Before moving on from this amazing and theologically rich sentence, I thought it might be helpful to look at it once, altogether. I will be using my ‘loose’ translation from the Greek New Testament, though, for this particular exercise.
Speak well of God, the Father of our Lord Messiah Jesus, for he has spoken well of us, with all the spiritually rich good Messiah words, selected to be holy people, as if we were blameless in his sight, it was love ever since the foundation of the world — his plan was always adoption to him through Messiah Jesus, and it was something he really wanted, it made him happy in celebration of his fantastic grace, graced in the beloved one, in him, through his blood, we have deliverance, the forgiveness of wrongdoing, and so the wealth of his grace which flooded us with all wisdom and insight showing us his mysterious will, and he was happy to show us — and all in him, re-establishing everything in heaven and earth around Messiah as he oversees the ticking of time — we were selected in him, it was his purpose, his forever plan, everything happening according to his will that we be in celebration of his glory, pre-hoping in Messiah the person who, after you heard the true words about the good news of your salvation, then marked you with an emblem in the Spirit about the holy promise who is the down payment on our inheritance, until the whole estate is ours, praise his glory!
As you could well imagine, there have been innumerable attempts by people, all smarter than me, to organize this sentence in some comprehensive way. Many of the views see verse three as an opening to a hymn, a eulogy, or doxology. Some see three parts of a hymn which follow, each to a different part of the Trinity. This view has 4-6 as being to the Father, 7-12 for the Father, and 13-14 to the Holy Spirit. Other schemes for organization involve the use of key verbs like ‘having chosen’ and ‘predestined’ and ‘having made known’. Others think it a baptismal hymn that Paul has adopted and inserted into the text. For the record, I chuckle at this one because it is the favorite of New Testament scholars. They think everything was a ‘baptismal hymn’.
All of these views on what this is have some validity and are interesting, but in my view this is simply a really great example of Paul being like you and me in the sense we just keep adding one describing phrase after another. If you listen to people pray, especially pastors, this is exactly how it often happens, a kind of wandering communication that gets wrapped up in one glorious thought after another. More specifically, listen to people speak to one another, and you will rarely find clear verbs and nouns and sentence structure but instead phrases that run together like this:
We went to the store to get milk, you know the good milk not that nasty two-percent kind that mama doesn’t like and wouldn’t you know it but as we were turning around the corner from the cheese because I had to grab some of that delicious brie while I was at the store — I just love that stuff, warmed up and topped with honey then you dip into it crackers and some green olives on the side — but it was right there that we ran into Suzie Sunshine and her new ‘boyfriend’ for the month because I called him by the name of the last guy which was Randy because of the fact I thought I had met this new guy, turns out his name is Franklin and he is very particular about that Franklin because when we were getting ready to leave I called him Frank and both Suzie Sunshine and Franklin corrected me and then the next thing I knew they had invited us to come over to their house for supper on Saturday night because of the fact Suzie was making up a big dish of lasagna to celebrate her son’s birthday — I can’t remember his name but I think it is something like Dakota or Darren, who turned ten years old last week but they couldn’t celebrate the birthday then on account of the flu.
There are a couple of characteristics of this doxology that are fascinating to me. First, the scope of Ephesians 1:3-14 is universal in its vision for salvation. The text is rooted in Old Testament ideas, but the vision has enlarged to all humanity who call upon Jesus as the selected and chosen ones. Election then is based upon faith and response, not genetics or whims. Second, the key idea in the whole thing is the sovereignty of God’s plan, which is to make us children of God through Jesus. Third, I do see the Trinity in these verses where by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are working together in different through this unveiled mystery to bring about our deliverance. Anyone who would deny the biblical teachings the Trinity must first sit with this passage for a good long time and ponder, if not three personalities doing three different yet related things, then what? There is no other explanation for what we find here. Praise be to God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!
Also notice, please, that when it finally ends, I opted for an exclamation point rather than a period, for I can’t imagine Paul coming to the end of that and not shouting, either aloud or internally, ‘Praise his glory!’