Brief meditations on Ephesians 1:7-11

I absolutely love Paul's description of God's grace as it comes to us through Jesus Christ. Verse 8 is a subordinate clause further describing the grace (or χάρις) that Paul first introduced in verse 6 and mentioned again in verse 7. the operating word of this subordinate clause is περισσεύω, which very basically means "abounds" or "overflows." My NIV translation rephrases this something to the effect of "God lavished," and although that is a pretty warm-feely rendering of the text, I get theological goosebumps from the implications of "grace overflowing to us."

Although it isn't necessarily heresy to claim that God's giving us grace through Jesus Christ was an act of deliberation, I'm not sure that's the picture Paul was painting when he selected the verb περισσεύω. The relative pronoun--referring obviously back to the word "grace" in the preceding verse--clearly adopts "grace" as its subject. The grace, by nature, abounds. God's grace naturally overflows. This by no means makes our receiving the grace an involuntary incident on God's part. God might not have ever created humanity as part of the overall scheme of the cosmos--later to be "summarized" or "recapitulated" in Christ (ἀνακεφαλαιόω, verse 10)--without intending for them to receive his grace, which he knows to abound naturally. Yes, perhaps after all it is an act of deliberation, but more in the fact that God designed it as part of the "plan of salvation" (οἰκονομία, verse 10) embedded in the cosmos, creating us with a purpose of receiving his grace by placing us in the position to receive its abundance.

Verse 8 also uses the phrase "in all wisdom and intelligence" (my translation; σοφίᾳ translates to wisdom, while φρονήσει indicates knowledge and intelligence) to further qualify the overflowing of God's grace. It reads: [τῆς χάριτος...] ἧς ἐπερίσσεθσεν εἰς ἡμᾶς, ἐν πάσῃ σοφίᾳ καὶ φρονήσει. For some reason, when I first read and attempted to translate this verse, my thoughts got lost on the implications of the different translations of the preposition ἐν. In the NIV translation, it is translated as "with," which I always thought to convey accompaniment. ἑν could also be translated as "in" or "by" or "within," though I think the most appropriate translation is "in," however ambiguous it may be. How does this change the meaning? Being the aspiring Christian scholar I am, I cannot help but wonder what the relationship between Christian knowledge and grace was to Paul. Could this phrase not also be Paul's way of calling Jesus "all wisdom and intelligence"? I suppose there could be evidence both ways...