The Bible Study Podcast, episode 501.

Today, the Bible Study podcast starts a study of the book of Ephesians.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen.

We're going to do a study on Ephesians.

I've been back

looking at what studies we've done on the New Testament epistles or letters, generally letters

from Paul, and it seems like we have not yet done Ephesians. So we'll be doing that one. Just to

put this in perspective, Ephesus is in Asia Minor, what is now Turkey. It's on the

western coast of mainland of Turkey. And it was at the time of Paul a very major center,

both commercially and religiously. And I'm not talking about the Christian church, at least not at first.

This was one of the places where one of the seven wonders of the ancient world was,

and this was the Temple to Artemis at Ephesus.

And that is part of the story of Paul and that city, because when Paul went to Ephesus,

he was being so successful in terms of bringing

people to Jesus that it caused a riot. It caused a riot because people weren't buying the little

statues of Artemis of Ephesus, the souvenir version, if you will, that they would have taken home with

them. And so Paul is actually driven out of town because of this riot. Or basically there's

this riot and they calm things down, but Paul needs to leave. And so he is writing back this letter

and it's a love letter. He has spent a fair amount of time in Ephesus.

He had a good relationship with the people who were there.

We'll see at the end a number of different people who names by name.

But this is a letter where he's writing back to this church that he helped found,

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