Ephesians

" All things, then, are ordered from above for good, "that through the Church the manifold wisdom of God may be made known," according to the foreknowledge of the ages, "which he wrought in Christ.

"And you were strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope, and godless in the world.

And again, if the sword of the Spirit is the word of God, the Holy Spirit is God;

But as before that time, our hopes in the goodness of God were obscure and uncertain, we gained the assurance of an express covenant, that we should be united in one Church with the seed of Israel, the children of the patriarchs, their law, that was the wall of separation between us, being broken down.

And the man of God went out and withdrew into the desert, grieved that he had not been martyred, yet bearing witness day by day in his conscience and wrestling against the principalities and powers, against the world-rulers of the darkness of this age, against the spiritual forces of wickedness, as the blessed Paul says.

and suggesting to the Ephesians that what was proclaimed at the beginning concerning the man who would leave father and mother, the two to become one flesh, this he recognizes in Christ and the Church.

but saying "in your hearts," which are substantives of the flesh, he has now reckoned even the inner man himself to the flesh, whom he constituted in the heart.

" The apostle too, writing to the Ephesians, says that God proposed in himself, for the dispensation of the fulfilment of the times, to gather up again all things in Christ to the head, that is, to the beginning, both the things that are above the heavens and those upon the earth, in him.

Accordingly, to the Ephesians too, reckoning up their former state, he warns of the future: