Ephesians Series

by Athol Walter

Part 1

Introduction

The importance of a correct understanding of Acts cannot be over-emphasised, for if we go wrong here, we will go wrong in our understanding of everything that comes after the time covered by Acts. Suffice it to say that the important thing to realise is that throughout the Book of Acts God is still dealing with His chosen people Israel, and the subject of Acts is not the Church which is His Body, but the Kingdom of Heaven. Brian went to great pains throughout his series to show this clearly, giving the proofs from Scripture that we hope have carried your judgement.

What this means is that the Church of which we are a part, did not commence until AFTER God set aside Israel, and that setting aside was done, not at the beginning of Acts as is commonly believed, but at the end of Acts.

I sometimes think that we believers have become so accustomed to the fact that Israel is off centre stage in God's plan now, that we forget it was ever any different. But from the calling of Abraham up until the end of the Book of Acts, the descendants of Abraham through Isaac, and God's dealings with them, are the central theme of Scripture, and the only way that anyone could come to God was through Abraham and his descendants.

Things, however, changed at the end of the book of Acts. If you will re-read Brian's last couple of studies, you will see that it was there in Rome that the final appeal was made through Paul to leaders of Israel, who did not accept the message concerning Jesus, as the Messiah and King of the Kingdom of God, and for the final time Isaiah's prophetic words of doom were pronounced on them.

As we well know, Paul had been brought to Rome as a prisoner following his appeal as a Roman citizen to Caesar. He was now out of reach of Jewish hatred, and after that final appeal to the Jewish leaders of Rome, the book of Acts abruptly finishes with a short statement that Paul preached to all who came to him the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ. No longer is it concerning Moses and the things of Israel. And it is at this point that Paul starts to write the last seven of his epistles which have an entirely different tone and message from anything he wrote before.

Before we move on to that however, I want to make a point which, to my mind, is crucial to understanding what happened next, and why.

As I said earlier, up until the end of Acts, Israel was the channel of blessing from God and the way to God. So what was God going to do now that the appointed channel had been cast aside because of their unbelief and the rejection for the second time of Jesus as their Messiah?

I appeal to you, dear reader, to think carefully about this matter. In fact, I believe that one of the main reasons for the writing of the Book of Acts was to show why Israel was taken off the scene.

I want you to try to imagine yourself back in the second half of the first century AD. As a Gentile who had been attracted to the monotheistic religion of Israel, and then having responded to the preaching of disciples of Jesus of Nazareth who came not only preaching but performing miracles, you accepted that Jesus was the long promised Messiah, and also that He had died for you on the cross. Your sins were forgiven, and you became A WILD OLIVE BRANCH GRAFTED INTO THE OLIVE TREE OF ISRAEL. And over a number of years letters came from Paul, and others, teaching you and your fellow-believers many wonderful things about your blessings in Christ.

But then, you begin to hear stories about how Paul has dismissed Israel. And horror of horrors, the Roman army attacks Jerusalem and after a terrible siege, breaks into the city and among many unspeakable acts, they raze the Temple, no stone being left on another, as the Lord foretold. The Romans also scattered the Jews, and Jerusalem was left almost deserted. Obviously, it was no longer the centre of the Jewish religion, and the religious activities at the Temple ceased, and have never been resumed.

I hope that you can see the dismay and confusion of the believers at that time? No Israel, no Jerusalem and no Temple. NO OLIVE TREE. Where does that leave the grafted-in branches? What on earth was God going to do now? Had Satan won after all?

One answer to the dilemma that Christendom came up with was that the "church" had taken Israel's place, and that everything that was Israel's and promised to Israel was now the church's. You will hear this taught in many Christian churches today. In fact, the whole liturgy of a number of Christian churches is nothing more than a slightly modified form of Old Testament rituals. Strange to say, though, while people who believe this teaching are quite happy to take all of Israel's privileges and blessings, they seem to be just as happy to leave Israel's punishments with Israel.

Unfortunately from a number of points of view, believers at large back in the first century had apparently turned away from the one source of Divinely inspired information that would have provided the real answer. That source was Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles, who alone had been told by the Lord what was going to happen next.

And where do we find the answer that God gave through Paul? Where are we told of the card that God had kept up His sleeve, so to speak, for just this very time? The answer is in the epistles Paul wrote after the end of Acts, starting with Ephesians.

So it is no coincidence that we follow Brian's series on Acts with a study of Paul's epistle to the Ephesians, for this epistle reveals the next stage in the revelation of the Plan of God, the part that more than anything else in Scripture, is about us and for us.

There is another point that I think should be made here. If what was happening during the years covered by Acts was to do with Israel and the Kingdom of God, and not the Church which is His Body, then the epistles written by Paul, Peter and others during that time must relate to Israel and the Kingdom, and not to the Church which is His Body. That is not to say that they are not inspired Scripture, they certainly are. Nor does it mean that we should not read them and learn from them. We certainly should. But it does mean that they are not written expressly to believers today, giving us the rules for our doctrine and practice. I am aware that I may be accused of saying that the only part of the Bible for us are these last seven epistles of Paul. But that is not what I am saying.

Let me give an example of what I mean. We understand that while the Old Testament is profitable and can teach us many interesting and valuable things, it does not lay down the rules for our conduct as believers today. The rules that applied to Israel regarding diet, Sabbath observance, sacrifices etc., are ignored by most of us without a twinge of conscience, because we know that there was a change in the way God handled things, when Christ died on the Cross. To use a Scriptural term there was a change of dispensation.

In the same way, we believe that there was a change in the way God handled things when He set Israel aside at the END of the book of Acts, and that what applied to the believers in the Acts period, does not necessarily apply to believers today. And if I try to bring doctrines or rituals from before Acts 28 over into this dispensation after Acts 28, or conversely, if I try to take some truth or rule from this dispensation after Acts 28 back into the dispensation before Acts 28, then I will only create confusion, and even be in danger of walking unworthily of my calling in Christ Jesus.

This is, probably, the major theme of this magazine, and for want of a better description, we call it 'rightly dividing the Word of Truth' according to Paul's command in 2 Tim. 2:15.

And in the same way that we study and reap rich lessons from the Old Testament, we can also study and reap rich lessons from the Acts epistles, while still recognizing that they do not necessarily give us the rules for our Christian faith and practice today.

I hope therefore, that no reader will think that we throw most of the Bible out, and only keep the last seven epistles of Paul. If any had visited our Sydney meetings in the last 17 months, they would have found us studying the book of Isaiah, and currently we are only up to chapter 28. And in the Newcastle meeting, we have been studying the Book of Hebrews for well over a year, and Hebrews is not one of Paul's last seven epistles.

Are we ever going to get to Ephesians? Yes, soon, and I hope that readers will understand the necessity to set the context and fill in the background. I have been talking about certain epistles written during the Acts period and others written after the Acts period. Maybe some reader is thinking with dismay that all this means it is necessary to establish the precise date when each epistle was written. Well, some study Bibles do in fact give this information, or provide discussion about it. But no, the precise dating doesn't matter. It is simpler than that.

The turning point is the end of the Book of Acts, or as we say for simplicity's sake, Acts 28. The only question that needs to be answered is whether an epistle was written before or after the end of Acts, and you may be relieved to know that while there is controversy and doubt over the actual dates of some epistles, there is absolutely no doubt about whether epistles were written during or after the Acts period.

This question about dating only applies to Paul's writings, because he is the only New Testament writer who has any work written after Acts included in the canon of Scripture. That is, all the writings of Peter, John, Jude etc. all occur during the Acts period.

In case any reader is not sure, the last seven epistles of Paul are: Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus and Philemon.

I have read many different expositors, some of whom are diametrically opposed to our dispensational approach, yet all of them agree that the seven epistles mentioned above were written after the close of Acts.

EPHESIANS.
I must confess to some nervousness about writing this series on Ephesians. I am well aware that I really know so little about it, and I will certainly make mistakes. On the other hand, I believe that it is very important for us all, and trying to explain this epistle is part of being obedient to the Apostle's command to try to make all see just what is the Dispensation of the Mystery.

Bible Expositors have always recognised the special place held by Ephesians. It has been called 'the peak of revelation', the capstone of Scripture', 'the profoundest of Paul's epistles', to mention a few.

DATING.
Although I said earlier that it is not vital to know the precise date, it is interesting to get something of a general idea about when Paul wrote to his beloved church at Ephesus. Jameison, Fawcett and Brown say AD 62; Conybeare and Howson say Spring, AD 62; Dr. Bullinger says towards the end of AD 62; the NIV Bible says about AD 60. It will be seen that we cannot be absolutely sure about the date, but we can be sure that it was one of the things the apostle did during the two years mentioned in the last couple of verses of Acts 28.

Many expositors suggest that the epistle to the Colossians was written just before Ephesians. Again this may or may not be true, but what we do know is that Tychicus, accompanied by the runaway but now converted slave Onesimus, carried both the letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians from Paul to Ephesus and Colossae. Onesimus had with him the small epistle to Philemon.

It would seem reasonable to say then, that Colossians and Ephesians were written almost at the same time. The two epistles had differing purposes, and while there are many similarities between the two, it is Ephesians which is the more general of the two, and deals with doctrines relating to the Dispensation of the Mystery and the Church which is His Body in a wider sense than Colossians. I suspect it is for this reason that Ephesians is placed first before Philippians and Colossians in the English New Testament. 

OUTLINE
Ephesians is only 6 chapters long, not long at all when compared to some other books in the Bible. And while the chapter and verse divisions are quite artificial and arbitrary, in this case, the outline or structure of the book falls neatly into two halves, dividing conveniently at the end of ch. 3.

This structure or outline is taken from the book "In Heavenly Places" by Charles Welch, and readers wanting more detail should consult it.

The opening two verses give us Paul's commission and his salutation and this is balanced by the closing four verses of the book where we have Tychicus' commission, and Paul's closing salutation.

Then the main body of the book of Ephesians can be set out as follows:

Doctrine (1:3-3:13)	Practice (4:1-6:20)
1a. The Threefold Charter (1:3-14) Will of the Father Work of the Son Witness of the Spirit	1b.Threefold exhortation (4:1-6) Walk worthy of Calling Forbear in love Keep the unity
2a. Threefold Prayer that ye may know (1:15-19): Hope Inheritance Power	2b. Threefold Measure (4:7-19) Gift of Christ Fulness of Christ Measure of every part
3a. Threefold Union (1:19-2:7) Quickened together Raised together Seated together	3b. Threefold Application (4:20-32) Put off old man Put on new man Put away the lie
4a. Three works (2:8-10) Not of works We are His work Unto good works	4b.Threefold Walk (5:1-6:9) Walk in love Walk as light Walk circumspectly
5a. Threefold Peace (2:11-19) Far off nigh - peace Two made one - peace He came and preached - peace	5b.Threefold Stand (6:10-13) Stand against the Devil Withstand evil day Stand having "worked out"
6a. Threefold Union (2:19-22) Citizens together Framed together Builded together	6b. Threefold Equipment (6:14-18) Girdle & breastplate Shoes and shield Helmet and sword
7a. Threefold Equality (3:1-13) Heirs together Members together Partakers together	7b. Threefold Prayer (6:19,20) Open mouth Speak boldly As I ought
THE CENTRAL PRAYER (3:14-21) That He would grant strength That ye may be able to comprehend That ye might be filled unto all the fulness of God

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