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Notes on Ephesians 6:5-9

1 CommentTuesday • May 4, 2010 • by Brian

Sunday I preached on Ephesians 6:5-9, continuing our series on the book of Ephesians. As I mentioned in my introduction, I intentionally skipped over Ephesians 6:1-4 because Mother’s Day is coming next Sunday and that passage serves up a nice Mother’s Day message.

Because Bible study is important to us here at Calvary, I want to give you a little more information about why I think it was OK for me to preach Ephesians 6:5-9 BEFORE I preached Ephesians 6:1-4. Context is crucial to correct Bible interpretation, so normally it would not be OK to take something out of order this way. But in this instance, the context functions in a slightly different way than normal. Key phrase in context that conditions Ephesians 6:5-9 is Ephesians 5:21: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” This is the controlling statement and the next three paragraphs after it (5:22-33; 6:1-4; 6:5-9) all give applications of that statement. Here’s a pretty little picture that visualizes what I mean. Click on it to make it bigger:

Now, don’t misunderstand me: I don’t think Paul’s order for submission: wives/husbands, children/parents, slaves/masters was arbitrary. Clearly he was working his way through the household addressing people in order, so that the slave/master relationship follows the child/parent relationship logically and in priority. In that way, then, preaching on the slave/master relationship ahead of the child/parent relationship disrupts the logic of Paul’s application of Ephesians 5:21. But nothing that is said about slaves/masters in 6:5-9 is dependent on what is said about children/parents in 6:1-4. As long as you understand that children have higher rank and priority over slaves, there is nothing lost by studying 6:5-9 (slave/masters) before 6:1-4 (children/parents).

Posted in: Sermon Notes