Week 46 Ephesians
Halfway through the first chapter I realize I’ve been dropped into the deep end of the pool.
That first long paragraph – verses three-to-fourteen – is content heavy to say the least.
I was wondering what I could do with it. Thought it might be an idea to copy out each phrase one-under-the-other like an ingredient list. See if re-formatting it might help open up anything for me.
But I didn’t have time.
What I did do was write the verse numbers – 3, 4, 5…14 – in a column down the page. Then I re-read each verse, counted up how many distinct-information-phrases (DIPs) I could find and wrote the number beside each verse. There were about 21 DIPs in the twelve verses.
That exercise didn’t help much. I still had the feeling that Paul was kind of piling-on with a lot of DIPs (some of them pretty complicated). Wondering why.
It occurred to me that something else might be going on. I’d just finished reading Galatians and in Galatians Paul reduced the gospel to a pretty basic formula: if I believe that the Lord lived, died as my substitute, and came back to life, then I’ll be born into spiritual life. That’s it.
So was Paul changing his tune for the Ephesians? Adding-on a bunch of extras? I really doubt it. He’d already said what he thought of different gospels. I think it’s the same gospel but here in Ephesians drawn up in quite a bit more detail.