Our grandsons like to fish. The verdict is still out on the granddaughter (she’s six years old), but the boys are locked in. The ones in Arkansas are blessed in that they have a regular place to fish, so we get a quite a few pictures from their outings. I taught them early on what any self-respecting fisherman or woman knows—if you hold your fish close to the camera it will make them look bigger than they really are. As you can see from the picture the oldest boy understands this (the one in the middle), while the other two still have a way to go.
Of course, the opposite holds true as well. If you hold the fish away from the camera it will look smaller than it really is. While no one would do this intentionally it nonetheless reflects the truth that we also have the ability to make things look smaller than the really are.
I think that’s where we are—especially in the first half of Ephesians. It’s hard to read this section of Scripture and draw the conclusion that, as impossible as it sounds, we may have been holding the Christian faith too far away from the camera—we somehow have not grasped the scale of God’s glorious kingdom.
By this I don’t mean that we haven’t understood all there is to know about the kingdom. Of course, we haven’t—you could say that about just about any subject. But that’s not what I’m saying here. I’m talking about the possibility that we are being led astray by what we think we already know.
It’s like the stories we hear on a somewhat regular basis about people who have a painting in their garage, attic, or basement. It’s been there for years. They never thought much about it, but it turns out to be a Van Gogh, Rembrandt, or a Picasso and it’s worth millions of dollars. They thought they knew what they had, but they didn’t. It was far more glorious than they ever imagined!
That’s the kind of thing Paul is rolling out in Ephesians—that we’ve been holding our faith too far from the camera and we haven’t seen what God has accomplished in Christ as it really is—in all of its depth, wonder, and glory. And it’s our scale that’s off. We tend to think of redemption exclusively on a human scale, but Scripture also speaks of it from a cosmic perspective.
In Ephesians 1:10 we’re told that God is bringing “unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.” Colossians 1:20 speaks of Him reconciling “to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.”
It’s the “in heaven” part of those verses that throw us because we normally think of sin as something relatively localized—it happened on our little planet and nowhere else. But this does not mesh with picture presented with in Scripture. After all, sin didn’t just happen on our planet, it also happened in the heavenly realms among the angels (2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6). Sin is more than a planetary concern, Paul’s words in Romans 8 are that all creation is waiting to be “brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” will see in the resurrection (v. 21). Creation awaits its own resurrection.
If it’s true we should view sin on a universal scale, then shouldn’t we hear about the cross in such a way? Absolutely. Colossians 2:15 tells us that at the cross, Jesus “disarmed the powers and authorities . . . triumphing over them by the cross.” These are not the earthly powers and authorities who sought His death, but rather the same powers and authorities Paul speaks of as occupying the heavenly realms (3:10, 6:12). 2 Corinthians 5:19 says that “God was reconciling the world (cosmos) to Himself through Christ.” What happened at the cross was much larger in scale and scope than we normally think. There was a need for God to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth and that’s exactly what He did through Christ and where everything is headed.
A Taste of Grace with Bruce Green 