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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadMatthew Poole Commentary - Ephesians 1:2 - 1:2
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Ver. 2,3. Blessed be; i.e. thanked, praised. We bless God when we praise him for, and acknowledge him in, his excellencies or benefits.
Who hath blessed us; hath vouchsafed or communicated, all spiritual blessings to us. God blesseth us when he doeth good to us: and so the word blessed is taken in a different sense from what it was in the former clause.
With all; of all sorts or kinds.
Spiritual blessings; in opposition to temporal and worldly, which the carnal Jews principally expected, and the law mostly promised, {Deu_28:1-14} and which were but types and shadows of those spiritual blessings which immediately relate to the spiritual life and salvation of believers.
In heavenly places; Gr. supercelestial, or heavenly: understand either:
1. Things; and then it seems to be the same as spiritual blessings, only in other terms. Or:
2. Places, in opposition to earthly places, particularly the land of Canaan, in which God had formerly promised to bless his people. These spiritual blessings are in heavenly places, because, though they reach us here on earth, yet they are derived to us from God and Christ in heaven, and in heaven only have their full perfection and consummation hereafter.
In Christ; by or through Christ; upon the account of whose merit, and by whose efficiency, these spiritual blessings are derived from God to us. Or, in Christ as our Head, the repository and seat of all Divine blessings, from whom they flow down upon us as his members, receiving all we have out of his fulness. He seems to have respect to the promise made to Abraham, Gen_22:18: That in his seed all the nations of the earth should be blessed; pointing out Christ as that seed, and those blessings as spiritual. See Act_3:25,26.