Dale Partridge - Bible Blueprint - Block Diagram of Ephesians 1_3-6

00:00:00.600 Welcome to this edition of the Bible Blueprint. My name is Dale Partridge. We're going to be

00:00:04.880 breaking down Ephesians 1, 3 through 6 in a block diagram. For those who don't know what a block

00:00:11.340 diagram is, really it's just a method of scriptural observation. And it allows a reader or someone

00:00:20.080 who's studying the passage of scripture to visually see the literary structure of a particular text.

00:00:27.500 it allows you to see what you can't see in paragraph form as easily so basically it's

00:00:34.840 a process that allows you to see kind of grammatical units of a particular passage

00:00:40.920 in blocks or in groups that's why it's called a block diagram so what you're going to see me do

00:00:46.980 here is you can do this in a word document and you're going to basically have each main clause

00:00:54.160 which you'll see what a main clause is in a minute, placed to the far left side, and then

00:00:59.540 dependent clauses or developing clauses, which are usually identified as prepositional phrases.

00:01:06.320 So lots of grammar stuff here. These are modifying the main clause and they're placed beneath the

00:01:12.840 phrase in which or the word they modify. So block diagrams are primarily used for English. They're

00:01:19.240 not something you would use in Greek or Hebrew, where you would be using more of a line diagram.

00:01:25.520 But again, it's a really wonderful process, and you'll get a chance to see how I break down a

00:01:30.520 particular text before I teach it or I preach it. And so this is for Ephesians Bible study number

00:01:38.300 two, and we're going to be breaking down this text together. So first thing I do is that I always

00:01:46.320 put each verse on its own line. That's just a really easy way to make sure that we have

00:01:56.640 things organized. Generally speaking, each verse is going to be the beginning of a sentence. If

00:02:02.200 it's not, that's okay. And I'm going to talk about some of this passage of scripture here

00:02:06.060 that's important. The other thing that really helps is I'm just going to break down the text

00:02:10.580 in any punctuation that really changes the text of commas and periods, those are automatically

00:02:18.000 going to be line breaks. So yeah, in love, we're going to have to deal with this in love thing in

00:02:23.320 a second. And so we've got these commas here, and this is just kind of jump-starting the process of

00:02:29.760 breaking down the text. So verse 3 here through 14 is actually one sentence in the Greek. So

00:02:39.880 when I'm diagramming here verses three through six that has periods in the English, there's no

00:02:47.040 periods in the Greek. And so these have been interpretations of how they end. For example,

00:02:54.840 if you see here in verse four, is Paul saying that we should be holy and blameless before him

00:03:02.220 in love? Or is he saying, in love, he predestined us for adoption to himself? That's an interpretive

00:03:11.880 translation of putting a period there, because ESV thinks that he's talking about in love,

00:03:21.360 he predestined us for adoption, where some translations in the past have thought that

00:03:27.220 we should be holding him blameless before him in love.

00:03:31.660 So there's some things going on in the background that's important.

00:03:34.700 But let's go ahead and start and give you kind of an idea of what's happening here.

00:03:39.040 So essentially, in the Greek, there's one giant main clause, and that's blessed be the

00:03:43.780 God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

00:03:46.460 It would actually be blessed be the God and Father.

00:03:48.580 So we're going to start with this.

00:03:50.480 Blessed be the God and Father.

00:03:52.280 That's going to be our main clause.

00:03:53.640 We know that a main clause is generally a subject and a verb put together.

00:04:00.720 And so, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

00:04:04.500 Now, let's put of our Lord Jesus Christ.

00:04:06.980 So, God of our Lord Jesus Christ or God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

00:04:14.440 Who has, who's the who?

00:04:16.820 Is the who Jesus Christ or is the who the Father?

00:04:19.200 Oh, the who is the Father.

00:04:20.120 So, blessed be the God and Father who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing.

00:04:25.620 So, essentially, we can remove this modifier if we, grammatically speaking, right?

00:04:30.380 We could remove that, and the sentence still works.

00:04:33.600 So, we know that this is just a modifier.

00:04:35.260 It's a prepositional phrase.

00:04:37.360 Of is a preposition.

00:04:39.140 So, this of our Lord Jesus Christ is a prepositional phrase, and that's a modifying Father, right?

00:04:45.060 So blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us.

00:04:50.780 Where have we been blessed?

00:04:52.700 We've been blessed in Christ.

00:04:56.080 His blessing of us, the location of our blessing is in Christ.

00:05:01.100 He blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

00:05:07.020 He blessed us in the heavenly places, or he blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

00:05:16.180 So the location of the heavenly, of the spiritual blessings are in the heavenly places.

00:05:23.620 Even as, now we're going to leave verse 4 over on the left, because that allows us to continue to see our verse numbers, which is helpful later.

00:05:33.240 and so even as now even as could be a comparison clause but actually in this case

00:05:43.060 it's operating as a causal clause so you could almost translate this word from the greek to the

00:05:50.700 english to in as much as in as much as or because and i'm placing it under blessed because you could

00:06:02.580 read it. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us because he chose

00:06:08.480 us in him. The way that we've been blessed is through our election, essentially. We're being

00:06:17.060 chosen in him. And so I'm going to put that there. Even as he chose us, where did he choose us?

00:06:25.600 he chose us in he chose us in him uh he chose us before is also a preposition

00:06:36.440 um he chose us before the foundation of of the world now foundation of the world

00:06:43.940 um you you would maybe want to go oh foundation of the world right you know put it there i think

00:06:52.380 that's actually not what you would do because I think foundation of the world is operating in

00:06:58.060 what's called a noun clause. It's kind of a thing. It's kind of like Lord of Lords or Holy of Holies

00:07:03.480 or King of Kings, right? It's a, it's, um, you know, foundation of the world. It's kind of one

00:07:09.120 statement. So I'm going to leave it there as, as that, and that we should be holy and blameless

00:07:17.640 before him in, in love. And so, um, well, I'm going to find that I'm going to put this here

00:07:27.660 that we should be. Um, so where is the, that going to go? This is going to be tricky, right? So, um,

00:07:37.300 we go before him chose us. Why did he choose us? That we, okay. Yeah. So even it's because

00:07:47.580 he chose us in him or because he chose us that we should be holy and blameless.

00:07:54.420 So I'm going to, I'm going to do this.

00:07:55.820 This is what I do when you have kind of two items here.

00:07:58.360 I do holy and, and blameless before him, um, blameless before him.

00:08:10.840 um and so we're we're you could actually do blameless before him yeah i think that's

00:08:20.120 functional i mean you could also do this and so this isn't where are we blameless we're blameless

00:08:25.920 before him um and so you you could do that i'm going to just leave it though because i think

00:08:33.160 it's a statement blameless before him. And so this is an art and a science. So from one person

00:08:41.640 to another, your block diagrams might be 95% the same because grammar is a little flexible and you

00:08:48.200 have some interpretation there. It would be strange if they were 30% different between two

00:08:54.760 expositors, but I think it's very fair that you might have some that are 10% different from each

00:09:01.640 other. And so we have this word here in love, the way that the ESV translates it is going to be put

00:09:08.980 here in love this way, which again, I think is super strange. So let's just, let's just do some

00:09:17.240 adjustment here. I'm going to put five that way and go in love. He predestined us. He predestined

00:09:26.880 us for what? He predestined us for adoption, right? Um, I guess it's not, what is for adoption

00:09:35.780 modifying? Well, it's modifying us, right? So he predestined us for adoption, uh, for adoption

00:09:44.980 where? To himself, as, to himself, as sons. Let's see, this could be, let's maybe adjust this some

00:10:04.940 more here. So we go, in love he predestined us to himself. So this is fine too. You can actually

00:10:11.720 leave it this way because the sentence works this way. In love, he predestined us to himself.

00:10:17.820 He predestined us as sons. And how did he do all of this? He predestined us

00:10:26.760 through Jesus Christ. So this is kind of neat, right? So you get in love, he predestined us

00:10:33.020 for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ. So you get a little point there. So you

00:10:38.080 get to already see, you go, wow, okay, cool. Now I can do, I can do a, you know, some outline here

00:10:49.040 of, okay, for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, right? So you start to have

00:10:57.320 this structure where you can start using points and having an outline for whatever you're going

00:11:07.220 to be teaching and preaching on. So now we get over here to according. So he predestined us

00:11:12.680 according. How did he predestine us? He predestined according to the purpose of his will.

00:11:25.060 And I'm going to just again, put this, we have some weird stuff here, according.

00:11:28.200 so this will be six right here according to the purpose

00:11:37.280 of his will he predestined i'm actually going to say this here so we get another thing

00:11:47.100 another list there a court he predestined us yeah look at this list this is going to just get longer

00:11:53.780 to the praise of what of his glorious grace with

00:12:04.520 so this is talking about the grace the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed

00:12:15.300 uh he has blessed us um you know what i'm gonna do i messed that one up right there so we'll back

00:12:27.860 that up he has blessed us in the beloved so the location of our blessing is in the beloved

00:12:35.440 okay so now we have this really wonderful block diagram that's letting us see a little bit of

00:12:46.600 the structure of what's going on here so we have blessed be the god and father of our lord jesus

00:12:52.520 christ blessed be god and father who has blessed us in christ with every spiritual blessing in the

00:12:59.940 heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we

00:13:07.100 should be holy and blameless before him. So you start to see, you know, a little bit of a list

00:13:14.640 here. In love, he predestined us for adoption. And again, I think, you know what, when I'm

00:13:23.480 thinking more about this, I might want to do this. For adoption, where's the adoption? To himself,

00:13:29.940 as sons. He predestined us for adoption to himself as sons. He predestined us through

00:13:37.860 Jesus Christ. He predestined us according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his

00:13:45.480 glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. So you do have a couple points here,

00:13:50.580 right? So you get like a point here. Oops, that shouldn't work that way. I need to go this way.

00:13:56.160 you get a point here, you get a point here, you get a point here, you get a point here.

00:14:01.920 And so you start to see a little bit of a structure. Now, a couple of things that I want

00:14:05.820 to mark. One is, I always mark my main clauses in yellow. And so our main clauses here

00:14:14.480 and our other main clauses here. So we have our main clauses there. Now, we also have a whole

00:14:21.420 bunch of different developing clauses. And these developing clauses teach us what the

00:14:25.640 sentence is doing. And so if I'm going to identify those, I'm going to identify those in green. So

00:14:32.920 blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, okay, that's kind of not the best

00:14:40.840 color. Let's do like a darker green. Okay, who, and who is a relative clause. It means that it's

00:14:49.320 identifying a person, it's usually a pronoun, right? So I want to know who the who is. And the

00:14:56.560 who is an antecedent. So the answer to the pronoun is what's called an antecedent. And so blessed be

00:15:02.880 the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, well, who's the who? The who is God the Father.

00:15:08.180 And so I want to know that. So I'm going to be marking all of the other pronouns in a minute

00:15:14.740 here, but who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,

00:15:23.060 even as, so this is again, a causal clause, which I'm noticing there. It looks like a comparison

00:15:29.200 clause. Like it looks like he's saying just as, um, like Johnny is just as good as Billy, right?

00:15:38.560 That's a comparison clause.

00:15:41.040 A causal clause is he loves her because she's beautiful.

00:15:46.020 The ground of or the cause of his love for her is her beauty.

00:15:52.680 And so you want to find out which clause is which.

00:15:56.020 And it takes a little bit of time, but there's really only about 12 different types of clauses that you need to memorize.

00:16:01.180 And then you'll be able to do that while you're studying.

00:16:05.940 He chose us in him before.

00:16:08.140 so this is a temporal clause. It indicates time, so we want to catch that. So this has happened at

00:16:14.520 some point before, after, or a sequential clause would maybe show something. He did this, then he

00:16:22.420 did this, then he did that. So I'd want to mark those things if they were sequential, but this is

00:16:26.960 a temporal clause. That is a clause. This is a purpose clause. So why did he do this? That we

00:16:35.120 should be holy and blameless before him. And so this is a purpose clause. And in my notes,

00:16:42.600 sometimes I would mark this out as a, you know, I'd write out that this is a purpose clause and

00:16:47.460 this is a temporal clause and this is a causal clause and this is a relative clause. But just

00:16:53.760 to kind of save space for what we're going to do, I'm going to not do that. And in love, he predestined

00:17:00.800 us, uh, for adoption to himself as sons, uh, through Jesus Christ, according to, so, um,

00:17:14.960 according to, it could be a purpose clause, uh, the purpose, you know, for the purpose of his will,

00:17:20.220 according to the purpose of his will, it could be, uh, not just a purpose clause, but it could be a,

00:17:24.960 um, I can't think of the other type of clause right now that it could be, but I'm going to

00:17:30.300 mark it for a second, of his will to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us

00:17:35.300 in the beloved. Okay, so I'm going to also go and get my pink, and I usually do pink when I go

00:17:40.840 through all of my pronouns. So I want to, you know, mark all of our pronouns, right? So blessed

00:17:47.860 be the God, a father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us, right? So in Christ Jesus,

00:17:54.800 with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the

00:18:01.280 foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless, that we should be holy and blameless

00:18:07.220 before him. In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ,

00:18:20.760 according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he

00:18:25.120 has blessed us in the beloved. And so I will want to know who every pronoun is referencing.

00:18:36.060 And I'll tell you what, there is a lot of bad theology because of a misunderstanding of pronouns.

00:18:41.100 And so figuring out, you know, what is the antecedent for each of these pronouns? And

00:18:46.720 then there's other pronouns like everyone, and that, this, and these, and those, you know,

00:18:51.100 the demonstrative pronouns. So there's lots to understand when you're doing biblical interpretation

00:18:55.700 before you. This is, again, observation. So we haven't even gone into interpretation quite yet.

00:19:02.160 So at this point, I'm going to start making some more observations after I've identified clauses,

00:19:07.280 and I understand what the text is doing, and some structure. So I'm going to go through it.

00:19:11.440 Blessed be the God and Father. So this is, I'm just, you know, going to mark this here.

00:19:16.720 with something and just go, well, you know, this is, this is, oh, well, that is a very big

00:19:22.340 thing here. How about I go back to here and I go to blue. This is kind of

00:19:28.800 praise, right? This is opening up with praise. I think of Psalm 100 verse four, right? It's the

00:19:38.880 enter his gates with thanksgiving. I think that's what Paul's doing there.

00:19:42.400 who has blessed us, right?

00:19:46.420 So I want to know what the word blessed means.

00:19:49.960 In the Greek, it's like eulogatos or eulogates.

00:19:54.320 And so it's the word we have for eulogy.

00:19:57.080 And so I'm going to want to know, you know,

00:20:00.300 I want to look back at that word blessed.

00:20:03.280 And it's God the Father that's doing the blessings.

00:20:06.060 The blessing is God the Father.

00:20:07.620 So I'm going to note that.

00:20:08.840 And he's blessed us in Christ, okay?

00:20:11.940 So this is key, right?

00:20:13.920 These are linked together.

00:20:15.020 And so the location of our blessing is in Christ.

00:20:18.180 So that's, we're talking about the doctrine of union.

00:20:21.940 This is something that I'll probably, I'll probably write up here, you know, doctrine

00:20:27.460 of union with every spiritual blessing.

00:20:36.480 So every, that's kind of a, it's a, what is that called?

00:20:40.820 the superlative, right? Every spiritual blessing in, there's a lot of ends, right? In the heavenly

00:20:46.860 places. So it's in Christ, in the heavenly places here. I want to know what are spiritual blessings.

00:20:56.660 So I'm going to, I want to look that up. I want to do a little study on that. I'm thinking about,

00:21:01.460 okay, well, we think about regeneration and repentance and faith and salvation and,

00:21:06.860 you know, sanctification. I think these are all spiritual blessings, and they're all found

00:21:12.000 in Christ. And so in the heavenly places, where are the heavenly places? Is that just anywhere

00:21:20.780 with Christ? I want to do a comprehension there. Even as he chose us, I'm going to mark this as

00:21:30.080 because, because it helps me remember, because he chose us. So this is a verb, right? So sometimes

00:21:41.980 I want to mark my verbs and I might even mark them, you know, in red, you know, okay. Chose us

00:21:49.060 in him before the foundation of the world. So this is before the foundation of the world.

00:21:57.480 I'm going to do some cross-referencing here before the foundation of the world.

00:22:04.340 So cross-reference, Revelation.

00:22:10.100 And we know that because my writing's terrible.

00:22:12.880 Sorry, guys.

00:22:14.580 We know in Revelation it talks about our names being written in the Book of Life,

00:22:20.100 the Book of the Lamb, before the foundation of the world.

00:22:22.700 So I want to reference that.

00:22:23.780 And that we should be holy, hagios or hagioi for the Greek and holy, separate and blameless.

00:22:34.680 This is a sense of forgiveness, right?

00:22:38.720 So, yeah, we're forgiven.

00:22:44.220 So I'm going to mark that before him, God the Father.

00:22:52.260 God the Father.

00:22:53.780 and this is basically referencing the reconciliation that we have through Christ

00:23:00.160 and so I'm looking at that okay that helps me get some connection points there

00:23:04.220 there's a lot of us's that I've noticed so he he blessed us I'm gonna I'm gonna

00:23:10.860 kind of put these in red here. And so he blessed us, he chose us, and he predestined us. And so

00:23:25.780 I'm kind of keep those in mind here for a minute later and look at that. For adoption to himself.

00:23:32.940 um he okay so he's adopted us to himself himself is uh it's the father

00:23:41.580 the father uh so this is why when i think of first john is you know uh john talks about

00:23:49.840 an amazing thing that we are called children of god we're called children of god through christ

00:23:55.520 In Christ, we become children of God as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ.

00:24:03.060 He says it right there, right?

00:24:04.620 According to the purpose of his will.

00:24:07.180 Okay, so God's will was that.

00:24:10.360 To the praise of his glorious grace.

00:24:15.980 Karis, right?

00:24:17.700 That's grace in the Greek.

00:24:20.680 to the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us past tense so i see this of

00:24:28.980 of just going this is this is past tense so i'm just again making observations at this point i'm

00:24:37.420 not interpreting yet i'm just making observations and i also know is he has blessed us oh what's

00:24:43.700 going on there. He has, oh, I deleted something. Okay. Anyways, he has, there's another past tense,

00:24:56.180 right? So this is another past tense. He has blessed us in Christ. I think I lost my red

00:25:05.400 blessed us there. And so for adoption of self as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the

00:25:12.080 purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the

00:25:16.340 beloved. So there's a lot of in him, in him, in him, right? So I'm going to circle some of those

00:25:23.680 and, and I need, I need more colors. That's kind of what I feel like. Maybe I'll grab this purple

00:25:27.720 here. Um, but it's like, we got a, we got an in Christ here. Uh, we have an in the heavenly places,

00:25:35.600 in him, right? We have before him, he predestined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ,

00:25:44.880 according to the purpose of his will, to praise his glorious grace, which is blessed us in the

00:25:47.660 beloved. So there's just a bunch of these here. So I'm starting to see that essentially what we

00:25:52.480 got here is I'm going to do kind of a circle and summarize. We have a little bit of a structure.

00:25:58.160 where you're like, okay, well, this seems to be one thing.

00:26:04.340 Now, I actually think, you know, let me get rid of that.

00:26:07.800 Let me just go.

00:26:09.240 I think that this is one point, and it's he has blessed us.

00:26:19.120 And then I think we have another point here,

00:26:22.880 and we go, okay, now we have point number two,

00:26:27.160 and he has chose us and then we have number three we have a third point right so it's this point

00:26:34.380 here he has predestined us and so we have a little bit of a of an outline of our text we're ready to

00:26:42.100 kind of start making some interpretations and um and so what i would do off at the end of these

00:26:47.520 things is i would create kind of a roman numeral exegetical outline down here and i would go okay

00:26:56.420 he blessed us, so he blessed us, and this is verse 3, he chose us, this is verse 4,

00:27:16.660 does it go through 5? No, it goes to verse 4

00:27:20.660 and then I would do

00:27:21.840 he

00:27:23.100 predestined us

00:27:28.240 and that's 5 and 6, right?

00:27:32.300 verse 5 through 6

00:27:34.340 okay, so now I have a little bit of an

00:27:36.620 exegetical outline here, so I can start

00:27:38.700 preparing my sermon or my

00:27:40.180 Bible study outline

00:27:41.620 point number 1 will be he blessed us

00:27:44.780 And then we'll talk, you know, verse by verse or section by section about what does it mean that he's blessed us and how has he blessed us and where has he blessed us.

00:27:54.140 And then the next one, obviously, verse four is he chose us.

00:27:57.620 Well, how did he choose us and where did he chose us and when did he choose us?

00:28:00.960 And then in verse five and six, you know, he predestined us.

00:28:06.580 Well, for what and how and when and where and who and and why?

00:28:11.540 And then you get to basically put an intro and a conclusion or some application at the end.

00:28:26.020 And you have a structure now for your sermon or your Bible study outline.

00:28:32.300 So if you want to hear the teaching of Ephesians 1, 3 through 6, you can listen to that on

00:28:37.940 the Real Christianity podcast, Ephesians Bible Study, episode number two.

00:28:43.380 And I will be doing these block diagrams for every passage that we teach through on the

00:28:48.980 Ephesians Bible Study.

00:28:50.360 And you can listen to the exposition that I will build out off of this block diagram.

00:28:57.180 and I think that'll be helpful for you to see the front half of what I do before and

00:29:03.080 then how it all comes together on the end.

00:29:05.500 So hopefully this was helpful, this episode of The Bible Blueprint, and we will see you

00:29:10.120 guys on the next episode going through Ephesians 2.

Dale Partridge - December 16, 2021

Bible Blueprint - Block Diagram of Ephesians 1_3-6

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript