An In-Depth Look at Ephesians 1

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. My name is James White coming to you once again, live from the great state of Colorado. Great state as in one of the most beautiful states. Weird things going on politically, but I keep mentioning that just because it's a little scary.

But anyways, yes, it is July and actually gonna be here into August a little bit, but heading home early next week and back into the heat only for a little while because we're gonna be heading to South Africa very shortly after that.

And so lots and lots of stuff going on. Today I played around with a number of different topics and I thought about doing Radio Free Geneva because I have plenty of material because the program we did a little over a week ago while still in Phoenix, I believe, Radio Free Geneva in response to Michael Brown's brief presentation.

He did a response a couple of days ago or last week maybe, now that I think about it, it was last week. And then we have Pastor Mike Winger also did a response to some of the comments that I made on particular redemption.

And so there'll be plenty there. I simply haven't had the time to put it into Audio Notetaker and just trying to play through it would just be way too repetitive. It would take too much time. We really wouldn't get to the important stuff as quickly as we need to.

So I need to hold those off so I can put those together. Likewise, I was expecting a little more information to come out in regards to the founders video and a little some has, but not a whole lot. There've been some articles that have appeared but not really addressing the issues that I think need to be addressed.

And so I'm not sure if I just need to wait on that or just what, but I will be waiting on it today anyways to see what's gonna be going on with that. So where does that leave me? Well, thank you for listening to the Value Monday.

No, that leaves me having listened to some of the comments that were made by Michael Brown and others in regards to Calvinism and wanting to look at some passages of scripture today rather than necessarily any major confrontational issues or anything like that going on in the world.

It's always good to spend some time looking at the scriptures. And in particular, I did start listening to Michael's response to me. And he basically said, hey, I've put a stake down. I've said what I believe about this for years and years and years.

How could you not know that? We've done debates, so on and so forth. But there's some miscommunication taking place. And it's interesting in both of the responses that were given to me. Both of us feel like the other side isn't hearing what we're saying.

And part of that may be, you do a video, I do a video, you do a video, I do a video. And yet, Michael and I have obviously done more than just doing videos. We've done a lot of things where we were live.

And I think I can sort of prove that I am hearing and I am listening and I think I do understand where Michael's coming from, but I'm not hearing him interacting with historic Reformed understandings of the key passages and the key questions.

And one of the things that came up was Michael used the term philosophical issues and that he's more focused upon biblical issues. Well, I understand that. I certainly would say in the same way that I think that exegesis is the very essence and source of Christian truth and Christian theology.

And it's the only thing that will ever truly satisfy the heart and soul of a true believer. Jesus said, my sheep will hear my voice. They know me, I know them. And so I get that, but at the same time, my belief is that when Michael criticizes what we're saying and criticizes the Reformed perspective, there are particular presuppositions that underlie not only his criticism, but most people's criticism of Reformed theology.

There are certain assumptions that are being made. You can call them philosophical assumptions if you want to. There are a lot of people who adopt philosophical presuppositions, even if they don't know what the terminology might be, even if they haven't necessarily read extensively in philosophical sources or early church sources, wherever else it might be, there are still assumptions that are made that then become central to the argument as it is being presented.

And there are such presuppositions in the things that Michael says. And so when you can say there's no passage of the scripture that, for example, presents to you the distinction between the revealed will of God and the decree of God, well, it's very plain to us that there are.

It is very clear to us that that is a necessary distinction. Just simply saying God says thou shalt not kill, and then he sends the Messiah to die and makes him a sacrifice means you have to deal with Acts chapter four.

You have to deal with the fact that God predestined the actions of Herod and Pontius Pilate and the Jews and the Romans and without contradicting himself. And so, yeah, there are vitally important things like that that I think very often are hidden under the verbiage of our discussions with one another.

And it's unfortunately a rarity when you get into a situation with fellow believers, it shouldn't be a rarity, but unfortunately it is, where everyone's like, well, let's examine our presuppositions. Let's look at what the foundations are.

How does that sound? Instead, and I think social media is partly, not completely, but partly responsible for this. We just circle the wagons and line up and start the old, all the way up through the Civil War, just line up on both sides and shoot each other type of a thing, instead of hiding and everything else.

That's what we do. And that generally does not result in an overly deep understanding of Christian theology. So what I'd like to do here on the program today, at least at the start, is to look at a very well-known passage of scripture.

We have looked at it before, but we have new listeners and new viewers all the time. And to just broadly consider what is foundational to what the scripture says about our God and about the relationship of his will to human action.

Because this is really what the issue is all about. This is, it's not what you're normally challenged to think about at church. And these days, you know, where you just, you want, you know, if you have a church that wants to make unbelievers feel comfortable, now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that an unbeliever should feel like if they walk into your church that, you know, everyone's aiming a gun at them or something like that.

But at the same time, the church's purpose is to worship God by proclaiming his truth. It is a fellowship of saints. If you have the idea that the church is the main mechanism of evangelism, then you're missing where evangelism is supposed to be taking place.

I was climbing a mountain yesterday morning and we were joined by another climber and we started talking and, you know, I was like, all right, even though we're at 13 ,000 feet above sea level, how can I try to find out if this fellow's a Christian, you know, start a conversation.

Hopefully he won't be so opposed to the gospel that tries to throw me off a mountain. But it turned out he was a Presbyterian and we had a nice conversation. And, but you're, that's where that stuff is supposed to be happening.

You're not supposed to be starving the sheep so as to try to birth some other sheep in the process only to starve them too. That's not how it's supposed to be happening. So anyway, if you have that idea and that concept of what the church is supposed to be, then you're going to be dealing with issues like this and you're going to be talking about the relationship of God's decree, the nature of God, man is his creature and especially how that decree interfaces with man as a responsible creature.

This is something that should not be a once in 10 year special study only on a Wednesday night for the super believers. This, I think, is central to Christian discipleship. I would think it would be central, for example, if you have a hospital ministry, if you have a nursing home ministry.

And this is foundational to how you deal with suffering and evil in the world. And I do not for a second apologize for saying that I think all Christians should know what theodicy is. They should know that theodicy comes from two Greek words, theos, God, and dikaioh, to justify.

It's a justification of God's existence in the light of the existence of evil. Because, I mean, isn't that one of the primary arguments that is used against the existence of God? How can there be a good God when evil exists, et cetera, et cetera.

So we should know these things. They should be things that our people are asking about because they are actively involved in seeking to present God's truth at all times, not just on a Sunday, but on a Tuesday at work and a Thursday night at home, whatever else it might be.

So one of the passages that I think is just, it's one of those passages that in many churches, in many churches, what you're facing is the idea that these are too difficult. They're too challenging passages.

And I can't tell you how many people I have seen who have adopted the idea that since Peter says there are difficult things in Paul's writings, that therefore you can just simply ignore anything that seems challenging or difficult in the Pauline corpus.

And in the process, you not only mutate the faith, you fundamentally limit it to infancy for the rest of its existence. You're not gonna have a full-orbed New Testament faith about Paul's writings. Now, people say, ah, see, you're just a follower of Paul and a follower of Jesus.

Jesus was Paul's Lord, and Jesus chose Paul to function in a particular fashion so as to give the entirety of divine revelation to his church. So when you dismiss Paul and his writings, when you adopt hyper-red letterism, when you become a red-letter Christian, whatever else it is, you are fundamentally rejecting the wisdom of God and the creation of the canon of the scripture.

You are fundamentally rejecting the history of the witness of the church itself. And it is not surprising to me that red-letter Christianity or hyper-red letterism always, always, and I mean always, results in fundamental unorthodoxy because you are rejecting an entire portion, a major portion of what the spirit of God has provided to the church.

And so it's not surprising to me that when you see people adopting this stuff, off they go into some strange, weird theology down the road. So if you want to look into scriptures, I'll be reading it to you, but if you want to look into scriptures at Ephesians chapter one.

And again, we like to provide lots of information. You need to understand that one of the reasons, see, you and I sit here and we open our Bibles or we put the text on the screen and we approach these words as the authoritative revelation of God that needs to be kept in balanced harmony with the rest of scripture.

We read this in light of the prophetic witness of the Old Testament, what the prophets taught. Certainly I see a tremendous amount of connection to Isaiah chapters 40 through 48. This is certainly behind much of what the apostle says here, for example.

But you then, if that's what you're accustomed to in Christianity, you then become confused when you see people in quote unquote, mainline denominations, not giving any meaningful weight to these words at all or interpreting them in the strangest, most self-contradictory fashion.

And you wonder, why is this? What is that all about? And you must understand that many of those men, the majority of men and women being trained in theological seminaries and Bible colleges in the Western world today are going to be taught that Paul did not write the words we're gonna be looking at.

They are taught a, what would be styled a minimal Pauline canon, maybe seven books. Ephesians and Colossians would be rejected and the pastoral epistles would be rejected for sanctity of Titus. Sometimes they'll accept Philemon, but anyway.

Depends on the guy you're reading or the gal you're reading for these days. So a large portion of, you may grab hold of this and you may read Ephesians 1 and go, wow, it's incredible. And then you just wanna go out and talk to other people about it and you sit down with somebody and you're wondering why, they say they're following Jesus and they say they love the Bible and stuff like that, but you're not connecting.

And part of the reason is maybe in the background, maybe they don't know this, but their preacher has communicated through the sermons, oh yeah, that's Ephesians. And that was probably someone who knew Paul or in the Pauline circle, but no matter what you do, it ends up creating a deuterocanonical concept.

It's a secondary canon. It's not quite as authoritative as maybe Romans, even though anyone can see the deep connection between the two. And by the way, just in passing, most of the argumentation of this is based upon presuppositions and those presuppositions are that the church everywhere had a particular form to it that would preclude Ephesians or Colossians from representing that early church period during the life of the apostle Paul.

And so the presupposition is always evolutionary. That is that the early church had to evolve not under divine revelation, not under authoritative apostles, but it had to evolve pretty much through natural human processes, conflicts, things like that.

And so it started in this form and it ended in this form. And it's the Bauer hypothesis. There was all this diversity. And finally one Orthodox group ended up winning out. And it's the same thing back in the 1870s when German scholarship was saying that the Gospel of John could not have been written any earlier than 175.

Why? Because it has such an advanced Christology. It has such a high view of who Jesus is. And so it had to be that late because it had to have time to develop. So there are all these presuppositions.

And once you really dig through the presuppositions, you discover that there is a simple unbelief at the foundation of it. And so, wow, it's really shocking to discover that once you start foundationally with unbelief, you end up in Union Theological Seminary, which if you don't know is sort of these days the watchword of apostate seminaries, just completely have abandoned any semblance of orthodoxy or belief.

And they're the ones that put out the thing after we put out the Statement of Social Justice, started out saying, we confess the errancy of scripture. It's sort of like, well, you end up going to other sources then, that's shocking.

But yeah, that's what ends up taking place. So I just mentioned that because what happens is, we'll dive into a text like this and we're having a great old time, but I also realized that sometimes new Christians will go, hey, let's go get a commentary.

I can go to my local Christian bookstore, oh boy. Or I'm gonna go on Amazon, that's about the only bookstore left. Barnes and Noble's out there too. And I'm gonna pick up a commentary on Ephesians. And I'm just only end up buying the one that has the nicest cover or something and end up with a porridge of poison.

And they're wondering where it came from. And they're wondering why, what they got excited about when we walked through Ephesians one, they start reading whoever it is they picked up and they're nowhere near that.

They're coming to completely different religions. And that can lead people to think that, well, the text just must not be very clear. It's not about the text. It's about the presuppositions you bring to the text.

It's about the methods of hermeneutics and interpretation that you use. So that little side part there is just sort of a background stuff that hopefully will be useful to a number of people. Anyway, so looking at Ephesians chapter one, and again, just background is always so important.

I really do think, I can't absolutely prove to a thousand%. I can't prove this theory, but I think it has really good sound evidence behind it. But I think Ephesians is the book that is referred to over in Colossians 4 .16, as I recall off the top of my head, where Paul instructs the church of Colossae to read the epistle that is coming from the Laodiceans.

Now there could have been an epistle to the church of Laodicea that was not preserved, that God did not intend to have preserved, but I sorta doubt that. I think Ephesians was a circular letter that was written to all the churches that were upstream, upriver, literally, but also as far as being founded upriver, from Ephesus.

And Paul had spent many years in Ephesus. He had planted a very healthy, sound, solid church with plurality of elders. And he intended that church to function as a natural, evangelizing hotspot for everything in its area.

And there are a lot of parallels between Ephesians and Colossians. They're written at the same time. They cover many of the same topics. And it seems to me that Ephesians, especially because it does not mention personal names and things like that, even though Paul had spent so much time there, it's really odd that that would be the case unless its fundamental intention was to be passed around amongst the churches.

So I think that's what we're probably looking at here in Ephesians chapter one, which means Paul didn't just want the uber mature church of Ephesus to know this. And we can tell, even you look at the book of Revelation, you can see the church of Ephesus was a very mature church.

It was in danger of some pride or maybe some becoming puffed up because of that. But it was a mature church. And yet when he writes this epistle, he's not just writing it to them. He wants all the churches to understand what is the breadth and the length and the depth and some of the most beautiful elements of Paul's prayers for the churches found in Ephesians and Colossians.

He wants all believers to enter into the depths of the consideration of what God has done in Christ Jesus. And when we, for misguided reasons, keep that from our people, thinking that, well, you know, Mrs. Jones over there, she just, I can just tell she wants me to keep it nice and simple.

Well, if Mrs. Jones is a believer, she's indwelled by the spirit of God. And I think there's just a fundamental lack of trust in the spirit to take, if you really believe these are the spirit's words, do you think the spirit can't communicate to people who don't have some type of advanced theological degree?

That doesn't make any sense. We need to have trust in the spirit's work. So that's a lot of background. Ephesians chapter one, blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the one who blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.

Now, one of the issues that we deal with here, this is a long convoluted sentence in the original language and translations have guidelines as to just how long they will allow sentences to go. In modern English, you generally aren't supposed to write like the Puritans.

I mean, the Puritans could go on for paragraphs. They loved semicolons and dashes and so on and so forth. But today that's considered inappropriate. So you're supposed to break things up. And what that does is it introduces issues of exactly where you are to break up the text.

Because once again, the originals were written all capital letters, no space between words, basically no punctuation at all. And so where you make paragraph breaks, there's a couple of places that we're gonna see very early on where you have to make an editorial decision as to where you're gonna place particular phrases.

If that makes you uncomfortable, then you need to get over being uncomfortable about that because that is simply the reality of what we're dealing with. But the focus is the only thing mankind does here, and mankind only does this as part literally of all of creation, is to bless God.

We, it has been well said, the only thing we bring to our salvation is our sin. And that's true. This blessing upon God is really a blessing that's pronounced by all of creation, but we get to be involved in it as well.

But it is God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the fountainhead and the source in this opening section of the epistle of everything else that comes afterwards. This is vitally important to recognize because for some reason, a lot of new believers pick up the idea that God, the father, is the mean, wrathful, nasty guy that Jesus comes along and mollifies.

He calms him down. Oh, father, don't, I'll die for these people. No, the cross finds its origin in the father, its loving accomplishment in the son, and its application in the spirit. It's Trinitarian, but it starts with the father.

And so when you see us, who is the us? Now, it's interesting that a lot of people will presuppose that when you read the Bible, all of humanity is represented as the audience of the Bible. The reality is, many, many times, the audience is the covenant people of Israel.

The audience is the church. Sometimes the audience is all the world. Sometimes it's only the inhabitants of a particular city or people who are alive at a particular time that we can then look back and learn from.

But the reality is that that's what we're looking at. And so that needs to be, that really, really does need to be kept in mind as we consider the question of the one who blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

Now, in Christ, I'm sorry. Who is the us? So often when dealing with Reformed theology, careful attention to who the us is. For example, careful attention to who Jesus is addressing, in Matthew chapter 24, is very important.

Yes, it is. There are all sorts of passages where you have to allow the immediate context to determine how you're gonna make application. And if you skip past that, or just simply assume as many, many unlearned believers, new believers, you expect this, you don't get mad about it, you just offer correction.

We'll assume that something like this, that any person who picks up the Bible can read Ephesians 1, 3 and say, oh, that's me. You don't do that with any other book. But we do with the Bible. There are presuppositions that have to be addressed.

So the point is, God is the one who blesses us. And he blesses us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. Now, that's the first appearance, let's just point this out first, of the phrase in Christo, in Christ.

Numerous times throughout the first 14 verses, you are going to see in Christ, in him, and once it's going to be expressed in verse six, in the beloved one, which would emphasize, I think, the close personal relationship of father and son in the accomplishment of salvation itself.

But it's, if you have a spiritual blessing, you have it in Christ. One of the, I think one of the reasons that a lot of people don't like Ephesians chapter one, is that it is one of the most exclusivistic texts that I know of.

And exclusivism is a bad word today. It's a bad word today. Everything is supposed to be inclusivistic. You're supposed to include everyone. Well, according to Ephesians one, all of these divine actions, all spiritual blessings are found where?

Only in Christ. If you yourself are not in Christ, then the promises that are in him are not yours. They're not yours. The eternal life is found in him. The summing up of all things is found in him. Grace is found in him.

It's all in Christ. This is about as exclusivistic as you can possibly get in this text. And so the one who blesses us with every spiritual blessing. So if you claim a spiritual blessing, if you have discernment, if you have understanding of who Jesus is, if you recognize the depth and depravity of your sin, your absolute dependence upon Jesus Christ, that came from the father.

That's not Jesus doing those things for you and just keeping the father out of the way and being the nice guy while the father's the bad guy. No, these are spiritual blessings that God intends you to have.

But then it says in the heavenly realms. And the amazing thing is when you get into chapter two, we're gonna be told that we have been seated together with him in the heavenly realms. The point is that the salvation that the apostle announces to the church at Ephesus and all the churches through them to all of us, the salvation that he announces is a salvation that has heavenly certainty.

I think most Christians can understand that if something is real in the heavens, that there is no power on earth that can alter what is already real in the heavens. Isn't that one of the messages of the book of Revelation?

We have these heavenly scenes. Is there ever an instance in those heavenly scenes where there is doubt that God is going to be able to accomplish what he intends to accomplish? When you read through the book of Revelation, is your trust that God is going to accomplish what God is going to accomplish increased or decreased?

As long as you interpret it properly and don't turn it into the filter through which you read the New York Times today and recognize what it meant to the people to whom it was originally written, it is one of the most encouraging books you'll ever read.

That's not how most people read it, unfortunately, but it's the case. These spiritual blessings are in the heavenly places. This salvation that he announces is a salvation that is as certain as God's throne is in the heavenly places.

So he blessed us with every spiritual blessing just as, Kathos, he chose us in him before the foundation of the world so that, and there was a reason for this, he has a purpose that he is fulfilling. It is never some random thing.

God is a God of reason. He is accomplishing something. And it does not say we chose him. It says he chose us in him. And the him would go back to Christ. So the realm of the election is only in Christ, but Christ is not the one who is chosen.

He is in other contexts, but not in this one. And you can't run off to some other one and drag it over here and try to make Paul say something that Paul was not saying. Instead, the blessings, just as God gave us spiritual blessings, now God chose us, this is an action of God, he chose us in him, never separate from Christ, never based upon anything in us, but only in Christ.

And this choosing is pra before the foundation of the world. Now, again, people have stood on their heads to try to get around this text and to try to get around what it's saying and what it's communicating.

Before the foundation of the world, this choice was made. He chose us in Christ. That elect people were united with Christ in God's eternal purpose. You have to have not just room in your theology for this truth.

This has to be the core. This has to be the source. There are, I was listening to one fellow saying today, well, there's just so many plain scriptures that clearly refute particular redemption. And I'm sitting here going, well, they're actually plain scriptures that preach it and teach it.

And then here's one that plainly is preaching and teaching God's absolute sovereign power to accomplish his purpose in all the things that are gonna be mentioned in this text. And he chose us in him before the foundation of the world.

So it can't be based upon what we do. The choice is done before our creation even takes place. I mean, you can sit there and want to go, well, but God knows future events. So he's looking at what we're gonna do.

You can say that if you want, but don't pretend you're deriving it from a text like this because that's not what this is saying. That assumption, you can make that assumption, but you can't assume that Paul was making that assumption.

This decision is before the foundation of the world and it's for a purpose. So that we, same we that was the direct object of being chosen, we might be holy and blameless before him. So whatever this choice is, it results in holiness and blamelessness, which means it's dealing with the issue of sin.

The purpose and intention of whatever it is God is choosing to do here is going to result in holiness, blamelessness. It's right there in front of us. Now, this is where we run into one of the issues.

Is it that we might be holy and blameless before him in love or should we have the break and simply say that we might be holy and blameless before him? In love, he predestined us. Well, to be honest with you, you can make arguments on both sides.

There is no way to determine the answer to that question simply by reference to grammar or syntax. It is allowable in either direction. That is certainly appropriate. It might chafe some people to render it as in love, he predestined us unto adoption through Jesus Christ to himself, primarily because a lot of people have certain presuppositions as to that word election.

Let's go with that. Let's go with verse five being in love, he predestined us unto sonship. Because when you think about it, when you think about the depth of what that term sonship adoption really means, it is immersed in the concept of God's love.

How could God actually bring us into the kind of familial relationship? Rebel sinners, filthy rebel sinners in love with our own rebellion, he brings us into a position of adoption where he is our father.

We say, I'm a father. All of his, the inheritance promises are ours. I mean, that's love. That is, what other context can you place it in? So in love, he predestined us, not the son. The direct object of predestination is us, but unto adoption through Jesus Christ.

So again, if you wanna be a son of God, there is only one way. It is an absolutely exclusivistic language. Those users, you cannot avoid predestination of particular people, the same ones who are blessed, there is spiritual blessing, same ones who have been chosen to be holy and blameless for love, same ones who are then predestined unto adoption through Jesus Christ unto himself, because we call him Abba Father because we're joined to the son.

And that right there, that assumes incarnation, the reality of the incarnation. I would even argue that that assumes the reality of the dual nature of Christ, one person, two natures, because we are united with Christ.

He has to truly be the God-man for us to be able to call the Father, Abba Father. So predestined us unto adoption through Jesus Christ to himself, on what basis? And here, these two verses, as far as I can tell, are one of the clearest, most foundational texts upon which we can answer the big questions.

Maybe not in the way that mankind wants them answered, but we can understand the question of why. Why? And when you think about it, demanding that God answer that is a little bit arrogant on our side, on our part, but at the same time, God made us to be people who want to have answers like that.

And so he gives us an answer. See, Proorizo, to predestine, automatically raises the question, on what basis? Why would he choose one over another? Why would he choose one people over another people, one person over another person, one leader over another leader, whatever it might be?

Well, and in this case, since it's adoption, and we're gonna only go a matter of words before we have grace, we have redemption, we have the forgiveness of trespasses, and so we see that we're talking gospel here.

We're talking salvation here in its fullest. Why? According to the kind intention, the eudaikion, the good intention of his will, his will. Standard word for a will. And God has one, and it's a good will.

And that fits with predestining in love. It is a good will according to the goodness of his will. That's the basis of this election. Not mankind, not fulfillment of works, not fulfillment of anything.

It is according to the kindness of his will, the good intention of his will. And because it is solely of him, you will notice so far there has not been the slightest crack left open in the door for the insertion of anything of man's worthiness or anything else.

Man's works, man's accomplishment, no room, there's nothing there. So kind intention of his will, and because of that, that is unto the praise of his glorious grace. You could say unto the praise of the glory of his grace.

It's descriptive, this glorious grace, which he graced us. Yeah, you can translate that as gave to us. Yes, that's standard use. But when you have the same root being used only with only two words separating, the writer is probably attempting to communicate something there.

To the praise of his glorious grace, with which he graced us in the beloved one, in the beloved one, in Christ, it's singular. It's not in the beloved as in the congregation or something like that. It's in the beloved one.

So do you want to experience the grace of God? Do you want to possess that as your own? There's only one place to find it. And if you're looking for it any place else, the empty tomb says you missed it.

The empty tomb says you missed it. Whoever you're believing, whether it's Muhammad or any of the other, Buddha or Krishna or anybody else, it doesn't matter. The empty tomb says here is where grace will be found and nowhere else.

It's specific, it's powerful, and it's not based upon man's accomplishment. Now, before getting into any more of this, have you seen that none of this leaves a door open for open theism? How can an open theist understand any of this?

Are you really saying that when God created, he had no idea he was going to have to do all this stuff, but man, he came up with a pretty good plan afterwards. Really? How does that fit with the foundation of the world?

All of the prophecies of what the Messiah was going to accomplish. We can start connecting all this stuff into how Jesus is the Prince of Peace, how he is the mighty God, how he is the Father of Eternity.

I mean, you've got these prophecies that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt were written hundreds of years before Jesus. A God who is just juggling things real well is insufficient grounds for even what we've seen this far.

Insufficient grounds. But time is passing us by. Verse seven, in whom, that is again in Christ, in the beloved one, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of trespasses according to the riches of his grace.

And so spiritual blessings in heavenly places, well, how? Well, because in him, that's remember the spiritual blessings in heavenly places were those who are in Christ. If you're in Christ, then you have redemption through his blood.

You have the cross, not mere potentiality, not mere provision, only those who are in Christ have redemption through his blood. These are not words that can be said by the unbeliever in hell after the day of judgment.

Oh, I had redemption in Jesus Christ too. No, you didn't. Oh, well, what they means is the provision of redemption and they just simply didn't choose to accept it. Well, now you're changing what redemption means and you're changing when it was accomplished, in whom it was accomplished and what it actually means until some human action makes it transfer from mere potentiality to reality.

Just think about what that means and what has had to be done to terms like redemption, propitiation and others by people trying to avoid, simply trying to avoid what the New Testament teaches about God's role in these things.