Chapter 1
v4: This verse does not prove Calvinism. Rather, God had the plan of salvation in mind before creation.
A key phrase here is in Him, meaning in Christ. If we have put our faith in Christ, we have been destined before eternity, or predestined, since eternity hasn't started yet, to be fellow heirs with Christ forever and ever. Romans 8 29
Another key phrase is love. 1 John 4 8 Love is not love if it's forced.
Love also isn't love if it claims to love a group, i.e. people, but only actively shows love to select individuals within that group, or indeed actively destroys most of them. It's like saying you love babies even though you cuddle and care for only five percent of the babies you meet and snap the necks of the other 95 percent, or at best neglect 95 percent of those babies with whose welfare you have been charged.
Finishing this sentence by looking at the first part of verse 5, we therefore see that those who have chosen Christ had it determined before the beginning of time that, upon doing so, they would be adopted as God's children into the Father's family.
v5: "According to the good pleasure of His will" means God wanted to save us. Many Christians have this idea that God, after keeping away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil didn't work, and after animal sacrifices didn't work, begrudgingly sent Jesus down to Earth to die for our sins. This is simply not true. Again I say God had our salvation in mind literally from before time began.
v6: In the last half of this epistle, Paul is going to give a lot of instructions, really commandments, about how believers are to live in Christ and what they are to do in this regard now that they've been saved. However, it is only by God's saving of us through His grace that we can obey the stuff in the second half of this Biblical book.
v7-9: God not only wanted to save us and restore the relationship He originally had with humankind before Adam and Eve ate the fruit in the garden; He also wants to sanctify us.
v10-11: If you have been adopted into God's family, you get an inheritance, another thing which was predestined to accompany our choosing to follow Christ through the salvation provided for us.
v12: The meaning of life, the reason we humans are here, is to glorify God.
v13-14: Those of us who have been saved have Jesus' Holy Spirit inside us who sanctifies us and keeps us growing toward perfection until the first resurrection spoken of in Revelation.
v15-16: Lord, I echo this prayer for the faithful and loving fellow saints I know. In Jesus name, amen.
v17: Christians need revelation to know about God and who He is as well as wisdom to know how to live for Him.
v18: The world doesn't know the stuff mentioned in this verse. Spiritually, unbelievers simply can't see it, as we couldn't before we were saved.
We need to keep our eyes on the hope we have in Christ and the glorious riches that await believers in eternity instead of being obsessed over the things of this world the way we were when we still walked in darkness.
v19: We also need to realize just how great and powerful our God truly is which is what keeps us from falling prey to all the fear the world wants to put on its inhabitants.
v20-21: See 2 6.
v22-23: Paul will allude a lot more to this concept in chapter 5 when he talks about marriage.
Chapter 2
v1-7: Many Christians (a lot of whom I suspect have never actually been born again) have a sort of attitude of having gotten a headstart when it comes to Jesus due to growing up in the church. This is wrong! We are all sinners. We were all headed for Hell. God has brought every one of us from death to life.
However, not only has our Heavenly Father done this. He insures that life in Him is filled with rewards, including most importantly every spiritual blessing (verse 3 of chapter 1) and will reward us with an eternal paradise in the age to come.
By the way, James says that every good thing comes from God, so there's that, too.
v8-10: We are saved by grace through faith, both of which come from God.
If we could do enough good stuff to save ourselves, then people would brag that they got in ahead of the next guy.
The purpose of our being saved is so we can go on to live a life of obedience to Christ, doing the good works James talks about. Our good works flow out of our faith as Christian and come about by the Holy Spirit through the sanctification process. Meditate on these previous two statements to realize how our life in relationship with Jesus Christ operates.
v11-20: In the beginning, man sinned, so God effectively divorced all nations. He then chose Abraham and his seed, including Abraham's grandson Jacob who was surnamed Israel, to be His covenant people.
The northern ten tribes of Israel sinned so grievously they were dispersed among the other nations by the Asyrians, effectively becoming divorced from God.
A couple centuries later, God divorced the tribe of Judah as well, allowing the Babylonians to invade the land of Judah and carry the people away, those people subsequently being dispersed throughout the Babylonian empire.
Centuries later, Jesus Christ, God's Son and the second person of the trinity, came to earth to save humanity. Jesus cursed a fig tree, which symbolized the old covenant law system.
When Jesus died on the cross, the veil of the temple was torn in two, symbolizing the destruction and end of the old covenant priesthood and the coming together of Jews and Gentiles in Christ. God bought back Judah, he bought back the northern tribes and He bought the whole rest of the world so that now anyone can be saved.
This is what we Christians today directly benefit from, partaking in Christ's sacrifice as our only means of salvation, just as the first Christians did.
What's more, we look back on Christ's sacrifice, but additionally all those who believed in God before Jesus' death and resurrection looked forward to Christ's sacrifice for salvation. Thus, they are included with us among God's people and are equally our brothers and sisters in Christ.
v21-22: See 1 Corinthians 6 and 1 Peter 1.
Chapter 3
v1-4: See Acts 9
v5-6: See Acts 10.
v7-8: Paul viewed himself as the least of all saints and the chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1 15) because he persecuted the church before he got saved. The church being the body of Christ, as Paul has talked about previously in this letter and mentions other places, it was thus as if Paul had been punching, kicking, stabbing, and insulting Jesus Christ Himself when he did this.
v9-11: If you have one of those red letter Bibles, read the red parts in the Gospels and think about how revolutionary and awe-inspiring our Lord's words were to the people at that time.
v12: Lots of Christians are afraid to ask God even for things they need. Through Christ, we are now able to approach the Father confidently because we have placed our faith in Jesus.
v13-16: Paul faced lots of persecution and the Christians to whom he was writing were likely to face it, too. They and we need God's inner strength to face persecutions and everything and anything else life throws at us.
v17: Christians stay rooted and grounded in love, as opposed to drifting around, believing in and doing whatever we want, by studying the Bible, conversing with God in prayer, fellowshipping with other believers (which doesn't necessarily mean going to church on Sundays but real, meaningful interaction with brothers and sisters should be regularly present in our lives), and by showing our love for others to them in whatever forms the wisdom of the Holy Spirit leads us to do so.
v18-19: "I pray that you guys would get just how loving our God and His Son Jesus Christ are."
v20: "As well as just how powerful He is."
v21: This present evil age is going to come to an end and what Christians call the world, that is the system by which humanity currently operates, is going to come to an end, but the world is never going to come to a final end. In fact, according to 2 Peter, it is going to be replaced by a new, yet restored world, one that is like Creation was originally supposed to be before man ruined it with sin.
Chapter 4
v1: Now, in light of all Paul has said about the character and nature of God in the previous three chapters, here is how Christians are to be.
v2: The first three things we need to be successful Christians are humility, humility and humility.
Meekness is not whimpiness but rather having the right attitude about the world around us and the things that happen to us and other people
Longsuffering is patience with people, which we are going to need as followers of Jesus in dealing with each other in a restrained, or forbearing way, as well as with unbelievers for the ultimate purpose of winning them to Christ.
v3-6: Christians are great at disagreeing with each other and falling out over issues which are not salvific in nature. Paul here emphasizes the unity God's people are to have in Him because it isn't ourselves for whom we are living this life: it's our Heavenly Father.
See the first few chapters of 1 Corinthians, Acts 2 38, 1 Corinthians 12.
v7-10: Of course, we equally live our new lives in Jesus for Him as well, the second person of the trinity and we carry out these lives in what Jesus Christ did for us as well as who He is.
v11: I would consider today's apostles to be those missionaries who take the Gospel to peoples and parts of the world where it hasn't been heard before.
There are still prophets today, those who predict the future, but the Biblical role of a prophet is more than this. Prophet also carries the idea of someone who tells the people what God's Word, the Bible, says is going to happen to those who either follow or don't follow Him, in adition to passing along extrabiblical revelations from God.
Evangelists either travel around either literally or by radio, TV, the internet, etc. or else have people come to them for the purpose that believers and unbelievers receive messages from God's Word.
Pastors, in the Scriptural sense of the word, work with believers one on one, giving instruction, guidance and counsel. The term refers to shepherds over their sheep.
Teachers delve deap into the Word of God, mainly teaching groups of people. They go into the literary and cultural context of a passage, explaining the meaning of the ancient Hebrew and Greek words, also finding other good sources of information which expand upon and back up things written in the Bible.
v12-13: All these offices are for the purpose of ministering to and building up their fellow Christians and for aiding them to go onto the perfection of Jesus, as He said in His last line of the Sermon on the Mount.
v14: Christians need to mature and become rooted and grounded in their beleifs, not childishly chasing after every grisly morsel of teaching that sounds appealing, even though it has no true basis in a correct interpretation of the Word. There are a lot of slippery deceivers out there who are more than happy to assist Satan in taking as many people to Hell with him as he can.
v15-16: When believers speak the truth to other believers to correct them in these false doctrines to which the other believers have fallen prey, this always must be done with love. There are a lot of Christians out there who's love is growing cold as Jesus said in Matthew 24 precisely because so many fellow Christians aren't measuring up toward that perfection mentioned above. Quite simply, these believers Jesus spoke about need Him to heat up their love once again.
Lord, please do exactly this. Thank you. In Jesus name, amen.
A healthy believer and group of believers will be developed and developing, but an unhealthy individual or group of believers won't, just as a defective human body won't.
v17-24: True Christianity is a relationship with God and we as Christians therefore are to do our part in this relationship to grow closer to God and be more and more the way He, our Creator, wants us to be. We need to put away the ways and thoughts and feelings and attitudes of the unbelievers we formerly were and put on Christ, of whose body we are now a part as Paul says in the early part of this passage. Romans 12 1
v25-28: The problem with the modern self-help movement is it emphasizes stopping doing things but doesn't give adequate, or in some cases any replacements.
Here Paul tells believers not only to stop lying but also to speak the truth. Since the church is one body, lying to someone doesn't only hurt the person you lied to: it hurts the rest of the body of believers as well, not to mention yourself.
Paul also tells the Ephesians not to "let the sun go down" on their anger, meaning not to use their naturally occurring emotion of anger as occasion to act in a fleshly way. He also warns them not to listen to the temptations of Satan who will inevitably whisper in our ears with what seems like the perfect way to make that which is angering us right again.
Christians who were thieves should not only stop stealing but they should get a job. Furthermore, rather than thinking solely of themselves and their wants and needs as the criminal type is wont to do, these new children in the faith are to use part of their pay to help the needy.
v29: The purpose of our conversation, directly or indirectly, is to build up other people and to reflect Christ and His grace to them. This doesn't mean we can only talk to people about the things of God and only whatever else is absolutely necessary, but it does mean that, diredctly or indirectly, our speech shows Jesus, whether we're talking directly about things to do with God and His Word, or whether we're talking about anything else and our speech indirectly communicates Christ via the way we conduct ourselves in our talk.
Some ways of communicating God's gracv through our speech include finding out what others are interested in and having something intelligent to say about these topics, giving compliments, truly being concerned and caring about other people's current life situations, and thanking people for what they do for us.
30: Be quick to obey God so the Holy Spirit will be pleased and He can continue to perform His sanctifying work in you.
v31: Here is a post on bitterness.
Christians are also to put away unjustified anger, the improper expression of justified anger, a mindset of always looking for something to get mad about, speech that harms others, as well as all intention to harm others.
v32: See Jesus' parable about the unforgiving servant.
Chapter 5
v1-2: God is our Father and Christians are to act as his loving children, eager to spend time with God, treat Him well and be quick to obey God's law.
Christians are to love each other the way Christ loved us and the way Jesus, in turn, loves God.
v3: I've heard this verse used as one of those freedom robber verses. Paul is not saying that, for example, a brother can't give a sister a lift somewhere with no one else in the car because unbelievers might see them together and erroniously conclude they're having an affair. There were already rumours going around that those of the early church were murderers and cannibals because they talked about eating the body and drinking the blood. (In light of this, a rumour about Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones seems pretty tame.)
In essence, what Paul is trying to get across in this verse is, "Guys, the world is going to spread rumours and falsehoods about you because it hates you, the same way it hated Jesus. However, any rumour going around about you better not turn out to be true." We want the false gossip to be Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones are having an affair because one was seen driving the other one to their destination, not Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones are having an affair because someone happened upon them getting it on with each other.
v4: Don't be the guy with the dirty jokes, don't be the type of Christian that makes jokes about the things of God that illustrate no legitimate point and besides are borderline blasphemous, and don't be the Hawkeye Pierce type who has to insert a joke anywhere he possibly can.
If we have been transformed by the power of Christ, a lot of our speech, especially to the Lord, should consist of thanking Him. 1 Thessalonians 5 18
v5: 1 Corinthians 6 9-11
v6-10: Don't let someone lead you astray with false doctrine that only produces bad fruit. See 1 Timothy 4 1-6 and 6 3-10 You were bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6 20) so don't fall back into darkness but rather reflect Jesus Christ, the light of the world, as He said to do in the Sermon on the Mount.
Verse 7 has got to be one of my favourite verses. Paul is talking about all these false Christians trying to lead people astray, something that made me hate God, Christians and Christianity before I got saved. He basically says in counter to such people "Don't be like them." Keep it simple indeed.
v11-14: Rather than taking part in all this sin, we should expose it and the people, especially I believe in high places, who are committing such things. If we only talk amongst ourselves and cluck our tongues about how bad they are and ask what the world has come to, this is a shame because we ought rather to be publicly calling out sin for what it is and exposing the works of darkness. Not only that, but we should use our exposure of such people and their evil deeds to then point unbelievers to Christ and His perfect law of liberty. James 1 25
v15-17: Christians are to be careful how we live, spending our time wisely. The only reasons we are alive now that we have been saved are to show Christ to others, tell unbelievers about Him and to be there for each other.
v18-20: "Whereas you used to hang out with your pagan buddies, drink to excess, sing filthy songs or songs that reflected your unbelieving Greco-Roman worldview and complaining about how terrible life is to each other, now get together with brothers and sisters, sing and quote the lyrics of Christian songs to each other, and communicate how thankful you are to God for and in all things."
v21-24: These verses get criticized a lot, but it must be remembered that Paul starts off his whole famous, (or in the reprobate minds of many unbelievers, infamous) section about families and masters and servants by telling all believers to be subject to each other. Those in the leadership positions aren't always going to be able to have their way.
In the time in which this was written, you only got married for the purpose of providing yourself heirs. A husband's responsibility to his wife and family basically extended to checking in on them every few days with the necessities of life and getting her pregnant enough times so a man could be assured he'd have enough children, read sons, to carry on after him. In light of this, how willing would you be to submit yourself to a guy like that and how much would you respect him?
Paul's words are so kind, loving and revolutionary. In this section of his letter, he, under Holy Spirit inspiration, is calling people to a much higher, better life than what they had before they got saved.
v25-33: Husbands are to love their wives, contrary to the predominant culture described above.
The husband's headship of the household is a role of servant leadership. Men are not to be tyrants over their spouses and children and no wife has to submit to her husband's orders to do things that contradict God's law, nor does your wife have to continue to live with you if you are abusing her.
Verse 25 has been misinterpreted by some Christians to say the job of the husband is to make the wife more holy. It is not the job of the husband to make his wife anything. Rather, Paul here is alluding to the selfless, sacrificial love shown by our Lord Christ Jesus. Just as Jesus loved us more than anybody else has, demonstrating this by dying on the cross for our sins, so men are to love their wives in a particular way in which they would not love any other human being.
The church is the body of Christ. God is sanctifying us. We have been baptised into Christ and are going on to perfection by obeying His Word. When this life is over, every true Christian will be made totally perfect, without sin or fault of any kind. Just as our Lord takes special care and pays specific attention to the maintenance and improvement of His body, this is to be mirrored in human form by the way husbands are to care for their wives in the husband's servant leadership of his wife.
The end of verse 28, I believe, hearkens back to the concept of the two becoming one instituted early in Genesis, as is later explicitly referred to in verse 31.
As a side note concerning verse 29, the whole concept of self-hatred and the consequent prescribed remedy of self-love so popular today is a bunch of malarchy. No one truly hates themselves. Statistics, and just looking around, shows that people care for themselves very much, some or many times to the extreme. Whether it's the person who makes sure they eat right and exercise properly, the 300 pound person who eats whatever their body craves, or even the man who locked himself in his apartment years ago, eats only junk food, practices no personal hygine, and deliberately ignores all visitors and communication from the outside world, everybody loves themselves because they are all doing what theirself feels is the best thing for them at this time. Even the latter case is doing what his self wishes to do, as messed up as that appears to be and is to any normal person. If the apartment hermit truly hated himself, he would be showering, constantly out socializing, and living healthfully because that would be truly punishing the self he hates who just wants to rot away in isolation.
Again, if someone truly hated themself, they would be going against their own self-will, whatever that looked like for the individual.
Of course, getting back to the main flow of this passage, truly doing what is in our own best interest, such as keeping ourselves healthy so we can keep functioning well and feel how we should, isn't wrong. In fact, this is what Christ does with His body, us. Rather, Christ's command to love our neighbour, our neighbour in this context being a husband's wife, Jesus takes for granted that everybody loves themselves. He is telling us to take the same care, show the same love and give the same attention to others as well.
v30-31: In addition to being the body of Christ, the church is also Jesus' bride.
v32: In Biblical parlance, a mystery isn't something which is not known. Rather, it was something that was unknown that has now been revealed.
v33: A husband needs to respect his wife, and a wife needs to love her husband. Paul words this verse the way he does because, as I said at the beginning of this passage, husbands of that culture weren't expected to love their wives and wives weren't obligated to revere their husbands.
Chapter 6
v1-4: Children are to obey their parents, but, as with the marital relationship just covered, the parental relationship is not to be tyranical in nature either. Fathers are not to raise children in such a way where their kids would have legitimate cause to be angry, imbittered and hateful toward their dads when they themselves become adults. Rather, there is to be nurturing, in a time and culture that frankly wasn't very nurturing, and correction, which can but should not always include corporal punishment.
v5-9: Whether servant or master, all will be judged by God in the end. The masters who treated their servants well because those masters had Christ in them and the servants who obeyed their masters, regardless of the master's spiritual standing, because the servants knew they were ultimately working for the Lord, laying up treasures for themselves in Heaven as Jesus put it in Matthew, will be rewarded with eternity in Heaven. Cruel masters and lazy, disobedient servants will spend eternity in Hell.
v10: This verse reminds me of Joshua's being told to "be strong and of a good courage."
v11: When and how do Christians put on the full armour of God? I used to think this was something that automatically happened to you when you got saved. However, I believe what Paul is talking about here is similar to what he says in Colossians 3 12 about putting on mercy.
The armour of God, as such, isn't something you put on as a sort of daily ritual or practice like getting dressed in the morning. The idea here is more that of continuously wearing these things, constantly living the Christian life in the ways Paul is pointing to with this analogy. Granted, Christians who aren't doing what the following verses command need to put on the armour in the sense of starting to do these things, but the passage is really getting at some specifics of what the Christian life looks like when properly lived out.
v12: Contrary to a mindset that is currently going around, what with all the sociopolitical and economic turmoil in the world, Christians are not at war with people who are wicked and unsaved. We are at war with the spirits behind those people and what they do, namely Satan and his various ranks of demons.
v13: The days were evil in Paul's time, they are evil now, and for Christians who are still alive, in my view, not too many years from now, they will be more evil than they've ever been.
We need to stand in days of evil so we will be able to stand before the Son of Man at the first resurrection. Luke 21 36
v14: Many people, including Christians, get all wrapped up in worries and cares, paying more attention to them than is warranted. Rather, God's church needs to be wrapped up, as it were, in truth. To use the modern parlance, we have to be all about truth.
My new heart, given to me by Jesus through His sacrifice, knows what is right and this righteousness operates hand in hand with the faith, as per verse 16, I have placed in Him.
v15: Romans 12 18
v16: Our faith, exercised in righteousness as per the end of verse 14, is what prevents arguments against Christianity as well as various doubts and temptations from having their desired effect. 1 John 5 4
v17: Romans 12 1Philippians 2 5-11 Having received salvation, Christians need to grow in Christ and one of the main ways we do this is through reading the Bible, obeying what it says as well as committing it to our hearts and minds so we can preach, defend and explain Christianity to the unsaved as well as each other.
The Holy Spirit who lives in God's people enables us to understand Scripture in a way we couldn't before we were saved.
v18: Though more formal and specific times of prayer are good, ultimately we should always have an open line to God, being aware whenever something that is in need of prayer, whether that's a request of God or thanks to God, comes up in our daily lives, praying for it right away or as soon as possible. I also enjoy conversing informally with God throughout the day, whether that takes the form of "talking to myself" when I'm "alone" or whether that's in my head when I'm with other people.
v19-20: Phillipians 1 19
v21-22: If the Bible were made up would the fake author have bothered to include verses like these?
Knowing how someone is doing enables fellow believers to pray for them better.
Paul also wants the Ephesian Christians to know more about him than can be conveyed in a letter.
Tychicus telling them about seeing Paul in his suffering and imprisonment would enable them to appreciate Paul's service to these followers of Jesus more.
v23-24: 1 Timothy 23-24
