The Ephesians Story (Part 5)

And our point is, this is really centered on the Lord Jesus Christ. And what is staggering is that Ephesians 1 has probably been more of a battleground of doctrine than any other single chapter in the New Testament, with a possible exception of Romans 8, and I kind of doubt that. It would come in, come in second at best. Romans 6 might come in there somewhere, but Ephesians 1 is where the Church of Jesus Christ has done all the killing and bloodletting and dividing, and it is centered on the Lord Jesus Christ, in Him. And it’s the Him that is greater than the “in”, but it is in Him.

I stopped where, with verse 5? Okay. “According to the kind intention of His will to the praise of the glory of His grace.” Amen. “To the praise of His grace which is glorious.” To His grace, and that’s really where I stopped, and as our brother over here said, we’re not under the law and we’re under grace. Now, Carisia, tell me everything that grace does not cover. The sins, the obligations, and the demands that Christ has put upon us that we have to do, must do, or should do, that if we fail to do, grace does not cover. Everything? Are you sure? I told you that yesterday. Does that include being redheaded? Okay. Does that include being hot-tempered? It covers everything. It covers everything. Does it include being shy, Tim? Alright. Does it include being…let me find out…who’s the most outgoing among you here? Amy’s not here. Yeah, no, that’s here. Does it include being strange? Just barely. Does it include our weaknesses, and does it include our sin? And does it include our sins? Why does it do that? Why? What’s, what’s the key here, saints? What? Agape. Or we can say a purpose. It is included because grace reigned before sin reigned. Grace reigned when He marked you off in Him before the foundation of the world. All issues were settled then. That was grace, saints. It was kind; it had nothing evil in it. He was not a God after punishing you. It was kind that He marked you off in Christ. It was gentle, and it was a grace. He was inviting you into the fellowship of His inmost being, and you had not even been created, and neither had anything else. He did this before the foundation of the world. I want to drive this home to you as we keep going forward here, and that is that that state has never changed.

When we described last night the Father and the Fatherness, and that in the very center of the being of the Father is the eternal Son, and He, He chose a portion of the eternal Son. In the very center of the inmost being of God, He took a chip of the eternal Son and marked that off to be dispensed, to be scattered into those of us who would one day intersect with that grace and that life of His in space somewhere and in time somewhere. And that became an established reality. Again, I want to invite you into the eyes of God. He doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to your body when He looks at you, and really, that’s a good thing to do, because it’s really very corrupt, and it is very prone to sin, because it’s flesh. But in His eyes, just consider His eyes, you did not exist until the day you were saved.

Well, now, Gene, that’s a really strange statement. You did not exist until you were saved. Why did you not exist until you were saved? Sister? I hadn’t been born yet. Alright. Okay, now come on, just give it some consideration. This is not something I thought up. That’s right, sister, you got it. Because what you were previous to that has always been calculated as dead. Not died, but dead. Not having a funeral, but if you please, born dead. Stayed dead. Was dead, is dead, and you’re going to be dead. Well, how did it die? Your flesh was crucified before the foundation of the world. Praise the Lord. What happened at Calvary was the death of your old man, but brothers and sisters, that was in time. It happened first in eternity. The Lamb was slain before the foundation of the world. And so was a creation not yet created, and so was a law not yet given, and so were ordinances that had never been brought forth, and so were the principalities and powers who had not yet come.

I want to say it to you again, that when this creation was brought into being and dropped from the fingertip of God, it began crucified. It came into existence crucified. It was born already crucified. The principalities had already been done away with; death had already died. This creation had been done away with. All of it had already been brought to a cross, a slaying of a lamb, before any of it came into existence. That’s how completely God took care of history. That’s how complete He wrapped this thing up. He, in the words of Hebrews, He finished all things before He created all things. You were crucified in that Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. It’s very difficult for you and me to grasp that, but as our scientific brother here has explained to us, creation…we may be going along in time of creation, but creation and time and space were all created from beginning to end when they were created, and that’s a quotation out of science, not out of the Bible. He was at the end the same time He was at the beginning. He is the end at the same time He is the beginning, and you have already been crucified with Christ, and so has the world, and so have all the things in it, and all that is enemy, and all that is negative, and I left out sin and sins, were crucified. They were born crucified. They were created crucified. They had on their neck, “Crucify.” And that was in the eyes of God. So, you didn’t really exist. You were always dead. Listen to your Lord’s eyes. Listen to His eyes speak. “Let the dead bury the dead.” Those are the eyes of your Lord. They may be like trees walking, but to Him, they were already, to borrow a Georgia statement, they had already been funeralized. They were already dead. They were reckoned by God as dead, and if He reckons they’re dead, they’re dead. That settles it.

So, do you remember the day you got saved? Well, until that moment, you were in Christ, and you didn’t exist till that day, and you became what? Say it, brother, really loudly.

Audience: New creation.

You became a new creation, and you went a little further than that. You became part of a coming creation, and when you got saved and I got saved, we actually marked the beginning of a, I’m using the word second, that’s not scriptural, but to communicate. You became part of a second creation. The first one has already been crucified. Now here’s the most marvelous thing about that new creation. What is the atomic structure of that new creation? What is its metabolic content? What is the astrophysics of that new creation? What is the biology of that creation?

Audience: The Lord Jesus Himself.

Praise the Lord. He is the molecular structure of that creation, and that creation was introduced upon this earth in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, when all things in space and time were done away with. Again, through the eyes of God, the crucifixion and the resurrection did away with that old creation. One was crucified; another one began. A three-day gap between the two. And out of that tomb came the birth of a new creation as far as it’s being able to be seen visibly, as far as it is able to see invisibly.

Now, I want Kevin to stand up here. Please, brother. Now there are two things that we can say about Kevin. One of them is, he does not look biologically different from unfallen man, does he? And secondly, He’s not very pretty. Nor are some of his friends. The body still carries the mark of the old, but in the sight of God, let the dead bury the dead. In the sight of God, this part’s already dead. But in the eyes of God, Kevin marks a new species and a new…when I say creation, do you understand? I’m talking about six days, the Lord labored, and on the seventh, He rested. He made the stars and the moon, the skies and the earth, and the fish, and the flying creatures, and the animals, and man. We’re talking about that creation, the physical one. There is another creation that fell from His being, and Kevin belongs to that creation and has never belonged to any other creation, for that which is not of that creation, God has always seen as dead. Born dead. It was a stillbirth. Born crucified. If it’s crucified, it’s dead.

So, honor this creature. If you’ll let me stretch the English vocabulary, he’s not a human being. Comes from another realm, and that’s not all. He is not only biologically unique. It’s like there if you could think for a moment of two creations in existence at once, though they’re not. He hasn’t got anything to do with this earth and the stars and the moon and the skies. He belongs to some other realm of some other creation, and this is the uniqueness of this brother. Now then, if somebody says, “How is he biologically different from some of the other people downstairs?” How is he unique? He is unique in this respect: he has a functioning organ in him that the unsaved do not have, and he has something in him they will never have. He has life. They have death. What life? The highest life and the only life, and that life is resurrected. He has the life of God in him, and other creatures don’t. And in this respect, he is unique, in that if you look at him from an earthly view, he has two lives in him.