Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ . . . a long-range plan in which everything would be brought together and summed up in him, everything in deepest heaven, everything on planet earth.–Ephesians 1:4-5, 10 (The Message)
He that made all things for love, by the same love keeps them, and shall keep them without end.— Julian of Norwich
In the first verses of his letter to the Jesus-followers at Ephesus the Apostle Paul sketches out God’s entire work of salvation — from before creation to the uniting of heaven and earth. Human beings are both beneficiaries and agents of God’s plan, but God’s salvation is bigger than us. It involves the renewal of all creation. God’s saving plan isn’t about getting individual souls into heaven. It’s to repair human beings and the world itself.
Before creating the world, God planned to have a human family. God made human beings for intimate communion with him, and he appointed us as his co-regents with loving stewardship of the earth. God did this because of his overflowing love and because it gave him joy.
God blesses his family with his free and loving favor. Through Jesus’ sacrifice, our sins are forgiven, and we are brought into union with God. In relationship with Jesus we grow to embody God’s own just and loving nature. We have an active role in God’s saving plan as Jesus’ co-workers in bringing new creation to the world.
As God’s family we have a wonderful inheritance – a promised future possession. We will be resurrected in the likeness of Jesus’ resurrection in a fully renewed world, free of evil. Goodness and love will reign in creation, filled with God’s presence. God will make his home with humanity forever.
While we await this inheritance God gives us the Holy Spirit, God’s own personal presence with us and in us, a taste of the life of the world to come. God’s Spirit empowers us to touch the world with newness now. The Holy Spirit is our down-payment and guarantee that one day all heaven and earth will be ours.
This is Paul’s breathtaking summary of God’s great plan of salvation for us and for the world.
Every step God takes in his saving work is done in and through his unique Son Jesus the Messiah. In the 14 verses of Paul’s introduction to Ephesians he cites Jesus 17 times. This constant reference ensures we get the message that Jesus is at the heart of God’s great work.
Paul reminds me of someone I knew as a young believer who praised Jesus with every sentence he spoke. He would say, “How are you doing? Hallelujah Jesus.” “How are things going, praise Jesus, with the church? “I just read, praise the Lord, a terrific new book.”
He always spoke like this, whoever he was talking with. I thought this was his way of witnessing, and I doubted that it would make a positive impression on non-Christians. It felt excessive and annoying. But looking back, I see that this practice was a spiritual discipline, almost contemplative. It helped him stay in close communion with Christ. As Paul writes, Jesus is the heart and soul of our faith, and we do well to stay close to him.
Jesus brings new hope to humankind.
Paul presents a devastating view of the human condition. Humankind is immersed in sin and spiritually dead.
This may seem like hyperbole. When we look at most human beings as individuals, we don’t see the kind of depravity Paul describes. We see shortcomings and misconduct, but we also see kindness, caring and love. Indeed, most people as individuals are virtuous and honorable. People who give and receive love. People who are doing much good. This shouldn’t surprise us. All people are created in the image of God.
So where does Paul’s picture of human depravity and spiritual death come in? If we shift our focus from individuals to the world at large the truth of Paul’s indictment becomes clear. We humans have corrupted the earth with our greed, violence, war, injustice, oppression, racism and bigotry.
Through all of history we have perpetrated horrific savagery on each other. Indeed, the 20th century was the bloodiest and most destructive of all. Not only so, but we have created the nightmare perils of nuclear obliteration and catastrophic climate change.
We have made an ugly mess of the world. And we can’t escape what we’ve created. So, as Paul writes, humankind is “without hope in the world.”
Here we would stay except for the grace of God. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love for us” has acted in Jesus to save us and heal us. God is not going to remove us from the world to some other realm. Instead, he is reversing humankind’s ruinous state.
Those who were spiritually dead are being made alive in Christ. Those who were captive to Evil and trapped in the world’s fatal squeeze, are, as it were, “raised up and seated with Christ in heavenly places.” Those who lived according to their self-destructive cravings are being re-created in Christ for love and good works.
Lives are being transformed every day. In early adolescence, my son Josh developed a kind of hard shell emotionally. He had a tender heart, and this was his protection. But it made him difficult to feel close to. When he asked Jesus to come into his heart and committed his life to him, that shell dissolved. Josh was remarkably changed. Still tender-hearted, but open and relatable.
I knew a married couple in which the husband came to faith in Christ. He never attempted to talk with his wife about Jesus or persuade her to believe. After six months she said to him, “if you had tried to get me to become a Christian, I’d have left you. But I’ve seen the change that Jesus has brought to your life, and I want what you have.”
God’s renewal of humankind has begun with those who follow Jesus – but it will not end with them. In the Bible Jesus-followers are understood as the “first fruits” of the renewal of humankind, as we let Jesus shape our lives and seek to be made like him in love. The first fruits represent the beginning of a harvest, not its totality. God is repairing humanity at large.
God is renewing humankind to become God’s workmanship, God’s masterpiece, God’s work of art. God isn’t giving up on human beings or on the world. He’s remaking us for life in a world made new – for the union of heaven and earth. God is repairing humanity to shine forth with Jesus’ character and love. To love God and others. And to become the wise stewards of creation that God always intended us to be.
God took the initiative to choose us.
Paul wants us to understand that God chose us. Being chosen means that God takes the initiative to reach out to human beings in love and joy. Many of Jesus’ parables highlight God’s determined initiative in our lives. The shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to go out and find the one lost sheep. The woman who gets down on her hands and knees to search for one lost coin. The father who puts all dignity aside to run to embrace his returning prodigal son. The vineyard owner who goes repeatedly to the marketplace to give work to desperate laborers.
That’s what God is like. In love God gives himself fully to be with us and make us into his family. We don’t have to search heaven and earth to find a hidden God. But only to respond to his love in faith.
When I think about being chosen, I remember the playground sports we used to play as kids. The team leaders would take turns choosing the kids to be on their respective teams. I wasn’t very athletic, so I was often the last or next to last to be chosen. That can be hard on a kid’s ego!
But God’s act of choosing isn’t like that. God doesn’t invite us to be in his family on the basis of our abilities or virtue. He calls us because he loves us. We don’t have to deserve to be on this team. We don’t have to be worthy to become part of God’s family. Yet once we are a family member God works with us to transform us into the likeness of Jesus’ self-giving love.
Choosing goes both ways. God chose us and we in turn can choose God. I think of George and Angel, who adopted Abel, our foster son who we raised for the first two years of his life. The adoption agency chose George and Angel to become Abel’s parents. George and Angel chose Abel to be their child and to love him unconditionally. And at three years old, Abel said to George and Angel, “I’m so happy that I adopted you!”
Being chosen doesn’t mean that God foreordains some selected people for salvation. It means that God predetermined to have a family in Jesus. It means that God loves human beings and takes the initiative to come and be with us. We simply say Yes to God’s courtship of us. We trust Jesus to transform our lives to be like his. “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters.”
God will unite all things in heaven and earth.
Paul also emphasizes that God will unite all things in heaven and earth. He will bring all the clashing elements of our lives and the world into unity and right relationship in Jesus. Salvation is peace with God and peace among human beings “from every tribe and tongue and nation and people.” No more war or racial injustice or class divisions or broken relationships or self-alienation.
God’s first major step in bringing the world together in justice and peace was to unite Jews and Gentiles into one body in the Messiah. This was visible in the churches of the first century. Indeed, people from all places and walks of life were united as one family – different, but equal — in the Messiah Jesus. God’s work of unity had begun.
Very few churches today consist of both Jewish and Gentile believers in Jesus. But most churches have members who are different from one another in many ways. We have diverse beliefs about Christian teachings and about how to understand and interpret Scripture. We hold a variety of political views. Some churches have a diversity of races, ethnicities, social and economic conditions.
Loving each other as equals across differences is a visible witness to the unifying power of Jesus’ death and resurrection. But this requires uncommon action against formidable currents of culture and tradition. Paul’s vision of churches comprised of Jewish and Gentile members not only faced unrelenting opposition from the traditionalist Christian “party of the circumcision,” but on at least one occasion from Peter himself.
One of my mentors in faith was a retired Pentecostal pastor. Jim Boren had been raised in the segregated South, and he was a virulent racist. But one day as a young adult he had a vivid dream that changed his life. In a vision of God’s Reign Jim saw people with every shade of skin being together in loving fellowship. Jim heard a voice of an angel shout, “There’s no segregation here!” Miraculously, the racial hatred in his heart dissolved.
After serving for years as a pastor, Jim was called as a missionary to Haiti. In those days the White missionaries lived in a compound separate from the community they worked among. But Jim had seen the vision of unity in Jesus. He and his family lived in the Haitian community, and were generously received and accepted by them.
Tragically, far from embracing unity in diversity, we often let our differences drive us apart. The church I grew up in lost most of its members several years ago over differences with the national denomination on same-sex relationships. The church I co-pastored in the 70s and 80s later lost members over this issue. My denomination today has lost entire conferences because of this conflict. In the previous generation, similar splits occurred over race. Should we not lament and mourn?
“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity,” the Psalmist proclaims. Unity is a joy, but it is also an imperative. “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another,” Jesus said. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” What if instead of dividing, we were to pray, fast, agonize, weep, and beseech God for as long as it takes to find a loving and just resolution enabling us to stay united as Jesus commanded?
How important is our unity? Unity in diversity in Jesus demonstrates the truth of the Gospel message. It is a witness that God is real, and Jesus is Lord. It shows the power of God to bring about the ultimate unity of all things. Reconciliation in love among Jesus’ followers confirms our reconciliation with God. “If we don’t love our brother and sister, whom we have seen, how can we say we love God, whom we have not seen?”
Renewed humanity is becoming God’s eternal home.
Perhaps we would work more faithfully at loving unity if we better understood the grand climax to God’s saving work. Renewed humanity, Paul writes, will become God’s temple, God’s eternal home.
God will make a home for himself with and within human beings in a world made new. Our ultimate destiny is not to live in heaven as disembodied souls. Rather God will come to earth to live with and in us. We will be a “city from heaven,” “the New Jerusalem,” a united and variegated community, God’s temple and home. Humankind will be the place where God “lives and moves and has his being.” We will be filled with God’s life and love and joy forever. Indeed, God has already begun to do this by the Holy Spirit.
We prepare ourselves for this union with God by “being holy as God is holy,” that is, by allowing God to mature us into the self-giving character of Christ. And as churches, by working through our differences to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
“Look!” the angel cries out, “God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”
Praise be to God!
Paul’s account in Ephesians of God’s saving work is offered as praise to God. Paul begins by writing, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” All that he goes on to say about God’s great work of salvation is expressed as praise.
We’re sometimes overcome with wonder and awe: for a new-born baby, an amazing sunset, an extraordinary piece of music. By the beauty of a loved one. By an unexpected encounter with the Divine.
That’s how Paul feels as he thinks about the length and breadth and height and depth of God’s majestic work of salvation in love. Paul is so moved and awed and humbled by what God is doing that he responds with bountiful praise.
Let’s join him: “Praise be to God for his indescribable gift!”