Ephesians 1:3-14 Commentary

Is there a better way to begin anything, including a new year, than by talking about blessing? Paul might have seemed to think so. He, after all, begins this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson with three references to the Greek combination of eu and logos that’s often translated as some form of the English word “blessed.”

In verse 1 the apostle sings, “Praise be [eulogetos*] to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed [eulogesas] us in the heavenly realm with every spiritual blessing [eulogia] in Christ.” We might paraphrase the apostle as literally professing “we publicly speak well of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every imaginable blessing.”

Of course, the apostle isn’t the only person to speak of blessing. In fact, I have noticed what I perceive to be culture’s increased use of the term “blessed.” Nearly countless strangers invite me to have a “blessed day.” I’ve heard some athletes speak of being “blessed” with athletic success. A few T-shirts even announce their wearers are “Too blessed to be stressed.”

Yet Jesus’ friends aren’t the only people who talk about being “blessed.” While society uses the term in a variety of ways, “blessing” seems to generally contain an element of bestowal. In other words, non-Christians who refer to themselves as blessed seem to express appreciation for some good they’ve received from outside of themselves rather than something they’ve mustered on their own. In fact, the idea of “blessing” sometimes sounds to me a lot like good “luck” or “fortune.”

When Ephesians 1’s Paul speaks about blessing, he too recognizes it as something (or one) that comes to Christians from outside us. But he doesn’t see it as a random gift from some nebulous source. The apostle, instead, identifies the source of everything good as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (3).

This is a timely reminder that all of the good things God’s people received in 2025 and will receive in 2026 come from our God’s gracious and generous hand. Verse 3 also invites the recipients of those blessings to praise God for them. Those whom God blesses want to remember to literally “speak well” to and about God for God’s innumerable blessings.

In this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson Paul enumerates some of those blessings. God, he sings in verse 3, “has blessed us in the heavenly realms [epouraniois] with every spiritual [pneumatike] blessing [eulogia] in Christ.” This profession is somewhat mysterious. It’s not perfectly clear, for example, what exactly the apostle means by “in the heavenly realms.”

Yet he may mean little more than that “spiritual” blessings are most acutely recognized in the heavenly realm by the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our blessings are not material, but first of all spiritual in the sense that they reflect God’s satisfaction with us for Jesus’ sake. Among our greatest blessings are the way God graciously chooses to view and treat God’s adopted children.

Those blessings, the apostle goes on to profess, are nothing new. In Christ God, he insists in verses 4 and 5, “chose [exelexato] us … before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined [proorisas] us for adoption to sonship [huiothesian] through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.”

This is a theologically “thick” profession that wise preachers proclaim through the lense of our own faith tradition. But all preachers might follow the Spirit’s guidance to note the theocentric nature of all this choosing, predestining and adopting.

There’s very little this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson’s Paul explicitly commands his adopted siblings in Christ to do. Of course, God expects God’s adopted children to accept God’s choosing with our faith in Jesus Christ. But that is only and always a response to what God has first done for us in Christ. Through Christ God graciously does all the “heavy lifting” necessary for our rescue from Satan, sin and death. Jesus’ friends need only receive the blessing that is that gift by “opening it” with our faith in him.

Paul later returns to the theme of the blessing that is God’s predestining of Jesus’ friends to be part of God’s gracious rescue mission. In Christ, he writes in verses 11 and 12, “we were also chosen [eklerothomen], having been predestined [prooristhentes] according to the plan [prothesin] of him who works everything out with the purpose [boulen] of his will, in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory [epainon doxes autou].”

Paul ends this pericope by reminding God’s dearly beloved people that all of this blessing is to “the praise [epainon] of God’s glory [doxes]” (14). Perhaps preachers need to say little more about that praise than this: while God’s blessings on God’s people are innumerable, they are ultimately not for our glory, but God’s.

God blesses us with all this choosing for God’s glory and praise. God doesn’t choose Jesus’ friends because we’re the last people left or because all God’s other choices somehow fell through. God lovingly and graciously chooses to bless us because it causes God’s beloved people to bless and praise God.

This might offer preachers an opportunity to talk about how God does all of this blessing for God’s praise. At first glance, after all, it may sound as though God blesses Jesus’ friends because God is a “glory hog” who just wants people to stroke God’s ego. That’s why it may help to remember that God created us to praise God. To withhold praise from God is to blur the image of God in which God created us. We are at our most Christ-like when we cause not only ourselves, but also others to praise God.

God’s blesses God’s dearly beloved people who are holy and blameless in God’s sight only because of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. After all, as Paul asserts in verses 7-8a, in Christ “we have redemption [apolytrosin] through his blood, the forgiveness of sins [aphesin ton parptomaton], in accordance with the riches [ploutos] of God’s grace that he lavished [eperisseusen] on us.”

In making this profession, the apostle announces God has graciously blessed God’s dearly beloved people with rescue from our sinful ways. God has blessed us with the forgiveness of our sins that’s a gift of God’s lavish grace to Jesus’ naturally sinful friends. God has, quite simply, blessed us by freeing us from the mighty power sin, Satan and death naturally hold over us.

What’s more, Paul goes on to celebrate in verses 8b-10, God has “with all wisdom [sophia] and understanding [phronesei] … made known [gnorisas] to us the mystery [mysterion] of his will according to his good pleasure [eudokian], which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect [oikonomian] when the times reach their fulfillment – to bring unity to [anakephalaiosasthai] all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”

This is yet another example of a theologically rich profession that deserves more attention than most preachers have time to give it in the course of one worship service. But perhaps we might sum it up this way (while going a bit further if the Spirit prompts us): all along God had a plan to bless God’s dearly beloved people by rescuing us from the messes we sinfully make for ourselves, our neighbors and creation.

While God largely only hinted at that plan before the Son of God became incarnate, God didn’t keep that plan a secret forever. Instead God’s plan “went public” in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. That plan for the blessing that will be the redemption of the creation and its creatures will be fully completed when Christ returns to unite them under his loving lordship.

Among the last blessings Paul lists in this Sunday’s Epistolary Lesson is that of inheritance. He alludes to it when he speaks in verse 5 of our predestining “for adoption to sonship.” While the NIV translation obscures it, the apostle also literally refers to our obtaining of our “inheritance” when he uses the Greek verb eklerothomen in verse 11a.

In verses 13b-14 the apostle celebrates, “When you believed [pisteusantes], you were marked [esphragisthete] in [Christ] with the seal, the promised [epangelias] Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing [arrabon] our inheritance [kleronomias] until the redemption [apolytrosin] of those who are God’s possession [peripoieseos].”

In this yet another theologically saturated verse, preachers might let the Spirit guide us to call attention to the blessing who is the Holy Spirit. Satan and our guilty consciences try to provoke us to doubt God’s good plans for us. So when God grants us the gift of the Holy Spirit, God doesn’t just gift us with faith and mold us into the likeness of Jesus Christ. The Spirit also addresses our doubts by blessing us with God’s guarantee that someday God will grace us with the rescue of the creation, creatures and us from the deathly grip of sin and Satan. The Spirit blesses us, what’s more, with confidence not in ourselves, but in God’s plan to draw us into the glory of the new earth and heaven.

This proclamation may provide an excellent “onramp” to the year of our Lord, 2026. While all sorts of people make predictions and some signs seem at least sobering, no one can know what this year holds. But Jesus’ followers in whom the Spirit lives are confident that God blesses us by holding both this year and us in God’s loving hands.

*I have here and elsewhere added in brackets the Greek words for the English words the NIV translation uses.

Illustration

While the concept of blessing being unmoored from God may seem like a relatively new one, it’s actually more than 40 years old. In his entry on Sugar Ray Leonard in 1983’s Context, Martin Marty quotes an article in Sports Illustrated that attributes to the world champion boxer his description of blessing.

Leonard told an audience at Harvard University: “I consider myself blessed. I consider you blessed. We’ve all been blessed with God-given talents. Mine just happens to be [beating] people up.”