Continual Burnt Offering: Daily Meditations, October 22 (3:14-15)
“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” — Ephesians 3:14, 15.
PAUL locates the whole redeemed family in two places. They are either in heaven or on earth. This is the death-blow to the Romish idea of purgatory—a third state between heaven and hell. And it is also the perfect answer to soul-sleep theories of every kind. Paul does not say, “The whole family in the grave and on earth.” He declares they are either in heaven or on earth. This agrees with many other Scriptures. Our loved ones in Christ, when they leave this scene are, at once, “absent from the body, present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5). They depart to be with Christ, as Paul says in Philippians 1. It is only the tired, weary bodies of the saints that sleep until the resurrection morn when the dead will be raised and the living changed.
—J. Montgomery