What Does Ephesians 1:17 Mean?

(17) **The God of our Lord Jesus Christ.**—See John 20:17, “I ascend unto My Father and your Father; and to My God and your God.” It has been noted that, while on the cross, our Lord, in the cry, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” adopted the common human language of the Psalmist, He here, after His resurrection, distinguished emphatically between His peculiar relation to God the Father and that relation in which we His members call God “our Father.” St. Paul’s usual phrase (see above, Ephesians 1:3) is “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ;” the phrase here used is unique, probably substituted for the other on account of the use of the word “Father” in the next clause. It refers, of course, entirely to our Lord’s nature as the true Son of Man. In that respect God is in the full sense (which in us is interrupted by sin) His God, in whom He lived and had His being. In proportion as we are conformed to His likeness, “God is our God for ever and ever.” **The Father of glory.**—Better, *of the glory.* This phrase is again unique. We have, indeed, such phrases as “Father of Mercies” (2Corinthians 1:3), “Father of Lights” (James 1:17); and, on the other hand, “the King of Glory” (Psalm 28:5), “the God of Glory” (Acts 7:2), “the Lord of Glory” (1Corinthians 2:8; James 2:1). In all these last instances “the glory” seems certainly to be the *Shechinah* of God’s manifested presence, and in all cases but one is ascribed to our Lord. But “the Father of the glory,” seems a phrase different from all these. I cannot help connecting it with the missing element in the preceding clause, and believing (with some old interpreters), in spite of the strangeness of expression, that God is here called “the Father of the glory” of the incarnate Deity in Jesus Christ (see John 1:14), called in 2Corinthians 4:6, “the glory of God in the face (or *person*) of Jesus Christ.” (See *Excursus A to St. John’s Gospel: On the Doctrine of the Word;* dealing with the identification of “the Word” with the Shechinah by the Jewish interpreters). The prayer which follows connects the knowledge of the glory of our inheritance with the exaltation of our Lord in glory. **The knowledge of him.**—The word here rendered “knowledge” signifies “perfect and thorough knowledge;” and the verb corresponding to it is used distinctively in this sense in Luke 1:4; 1Corinthians 13:12. It is employed by St. Paul more especially in his later Epistles (Ephesians 4:13; Philippians 1:9; Colossians 1:9-10; Colossians 2:2; Colossians 3:10), dealing as they do with the deeper things of God, and assuming more of a contemplative tone. It is represented here as coming from distinct “revelation.”