Ephesians 1.3–10
A Sermon preached at St Margaret’s Church Nedlands 28th June 2026
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. He predestined us in love for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed (graced) us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. Ephesians 1.3–10
I have commended the Letter to the Ephesians to you; I said it would be a blessing to us to open and explore it. Now I must demonstrate that this is so. The first task before us as interpreters is to determine what this passage we are looking at is about. What is it about, and then, what does it say about what it is about? The subject is important, because on the surface it is about many things. I put it to one of my classes to tell me the subject of this passage, and the suggestions I got were: predestination, God’s love, redemption, forgiveness, grace, God’s plan, and wisdom. All these are mentioned, but they are not what the whole passage is about. Readers tend to focus on what is most interesting to them, but what did Paul wish to say? His subject is blessing.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies …
And then he lists what some of those blessings are; there are at least seven of them. I shouldn’t have to tell you that blessing is an important matter. I often have cause to remember the couple who approached me to marry them. Both were doctors, and they were upfront with me that they were both atheists. They also assured me they were not looking for a nice church for their wedding. No, they had explored all the options and decided that a Christian service was most meaningful. I reminded them that if there were no God, nothing had meaning. They conceded this, but said a Christian service treated their marriage as they thought it should, and they added, “And if there is blessing to be had, we want it.” That was a giveaway. Everyone wants their life to be blessed, because blessing leads presumably to happiness. But for many, asking for blessing is like rubbing the magic lamp to conjure up the genie. The idea of blessing brings God into the picture; the only other way to think of it is luck. The problem with luck is that it is fifty-fifty whether you get good or bad luck. Read any of Thomas Hardy’s stories—Far from the Madding Crowd, for example—and you will meet an author who was obsessed with the power of bad luck to spoil a person’s life. Blessing is about having good luck; is this something we can have?
The Greek word for blessing which Paul uses here means to speak well of someone (eulogetos). Paul speaks well of God—blesses him— and God speaks well of us. But speaking well of God is quite different to him blessing us. Blessing God means thanking, praising, worshipping. Paul thanks God for blessing us. When God speaks a good word over us it means he is marking us out for special treatment; he is wishing good on us—but since he controls everything, he is saying that for us he will work everything for good. It would be an incredible thing to be blessed by God like this. Much better than a genie with only three wishes. But what sort of blessings are we talking about?
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places …
What are spiritual blessings in the heavenly places? Does this mean we will be blessed in heaven, but life under the sun may be as miserable as hell? We will have to see.
Paul lists some of these blessings, others are explained later in the letter. Remember the letter is addressed to “saints”; it is telling God’s people about the very real benefits that are ours if we join ourselves to Jesus.
Blessing number 1:
… even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.
Christian, God had you in mind before ever he created the world. He created the world for you. You mean more to him than the planet, than the universe, no less. He had you in mind for himself, that you would be with him for ever as his child and special friend, holy, like all the saints, and freed of all blame and every possible accusation. Someone is about to publish a book about my life, and I am terrified someone who knows my past will call me out and shame me, especially when we go back to where I grew up. But there will be no blaming and shaming in the world to come; that will be done and dealt with.
Blessing number 2 is about predestination.
In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons [and daughters] through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
Christian, your destiny has been determined. God set his love on you from the beginning of time, when you were nothing but a thought in his mind. He laid out your life beforehand, to lead you to Jesus and to be adopted as one of God’s children. This includes the country and century in which you are to live, who are to be your parents, whether you are to be rich of poor, and a million other things—whether you are to marry, and whether your marriage will be happy or miserable, whether you will be in good health until the day you, or whether you are to struggle with chronic disability. This is huge and I don’t have time to explore it now; sufficient to say how difficult this is to get your head around, if say, one of your parents was abusive. That discussion will have to wait for another day.
Blessings number 3 & 4:
In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight …
At a point in time, namely that day in April AD 30 when they nailed him to a cross, Jesus did something that he and his Father had planned from eternity—even before he thought of us! The Son of God paid the price of your freedom; he died so you and I could be redeemed from all that enslaves us: death and the fear of death, the Devil and his power to drag us down, my sin which without redemption will take me to hell, and more. When you place your life in Jesus’ hands, he forgives you all the wrong you have done, past, present, and future, and moves you into the sphere of his kindness—that is what grace is, and notice that he lavishes it on us. So this is not just about what happens in heaven; it is not like winning the lottery, but luckier by far for the person who receives it.
And then he grants us wisdom and insight and reveals to us his plan, which is blessing number 5 & 6.
… making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.
For someone like me, who spent some of my early years weighed down by the meaninglessness of life, this is sensational: God tells us what it is all about. He reveals his grand plan.
Note that this is a plan for the fullness of time. It is not a plan for the year ahead, nor a five-year plan, nor even a ten-year plan. Iran is said to play the long game: if it takes a century to reach its goal, that is what it will take. God is playing the longest game. His plan is for the fulness of time.
This word “fulness” tells us something important about time. We are taught both in the Bible and by modern cosmology that time as we know it had a beginning. It will also have an end, not the heat death of the universe, but when God who created it calls “Time!” Of course, there will be an after, but that will be something new, and difficult for us now to imagine. I spoke last week of Spaceship Earth, out of control and heading nowhere. But it’s not true it’s heading nowhere, not when you bring God into it. “The Universe of Time and Space,” to steal a line from Stephen Hawking, is in God’s hands, racing towards the fulness of time. God has a plan to bring things to completion.
The second thing to note about this is that God’s plan is for everything, it is a plan to bring all things together. This expression “all things” (ta panta) can mean the universe. It is comprehensive; nothing will be left out: no country, no people group, not a single individual, not you and not me. This sounds like the Eastern dream, everything reunited, but not at all as they imagine it, not a meltdown of individuality into an indistinguishable mass of everythingness and nothingness, but a new universe, a new space-time reality, a new world, the perfection of what God created as a “vast array” and said was very good.
And God’s plan includes more than the world of men. “Things in heaven and things on earth” means the whole angelic and demonic worlds are included. Recently I read something that changed the way I think. I had always thought of heaven as the place where God lives—not a geographical location, of course, but something, somewhere beyond what we can know, and not part of creation. Genesis says that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. I had always taken “the heavens” to mean the sky. But what I read suggested it is more: it is also the place of angels, the place where the Lord Jesus presently reigns at the right hand of God, and very much part of God’s original creation. God himself, of course, is above even the highest heaven; this is the only way we can think if it. But the point is, that whatever exists out there, maybe more than one heaven, and maybe creatures we cannot at present imagine, the whole of God’s creation is included in this plan, a plan for everything, and for all time, “things in heaven and things on earth.”
What then is this plan? It is to bring all things together under Christ. This simple statement hides a big word with massive implications. The Greek word anakephalaiosesthai can mean to summarize, to bring things under one heading. The word kephale means “head.” When God created the world he appointed Adam to be its head. But Adam listened to the Devil and brought the world under his influence—not his headship, mind; Satan could never be the world’s head. He does not have the capacity to shovel dirt, or manufacture a missile. He always acts through human beings. He is the original parasite, the original virus. No, Adamwas appointed by God as the head of the human race, and indeed, ultimately the head of the whole angelic world as well. But he fell and lost his place. And God’s plan now it to “rehead” the whole creation—that is what that big word means (ana-kephalaiosis)—under Jesus Christ.
When you ask what was the meaning of Moses and Israel, and what was the meaning of Israel’s destruction by the armies of Babylon—and then Rome—when you ask about the meaning of China’s great civilization—and the East and the rise of Islam. When you ask about the meaning of the first and second world wars—and the holocaust, and the rise of America and perhaps its fall, and Gaza, and Iran, and north and South Sudan. And I could go on and on, because it is a plan that comprehends everything, the war in heaven and the war is so many homes. But I do not want to overwhelm us. The answer to the meaning of all this, is that God is working in all things to bring everything under the control and leadership of the new head of the human race, the Lord Jesus Christ. Grasp this, and you will never be the same again.
But now, ask anyone in the street what they think is the purpose of life, and they will either say to be happy, or they will admit they have no idea. Everyone wants to be happy, of course, so it is a natural thought to vote happiness. The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, saw this, and built his whole system of ethics on the premise that we all seek happiness. There is a problem though: how to be happy? The conflict between our political parties (all seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people), and the ever-increasing number of young people committing suicide, should tell us that we do not easily find happiness—even here in the lucky country, which should surely be the happiest, but is not. The truth is, we don’t know how to be happy.
Jesus spoke of happiness. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he said, and the word is “happy”; I do not know why translators have to make it sound religious. “Happy are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” The poor in spirit are the depressed, the broken down, the failures in life, those who cannot make a go of it in the world as it is. When you factor in your struggle for health and sanity, and your sin, and your inevitable death, we are all poor as beggars, if we knew it. But Jesus promises happiness—to those who are blessed to find a place in that kingdom which will be when God has completed his plan for everything and for the fulness of time, when everything will be under the leadership of Jesus. Then we will find the happiness we can never find in this life—and knowing this makes us happy in this life, even in the midst of trouble. Aristotle was right, he just didn’t know how to get there. Nor did Karl Marx, and nor do our well-meaning politicians. But blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every blessing in the spiritual realm, choosing us, laying out our destiny, redeeming us through the death of his Son, forgiving us, showering his generosity on us, giving us wisdom, and revealing his eternal plan, which is a plan for our ultimate happiness.