ALIVE IN HIM
By Gloria Furman
Crossway. 192 pages. £12.99
ISBN 978 1 433 549 779
The source material for this book is Paul’s letter to the Ephesians.
For many Christians, Ephesians is characterised by that huge mind-blowing mega-sentence in Chapter One, by a number of lists and by numerous sound-bite memory verses: ‘By grace you have been saved, through faith’; ‘Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry’; ‘Keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace’; ‘Put on the full armour of God’; etc.
Gloria Furman aims to take the reader deeper, to make us step back and take a very long view. The scope of this extraordinary letter, she claims, takes us back before the beginning of time and fast-forwards to the very end. It takes a cosmic view of what is going on in the world and not just the one we see. And it places the ordinary humdrum believer, whether in the first century or the 21st, into this cosmic drama as a chosen participant. It is huge and yet it gets personal, as the book’s sub-title implies – ‘How being embraced by the love of Christ changes everything’.
Thematic style
Don’t look for a line-by-line commentary on Ephesians in this book: you will be disappointed. This is a thematic approach and it might take a while for the reader to grasp that and relax into it. Although each chapter of the book takes the chapters of Ephesians in the order they appear in the Bible, Furman is not limited by that, but sweeps back and forward, ranging over the whole letter to see each section in the context of the whole, and indeed to see the letter itself in the context of the whole Bible story. So you go from Ephesians to Psalms to Isaiah to Genesis to Revelation.
I liked each succeeding chapter better than the one before, as the whole glorious narrative is unpacked. At the centre we are led to the point of it all: the revealed mystery of the church. And that truly makes sense of the latter half of Ephesians. By the time you get to the section on wives and husbands, which is excellent, you are being taken into a realm way beyond top tips for marriage. The armour of God, in this cosmic context, is the obvious necessary equipment for the believer to ‘enter the dark places of the world to plunder Satan’s kingdom, searching for captives, announcing the good news of their release.’
‘Again and again the evil powers are confronted by the startling character of the church’, says Furman. So right down in our family lives, our workplaces and our church relationships we have opportunity, as she so delicately puts it, to ‘stick it to the god of the age’. Amen to that.
