Ephesians 1:7 gives us the first use of a word Paul used six times in this letter, rich/riches (1:7, 18; 2:4, 7; 3:8, 16). Through this word, he emphasized that God, in His eternal plan of salvation from before the foundation of the world, has everything needed in His Son to provide for the redemption of sinners. God does not have to allocate grace as if there is a limited supply. God has acted in Jesus “according to the riches of His grace.” It is through this never-ending supply of grace, made available in the sacrificial blood of Jesus, that “we have redemption,” which is made available to us, and experienced by us, as “the forgiveness of sins.” God’s grace revealed in the death of Jesus reaches to the lowest depths of sin, reaches to the ends of the earth, reaches from generation to generation. In the words of Andrae Crouch’s song, “the blood will never lose its power!”[1]
Redemption takes us to the deliverance of Israel from bondage in Egypt (Exodus 11-14). The Israelites could not purchase their liberation. They could not muster enough political, economic, or insurgent power to liberate themselves. Only God had the power to break the sinful, death-like oppression over their lives and give them a new future. Only God could use the shed blood of a lamb to mark their homes and preserve their lives.
Noel Brooks wrote of this understanding of redemption: “(it) clearly implies that the person to be redeemed is in a situation from which he cannot free himself. He is a slave or captive.”[2] In the Old Testament, a person could act to redeem another and provide a new life. This is the case of Boaz taking action to marry Ruth, where eight times in two verses, the language of the ga’al, a kinsman redeemer, is used (Ruth 4:4, 6). This was such a reality in Israelite history that thirteen times, this same word is used in Isaiah to describe God and His action to redeem Israel from captivity in Babylon.[3]
Just as in the Old Testament, the shedding of blood in Tabernacle and Temple worship meant forgiveness of sins, so now in Jesus Christ, His shed blood means the same forgiveness of sins. The difference is that Christ shed blood has been “once for all” (Hebrews 7:27; 9:12, 26, 28; 10:10; 1 Peter 3:18). That we are forgiven our sins means we are set free; we are released. In Leviticus 25:31, describing the release, or forgiveness, that occurred in the Jewish Year of Jubilee, the Septuagint used the same Greek word used seventeen times in the New Testament, the word aphesis, including Ephesians 1:7. What Christ did on the cross, and what we receive by faith in what Jesus has accomplished, is a permanent blood bought “Year of Jubilee!” We don’t have to wait fifty years to experience forgiveness. We are set free from the bondage of sin, so that as Ephesians 1:4, 5 expressed it, “we should be holy and without blame before Him in love. . .. to the praise of the glory of His grace.”
Returning to the “riches of His grace,” in verse 8, Paul added to the imagery of unlimited riches of grace with the word we translate in the New King James as “abound.” This verb, perisseuo, carries the sense of “surplus, extremely rich, present in abundance.”[4] This abundance of grace not only brings God’s act of redemption to us in forgiveness of sins, but it also brings us “all wisdom and prudence.”
It is through “wisdom and prudence” that we discern God’s activity in our lives and in the world. Noel Brooks quoted William Barclay that wisdom concerns our mind, our thought-world, while prudence concerns our conduct and action. Brooks further quoted Barclay, “It is Paul’s claim that Jesus brought us sophia, knowledge of the eternal things; and that He brought us phronesis, the practical knowledge which enables us to handle and to solve the day-to-day problems of practical life and living.”[5]
The purpose of an abundance of wisdom and prudence in the life of redeemed people is laid out in Ephesians 1:9-12:
- We learn the “mystery of God’s will.” Later in Ephesians, Paul revealed what the “mystery” is: Gentiles share in the blessings of God with the Jews (3:1-7).
- This revelation is not something we discover but something God reveals because it has been in His “good pleasure” from eternity. God takes joy in bringing about redemption and the goal of His purposes in human history.
- God is at work as He manages His plan in history (1:10).[6]
The abundance of the riches of grace manifested in redemption, forgiveness of sins, wisdom and prudence leads to two conclusions:
- In God’s management (dispensation) of redemption, He desires to bring together all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth (1:10). This reflects Jesus’ prayer in Matthew 6:10, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Human history is moving toward the goal of Christ fully established as King over all that has been created.
- God’s eternal plan includes inheritance. There are two ways to consider that “in Him (Jesus) we have obtained an inheritance.” First, it is something we have received and can be shared with others.[7] But the language of inheritance also refers to Israel as God’s inheritance. Using that Old Testament backdrop, Paul may be thinking of passages such as Deuteronomy 32:9; Psalm 33:12. John Stott takes the view that the language of inheritance in Ephesians 1:11 and purchased possession in 1:14 refer to the church, just like Israel, as belonging to God’s inheritance in the world, a people called to live “holy and blameless before Him in love” as witnesses of God’s grace to the world.[8]
In Ephesians 1:12, Paul makes a personal comment about himself and others, primarily Jews, who “first trusted in Christ . . . to the praise of His glory.” Paul took seriously God’s purpose for, and promises to, Israel as a light to the Gentiles, a chosen people destined to live to the praise of God’s glory. He also recognized that in the Jew Jesus, God had acted through Israel to bring about His purposes and promises.
The Gospels affirm that Jesus came first to Israel, and Paul affirmed that the gospel message was first for the Jews.[9] We will see in Ephesians 1:13 that Paul changes pronouns from the “we” of Jews to the “you” of Gentiles. The purpose is not to continue a separation but to set the stage for Paul’s later argument that God’s mystery of uniting Jew and Gentile for His glory has been accomplished in Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of Israel and Savior of the world.
In a sense, the phrase in 1:7, “according to the riches of His grace,” provides the certainty that through God’s Spirit there is so much more that can be accomplished to bring redemption to this fallen world. We can live by faith because God’s riches never run out. Heaven’s “stock market” never fails. Love, faith, hope, mercy, justice, peace, reconciliation, are all possible because of God’s abounding riches of grace!
[1] To hear the late Andrae Crouch sing this song go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FQCWMOmfio.
[2] Noel Brooks, Ephesians Outlined and Unfolded (Franklin Springs, GA: Advocate Press, 1984) 25.
[3] Isaiah 41:14; 43:14; 44:6, 24; 47:4; 48:17; 49:7, 26; 54:5, 8; 59:20; 60:16; 63:16.
[4] Walter Bauer, William F. Arndt, F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971) 656.
[5] Brooks, page 29, quoting Barclay’s New Testament Words and Daily Study Bible. Sophia is the Greek word for wisdom and phronesis is Greek for prudence. The bold type is in Brooks.
[6] The word translated “dispensation” in 1:10 is not about a period of time (see Brooks, 29). Rather, it describes management and plans. The Greek is oikonomia. An oikos is a house in Greek. The word Paul used is of someone managing a household to keep things in order and to provide for the purpose of the home. This word is important to Paul in Ephesians as it will appear twice more in 3:2, 9. Markus Barth has an extended study of oikonomia in volume 1 of his Anchor Bible Commentary on Ephesians, pp 86-88.
[7] More about this in Ephesians 1:18.
[8] John Stott, The Message of Ephesians (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, revised 2020) 27, 28.
[9] Matthew 2:6; 10:6; 15:24; Luke 1:16; John 1:31; Acts 2:22, 36; Romans 1:16, 17; 3:1; 9:4.
