Summary
Statement: of Ephesians 1:3-5
God
finds pleasure in adopting us into His family. He does not see all
the ways we fall short or fail to live up to the standards we absorb
from the world around us. God sees us as holy and perfect without
defect.
Historical
Context:
Alexander
the
Great
had conquered vast
territories in a shorter time than anyone else in recorded history.
One of the reasons he was so successful because imported Greek
values to all the areas he concurred.
Alexander insisted on making major cities the center for education
and philosophy.1
2
Alexander
was driven by certain ideals. These ideals are reflected in Greek
myths and poetry. The Greeks saw humans as the center of everything.
The naked human form was the highest for of beauty and worship. The
Greeks were driven by their ideal of beauty, courage, achievement.
How good are you , how well can you climb to the top, how good
looking are you, how brave are you... So Alexander wants to make the
world Greek. He wants to take the Greek world view and wants to make
it everyone’s world view everywhere.
He
would conquer a city and in the process destroy it and then re-build.
He would build a gymnasium A key idea of the Greek worldview is that
it is holistic. So you would go the the Gym and you would offer
incense to the Gods, you would do all these sports (discus, javelin,)
sweat, work out, tone your body. And then along the edge of the gym
would be all these classrooms where you would learn to write
classical Greek, learn poetry, and philosophy, and the myths of the
Gods. So you would send your kids to school each day and he/she would
be immersed in the Greek world view. Ephesus
had all the conveniences of a modern Roman city: a gymnasium, a
stadium, theaters, and a central marketplace.3
The
Greeks would build a beautiful temple to the Gods. In Ephesus
Alexander
would incorporate the Greek goddess Dianna and Artemis. The Greeks
restored a huge temple to this goddess and increased its splendor and
reputation
4
They
made it the banking capitol of Asia minor bringing wealth and
success.
The
Greeks were masters of using mass media for propaganda. The theater
in Ephesus, which
had a seating capacity of some twenty-four thousand,5
would put on the stories of the Greek Gods. Often times a Greek
theater would have no back and would be built in such a way that the
back of the stage would overlook the city. So when you sat in the
theater and watched these dramas featuring Greek mythology and
philosophy your own city would be the backdrop 6,
People would quickly begin to see their stories in the myths they
encountered in the theater.
The
main street of Ephesus connected the theater with the harbor and was
flanked on either side by a colonnade. Another important feature the
Greeks added to the the city was the agora, the marketplace, located
southeast of the harbor bringing goods from all over the world to
their doorstep.7
The
people of Ephesus were able to dine on food from far off lands, wear
fashions from exotic regions, and read literature from scholars they
would never meet in person.
The
Greek worldview was designed to just move in and take over. Something
happens, however, when you begin to place the worth of a life on how
much you achieve and how pretty you are. If your value comes from how
pretty you are, if you worth comes from how you do at athletics, if
your merit and standing in the community is based on how well you do
in class and how clever you are you begin to view others in that same
light. What subtly happens is you are going to end up putting worth
on human life.
Soranus
of
Ephesus wrote
“a practical guide to gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics.”
In it he
described a method of assessing the health status of newborns titled
“How to recognize the newborn that is worth rearing.” He suggests
that the following characteristics are indicative of a worthy infant:
“... its mother has spent the period of pregnancy in good health,
it has been born at the due time, when put on the earth it
immediately cries with proper vigor, it is perfect in all its parts,
members and senses, its ducts are free from obstruction and the
natural functions of every member are neither sluggish nor weak ...
conditions contrary to these indicate the infant not worth rearing.”
Classical
Greek literature asserts this same philosophy. Aristotle said “As
to the exposure of children, let
there be a law that no deformed child shall
live.” In his work The Republic Plato writes: “The offspring of
the inferior, and any of those of the other sort who are born
defective, they will properly dispose of in secret, so that no one
will know what has become of them.” A deformed child just doesn’t
fit into the Greek world view.
An
infant that was deformed or even weak was viewed as a sign of divine
displeasure. It was thought to be a curse from the gods. A family
with a deformed baby must somehow have a problem with the gods. So
they had to get rid of the baby because they didn't want any of that
divine displeasure to rest on their household, and they certainly
didn't want their neighbors to know, that would be a blow to the
status of the whole family.
This
gruesome practice, that was perfectly legal under roman law, is
sometimes translated as exposure and encouraged throughout ancient
Rome. To get rid of an unwanted infant one might resort to abortion
(very risky in those days) or drowning, but the preferd method was
infant exposure where, “the family would simply take the child out
beyond the city and abandon it to die from exposure to the
elements.”8
Ephesus
had a mountain on the norther edge of the city. This mountain is
considered by some scholars to be the sight of the baby dump, others
place it closer to the main city gates. If you lived in this city in
the ancient world, this is where you would take a deformed, weak, or
unwanted child and leave it to die.
Since
Ephesus was a large port city with commercial traffic coming and
going to both Rome and Asia Minor it also became a slave trade
center. A common practice in the ancient world was to raise children
into young adulthood to be slaves. People would go up and would sort
through the rejected babies looking for ones who might make good
slaves. So they would look for deformed babies who still held some
potential. They would then bring babies back home and raise them
ether as personal slaves or to be sold.
Literary
Context:
In
Ephesians Paul addresses masters and slaves, so his intended audience
is both masters and slaves. The people who first heard this letter
would have included folks who had gone up on that mountain and sorted
through babies who they thought might make good servants and it would
also have included folks who had been raised as slaves, knowing full
well their status was because they had been rejected at birth.
I. God sees us with our blemish (1:3-4)
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. In love
9
The
word for blameless is
ἄμωμοςa
and it means “without defect, without blemish.’10
God chose you before the creation of the world to be holy and without
defect. He looks at you and He doesn't see a long list of how you
don't measure up. He sees you as holy and with out defect.
II. God chose us (1:5)
In
love 5 he
predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according
to the purpose of his will9
This
is the verse that cinches it. God chose to go up the mountain and
rescue us not to raise as slaves but for adoption into His divine
family even before we were born. He did not just do this on a whim it
is all part of His eternal rescue plan.
Original
meaning:
It
is doubtful that the first people who heard this got into a heated
discussion about predestination vs freewill. The first people to hear
this probably wept. Adoption for them was going up the mountain and
taking the abandon babies that were all screwed up and raising them
as your own.
Paul
begins “in love God decided beforehand to make you His children.”
This text calls out the idea that a deformity is a sign of Gods
displeasure. This text says God is the God who hikes up on the
mountain and brings home the unwanted, the discarded, and makes them
part of his family.
Modern
meaning:
Think
of the messages we are sent about our value, our worth, and how we
measure up or more likely all the ways we don't. We live in a culture
that constantly reminds us that we are not good enough. If you go
through a checkout isle you are confronted by a plethora of magazines
telling you are not the right shape, you don't make enough money, you
have bad hair... If you turn on the television or radio you are
blasted by marketers telling you how bad your life is and how if you
just had their product you could finally measure up.
According
to this text the gospel is me coming to the place of realizing I was
the baby on the hill left for dead and God hiked up there to get me.
God created each of us, He chose us to be adopted into His family. He
looks at us and does not see all the ways we fail or don't measure up
to some standard. He looks at us and loves us, He takes pleasure in
bringing us into His family.
If
we can live this text it will profoundly effect the way we live.
Every time we are reminded about our deformities about all the ways
we fall short this text should leap into our hearts and onto our
tongue. If we can take this text seriously we must recognize that God
has some weird kids and He loves them all, even if we find them
strange or even offensive.
Implications for Ministry:
The
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
once
said "It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian
America is
eleven o'clock on Sunday morning.” The
Church has a way of becoming a social club. If we are going to take
this text seriously we need to accept that we
are not called to be tolerant!
The
very idea of tolerance implies enduring or putting up with something
you don't like or value. Tolerance does not value people but simply
puts up with their behaviors or beliefs. We cannot build authentic
relationships with each-other on tolerance alone, because tolerance
can only look the other way.
Tolerance
might deal with differences, but it can't embrace us in full. God far
exceeds mere tolerance, He showers all of us with grace. We are to
represent God and so we must not just occasionally tolerate people we
don't like, we too must show grace and acceptance.
The
church should be a gathering of people where we can stand up and say
we are wretched, and everyone will nod and agree and then remind us
that we are also beautiful...
When
we look through the eyes of Jesus, we begin to see new things in
people. In the murderers, we see our own hatred. In the addicts, we
see our own addictions. In the saints, we catch glimpses of our own
holiness. We can see our own brokenness, our own violence, our own
ability to destroy, and we can see our own sacredness, our own
capacity to love and forgive. When we realize that we are both
wretched and beautiful, we are freed up to see others the same way
God
loves each of us just as we are, but he loves us so much he doesn't
want us to stay that way. We must never confuse acceptance with
agreement. Acceptance is not an agreement of people’s choices,
beliefs, or behaviors. We must see ourselves as in-process, none of
us has arrived or achieved some ultimate level of spiritually
superiority. While we must always extend grace and acceptance to
everyone, we should always hope and pray that none of us will remain
spiritually stagnate.
There
is a place for "appropriate judgment," but only among
disciples who are in close personal relationships with each-other in
which they have invited one another fully into their lives. This kind
of judgment is done only in private and it takes the form of
discernment and loving feedback. The end goal is for both disciples
to be continually transformed by this relationship.
I
do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but
what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that
the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it
is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is,
in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I
cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no,
the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing.
The
Apostle Paul to the church in Rome 58 A.D. (Rom
7:15-20)
Works cited:
1.
Wiersbe, W. W. (1996). The
Bible exposition commentary
(Ac 18:23). Wheaton, IL: Victor Books.
2.
Discipleship
Journal, Issue 32 (March/April 1986).
1986. NavPress.
3.
Discipleship
Journal, Issue 122 (March/April 2001).
2001. NavPress.
4.
Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., & Brown, D. (1997). Commentary
Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
(Ac 19:27). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
5.
Myers, A. C. (1987). The
Eerdmans Bible dictionary
(342). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
6.
Jamieson, R., Fausset, A. R., & Brown, D. (1997). Commentary
Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
(Ac 19:29). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.
7.
Myers, A. C. (1987). The
Eerdmans Bible dictionary
(342). Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
8.
Price,
Christopher. 2004. “Pagans, Christianity, and Infanticide.”
www.christiancadre.org
/member_contrib/cp_infanticide.html
Last accessed August 11, 2012.
9.
The
Holy Bible: English Standard Version.
2001 (Eph 1:3–4). Wheaton: Standard Bible Society.
10.
Louw, J. P., & Nida, E. A. (1996). Vol.
1:
Greek-English
lexicon of the New Testament: Based on semantic domains
(electronic ed. of the 2nd edition.) (699). New York: United Bible
Societies.
