Stepping Into Ephesus. Ephesians, Introduction and Overview.

The Bible Project Daily Podcast is an in-depth, daily study of the entire Bible, chapter by chapter, verse by verse. 

Episode Notes:  Stepping Into Ephesus. Ephesians, Introduction and Overview.

A messenger has arrived from far away. He carries a letter. Not just any letter, a letter from a man they have heard about but never met. A man whose reputation has travelled farther than he ever could. A man who has been beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and yet somehow is still shaping the world.

 The letter is opened.

And the room falls silent.

 This is the moment the church in Ephesus first heard the words we now call Ephesians. A letter that would outlive empires, reshape theology, and call believers across centuries to live in the light of their calling.

 And today, we begin that journey together through that letter.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Imagine you're standing in the middle of a city that truly never sleeps. The sun is sinking behind the marble columns of the great temple of Artemis, a structure so massive, so dazzling that ancient travellers wrote poems about it. Merchants are shouting over one another in the marketplace, the smell of spices in the air, the smell of sweat and incense also, and sea salt hangs in the air. Philosophers are arguing in the shades of the porticos, idol makers hammer away at their trade, shaping gods from metal and stone, and somewhere in the midst of all that noise, all that spiritual confusion is a small group of believers gathered quietly in a home. They're not wealthy, they're not powerful, they're not influential, they are simply people who've heard the message of Jesus Christ and believed it, and they're waiting. But a messenger has arrived from far away and he carries a letter, not just any letter, a letter from a man they've heard about but never met, a man whose reputation has travelled further than he ever could. A man who has been beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and yet somehow is still shaping the world. The letter is opened, and the room falls silent. This is the moment that the church in Ephesus first heard the words that we now call Paul's letter, his epistle to the Ephesians. It is a letter that would outlive empires, reshape Christian theology, and call believers across centuries to live in the light of their calling. And today we begin our journey through that letter. Welcome to today's episode. Welcome to the Bible Project Daily Podcast. Paul's letters are some of the most intimate documents in the New Testament. In a world where personal letters were rare and precious, Paul poured out his heart to the churches that he loved. Now he didn't write these as academic essays. He didn't sit at a desk crafting theological treaties. He dictated his letters, probably while pacing around a room, praying, wrestling, and sometimes pleading with the people, and a secretary was probably just sitting there desperately trying to keep up. That's why his sentences sometimes run out like a river in a flood. That's why his emotions sometimes spill over the edges. That is also why 2,000 years later, many still feel that they know the person behind these letters. But reading Paul is a bit like listening to one side of a phone call. We hear his answers, we hear his concerns, his corrections even, but we don't always know the exact situation he was responding to. So before we can understand Ephesians, we need to reconstruct the world into which his letters were written. Now in the modern world, a handwritten letter is becoming a bit of a rare thing, isn't it? We send texts, we have emails, sometimes we just send emojis that are supposed to convey the feelings we have, but for thousands of years the letter was the most intimate form of communication available to people, and people poured their heart into ink and onto parchment. They revealed therein their fears, their joys, their frustrations and their hopes. Now biographers still know this. When you want to understand a person, a biographer, if he wants to truly understand them, usually go straight to the letters, because letters reveal the real inner life of the person. And Paul left us many letters, and it is because of those letters and the number of them that we feel we know him still. We hear his voice, we hear his joy, we hear his frustration at times, we even hear his heartbreak. We also hear his love for the people he writes to in many of the letters, even when they're being difficult, misguided, or in sometimes just downright rebellious. Sometimes reading Paul feels like reading a friend's journal. Other times it feels like listening to a pastor who is desperate for his people to flourish, and sometimes it feels like listening to a man pacing the floor, pouring out his heart faster than the scribe could write. To appreciate Paul's letters in general, we need to understand the world into which they were written. In the ancient world, the primary writing material was paparus, that was made from bulrushes that grew along the Nile. Strips were laid crosswise, pressed dried, and turned into something that looks a little bit like the rough brown wrapping paper we can buy today, but it was very brittle, fragile, and yet when kept dry, astonishingly durable. Archaeologists have found literally thousands of papyrus documents from that era in ancient rubbish heaps, things like marriage contracts, legal agreements, tax forms, even shopping lists, and most fascinatingly of all, private letters. And when we read these ancient biblical letters, we discover something remarkable. They all follow a pattern, all of Paul's do anyway. They have a greeting, a prayer, a thanksgiving, then the main body of the letter, then usually some final personal greetings, and a closing blessing. And Paul follows that pattern almost exactly. Not because he's trying to be formal, not because he's trying to be literary or meet the standard of a literary norm, but because he's simply writing real letters to real people in his real world. Paul's letters are not essays, and that is important to understand. When Paul wrote his letters, he wasn't writing them for a textbook or a Bible commentary, he wasn't writing theology, he wasn't writing for scholars, he was writing to and for friends, often for people he loved or people he prayed for, and indeed people he just worried about. And most of the letters were also written to address the immediate situation. Things like a crisis in Corinth, confusion in Galatia, persecution in Thessalonica, and false teaching in Colossae. Or what about discouragement for those in Philippi? You see, Paul didn't sit down and think I shall know something that will be read for a thousand years. He wrote because something urgent was happening in a church that he cared for or felt responsible for. And yet, because human nature hasn't changed, the situations that he addresses are still situations that we as ordinary people face today, and that's why his letters still speak to us. Now another detail that helps us understand Paul's style is the fact that he didn't usually write those letters by hand. We know he dictated them. We know the names of some of the secretaries even because they slip in their own greetings at the end. And sometimes they even sign them, and on other occasions Paul takes the pen himself and then signs his name personally, almost like the pastor signing the bottom of a typed letter to make it more personal. And this explains a lot, I think. It explains why his sentences sometimes feel like they're sprinting. It explains why sometimes they're very long, but then he suddenly occasionally changes direction mid-thought, and it explains why his emotions sometimes burst through and out of the structure. Imagine Paul, he's pacing the room, speaking passionately, urgently, emotionally, and as a scribe there just simply trying to keep up. The words tumble out, the ideas overflow, the heart leads and the mouth follows, and the following the mouth comes the pain. And that is probably why Paul's letter still feels so alive to us today. When Paul dictated his letters, he wasn't thinking abstractly, he was thinking about people, real people with real struggles, facing real temptations, real fears, and who had real hopes. I imagine he saw those people who he was writing to, he saw their faces in his mind, and he remembered their stories. He felt their pain, he longed for their spiritual maturity and he prayed for their unity. And sometimes the urgency of his love means that the words almost trip over each other, and that's why the letters still resonate. Because they're written with love, and you know what? Love has a real way of lasting. Some people think that because Paul wrote to specific churches in specific situations, his letters are limited to those contexts. But I think that's a mistake because that's not how truth works. A letter written to a church facing division can speak to every church facing division. A letter written to a believer struggling with sin can speak to every believer who's struggling with sin. A letter written to people confused by false teaching speaks to every generation facing confusion and false teaching. Human nature hasn't changed, has it? The human heart hasn't changed, and the human need for grace hasn't changed. And so Paul's letters still speak, not because they were written for us, but because they were written for people exactly like us. So before we open the letter to Ephesians, I think we've already learned something vital. That being, we need to understand that Paul's letters are not cold documents, they are warm, human, emotional, urgent, and pastoral letters. They are windows into the heart of a man who loved Christ and loved his church. And the letter to the Ephesians, the one we're about to explore together, is one of the most profound and most sweeping, and some say the most beautiful of his works. So let's step a little deeper into the word of Ephesus and let's drill down and explore the purpose of this particular letter and discover why this particular epistle has shaped Christian thought now for over two thousand years. But before we do that, remember this. Before Ephesians was ever considered scripture, it was a letter. A letter written with love, a letter written with urgency, a letter written to people who needed to know who they were in Christ. And so do we need to know that. Paul's letter, this particular letter to the Ephesians, is a message with a breathtaking vision that makes this letter unlike anything else in the whole of the New Testament. Now Ephesians is not a casual letter, it's not a quick note dashed off between missionary journeys, it's not either a simple response to a single crisis. Ephesians is the most soaring of his letters, a letter that begins with the depth of human ruin and rises to the heights of God's divine redemption in Christ. It is a letter that stretches from eternity past to eternity future, and it is a letter that lifts our eyes from the everyday dirt of daily life to the cosmic, magnificent purposes of God. And at its core, it's a letter about calling. Not just Paul's calling, not even just a church's calling or the whole church's calling. Importantly, it's about all of those things, but it's also about your calling, the calling of every believer to live in Christ, walk in unity, stand in strength, and shine in a world that desperately needs the light of the gospel. For this is a letter that changed the course of Christianity. Many biblical scholars contest that Ephesians contains some of Paul's most profound thinking. Some even argue that without the ideas that he develops in this letter, Christianity might have remained a small Jewish sect, still bound to circumcision, ritual law, and ethnic boundaries. Imagine that for a moment. Imagine a world where the gospel never broke free from its Jewish roots. Imagine a world where any non-Jewish person was told that they must become a Jew before they could become a Christian. Imagine a world where the grace of God was fenced in by ethnicity, tradition, and religious rituals. But Paul, guided by the Holy Spirit, saw something bigger here. He saw a gospel for all people. He saw a world church made of every tribe and tongue. He saw a unity that would stretch across nations, cultures, boundaries, and centuries. And Ephesians is where he unfolds that vision for us. This letter is not just theology, it is the liberation, the setting free and the expansion of the gospel. It is the opening of a door that no one can ever shut. Twice in the letter, Paul is at pains to identify himself as the author, once at the beginning, in the very first verse, and again in the opening verse of chapter three. Tradition and church history and the internal evidence of the letter itself all agree that this is the authentic voice of the Apostle Paul. And by the way, he's writing it from prison. Ephesians is one of what are called his four prison letters, along with Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. These letters were written during a period of confinement. Likely Paul's two-year imprisonment in Rome that is recorded for us in Acts 28. Think about that. Paul is probably chained, he's certainly guarded, he's restricted, he's unable to travel, unable to preach in the synagogues, and unable to plant any new churches at this time. And yet from that place of limitation he writes a letter that explans the horizons of the church to the very ends of the earth, which tells me that sometimes God does his greatest work when we feel most confined. One of the most striking features of Ephesians is how impersonal it is compared to Paul's other letters. Please note there are no personal greetings in this letter, no references to any shared memories, no affectionate stories in the background, no mentions of any individuals by name. Now this is unusual for Paul. In Romans he greets more than two dozen people by name. In Philippians he writes with the warmth of a father to his children, and in Thessalonians he recalls the tears that they shed together and their faithfulness together. But in Ephesians nothing. Instead Paul's right, I have heard of your faith, not I remember your faith, and he writes, Assuming you have heard of the stewardship of God's grace given to me, not as you know me as the spiritual leader from my time with you. So this is all suggesting something important. Paul and the recipients of this letter probably have never met. Many say this wasn't a letter actually written to a single congregation Paul knew intimately, it was a letter written to a network of churches, a circular letter copied and carried from town to town across Asia Minor. Some ancient manuscripts even omit the word Ephesus in its opening line, which supports the idea that the letter was meant to be inserted with the name of every church within the region of Ephesus as it was delivered. In other words, Ephesus was written for the whole region and thereby extension for the whole church. But Ephesus mattered in the life of the early church because Ephesus was the strategic art of what you we would today call Asia Minor, that whole region from Turkey extending into the Middle East, Iran, Iraq, and beyond. It was the chief city of the Roman province of Asia, and it was a bustling port, a centre of commerce, a hub of culture, and a magnet for spiritual seekers. The great temple of Artemis dominated the skyline, drawing pilgrims from across the whole wider Roman Empire. Ephesus was a city of wealth, influence, but it was also a city of superstition, magic, idolatry, and spiritual confusion. And when people came to Christ in Ephesus, they brought with them a lifetime of spiritual baggage. They had been shaped by a world where unseen powers were feared, where magic was almost considered normal, and where idols were everywhere, and people were, how shall we say, morally flexible? Paul knew that if the gospel would take and could take root in Ephesus, it would then spread throughout the entire region. But he also knew that the church in Ephesus would fake unique challenges, false teaching, moral pressure, spiritual warfare and cultural confusion, and so he is writing here to strengthen them, to encourage them. At the time Paul wrote this letter, you see a particular kind of false teaching was spreading quickly across and throughout the region, an early form of what is called Gnosticism. Now this teaching claimed that Jesus was not fully God. Ironically it claimed he was also not fully human. Jesus was believed to be a kind of semi angelic being, and that humans needed help from these unseen spiritual powers to reach perfection, not salvation. In other words, Christ was not enough. And Paul writes to the Ephesians to crush that idea completely. And in it he declares that Christ is supreme above all things, exalted above every power and authority, and he is the fullness of God in bodily form, the head of the church and the centre of God's eternal plan, and because Christ is supreme, then believers can share in his victory. So this is not a letter of theology, it is a letter ultimately about spiritual warfare. It also has that aspect of pastoral protection. Paul is guarding the flock from the wolves that are around him. So if you had to summarize Ephesians in one sentence, it might be this live a life worthy of your calling. Now Paul begins by showing us how God in every aspect, the Trinity, is involved intimately in our salvation. He tells us the Father chooses, the Son then redeems, and the Spirit seals that redemption. Then he prays that believers would be enlightened and that they would know the hope of their calling, and the riches of God's inheritance that they receive, and the greatness of the power of the Holy Spirit to enable them to live it out in the real world. He reminds them that they have been brought near and now reconciled with God, but more than that they are united with Him and made into one new humanity. We're built into a holy temple called into fellowship with God and with one another. So he's urging them to walk worthy of that calling, to walk in unity, walk in love, walk in wisdom, walk in purity, and walk in strength. And we'll focus on all those aspects of it as we progress through this letter together. But remember, this is not a letter about abstract ideas. This is a letter ultimately about identity, about purpose, about transformation, and about living as people who belong to Christ. One of the most tender moments in the letter will come in Ephesians chapter 3.13, where Paul will write, Do not lose heart because of my sufferings for you. Now Paul knows that his imprisonment may have discouraged some of the believers there. They maybe are wondering if the gospel is failing. They wonder if God has abandoned his apostle, and they wonder if they might be abandoned one day and if the church will survive. But Paul says, My chains are not a setback. My suffering should not be interpreted as defeat, because God is using it, all of it, all of it, to reveal and expand the mystery of Christ. And if God can use Paul's imprisonment, he says, he can use your circumstances too. So, friends, as we stand at the threshold of Ephesus, before we launch off, let me remind you of what we've discovered here. This letter was written from prison to churches that Paul probably never met, in a region that was filled with spiritual confusion, but was an important region, and he wrote it to strengthen the believers, to correct the false teaching that was emerging, and to reveal God's full cosmic plan for mankind, and to call every Christian, which means every Christian, including you and I, to live a life worthy of that calling. So let this settle in your heart before we launch out in our time together in this book. You have been called, you have been chosen, you have been redeemed, and you have been sealed, and you have been invited into living a life filled with the eternal purpose of God. And Ephesians is the letter that can really show you what exactly that means. It's also worth noticing something else about this book. Ephesians is intimately connected to those other prison letters, one in particular, the book of Colossians. All the Bible commentators comment on the fact that if Colossians Colossians was Paul's declaration that Christ is sufficient. Then Ephesians comes on top of that and it's his declaration that Christ is supreme. Colossians will tell us that in Christ are hidden the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and that the fullness of God dwells in him, and it insists that Christ alone is necessitate is necessary and sufficient for salvation, that no rituals are required, no angels with secret revelations, no secret knowledge requires. But then Ephesians takes that truth and expands it and plays it out on a sort of cosmic panorama of a stage. Where Colossians said Christ is enough, and of course Christ is enough, Ephesians then comes along and says Christ is more than enough, he's everything. Where Colossians said Christ is the fullness of God, Ephesians says all things will be gathered up in him. Colossians says Christ is supreme over every power, and Ephesians says, and you, yes, you are united with him in that power. It's as if Paul wrote Colossians with the fire in his bones, and then he sat down in his prison cell, prayed and reflected, and allowed the Spirit to lift his eyes even higher, and the result was his follow-up letter to Ephesians, in which he expands that on a cosmic stage. If you want to understand Ephesians, you must understand this one sentence that I believe is the heartbreak of the entire letter. God's plan is ultimately to unite all things in Christ, all things in heaven and on earth. This is the center of gravity of this letter. This is its organizing principle. This is the melody of the line that runs through every chapter. Paul is looking at the Gentile world in which he's writing into, and he sees division everywhere, Jew versus Gentile, slave versus free, rich versus poor, nation versus nation, culture versus culture, even angels versus demons, and he says in Christ all things will be gathered up and can find their unity under him. Not by force, not by political power, not by cultural dominance of one group over another, but by redemption, by reconciling all things through his blood. This is not just a spiritual idea, this is a cosmic vision for the whole universe. Paul sees that universe as fractured, broken, a disjointed creation because of sin, a world at war with itself, a humanity at war with itself, and in the spiritual realm, wars going on behind the scenes all the time. And into that chaos Christ has come, he said, Christ has stepped in and he's the one who can bring peace. Paul's vision of this peace and unity is not abstract because it begins with the individual human heart. He knows, as we all know, that every man or woman carries within them attention at all times, a sort of internal civil war, a pull towards good and a pull towards evil, a longing for God and a longing to be self-centered, a desire what is to do what is right, but also the desire the temptation to do what is wrong. And Paul hates sin both in himself and the people he writes to, but he whilst hating the sin, he still loves the people. He sees their struggles, he understands their temptations, and he knows the battle they face. And he writes Ephesians to show them and us that the unity Christ brings is not just cosmic, it's not just ecclesiastical church related, it's not culture related, it's a personal battle that he wants to help us win. Christ, he says, can bring unity to a fractured, divided human heart. In Paul's world, both Jewish and Greek people believed that the universe was filled with spiritual beings, both good and evil, angels and demons, powers and principalities, forces of light and forces of darkness, and they believed that these forces were at war all the time. And Paul, let's be clear, does not dismiss that worldview. In fact, he affirms it, but then he refames it. He says, yes, there is a cosmic battle, yes, there are spiritual forces of evil, yes, the heavenly realms are indeed filled with conflict, but Christ is supreme over all, all of it. He is seated far above every power and authority, we will be told. He has triumphed over every spiritual force. He has disarmed the rulers and the authorities, and he has made a public spectacle of them in doing so. And because Christ is victorious, we as believers can share in his victory. That is why Ephesians speak so much about spiritual warfare, not to frighten us, not just to fascinate us, but to remind us that the battle is real and that the victory is already won. Ephesians follows the ancient letter format, but Paul uses it very differently. In it he'll weave the most huge themes, returning to them, building crescendos and drawing the listener into something beautiful whilst at the same time really insightful and helpful. The letter opens with a greeting and a prayer, but in the middle of a prayer, Paul literally takes a theological detour. Then he'll return to the prayer again, and then he'll wander off again into another theme. Finally he'll circle back and pray a second time. It's as if the truths he's describing at times become so overwhelming that he can't help but pause and praise or worship or pray. But beyond that introduction, the letter does but people can see beyond this swirling mass of ideas, the letter does in fact divide into two great halves. The first half, chapters one to three, are about our calling, our identity, our wealth in Christ, doctrine one might say, and Paul lifts our eyes to the eternal purposes of God. Then chapters four to six talks about our walk, our duties, our conduct, our life together as Christians, and Paul brings those truths into daily life. Or as some have put it, this book will tell you how to first sit, then walk, then stand, to sit in your identity as a child of God, then understanding that to walk in your calling, and then to take that stand against the enemy. It is in Ephesians that Paul will use and utilize one of the greatest images in the history of Christian writing, the idea of the church as the body of Christ. The church is revealed not to be a building, not an institution, not a club, not a weekly event. The church is a living, breathing body of Christ on earth. We are his hands doing his work, we are his feet that carry his message, we are his mouth that speaks his truth, and we are his presence shining his light into the world. And because the church is Christ's body, the church is then the instrument through which God brings unity to the world. The church is meant to be a preview of the world to come, a community where the divisions of the world are seen to be healed, where the hostility of the world is overcome, and where the love of Christ is made visible in the everyday. And one of the reasons Paul's right to Ephesus is to confront that early form of Gnosticism that was breaking into the Christian church, a teaching that claimed that Jesus was not fully God or fully human, but something in between. A teaching that indeed has influence to this day. According to this teaching, it said, yeah, Jesus was superior to ordinary human beings, but he still needed help from angelic beings, and that believers needed some sort of secret knowledge to reach spiritual maturity. But Paul's response here is thunderous. He will tell us that Christ is supreme, Christ is sufficient, and Christ is Lord over all. He has triumphed over every spiritual force. He is the fullness of God, he is the head of this community called the Church, and Christ is the center, the absolute center of God's eternal plan for humanity. And because Christ is so supreme in that way, we believers are truly secure. So, Paul, this letter, is written with three great purposes in mind. Firstly, to enlighten believers concerning their calling as Christian believers. He wants us to know who we are and whose we are, what God has done for us and what God is doing for us and what God will do through us. Secondly, he wants to urge us to walk in a manner worthy of our calling, to live our lives in the light of that calling, not in pride, not in fear, but in unity, love, wisdom, purity, and indeed strength. And finally, to encourage these people he's writing to never to lose heart. Paul knows his imprisonment has encouraged some believers. He knows they're worried, he knows they're confused, and he knows they're wondering what exactly is God doing at the moment. So he writes to them and says, Don't lose heart. My chains are in fact for your glory. God is using this, God is revealing his mystery, and God continues to build his church. And if God can use my Paul's imprisonment, then he can use your circumstances too, no matter what they are. So Paul writes to people to encourage them and enlighten them concerning their calling as Christians, to urge us all to walk worthy of it, and to encourage us not to lose heart. And he's wrote it to them for that reason, and he's writing it to for us today for that very same reason. Ephesians is a letter that lifts our eyes, it's a letter that can strengthen our heart, it's a letter that will call you to live differently if you choose to listen to what it says, and it is a letter that can do nothing less than reveal the cosmic purpose of God. It's a letter that invites us into unity with Christ and with one another. And now, my friends, with the stage set and the world built and the themes laid out, I think we're ready to step into the letter itself. Thanks for being with me today. I do trust I'll see you back here again tomorrow as we launch off on the opening verses of this glorious letter to the Ephesians. Bye bye for now