world. But that Greek word of apakaloopsis literally just means to uncover something, like pulling a blanket off of something that was already there. Pulling the lid off of the Thanksgiving turkey to reveal the juicy deliciousness that you're serving for dinner. It explicitly does not describe the end of the world. It's describing the moment when you finally see what's been true all along. It's like those art exhibits. I don't know if you've ever seen these. They're absolutely incredible. But you think that what you walked into this art exhibit to look at is honestly just a big pile of trash on the floor and then someone flicks on a light and what you actually see is a masterpiece. You see this trash, but when the light turns on, it's actually a silhouette of two people leaning against each other and it's absolutely startling. This is revealing what was there all along. Even if it seemed like unintelligible scribbles,

[5:38] this is what's actually happening. The masterpiece was always there. or you just needed the right light to see it. That's apocalypsis. The light gets turned on, the veil gets removed, and reality becomes visible. Paul had this experience on the Damascus road when the risen Jesus appeared to him. A lot was revealed to Paul in that moment. It was revealed to him that he was not following the path that he thought he was. He intended to be serving the God of Israel and he was actually persecuting him. But he could also see that heaven and earth weren't two separate realms of reality. They were overlapping dimensions of one unified creation. And Jesus, the crucified and risen Messiah, was the hinge point where these dimensions met. So if we go back to Ephesians 1 and we look down at verse 10, we are going to do a full exogetical walkthrough of this at some point, but that's not what today's video is about. If we look at verse 10, he says this

[6:25] interesting phrase. In fact, let's start in verse 9. He made known to us the mystery, there's that word again, of his will. Meaning what his will was, was not actually fully revealed before this moment, according to his good pleasure, which he set forth in him, that's in Jesus, regarding his plan for the fullness of the times, to bring all things together in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth. This isn't plan B because humanity messed up. This was always plan A. Since the foundation of the world, God's intention was to create a reality where the heavenly realm and the earthly realm would be perfectly integrated. If you spent even 5 minutes around my channel, you know that I'm always sort of harping on this idea. In Genesis 1 and 2, the Garden of Eden was the prototype, a place where God walked with humans in

[7:14] the cool of the day, where heaven and earth overlapped seamlessly. So, when Paul talks about God's plan for the whole world, it's not just about rescue. Of course, rescue from sin is a central part of that for everybody who claims the name of Jesus. And he's not just talking about escaping to go to heaven. He's talking about God's project to bring heaven and earth back together the way that they were designed to be. And that's why in Ephesians 2, he can say with a straight face that God has already raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms. We're not waiting to get to heaven in that sense. Heaven is being established here through us and it will ultimately be brought to bear when Jesus himself returns to complete the job. Hey, sorry to interrupt the video, but there's actually something I wanted to share with you that I hope you're interested in because what we're talking

[8:02] about here is the overlap of heaven on earth in Christ in the book of Ephesians. I think it might be relevant for you to know that I created something that I'm calling the heaven on earth prayer journal. This same exact theme is repeated in Jesus's amazing prayer that we call the Lord's Prayer, where he says, "May your kingdom come and your will be done here on earth as it is in heaven." And this is a resource that I designed and wrote out intending to help you live every second of your life in light of that amazing prayer of Jesus himself. I've included even daily, weekly, and monthly prompts to help you sort of gauge where you're at in terms of living this way. I've given you maps and reflections and even coloring pages for those of you who are interested in that sort of a thing. And I've intended to just give you as many resources as I can to look at the ways to live life as

[8:51] Jesus Christ intended to adopt an eternal perspective that looks at his eternal purpose in unifying all things in heaven on earth through him. So if you're interested in that, you can always grab your own copy completely free just by going to the overlap.life/prayer-journal. And if you really like, you can spread the word afterwards and get some other cool resources as well. Yours for free if you want it. I hope it blesses you. Let's get back to the rest of the video. And this is where the church comes in. Because the church, which we've talked about in past videos, isn't just an organization. It's not some kind of 501c3 nonprofit. It's not an event you go to on a Sunday. It's his people, his covenant people forming a kingdom together. It's not a social club for people who happen to believe similar things about God. The church is God's people and it's through them that his

[9:39] strategy for demonstrating what unified heaven and earth actually looks like runs. Paul calls the church God's masterpiece in Ephesians 2. But the Greek word is poma which means like a work of art or a poem. We can be seen as God's poetry, his creative expression of what happens when heaven invades earth. When Jews and Gentiles who have hated each other for centuries suddenly start worshiping the God of Israel together, share meals together, care for each other's children, that's supernatural. Something really crazy is happening there. Something revolutionary. And Paul wants us to see, and this is thematic to the entire book, that is heaven and earth overlapping in Ephesians 3. Again, Paul says that this unity puts the manifold wisdom of God on display to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places, which by the way, not all of them are good. That's a preview of something coming in Ephesians 6. But

[10:27] the church's existence is a cosmic announcement that God's plan is working. Every time your local church community gathers, every time you get together with two or three in Jesus's name for mutual edification, love, and encouragement to live as if Jesus is king more faithfully in your rest of your lives, even if it's all messy and there's all kinds of craziness and in all the diversity, you are participating in the greatest artwork God has ever created, the preview of heaven and earth unified in Jesus the Messiah. So that's really the first half of the letter in major summary. But here's where Paul's genius really starts to show off. Most theological thinkers can handle big philosophical cosmic ideas, and most practical teachers can give you life advice. But Paul does something that I don't think anyone other than Jesus has ever pulled off to the same level of

[11:15] skill. He seamlessly connects the biggest possible vision of everything that's happening in reality with the smallest daily details. And he does it in a way that frankly still makes sense to us thousands of years later. Because if you look at the structure of Ephesians, you'll see Paul's method. Chapters 1 to three are just pure vision from the throne of God. Election in Christ from the foundation of the world, resurrection, power, principalities and powers, the mysteries hidden for ages, being seated with him in the heavenly places in Christ. And then chapter 4 starts with one word, therefore. Therefore, walk worthy of the calling with which you've been called. He's not changing subjects. He's showing a logical connection from the first half of the letter to the second half. Because God has a cosmically significant plan to unify heaven and earth. And because you're part of that plan, here's

[12:02] how you brush your teeth tomorrow morning. Here's how you handle conflict with your spouse. Here's how you approach your job and all of your other relationships. Paul never treats theology and practical living as separate categories. The same God who planned before the creation began to unite all things in Christ is the God who cares about whether you tell the truth to your neighbor. He's the same one who authored the Proverbs full of all the wisdom of practical living to live along the grain of the universe as God designed it. And God designed heaven and earth to go together. Heaven and earth overlap in your kitchen table conversations just as much as they do in cosmic spiritual warfare in the heavenly realms. And what's interesting and I think often missed when we sit down to actually read Ephesians is that Paul's primary test case for whether this heaven and earth vision is actually working is ethnic reconciliation. In Paul's world, the deepest human division

[12:50] was between the Jews on one side and the Gentiles on another. This wasn't anything like what we can imagine. The closest that we can imagine is, of course, the slave trade in the early years of the United States and how awful that process was of trying to reintegrate and trying to find a way to heal and form into one people together moving forward. That was before most of us and what we've experienced. And although there's reverberations of us still trying to figure all of the details out of how that makes sense, that's something that isn't quite personal to the rest of our lives here and now. But in those days, the Jew and Gentile divide was these were people who had been taught for literal centuries that God loved one group and merely tolerated the existence of the other until he was going to have them all destroyed. When Paul talks about the mystery in Ephesians 3, the content of this earthshaking revelation as part of

[13:40] the whole overall thing that God is revealing his vision to unify heaven and earth is that the Gentiles are also fellow heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. People who hitherto were enemies are now family. People who couldn't eat together are now sharing a communion table where even the strong are serving the weaker and lower in status. Paul calls this one new humanity in Ephesians 2:15. Jesus is not simply saving individuals. He's creating an entirely new category of human being. And if the gospel can bridge a Jew gentile divide, it can bridge any divide. The church becomes God's demonstration project that heaven and earth unity actually works in the real world with real people who have real differences. And if you can figure out a way to unify Jew and Gentile into one

[14:28] new family in Christ, there's almost no problem that can't be solved with a heaven on earth vision. And that's why Paul spends the rest of Ephesians talking about marriage, parenting, work relationships, conflict resolution in your other relationships. And rather than random practical tips tacked onto his theological treatise, we're looking at case studies in how the cosmic vision reshapes every human relationship by conforming them to God's plan in Christ who is the king of the universe. So let's take marriage in Ephesians 5. Paul's marriage advice is not anything like what we would expect marriage advice to look like. He calls marriage itself a profound mystery that reveals the relationship between Christ and the church. Your Tuesday night conversation about the budget isn't as simple and as reducible as just logistics. We're supposed to view this as like a living parable of how heaven and earth unite in

[15:17] love and mutual submission. It's a poem with rhyme scheme written over the top of the poem God is already writing. Unifying a man and a woman into one flesh is something like what Christ in the church looks like, which is something like what heaven on earth looks like. Or let's look at how he addresses slavery in Ephesians 6. Paul doesn't abolish the institution overnight, but he plants the seeds that will eventually destroy it. When he tells slaves and masters that they both serve the same Lord in heaven, who shows no partiality, he's introducing a heaven on earth perspective that makes earthly power structures temporary and ultimately meaningless. The heaven on earth overlap changes everything, even when the changes take some time to fully manifest. So, what does all this heady philosophical cosmic theology revelation according to his purpose actually look like in real life? He doesn't leave us

[16:05] guessing. He takes this sweeping vision of heaven on earth unified in Christ and shows us exactly how it transforms the most ordinary parts of human experience. And the result is what we might call the overlap life. Living as if heaven and earth are already one. And one of the most wild things in the entire letter, frankly, is that Paul goes out of his way to show that all of these things that we consider ordinary are actually reflections of how we live as royalty in Jesus's own kingdom. which is a pretty wild statement. Again, remember prison. He's in prison when he's writing this. Paul isn't just telling us how to live differently. He's telling us we literally are different. And when we understand what he says about our new identity, my prayer, honestly, is that it'll blow your mind and change how you see yourself forever. I made a video about this a long time ago that most people did not sit down and watch. But

[16:52] this is what Paul is getting at. Back in Ephesians 2, Paul describes what I might say is one of the most dramatic identity shifts imaginable. And he's not leaving it on the level of theory. He's saying this is reality. He begins the chapter by saying you were dead in your trespasses or your offenses and sins. Not sick, not wounded, not just struggling, dead. You were cut off from the life of God, walking according to the course of this world and the prince of the power of the air. And this world is not the creation necessarily, but it's a lot more like this age. And then comes one of the most beautiful but God statements in all of scripture. But God being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us even when we were dead in our wrongdoings made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the

[17:40] heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the ages to come he might show the boundless riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. This language is really intense and really powerful and it's almost like he's saying that this is like a foretaste of the resurrection from the dead. He's using the same language he uses for Jesus's resurrection to describe what happened to you when you came to faith. Forgiveness is central to this. Remember, it's not the main thing here. There's a whole bigger picture here. Forgiveness is one part of it. You're also getting a completely new operating system. You're now empowered by the spirit in a way that you weren't before. It's not just about you getting your sins covered. You're also getting transferred from the kingdom of death into the kingdom of life. And it's not limited to something that will happen when you die. Paul says it in the past tense. It already happened. And again, raised us up with Christ and seated us

[18:29] with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. You're seated in heavenly places right now. Like right now, while you're watching this video, while you're dealing with traffic and dirty dishes and work deadlines, that's his claim. This is Paul's apocalyptic way of thinking. Learning to see your true location and your true nature. Your physical body might be limited to on earth, but your real identity is established in heaven. He expects you to be living from a heavenly perspective on these earthly realities. When you understand what's happening, I think everything should change. And I'm still in the process of this. I'm working on this even as we speak. Difficult conversations are something that we can do from a heavenly vantage point. Financial stress is us processing something whose citizenship is in heaven in a way that we're still just thinking about like only earthly matters. I think Paul's claim is that when you know you're seated with Christ in the heavenly places, earthly powers lose

[19:16] their ability to intimidate you. Earthly failures lose their ability to define you. You live with the confidence of someone who knows where they really belong and to whom they really belong and who they really are. And here's one of the most mind-blowing parts of the entire letter and most of us just really skip past it because it's just part of the intro. Paul addresses this letter to the saints. And again, the early manuscripts don't have this at Ephesus or in Ephesus part. So it's just the holy ones faithful in Christ Jesus. Saints in Greek, this is the hagio, the holy ones. The same title used in the Old Testament for the angelic beings who surround God's own throne. You share the same designation as the spiritual beings who do worship God day and night in heaven. In fact, in ancient Jewish thinking, there were really two groups called the holy ones. There was the covenant people of Israel on earth and then the loyal spiritual beings in

[20:03] heaven. Paul takes that language and applies it to all the members of the church, the holy ones. So rather than seeing ourselves as forgiven humans trying to be good, we're holy ones, cosmic royalty, part of God's divine counsel. We have the same status as angels. In fact, we have the same status as an adopted son and daughter in the king's own household. That's why in Ephesians 3:10, Paul says that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places. The angels are learning about God's wisdom by watching us. Our local church gatherings aren't just nice weekly meetings. They're cosmic classrooms where heavenly beings observe God's masterpiece in action. It's not as simple as living for yourself. In fact, it means not living for yourself. And it's not simple to just say it's living for other people. We are living out our

[20:52] entire lives as a community before the audience of heaven and earth, demonstrating what happens when God's imagebearers live an overlap life. So, here's what we've discovered about Paul's letter to the Ephesians. It's not just a collection of inspirational verses like a grab bag for your individual encouragement. It's not even just a theology textbook. Although the theology is breathtaking, Ephesians is one of Paul's masterpieces. An absolutely incredible crown jewel statement of what Christianity actually is and what it's supposed to accomplish in the world. We learned that Paul wrote this cosmic manifesto while chained in a Roman prison. And that's not ironic. It's prophetic. And honestly, it's a beautiful reversal because it's revealing a vision he's describing that can't be contained by any earthly power. We learned that God's eternal purpose is to unite all things in heaven and on earth in Christ. And that that

[21:40] unification starts in the most ordinary, messy places of our day-to-day lives, ethnic relationships, your marriage, workplace, your church community, your neighborhood. And when we read Ephesians with fresh eyes, we're going to be able to realize that God's plan has never been just to rescue you and airlift you out of this world. God's plan is to rescue this world through Christ and through you operating in him as a community. We're learning to live as heaven's representatives here on earth. Every relationship becomes some reflection of this mystery. Every conversation becomes some act of worship. Every act of love becomes a glimpse of the cosmic reality that God is bringing about through the manifold wisdom of the church. And it means our lives, our actual ordinary Tuesday morning lives are far more significant than we've ever imagined. It's time for

[22:27] us to participate in the pyama, the greatest work of art that God has ever created, the demonstration that heaven and earth can be one. So next time we're actually going to jump into Ephesians starting in chapter 1 and dig through some things. In fact, as something of a preview, what's going on in here with this us language? Our us, every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus. He predestined us. And then who's the who's the you in him? You also, you were sealed. For this reason, I too having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you. What's going on there? So, we're going to jump into the first main literary movement in this letter, which is Ephesians 1:es 1-14. So, I gave you this challenge a while ago, but remember, I'm going to give it to you again. Read Ephesians again, but this time, let's not reduce it to some spiritual therapy. Let's read it as the

[23:16] blueprint for a completely new revealed reality itself. Let's look with curiosity to all of the hours we spend in our week. How is our marriage, how is our parenting, how is our work, how are our friendships, how is our church community becoming more of a place where heaven and earth are visibly overlapping? And if it's not, what can we do? How can we pray to see that brought forth and made manifest in our daily lives in more unique ways? The the apocalypse isn't coming someday. The apocalypse is here now. Heaven and earth are being united in Christ. And you get to be part of making that unity visible to a world that desperately needs to see it. Welcome to what you might call the overlap life. This is what you were created for. Come further up and come further