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Lenten Observations Feb. 24 - Spiritual blessings

 It is very hard to move on from Ephesians 1:3-14, so I won't yet. It is one long sentence in the Greek; in my English translation the translators broke it up to three sentences. Again, I post the passage:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, 5 having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He [a]made us accepted in the Beloved.

Blessed us with every spiritual blessing int he heavenly places in Christ. Observations:

These are not future, but now. 

There are many of them and in this long sentence Paul "piles them on" to show how overwhelmed with blessings we are. 

There are blessings that affect our physical life here, and those that are about relationship and connection, those that have happened and are yet to happen. 

They evade numeration, really. 

They include the fruit of the Holy Spirit, which are (is?) character- and personality-redemptive; the eternal security of being loved like the Beloved, Christ the Son, is--God is not going to stop loving the Son and therefore not us. Prayer, which we depend on and struggle with*. An eternal position seated with Christ after everyone here has forgotten our personal, individual existence; adoption, which has different connotations in Roman thinking than modern** . There are many others here and described elsewhere, including one of my favorites "Christ in you the hope of glory," and one mentioned multiple times in Ephesians, "in Christ."

*The friend who led the Bible study this week asked us to think about our best and our leftovers. Prayer gets my leftovers, to my embarrassment. 

*In Rome, adults were adopted so that a childless couple could have an heir. Adoption of babies is not something we consider in Roman civilization, although it could happen, of course. So many children were abandoned for reasons of convenience or weakness and taken in by farmers and shepherds and such that it became a fairy tale trope, even a plot point in Oedipus Rex.

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