Introduction to Ephesians

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. I'm coming to you today from the sanctuary here at Sovereign Grace Family Church. We are beginning a new book today.

We are going to begin looking at the book of Ephesians. Ephesians is a small book with a big message. It's only six chapters long, but even in the very beginning we can see the powerful message that it has for us when we open its pages.

And what I wanted to do today as a way of introducing the book of Ephesians is I wanted to also introduce you to another book and some authors, particularly D .A. Carson and Doug Moo. They wrote a book called Introducing the New Testament.

This is a book that we've had out on our shelf for a while and I am going to be using this book in our upcoming Sovereign Grace Academy class when we do a survey of the New Testament. This is going to be one of our texts for that class.

And what this book does is it provides an introductory words for all of the New Testament books as well as an overall introduction to the New Testament itself. But I wanted to reference a few of the things that it says about the book of Ephesians because anytime we start a new book I like for us to have a little bit of information about the history of that book, where it comes from, who it's written to, and why.

And that's what this book is all about. This book is helpful. And again, if you don't know who D .A. Carson is or who Douglas Moo is, I would encourage you to look them up. They're both scholars, New Testament scholars.

They're wonderful Bible teachers and information that you can get from them would certainly be useful. Now again, when I endorse anyone I can't endorse everything they've ever said or anything they've ever did.

But when it comes to D .A. Carson and Douglas Moo, they're both solid teachers with good reputation. So I would encourage you to look them up. So I'm going to read just a few of the things from this book.

I'm going to go right here to where it says, who wrote Ephesians? We probably know this, the Apostle Paul. It says, the traditional view is that Ephesians is a genuine Pauline letter. But, and this is the part I want to reference, many scholars have denied this.

Arguments such as the following support that Paul is the author. One, it claims to have been written by Paul, not only in its opening, but also in the body of the letter. Two, it was right widely circulated from early days and its authenticity does not seem to have been doubted until recently.

And again, a lot of higher critical scholars tend to doubt the authorship of the New Testament books, but not always for the most noble of reasons. Oftentimes they're trying to call into question the veracity and historical reliability of these books.

The third thing here, it says, its structure, language, and themes parallel Paul's other letters. And four, it develops Colossians, which Paul wrote first. Paul may have written Colossians with a specific situation in mind, and then written Ephesians with a broader, or with broader purposes.

So again, that's something that a book like this can help you with. It can help you with a little bit of the history of the book, who wrote it, where it came from, and some of that information. But I want to go further, because the next question is, to whom was it written?

And this is where a big question lies, because we would say, well it was written to the Ephesians. It says to the Ephesians. However, I want to read to you what this says. Although we might assume that this book was simply written to the church in Ephesus, there are two caveats we must consider.

One, the phrase in Ephesus is absent from chapter 1 verse 1 in some of the best manuscripts. Two, the calm and impersonal tone of the letter does not seem to befit Paul's relationship with the church at Ephesus.

Paul had evangelized the Ephesians, spent a long time with them, and considered them to be his dear friends. We see this in Acts chapter 20. Yet parts of this letter seem to indicate that the writer may not have personally interacted with the readers.

So these factors, and I'm reading on, these factors suggest another option for Ephesians, that Paul intended this to be a circular letter. That is, a letter intended to circulate among a general audience.

We do not, therefore, know with certainty that the letter was originally intended only for the church at Ephesus. The evidence of the great majority of the manuscripts and the improbabilities of other theories may compel us to take that view.

If, on the other hand, we place great significance on the absence of Paul's characteristic warmth and of references to concrete situations, we're more likely to think Ephesus as some form of circular letter.

Was it written to Ephesus only? Was it written to Ephesus and meant to be read by other churches? Well, that's a question that we could wrestle with and we maybe could come to different conclusions on.

But here's the thing that we do know. The book of Ephesus is relevant as much to us as it was to its original audience. The book of Ephesus is a tremendous work and it carries important themes. And that's the thing, another thing that I want to mention from this book, is the themes that we find in Ephesus.

What is Ephesians about? What are the themes that we find? And again, if we look through the book of Ephesus, we will find themes such as the sovereignty of God and salvation. We find that in the very first chapter.

It talks about election and predestination and God's will being the focus of his reason and purpose in those things. Something that I often tell people, if you ever have doubts about the subject of predestination and election, one of the first places you can go is to the book of Ephesians.

And in the book of Ephesians, you'll find very clearly in the very first chapter that the Bible says that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world. Very important passage. The other things, Christ's saving work, we see that all throughout the book of Ephesians, particularly in chapter 2 where it talks about being saved by grace through faith and not of ourselves.

We see the Christians growth and knowledge. We see the subject of love coming up. And we see of course the importance of the church. The book actually tells us that husbands ought to love their wives as Christ loved the church.

So that's a theme of love of God, love of Christ for the church. And of course the idea of transformed lives is another theme that we see in the book of Ephesians. It says that we must no longer live as the Gentiles do, meaning no longer live as the ungodly.

When we get toward the end of the book, we hear about the armor of God that we are to put on so that we're able to withstand in the evil day. So again, this book is important. This book has a lot of tremendous value and my encouragement to you is to not only read each chapter every day as we are trying to do throughout this study, but to take an opportunity and read the chapter multiple times.

And read it with a pen and paper and that way whenever you're reading through, you can write down questions. You can write down insights. What is God showing you in this passage? And remember that one of the things that I enjoy doing on Coffee with a Calvinist is answering your questions.

So if you have a question as we go through this study of the book of Ephesians, please take an opportunity, if you would, to write those questions down and then go into your computer and however you communicate, whether it be through YouTube or Facebook, send those questions in and I'd love to be able to answer your questions on a future episode of the program.

Thank you for watching the episode today. I hope this has been an encouragement to you to look forward to our study of Ephesians. Today is Ephesians chapter 1. Tomorrow we'll be looking at Ephesians chapter 2.

But until then, this has been Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I appreciate you watching. May God bless you.