Ephesians 1:3

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ.

Every spiritual blessing ... There are no spiritual blessings of any kind whatever, other than "in Christ." As Bruce said, "Paul here struck the keynote of Ephesians at once. The writer and his readers are `in Christ,' members of Christ, sharers of his resurrection life."[6]

In heavenly places ... MacKnight gave the meaning here as "in the Christian church";[7] and, although the blessings "in Christ" are certainly those in his spiritual body, which is the church, it seems evident that more is intended here. As Bruce expressed it, "Christ is exalted to the heavenly realm, and thus those who are `in him' belong to that heavenly realm also."[8] This remarkable expression occurs five times in this epistle (Ephesians 1:3,20; 2:6; 3:10; 6:12) and nowhere else. The expression was evidently used by Paul to convey the idea that the totality of all blessings of a spiritual nature and having eternal value are to be found exclusively "in Christ."

With this profound verse, Paul began a doxology which runs through Ephesians 1:14, composed of one long complicated sentence "impossible to analyze, in which each successive thought crowds in on the one before."[9] Some of the grandest and most perplexing words in the vocabulary of Christianity are used in it, such as adoption, redemption, foreordained, heritage and sealed.

[6] F. F. Bruce, op. cit., p. 27.

[7] James MacKnight, Apostolical Epistles and Commentary, Ephesians (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1969), p. 258.

[8] F. F. Bruce, op. cit., p. 27.

[9] Francis Foulkes, op. cit., p. 44.