Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church, but

now an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette,

Louisiana.

Okay. So we'll go ahead and get started. Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay.

So we'll go ahead and get started.

And when we get started in just a moment, we're going to be picking up at the beginning of St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians chapter three unless someone tells me I'm wrong.

But I don't think so. But to do our sort of quick catch-up, we're not super far into St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, but just to quickly, we call it St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, but it was actually probably written

from Ephesus, not to Ephesus, although it's circulated in Ephesus in the area around

Ephesus in Asia Minor, what's now Turkey.

And as we've been going through the first couple of chapters, St. Paul in the first chapter,

we saw was really laying out what we as Orthodox Christians call

theosis about the destiny of humans to become be adopted as sons of God and to share in

God's eternal divine life and he right at the end of chapter two sort of segwayed from that

because he's been talking about the renewal of humanity in Christ.

So that allowed him to segue into the unity of Jews and Gentiles in Christ because whether you were a pagan or whether

you were a Judean or Jewish before coming to Christ, now that you've come to Christ, you

are a new creation and have that same new humanity. He ended chapter two by using the

metaphor of a temple that's being built with a foundation laid by the apostles and prophets Christ the chief

cornerstone in them as sort of living bricks being built into this together into this temple

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