God of Jesus?

Okay. I’ve got the egg on my face. I goofed. In my haste to get to the Kenotic passage, I accidentally skipped over Ephesians, which I realized this morning. Well we’re going to backtrack today and go back to that book. There’s a lot of stuff to cover in it and my urgency to get to the kenotic passage will have to wait. *Grumble Grumble.* Oh well. If you can’t laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at? (Silly question however. You can laugh at everyone else which is tres amusing.)

So, we’re going to finish Philippians later and cover Ephesians for now and we’re going to be in the first chapter and looking at verse 3:

³Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.

This isn’t the only place this shows up in the text. Look at verse 17:

¹⁷I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.

So what is going on in these passages? Is Paul denying the deity of the Son by saying that the Father is the God of Jesus?

This is again the error of unipersonalism that we have seen many times before. The assumption is that God is one person and in this passage, God is spoken of as the Father and since Jesus is not included in that, then obviously, Jesus is not God. It follows logically indeed if you accept unipersonalism. The question remains, “Why should we?”

What we have going on in these passages right now is rather a revelation about relation. The opening passage of Ephesians after the customary greeting and verse 3 is really one long sentence. The Greek experts I have spoken to have consistently spoken of what a run-on sentence it is. The grammar really doesn’t fit, but Paul is just so overwhelmed with praise that it seems he just can’t contain himself.

This chapter is about how God has revealed himself in Christ to bring about the salvation of mankind. Notice also that the Holy Spirit is not absent in the whole chapter. He is there and plays a part in salvation as the down-payment for us that seals us until the day of redemption. The Holy Spirit is the proof that God will keep the promises that he made to us in Christ.

What we sorely miss in the area of the Trinity so often is the wonderful relationship between the persons. We don’t realize how they interplay together so well. What is going on with the Father and the Son and the Spirit?

I recently had someone on the forum I debate on speaking about the core concept of God among Christians being “Maker of Everything.” I agree that God is the maker of all that is apart from him, but I don’t think this is the key concept. God is not just who he is in relation to creation, but who he is in relation to himself. I fear if we focus on just us, we miss that wonderful relationship in the Trinity we can learn so much from.

Again, my apology for the screw-up. We shall continue tomorrow however.