EPHESIANS 1:3-14

Some act as if there is no context surrounding an individual verse. In the first place, remember that the Bible wasn't divided up into verses and chapters until the Middle Ages and some of these divisions were rather arbitrary. So we shouldn't necessarily expect that a single verse represents the smallest literary unit to consider, or even that each English sentence is the smallest unit. For example, Ephesians 1:3-14 is one single Greek sentence usually divided into about six separate sentences in English. I once visited a Sunday school class when I lived in upstate New York. They would read and discuss one verse at a time and not allow discussion of any other verse in the chapter until listing all the possible interpretations of each individual verse under question. Of course, most of the suggested interpretations could have been easily dismissed if they had only looked ahead to the rest of the passage.

Let's look at that long sentence in Ephesians I mentioned. It starts out: “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.” Ephesians 1:3

In a classroom situation, we could go around the room with each person giving an opinion on what “every spiritual blessing” means. Or we could simply read the rest of the sentence to see what Paul himself had in mind:

chosen to be holy and blameless (v. 4)

destined for adoption as his children (v. 5)

bestowed his glorious grace on us (v. 6)

redemption through his blood (v. 7a)

forgiveness of our trespasses (v. 7b)

made known to us the mystery of his will (v. 9)

obtained an inheritance (v. 11)

marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit (v. 13)

redemption as God's own people (v. 14)