Introduction III, Ephesians & Colossians
Colossians; Ephesians · Vern Peterman · Jan 11, 2004
Ephesians & Colossians, No. 03
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4826232166756

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

We're going to proceed this morning with studying Ephesians and Colossians, and doing so by looking at the first two verses of both Ephesians and Colossians. And as we look at those verses, one of the things we see is that they're certainly not identical, and yet there are some similarities, aren't there?

We highlight those similarities, we end up with this. Rather minor differences. One of the things we see, of course, is Timothy is mentioned over here. He's mentioned as a co-author, and as a matter of fact, you see his name mentioned as a co-author on several New Testament books. Philippians was one of them that we looked at. One of the other differences, of course, is this one, it's Ephesus, this is to the Church of Colossae, and Paul inserts the word brethren here.

One of the other things to note, today, because we're covering the first two verses of each of the books all at once, a lot of material, we're going to be hitting on some themes rather quickly. It seems that when we started Philippians a year ago, we were two months getting out of the first verse. So we covered things in great detail. One of the things that we see as we begin looking at the introductions to these letters is that Paul did have a typical pattern that he used as he introduced each of the letters.

And we would start off with some kind of a greeting. And as we mentioned before, his greeting would be unlike ours, where we wait until somebody finishes the letter and then we say who we are. Paul would start off and say, I'm Paul, and here's my role. Here's my particular authority.

And he did that exactly as we see here in Ephesians and Colossians. He starts off with a greeting, just like he typically does in most letters. The next thing that shows up is that he has a prayer commonly, and we see that in Ephesians and Colossians. It's nothing lengthy, but it's basically a wish for those that he's writing to, and typically including grace and peace, as we'll see in a little bit here. So Paul carries on that pattern here as well, as he introduces the books to Ephesians and Colossians. And then either a thanksgiving or a blessing. is included.

And we'll see in Ephesians, he very much continues that pattern, Ephesians 1.3. But those three things, the greeting, the prayer, and the thanksgiving are a blessing addressed to God. Remember that's one of the things that we looked at. Thanksgivings in the Greek and Roman culture were never addressed to other people. He just didn't do that. But instead addressed directly to the Lord, that was allowable, that was normal, permissible. in the same thing that's happening here. Now, I think there's some things to look at as we look at typical letters during the New Testament era. Paul would write things that were in some ways similar, and yet some things that were different, and we'll want to take a look at each of those.

Typically they would start off, as Paul did, with, here's the name of the author. Start off with that. They would have some kind of an introduction. To whom am I writing? Just like Paul does here. And then there would commonly be some sort of a wish for physical health. May it be well with you. May your health be good. Those kinds of statements.

Those were common things in Paul's day. And so there are aspects of what Paul writes that are certainly the norm in keeping. But, now here's the difference. Paul, as he would write his introductions, would put a focus upon Jesus Christ. That was unusual. He would give credit to the Father. That was unusual. He would, in the introduction, make multiple statements about the believer's position in Christ that he was writing to. That was unusual. No, it was very unusual. It was very unusual because that was not at all what people would do in his time.

The other thing is, while the typical thing was for people in his day to wish physical health, what does he do instead? He wishes spiritual health. And spiritual health is going to be typified by grace and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Very different from his day. First thing to introduce there is not a wish for physical health, but for spiritual health. And he gives what that looks like with grace and peace.

Now, we start off as he begins this letter with Paul. Paul himself is introductory here. Let's take a look at this guy, Paul. I think one of the things that stands out about Paul, he is a man of contrast. What's the contrast? The contrast between the Paul before he was a believer to the Paul afterwards. A radical change, radical change. Paul was born as Saul the Jew.

First mention we hear of him is in Acts 7.58.

He was continuing his breathing out threats. A short little Greek word says he was yet doing it, as if to imply he had been doing it before and now he's still doing it. He was a Jew. As a matter of fact, as we read in Hebrews, he was a Hebrew of Hebrews. He was steeped in the law. Paul, and we can say this literally, he slept and breathed indefinitely, ate Jewishness. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews, steeped in the law. He says, I was a Pharisee. And by the way, you know, I wonder how many Pharisees there are. There were only maybe a few thousand who were actually officially Pharisees.

So he was part of a select group. Among the select group, he was at the top. He was being tutored as a young man by Gamaliel at the very top of the heap among the Jews. He was part of the Sanhedrin. He was so rabid, so venomous about his Jewishness that he persecuted the church, even he himself said, to the point of death. He was Jewish to the core. Born a Jew, lived a Jew, made others die because he was a Jew.

This man radically changed. Acts chapter 9 verses 1-19 gives us the information on that. He was born again. Subsequently, chapter 13, we'll see him renamed Paul. It'll say Saul, who was also called Paul. And then you see a transition where the name Saul drops out. and the name Paul takes over. And you'll see that here. Here is Paul, who was a man who began a Jew named Saul, now a Christian believer among the very people that he sought to kill, taking on the different name Paul. And now, he was steeped in the law on the one hand, now what does he preach? Grace. Grace. And what does he do?

The unthinkable! you're no longer under the law. That thing that I studied, that thing that I lived for, that thing that I followed meticulously, you're not under it. Wow, what a change. Then, instead of killing people who were in the churches, let's go start some more. How about that for radical? So here's Paul, a man of not just minor, but huge contrasts. Who he was, what he did, what he ate and breathed and lived changed radically. Look at Paul's earthly resume.

He says, I was a Jew born of the tribe of Benjamin. He says that's among the very best. These are the ones who remained faithful when others fell away. When it was time to do the right thing, the Benjamites have got the right resume. He's born of Tarthas, raised in Jerusalem. We have that information. Speculate that he went to the University of Tarsus. We know there is a university there. Educated in Judaism by Gamaliel. A couple different places where that crops up.

The son of Simeon, the son of Hillel. Hillel was the founder of a major Jewish legal system. The Jews, and this is interesting, the Jews had two different marriage and divorce courts. And you could pick which one you operated under. The founder of one of those marriage and divorce courts was Hillel. So here was Paul, or Saul, being tutored by the grandson of this major specialist in the law.

He has multiple claims to being a Roman citizen. That would be unusual for a Jew, and there's one reason why it wasn't expected of him. But he many times claimed Roman citizenship, gave him special privileges, and as we mentioned when we were going through Philippians, He also got the privilege of being chained to a Praetorian guard 24-7 when he appealed too.

So that was a part of it. He was a tech maker by trade, claimed that. I would guess since he seemed to keep busy at odd hours, he probably involved Timothy and Sostenese and Silas and some of the others in the trade as well. Keep them busy. Plenty to talk about anyway while you're working.

Fluent in Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic. We know of course Greek because those are the letters that we have, they're in Greek. As a Roman citizen, Latin would have been common. He also went into several, about five that we know of, Roman colonies. Trained under Gamaliel, of course he would have learned Hebrew. That he would have started at a young age. And Aramaic would have been the language commonly spoken in Israel. So those four languages certainly he would have some background for. He was also, prior to his conversion, an aggressive persecutor of the Church. So here is this man, Paul, now writing this letter to the Church at Ephesus and the Church at Colossae. Now he says, I'm an apostle. In each of these letters he says he's an apostle. This word apostolos is the name.

And this is a, it means in New Testament times, a special messenger. One of the documents that we have from that era describes an apostle being sent by an admiral who was on a ship to negotiate for the admiral on shore. And so the point being, he's a special messenger, not just a messenger by occupation, who doesn't know what he's carrying and doesn't have any authority to carry anything out. That's the contrast here.

This word apostolos conveys a lot of the English thought of an ambassador, somebody who has that capacity as a special messenger, that is, he's sent for a particular purpose, but secondarily has delegated authority from the one who sent. The one who sent sent him says, okay, you are sent for this purpose, and secondarily, you have the authority to carry things out. And that's why we see that the apostles, when they wrote, they wrote with authority, didn't they? Paul could write, you must, no longer. because he had the authority of an apostle sent from the Lord himself.

One of the things that's important for us to take a look at, because there are people, believe it or not, that claim to be apostles today. Have you ever run across that? There are people who make that claim. I haven't run into any of them, but so I read and hear. There are some qualifications for being an apostle. You might want to make sure you take note of these if you run into somebody who does claim to be one. First off, they have to receive the gift in office by decision of the Lord. It's the Lord who makes this decision.

I can't say, you know, I think I'm going to raise my kids to be apostles when they grow up. Okay? We can't do that. Why? Because this is the Lord's decision to make and not ours. We can't suddenly decide, hey, I'm going to major in apostleship. Because this is God's decision. Apostle had to have been an eyewitness of the resurrected Lord. We see that as a as a criteria presented in Acts chapter 1. And Paul himself sets that forth. That's one of the reasons we don't have apostles today, and people can't just say, hey, I'm an apostle. Another is apostles had to be able to perform signs, wonders, and miracles.

Not fake, not once in a while, but consistently. You will notice that when Peter and John were going up to the temple, and there was the one man who was lame, They didn't come up and say, you know, I think I might be able to heal you. Let's pray and see if it works. They came instead and healed him right there. Why?

They had the gift of apostleship. There was no question about it. And they did not even question or doubt their ability to do it. Not because of their confidence in themselves, but because of their confidence in the Lord. Finally, an apostle had success in evangelism. You see that consistently. Can you imagine some of the places that Paul would go into and people would listen, people would be touched. Yes, there was opposition, no question about it. But his evangelistic efforts had huge impact. It said, for example, when he was in Ephesus, that all Asia heard the gospel, not just Ephesus.

The apostle finally had the capacity to suffer patiently. And yes, that's something Lord intends for each of us, but for the apostles, a special gift. The apostles had the ability to suffer patiently, and can you imagine, here is Paul, he is in prison.

He's chained to a Praetorian guard 24-7, and when he writes to the churches, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, he doesn't say, oh man, this is miserable, this stinks, these guys are horrible, and the food is rotten. Instead, what does he say? He says, rejoice in the Lord always. Wow, that's remarkable. Even when he was taken there in Acts chapter 16 at Philippi, remember they put him in the prison?

We don't know the particular case there, but quite often when they put somebody in stocks, here's how they did it. They would put them sitting on a piece of cold stone that hadn't been cleaned from the prior guy that was there. You were not given bathroom breaks. They put you tail end first, squatted down, into a space about the size of a dishwasher, shoved you back in that hole, and had your arms and legs sticking out. That's what Paul and Silas were doing, singing at the top of their lungs into the night, suffering patiently.

The apostles had a special gift for it. Beyond that, Paul had a special assignment. He was the apostle to the Gentiles. He makes multiple references to that in Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians. He had a special appointment. Remember he said that an apostle is one who has a particular assignment? That was Paul's assignment. Apostle to the Gentiles. He also conveyed some teachings that were exclusive to Paul, or almost entirely exclusive to Paul.

Let's look at some of them, and this is not all of them. The body of Christ. We're going to see that phrase and that teaching show up as we go through the book of Ephesians. Another one is sealed by the Holy Spirit. Twice in the book of Ephesians, Paul is going to teach about this. He also wrote to the church at Corinth.

2 Corinthians 1.22, Ephesians 1.13, and 4.30. He's going to talk about sealed. In every single case, it's past tense. You have been sealed by the Holy Spirit.

The other thing to remember is, what is a seal? It isn't this, oh, oh, oh, oh, thing. It's not that. A seal was the particular mark that they would do frequently with a special seal or a seal ring. One of those things. And they would mark on, say, a document, a letter. It might be a letter or it might even be a will. A legal document. And that offered three things. It offered identification. We know who it is. It offered ownership. We know who this belongs to. And finally, protection.

Because many of the seals had the protection of the Roman Empire where breaking the seal came with the penalty of death if you were not the one authorized to open. So identification, ownership, and protection were the message of the seals. We'll see this come up twice here in the book of Ephesians.

There are other places in the New Testament, roughly 20 of them, that you can take a look at. Another one here is spiritual gifts. Certainly the other apostles made occasional reference, but Paul has three More extensive references, one of those is Romans 12, where he lays out some listings of spiritual gifts. The next one is in 1 Corinthians 12-14, he actually covers three chapters that include teaching on spiritual gifts. And then finally in Ephesians 4, so we'll be addressing it here as we go through the book of Ephesians, 4.11 is the place where he lays out some more teaching there. So spiritual gifts as a function within the body of Christ is something that Paul almost exclusively addresses.

The believer's identification with Christ, we've brought this up before, we'll most certainly bring it up again, count on it. But it shows up in Romans, it shows up in 1 Corinthians, it shows up in Galatians, it shows up in Ephesians and Colossians particularly. Elsewhere, yes, but those books particularly, and so Ephesians and Colossians is going to be just full of these teachings, and especially in those books.

Finally, the Jews and Gentiles are both in Christ. That was a remarkable statement, especially for Paul, who previously was a rabid Jew. The idea that Gentiles could just believe and be a part of something, anything that had to do with the Jews, was absolutely unthinkable to him until he became a believer. And now he's turning around and teaching it.

So those are some teachings, there are some others. But one of the things to just keep in mind, Paul had some exclusive or near-exclusive messages. These are some of them. The next one is just simply the name Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus. And look at the two books, they get switched. As we look at this, it's Paul who is sent as an apostle by Jesus Christ.

He says, I'm an apostle, and you know, if you think about it, But if an apostle is a special messenger and he has delegated authority, doesn't it make sense that he would tell you who sent him? If I have delegated authority, I better say from whom. And so he does. That's exactly what he does in both cases. If I have delegated authority, if I have a special purpose that I've been sent for, then it is certainly the expected thing to do to say who sent me. And that's what he does here. right in the introduction. It doesn't leave us hanging on that question at all.

Now, the first Jesus is from the Hebrew Yeshua. It means Savior. And so when we look at Jesus Christ, by the way, it's really important, this isn't first and last name. Christ Jesus or Jesus Christ isn't like Verne Peterman and Peterman Verne. They're not the same idea at all. It is not simply a name. It is an identity. So the order is not that big a thing, and that's one of the things you'll find in scriptures. Frequently you'll find them both ways. Or you'll see one name or the other. It's an identity, not first and last name.

Next we'll see here Christ, it's from the Greek Christos, it means the anointed one. Our word that we have in English carried over from the Hebrew Messiah is the same idea, it's just simply in the Anglicized Hebrew. Hamashiach, or Mashiach, would be the Hebrew expression for that.

And so what is he looking at here? He says that he is an apostle, he is a special messenger sent by Jesus Christ, sent by the Savior, sent by the Anointed One. Christ is the object of our spiritual gaze. As Paul is sent to the Gentiles, he is constantly beholding the Lord. as Paul is sent out to the Gentiles, and he talks to the Jews too, right? But as he's sent out to them, he calls them to behold the Lord. The Lord Jesus Christ is the object of our spiritual gaze. He is the one who gave Paul the authority, and he is the one who Paul, by that authority, is calling people to behold.

This is one way we can look at it in kind of a timeline. Here's Jesus Christ who existed with God and was God, had a love relationship with the Father, had glory with the Father, created all things, and was slain before time. And yet, in the context of history, what happened? He was incarnated in His first coming.

Here you see the name Jesus, which means Savior. In that name, we were identified with Him in His crucifixion, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seating. We were identified with Christ in that name. Now, do we have anything to do with the name Christ?

Yes, Christ the Messiah, He will come for us, He will reward us, He will come with us when He returns in His second coming. We will reign with Him. He will be the one reigning and we will be with Him. And what is amazing is that He shares His glory. And by the way, that doesn't wait until then. because as we behold him, we're growing from glory to glory. Now, the next thing that Paul does, and he does it consistently in each of the introductory letter portions there, he talks about the will of God. What was the will of God? That he be made an apostle.

Can you imagine that? Put yourself in Paul's shoes Here you are starting life, you're thinking, I'm a Jew, I'm a Jew's Jew. I'm at the very top of the heap among Jews. I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews. I'm steeped in the law. I'm a Pharisee. I'm the cream of the crop.

And God comes in and changes all that. And he is absolutely certain, it is the will of God, that he be an apostle of Jesus Christ. If you think about this for a minute, Christians struggle with trying to find the will of God, don't they? Ever been through that? What's God's will here? Paul has no doubt at all about this.

He is so certain of it that he'll write letters one after another. I'm an apostle by the will of God. No questions. I've got no questions, no qualms, no second thoughts, no doubts. I'm doing this by the will of God. No question about it. He is absolutely certain that that's what God wants him to do. He's absolutely certain that that's what God has called him for. What an amazing thing to look at this and say, this is the will of God. I know it. No question. Absolutely certain.

Now, he's an apostle by the will of God. He wrote to five churches and to Timothy, who of course was kind of an apostolic delegate and disciple. Paul, the one that we have a great deal of information about throughout the New Testament. He said variously that he was an apostle by the will of God, or called to be an apostle, or sent as an apostle, which of course is the definition of an apostle, right? So he was very clear and consistent about that claim. We see that here in these several passages that show up.

Do you recall A few weeks back when we were closing the book on Philippians, we brought out the point that Philippians has this bookend phenomenon. That is, either words or phrases or themes that are brought up in the very beginning of Philippians were also brought up at the very end. And we listed those here. And then one page wasn't enough to list them. There was some more. More bookends.

Things that were similar words, phrases, or themes from the beginning of Philippians to the end. Well, guess what? When we go to Ephesians and Colossians, same song, second verse. More of the same. We find things that are brought up at the beginning are also brought up at the end.

So at the beginning of Philippians he says, I'm an apostle by the will of God. What does he do? He returns to this concept of the will of God again at the end. towards the end there and this time he's talking to slaves in Ephesians 6, 5, and 6 and he talks about the slaves and he says they're as slaves of Christ doing the will of God from the heart. Doing the will of God from the heart.

So he returns to that theme. End of Colossians. Same thing. What do we see again? He writes about Epaphras which he has also, by the way, talked about at the beginning of the book He wrote about Epaphras in 1.7. Now in 4.11.12 he mentions him again. He says, "...that you may stand perfect and fully assured in all the will of God." So now what we have here, again we see this word teleos.

That's a word that we looked at last week. It means mature. The intent here in the will of God is that you be mature. and he used this word pleurao, it means literally crammed full. Now how many of you are crammed full this morning? Anyway, never mind.

But having all that is spiritually necessary for your walk, that's his intent. He says the will of God has to do with this maturity, and we'll get into this in detail later. The will of God has to do with this having adequate tools, everything necessary to carry out the will of God. But he starts off the book with what he ends up with. The will of God theme shows up in the beginning and at the end of each book. Now he talks about saints. He's done that before.

And of course the expression in our culture has come to mean a saint is somebody who is really up there in terms of behavior and performance and ability, right? That's the concept that if you talked about in our culture somebody being a saint, You'd mean, boy, that guy, his behavior is impeccable. They really, really did well. That's the idea that we have in our culture.

That's not the way he uses it, as we'll see here shortly. Saints. Paul wrote six letters to the churches in which he said in those letters, he addressed every single one in the whole church as saints. As a matter of fact, I started looking because there are about 60 places in the New Testament where that word saint is used. It's never used in terms of somebody being like cream of the crop, top echelon, you know, ultra-spiritual. It's never used that way. How about that? So the way we use it in our culture is not at all the biblical use.

As a matter of fact, we'll see at the end, as we go towards the end of Ephesians in the last half, he'll say, these are the saints now that he's talked about. Stop stealing! Which means, If they have to be told to stop stealing, it means as of the time they're getting the letter, they are stealing. And those are saints. How about that? And why are they stealing? We brought up that issue last week.

We pointed out that if you got within bow shot of the Temple of Artemis, you were free of any crime. You couldn't be arrested if you got in bow shot. So what the criminals would do is they would camp in a ring right around the temple, because they could never be arrested as long as they stayed there. So they just pitch a tent and that's where they would stay.

All the saints include all those who don't behave in ways that look very saintly. All the saints. He would address them all. The Greek word there was hagios. Now, the word was in use among pagans. Pagans would use it. It meant anything, whether it was a person, an object, something that you wore, anything that you did that was devoted to this religious purpose, to this sacred purpose. And so it was even used in the pagan temples. The pagan priests would be haggios. They would walk into a pagan temple and be haggios.

So, in order to cure that problem, avoid the confusion, use the word, but not have it misunderstood, he would use words in the context to clarify the meaning, such as saints in Christ Jesus, or Christ's inheritance in the saints, or our Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints. So there would be a tie to make it clear he was not making reference to the pagan understanding of it. This didn't have to do with your haggios because you walked into a pagan temple, or you put on a pagan robe.

Your haggios because of your position in Christ. This is what he wrote to the church at Corinth, and the church at Corinth was in a terrible city. The Church of Corinth was so bad that they had a word for immorality that was basically Corinthianized. To those people, this is what he wrote, to the Church of God which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified in Christ, saints by calling. And when he says sanctified, he uses the word hagiazo.

Hear the similarity? It's a verb. Basically, it's hagiaz converted into a verb form. And this is perfect passive, is the Greek there. I don't mean that those people are perfectly passive. By perfect passive, we mean it's a completed past action. They were already sanctified in the past, and the results are ongoing into the future. It implies permanence. And then, those who have been, the verb, sanctified completely, with ongoing results into the future, those are saints by calling.

He's being abundantly clear. Now, was it because the people in the church at Corinth had everything down perfectly? No, most definitely not. But he's saying, positionally, as a believer, you are in Christ, and you are saints, haggios, completely devoted to his sacred purpose.

Finally, this word faithful comes up in both of the letters. This word pistos, This word faithful is used in various ways in the New Testament. It's used to describe God. Examples there in 1st and 2nd Corinthians. The word faithful is used to describe the Lord Jesus Christ. The faithful witness. Faithful and true. And we saw that as we studied through Revelation.

There is also, in this word pistachio, it's used to describe whole churches. Whoa! Whole churches. We have the examples right here in Ephesians and Colossians. And faithful is used to describe individual believers as well. And we'll see that example right in Colossians.

The Greek text, by the way, has no definite article here. You might make note of that in your handout if you'd like. The Greek text contains no definite article, so the focus is upon the character of the faithfulness. That's specific to this particular context, not in every case.

Faithfulness is in our eternal position and present condition. Paul could call every single believer at Colossae faithful. Why? It's the character of the Lord himself and they are in Christ. That's why he could call them faithful. Not because they were in their practice always faithful, but positionally they were faithful because they were in Christ. Faithfulness in our present condition is possible as we walk by His life based upon the eternal position that we have in Christ.

Now, we use that phrase, in Christ, and that shows up here. Every believer is described as in Christ, in Christos. We don't find any instance where somebody who has been described as in Christ is then described as out of Christ, at Christos. It doesn't exist. We find the in Christ phrase showing up repeatedly.

As a matter of fact, we find in Christ, in him, several times in just the first chapter of Ephesians. In subsequent chapters it shows up again, and then we also find the phrase in whom. So multiple reference to our position in Christ. In Colossians as we go through it, we'll find that in Christ, in him, in whom prays less often, but when it's done, it's done with great impact, just as we saw in Colossians 128 last week.

Finally, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Every letter, Paul writes grace and peace. I didn't find any exceptions to that. The one difference is when he wrote to Timothy, he added mercy. We could talk about why he would do that, but he made that change.

The Greek greeting, if you said hello to somebody, was keres, grace. We say hi or hello, something like that, greetings, they would say keres. And the Jewish greeting would be, in the Hebrew, shalom, or the Greek version of that, Irene. We have the woman's name Irene based on that. Shalom, you recognize in Yerushalom, Jerusalem, habitation of peace. Grace is one of that Keres family of words.

We talked about the Keres family of words as we went through the book of Philippians, and a similar list of words comes up. However, there's a different tilt, and the tilt is, one, that each of the books uses the words a little differently, and secondly, we'll find that Philippians had a significant different use in that Paul talked about joy and rejoicing more with Philippians than we'll find in Ephesians and Colossians combined.

But notice the source from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. The other thing is that this source is personal. It doesn't just get laid out in a package and we grab it and that's it. It has to do with our relationship with Him. It also is an expression of God's character. It has to do with who He is. Peace has to do with the working out of God's grace expressed in our lives. Finally, God our Father, our Father, ours personally, not because we own Him, but because we belong to Him, and because we are of His family.

In 1 John 3.1, this is basically an expanded version there, you must, based on your position, pause to wondrously consider the quality of the permanent unconditional love the Father has freely given us. that we who are at one time spiritually separated from God would instead be called children of God. Paul also tells us that it's the Father who gets the credit for the blessings that we'll look at here in a couple weeks that are in heavenly places. You have already been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Who gets credit for that? The Father. And finally, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul starts off addressing the Lord Jesus Christ here, as he begins writing, and then finishes off. Here's another example of starting off with a theme and then finishing it. As we come to the end of Ephesians, what do we see? Two mentions of the Lord Jesus Christ at the end of Ephesians. Along with that, notice, grace and peace brought up again. As we look at the introduction to this passage, Paul has started off with what he's going to end up with. And even in his introduction, he ends up with the Lord Jesus Christ. And what better place could he take us? What better focus could he bring us to? After all, his purpose is that we as believers behold the Lord Himself, the Lord of Glory.

And he does that in the very way he structures his introduction. He does that in the way he structures the whole book. The ending thought is the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord, we thank you. As we look at what you have inspired Paul to write here, that we can be deeply enlightened by Paul just starting off with what most people would have as hello. And Lord, to see that as he writes here, he builds in great depth, and he wishes the very best for our spiritual health, and he does so by directing us to the Lord himself. We thank you for that, Lord, in Jesus' name, amen.