The Secret of His Purpose

Chapter 1: In Christ

The first three chapters of Ephesians outline for us God's aim and purpose. In chapter one, God, in wisdom and grace, fashions and moulds the character of His people; in chapter two He fuses them into an indissoluble unity; in chapter three He reveals the breadth and length and height and depth of His counsels. Each of these chapters finds its climax in the church (1:22-23; 2:20-22; 3:20-21), for it is in the church that Christian character finds its full expression, the purpose of our unity is revealed, and the revelation of God is completed. In the church is the consummation of all (1:23).

But what is the basis of the church or assembly? The basis of the church or assembly is simply being 'in Christ.' By this phrase Paul addresses the Ephesian Christians in the first verse of the epistle, and it occurs a number of times in the course of the first chapter alone. Its meaning is clear. In Christ, we that were once far off are made nigh (2:13) through the work of the cross; we are accepted of God and brought into a relationship with Him as children (1:5-6). To use the words of Peter, we are 'made partakers of a divine nature' (II Peter 1:4), and the outward indication of this new relationship is that we live changed lives. "If any man is in Christ there is a new creation: the old things are passed away: behold, they are become new" (II Corinthians 5:17).

The basis of the assembly, then, is our relationship with Christ. This simple fact is all too little understood. Present-day Christianity is a confused and conflicting mass of groups which have been established on every conceivable basis of doctrine and practice, ignoring the fact that the church is simply a family relationship. Yet this relationship should be the most compelling of all reasons why God's people should meet together, and forms a bond of unity stronger by far than any other.

This relationship is brought about, Scripture tells us, through faith (Galatians 3:26). Faith contains two factors, dependence and knowledge. Through knowledge alone is dependence possible. We can only trust a person whom we know either personally, or on the authority of someone else, to be trustworthy. In Matthew 18:3 when our Lord tells the disciples that unless they turn from their own will to complete and childlike dependence upon Him, they cannot enter His kingdom, He is emphasising the absolute necessity of dependence upon Him for salvation. The knowledge on which this dependence is based, however, can be the product of understanding, or it can be purely instinctive. Of the first type is our knowledge of Christ through the Scriptures. As we believe the facts contained in the Scriptures concerning Him, we can understand His redemptive work, we can understand our need of Him, and on the basis of that understanding can place our trust in Him to accomplish the work of salvation in us. Different from this is the instinctive knowledge of a young child who, while unable to reason out the love of his mother, knows that with her he is safe and instinctively commits himself to her care. Dependence may be based on either of these two types of knowledge or on a combination of both. They have, of course, a common source in the revealed Word of God.

There are many people who might find great difficulty in explaining the process of redemption who, without any shadow of doubt, know Christ, and whose lives are ample testimony to the reality of their experience. Their lack of understanding does not exclude them from the church. There are some who do not have the capacity to enter into a full understanding of divine truth, yet whose understanding of personal need and of the fact that Christ could meet that need sufficed to bring them to a place of faith and relationship with Him. It might in fact, be said of all who have committed themselves to Christ that their initial understanding was rudimentary or even faulty, but faith in Him was nonetheless real, and relationship with Him nonetheless assured.

The converse of this is equally true. Just as a poor understanding does not exclude a person from the family of God, neither does a great understanding assure a person of a place in the family relationship. A mere statement of belief, the right answers to questions on the way of redemption is, therefore, no adequate test of spiritual life. The only test is in a life which is obviously lived in relationship with Christ.

The basis of the assembly is life 'in Christ.' A recognition of this simple fact at once demonstrates the inadequacy of believers meeting on any other ground, for every other basis of gathering can be maintained quite independent of life in the Spirit. The full and carefully worded doctrinal statement, although completely correct, can be implicitly believed yet unknown in experience, just as the Pharisees held rightly to the letter of the law but knew nothing of its spirit. The observance of baptism and the Lord's supper, bereft of true devotion to the Lord, can become as much a ritual as the God-instituted sacrifices of the Old Testament became to the Jews, and can earn like condemnation (Isaiah 1:10-15). What may be a simple and scriptural pattern of gathering can become as much a ritual as that of Rome. God would have us all study and understand His Word to the measure of our capacity; baptism and the Lord's table are clearly taught in the Scripture and can be a means of both spiritual blessing and testimony; likewise do we need to enquire into the Lord's pattern for His church. But none of these things are the basis of the assembly. The basis of the assembly is life in Christ and that alone.

The church, however, reveals more than the simple fact of relationship with Christ. Paul links this fact of relationship with submission. The Ephesians were not only 'in Christ,' they were the 'faithful in Christ.' They were not only children of God, they were also obedient, submissive to their Father's will. It is from this submission that the authority of the believer and of the church stems. In the same first verse, Paul says that he is an apostle 'through the will of God.' His authority was solely due to the fact that he himself was under authority, as an ambassador's authority depends upon his own complete loyalty and allegiance to the country he represents. So it is with the church. The church is meant to represent Christ, to be His fullness (1:23), but that is only so as it remains under the authority of Christ. When disloyalty supervenes, the authority is removed.

This combination of authority and submissive humility is something which is largely foreign to the world, yet it should be one of the salient characteristics of the church. It was much in evidence in the life of the apostle as we see from his exhortation to the Ephesian elders at Miletus recorded in Acts 20. On the one hand he testifies to how he served the Lord 'with all lowliness of mind, and with tears and with trials' (v. 19); on the other hand he affirms how he 'shrank not from declaring unto you the whole counsel of God' (v. 27). In the Christian walk authority and submission are inseparable. The believer who would bear the authority of representing Christ must live in subjection to Christ. The church which would reveal the authority must likewise be completely subject to Him.

What is the source and character of this new life? "God hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing," Paul tells us in Ephesians 1:3, "in the heavenly places in Christ." The relationship which God's people enjoy with Christ and the life which has been imparted through faith in Him is not of an earthly but of a heavenly character. Its quality is different from anything the world knows, and the church is, therefore, something unique and distinct from every other association known to men. At the same time it is life of a higher order. When our Lord was preparing His disciples for the time of His departure, He strengthened them with the assurance that the peace of His own life which He left with them would triumph over every fear or trial which the future might hold. "My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be fearful" (John 14:27). That peace, which was an inseparable part of His life, was something the world could not give. It was of a divine and heavenly quality, and that quality of life was to indwell the church, making it victorious and also distinct. The record of the Acts and of the early Christians, a record of triumph in trial unparalleled through the centuries which have followed, is adequate testimony to the supreme character of the life in Christ which was known in the churches of those days.

A company imbued with such a heavenly character must, as we have already noted, be distinct. If the church is, in fact, based on this divine life, it is inevitable that it be different from the world around, and separate. The holy character of God cannot but stand out in stark contrast to the heedless ways of men. "Ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession," says Peter (I Peter 2:9). What stronger indication can we have than these words that the church is to be something different, separate, distinct?

God's holy character forms the essential revelation of the Old Testament Scriptures. It was shown in the minutest details of law and order which governed the lives of the children of Israel, in the strict injunctions which determined the order of the sacrifices, in the meticulous instructions given for the erection of the tabernacle. All these combined to produce a way of life completely foreign to the nations around, a way of life immeasurably holier and higher. Israel's separation from heathendom was not an imposition by an arbitrary-minded God; it was the inevitable distinction between people owning opposite allegiances and opposite standards.

God manifest in the flesh was likewise separate. He was despised and rejected of men not because of sin, but because of holiness. He loved the world and poured out His life in the service of the crowds that followed Him, but he was not of this world, and, because He was different, these same fickle crowds were later to be found in the forecourt of Pilate's hall screaming for His crucifixion. "Let us, therefore, go forth unto Him without the camp, bearing His reproach," writes the author of the epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 13:13). Church history is a grave warning that as the church increases in worldly goods and ostentation, it decreases in spiritual power. The church is not simply a convenience for a people bearing a Christian label, giving a perfunctory recognition to God and organising what material and mental resources it can for the temporal comfort of its adherents. The church is a testimony to a heavenly life dominated by the standards of a higher and better world. It both illuminates the depravity of man and lightens the way to salvation and fellowship with God through Christ. It may be hated by those whose god is this world. It may be loved by those who would seek the Lord. Always it is distinct.

This path of separation from the world led our Lord ultimately to the cross. There could be no other end. The holiness of God that put the lie to the veneer of rectitude which is the world's best could only end in being denounced by the world whose standard it rejected. But the cross was the gateway to life eternal. God calls the church to tread the same path, and the path of life for it will, like its Lord's, be the way of inevitable rejection because it delights to do the will of the Father.

We tend to ignore the fact that this life of separation and distinction is one of the conditions which God demands before He can use the church for the fulfilment of His purpose. This is the grave warning of the message to the Ephesian church in the second chapter of the book of the Revelation. However much the Ephesian assembly may have been used in the past, it was not proof against the creeping paralysis of spiritual degeneration when its devotion to the Lord was found to flag. The assembly was commended on many counts. It was a church which toiled in the Lord's service. It was a church which did not bear with evil. Sin was recognised and judged, unlike the situation in the assembly at Corinth where party strife had led to an indifference even to blatant moral evils. There was also a considerable measure of spiritual discernment. The company was well grounded in the truth and was quick to recognise error in whatever guise it appeared. Ephesus, in fact, had all the outward appearance of a model assembly. But there was one lack. That deep heart devotion to the Lord which had been the foundation of the church had, in course of time, ebbed away. The superficial fervour of work and witness still remained, but the first love of delight in the will of God which is the source of a separated testimony had gone. The Spirit of God calls them to repentance on the penalty of His withdrawing their privilege of being a witness to Him.

God never hesitates to set aside what can no longer be of value to Him. The church is dependent for its usefulness upon a spontaneous spiritual life, and when that life ebbs away, although the outward form may be preserved, it ceases to be the church in any scriptural sense. It may not be possible to determine, or profitable to try to do so, at exactly what point this change takes place, but we would do well to take to heart the fact that, alongside the love of the Lord extended in grace and long-suffering, there is His judgement which ever begins at His house. In the life of any assembly there may come that stage of degeneration when God will leave and start afresh, leaving a once enlightened and vital group a castaway.

God's people are much more hesitant to start afresh than is God Himself. Man always tries to conserve what God rejects, as church history adequately demonstrates. The result is seen in the bulk of present-day denominationalism, much of it a lifeless monument to glories that have long since disappeared. Let those, however, who meet on surer ground and know something of the Spirit's moving in their midst, take heed and beware lest someday they too become but another stark reminder of a glory that has departed.

This distinct nature of the church indicates the unique purpose for which it is called, 'that we should be holy and without blemish before him' (v. 4). God, in infinite understanding has, before the very foundation of the world, chosen us in Christ as His church to mirror His character upon the earth. Yet even this is but ancillary to a much greater and eternal aim, 'to sum up all things in Christ' (v. 10), and 'that we should be unto the praise of His glory, we who had before hoped in Christ' (v. 12). Of the first part of this objective we are told comparatively little in Scripture. What we do know is that one day 'in the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth' (Philippians 2:10), and that it pleased the Father 'through Him to reconcile all things unto Himself' (Colossians 1:20). No aim that God had in creating man is to be left unrealised. No purpose will be unfulfilled. The blight of sin on this stricken world is a reality; judgement is a no less solemn and inevitable fact; but grace will triumph. This is the purpose of God viewed from His own divine standpoint.

In verse twelve, however, we look at it from the standpoint of the church. God knows the potential of His children through grace, and the day of His praise and glory will be when every limitation is overcome, and all the vast potential of spiritual life is fully developed, when we shall know even as also we are known. This is the realisation of the church's hope.

Hope is the energy of life. Paul tells us it is one of the three things that abideth (I Corinthians 13:13), yet how little do we realise the importance of hope in the life of the assembly. On a purely physical level, life without hope is impossible. When the hope to survive departs, the victory of death in its inexorable pursuit is sure. The whole of life is an unquenchable thirst to know more, an insatiable desire to accomplish greater things. This is vividly seen in childhood. What child does not long to be a man? He plays at it; he thinks about it; he hopes for it. With great anticipation he welcomes every year. He is a year older; he is growing up. Each year brings fresh challenge. More childish limitations are left behind. New vistas of knowledge open up before him, new possibilities of mind and body, and with it all new energy to meet the demands of this constant thrill of living. And yet newer hopes and greater aspirations lie ahead. This same spirit of quest, ever pressing forward towards the mark, is another characteristic of the church of Jesus Christ. Weaknesses there may be, but where this hope is absent the church cannot exist; it is but a soulless corpse.

Next: Chapter 2: Child Training