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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
‘In the heavenly places.’
Eph_1:3 (R. V.)
We have said that this is the Epistle of the believer’s union with the risen and ascended Christ. The expression ‘in the heavenly places’ is one illustration of this. It occurs in no other place in Scripture, but is quite peculiar in this Epistle. There it occurs five times, being but one of many expressions which raise our thoughts to Christ as ascended into the heavens, ‘so that we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with Him continually dwell.’ We will now consider the five contexts in which the words occur, taking them not in the order of chapter and verse, but rather of the ideas which they suggest. We shall also assume that the words have reference in all five places not to heavenly things or heavenly blessings, but to heavenly places—the abode of Christ, and therefore of the Christian.
I. Christ in heavenly places.—In chapter Eph_1:20 we find the words used of the present abode of Christ Himself; that height of glory to which he ascended, when He ‘went up on high, and led captivity captive.’ ‘He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places.’ Such is the first thought which the words suggest. They raise our minds to things above; they bid us ‘lift up our hearts.’ Let us ‘lift them up unto the Lord.’ It is ours surely at this time to rejoice with no mere selfish joy for the blessings which Christ’s ascension has procured, but with that blessed self-forgetting joy which can rise out of the merely personal, and can triumph in the triumph of our King.
II. Believers in heavenly places.—In chapter Eph_2:6 the same expression is used of the present abode of true believers, and that because it is the abode of Christ. ‘God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, quickened us together with Christ … and raised us up with Him, and made us sit with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus.’ Here is the central truth on which this Epistle hinges, our union with Christ. He who believes upon Jesus Christ, casting, resting his whole self upon Him, as revealed in His glorious Person, His finished work—that man becomes at the moment of belief, by the Holy Spirit’s energy, united with Christ, a member of His body, the Church. He is ‘in Christ Jesus,’ as a branch is in a vine tree, and therefore, in a true though spiritual sense, where Christ is, there he is also.
III. Blessings in heavenly places.—In chapter Eph_1:3 a further stage is arrived at. The Apostle here makes ‘every spiritual blessing’ depend on these two previous verities. Christ is ‘in the heavenly places’; we are ‘in Him,’ and so are ourselves in the same heavenly places. What follows? Thus united to Him, all His fullness flows to us; we are blessed ‘with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Him.’ It is the epitome of the whole Epistle. ‘Ye are complete in Him.’ Little wonder, then, that Christ Himself said, ‘It is expedient for you that I go away.’ All that Christ has in our nature gained by being raised into the heavenly places is thus brought within our reach. ‘All things are ours,’ and it is only our weak faith, our vague beliefs, our want of full surrender to the Holy Spirit’s energy, and the consequent weakness of our union with Christ, that hinders our full enjoyment of them. Let it be so no longer. If these things be so, let us ‘be borne on,’ and so let us ‘press on to perfection.’
Two passages now remain; they do not bear directly, like the first three, on the central truth of our union with Christ, but on certain consequences which follow from it.
IV. Wisdom in heavenly places.—In chapter Eph_3:10 St. Paul is speaking of the great privilege of preaching ‘unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,’ of ‘making all men see the dispensation of the mystery’ hitherto ‘hidden in God.’ And with what object? ‘To the intent that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the Church the manifold wisdom of God.’ ‘Which things,’ St. Peter says, ‘angels desire to look into.’ The same thought is present here; it is that those heavenly intelligences who wait around the throne, whose only desire is to do God’s will, take the keenest interest in the unfolding of God’s purposes, and love to study them. And thus we learn one of the glorious privileges of the Church of Christ. Not only is it to reflect the glory of her Lord to this world below, but it is to be the mirror by which angels and archangels themselves must stoop and look, if they are to behold the gradual unfolding of Divine love in the manifold wisdom of God.
V. Conflict in heavenly places.—One passage remains, and it is at first sight a startling one. It tells us of our conflict, and that conflict is ‘in the heavenly places.’ In chapter Eph_6:12 we read, ‘For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.’ Thus the same word which is used to express the abode of Christ, and of our being blessed in Him, and of the home of the holy angels, is here used of the abode of our terrible foes, or at least of the scenes of our conflict with them. The true key to the difficulty seems to be found in the same Epistle. In chapter Eph_2:2 Satan, the leader of these spirit hosts, is called ‘the prince of the power of the air.’ Let us remember that the word translated ‘air’ always means in Scripture the atmosphere which surrounds this earth; so that the very air we breathe is associated in Scripture with the agency of the powers of Satan. Turning to the expression of our text, we must remember that the word ‘heaven’ has in Scripture a twofold reference. There is a lower as well as a higher heaven—a heaven which signifies the same region as ‘the air’ as well as a heaven which is the abode of angels and of God. It must be this lower heaven which is specially referred to in the last passage. The ‘prince of the power of the air’ is the captain of these hosts of wickedness which assail us even in ‘the heavenly places.’ We are ‘in the heavenly places,’ but so, too, are our foes. Still, we can face the fact without fear.
Bishop T. W. Drury.