a simple desire

By grace you have been saved; and [God] raised us up with [Christ] and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. (Ephesians 2: 6-7)

“God seated us with him in the heavenly places.” This is a startling sentence: it’s not “God will seat us with him,” but “God seated us with him.”  It’s something that has already happened. I don’t know whether our author is using a kind of special metaphor–i.e., it’s as if it has already happened–or whether he thinks that, in some sense, we are even now “in the heavenly places.” Or whether it means something like, “gave us a seat,” as in “reserve a seat.” Or perhaps he is using the strong parallelism between “raised us up” and “seated us.”

In fact, the original Greek for  “raised us up with him and seated us with him,” is really just two verbs connected by “and,” but you can see the parallelism, even if you don’t know much Greek (like me): συνήγειρεν καὶ συνεκάθισεν. The interesting parallel is with “συν-”, a prefix often meaning “together,” as in English “synchronize” or “sympathy.”

In words of one syllable: God “picked us all up and sat us all down.” In the words of the King James version, which preserves the parallelism better, I think, than the translation given above: God  “hath raised us up together, and made us sit together.”

But beyond all this micro-analysis of two words, and look at the point of God’s action: God sits us all down so that God can show the “immeasurable riches” of God’s grace: from our heavenly perch, we will be able, we can even now, begin to see the view.