Reading Paul's Letter to the Ephesians

 I frequently tell people that I'm a "late bloomer," because there are multiple areas in my life where I feel like I matured or developed much later in life than the average person. I've had several breakthrough or "ah-ha!" moments in my late 20s and 30s that would have been useful earlier in life. I recently felt like I had one such breakthrough in regards to the epistles of Paul, but the book of Ephesians in particular. My mention of being a late bloomer is kind of a disclaimer saying that what I'm able to say may be super obvious info that most readers already understood.

The Problem

The first three chapter of Ephesians, and several other places in the epistles, have always been a little hazy for me to read... like they wash over me, but I don't absorb much. Or the sentences just go completely over my head. The first three chapters of Ephesians are rich and full of theology, but I've always found myself reading it, being encouraged by a sentence here and there, but mostly overwhelmed and clueless as to what it really means "for me." There are some obvious exceptions like the reality of our "predestination to adoption as sons," but large chunks have just felt like an abstract painting that looks cool but doesn't "speak to me."  Chapters 4-6 contain much more applicable verses to everyday living, so I can more easily remember the teaching in these chapters.

The problem was that I've always read these passages, one verse at a time, trying to find their direct application to ME and find the "eternal truths" and principles that I can immediately claim and apply, as if Paul was writing a theological how-to textbook. But by taking a microscope to these verses, I lost the forest for the trees. And it's ironic that in an attempt to understand with the microscope method, the result was a lack of understanding. Our problematic tendency in our approach to interpreting scripture is that we prioritize "archetypal principles" and "eternal truths," and immediately insert ourselves into the text with little regard to the original context of the writing. What's embarrassing is the fact that I've known "context is important!" for a long time, but only recently did Ephesians open up to me in a new way -- simply because of this idea of original context. Side note: when we're taught to consider the context of a passage, often we think that just means look at the few verses before and the few verses after. But the other things to consider are 1) who exactly was Paul (or Peter, John, etc.) writing to, and 2) what did those readers think/feel/experience that might necessitate a letter like this?

The Solution

When I recently read the book of Ephesians in its entirety in one sitting, as one cohesive letter to a specific recipient, the veil was finally lifted, and the mystery was revealed. In an extreme case of irony, the key to the "mystery" I had always struggling with, -- in terms of the meaning of all these rich verses -- is right in Eph. 3:6 when Paul reveals the mystery of Christ. The whole purpose of this letter was to assure the Gentile Christians that they had a seat at the table and were no longer outsiders in God's story! Now, rather than continue writing about the implications of that and what we see in Ephesians, I want to approach this another way. This may be slightly controversial, so please bear with me. In order to help you read Ephesians, I am going to write a fictional letter to Paul from the church in Ephesus. Anyone could write this letter in a number of different ways. All I'm trying to do is use a mirrored approach to highlighting the meaning of Paul's words in Ephesians. So what I encourage you to do is this: read my letter below, then immediately either listen to or read the book of Ephesians from start to finish. It's only 6 chapters, and it takes about 18 minutes to listen to the whole book.

Last thing I feel I should mention: many Bible scholars believe that the letter to the Ephesians was kind of a "general" letter that Paul wrote to Gentile Christians that was passed along to several different communities. Unlike the letters to the Corinthians, which was very specific in addressing problems of a particular congregation, Ephesians is more broad in scope. So this is very much pretending and "sanctified imagining" if you will, but I still believe it will be helpful.

Dear Paul,

We hope you are well, and we are ever grateful for your visit and preaching the message of Jesus Christ to us.

This is all so new, strange, and still sometimes confusing. We are reckoning with and wrestling with the scriptures, trying to remember all you told us, but still trying to understand. We've even been discouraged at times. You told us we need not be circumcised to be part of Christ's church. But that still seems to be such a divide between ourselves and the Jews -- not just for them, but for us as well. Our city of Ephesus is so full of pagan worship and sinful practices--it is the way of life here among our people. We're almost ashamed to call ourselves Ephesians, but that's what we are. Is there really hope for us to have a place in Christ's church? Can we be anything other than lowly, needy, outcast Gentiles? How can it be that we might in any way be included in God's promises to His Israelite people...the promises He made time and again for generations? We barely just arrived on the scene! What business do we have with God's covenants with Abraham, David, etc?

We heard about the Messiah's conversation with the Gentile woman who told Him, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.” We have these crumbs, and we are exceedingly grateful for them. But is this the way Yahweh will always see us? Are we hungry dogs forever? Will we be merely fortunate to receive whatever is left over after the Firstborn receives his inheritance? The Jews have all these promises of inheritance, glory, and communion with God. How can it be that we are part of the same community in Christ? Even some of the Jewish Christians that come through town seem to struggle with the issue of our uncircumcision, our dietary practices, and other cultural differences. What does Christ want from us? How are we to live? Which customs and laws should we make sure we are observing? We want to give Him thanks and praise, and we hope to be included among His people, even though we might not partake in the full inheritance that He reserved for the Jews. We know that God chose you, Paul, a son of Israel. A Hebrew of Hebrews. You are part of the Chosen People. We stand here, hoping to be so much as doorkeepers at the house of the Lord, rather than dwelling in the tents of the wicked (Psalm 84:10). Though we hesitate to even draw a line between ourselves and "the wicked" referred to in Psalm 84. "The wicked" was us.

In short, we as Gentiles know that we are akin to foreign slaves, spoils of war - products of the Victory of Jesus - who now live just outside of the house of God and thus reap some of the rewards and benefits of living among the righteous. But it is nevertheless difficult to be second-class and to have assurance of God's love and care for us. Do you have answers? When you were with us, preaching to us, you used the words "us" and "we" in a way that put yourself and us in the same category. Were you just trying to come down to our level out of hospitality? Was that a mistake? Do we actually share much in common beyond our allegiance to Christ?

Sincerely,

The Church of Christ in Ephesus

Standing Up to the Religious Authorities

When people make their comments about how Jesus “stood up to the religious establishment of his day” and try to use that as a parallel to the exvangelical/deconstructing practices of questioning the prevailing views on fundamental Christian doctrine today, they end up missing the actual parallel.

The religious establishment today is secularism.  The people in power right now are what fundies like me would call “modern paganism.”  They are the figures who laugh at and shame anyone holding to a 6-day view of creation, or a literal resurrection.  They react with shock and disgust at anyone who doesn’t hold to their doctrines of left-ward political activism and their humanistic liturgical calendar.  They are the Pharisees of today, and they pretend that Jesus is on their side — the Jesus that affirmed the authority of scripture, the Jesus that taught about a real hell, a real resurrection, a literal Adam, and affirmed and celebrated every jot and tittle of God’s Old Testament Law.  Wait, not that Jesus.

They push the virtues of government schooling, even though the classroom has been proven to be the complete opposite of an environment conducive to learning.  They accept darwinism by default, and then steal from the Christian worldview in order to legislate their morality — a morality that makes zero sense within an atheistic, evolutionary worldview.  They bully and guilt-trip people, exactly as the Pharisees of Jesus’ time did.  They ignore parts of the law they don’t like and enforce parts that don’t exist, all so they can claim to be the most virtuous.  Like white-washed tombs, they are clean and pretty on the outside, but full of death, toxicity, and self-absorption on the inside.

But I don’t say all this so that Christians can feel better about being “the good guys.”  Jesus never called out the Phrarasees in order to make his friends feel better about themselves.  He called them out because they should have known better.  And yet he told his followers, ”unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of God.”  Jesus’ followers knew better than anyone that they were sinners, and his life was spent teaching them how they would be saved.

Singleness

      A while back I read a piece by well-known blogger called “Singleness as Affliction.” I don’t remember the content in much detail, but I generally agreed with it, and the nice thing about catchy titles is that they help you retain the general point.  The basic point of that post was to yank the pendulum of how we treat and view “Christian Singleness” back in the opposite direction from where it has been leaning in the current culture of Christians in their 20s and 30s.

    Just to summarize the popular view of the 21st century thus far: it is essentially the message that “singleness is a gift that should be prized” — this entails the strong message to not waste your singleness, to be totally content, and to remember that you're uniquely useful to the Kingdom as a single person.  But along with the truth contained in those messages has come (sometimes explicitly, many times implicitly) the message that there’s something wrong with “craving” that relationship…that marriage.  Then we have these warnings against “idolatry:” the “idol” of marriage, the idolizing of relationships.  And finally, smuggled into the message of "your unique usefulness as a single person" is the idea that you will be essentially less useful for the Kingdom once you have a spouse and kids to care for.  To parody an infamous and unrelated quote, Big Eva appears more to whisper about the virtues of marriage and seeking marriage compared to its shouts about feeling good and satisfied with your singleness.

    The popular American evangelical voices and "thought-leaders" (a big exception being Kevin DeYoung, God bless him) have - perhaps unintentionally - lulled many a young adult into this awkward state of trying to "put off" something that God put there to begin with.  While "Singleness as Affliction" was meant to be a splash of cold water to the face, snapping people out of this pietistic trance they may have fallen into, I want to distill it and very briefly repackage it in my own words.  The key thing to remember in all this ("this" being the Christian blogosphere and all its internal debates) is balance.  And in order to shift the balance back to wherever the Bible has determined is the center, we need to lay the weight of the virtues and normativity of marriage back on the scale.

So, to let the Bible speak:

Genesis 1:18 Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”

Proverbs 18:22 He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord.

Proverbs 31:10 An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.

Titus 2:3-5 Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, 4 and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

1 Peter 3:5 For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands,

1 Corinthians 7:1-2  Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband.

1 Corinthians 7:9b For it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

1 Timothy 5:14 So I would have younger widows marry, bear children, manage their households, and give the adversary no occasion for slander.

I would argue that the only one of these that we NEED is Genesis 1:18 in tandem with the whole Bible's assumption of the normativity of marriage.

    Now I want to quickly shift to the idea of singleness as "affliction."  In the aforementioned article, some fun is poked at the notion of singleness being a "gift," as it is a "gift" that frankly almost nobody wants.  Here's what we need to remember: everything comes to us by God's hand, and that includes affliction.  We do not have to adopt these labels of "gift" and "prize" and "treasure" simply in order to preserve God's sovereignty over our situation.  We can call it what it is -- hard, painful, suffering, affliction -- without giving into sins of anxiety, discontentment, distrust, hopelessness, and faithlessness.

    Hunger, illness, and loss are afflictions.  A mature Christian will learn to find contentment in Jesus and peace with God in the midst of these afflictions, but Christians are never told to enjoy or even to ignore them.  We do have to be just a little careful here.  Paul speaks much of "afflictions" in the New Testament, and he rejoices in them, seeing their ultimate purpose.  But there is a difference between a) learning to kiss the wave that tosses us against the Rock of Ages and b) being guilted into thinking we must actually enjoy the situation or to pretend that the pain doesn't exist.  We mustn't think ourselves less holy for feeling the pain and praying God comes to our aid (even in the form of sending us a spouse).  We aren't to enjoy hunger.  We aren't to enjoy illness.  Likewise, while we find contentment in our Creator (and, in the case of food, are taught that man does not live by bread alone), unfulfilled longing is unpleasant.  We want something that we don't have, and that is not fun.  We need not pretend that it is fun, and we need not feel guilty for feeling that we are missing out on something.

I don't think I need to belabor this point any further.

    What are we not-so-happy single people to do then?  First, we give thanks.  We live a life of thankfulness to God for what He has given us and for what He is doing with us.  We rejoice in our salvation and live joyful lives in Christian community.  Second, we allow ourselves to feel the loneliness and pain without losing complete trust in God.  Third, we pray for and seek a spouse.  We also ought to allow our close friends to tell us if we are obsessing over our desire for marriage to the point of neglecting the tasks God has put before us.  But let's not kid ourselves anymore with language that suggests that God will surely use you more mightily in your single years than in your married years.  Nor should we allow our thinking to be influenced by the current culture's obsession with "identity" and, as a result, obsess over language of "completeness" or "wholeness."  You are in Christ.  HE is complete, and you are in HIM.  Who YOU are is not relevant in the common sense of what it means to "be."