Bible Commentaries
Ephesians 1

Verse 3

THE HEAVENLY PLACES

‘In the heavenly places.’

Ephesians 1:3 (R. V.)

The Epistle to the Ephesians is the Epistle of our union with the risen and ascended Christ, and of the blessing which that union brings. For its keynote we may write those words, which ring throughout its teaching, ‘In Christ Jesus’; and for its brief epitome the verse in which our text occurs, ‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.’

We have said that this is the Epistle of the believer’s union with the risen and ascended Christ. The expression ‘in the heavenly places’ is one illustration of this. It occurs in no other place in Scripture, but is quite peculiar in this Epistle. There it occurs five times, being but one of many expressions which raise our thoughts to Christ as ascended into the heavens, ‘so that we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with Him continually dwell.’ We will now consider the five contexts in which the words occur, taking them not in the order of chapter and verse, but rather of the ideas which they suggest. We shall also assume that the words have reference in all five places not to heavenly things or heavenly blessings, but to heavenly places—the abode of Christ, and therefore of the Christian.

I. Christ in heavenly places.—In chapter Ephesians 1:20 we find the words used of the present abode of Christ Himself; that height of glory to which he ascended, when He ‘went up on high, and led captivity captive.’ ‘He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places.’ Such is the first thought which the words suggest. They raise our minds to things above; they bid us ‘lift up our hearts.’ Let us ‘lift them up unto the Lord.’ It is ours surely at this time to rejoice with no mere selfish joy for the blessings which Christ’s ascension has procured, but with that blessed self-forgetting joy which can rise out of the merely personal, and can triumph in the triumph of our King.

II. Believers in heavenly places.—In chapter Ephesians 2:6 the same expression is used of the present abode of true believers, and that because it is the abode of Christ. ‘God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, quickened us together with Christ … and raised us up with Him, and made us sit with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.’ Here is the central truth on which this Epistle hinges, our union with Christ. He who believes upon Jesus Christ, casting, resting his whole self upon Him, as revealed in His glorious Person, His finished work—that man becomes at the moment of belief, by the Holy Spirit’s energy, united with Christ, a member of His body, the Church. He is ‘in Christ Jesus,’ as a branch is in a vine tree, and therefore, in a true though spiritual sense, where Christ is, there he is also.

III. Blessings in heavenly places.—In chapter Ephesians 1:3 a further stage is arrived at. The Apostle here makes ‘every spiritual blessing’ depend on these two previous verities. Christ is ‘in the heavenly places’; we are ‘in Him,’ and so are ourselves in the same heavenly places. What follows? Thus united to Him, all His fullness flows to us; we are blessed ‘with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Him.’ It is the epitome of the whole Epistle. ‘Ye are complete in Him.’ Little wonder, then, that Christ Himself said, ‘It is expedient for you that I go away.’ All that Christ has in our nature gained by being raised into the heavenly places is thus brought within our reach. ‘All things are ours,’ and it is only our weak faith, our vague beliefs, our want of full surrender to the Holy Spirit’s energy, and the consequent weakness of our union with Christ, that hinders our full enjoyment of them. Let it be so no longer. If these things be so, let us ‘be borne on,’ and so let us ‘press on to perfection.’

Two passages now remain; they do not bear directly, like the first three, on the central truth of our union with Christ, but on certain consequences which follow from it.

IV. Wisdom in heavenly places.—In chapter Ephesians 3:10 St. Paul is speaking of the great privilege of preaching ‘unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,’ of ‘making all men see the dispensation of the mystery’ hitherto ‘hidden in God.’ And with what object? ‘To the intent that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the Church the manifold wisdom of God.’ ‘Which things,’ St. Peter says, ‘angels desire to look into.’ The same thought is present here; it is that those heavenly intelligences who wait around the throne, whose only desire is to do God’s will, take the keenest interest in the unfolding of God’s purposes, and love to study them. And thus we learn one of the glorious privileges of the Church of Christ. Not only is it to reflect the glory of her Lord to this world below, but it is to be the mirror by which angels and archangels themselves must stoop and look, if they are to behold the gradual unfolding of Divine love in the manifold wisdom of God.

V. Conflict in heavenly places.—One passage remains, and it is at first sight a startling one. It tells us of our conflict, and that conflict is ‘in the heavenly places.’ In chapter Ephesians 6:12 we read, ‘For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.’ Thus the same word which is used to express the abode of Christ, and of our being blessed in Him, and of the home of the holy angels, is here used of the abode of our terrible foes, or at least of the scenes of our conflict with them. The true key to the difficulty seems to be found in the same Epistle. In chapter Ephesians 2:2 Satan, the leader of these spirit hosts, is called ‘the prince of the power of the air.’ Let us remember that the word translated ‘air’ always means in Scripture the atmosphere which surrounds this earth; so that the very air we breathe is associated in Scripture with the agency of the powers of Satan. Turning to the expression of our text, we must remember that the word ‘heaven’ has in Scripture a twofold reference. There is a lower as well as a higher heaven—a heaven which signifies the same region as ‘the air’ as well as a heaven which is the abode of angels and of God. It must be this lower heaven which is specially referred to in the last passage. The ‘prince of the power of the air’ is the captain of these hosts of wickedness which assail us even in ‘the heavenly places.’ We are ‘in the heavenly places,’ but so, too, are our foes. Still, we can face the fact without fear.

Bishop T. W. Drury.

Verse 7

GRACE IN RELATION TO THE ATONEMENT

‘In Whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace.’

Ephesians 1:7

Let us consider the subject of grace, in relation to the atonement, and the forgiveness of sins.

I. The forgiveness of sins is associated with the death of our Lord—is associated with the precious blood. It is said in these days, ‘Let us get away from the subtleties and speculations of the theologians, and go back to the Christ.’ Well, sometimes that cry of ‘back to the Christ’ is very fallacious, because in going back to the utterances of Christ there is a disposition to forget the utterances of the inspired Apostles of Christ. But in this relation let us go back to the Christ. Our Lord’s words are perfectly clear: ‘The Son of Man,’ He said, ‘is come to give His life a ransom for many.’ Let us turn to St. Paul. St. Paul says, ‘I delivered you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins’; so again, ‘And God commended His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’ And St. Peter, a very different type of mind, tells us of Him ‘Who in His own body bare our sins upon the tree.’ And St. John, again a very different type of mind, tells us ‘The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin’; and when he heard the anthem of the Blessed, as recorded for us in that wonderful last book of the Bible, we know that the theme of the Blessed was that they had washed their robes and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb; that they were redeemed by the precious Blood. Therefore, let us get perfectly clear, as Christian people, that we are committed to the old theological view, that forgiveness comes through the precious Blood; that the Atonement is no invention of the theologians of the Middle Ages; that the forgiveness of sins is some way, somehow, for the Christian inseparably associated with our Lord’s death.

II. The true significance of the term, ‘the Blood of Christ.’ The term, of course, is always to be taken in its Old Testament sense. ‘The blood,’ it says, ‘is the life.’ The blood represents the energy of the physical life; and therefore the first idea of the shedding of our Lord’s blood which is very familiar to us all is that it is the highest expression of an absolute self-surrender, the giving up of everything. This is a most important point in relation to the forgiveness of sins, if you will bear in mind that the essence of sin is the self-assertion of the finite against the infinite, that the essence of sin is self. The offering of the Blood conveys the idea of the absolute surrender of self, of the very essence of self. We are not to regard our Lord as merely offering His Blood upon Calvary. His life was, so to speak, set free by death. This idea of the life set free by death entering into the higher plane of existence and of the presentation of the Blood before the throne of God is necessary to a complete realisation of what the Atonement means.

III. If you would get clear upon this subject of the Atonement, you must analyse the word into its constituent parts. The ordinary pronunciation of the word atonement is unfortunate. At-one-ment is the full analysis of the word. Let me trace the stages in broad outline.

( a) First of all, once there was at-one-ment between God and man. God created a creature capable of appreciating his Creator, and God saw creation as it found its completion in man, and, behold, it was very good. Perfect at-one-ment between God and man is the message of Paradise, and if we may venture for the moment into the region of speculative theology, if the Fall had not taken place, in all human probability there would have been a steady development of the human creature on and on, until the Incarnation would have been effected apart from the Fall. The Nicene Creed says, ‘Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from Heaven, and was Incarnate.’ For we must remember that the Incarnation was no mere expedient; it expresses the eternal purpose of God that there should be union between the Creator and creature.

( b) Now let us draw strongly and clearly a second line. The at-one-ment ceases to be; sin comes into the world, and as generation after generation of mankind stands upon this earth there is a gradual declension; the gulf between God and man becomes wider and wider, and man with a darkened mind, with a seared conscience, with a weakened will crouches away from his God; ceases to believe that God is his Father; he is in a settled state of alienation, and he begins, as you find still in certain parts of Africa, to worship the powers of evil. His whole conception of God has changed. Now along with this change there is also the necessary alienation on the other side—though who would dare to attempt to peer too closely into this? But there is the necessary alienation on the side of God; not that the Father ceases to love His fallen child, but because there is a necessary averting of the face of God from all that is unholy. So the gulf widens more and more.

( c) And now we draw our third line, and ask ourselves the question, How is this gulf to be bridged over? The answer is that it has been bridged over by the Incarnation. The root idea of all forgiveness is union. There must be nothing between. There must be the removal of the hideous thing which has come between. Now, in the initial fact of the Incarnation there is absolute unity between God and man; but the Incarnation finds its more completed expression in the Cross. There is a phrase which the Apostle uses, which I think we could only have used with the greatest caution if he had not used it, but which he does use, and so we have a right to use it. St. Paul speaks of the Blood of God, and when you think of the offering of our Lord’s Blood, what does it mean? Why, that there is perfect at-one-ment between God and man.

—Rev. G. F. Holden.

Verses 22-23

THE CHURCH

‘And hath put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be the head over all things to the Church, which is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.’

Ephesians 1:22-23

This phrase conveys to us a most startling thought, for it suggests to us this supreme truth that the idea of the Christ is incomplete without the idea of the Church, that the Church is the fullness, or, as we should render it, the completeness of the Christ. Our Blessed Lord is the second Adam. He is the elder among many brethren, and His Church completes the idea of the Christ or the Messiah. You could not have any higher conception of what the Church really is than this.

I. The idea of the Church is absolutely vital.—The Church of God is no mere convenient machinery for spreading the truth; the Church of God is no mere creation of a later age—the dream of some ecclesiastical minds in the Middle Ages. The Church of Christ is part of the Gospel. The Christian conception of salvation is not that of a series of isolated units, each purchasing its own individual safety, but it is salvation in the body; it is salvation under the limitations of the sacred fellowship; it is salvation in the Divine society; it is the Gospel of the Kingdom of God.

II. This idea of the Church is threatened in our own day and generation from at least three separate quarters.

( a) It is threatened, first of all, by all that wealth of idea, for much of which we can heartily give thanks to God, that is associated with the rebound of thought from the materialism which dominated the middle period of the Victorian era. Now we have rushed into the opposite extreme of spiritualism, or into the extreme of the spiritual view of things. There has grown up along with this, quite logically, a kind of depreciation of the material; and even in certain Christian circles there has been developed an almost morbid hatred of outward form or organisation. One of the great leaders of modern thought in this connection has told us that we are to look for the Christ outside the ‘Churches.’ Can you imagine St. Paul speaking in that way? ‘Looking for the Christ outside the Churches!’ Why, the Church is the body, the fullness of Him Who all in all is being fulfilled. And the message of our Blessed Lord to the material world emphatically is not the depreciation of the body, not the depreciation of the outward, not the depreciation of the material. Wherever you find that idea, you can almost certainly trace the note of heresy.

( b) It is threatened from the point of view of those who dream that the religion of the Early Christians approached in character the simplicity of the Quaker. But here in this Epistle from which I have quoted is clear evidence of what the early Christians believed. While certainly not earlier than a.d. 59, it is also certainly not later than a.d. 70. In it we have clearly revealed the whole idea, the majestic, the stupendous idea of the Church of Christ as present to the mind of the Apostle St. Paul.

( c) It is also threatened from a third point of view, which is peculiar to our own day, and which has been largely evolved through the disunion of Christians in England. Statesmen, instead of frankly recognising the denominational principle as a good thing in itself, have attempted to create what is called a ‘common Christianity’—that is, the thinly attenuated residuum of religion after everything has been removed distinctive of any denomination; so we get that which Mr. Gladstone called ‘a moral monster’; we get the spectre of undenominationalism. We Churchmen are bound to maintain that there shall be no kind or sort of acceptance of a common Christianity which eliminates the idea of the Church or the idea of the Sacraments. To us emphatically this is not Christianity. That which to us is vital is left out.

III. Two reflections in conclusion.

( a) As we reflect upon the idea of the Church of Christ, we cannot but remember that in history the idea of the Church is anterior to the idea of the sacred writings. That is true of the Old Testament; but it is pre-eminently true of the New Testament. So we come back to first principles, and we realise that our Lord Jesus Christ did not design to spread His religion in the first instance by means of a book. No; He founded a Kingdom—a Church. It was the Church that produced the book, and those early Christians, although they had not the Bible—we ought to be better than they, because God has given us this wonderful Book—those early Christians had quite enough for salvation in the Creed, in the Church, in the Sacraments, in the proclamation of the Gospel.

( b) The idea of the Church should teach us to enlarge our horizon. Death is a beginning, not an end. Death is the going away from this outlying colony back to the home country, where is the King, and where are the myriad members of the Empire of Jesus. As we fight on, let us always remember we are surrounded by the cloud of witnesses. Let us think of that greater Church beyond the veil.

—Rev. G. F. Holden.

Illustration

‘I always think that in some respects the most magnificent episode in the history of England is the spectacle of that little handful of Englishmen holding India at the time of the Mutiny. Everything seemed to be against them. Many people thought it was quite impossible that they could prevail, or that India could be saved. How did they prevail? They prevailed by what we call prestige; they prevailed because they realised England’s greatness; because over the seas they knew the ships of England were bringing the forces of England to the succour of her distressed sons in India; because they knew the power of the Old Country and her readiness to help, and so they were content to fight on against overwhelming odds until they won.’