We the Church aren’t what we appear. We’ve seen Ephesians bringing us one profound image after another as Paul labours to express our destiny. Like we’ve said: What God wants, and gains, from history, is a Bride! Astonishingly, our loving God wants a collective Companion made up of everyone who loves Him. She, this Church, is God’s delight, because He’s created Her to share all His existence and glory, all He has and is, forever. Each of us who believes is part of Her; God is at work building us together into a vast, worshipping Body, millions of diverse individuals each unique, mature and indispensable, that will love Him, love each other, grow and serve together and be loved by God forever…
And equally astonishingly: when God has finished this wonderful, creative, artistic, and incredibly costly enterprise, we’re told that She the Bride will totally reflect (Rev 21:11), or rather be filled with (Eph 1:23), all of Christ’s own nature. We have quite a way to go to reach that point! In Eph 2:10, therefore, Paul, and God, gives us a further picture of Church: we the Bride are God’s `workmanship’ (2:10), His `artwork’, His `masterpiece’. The history of His Body here is His drama, His symphony, where He orchestrates the free actions of numberless participants with boundless skill, to bring us to our destiny of being made like Jesus (cf Rom 8:29). Paul feels an understandable calling to `make plain to everyone’ the sheer wonder of this reality, this `mystery’ (3:8-9); but, remarkably, not just to humanity. Paul adds that the matchless brilliance of this enterprise reveals `through the Church, the manifold wisdom of God… to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms’ (3:10). God has purposes for the unseen worlds of which we know nothing: what’s amazing is that it’s through us His glory is revealed, so that He receives `glory in the Church’ (3:21). In the cross God revealed His cosmic purpose in all its love, selflessness, wisdom and grace: as it’s expressed now in our amazing destiny, we participate in its revelation at levels we cannot imagine. As Kelly suggested a century ago, even if the whole world rejected us, that itself would be an astonishing calling! (Lord, may I live up to it…!)
This incredible destiny, this `glorious grace’ of generous divine craftsmanship, is a major theme of ch.2. So let’s look at the verses through which Paul paves the way for this revelation, so that imaginatively we can walk the same way. We can list a whole sequence of things (I counted nine) to rejoice over! (Thankfulness is a very healing thing!- I had an aunt who was really characterized by it, and when I think of her I feel I need to learn lots more of it!)
So then first: at the start of ch2 Paul reminds us of the unpromising raw material with which God’s craftsmanship starts out. For him, the first essential is that we realize how disastrous was our situation. (Cf the double `Remember!’ in vv11-12.) Have I grasped what 2:1 says, that before I was (as Jesus says) `born` again, I was actually dead, in the sense that really matters? Nor was that all. V2: until I was born again I naturally followed the direction and impulses of my sinful nature, and there were two big problems with that: first, although I might have thought I was doing what I wanted, actually (v2) I was being pushed around by demonic forces; and (v3) I was naturally headed for God’s anger. When I `followed the ways of this world’ – when the surrounding world was setting my agenda – the norms I lived by were not neutral but were actually those of Satan. (Cf 1 John 5:19: `We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one’.) What I was facing therefore (Lord, please help me grasp this) was genuinely the anger of God, v3; and it was this – the first enormous step in God’s costly workmanship – that Christ carried for us on Calvary. (Thankyou, Lord…!)
Do I believe this? In other words the normal, natural existence of a human being is headed into catastrophe. That’s why we do evangelism! Of course there’s a deep antithesis here that can make our postmodern mindset uncomfortable. Clearly there are those who are `in Christ’, on the one hand, and those who are disastrously outside, on the other. We may not like this idea (Nordic liberal churchmen get especially fidgety about any idea of a `them’ and `us’, a Norwegian friend told me). But if we’re serious about aligning our understanding with God, we have to follow his revelation here. Jesus talked much about there being `sheep’ and `goats’, and about a `narrow gate’ to life which only a few find. (Matthew 25:31-46, Matthew 7:13-14; etc etc.) And it mattered enormously that we (yes, we) were outside the `narrow gate’. Without Christ we were not just ignorant, not `basically OK’, says Paul: `You were once darkness!‘ (5:8). And since in the most crucial sense we were totally `dead’ (2:1; `separated from the life of God’, 4:18), what had to be achieved was nothing less than our miraculous resurrection from the dead (2:5). Thankyou Lord!
Further into the chapter Paul develops this further: We had been `separate from Christ, foreigners to the’ (Jewish) `covenants of promise’ (v12). (We could pause to think how it might have been if God’s `covenants of promise’ had indeed been for one race only: if, for example, you were permanently excluded from salvation unless you were black.) Ours was a life going nowhere, he says, `without hope and without God’ (2:12; very clear, very strong!): `now you who once were far away have been brought near’ – but at the cost of the blood, and the fathomless agony, of the Son. Yes: that divine love was the first costly step of God’s `workmanship`!
Here is the indispensable `bass note’ of spirituality. If we have not grasped the depth of the darkness in us, we will not be raised up by a love astonished at the cross. This is why the most prominent lesson from many earlier parts of the Bible seems to be the huge significance of holiness (in much of the pentateuch, for example), and our utter inability to get it right on our own (eg in Numbers or Judges or Kings, taken as a whole). At least that is the way in which, historically, God has chosen to reveal Himself, though obviously the themes of His enormous love and His rescue shine out also from Genesis 3 onwards; but it’s really after those first lessons that we’re ready to learn about Messiah and the Cross. Genuine revival, Martyn Lloyd-Jones taught, stems from a `sense of the awful majesty of God and the abject wickedness of sinful men and women in the presence of their holy Creator; in consequence a deep abhorrence of sin, and a grateful reception of the mercy and grace of God’; and that’s why, as he observes thought-provokingly about Romans, the wrath of God is actually the starting-point of Paul’s classic expression of the gospel (look at Rom 1:18). `The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’; we’re only ready to grasp all the love, the glory that God is bringing us into, our wonderful destiny, when we’ve grasped our deep need to be forgiven. This is one way in which `the message of the cross is the power of God’ (1 Cor 1:18): love blazes up from a genuine grasp of Golgotha. (Lord, please help me to see, and to worship…)
But then God’s workmanship harvests the benefits of the cross! God says to us, because of My great love for you (v4), I have made you alive (v5)! And now that this miracle has happened, now that we are `born again`, all that this word LIFE really means is available to us, because through the cross the barrier between us and the LIFE of God has been taken away. (Cf John 10:10?) So specifically asking for God to put his LIFE within us will make all the difference, will mean His workmanship, will mean transformation! There is a big difference between you or I as a Christian and you or I when we were not yet Christians. It’s not that Christians are better people than not-yet-Christians; but there will be an increasing difference between you or I as a Christian and you or I when we were not yet Christians. It’s as if we are designed to be connected to the power of the electric mains, yet for some reason we’ve tried to operate with batteries only; and it hasn’t worked very well. But once we commit to the mains power, there is no limit to what God can do. Because we are `God’s workmanship`, there is no weakness, no habit, no addiction that is beyond His power; no sexual distortion, no emotional scar, no past folly that is beyond His redemption. (Thankyou Lord!) Maybe some of us really need to reach out and grasp the assurance of this, and the reality of the transformation God can give us!
Then in the next few famous verses Paul really piles on the glory of this. We devoted an earlier post (https://petelowmanresources.com/latest-ephesians3-god-says-were-in-heaven-right-now-21-7-113-14/) to the amazing v6, trying to grasp what it actually says rather than what we might expect it to say. It’s not that we will be seated with Christ in the heavenly (unseen, supernatural) realms one day after we die; rather, Paul uses past tenses to say we have been raised up and are seated in Christ there now; heaven is where we go when we’re born again! (Cf Col 3:1-4.) Like we’ve said, we don’t sense this, except perhaps in a few, very best moments of our lives; but one day we will; which is why death will be, for Christians, such a wonderful moment! But being `seated with Christ` right now also means we share Jesus’ authority (1:20-21, 6:12); when it comes to habitual temptations and negative thoughts we can’t seem to break, we actually have the authority to say to Satan, Stay out of my head because it’s seated in Christ! (Try it!) Further, it’s because we’re absolutely united with Christ that God has already `has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ` (1:3). As Watchman Nee insists in his brief but excellent Sit Walk Stand, it’s not `Lord I need this`, but `In Christ I actually have this and will live in faith on that basis.` Because (v6) we are risen and seated in Christ, everything we need is already available to us, and this is the basis for (v10) God’s workmanship in us, for our spiritual growth. Should we not take a moment to thank Him?
Then comes v7, about the goal of God’s craftsmanship: He is going to use all the future ages to show us how much He loves us! What’s heaven for? Worship? Yes! Doing fruitful things? Yes! But why this? Because it’s what God’s like. Imagine your partner takes you to a wonderful art gallery they’ve quietly set up to show you how much they love you, and you look around it and just say, `I can’t believe you’ve done this.` It’s what Paul said in Eph 1:18: the Lord wants us to see now how joyful He is as He looks ahead to what He’s making of us, we who are his `inheritance`; that is, that we `grasp how wide and long and high and deep` is the love of Christ for us` (3:18)! Hallelujah! Again we should surely pause and worship Him?!
Ah, but can we be sure that this is our personal destiny? Before he speaks of our being God’s workmanship Paul gives us one of the NT’s key verses, v8: `For it is by grace you have been saved!` We need to grasp that `for`; the reason for our confidence in the amazing things he’s just said, is that the whole foundation of our future existence is God’s colossal love for us! What is grace? It’s worth one day using a Bible concordance, and we’ll see it’s God’s colossal love, our Father’s unearned, undeserved love (cf v4). We need to preach this, don’t we? And especially if we’ve got fellow-believers who didn’t have a father, or had a father who was a disaster. The God who really exists isn’t dull or uncaring. First of all, God is a God of colossal love for us as we are! Thankyou Lord!
Of course we mustn’t be sentimental about this. Too many of our songs drift into a dreamy `Jesus is my beautiful boyfriend` and leave out anything about His holiness, justice, and what v3 even describes as his anger. And then we can start being allergic to anything that might give a sense of guilt, as if that’s always a bad thing rather than being, sometimes, the means to God’s workmanship; and we lose God’s greatness, majesty, awesomeness, and after 10 years of this we have a picture of a God whose service and commands don’t really matter, and we get careless about holiness and obedience and end up in shipwreck. No: as we grasp God’s grace we must grasp, alongside that, His holiness; it’s the two combined that fuel His workmanship! Nonetheless the key point here is above all God’s colossal love for us; He loves us more than we could ever imagine!
Grace, the power inspiring God’s workmanship: God’s unearned, undeserved love. `Unearned`: this is an idea our human spirit resists: we always want to contribute something. Just about every other world religion tends to go adrift here, by making salvation somehow a matter of works. Sometimes it’s a criticism levelled at Catholicism too, I think unfairly (to me the problem with official Catholicism can be more of salvation being, not by faith (as this verse says), but by sacraments (see Rom 4:6-12 on that); and yet Catholics do often speak of `Catholic guilt`, perhaps because in RC theology salvation is not an assured, once-for-all new birth, but depends on our keeping on doing our bit, especially in participation in the sacraments. But if evangelicals lose what Paul is saying here, we too fall into our own version of guilt – have I done enough to please God? The answer is, no you haven’t & no you can’t! And as we grasp this truth it will set us free! Vv8-9 are saying we are saved by grace alone, by the colossal love of God, the unearned love of God. We don’t find our own way home; it’s only because of the divine initiative of grace; otherwise there would have been no salvation. We don’t have to work for it, there’s nothing we can earn, nothing we need to do. God’s initiative and workmanship is what makes it happen; and that gives us total security. It’s because we know we don’t have to earn it that we can feel utterly safe. When Jesus died to pay for our sins on the cross he cried out `It is finished`, and it was! We are God’s workmanship; all we have to do is reach out in faith, trust His forgiveness, and on the basis of that receive Him. Again – let’s thank Him!
We’re God’s workmanship. By grace we are saved – through faith. Only because grace comes first is our faith-response of any value. Unless God’s mercy, God’s unbelievably loving plan of Christmas then the Cross had come first, our faith would have been useless, there would have been no salvation to put our trust in. Indeed, faith isn’t something natural to us as humans; it’s a gift that comes through Him (Acts 3:16) & we have to accept or reject it. There is a crucial moment when by grace people recognise the possibility of faith, and Paul pleads: don’t let that grace-moment go (cf 2 Cor 6:1-2); accept His gift of faith, reach out and receive the love of God and presence of God through the cross… (`I want that… Jesus died to make it possible… I’m receiving all that!`)
We’re God’s workmanship. So now we’re ready to learn from Eph 2:10 the implications of this (and the rest of Ephesians will tell us lots more about them). `We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works`; as Phil 2:12 says, `It is God who works in you to will and to act according to His good purpose.` `To do good works`: we are saved through faith, not by works (v9); but that doesn’t mean that what we then do doesn’t matter. If it did, WE wouldnt matter! The point is that by the power of the Spirit we do the Jesus-actions of love and goodness that God wants done on earth; but we don’t do them in order that we should be saved, but because we’re saved. It’s a vital difference. It will keep us from the slavery of being religious (& trying to earn our salvation), and instead will keep us living as God’s forgiven children who know we are safe because we’ve become His children once and for all, and therefore we do what our Father desires! I’ve never forgotten hearing Anfin Skaaheim from Norway say (quoting Luther I think), `We are saved by faith alone; but faith is never alone.` A while ago I was having lunch with a friend who’s a Muslim leader locally & he said, So your sins are forgiven, that’s nice, now you can do whatever sin you like? I said, No, if you’re consciously doing whatever sin you like, no matter what God wants, you haven’t repented in the first place and you’re not saved, you’re not a Christian. Precisely because we’ve repented and He’s our Father we set out to do what God wants, and by His working within us. What we do matters because God wants to partner with us here; He has vital `good works which He prepared in advance for us to do` (Eph 2:10)! Sometimes we lose this and talk as if NT grace means it doesn’t matter what we do. But see Titus 2:11-12,14: we’re called to a passion for God’s grace on the one hand, and for God’s holiness on the other. And to a passion for the spread of God’s goodness! Let’s absorb Eph 2:10 again, because it’s terrific: `We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do` – shaped by our Maker Himself to be channels of acts of love, truth, wisdom, goodness; acts which were set up for us personally to do!
And this takes us back to where we started: as individuals, and also together, we Church are God’s workmanship, God’s masterpiece, God’s artwork, which He’s shaping for our destiny of releasing goodness, then beyond that for unimaginable glory. (Shall we say, `Thank you my Saviour, Lord, my Master Craftsman… I want all that`?) Church on earth is growing, maturing, in all Her components (you and I) — like a chrysalis from which, one day, a beautiful butterfly will emerge. Sometimes that chrysalis isn’t beautiful at all; but God knows exactly what He’s doing to make us (cf Rom 8:29) exactly like Jesus. `Being confident of this,` says Phil 1:6, `that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus`; and Ephesians 5 tells us how He’s doing it: `Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant Church… holy and blameless!` `Washing with water through the Word`; as I was preparing this I read John 13 and wondered, can we see this, worshipfully, as one way in which Jesus, astonishingly, still washes our (individual and collective) feet??
Anyway a final reason to give thanks: we can’t imagine how glorious all this will be at `the day of Christ Jesus`, when God’s craftsmanship is complete. We’ve a long way to go, but this is the vision; this is where God’s workmanship is taking us. Let’s recall again the astonishing way Paul phrases it: in the end, he says, God has destined us collectively to `become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ’ (4:13; see also Rom 8:29), with all of His love, and joy, and power for goodness, flowing out through us. `That you may be filled with all the fullness of God’, says Eph 3:19-20; that will necessitate eternity! But this is what ultimate unity with Jesus and divine companionship finally mean; this is what God’s loving skill has set up for His Bride, for His Body, for His workmanship; this is heaven! She is what God loved passionately enough to die in agony for at the start of His workmanship; She is what in the culmination will share His throne forever (Rev 3:21); this, Church (yes), is what He calls us to live joyously as part of…
Hallelujah! And still more next time!
