Ephesians Lesson 26 of 39 part 2

To complete our thought for the last posting, in Ephesians we have, "one Lord" and we can literally toke it out of the Old Testament setting, when we do, we have "one Master!" This then is in accord with Psalm 82 which states this, but I caution you the listen closely because Jesus quoted this and man has not heard what this is saying, so listen closely;

Psalm 82:6  I have said, You are gods*; and all of you are children of the most High. *this should be a capital "G" because from the very beginning we have been God's, this a positional or an ownership statement.

If we remember correctly the disciples referred to the Lord most times as "Master" didn’t they? It was such an appropriate term, because indeed that is Who He is. So when we come back to Paul’s teachings of the Lord being our Master, then that means everything, because we are His bond slave as it were. He is the benevolent Master, He is never hard to serve, and so consequently we have a Lord that we can serve with all the energy that is in our being, because He is so benevolent toward us, through His Grace in living Truth and trust. In the old LXX Hebrew (*you are gods H430) we find that we carry the staff as an yoke, laid across our shoulders, this is the same yoke that Jesus asks us to carry to learn of Him (Matthew 11:29). For like the older more advanced ox (God) is on one side of the heavier yoke (the law of Moses) to train the younger ox (Israel), the Lord is on the other end of His staff to train us, is the Spirit of Truth. The yoke in our case is the New Covenant in which we are bond to Him and He to us, this is the meaning of being "in Him, in Whom, and in Christ as well as our being positionally in God". We benefit form His divine power through Grace by faith's receptivity in Truth and Love. We just do not know how else to put it. He is the only Lord, or LORD that we are to serve in all Truth. He does not have those other aspects that the pagan gods have. For they only have a false form truth and this causes an inward friction and grinding within us when we hear someone preach but there is NO truth in that person matters not what their words are or what they convey. So we have one Lord, one Master, Who is Truth. You may question why, we are stressing truth here, it will become more obvious as we proceed. Now for the next of the seven ones is. 

Ephesians 4:5b

"...one faith,..."

Boy!, now we could stay here a long time couldn’t we? Stop and think of the world in general. How many different faiths are there? Why we couldn’t even begin to count the number of what they call various faiths. Even in Christendom, and we have to qualify that when we use that word, I’m not talking about the "Body of Christ" the True Church. When we use the word Christendom, we are talking about anybody and everybody that uses the New Testament to some degree or other for the basis of what they practice or profess to believe. So within the realm of Christendom, how many faiths? Even among Protestants look at them. You have the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Assemblies of God, and so forth. They are broken branches of Christendom down to these various faith. But what does the scripture say? There is only One Faith! We are to stand for the One Faith found in Truth and grounded by Love. Now turn with us to the little book of Jude. We are not to be adversarial, just for the sake of being argumentative, but on the other hand we are to never compromise our faith in the Truth, which we trust is the One Faith that Paul is talking about. If we have not Truth as the Spirit which is working within us. Then we are none of His and are a false prophet, a lie, anti-Christ, for even the lie of false truth is a spirit.

Jude 3

"Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith,..."

“The faith”, not just your faith, but rather “the faith!” Well what is “the faith?” Let’s just go back and look at some of the places that Paul uses this word. We are always stressing that Paul is the Apostle of the Gentiles, Paul is in the Church Age, a called out one an Apostle, and so let’s come back to his letter to the Romans in chapter 3. He uses this word "faith" over, and over through out his letters.