Ephesians 1:17 Commentary and Bible Study

Here is the major prayer for the church at Ephesus. Paul speaks of God the Father gloriously, his being of infinite worth and value, weight and preciousness. He prays that God ‘may give unto you the spirt of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him’, and the reference to ‘him’ at the end of the verse refers not only to God generally, but specifically to Christ. So it is about knowing Christ through his word. He prays that they may grasp its message and its purpose. As Christians, may you have the Holy Spirit, because he will impart wisdom to benefit from revelation and to see Christ in the word, his instruction and guidance. Today, there is a tendency, even among faithful teachers and preachers, to say that the Scripture has only one sense. It bears only the obvious sense of the passage. Well of course, the literal historical sense of any passage of Scripture is the most important to us and it comes first. But it is being said that the Old Testament writers were concerned only to speak to their own generation and to address the situation in which they lived. There is a phrase used to express this view – they never spoke better than they knew. The idea is that there is no subtext in the message of the prophets, there is no spiritual message intended by the Lord, there is no underlying sense for which we must search. You must take Old Testament narrative at face value, and enjoy what you can of it, but do not go looking for a message from God that exceeds, that transcends the local situation to which the prophet ministered. This is the approach of most Study Bibles today. They will not teach much of Christ in the Old Testament. They put it like this so often: they say, there must be no allegorising of the Scripture. Well, we agree there should be no free allegorising of Scripture, but what they mean is that God did not intend that the original message should include pastoral lessons and applications. Sometimes it is claimed that the Reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, insisted that only the obvious sense is the intended sense but that is quite incorrect. Both Luther and Calvin made it clear, for example, that the history of the family of Abraham and his successors is the history of the typical church. It is not the history of just a remote family in ancient times. Israel was the typical church and therefore all the things that happened to them, were orchestrated by God to impart lessons to us. That modern view is not only wrong but it is opposed to what the Scripture says about itself. Throughout the Bible there is a subtext, there is a deeper sense. It is not so mysterious and not so hidden that only certain special people can ever tell you what it is, but it is something which, when we have spiritual wisdom, should be obvious to us.We can prove this from passages such as Romans 15: 4 – ‘For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.’ Or from 1 Corinthians 10:1 – ‘Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea [the Red Sea]; and were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea.’ What is this? It was the equivalent of baptism for them. It was a kind of ordinance of faith when they went through the river. It parallels our experience as Christians in conversion and baptism. ‘And did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ.’ All that happened to them was orchestrated by God so that it should be a parallel in many ways to the experiences of the Christian life in New Testament times containing lessons for us. Like them (verse 5) some in the church may turn out to be not converted and have no faith and be overthrown. These things were lessons for us (verse 6). How did they tempt Christ (verse 9) before the incarnation if Moses wrote only of their local situation? Are we guilty of murmuring and complaining and doubting the Lord and allowing ourselves to get depressed (verse 10)? All these things were ensamples (patterns) for us (verse 11).