Equipped Together: Andrew Wilson on Ephesians 4:1–16

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Andrew Wilson
What a morning. The British are coming. Sorry, very I know that’s bad news on this side of the Atlantic, isn’t it. Do you want to turn in your Bibles to Ephesians? Chapter Four. We’re going to be in Ephesians four, one to 16, tragically, having to skip the second half of chapter three. But obviously the first half Alistair has opened up for us so beautifully. Earlier, we’re going to read it in a moment, but I want to set the scene. Ephesians doesn’t make sense without the ascension, which would sound odd to some of us, because I think we would be used to thinking that of of the resurrection or the cross. If I said Ephesians makes no sense without the resurrection, everyone say, Well, of course, because Christianity doesn’t work without the resurrection. You can’t it’s a load bearing wall. You can’t take it out. If I said Ephesians doesn’t make sense without the cross, we’d all say absolutely. Because how could you have a gospel without a cross, as we’ve just been singing. And if I said Ephesians doesn’t make sense without the gift of the Spirit, those of us who know the letter well would probably say again, of course, Ephesians. I did the nerdy stats on this, but Ephesians is on in crude percentage terms, is the most spirit filled book in the Bible in terms of the number of times the word spirit appears. And so we might say, Well, you can’t take the gift of the Spirit out either. But if I said you you can’t have Ephesians, and the argument doesn’t hold. It doesn’t watch if you don’t have the ascension in it, some of us might be tempted to ask why the ascension doesn’t feel probably to some of us, our church traditions, the ascension doesn’t feel like a load bearing wall. It probably feels like, do you call them stud walls here, you know, sort of at the wall that you can kind of like a bathroom or where you you sort of build it within a room and then create a new space. It feels like something you can stick up, take down, but you wouldn’t lose the house if the ascension wasn’t true. And I put it to you that in Ephesians, you absolutely would. Ephesians doesn’t work without the ascension not only being true, but actually being at the heart of the argument that Paul is making. So in chapter one, the ascension is completely central to the chapter, in a way that the resurrection actually isn’t I mean, obviously Jesus isn’t alive, then there’s no ascension anyway. But bear with me, the resurrection is not integral to the argument of chapter one in the way that the ascension is when Paul says God raised Christ from the dead tick and seated him at the right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that’s named, not only in this age, but the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him his head over all things to the church. Who is his body, the fillness of him, who fills all in all anything Paul is. We’re going to take the resurrection as read, and then we’re going to wax lyrical about the ascension as central to the argument, which then grounds the argument of chapter two, which, as we heard the other day, as we large part, we are seated with Christ in heavenly places. You can’t be seated with Christ in heavenly places if Christ hasn’t been ascended to the heavenly places. And the ascension is also key later in the letter is key to Paul’s argument about marriage, because the ascension establishes Christ as head over the church, which means that the head body analogy, the Christ Church analogy, doesn’t work, and therefore the husband wife analogy doesn’t work if Christ isn’t ascended. In that sense, it’s central to Paul’s argument about slavery, the reason why masters need to serve slaves, just as slave serves Masters is because they both have a master in heaven, and he’s up there, not down here. So so many features of this letter fall apart if we don’t have the ascension in the middle. And the ascension is literally central to Ephesians, chapter four, verses one to 16, which is mainly about, we would say, about the unity and maturity of the church, but the passage is mountain shaped, if I can put it like that. So you might have a graphic here to illustrate the way in which Ephesians four, one to 16 is mountain shaped, and it’s got the ascension in the middle. We don’t have a graphic here. Don’t worry. Let’s take my word for it, right? It’s a lot of us would talk about a chiasm. Like the idea that you’ve got to at the very center of the chiasm. Is this particular high point still not here? I feel like, okay, that’s fine. We’ll work with me. Okay. I’ve thought this might happen, so I’ve sketched it out on a little on a little sheet. But you end up with, if you think the structure of Ephesians four, one to 16 begins and ends in the same way, and then it basically builds up to a peak in the middle. So you have, it begins with walk in verse one and walk in verse 17, and then you have love in verse two, and love in 15 and 16, and then unity and unity body, body Gifts, gifts ascension at the top. It’s at the very heart of the chiasm. And you could say, well, that’s just, that’s just a normal chiasm. And I say, Yeah, but in my church, if I say chiasm, everyone goes, but if I say mountain shaped, everybody goes, ooh. Tell me more about this mountain. So that’s what I mean. But it’s like the idea that the ascension is at the very middle of the chapter and at the heart of that, that beautiful section. And so we’re going to read it, and hopefully you’ll see that it begins and ends with walking and then love body gifts all the way up. And. So we’re going to read Ephesians chapter four, and beginning at verse one, I therefore a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another, in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, there is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is overall and through all and in all. But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore, it says when He ascended on high, he led a host of captives and He gave gifts to men. In saying he ascended, what does it mean, but that he’d also descended into the lower regions the earth. He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens that he might fill all things. And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes, rather speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who’s the head into Christ, from whom the whole body joined and held together by every joint with which it’s equipped. When each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love. This is the Word of God, Amen. So now you can see my mountain. Okay, this is great. It’s to be honest, other things like this better late than never, and I’m very grateful for it, because actually you can see the shape, right? So this is a beginning and end with walk, and then you have love, unity, body gifts, and then the ascension at the very heart of the passage. And we’re going to come back to why that’s so critical later on in their in the message, and just trying to understand why that’s true. But in many ways, that is actually quite a simple passage. It’s quite a, it’s quite an it’s one of those ones where, if I said to summarize it, you could do that pretty easily. You’d say, well, Ephesians four, one to 16 is an Paul is urging the Ephesians towards unity in verses one to six and maturity in verses 13 to 16, and in the middle, he’s grounding that unity and maturity in the gifts of the Ascended Christ to the church in verses seven to 12. It’s quite an easy thing to you do structural summaries. That’s what happens. Focus on unity, the gifts of Christ to the church focus on maturity. And it’s, in that sense, quite a simple passage. And depending on your tradition, you zero in on different bits. So Catholic minded, ecumenical minded Christians love the first bit because it’s all about the absolutely indissoluble unity of the church, one body, one hope, one faith, one baptism, one God in three persons, and a church that’s eager to maintain that unity. So if we’re ecumenically minded, catholicly minded people, we’ll zero in on that first bit. I’m from a Pentecostal charismatic background. I’m from a new frontiers Church. We love the middle bit. So we’re like Ephesians, four, seven to 12. We’re all about the gifts of the Ascended Christ to the church, and we always go on about those. So there’s something there for us. And then if you’re a more reformed gospel centered, which I like to think I am a bit as well, but we are mostly here. We zero in on the last bit, which is about the way that the church is preserved from immaturity and foolishness by being grounded in the truth and being well taught and understanding. And so in other words, whoever you are in the worldwide church, there’s something here for you. It’s kind of a nice bit where you zero in, in your bit and go that well, that’s That’s true, that’s true, that’s true. But I really love this bit, or I love that bit. That’s the way, in some ways, the passage works, and it’s a beautiful invitation for us to consider the the wonder of the church, and at the heart of it, the Ascended Christ, uniting the church and gifting and maturing his body as we all grow up into our head. In some ways it’s quite simple,

Andrew Wilson
but in other ways, the chapter is very puzzling, and I think is more puzzling than most other passages in Ephesians or most other passages in Paul actually, there are some very strange elements to this chapter that those of us who’ve had to do deep study on a deep dives to preach it well, we’ll probably have noticed. Think this is not easy, because there are some mysteries or some puzzles and tensions in here that are a bit surprising. So one is, why is a three that jump out to me? By the way that the first one is, why is there a Why is there a tension here about unity, which seems to be the main point of the text. But why is that tension here? It, by the way, you can, you can remove the image now, I don’t think we need it any any longer, but yet, the idea so why the tension? Paul talks about unity as something to maintain, because, as if we have it already. But he also talks about it as something that we need to attain in the future, as if we don’t have it already. And that’s quite an important tension in a chapter that’s largely about unity. Why does Paul do that? Why does he say you’ve got to maintain the spirit, the unity of the Spirit, and you’ve got to attain to it as if it’s something far off that we don’t currently have. It could leave a lot of us thinking, would do we? Is the church United or not, or is it united in one sense and not in another sense? What’s going on? Why does Paul do that with such a central idea in the text, why the tension. The second puzzle for me is why the quotation, why, of all of the passages Paul could have chosen in the Old Testament about gift giving, why did he there’s loads of them he could have chosen from. So why did he pick one that required him to change the text from received gifts among to gave gifts to which is what Paul does. If you know that bit and you we’re going to turn to Psalm 68 later, you’ll see for yourself. It’s it’s a strange thing that Paul, of all of the options open to him, picked a passage that required him to tweak the what the text actually said in his quotation of it. That’s a Why did he do that? And what do we do with it, as those who have a very high view of Scripture, how do we handle the fact Paul did that, and why we think, why do we think he did it at all? So why the tension? Why the quotation, and why the ascension, as we’ve already seen in the conference, like our unity is secure in the cross and in the resurrection and in the gift of the Spirit. So why here does Paul go for the ascension, as if that’s the thing he’s hanging his hat on for the for the unity of the church? Why? What do we miss, if we neglect the ascension? As my guess is, some of us in our church backgrounds probably do, including mine. So why is the ascension so important here? So we’ve got three puzzles for me. One, the last one’s more of a theological puzzle, but, but a couple of them are just obvious, like exegetical like, what are we doing here? Why has Paul created a tension he didn’t need to, and why is he quoted a passage that required him to change it? He could have done something else, surely. So there’s some puzzles here to look at, and I want to start by looking at the tension, and then we’ll look at the quotation and finish with the ascension. That’s where we’re going. So the unity at the church is at the heart of the passage, the fact that there is one church and that we are intended to seek unity. Great. But why then, does Paul establish unity as something that it seems like we simultaneously have and do not have? Right? So in the first paragraph, in verses one to six, if you look there, Paul calls for seven unifying virtues or habits grounded in seven unifying realities. That’s what he’s doing in those opening six verses, the seven realities, the foundation for unity, is really well known. One, body, spirit, hope, Lord, faith, baptism, father. So we got the seven. We know that those things, we’re one in all of those ways. And on the back of that, Paul then calls for seven virtues or habits of maintaining unity, humility, gentleness, patience, endurance. That’s the word bearing with love, unity, peace. So I want you to seek these seven things on the basis of these seven grounding, realities, one body, one church, one spirit, etc, and and in that sense, I want you to seek unity and seek to maintain it. But the point for Paul is that unity is something that you already have, and you need to work really hard to try and maintain. The puzzle is that later in the chapter, he talks about unity as something that you need to attain or reach for, as if it clearly is not something that you have now. And that’s in fact, why we need the gifts of the Ascended Christ, the apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers are given to the church to build us up so that we might attain unity. And the implication there is, unity is not something you yet have. You’re kind of reaching for it and trying to get it. Meanwhile, in the beginning bit of the chapter, he said, unity is something you have, and so you need to maintain it and be very careful to that the word there is to guard it, or to keep it, to look after it. So what are we doing? Are we guarding a unity we have, or are we seeking a unity we don’t have? It can seem like a puzzle. Is the church something that’s vulnerable and fractured and in need of knitting together, or is it something that is pristine and whole and needing to be kept as it is? It’s my trusty easter egg. Is the church a whole united, beautiful egg that needs to be preserved in its pristine condition and protected from anything that might nibble away at it in small pieces? Or is the church a fractured, shatter? A mess that is in hundreds of little pieces that we now need to maintain and, rather to attain unity. And go, how are we going to put the Pentecostals in there and the Presbyterians there and the Baptist there? Just and we got to, yes, yeah, the Catholics and the Orthodox, many of them as well. Okay, how are we going? It’s just a bit of a jumble. So which is it? And that’s in some ways, the question is it, are we meant to be preserving and maintaining unity because it already exists, or are we intended to be reaching for something that we don’t currently have? And of course, the answer, you know, because Paul says they’re both true, the answer is yes, you are simultaneously meant to be maintaining unity and attaining unity in that we have the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace and which we must guard, and we must also continually strive to attain unity through the ministry of the saints, equipped by the gifts of the risen Christ. And the reason why we struggle to hold those ideas together in our minds is because we picture the church in a static way, as if it’s like an Easter egg. And so we think the church is basically a thing that isn’t growing or moving or changing. It’s just an object that you can either maintain unit it’s either whole or it’s broken. But that’s not what living organisms are like. So now we can imagine said, Forget, say, forget the Easter egg. The church is no longer like an Easter egg. And I want you to imagine the Wow. Some pieces of this chocolate have gone a long way. I’m quite impressed with that, actually. So what you came for, isn’t it? So the some of these the church, forget for a moment, the church is not, not like that. In fact, that’s often how we might picture it, as like an object that can either be broken or whole. But now I want you to imagine the church is like a human pyramid that is continually growing and being expanded. So in a human pyramid, you start with three people in a triangle, maybe, right? I’m not a cheerleader, as you can tell, we don’t do cheerleading in England, our sports are exciting enough for people to cheer at the sport. That’s

Andrew Wilson
a very dangerous joke to make in this company. Thank you for being gracious with me. So you start with it. You’ve got three of you in a, say, in a little human pyramid. And again, bear with me here. But I know this is not how it goes, but she got three of them. She’s got somebody here like this, and the leg out like that. You’ve got somebody here doing the mirror image of that. And then you’ve got someone in the middle standing on both of them, right? And so you have, like, a pyramid to maintain unity in, but then other people start getting added to the pyramid. And so now you’ve got to, you’ve got to maintain the Unity you already had, but you’ve also got to attain to unity with these new people. So now instead of three, you’ve got six. So the guy in the middle, who was previously had a simple job, has now got a more complex job, because he’s holding, or she is holding, two people, one on each side, and you’ve got six, and then you maybe get another layer, and then it starts getting larger. Maybe there’s 10 or 20 or 30, and the church begins like that. And the church starts with a human pyramid, if you like, of 120 and they kind of know what they’re doing. And it’s like, set, and they’re established. And they’re like, it’s, it’s, there’s the foundation down here. The guys on the bottom row, the apostles, are holding the load bearing, you know, foundations and that sort of thing, as we know, they’re holding it up. But actually, more and more, you know, the 120 are kind of fairly solid. But then crisis loads of people start to get added to the church. In fact, 3000 people in one day do. And as a result, this human pyramid is like whoa. We we’ve got to strive for unity between us, to maintain the unity we already have, while also striving to attain unity with all of these new people who’ve made this pyramid much larger and more complex. And then priests start getting added to the faith, saying, What are they doing here? How am I going to work that in that’s the church is now going to 5000 you think this is quite a growth spot. And again, the apostles maintaining unity, but reaching for unity with the new guys. And then the Samaritans join in, and he’s like the one who goes on the bottom row. Again, this pyramid is getting a little unwieldy. Could somebody check that those guys have been filled with the Spirit? Yes, I think it’s okay. We’ll send Peter. You’re gonna have to move okay, right? We’re gonna have to effectively maintain unity with each other while reaching to attain unity with others. And then even worse, Gentiles come pouring in. And now the human pyramid is multiple, 10s of 1000s strong, and Gentiles are pouring in, and the Jewish guys who started it are having to negotiate with each other and say, there’s loads of Gentiles coming here. What are we going to do about them? We’re gonna have to maintain our unity. Meanwhile, we’re going to reach for unity within you guys. And someone at the top of the pyramid is saying, Gentiles here, that’s great, yeah, but they want to know if they need to get circumcised. What they want to know if they need to get circumcised? I know. I don’t think they do, but it kind of depends on whether they’re eating with other No, it No, it doesn’t. They definitely don’t have to. Are you sure? Right? So they’re having to negotiate maintaining unity and attaining unity as the church keeps growing, and then it reaches Ethiopia, and then it reaches Rome, and then it reaches Britain and Kenya and Korea and God help us America. And as the church continues to expand, more and more people, and every new addition of people means that the church, as she currently is, has to maintain. Attain the unity of the Spirit and the bond of peace, all the while looking to grow and to attain unity with these glorious new people that God is adding to the family of God. Maintaining unity is very easy if you’re not growing. There’s no arguments in a morgue. But if you are alive, and if the glorious human pyramid of God’s Church is continually expanding, we have to maintain unity and attain unity at the same time. And that’s why we need the gifts of the Ascended Christ. So the first puzzle is, why the tension? The second puzzle is, of all the gift passages in the Old Testament, Why does Paul quote one that requires changing the key verb? And this is, I’m sure this has puzzled many of us who’ve read this letter carefully, and those who haven’t, some of us is puzzling us right now for the first time, but it’s, it is odd. So Psalm, let’s, you’re going to need your finger in two, two places here. Okay, so, Psalm 6818 Psalm 68 verse 18, you ascended on high, leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men, even among the rebellious that the Lord God may dwell there. Ephesians four, Verse eight says, When He ascended on high, he led a host of captives and gave gifts to men. So the key verb in the Psalm is receiving gifts from or among men. The key gift in Ephesians four is He gave gifts to men. Why does Paul do that? And that challenge is actually for some of us. This has probably been a challenge in our understanding of inerrancy, we go I don’t understand. How do I make sense of the fact that Paul seems to be fiddling around with the Old Testament text in order to make the point he wants to make. So how is he okay to do that? And more importantly, why has he done it? Well, there are at least two contexts in ordinary life, so step aside from the world of the scriptures for a moment. There are two contexts in ordinary life in which giving and receiving a gift amount to the same thing. One of them is when you receive a gift which is immediately intended to be given to someone else. So this is my nine year old son, Sam, on Easter day, on Christmas day, where he but serves as like a Christmas elf. He’s like the gopher who has to take the presents and we give you give him the present, and he then has to go and give it to someone else. So he is simultaneously receiving a gift with a view to instantly giving. So receiving and giving a gift is basically the same thing. Alistair highlighted it so beautifully in the previous session. The grace that he’s given to me for you, right? So there’s a lot of dynamics like that. Actually, you do that in normal life. Normal life. This gift has been given to me. For you, you’re a courier. You’re a means of transfer from that person to that person. So that’s one context in which to give and to receive are the same. Another context is if I give you a gift, which you immediately turn into a gift for me. So we had cheese fondue with our friends the other day, and you bring round cheese, and you bring round like you kind of try and get nice cheese, and you bring it round, and they then take it, they put it, and they melt it in the fondue, and then they give it back to you. Thank you so much for this amazing cheese fondue. And they say, Well, you kind of brought the cheese. Because, in a sense, us giving a gift and receiving a gift to become the same thing, right? This happens, you know, if you go around to someone’s house, you take anything that they then serve back to you. If you take a bottle of wine and they then give you some, whatever it might be. So actually, in ordinary life, there are a couple of ways in which to give and to receive. In some situations, are the identical things. And the interesting thing about Paul’s use of Psalm 68 here is that both of those things are going on in Psalm 68 so if you keep your finger in Psalm 68 on the one hand, the Psalm is evoking a plunder scene at the end of a great battle, the Lord has conquered. He’s taken captives. He’s got spoil, which is why it says leading a host of captives in your train and receiving gifts among men. And then what happens is that God is effectively dividing that spoil that he’s just won among all of his warriors and his friends, like David did after the war with Amalek. You know, we’ve we’ve won, And now everyone’s going to get the same share whatever they did in the fight. We will now apportion the plunder so that effectively, the king is both receiving gifts from the dead people and giving gifts to his warriors at one and the same time. And because that is what is happening in the Psalm for Paul to draw out the give, the giving part rather than the receiving part, doesn’t actually change the text in that sense, it draws out the meaning of it more subtly. But the second thing that’s going on in Psalm 68 which is more subtle but equally crucial, is that Psalm 68 is also evoking the contributions being made for the Jerusalem temple. So you go back to Psalm 68 the focus of verse 16 is the mount that God desires. For His abode, yes, where the Lord will dwell forever. Verse 17 declares Sinai is now in the sanctuary. So we talk about the dwelling place of God. Then verse 18 says he was receiving gifts among men, even among the rebellious, so that Yahweh, Elohim, so that the Lord God may dwell there. So this is all about, the gifts are being given in order to make a dwelling place for God. That is, God is receiving gifts among men in order that he may then turn them, incorporate them into his temple, like my friends making me a cheese fondue with cheese that I’ve just given them. The people of God come and they give gifts to God, and God then turns those gifts into the temple, and then says, here a temple at which, in which, through which you may find the presence of God. You may find blessing and life. You may find answers to prayer and abundance, the joy of the whole earth. So the dynamic in the Psalm that Paul is quoting, so I know, because we’ve do two different layers of exposition here, but you’re looking at Ephesians as it quotes the psalm. But the dynamic in the Psalm is there’s a battlefield image in which gifts are being taken from the plundered soldiers and distributed among his friends. And then we’ve got a temple dynamic in which at the same time, the people of God are giving gifts that God is taking to build his temple and then giving straight back to them. And because both of those things are taking place, giving and receiving, in that sense, are indistinguishable. That when God receives gifts from his church, he is in the same breath giving those same gifts to his church. He is taking things from his people who come, willing your people offer themselves freely in the day of your power. They can’t we come and say, Here, Lord, take all of me. And he says, Okay, I will. I will build them into a beautiful temple called the church, and I will give them right back to you as my people, so that you may here find blessing and hope and joy and abundance and answers to prayer and community and all the rest. Because for God in that text, to give and receive are one of the same thing.

Andrew Wilson
So that’s how Paul, I think, is able to tweak the words of the Psalm to draw out its meaning, rather than to change its meaning. And it’s also part of the reason why Paul has chosen this particular psalm to this particular passage, to describe God’s gifts to the church. Because, in one sense, the gifts that God gives to the church are spoils of battle. He has conquered. He dies on the cross. He destroys the power of death. He rises again. He ascends in glory and conquest. And as a result, he is entitled to give His Church, His Bride, His body, anything he chooses. And now he freely bestows the plunder he has taken upon his friends, and gives gifts freely and without measure. But in another sense, his gifts are contributions taken from the Church for the building of the temple. They’re given willingly by his people, and they’re used for the building of his house that the Lord God may dwell there you see in verses seven to eight, if you look, Paul is not yet talking about the gifts, as in the apostles, prophets, evangelist, shepherd’s teachers, he’s talking about the grace given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. So he’s saying Christ is entitled to give you gifts on account of his victory and the purpose of those gifts of the Mercy, gift you have, of the generosity, gift you have of the prophecy or the teaching or the evangelism or the shepherding or whatever it may be, the purpose of all of those gifts is the building up of God’s Church, the temple. And so Paul is is using a text, one of the only texts he could have found, in which the church is described as a product of both tribute and triumph, right? This is the gifts being discussed here are both a moment of triumph God has conquered, and he’s given you the fruit of his of his battle. But they’re also a result of tribute, in which the people of God come and offer gifts to Him for the building up of the temple, the church. And I think Paul has chosen this otherwise quite puzzling quotation to get us to see that the church is the result the giftedness of the church is the result both of his triumph and of our tributes, at the same time in which giving and receiving become one of the same thing for Almighty God. And I think Paul has probably also got his eye on the fact that that beautiful word ascended is here, actually, the Old Testament very, very rarely talks about God ascending. Talks about God going up or rising, but doesn’t very often use the word ascension or ascending, that’s normally used for burnt offerings. But what’s happening is that Paul has got multiple different he’s got lots of different things going on here about the rising up of God and what it means for the triumphant future of the church, because he’s got a, you know, Russian dolls. Do you know, I mean by, you know, the sort of the ones where you have the big dollar and the answer and the smaller one inside and little one inside. So Ephesians four, eight is like the sort of outer, the big Russian doll on the outside. It says the ascension of Christ is connected to the gifts that he gives to build up the church. And then inside Ephesians four, there’s another. Little Russian doll, which is Psalm 68 which connects God’s ascension into the battle and the temple building, as we’ve just seen. But then if you look in Psalm 68 you’ll find an even smaller one, which is that Psalm 68 is itself a little got a Russian doll living inside it, which is this beautiful idea in the opening passage, number from numbers 10, God shall arise and his enemies shall be scattered, and that his enemies will quake before him. And so have this lovely idea that Paul is writing Ephesians, inside which he’s embedded Psalm 68 inside which is numbers 10, this amazing call to God is going to go up, he’s going to rise up, and as he does, the enemies of God are going to be scattered, and his people are going to be gathered, and Paul saying all three of those things are simultaneously happening with and through the ascension of Christ, which, like the rising up of the cloud in the wilderness, is a call to God’s people to say, right, God has risen. He’s given you the gifts you need. You have offered your tribute to him. He has triumphed over your enemies, and now it’s time to go. And so you are both a temple and a battlefield unit as you go out into the world. And as you do, your enemies will flee from you, because God has risen, God has gone up, and as God has ascended, you guys are going to experience victory everywhere you go, and the church is a missionary battlefield temple moving after the Lord, equipped with gifts by the Ascended Christ, both to drive out the enemy, praise God, but also to establish a sanctuary, a place of worship where God’s name can be known and his experience, his presence, can be experienced. So there’s a there’s a lot going on with this quotation. It’s a funny quotation, and it’s a puzzle, isn’t it, as you read passages like that, why has he done this? I think he’s done it because he wants to see there is more to the church than you realize. There’s more to the ascension of Christ than you realize. And so finally, I want to conclude by looking at why. Why is the ascension then so central. So we looked at, why is that tension there about unity? We looked at, why the quotation? And then finally, Why does Paul center his call to unity on the ascension of all things? And partly, I think it’s because of the point I’ve just been making, which is that he, Paul wants us to see the church as a demonstration of the tribute and triumph, the idea that the gifts are both taken from the enemy and they are also willingly offered by his people. But it’s also partly because of a term that Paul introduced in chapter one, which I don’t think we would have got to cover yesterday, because it’s in the sort of the bit of Ephesians one that we didn’t get to read. But it’s such a key word to the argument of Paul in this letter and in this passage in particular. And that is that in Paul’s opening prayer, Paul described the church as Christ’s body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all chapter one and verse 23 and then he returns to that idea in chapter three, in his prayer as well, the fullness of Christ. So Paul is saying in now, in Ephesians, chapter four and verse 10, that the purpose of the ascension is, we look at verse 10, that he might fill all things. That’s what the ascension is for Jesus. Jesus dies and rises, and he then ascends into heaven that he might fill all things. But the question would then be, well, how does His ascension into heaven result in his filling everything? And the answer, which quickly comes, Well, it happens through his body, the church, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way. So Christ, the head, fills everything that exists by means of His Body, the Church. And if Christ’s head hadn’t gone up, the body wouldn’t have been drawn up with it, and the body would not have filled the earth and heaven and everything else as it does so. Jesus goes up, he ascends. He lavishes gifts upon his people, and he sends specific gifts, apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds, teachers, to equip us to build up one another until we all attain unity and maturity. And verse 13, the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. That’s why Christ ascends, in many ways. He ascends so that he can fill all things with his body, the church. And then He gives these gifts in order to ensure that we are built up such that we can fill all things. And as the body of Christ expands and fills the earth and grows up in every way into Christ our head, verse 15, and remains held together in Him. Verse 16, Christ fills all things. That’s what happens in your ordinary life. When you get up in the morning, and I don’t know my case, make a packed lunch for the children, lay the table, kiss my wife, drive to work, do a day’s work, drive home, put the kids to bed. I mean those ordinary things, the purpose of those things as you do them. As you live ordinary life and cultivate humility and seek the unity of the Spirit in a bond of peace, but you just do ordinary life. The purpose of those things is that Christ fills everything, so that there’s no part of this nation, or any nation in the end, where Christ is not felt, where Christ’s presence is not is not influencing, is not experienced, is not seen as the power to fill all things, to unite all things, to bring all things under his feet, as you do your ordinary life and you speak the truth in love to one another, and as you use your gifts to build up the church Christ fills Indianapolis or wherever it may be. And that’s how it happens. Is his head’s gone up. His head is his head over all things already, all things under his feet. But his body, as his body grows, like to switch metaphors back to that human pyramid, as his body gets larger and larger and larger, filling Heaven and Earth as you do ordinary stuff to the glory of God Christ is filling your workplace, office, home, nursery, nation. So the purpose of the ascension, in our sense, is that his body, that’s us, might fill all things. And it occurred to me recently that this is probably the first specifically Christian doctrine that Paul ever believed.

Andrew Wilson
It just, it just hit me. I thought you think of Paul, you think of justification by faith, or something like it. Praise God for justification by faith. But Paul didn’t get to justification by faith straight away. That wasn’t he didn’t get that in his conversion. And many of us don’t, right, we, we, we are saved by faith, but we don’t realize we couldn’t articulate the doctrine. We just, that’s just what happened. But Paul, what we know that Paul got at his conversion, the first specifically Christian doctrine Paul understood was that the church is the body of Jesus because he hears a voice, Saul. Saul. Why are you persecuting me? Who are you? Lord? I’m Jesus, whom you’re persecuting. And in that moment, Paul goes, I don’t understand anything about how the cross saves. I couldn’t articulate the redemption of all things in Christ and His plan for the unification of everything. If it bit me on the nose, I didn’t. I don’t understand how the doctrine of the Church works. I don’t know anything about how you should appoint elders and deacons. I don’t know what the Lord’s Supper is, or I may have heard of it, but I think the Christians are a bit out there on it all these different I don’t understand any of that, but what I know is that the Church is the Body of Christ, because he just told me, he said, I’ve been persecuting him while I’ve been actually trying to kill his people. So the solidarity of Christ, the head and the church, the body, is probably the first uniquely Christian thing Paul ever understood and believed, and he never forgot it. And if you’d experienced Jesus in that way, you wouldn’t have forgotten either, would you. So he lives his life, carry but his weighty sense that the church is Christ’s body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way. And I wonder, there must have been a moment Paul started to wonder, why has Christ done that, assuming that Christ is risen and ascended, and he’s just spoken to me on the road, and his people are the ones who I’ve been persecuting, but in doing it, I’ve been persecuting him. Why has he done that? What explains the unity of Christ in the church? And I imagine at some point it would have dawned on Paul, whether quickly or slowly, because this is Christ’s plan for the filling of everything through little groups of believers in Judea and Samaria and Damascus and Antioch and Philippi and Rome and Indianapolis and Memphis and Omaha and Boston and London and Cape Town and all over. This is how Christ will fill all things. The head has ascended and His Church, the his body is now going to fill everything as a means of filling that world with the fullness of Christ. Friends, the Church of Jesus is bigger than you think it really is. It’s growing more than you think it’s doing more than you think it’s larger, richer, deeper than you think. You cannot exaggerate the importance of the church to World History. Her growth explains why we must both maintain and attain unity. Her nature explains Paul’s otherwise very strange reference to Battlefield and temple tribute and triumph. Her destiny explains Paul’s focus on the ascension in this passage, because the church is his body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all hallelujah. We’re gonna have a chance to sing and to respond, but I just want to pray the mighty words of Ephesians, three which we didn’t get to read Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we could ask or think, according to his power at work within us to him be glory in the church and in Christ, Jesus, throughout all generations, forever and ever, amen.