Seated Before You Started

What Ephesians 2 Says About Where You Are

Ephesians 2 doesn't mention a good deed until verse 10. Read it from the top and look at what comes first. Verse 1: you were dead. Verse 4: But God. Verse 5: made alive together with Christ. Verse 6: raised up and seated. Verse 8: saved by grace through faith. Verse 9: not of works. And only in verse 10, after all of that, does Paul say that good works are part of the picture at all.

And raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2:6)

Sit is a hard word to hear if you've spent your Christian life feeling like you're climbing.

The Climb

The Christian life often gets pictured as a climb. You start at the bottom, the dirt of your old life, and you pray and read and serve your way up toward God, and on a good week you reach a decent altitude. On a bad week you slide back and start again.

It feels humble and sounds spiritual, and it's exhausting. The people carrying it are usually the most sincere ones in the room, and they're tired. They keep checking their altitude, and it keeps coming in lower than they'd like.

Paul describes the opposite direction. Paul describes the opposite direction, God doing three things to you: making you alive, raising you, and seating you. Those are all past events in the Greek, and all three are done together with Christ.

A Table Set Ahead of Time

Picture a dinner table set before the guests arrive. Every chair has a card with a name on it, written in the host's handwriting. When you walk in, nobody asks whether you've earned your chair. You find your name and sit down.

Notice who did the work at that table. The host picked the china, set the forks, and wrote the cards, and the guests came in hungry and tired. Nobody's there to prove they deserve a chair. That's the shape of Paul's sentence, by grace you have been saved, a seat that was prepared by someone else and handed over.

Paul's point is the same. Your place with Christ doesn't depend on how well you climbed. The seat came with what Christ did, and you receive it the way every other part of salvation is received, by faith.

Hebrews says of Jesus that this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God. He sat because the work was done. Priests in the old temple stood day after day because their work kept going, and Hebrews never pictures one of them sitting down. When Paul says you're seated together with Christ, he puts you at the same table, in the same rest, on the strength of the same finished work.

What About "Seek Those Things Above"?

The verse that sounds most like climbing is in Colossians:

If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. (Colossians 3:1)

The word seek sounds like effort, like something you do to get where Christ is.

Look at how Paul builds the sentence. It begins with if then you were raised with Christ. The raising is the premise, so Paul's talking to people who were raised and telling them where their attention and effort can go now. And he means real effort. A few verses later he tells them to put to death what is earthly in them. That's real work, and he assigns it, though he grounds it in what already happened: for you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). The seat comes first, and the seeking follows from it.

Fighting From a Seat

If you're seated, why does life still feel like a fight? Paul takes that up later in the same letter, in Ephesians 6, where he talks about standing against the enemy. The standing there comes after the seating here, in the order of the letter. The fight in Ephesians 6 is a defense of ground you were given, which is a different thing from a contest for a place. The War Is Already Over follows this same standing into that chapter.

And Ephesians 2:10 completes what the chapter began. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. Good works are real, and Paul expects them, as part of the life God gives once you're in the seat.

Once the question of your place is settled, you can get on with loving the people around you, doing the work in front of you, and forgiving the person who wronged you, instead of checking your altitude every hour.

On some days sitting down will be the last thing you feel like doing. You'll be tired and distracted and short with someone you love, and the seat will feel like it belongs to somebody else. Look down at the card, though. The handwriting is the host's, and He set that table knowing exactly what your Friday afternoon would look like, with all of the people He'd put around it, and He chose your name anyway.