Of the spiritual blessings which we have in Christ we notice
I. Election. God has chosen us not only that we may be saved from eternal destruction, not only that we may be happy for ever in heaven, but He has chosen us for this special purpose: that we should be holy and without blame before Him. We cannot have before us a nobler, grander object to contemplate than that it is God's purpose to make us holy and without blame before Him, to conform us in spirit and in life to the image of His dear Son.
II. Predestination and adoption. Whatever may be said about all human beings being the children of God, I am inclined to think that there is more of sentiment than of sound Scriptural truth in that notion, for I find it continually set forth in the New Testament that there is a connection between faith in Christ and our becoming children of God. "Ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus," says the Apostle Paul, and thus it is that we are adopted and received into the adoption of sons.
III. Redemption. Much as this doctrine is derided at the present time, the fact that He bought us at such a price as His own precious life makes our redemption and eternal life so absolutely secure.
IV. Forgiveness of sins. Christ has not redeemed us from the curse of the law that He might afterwards reproach us for our sins. There comes with the redemption the forgiveness. There comes with the act of love that saved us from the curse of the law the act of oblivion, in which all sin is forgiven and forgotten.
H. Stowell Brown, Christian World Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 344.
(with Ephesians 1:20; Ephesians 2:6; Ephesians 3:10; Ephesians 6:12)
In the Heavenlies.
I. In the heavenlies we have (1) a blessed home. (2) We are quickened together and raised up with Christ. As a result of His thus quickening us together with Christ and raising us up together, God makes us sit together at His own right hand. This involves elevation over all created powers and a share in His absolute sovereignty.
II. The situation of believers in the heavenlies, thus blessed and thus exalted, naturally draws upon them the notice of other beings, of other intelligences, good or evil, who may be capable of understanding what is going on in the heavenlies. The heavenlies now put on the aspect of a theatre or place of exhibition in the view of holy angels, the unfallen inhabitants of heaven. By the Church they have made known to them the manifold wisdom of God.
III. In chap. Ephesians 6:12 another change or metamorphosis befalls the heavenlies. Instead of a spectacle, there is a strife; instead of an exhibition, a fight. The heavenlies now appear as a field of battle. The heavenlies are not now, any more than the heavenlies before the Fall, secure from the invasion of the spoiler and the foe. Our enemies are the world rulers of the dark and disordered system of things that now prevails among men. They follow us into our retreat. Resenting our escape from their dominion, bitterly grudging our being blessed by God and exalted in Christ, in the heavenlies, they would fain scale the mountain of our hope and joy in the Lord. Their temptations and assaults now are not carnal, but spiritual. Be not unduly afraid of them. Be not ignorant of their devices. Beware of meeting them in their own domain, in the world of whose darkness they are rulers.
R. S. Candlish, Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians,p. 1.
I. Men, in the midst of the many conflicting manifestations of God, are trying to find the supreme revelation which will harmonise all the crossing rays in its own serene and fadeless light. This supreme revelation we find in Christ. The God whom Jesus obeyed, the Father whom Jesus loved, is the God and Father we today are striving to find that we may love Him too. Every Godlike man gives a new revelation of God to man. "The God of Abraham" was a new conception of God that made primitive religion richer and better. The personal appropriation of God, so common in Hebrew piety, does not make the world at large poorer, but richer, by enlarging human faith and by sanctifying human experience. Every flower that blows, every bird that sings in summer, may claim the sunshine as its own. The violet can say, "My sun," without trespassing on the rights of the daisy; the butterfly can say, "My sun," without taking anything away from the lark. Each leaf and plant, each fern and flower, is a fresh revelation of the same sun a new incarnation of the one great mind in nature. So is every Godlike man showing a new phase of the Divine character.
II. The God of Jesus Christ can do no wrong. The eternity after time is done with will be as stainless as the eternity before time was. Time and sin are discords leading into deeper and sweeter symphonies. Christ saw hell and loved God; He knew that hell was not a land lying outside the boundaries of the kingdom of righteousness. Christ did not explain evil; He simply left it beneath His feet and went home. The explanation of sin comes only to those who have conquered sin.
H. Elvet Lewis, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxviii., p. 390.
References: Ephesians 1:3. Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 130: J. Stalker, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 127.