Daily Manna · Day 70 · March 11
Already Blessed
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ:”
Ephesians 1:3 to 1:14 is one sentence in Greek. Roughly two hundred words, no full stop anywhere in it, and it reads like a man who started praising and could not find a place to break off.
The word to hold is blessed, and it appears twice in this verse in two different senses. Blessed be the God and Father: that is eulogetos, the word for something worthy of being spoken well of. Who hath blessed us: that is a verb, an action God performed. So the first blessing is what we say about Him; the second is what He did to us; and the second is the reason for the first. The order is not reversible.
The tense is the whole argument. Hath blessed. Past, completed, done. Not offering, not preparing, not waiting to see how the year goes. And the content is specified: all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ. Spiritual is doing limiting work as well as expanding work. Paul is not underwriting your rent. He is saying that the things named in the sentences that follow, chosen before the foundation of the world, adopted, redeemed, forgiven, sealed, are already transferred, and none of them are pending your performance.
You checked the balance this morning hoping the number had moved overnight. It had not. Most of us keep a version of that habit, refreshing something, waiting for the thing we need to arrive.
The truth is that the refreshing is aimed at the wrong account. There is one that was settled before you were born, in full, and it does not update, because there is nothing left to add to it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 70 is One Generation (Judges 2:10).