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Moving forward after Advent: New Study, Ephesians

 On my trip to Turkey, one of the high points was Ephesus. I cannot put into words, at least not easily, what it meant to me. Knowing I was walking down a street Paul, John, and Timothy, among others, walked was transcendent.  I have chosen Ephesians as my next study, and I plan to take it slowly, even pedantically. You all (faithful readers?) will not get all of my reflective pedantry, but only some. 

1:3: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

We skip over that as a greeting, like "Howdy you all, God bless you!" So much more. 

The centrality of "our Lord Jesus Christ" strikes me here. While some think Paul saw Jesus during His earthly ministry, I think he would have said so. It was in the Damascus Road experience that he met Him. However, many of the people reading this original letter (which perhaps was a circular letter for more than just Ephesus) were alive when Jesus was. Contemporaries of Jesus were still living, about thirty years later. They had a more immediate sense of Jesus' physical life and presence. I think, and this might be heretical, that they put Jesus the man/Jesus the Lord and Savior on a higher plane than we do. Two millennia has led us modern conservative Christians to want to keep Jesus in His place, secondary. Philippians 2 doesn't do that. 

Just a thought. 

As to the "blessed be the God and Father..." John Pipe wrote:

This is not at all a strange semantic phenomenon. If God is the primal and inexhaustible "blesser," then he must be above all others in a "blessed" state—the fullness and source of all "blessing." If this is so, then a most natural burst of praise would be "You are blessed!" That this recognition and joyful exclamation of God's blessedness should then be described as "blessing God" is not unusual. Other analogies, though not exact, would be our expressions like: "I magnify the Lord" or "Let us exalt his name." Both of these expressions properly recognize and give joyful expression to God's magnificence and his exalted status. They do not mean that we make God larger or higher. So to bless God means to recognize his great richness, strength, and gracious bounty and to express our gratitude and delight in seeing and experiencing it.

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