Ephesians 1:6-7
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Ephesians 1:6-7
Ephesians 1:6-7
As we move down through these verses, I am just so overwhelmed by the immensity of how Paul just keeps adding to our list of blessings to be thankful for. We listed these a few weeks ago, but these blessings are just tremendous if you really stop and ponder on what God has done for us in Christ.
We will look tonight primarily at verses 6 & 7 and maybe touch on verse 8.
I want you to see tonight some of the wonderful things that we have to praise God for.
v. 3 “Praise be” v.6 “praise of the glory of His grace” v. 14 “praise of his glory”
This theme of praise goes all through Paul’s letters. And rightfully so. When you look at what God did for Paul on the Damascus road and all of the trials he was delivered from, all of the grace he experienced - Paul had a lot to praise God for. And so do we.
6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
What are we praising God for?
For His grace, that he has freely bestowed upon us. We are praising Him for His grace!
What is grace? It is God’s uncaused, unmerited, unconditioned love. Can you imagine something more incredible to praise God for?
God has supplied us with grace that we did not, could not earn. He saved us from paying a debt that we could not pay. He rescued us from an eternal damnation that we couldn’t rescue ourselves from.
We are going to take a deeper dive into God’s grace and what that means in verse 7.
But look with me at verse 6.
We are praising God for the glory of HIS grace. Again, we come back to this idea that God planned all of this out. It is HIS grace, it is HIS plan. It is all HIS doing. We are only involved because He allows us to be! His grace originates from the love that He has for His only Son, and for us! Never forget that GRACE always begins with God. Grace wouldn’t even be a term without God creating it. It is HIS story, it is HIS plan!
But now, look at it - it says that this Grace is “freely bestowed”.
Q. What begins to happen when you think that you can earn grace?
Well, the first thing is that the focus shifts from grace being “freely given” by God, to being earned by you. So the credit starts to shift from God giving it to you, to you earning it. That is one of the amazing things about grace. It can’t be earned. It can’t be bought. Ephesians 2:8-9 says this so well. It’s a free gift, and it is not of your own doing! You didn’t earn your salvation, and you can’t keep earning grace as you go throughout life!
And thank God that we don’t have to earn it! We could never be righteous enough, we could never be holy enough to meet God’s standards. That’s why Jesus had to give himself as a ransom.
Let’s move on to verse 7.
7 In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace
This verse right here is one of the best summations of the gospel in all of the scripture. This verse takes the whole of the entire gospel and boils it all down without losing any of the details.
This is one of those verses that you read and then step back from it and admire it in all of it’s beauty. It’s like a painting or something that you understand how difficult and how much time goes into it. You understand and appreciate the talent it takes to take some paint and a canvas and make it come to life.
Or like eating at a fine restaurant. When you realize the time and the technique that the cook has taken to prepare a certain meal, it just really stands out to you. You realize beauty when you see it. You understand the magnificence of something created where there was once nothing.
This verse is that type of thing.
So let’s break it down a little.
In Him - In who? Jesus. In Jesus we have redemption. What does redemption mean?
Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible Redeemer, Redemption
Redeemer, Redemption. English words derived from a Latin root meaning “to buy back,” thus meaning the liberation of any possession, object, or person, usually by payment of a ransom. In Greek the root word means “to loose” and so to free. The term is used of freeing from chains, slavery, or prison. In the theological context, the term “redemption” indicates a freeing from the slavery of sin, the ransom or price paid for freedom. This thought is indicated in the Gospels, which speak of Christ who came “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt 20:28; Mk 10:45).
This is great stuff. I hope you take all this in. This word redemption means to “buy back”. Well you say, where did God need to buy us back from? What were we slaves to that He would need to buy us back? We were slaves to sin! We were children of darkness. In Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve sinned, they plunged us into darkness with them by nature. We are now all born slaves of sin because of our descendant Adam. Adam sold us into slavery when he sinned in the garden and man has been slave to sin ever since.
God had to “buy us back” out of the kingdom of darkness. What was our crime that we committed? It was sin. And if we are honest, quite frankly - we’ve committed more of them than we’d like to admit right?
I mean you go right down the list of the 10 commandments and you start off with the first one “You shall have no other Gods before me”
And you think to yourself - “well, I don’t have any golden calves or statues of Buddha laying around in my house so I’m good to go” Check that one off the list! And then you realize that you can make an idol out of just about anything… right? And then the list only gets worse from there.
You get the idea. We were slaves to sin and bound for hell unless God did something to buy us back...
There was a price to be paid. There was a penalty for sin.
Redemption is the ransom that was paid for our soul. It was the price paid to purchase us. We read that verse last week in 1 Corinthians that says “you are not your own, you’ve been bought with a price”.
Well what was that price? Glad you asked.
v.7) In Him we have redemption through his blood
In the Old Testament, God set up a sacrificial system to atone for the sins of his people. You will remember at the passover, which we just experienced at Easter, what did they have to put above the door of their house to signify that they believed? The blood of the lamb right? Could they get any old lamb? Could they get the sick one that just didn’t get around good or the one that had a bad leg or was blind? Surely they could just use any old lamb they could find right?
No. The lamb had to be spotless. It had to be the best. Because God wouldn’t take anything less than the best “think also tithes, offerings, first-fruits”. God wouldn’t take anything less than the very best to atone for the sin of the people.
22 Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.
11 ‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.’
God required a sacrifice to be paid for sins, and that sacrificial system was setup in the Old Testament as a blood sacrifice. And the reason it was a blood sacrifice was because “the life of the animal was in the blood”. So in order for our sin to be atoned for, something had to give up it’s life. And so even in the Old Testament when they were sacrificing lambs and calves to cover for their sin, God was really setting up a symbolic system that would point forward to the ULTIMATE sacrifice for us.
What was so special about Jesus’ blood?
He was the spotless lamb. He was the sinless savior.
18 knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers,
19 but with precious blood, as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ.
18 For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit;
The JUST for the UNJUST. It’s the great exchange. That’s the gospel! He took your sin, and you took his righteousness!
Is there anything greater than that???