Ephesians 1:3 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ This is an amazing, an exhilarating, a rhapsodic passage of Holy Scripture at the start of this remarkable letter, a letter to our souls. The Trinity is here: there is the Father, there is the Son, and sometimes people ask, where is the Holy Spirit? Well, he is referred to by his work: ‘who hath blessed with all spiritual blessings’, which you could render as ‘blessings of the Spirit’. The sentence seems cumbersome: ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’, but it is intentional. Supposing we were asked, ‘What do you know about the Father?’ We may say, ‘It is difficult to do that because he is invisible to us. So, the apostle says, ‘Yes, but he is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, so we do know him after all.’ He has revealed himself in Christ. Christ has come and he has come with a heart of compassion to make an atonement. He has come out of love for his people and after his death he rose again and came straight back to his people and blessed them and warmed their hearts. When you see all the love and the sacrifice of Christ, you have seen the Father. Three different members of the one, sublime Godhead, equally divine, equally eternal. One person of the Godhead has become visible to us and so we have seen a member of the Godhead and we can read all the wonderful benevolence of the Father towards us in Christ.How do we understand the words, ‘Blessed be’? Is it an alternative word for praise? Well, there is a very important difference. They are translated from a Greek word which we have in the English – eulogy. It is to actively think well of. I am doing something almost like giving a blessing to God. How can I do that? How can I bless him? Well, I can return his love. I pray for the help of God in some great need, and God answers me and I am able to accomplish something. I know I could not have done it without his help, so I immediately return to him the glory and the praise. If I should witness to somebody and that conversation is used by God to bring that person to salvation, I don’t say, ‘I did that, I must have put the case for the Saviour very effectively.’ No, I return thanks to God and I give him the credit and I return the blessing to him in praise and in dedication of myself. As I praise him, I pledge myself to him. So to bless is to recognise God’s greatness and to return something to God that he has given. This chapter is filled with things which stir our hearts to give thanks and praise to him.But at the end of the verse why is it, ‘all spiritual blessings in heavenly places’? He is going to be speaking about election, God’s choosing of a redeemed people and predestination. These are blessings that were first of all founded in heaven. They were not made on earth fundamentally. Election was determined in heaven, in the eternal glory, before the foundation of the world - Paul goes on to say so. So too were justification and adoption; these are all heavenly things. They are decrees or determinations of Almighty God. It was in heaven that God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, determined the roles that each would take, and the Son, the second person of the Trinity, equal with the Father was assigned the task of coming into the world and suffering and dying for sinners and living a perfect life to earn and secure salvation and eternal glory for us. But it was in heaven that he said: ‘Here am I, Father, send me.’ All these things, we have only in part here. They are blessings that find their fulfilment and their wonderful enlargement in heaven when we cross the threshold of eternity. What we have now is wonderful but it is only the earnest. You have received, perhaps, the greatest blessings in some way. Pardon and forgiveness, light and understanding, conversion and new nature but through your Christian life there are more blessings to come and yet they are all rooted in God’s past decision to bless us.