Ephesians 5-6 (Page 2)
Paul’s ‘always’ in Ephesians 5:20 gets the same careful definition this series gave the word in Philemon, ruling out both literalism and vagueness. As God’s sons and Christ’s own brethren, believers have already received their inheritance rather than merely been promised it. 5:21’s call to rejoice with trembling describes, in miniature, exactly the posture Christ himself models toward the Father.
Paul’s use of ‘mystery’ in Ephesians 1:9 gets careful definition, set against the modern church’s own fascination with personal testimonies as a competing source of authority. Ephesians 1:10’s claim that Christ sums up and is all in all reframes what mystery actually means here. Paul consistently places historical, redemptive-historical theology above the systematic kind, a priority this sermon defends directly.
Paul’s own journeys and imprisonment, along with the debated question of his authorship of Ephesians, set the historical stage before the sermon turns to its real subject: becoming what believers already are in Christ. That becoming is a kind of holy warfare, waged inside the ordinary household by husbands and wives, children, and slaves alike. Domestic life, on this reading, is a real battlefield rather than a retreat from one.
Every command in Ephesians 5-6’s household instructions depends on a prior indicative, what God has already done in Christ, rather than the other way around. Christ’s own coming is itself a new act of obedience, God himself obeying on his people’s behalf. New obedience follows from that gift; it doesn’t earn it.