Intro to the Book of Ephesians Series #1 - Bill Shiley

I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

I have a dream that one day on the Red Hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

My name is Renee King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King and Clarence Hopkins.

My grandfather had a dream that his four little children will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream that enough is enough, and that this should be a gun-free world. Period.

Will you please repeat these words after me? Spread the word! Spread the word! Out your heart! Out your heart! All across the nation! All across the nation! We are going to be—are going to be—a great generation! A great generation!

She has a dream. Her grandfather had a dream that his four children will be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. And she has a dream that enough is enough, and that this should be a gun-free world. And then she gets the crowd to repeat this mantra.

Spread the word! Have you heard? All across the nation, we are going to be a great generation. And everybody applauds, and they say it again like they really mean it. And then they say it again like they really, really mean it. And the camera pans out, and the whole—from the Capitol all the way down Philadelphia Avenue, as far as you can see, is people, thousands and thousands of people there with this concern and with this vision of something new and something better.

And you can hardly find something to move your heart more than an African American man crying from the depths of his soul when he talks about his children, saying, "I have a dream today."

The question as I think about that, though, is whose dream was that? Was that something that Martin Luther King dreamed up? Or was what he was crying out for something that was already something that was a dream? He quotes there at the end of his speech from Isaiah, looking forward to the Messiah. "Every valley shall be exalted, and every hill is going to be made low, and the rough places will be made smooth, and the crooked is going to be straightened out, and everyone is going to see the glory of God." Was a gun-free world—is that something that just Yolanda King is concerned about? And as I look at these two moments of crying out about problems in the world, I look at those people there below the Lincoln Memorial when Martin Luther gave his speech.

And by the way, if you ever go there, there's a plaque—there's a brass plaque on one of the landings there. You can stand right there where he stood. But as I think about that group of people, I think, what did that crowd possess? How are we going to accomplish this? And what did that crowd possess that was going to make that happen? As I look at that crowd in 2017, they were rallying in Washington, DC, for gun control and for a gun-free world. What is that group of people—how are they going to make this happen?

What do they, as a group of people, possess that they're going to be able to execute this dream?

These are all things that are God's dream.

God is the one that dreamed before time of a gun-free world, of a world where people are judged and valued by their character, not by their gender or the color of their skin or their money or their size or their intelligence.

That's God's dream.

And God—I like the term that he uses in the book of Ephesians—he has purposes. That's a little more solidified, and that's something that's going to happen. It's not just like, "I have some plans," and they might sit on the shelf. We might not be able to get it done. But God has purposes that he's had since forever, and he is able to execute them. He has a purpose that he is going to carry out and that he is carrying out.

Reading from Ephesians 3, Paul is writing there, "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world have been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ." That kind of sounds like dream terminology there, doesn't it?

There's a mystery that since the beginning of the world is something that God has had wrapped up in himself, is something that hasn't been exposed, but he's been making it happen.

To the intent—so this is what God's dream is, God's purpose that he's been cooking up this scheme. And I struggle to find a good word to really encapsulate this. You have to say about 15 words. To the intent—this is the purpose that he has—that now, not after the rapture, by the way, but now, unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be made known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by his faithfulness.

So the last part there talks about us being able to get in on this. This is something that we are able to join and to be part of. I paraphrase this. Paraphrasing for me is not that I think I can say it better than anybody else, but trying to wrap my mind around it and comprehend it. So this is the BSP, and from here out, if you ever see that little guy down in the corner, that's what it is. This is my musings. "God entrusted this gift to me, the last person you would expect to be the one to declare to all the nations the immeasurable richness of King Jesus and his way, to open their eyes and to convince them to join in the secret, ingenious, and astounding scheme God has been working out since he began everything by King Jesus, and now is unfolding for us to see and join.

Here it is. This is the scheme, the plan, to demonstrate to all the supernatural beings out there the complete goodness of God's wisdom he created into every aspect of the cosmos." And he's going to do that by the group of humans who follow King Jesus in restoring all things.

That's pretty amazing to me that God has this plan. All these things that we work on and we're concerned about, God has had this plan from the beginning of time to set all things straight. And he has a method of getting it accomplished that everybody looks at and says, "Huh?" But he's doing it.

And he's doing it through us, wimpy little humans, choosing to follow Jesus in his upside-down way of winning, of loving your enemies rather than responding with violence or with light, but through serving and all those kinds of things. And through us, he is going to demonstrate to the angels and to all the who-knows-who's out there, the heavenly council and Satan and his angels and whatever spiritual beings are out there. He's going to demonstrate his goodness and convince them of the goodness of his way through us as we follow him.

God's mysterious purpose is to demonstrate his wisdom to all beings and so ultimately correct all that is wrong through the church. So I'm planning on starting a series on the book of Ephesians.

That's kind of a new style of preaching for me. I've never really done book expository preaching. I've taught this in Bible study at the room at least once. I have my students memorize this book. I have two years to do that. I have some amazing people who have memorized chapters 1 through 5. 6 was a bonus, a little much to get in a year, who memorized the whole book of Ephesians. And I have one or two that said it in one standing flawlessly, most of them missing maybe three, four, five words.

So that's why we go out for pizza and play mini golf and do escape rooms for it because it's a lot of hard work. But it is doable. And I'm excited as I listen to them going through and we read it together in class in the morning, and then they're reciting it and they're writing it out and we check in all this. And I'm excited because to them, it's a lot of hard work right now. But I listen to those words roll off their tongues, and I know that they are storing in their minds a treasure trove of understanding that God is going to unpack to them and use to equip them to be part of demonstrating his wisdom.

This book also has a particular interest to me because it was Ephesians 2:10 that really was a turning point in my life, opened my eyes to who God was and what God wanted to do with me. And so that's kind of a platform on probably most of who I am today turned on at that point. Some key concepts in the book of Ephesians are this idea of the mystery and this purpose, this thing that God is executing. He's carrying out laser-clear understanding and focus and execution of a design. This idea of being predestined. Yes, we are going to talk about predestination. And I love to talk about this and especially the passages in here because most of the time, wrong concepts, unhistoric concepts of that are simply because of a poor reading or a predetermined framework being imposed on a passage.

So in other words, we've been taught this, so then we take that passage and we interpret it. It must mean that. This concept of being in Christ is something hopefully we'll unpack through our studying in the book. This idea of being in the heavenly places, the position, who we are. He talks a lot about who we are as the foundation for then our behavior and our choices that we make.

And oneness, unity, bringing things together in one again rather than this division of us from God and us as people from each other and all the strife that's happened. Probably one of the things that brought this book to my attention and helped me to understand what God is wanting to do is the book, The Secret of His Purpose by John Kennedy.

The language is a little bit complex in some ways. It's not a terribly hard read, but you do have to chew through it. But it's a very good book, and I'll be using some thoughts, some quotations from that, as well as hopefully bringing in the early church fathers, especially on controversial passages.

I want to start out with actually a quotation from John Kennedy in his book about what the church is because there's lots of bad thinking about the church. And it's easy to say, "Oh, that's us. We're the church. So we are demonstrating to all of the supernatural beings out there the goodness of God. Wow, we're really awesome, aren't we?"

And we ought to think and to examine ourselves before we do that and ask ourselves, "Are we part of Jesus' church?" This epistle reveals the church as something vital and intensely practical, not as a mere theoretical number of the elect with little relevance to the circumstances of everyday life, but as the people of communion, as the place of communion between God and his people, the source of spiritual strength and sustenance or provision, food.

The medium or the method, the channel through which God expresses himself in the world, the way people see God and get to know who God is, is through the church. What is the church? What is its purpose? How is it maintained? How does it relate to the problems of living? These are all questions answered for us in the Ephesian letter. Its message, therefore, is of paramount or top-notch importance.

In light of the prevalent confusion of understanding on the nature of the church, in other words, what is the church? What's it like? A word must here be said on this subject if we are to grasp clearly the meaning of the epistle. Christianity today is a vast conglomeration of so-called churches, some of which are large federations of local groups diverse in many respects.

It contains much that is good and much also that is evil, those who are truly the people of God and those who are not, rival creeds and rival practices. What relation has all this to what the scriptures call the church or the assembly?

The fact of historical and organized Christianity—now, he's not using historical Christianity in the sense that we do, talking about the church that was built by the apostles and their immediate successors, but historically, as in for the last 1,500 years.

The fact of historical and organized Christianity and its obvious difference from the simplicity and spiritual vitality of the churches of the New Testament has given rise to the widely held distinction between the church visible and the church invisible. The church visible, we are told, is all that appears in the world as Christianity with its mixture of good and bad, righteousness and corruption, truth and error, children of God and children of the world. So when we look out there and we see people who many of them aren't much different than everybody else, that's the church.

That's what we are told by this concept of the visible church. On the other hand, the church invisible, we are told, is the sum total of God's children, those regenerated by the working of the Spirit, whatever their connection is to the whatever their connections in the visible church may be. So we have this thing that there's the visible church you see, which is the mishmash of what calls itself Christianity. And then there's the true church, which is this abstract, disconnected people who really, truly are children of God and are walking in the likeness of Christ, but they're all disconnected. It's just this abstract thing. They're all lone rangers floating around here and there, and you never know when you might run across one.

This distinction, which has no foundation in scripture whatsoever, has effectively relegated the church to a place of powerlessness in the minds of many of God's people. The church visible is a testimony to man's fallen nature rather than to the glory of God. And the church invisible is a mere theory whose consummation waits eternity. It's just this wonderful idea that it isn't happening at all now. And somehow, when the trumpet sounds, poof, we're all going to be wonderful and glorious in la la land.

But the church in the mind of God transcends the ages. It is a great and powerful fact, not only of eternity, but also of time. It is no mere theory. It is a visible reality and can be known now as surely as it will be in an eternity to come. Our Lord, in that striking series of parables recorded in Matthew 13, likens the church to a pearl. A pearl increases in size with the passage of time. But at whatever stage of its development it may be found, it is no less a pearl, a thing of glory and beauty. I think that's an interesting thing he's gleaned from that parable, that whether it's small, whether it was the early churches surrounding the Mediterranean era or whether it's today, it was something pure and valuable.

It is true that there are many yet to be added to it, but whatever and wherever, wherever and whenever it is found, it is complete and an expression of the glory of God. The layers of nacre which compose a pearl must be together, crushed to a powder and scattered to the four winds. Their beauty is gone. So it is with the church. The only expression of the church on earth recognized by the scriptures is the coming together of the people of God, the local church, a visible company of people through whose actual and practical relationship with the Lord and with one another, the glory of God can be expressed.

The force of this truth will become clear in subsequent chapters. He's talking about the book. But what it has been said will suffice to emphasize that any mention of the church or assembly in succeeding pages should be taken to mean not some theoretical company of the elect, but an actual and visible company of the people of God who are following and like King Jesus.

I thought that was a well-spoken and expressed drawing together of the disparagement that we see and hear about the church, what we're part of the invisible church, and it's this abstract thing. But that the church is always people who are like Jesus and are living and working together to demonstrate the glory of God.

So how should we read this book? Well, whenever you read any piece of literature, there are certain things that are good to think about. One is, what kind of literature is this? Is this poetry? Is it an essay? Is it a letter to somebody? Is it a legal document? And that changes how we interpret it. Who is the author? Who is the one talking in the letter? Who is the audience? What's the relationship between the audience and the author? And what is the purpose of the letter?

I gave away my hand there. Okay.

So first of all, the literary style. And as we read it, we find out it's a letter.

It just says Paul, an apostle, and he's writing to the church at Ephesus. And as we read through it, we find out that's what it is. He's writing to them and talking to them about their lives and about his life. And we'll get to purpose later.

The author. Well, it's pretty point blank there at the beginning. The author is Paul. And he is not just any old Paul, but he's Paul the Apostle. There's significance with that. He's one who has been personally chosen by Jesus and commissioned to bear eyewitness to Jesus' life, his teachings, his death and resurrection, and his ascension.

These were men who were authoritative. They were given, picked by Jesus because of their trustworthiness and were trusted when they spoke and when they taught to be teaching the very words, explaining the way and the life of Jesus.

Audience. So who is he writing to? Well, he's writing to people. That's usually who we write to. But I put that there in light of the next one. So if we back up, he says, "Paul an Apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God to the Saints which are at Ephesus." So he's writing to Saints. So who is a Saint?

I remember Paul Freed. Some of you know. How many of you know Paul Freed? Okay. I remember Paul Freed preaching years ago when I was probably about 9 or 10, and he was telling a story about this boy who was asked what a Saint was. And he looked at a stained glass window, and he said, "A Saint is someone that you can see right through." Whatever. But these weird ideas we have of a Saint, of some unattainable super superhero who lives in a monastery somewhere and doesn't participate in family and all the rest of life, or some drawing of some person that looks like they had bad chicken and are about to pass out from the Middle Ages, that looks very powerless and very impractical to the world.

But what is a Saint? Well, they are humans. They're people. The word Saint there is the Greek word hagios, which means an awful thing. That doesn't mean awful like, "Ew," but it means awful like, "Whoa." Something that you are in awe of, you reverence, and you look up to. Sacred, physically pure, morally blameless, or religious, ceremonially consecrated, a most holy one or thing, a Saint. So it's somebody who is not the average cut. They are somebody who is living on a different level.

They're not mixed in with the rest. They are set apart. We use that term with sanctification, that it's set apart. This is the same word that's used when we say the Holy Spirit. It's not just any old spirit, but it's the Holy Spirit. It's the one that's pure, the one that's to be looked up to. So these are rather than trying to define it, I'm just going to read some verses here where Paul gives a picture of what these kind of people are like. 1 Peter 2:9, "But you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people," so people who stand out and are unique, "that you should show forth the praises of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."

So these are people who stand out because they have left their own way and the darkness of it in the world, and they are walking Jesus' way.

And Titus 2:11 through 14, "For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lust, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world, looking for that blessed hope and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify unto himself a peculiar people zealous of good works." I like that last part. So people who are excited and enthused, this is what they're really pushing for in life, is to live like Jesus.

So they're saints. They're people who have been purified. They're purified people who are zealous about obeying Jesus. And it is a family of those kind of people living in Ephesus. We'll talk a little more about what that means to their world a little bit later.

In today's world, when we think about a church at a certain place, we think about one congregation. And that's probably largely because of the denominalization of things and splits and splinters and all that kind of stuff. But the church at Ephesus didn't mean they all met in one building. It just meant they were all followers of Jesus who believed that they needed to repent of their sins and follow Jesus into a new life. And so the whole city, everybody there was either a Christian or they were something else. You weren't different kinds of Christians. But they would have met from house to house as Acts depicts it there in Jerusalem. So sometimes they would all come together to listen to teaching or whatever, but they fellowshipped in small groups locally.

But it was all everybody in the city, all however many hundred or thousand of them were, were all part of one church, the church of Jesus. They were all people who treated each other and their world in Jesus' way.

This is another significant thing in understanding really any part of the Bible is you versus you. So in English, when we say you, we can mean you or we can mean you. Now, in the South, we can differentiate that because we say y'all or all of y'all. And that way, you know. But the King James' terminology was not necessarily normal English of the day altogether. And there is actually a purpose to the thee and thou in the King James. And that is to specify the difference between you singular, which in the King James has always said thee or thou, and you plural, which is said ye or you, depending what the framework is there. So if you're ever in question like that, you can go back to the King James and look at it, and it'll tell you whether it's talking about you singular or you as a group.

And in Ephesians, except for two times, which are quotations there, every other time you is used, whatever translation you're using, it is you as the group. So this is not a book written to individuals about them living out their Christianity by themselves.

This whole book is to all of y'all, and it's about each individual in the context of working together and treating each other the way Jesus meant to. So I think that's important in understanding the audience the book is being written to. There's many times where verses are pulled, and if you just look at the context of who he's talking to, it doesn't mean that, and inferences are made. So the teaching of this letter is only to people who have changed their loyalties and are zealously pursuing the likeness of King Jesus, their saints. And the teaching in this letter must be understood and lived out in a life-on-life body context, so where you actually are part of each other's lives and working together as a body.

Outside of that, it doesn't really work. And I think there are so many things like that that get implemented in trying to help people to grow, but they're not happening in the context of family. And so they turn into guilt trips because they're not in the context of family, or the person doesn't see the need because he doesn't realize that this is affecting something that's bigger than me.

So this is written to the family of those kind of people who are living in Ephesus. And so the next thing to look at is a relationship, and that is best going to be looked at by looking at the story of what happened in Ephesus. So we're going to do a little history recap here of actually, we're going to look at the place itself and then a little bit of the story of Ephesus to understand the Apostle Paul's relationship and what's happening, what's going on in Ephesus, what their life is like. So the port city of Ephesus, which is located on what is now the western coast of Turkey, was the crown jewel of Asia Minor, which is today Turkey.

It had the population of nearly 250,000 people. I was going to look up this morning, and then I got distracted and forgot. Chambersburg is about, last I checked, was about 17,000 people. Hagerstown is 60-some thousand people. Does anybody know what the population of Harrisburg is?

It's a big city. That's 24. That's four times the size of Hagerstown.

240,000 would be four times, roughly. And it was home to more than 20 pagan temples. Artistic beauty, cultural learning, erotic pagan worship, or immoral practices in the worship. World trade, criminal activity, and sorcery flourished amidst great wealth. As residents of one of the most sophisticated cities of the Roman Empire, the Ephesians enjoyed such luxuries as running water, indoor toilets, fountains, gardens surrounded by magnificent columns, colonnaded streets, so these streets with pillars and statues all down through them, paved with marble, gymnasiums and baths, a library, and a theater that could seat an estimated 25,000 people, which is an important part of the story.

At the heart of the city's life and economy was the worship of Artemis, where in the book of Acts, she's called by her Roman name, Diana. Artemis would be her Greek name, and they merged their mythology there. So in some settings, she's more one way. In some ways, she's more another way. She's an ancient fertility goddess, so they look to her as the source of life and all that kind of stuff. The temple dedicated to Artemis was 450 feet long. I was trying to think of a spot to help you visualize this, and I think I didn't pace it off, but I think that's probably about the difference between the Breckbill's back porch and Judd's house.

Probably somewhere in there. Or is it not quite that far? So if you picture a temple that the main building takes that much space, had more than 120 columns, 60 feet high, which is higher than most of the silos around here, probably, and was one of the seven wonders of the entire world, the ancient world. Because Artemis was considered to be so powerful and protective of her temple, people from all over the world deposited money there, which in turn was loaned out at a high rate of interest.

Thus, the Ephesians became extremely wealthy and naturally were very protective of the goddess who made them successful, powerful, and rich. That's taken from Ray Vanderlin, who has studied a lot over there and leads tours over there. Here is an artist's reconstruction of the city. In the middle here, you see the theater, which is where the uproar at Ephesus took place.

And you have the marketplace here.

There's library. The library of Celsus, I think, is over here. Up here is more where the government stuff took place. There are houses right along through here where some of the rich people lived that they have excavated and been able to dig some stuff up from.

This is the theater, which kind of gives you a perspective looking out towards the sea, which this is a bay. Ended up being man-made in the end because silt and things kept washing in and raised the sea floor to where they couldn't get in with ships anymore. But it was a very nice little port back in there. And yeah, so that's a reconstruction of the theater. You can see the hill, the mountain off here to the side, and out here is the seaport. One thing that's interesting about the theater at Ephesus is it's open in the front where everybody's facing.

And there were different Roman theaters like that, but many of them were closed all the way around, like the Colosseum. And one thing that one historian says that he thinks this depicts is in a theater, people watch movies that they connect with. It's like they're visioning themselves in that, or people who are heroes to them. And this kind of points to the idea that the Ephesians had this dream about themselves, and this is what they aspired to be. So the plays that went on, in a sense, were being played out in the landscape of their own town because they're all sitting there watching this thing happening, and in the background behind is their own town.

It's almost like they're acting out here and visioning what they want their city, what they dream of their lives being. I wouldn't die on that fact, but I think it's an interesting observation. Here's a couple of photos of the ruins. It gives you a little bit of an impression of the size of the place. And you picture that place packed out with mad people screaming, and they're dragging some of the disciples into the bottom here, and who knows what's going to happen to them next once they're in there.

The town clerk gets up there and silences the people and says, "Listen, guys, we're getting hot water for this." There's an aerial view.

This is a reconstruction of the temple of Artemis. Nobody really knows because the last time it was destroyed was in, I think it was the 250s, 260s.

This one, I think, gives you a little better impression of the size of it. A tremendously humongous place. The temple of Diana, who was making everybody rich because of the tourism there and because people trusting them with their money. Today, this is what remains of the temple of the great goddess Diana that the silversmiths were fighting for.

That's what's left.

Artemis wasn't the only person being worshiped. This was also a place where the emperors chose to demonstrate their power. Not many cities had actual temples to the emperor. The emperor was worshiped at different times throughout the empire. It was more something that you would put some incense at the altar going into the marketplace or something like that. But Ephesus was home to a couple of temples of emperors. This is the ruins of the temple to Domitian, who would have reigned a little after Paul's death and was one of the more brutal emperors toward the Christians.

And in the front of this, the temple of Domitian is right here. And this is a hill. You can't see it on this pier, but this is the side of a hill. So as you come into the port, you see, you look into the town, and up on the hill here, you see this temple to Domitian. And there's this colossus or a statue that's about 50 feet high of him standing up there with his arm. If I stood in front of that arm there, I would come to probably about right in here somewhere. It tells you a little bit of the size of the statue, just that presence there. And the Christians in Ephesus walking around, and they're seeing all these things that represent the power of the Roman emperor who is oppressing them and the calls to pursue the Roman Empire's way of glory and fame and pleasure in their face all the time.

So by the way, this temple was not there during the time of the Apostle Paul. This temple was built in the '70s, the '70s. So Paul was executed around '65. So this temple was not there at the time, but it was built between then and the time Paul writes to the church at Ephesus in Revelation. So Paul is there at a time when this city is growing. A lot of the buildings that I was looking at were built at or shortly after in the next 100, 150 years. This is a city that's booming and thriving and prospering and displaying its wealth and its power and the triumph of them pursuing their dreams and their life.

Here's the reconstruction of the temple to Hadrian, which was later on a few years. There's the ruins of it. This is a reconstruction of the library of Celsus, a quite elaborate building where there was stored the learning and knowledge of the Greeks and the Romans. There are the ruins of that today.

Here's a street that leads up to that. You can see if you look to the end, is the library of Celsus right down here at the end. Very likely the Apostle Paul walked down this street. There's the ruins of it today.

Some excavations of some of the houses of the wealthy there. Down here on the floor, you can see there's a mosaic on the floor with a lion on there, and I can't quite see what he's doing, but there's lots of those on the walls around there.

Lots of evidence that they were very wealthy people. This is a monument built to the honor of the gods where they're aqueduct. So they build this masonry pipe through the mountains. So water comes by gravity down to the city. And where it comes out and goes into the pipes in the city, they have a fountain there, and they're worshiping and praising the gods for the prosperity and for the life that comes to them through that.

There's the ruins of that today.

Here's an entrance to the marketplace. Here's a famous road that goes from the theater out to the port where the procession to Diana would come in and bring her image. They'd take her out and dip her in the harbor to renew her virginity, depending which cult you were part of. And a lot of things happened. This was a very impressive place to walk down through when it was all still there.

The storyline here of the church at Ephesus begins, as we know it, with a brief visit by the Apostle Paul and Aquila and Priscilla as they left Corinth and then Cenchrea. And Paul was just there for very shortly, and they begged him to stay, but he said, "No, I got to get back to Jerusalem." So he left, and that's where Aquila and Priscilla meet Apollos. And he's a very eloquent speaker. He's a very zealous man, but he only knows the baptism of John. So they instruct him in the way of God more perfectly, and he becomes a very supportive person in the churches of Asia.

By the way, this island right up here, Lesbos, that's where Quinn was over there in Greece. And Hannah, you were there too, weren't you? Yeah. So just a little, here's Ephesus down here, and that's where that is.

Today, they draw the political lines like this. So technically, that's part of Greece, not part of Turkey.

Then in Paul's second missionary—I'm sorry, his third missionary journey, Paul goes back and spends some time there. He meets another batch of disciples of John, baptizes them, lays hands on them. They receive the Holy Ghost. Paul spends six months in the synagogue persuading the Jews that Jesus is King. He is their Messiah that they should follow. And then after the Jews begin to resist him, he moves to the Tyrannus's school and holds discussions there for two years.

This is where people are healed by Paul's handkerchiefs. They bring the sick, and they bring aprons and handkerchiefs and lay them on them, and they're healed. And people know that God is—that Jesus is the power, the one who is all-powerful. This one thing that's interesting because of the—well, we'll get to that in a second.

This is where the seven sons of Sceva, among others, try to cast out demons in the name of Jesus, whom Paul preaches. And they, as the King James says, the man leapt upon them and overcame them, and they fled out of that house naked and wounded.

And then many people who were practicing curious arts, so witchcraft and sorcery, repented and came and exposed what they had been doing and burned their books, which was a lot of money lost there. It's interesting then that Paul talks so much about the spiritual powers in Ephesians. He says, "You used to walk according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that's working in the children of disobedience."

He talks about this thing of demonstrating to the powers that are out there the goodness of Jesus' way. In the end of the chapter, or the end of the book in chapter 6, he talks about that we're not wrestling against people. It's not the Roman Empire. It's the principalities and powers in the spirit realm.

And so as a result of this many people repenting, we have this story of the uproar at Ephesus that we talked about earlier where it's threatening the trade because less people are worshiping her, and the silversmiths are afraid they're going to lose their money-making scheme. And so they begin to raise up a rabble, and they end up with the theater full of people yelling for two hours straight, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians, great is Diana!" Just hep rally.

Before it fortunately gets quieted down, and nobody that we know of got killed from that. But then Paul, a few days later, has a touching farewell with the brothers there and leaves and continues to go on through Greece. Again, on his way back, before he goes to Jerusalem and is captured.

Now, somewhere in between, when he's writing the letter to the first Corinthians there, he says this about Ephesus. He's planning to go there. He says, "A great door and effectual." So there's a lot of good to be done here. This is really important. A lot of good is happening here for Jesus and his kingdom, but there are many adversaries.

So on his way back, Paul stops in there, and he sends to Ephesus. He doesn't go to Ephesus, but he calls the leaders of the church there. They come down and meet him there. And that's where they get together on the seashore, and Paul exhorts them the last time there with some of these very famous things that are quoted a lot. "The Holy Ghost witnesses in every city that bonds and afflictions abide me." And he exhorts the elders to take heed to themselves and unto the flock that the Holy Ghost has made them overseers over and to feed the flock. That's often quoted at ordinations.

And the benediction, "I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you inheritance above all them that are sanctified among those that are sanctified." And Paul tells him that he will not see them again, and that's how it goes.

There's one other part of the story here. This is a ditto here, but there's one other part of the story here. Paul talks about being the apostle, being the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles. And there actually is a reason why he says that. He's not just speaking in general terms. Because when Paul goes to Jerusalem, the issue there that he ends up getting arrested over was because he was saying that the Messiah was for the Gentiles as well. And particularly because he had brought Trophimus.

I think that was his name. I was intending to make a slide about this, and I forgot. But he brings this guy from Ephesus to Jerusalem, and the Jews just assumed that he had brought him into the temple and polluted the temple. So the turning point that caused him to be arrested there, not that it was their fault or anything, but just the hinging point there was him owning this Christian brother from Ephesus.

So definitely some pretty strong connections between Paul and them. And then in the Revelation, we read probably another 25, 30 years later, some things are not going so good there. And Jesus says, "I know your works. You're very busy, but you've lost the power and the energy behind it. You forgot who you are in Christ, and you're not serving God out of love." And so it's kind of some things are your flame is going out. And call them to repentance and to return to a love for God that would fuel all that.

So the last point here, the purpose of the book. So in Ephesians 3, Paul says in the course of things, he's writing how that by revelation he made known unto me the mystery like I wrote before in few words. He doesn't say at the beginning of his book, there's not some issue like they're having strife and division and there's immorality like in Corinth.

But he doesn't say. He just starts out praising God and talking about all this great stuff. But he's saying now, he's saying in chapter 3 that back here, "I have written to you a few words already about this." So here he gives us a point-blank detail what he's writing about.

And he says, "I wrote about this mystery before in a few words so that when you read, you can understand my knowledge in the mystery of Christ." And then he goes on and talks more about it, this mystery that the Gentiles should be together with the Jews and that God would repair all things in Christ and demonstrate his wisdom. So this word here, revelation, is the Greek word apoxalypsis, which we say in English, apocalypse.

And right away, when you think about the scripture and you think about the apocalypse, what do you think of? What book of the Bible? Revelation, right? And we have all these ideas. When we think apocalypse, we think end times and when the world of men comes crashing down and all things end in fire and brimstone or the zombies come out as it is today.

And it's not what the word means.

The word means a disclosure, appearing, coming, lightning, manifesting to be revealed, a revelation. So it's like when Apple comes out with a new product, right? And they have the unveiling ceremony, and all the big wigs are all out there waiting, and they say, "Ladies and gentlemen," and they grab the cover that's over and they say, "How do they say that?"

Anyways, "I something to you, the new, I whatever it is," right? And they pull it off, and everybody sees it, and it's like, "Wow, look at that. What a good job Steve Jobs did, although he's gone now." It's that kind of a picture. It's scales falling off your eyes, putting two and two together type of thing.