Let's remind ourselves briefly of the dominant theme of Ephesians: it is unity - God's Grand Design for Cosmic Unity centred in Christ Jesus. "God is working His purpose out as year succeeds to year", and that purpose is to establish harmony ... Shalom ... throughout the entire range of His creation.
That's why the great work of God in this age, which He calls the Church into being to share with Him, is reconciliation. The work of Christ is a "work of reconciliation", the Gospel itself is the "gospel of reconciliation", the life Christians live is a "reconciled and reconciling life", the ministry the Church is given is a "ministry of reconciliation". The Kingdom of God is a reign of peace; the Children of God are a family, a 'commonwealth', a 'body' upbuilding itself in love, a 'temple growing into a harmonious structure' - Paul rings the changes on all the mataphors he can find to make the point. When we work for unity we are 'workers together with Him'; when we don't we are saboteurs.
The foundation of this universal reconciliation - of man with man, of male with female (!), of class with class, of race with race, of earth itself indeed with heaven, (as we shall see) is ... reconciliation with God. Only as we are reconciled to God through Christ is true peace achieved. Any other peace is a false peace.
Apart from Christ the only peace and reconciliation men achieve with each other is collusion in unrighteousness, the way Pilate and Herod achieved it when they joined hands over the killing of the Son of God. That sort of unity doesn't bring peace; all it brings is a partnership in evil that leads to destruction. International mediators in the world's political arena can never bring true peace: all they can ever achieve is the avoidance of open hostilities, and some sort of compromise in the selfish demands of both sides. That is a great gain, of course, and it's not to be despised; it's better than war. But apart from peace with God , men seek for real peace in vain.
They want it; they yearn for it: but achieve it they cannot, in spite of their best endeavours. They can do everything right, and still it fails.
Why can we not succeed?
The reason is supplied in Ephesians, where the whole truth about the strife that bedevils life in this world is lifted to a higher level, where the solution is found. Both the strife, and the reconciliation which alone can heal it, extend far beyond the merely human plane.
In Paul's thought, as in the Bible's as a whole, God's creation is not confined to the material universe we can observe with our eyes, and explore with our sciences. There are orders of creation that have to be described as 'supernatural', in the sense that they are beyond 'nature'. There are 'angelic' orders of being, where forces of evil have played havoc just as they have played havoc on earth. And between the natural and the supernatural realms of creation, since they both sprang from the same creative hand of God, there is an interplay - each reacting on the other, both for good and for evil.
We need to be aware of this if we are to understand Ephesians rightly.
Paul refers to this higher dimension by the use of the phrase "the heavenly places". Let's explore it together.
The heavenly places: what are they? ... where are they? ... who's in them?
If you look at only one or two of the places where the phrase is used, you might be tempted to think that Paul meant no more by it than the higher level of spiritual experience into which a Christian is lifted when he enjoys personal fellowship with Christ ... as though the heavenly places were all sweetness and light. But then you discover that there are spiritual hosts of wickedness in them, and there is some sort of warfare going on in them.
Clearly the phrase means rather more than one commentator I've read who suggests that it means 'lifted above the commonplace'! (Tasker).
Let's take as our starting point Paul's use of the phrase in 3.10 - "through the Church the manifold wisdom of God is made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places".
Who are they?
We know what the principalities and powers in earthly places are - the 'principality' of Rome, for example, and its 'powers' ... civil and military institutions of government; or the Jewish institutions of civil and religious rule. Governments, as the Scriptures show us, are ordained by God Himself for the preservation of good order in the world. They belong to the order of things in this world by the will of God. They may, of course, in a fallen world like ours, come under the curse of the fall the same way our individual natures do. They may be beneficent - they may also be tyrannical: indeed, as we shall see, they may become demonic.
But all their power is derived from God, as Jesus said to Pilate: "You would have no power at all against me, unless it were given you from above" ... and Pilate's was political power. When they exercise it in harmony with God's will and purpose for our life on earth, it works for our advantage and our blessing; when they exercise it in defiance of God's will, it works for our hurt and for our cursing.
The trouble is that the men who are given that power are so often lured by it into using it for selfish and evil ends. They are tempted to worship and serve the power itself that God has put into their hands, instead of worshipping God (Who gives it to them) by the way they exercise it. So powers that God ordained become corrupted, and their exercise by men damages "life, liberty and the true pursuit of happiness".
But what does Paul mean by the "principalities and powers" in the "heavenly places"? In Ephesians he uses the phrase five times ...
1. 1. 3 God has blessed us in them with every spiritual blessing.
2. 1:20 Christ sits at God's right hand in them, 'far above all rule etc.'
3. 2: 6 God has 'made us sit with' Christ in them - that He might show us endless kindness. (To sit at God's right hand means to exercise His authority.)
4. 3:10 There are 'principalities and powers' in them - able to observe the church, so as to learn thereby what they otherwise might not know.
5. 6:12 There are "spiritual hosts of wickedness" in them - "principalities", "powers", "world rulers of this present darkness", with whom believers contend. Our defence against them is truth, righteousness, the Gospel of peace, faith, salvation, the Spirit, the Word of God, and "all-prayer".
Clearly "the heavenly places" is a phrase that refers - not to heaven itself, conceived as the abode of bliss to which the faithful go - but rather, as the whole realm of the unseen, inhabited by all those spiritual forces that exist beyond the realm of things seen ... and behind them.
In that realm, great forces are at work, forces that have an order and an organisation of their own. Those spiritual agencies, too, like us men on earth, have rebelled against God: at least some of them have ... so that the upper realms also have become disordered by the entry into them of sin and of evil.
The rift sin has produced extends both higher and deeper than the merely human level of creation. The whole universe as God created it exhibits a gigantic rift that runs through its whole fabric!
The powers of the upper world are in conflict - in conflict among themselves, in conflict with God. And their conflict is not separate from our earthly conflicts. In some way, their conflict with God bears on our conflict with God. There is an interplay between the two, so they react on each other. What happens on earth can have a profound effect on what happens in the heavenly places; what happens in the heavenly places can have a profound effect on what happens on earth.
There is an interesting background to this in the Old Testament, which supplies an illuminating clue to the 'connectedness' between the principalities and powers on earth and the principalities and powers in the heavenly places (a rather neglected background). I do no more than outline it.
The first clue is Deuteronomy 32.8: "When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of men (settled them in their geographical zones), He fixed the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God."
Angelic guardians of the nations appear to be referred to; each nation on earth was given an angelic ruler, or guardian. We're familiar with the idea that each of us has our own private 'guardian angel'; what the Scripture is telling us here suggests that from the beginning there have been higher ranks of angelic guardians for nations.
The gods whom the nations worshipped were subordinate angelic powers under the supreme authority of Yahweh. They formed a heavenly council around the throne of God, Psalm 89:6-7. They were part of the Hosts ('Yahweh of Hosts'); astral deities, like those acknowledged in astrology today, are included - Judges 5:20, Job 38:7.
So, for example, in Psalm 82, God is pictured, standing in the heavenly court, accusing these angelic princes, these "sons of God", of acquiescing in human injustice - and threatening them with death in spite of their supernatural nature.
'God has taken His place in the divine
Council; in the midst of the gods He holds judgment: "How long will
you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked? Give justice to
the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and
the destitute ..."' And the psalmist goes on: 'They have neither
knowledge nor understanding, they walk about in darkness; all the
foundations of life are shaken because of them.'
And God says, "I say, 'You are gods: sons of the most high, all of
you; nevertheless you shall die like men and fall like any earthly
prince.'"
As time went on and the nations surrounding Israel degenerated into idolatrous and immoral tyrannies, it became clear that some responsibility had to be laid upon the angelic rulers for these sins, committed under their supervision. The indications are that these angelic guardians fell into sin by accepting worship from the peoples they were responsible for, instead of encouraging and directing it to God. Instead of ruling on God's behalf, they exercised in their own interests the authority God gave them to serve His. They put themselves in the place of God, becoming thereby corrupted, and in turn corrupting the races in their care. They became demonic agencies.
Those of you who were here when we gave attention to the occult (see chapter in "Ethical Issues elsewhere in this web site) will realise where this Old Testament background ties in with the many expressions of the occult we are witnessing today - the worship of the stars in their courses, the old gods of so-called 'mythology', and even of Satan himself.
That's as far as I want to take this now. All I've been concerned to do is supply the Scriptural connection between human life on earth and angelic life in the heavenly places.
The earthly, material form of existence we know is by no means the only dimension of reality. There are other 'worlds', no less real than ours; indeed, if anything they're more real than ours, as Hebrews 12:25-29 shows.
They are not all "sweetness and light" - evil inhabits them as it inhabits the terrestrial realm, and in Ephesians, the work of Christ and His subsequent exaltation bear upon those realms too.
The arena which has to be cleared up before the God's kingdom can finally be established is vastly greater than the material order of things which is all that's open to our scrutiny. There is an order of being behind the veil of things visible that bears directly on life in this world, and a redemption God provides, to be complete, has to redeem that realm as well as ours. The New Testament insists that the redemption that is ours in Christ Jesus includes the reconciliation too of the principalities and powers in the heavenly places; for if it doesn't, it isn't a complete redemption.
When Christ became incarnate in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the King, He entered the arena where all these forces, terrestrial and celestial, are in conflict. And when He achieved His victory in death and resurrection, He achieved a total victory over all the powers of darkness. The work of Christ at Calvary was a work of cosmic significance. So in Colossians 2.15, Paul says that "in the Cross, Christ disarmed the principalities and powers, and triumphed over them"; in Colossians 1.20 he says that "in Christ, all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, so that through Him, God might reconcile to Himself all things - things on earth and things in heaven - making peace through the blood of His Cross."
Now all these considerations lend immense depth to the assertion we made at the beginning that only as creatures are reconciled to God through Christ are they truly reconciled to each other. Peace on earth, even if we were able to establish it, would still leave us at the mercy of these forces that lie beyond earth, and are intent upon our ruin.
God's grand design is to restore the shattered order of His entire creation, and establish in its place a harmony that coheres through the whole cosmic range of things, from the highest of angelic beings in the heavenlies to earth's meanest creatures.
Meantime, the conflict goes on - a conflict in which Christ's final rule over all the principalities and powers, whether in the heavens or on earth, is moving toward fulfilment. In this age-long conflict, events on the merely earthly plane have a spiritual dimension which none can see save those who have the eyes the Spirit gives. Behind every merely human conflict, whether it be the conflict between Arab and Jew in the Middle East, or between one church member and another in your church, there lies an unseen dimension - a spiritual hinterland. That's why Paul says in Eph. 2.2 that in 'following the course of this world, following the desires of body and of mind, we are in fact following, not merely human notions and impulses, but the prince of the power of the upper realms'. He is the 'spirit at work in the sons of disobedience'.
To imagine, therefore, that we can resolve human conflicts by merely human mediation is a foolishness, a very great foolishness ... as foolish as to suppose that if, somewhere in North Africa in World War II, you had persuaded two desert patrols to stop fighting each other, you had thereby reconciled Generals Rommel and Montgomery and brought World War II to an end.
But I don't want to leave it there. I want this study to have some practical application to our everyday living.
Just as the powers of darkness affect our day-to-day living, so our day-to-day living affects the powers of darkness.
We often feel that our faithfulness makes little difference to the life of the world around us. Perhaps we feel that the tide of life sweeps unheedingly over us. But the obedience we give to Christ, and the resistance we thereby offer to the trend of things, has repercussions in the heavenly places ... greater by far, it may be, than if we had persuaded a Trades Union not to strike!
When Daniel, for example, devoted himself to prayer, and humbled himself before God, and set his mind to understand God's ways, nobody paid any heed to him. But his prayer had repercussions in the heavenly places that led to a simply tremendous battle there, a battle whose outcome was to affect the course of human history - all because one man prayed ... unobserved!
Paul says in Eph. 3. that what the church does on earth has an impact on the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.
Let me flesh that out by telling you a true story.
Denise Walters stumbled on a flight of
stairs at school. By the evening paralysis was setting in. It
extended beyond her arms and legs to include her eyes, so that before
long she was blind. She'd been stricken with an unusual and
accelerated form of multiple sclerosis.
Her whole life shrank to the sheets of a hospital bed at Greenoaks.
She suffered. She was blind, remember, and paralysed like any polio
victim. No TV, no reading, no gazing out the window. It was difficult
even to speak. After a time, the visitors dropped off. No-one but her
mum was left to read to her.
She never complained. She comforted herself that God had a purpose in
what happened - that if people were to see the patience and faith
with which she bore her affliction, it would be a witness that would
lead them to seek God.
But this never happened.
As far as she knew, nobody observed, or cared about her love for God
and her patient trust in Him. Nobody ever said to her, "I want what
you've got. How do I get it?" ... nobody ... ever.
It really seemed to her that her suffering was for nothing. Her
witness seemed to leave even the nurses who attended her quite
unaffected - and there was an endless stream of them.
Life went on for her like that for eight years.
Then one day, Diana, a friend of Joni Erickson's, visited and talked
with her, and Denise dared to share with her the frustration and the
sense of futility she felt.
And Diana's reply was, "O dear no, your faith has not gone unnoticed
- it has not. My dear Denise, don't you know what it says in
Ephesians 3.10? ... that "through the church the manifold wisdom of
God might be made known to the principalities and powers in the
heavenly places." You're the church aren't you? You've been watched
these eight years, and your witness has not been wasted, believe me."
("A Step Further" - Joni Earickson p.56)
There's a world we don't see that has its eyes upon us. And to them we're a sort of blackboard on which God draws lessons about Himself and about Christ Jesus and about the salvation He brings.
In the heavenly places, my friends, we're on "candid camera", you and I.
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