Last week we focused on five spiritual blessings, five advantages for life and living. Such benefits, long understood, settle around our psyche acting quietly, but firmly. They shore up our present experience. The anchor lines stabilizing these blessings reach from where we are right now, our present, way off into the heavenly realm. Paul has a lot to say in the book of Ephesians about this anchoring place, God’s realm. This lesson will unpack four corner posts of the heavenly realm which Paul placed in this letter.
Heavenly Realms1
There are four places in this letter that use the term heavenly realm (places in the ESV below)
- “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,” (Ephesians 1:3–ESV)
- “and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,” (Ephesians 2:6–ESV)
- “so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 3:10–ESV)
- “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12–ESV)