As we continue our study of Ephesians 1:1-2, we could mull over every word, looking at cross references and doing word studies until we have successfully forgotten what our actual objective is: to understand what the author intended his audience to hear.
If you think about it, do you want everything you say (or write for that matter) to be pulled apart and analyzed in its constituent parts? Or would you like your audience to hear the flow of what you’re saying? Do not misunderstand, I am a proponent of studying scripture. Obviously, or we wouldn’t be sitting here, enjoying this delicious coffee in a beautiful pottery mug and having this conversation, right?
We want to balance between studying and letting the reality of what we discern change us. When I was in Anatomy and Physiology in college (briefly, while I was pregnant with our first child), I dissected a cat. At the beginning of the semester, when they distributed the specimens, they looked like cats. At the end of the semester, not so much. We do not want to do that to the scripture, where all the parts are laying around and you can’t tell where any of it goes anymore.
For this section of scripture, as I studied it, I decided the main concept I wanted to understand better at this time was Who Am I? If my conclusion about the recipients being multiple churches across Asia Minor is true, then an implication is that this letter could’ve been written to my church. Paul wrote it for congregations he hadn’t met; what is true about them? Without knowing them personally, what does the human author, under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, say about members of local churches?
The two words I see that describe the audience are saints and faithful. Let us begin our adventure of exploration with the term saint.
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
Ephesians 1:1 (ESV)
To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus:
Before we pull out our cool books or look somewhere outside of scripture, we want to remember to let scripture interpret scripture as much as possible. Let’s consider that diagram of concentric circles I showed you in this article. Wanting to be polite to our author, let’s ask Paul first what he meant when he used the word saint before we ask someone else. We ask him by looking at other places he used the word. Using a concordance or Bible software, you can look up all the places this word appears in the Bible, zeroing in on Paul’s writing.
In my software, I can see of the 95 times the word is used in the NT, Paul used it 42 times. As I scroll down, I see references for Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, oh look! Ephesians! Let’s see how he used it in the very letter we are immersed in.
For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints…
Ephesians 1:15 (ESV)
Ephesians 1:18 (ESV)
…having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints…
In both of the verses above, it looks like Paul uses the word saint without defining it too much. No surrounding context defining the term. Let’s look further.
Ephesians 2:19 (ESV)
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God…
A-ha! Now we’re talking! Paul tells us something about saints here. This is going to get a little deep if you are not thrilled to your core by grammar, but wade in a little ways with me.
There is this cool rule in Greek grammar I learned about a few years back called the Granville Sharp’s rule. This stuff just fires up my imagination! Look at the little graphic I made below.
Let’s dismantle the individual words there and figure out what this means.
- Article. In English grammar, these are a, an, the. In Greek, there are articles too. Using your interlinear Bible (I use my ESV in Logos. If you don’t have access to a similar software program, remember you can use studylight.org for free online.), you can discover the different word-types by hovering or right-clicking or whatever to get the information to pop up about the word.
- Noun. Remember in English class? A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea. Common nouns are what we want as opposed to proper nouns in the application of this rule.
- και. Don’t get stressed; you just read a tiny bit of Greek. Transliterated (put into letters from English), it’s kai. It is translated and . Neat-o, huh?
Now that we know what the constituent parts are, we are going to look at our verse and see what it means for us hermeneutically.
Can you look at the verse in English and guess where this ARTICLE, NOUN, και, NOUN might be? “…the saints and members of the household of God.” Cool. Let’s keep going to see what it means.
This grammatical construction means that the two nouns have the same referent. They are a unit. They go together. Roughly, they are equivalent. We learn from this exciting grammar rule that saints are also members (of the household of God). Therefore, people in God’s household are also saints. That’s a good start for understanding what a saint is.
If you look around further in that verse, we also find that the audience is no longer strangers and aliens, and in contrast they are fellow citizens.
Here is what we’ve learned so far:
- Members of the household of God
- Not strangers
- Not aliens
- Fellow citizens
We can look at some other verses that Paul used this word, too, but I know you would enjoy exploring that on your own. Let’s return to Ephesians 1:1 and look at the other word Paul uses to describe his audience, faithful.
As I studied this word, I noticed there was a superscripted footnote in the ESV. It didn’t seem to convey any information about the word in question so I moved over to the NET. The note on the word faithful is a “tn” which stands for translator note. The translators chose the English sentence construction, in this case, because of the way the grammar is in the original Greek.
The meat of the translator note says that the Greek style “suggests that the saints are identical to the faithful”. Let’s add that to the list:
- Members of the household of God
- Not strangers
- Not aliens
- Fellow citizens
- Faithful
Without even cracking open a Greek dictionary, we have a working definition of the Greek behind saints and faithful. I don’t like to trust my own scholarship without verifying with someone smarter than myself, I’m going to make a quick stop in Bill Mounce’s dictionary to see if we have arrived at a reasonable definition. Forsaking preconceived ideas and allowing scripture to tell me what I need to know is always a challenge. I want to avoid allowing my own mind to decide, “I like this definition. I’ll go with that.”
Looking up the Greek words ἅγιος and πιστός (hagios and pistos, respectively) in Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, I found these definitions:
[41] ἅγιος hagios 233× separate from common condition and use; dedicated. Lk. 2:23; hallowed; used of things, τὰ ἅγια, the sanctuary; and of persons, saints, e.g., members of the first Christian communities; pure, righteous, ceremonially or morally; holy [39, 40] See consecrate; holy; sacred; saint; sanctify.
Mounce, W. D. (2006). Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old & New Testament Words. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
[4412] πιστός pistos 67× faithful, true, trusty, Mt. 24:45; 25:21, 23; Lk. 12:42; 2 Tim. 2:2; put in trust, 1 Cor. 7:25; true, veracious, Rev. 1:5; 2:13; credible, sure, certain, indubitable, Acts 13:34; 1 Tim. 1:15; believing, yielding belief and confidence, Jn. 20:27; Gal. 3:9; spc. a Christian believer, Acts 10:45; 16:1, 15; 2 Cor. 6:15; πιστόν, in a true-hearted manner, right-mindedly, 3 Jn. 5 [4103] See dependable; faithful; reliable; trustworthy.
Mounce, W. D. (2006). Mounce’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old & New Testament Words. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
As I interpret it, both of these words are used for members of Christian communities and for Christian believers. Since we know these two words are basically synonyms, I believe we have correctly identified what the author intended for his audience to hear. Saints and faithful are people who believe in Jesus. Saint = member of Christian community = faithful.
In good Bible study, there is only one interpretation or meaning of a passage but there are potentially myriad applications. You can apply this information as fits in your life; I’m going to share one way I applied this to my life.
In my past, I’ve had a lot of folks tell me I have to be good; be a certain way; fit a certain mold; look like a certain type of gal to be a good Christian woman. Actually, no. I don’t. What is required for me to be a good Christian woman, to be counted among the saints and faithful is actually in the very next three words in our verse:
…IN CHRIST JESUS!
What is required of me to be “worthy” of being part of God’s family is that I believe in Jesus. Believing in Jesus is going to change how my heart desires to live and that has changed my life markedly. But as for fitting in a certain mold? No. I’m a Christian woman who eats meat (with my salad). I don’t like foofy tea parties. I like laughing OUT LOUD! I like sweating and getting dirty. I like challenging my husband respectfully (and he likes it too). I like driving my Jeep on crazy-hard 4×4 trails when other women don’t. I like being goofy and did I mention I like to be LOUD? I am a member of the household of God because and only because I am in Christ Jesus.
Definitions for the precise use of these words have nothing to do with the recipients’ behavior. It has everything to do with the object the recipients are putting their trust in.
And since we saw earlier, the recipients of this letter could have been any Christian church that loves Jesus, that includes us. We are part of God’s family because we are in Christ Jesus.
Our Bible Study Bite for today is to leave our preprogrammed ideas, to accurately interpret God’s word with cross references, Bible dictionaries, and other tools, and to then apply it to our lives. Let’s live in the truth and live in freedom!
