Ephesians 1:1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, To the saints who are at Ephesus and who are faithful in Christ Jesus: 2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love 5 He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, 6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. 7 In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace 8 which He lavished on us
It is easy to read Ephesians 1 with the concept that man is the focus of it all and that God is focused on human souls, which in turn means that human beings tend to look to themselves as they read Ephesians 1. In other words, though the Great Commandment teaches us that we are to love God with all of our being, we will take passages of Scripture like Ephesians 1 that are dripping with the glory of God and dry them up with the aridness of humanism. The soul that loves God should look for God and His glory in this great epistle rather than be caught up with theology or duty. Sure this book is full of theology and doctrine, but to see the real purpose of theology and doctrine we must see it as a revelation of God by God first and foremost.
The text starts off and tells us who Paul is and that Paul is an apostle of Christ Jesus. In other words, the reason for Paul and the reason for Ephesians is because Paul was sent by Jesus Christ with this message. Then to go on, Paul is an apostle of Christ by the will of God. Why was Paul saved? It was because God had elected Paul from all eternity and while Paul was on his way to Damascus to persecute the followers of Christ a bright light shone from heaven and God revealed himself to Paul. When Paul was blinded for three days God sent a man named Ananias to him, but Ananias did not want to God. Here was what God said to Ananias about Paul: “But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is a chosen instrument of Mine, to bear My name before the Gentiles and kings and the sons of Israel;16 for I will show him how much he must suffer for My name’s sake” (Acts 9:15-16).
In order to get at the real issues concerning Ephesians we must get at the reason for why Paul was Paul (instead of Saul) and why he was an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God. We must learn to look at Scripture from a God-centered view rather than a view that makes man the center. God called Paul and sent Paul to the Gentiles for the sake of His own name. All of the sufferings of Paul should not make us admire Paul as such, but instead to behold the glory of God because Paul suffered for the sake of His name and not his own.
Paul identifies the source of grace and peace, and those are not from him. Grace and peace come from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. This is vital to grab a hold on and to see that Paul is directing us away from him and a theology about him, but instead he is pointing us to the source of grace and peace. The book of Ephesians has a lot of teaching about grace in it and unless we think of grace as coming from God and His sovereign hand we will miss the real point of it all. Who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ? God the Father has. So why doesn’t this text turn us in admiration of the living God to behold Him and love Him? It is because we get caught up with wanting our doctrine to be correct and precise (which is important) and forget that this is primarily about the glory of God and God blessing to manifest His glory.
In the first few verses of Ephesians Paul directs us to why he is an apostle and the source of grace and peace. He moves on to tell the readers that all their spiritual blessings are in Christ and are given to them by God the Father. For Paul, it would appear; he is very small in his own eyes and is nothing but a messenger of the grace and glory of God in Christ Jesus. That should be a great lesson to all who would dare to handle the words in this text. Human beings are not the focus of this text but God is. Human beings are instruments that God manifests His glory through and they are not to try to steal some of the glory of God by their preaching, teaching, or expert handling of the text. No, God is the star (if we may say that with reverence) and man is to stand down. Even more, man is to bow on his face before this God and be in awe of Him while He praises Him for the splendor of who He is.
God Loves... Himself 
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