[This is an excerpt from my Sunday message and new series on Ephesians. PTL! -Joel]
Eph 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ:
Notice that we have in this one verse, blessed, blessed, and blessings, all variations of the same Greek word. Paul expresses a desire for blessings to the Father who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings. So let’s consider the word “blessed” from Webster’s 1828.
- BLESS’ED, participle passive Made happy or prosperous; extolled (exalted in commendation; praised; magnified); pronounced happy.
- BLESS’ED, adjective Happy; prosperous in worldly affairs; enjoying spiritual happiness and the favor of God; enjoying heavenly felicity.
I love that expression – “heavenly felicity!” Felicity is just great happiness or blissfulness. So heavenly felicity is you feeling the blissfulness of heaven here on earth.
Thus, when Paul talks about how God has blessed us, he means God has brought us happiness, more than happiness really – He brought us joy. He brought joy into our lives through His Son and His gift of eternal life and our identification with His Son, and in all of that, God has given us all these spiritual favors, advantages, privileges. He has spiritually enriched our lives. We’re spiritually prosperous. He has also made us prosperous in that He made us co-inheritors with His Son. With Christ, we are inheriting the entire universe. We will literally possess everything. We couldn’t be more prosperous in the physical sense than to be co-inheritors with Christ. Literally, the entire universe is yours. This brings us to “blessing.” Again, from Webster:
- BLESS’ING, participle present tense Making happy; wishing happiness to; praising or extolling; consecrating by prayer.
- BLESS’ING, noun Benediction; a wish of happiness pronounced; a prayer imploring happiness upon another.
- A solemn prophetic benediction, in which happiness is desired, invoked or foretold. (What we want is the second definition.)
- Any means of happiness; a gift, benefit or advantage; that which promotes temporal prosperity and welfare or secures immortal felicity.
I also love “Immortal felicity!” Immortal bliss. You forever feeling the joys of Heaven.
I’d say we’ve received blessings from God in the sense of the second definition. God has brought us joy. He has given us a gift of eternal life. He has given us all these spiritual benefits, if you will. He’s given us this rich spiritual inner life. He’s given us advantages in that He has empowered us with the Holy Spirit, and He’s opened the door for us to put on the attributes of His Son. Our lives have been enriched because of these spiritual blessings God has given us because of the exceeding riches found in His gracious nature.
By blessed, Paul is saying our lives have been greatly enriched. We have been made to be joyous, because we’ve been given all these spiritual advantages and spiritual privileges from God.
When you got saved, you believed that Christ died on the cross as a payment for all your sins, that He was buried and rose again the third day. His death was the payment. His resurrection was the receipt. You believed that and you got saved. God gave you His free gift of eternal life. It’s not like you’re the same people except now you have a ticket to Heaven. By accepting that free gift of eternal life, you’re also accepting your identification with what His Son accomplished at Calvary in order for eternal life to become a reality in you right here right now.
Thus, you are now no longer who you were because His death became your death. His resurrection became your resurrection. That identification was necessary for the victory Christ achieved on your behalf to become a reality when you got saved.
You are now a completely new creature – behold all things new! Everything you were in Adam is D.E.A.D. You’re now freed from the power and bondage of sin. And you are made alive unto God, complete in Him. You are His master workmanship. You are made able to fulfill the rightness of His ways in your life.
All this doesn’t even scratch the surface. You’ve been given so many spiritual advantages and blessings from God, it’s like walking inside a warehouse so vast and so endless, you couldn’t possibly inventory all the blessings God has given you. Paul makes the point in Rom 8:32 that if God spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? If God loved you so much that He was generous enough to give up His only Son to die for you, then wouldn’t God also be generous enough to freely give youeverything? We’re given all spiritual blessings in this life, and in the life to come, as co-inheritor with His Son, we will literally inherit the entire universe with Him.
God has literally given you everything. He loves you as much as His Son. He has given you as much as His Son. He could not do more and He would not do less.
Spiritual Blessings
So what are some of these spiritual blessings God’s freely given to us? What are the spiritual blessings Paul’s talking about here?
The fun way to answer that question is to say, “Hey, I’ve got a list of 101 Spiritual Blessings that we have in Christ.” A few years ago, I went through Paul’s epistles. Every verse that could conceivably be considered a spiritual blessing, I copied and pasted them onto the list. It was like 150. Some of them were repetitious. So I combined some of them and condensed it to a catchy 101 Spiritual Blessings.
But back to this question. What are the spiritual blessings Paul’s talking about here?
I’d suggest the correct answer is context.
Eph. 1:3-14 is a doxology and Paul would expand upon this very thought throughout his doxology. The spiritual blessings Paul is talking is every doctrine he mentions is his doxology from verses 3-14, and these blessings are all-encompassing.
In vs. 4-5, Paul talks about predestination. That is about how, before the universe was created, God made all His decisions about this age of grace. God making those decisions about our lives before He created the universe were spiritual blessings. How? Because as soon as God willed it, it was as good as done. For God, His will is already done the moment He wills it, which means our spiritual blessings go all the way back to before creation. We were spiritually blessed before the universe even existed because God willed it.
After that, Paul goes all the way to the beginning of the eternal state, to dispensation of the fulness of times, and the glory of being in those heavenly positions in our heavenly bodies for all of eternity.
So everything God the Father ever willed to do before the creation of the universe, the secret He kept to Himself about the age of grace, the glories of the all-sufficiency of the cross, the perfection of our standing before Him in love, plus, everything else He is doing today, and the glory of everything to come in the eternal state, everything God ever chose to do, everything God ever did, everything God is doing today, and everything God will do for us in the future, before the beginning of time all the way to the eternal state, those are ALL the spiritual blessings Paul is talking about.
Literally all-encompassing.
Notice also, Paul doesn’t say SOME spiritual blessings but ALL spiritual blessings IN heavenly places IN Christ. By all, he means every single spiritual blessing. Because he mentioned heavenly places, we know that these blessings are ours for all of eternity.
Here’s a question: “How can Paul say we’ve been given ALL spiritual blessings if we don’t have miraculous spiritual gifts?” Ever thought about that? How can Paul say we’ve been given ALL spiritual blessings even though we don’t have miraculous spiritual gifts?
Because if I had the ability to heal people, I’d say that’d be a real blessing. LOL
Personally, I’d want the gift of knowledge. Go solve a bunch of cold case files. I’d love that.
So what’s the answer to my question? How can Paul say we’ve been given ALL spiritual blessings if we don’t have spiritual gifts?
I have two answers. The first is that these are spiritual blessings IN heavenly places. God isn’t doing miraculous healings IN heavenly places. We have the same spiritual blessings that everyone else has IN heavenly places, which is all internal.
The second answer is that spiritual gifts are not true blessings.
We’ve been studying the Gospels in chronological order on Wednesday nights. Believe me, spiritual gifts come with a lot of problems and frustrations. Some of those gifts can be as much a curse as it is a blessing. We looked at the story last Wednesday of a father asking the Lord to cast out this powerful demon out of his son. The Lord was mad at the Father because he wasn’t a believer. He wanted to use the Lord without believing in Him, which is about as insulting as you can be. At the end of the day, His great miracles, the miraculous feeding of thousands of people, Him raising people from the dead, all His epic miracles, did very little to move the needle of faith in the people of Israel. Spiritual gifts were never true blessings. They were double-edged swords and distractions at best. This can never be said of the inner spiritual blessings we have in Christ.
There’s no downside to what God made you in Christ. There’s no downside to having His Word and having His peace and joy and love and grace manifest inside of you. Those are true blessings. You can never say that about spiritual gifts.
Thus, spiritual blessings means that God has brought joy into our lives. He’s enriched our lives, He has given us advantages and privileges that are spiritual in nature. The enrichment from God is spiritual in nature. Another way of saying it is that a “spiritual blessing” is a blessing of the Spirit. These are internal advantages and privileges through the Holy Spirit. That makes us wealthy in ways no one else on planet Earth is made wealthy.
I’ve heard it said that wealth is power and wealth can help a person make changes to his life. How much more true is it with all the spiritual wealth we have in Christ? How much more should we change our lives because of our spiritual enrichment from God?
SUPPLY OF GRACE 