Building up believers and the New Testament church

The Secret of His Purpose

Chapter 3: Faith and Love

From verse seventeen to the end of the chapter we have one of two great prayers contained in this epistle, a prayer that all the blessings already enumerated might be received, and that the aim of all might be realised, the fullness of the Lord in the church which is His body.

Paul prefaces his words of intercession by telling the Ephesians that he is able to pray for them at all in the manner he does because of two things in which their spiritual experience has become solidly grounded, the 'faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you, and the love which ye show towards all the saints' (1:15). We often pass by these two qualities as common marks of those who are devoted to Christ, without recognising how seldom they are found together in Christian experience, and how superficial expressions of them can sometimes be. It is significant that Paul couples them together again in writing to the Colossians. "Having heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and of the love which ye have towards all the saints" (Colossians 1:4), and also in his short letter to Philemon, "Hearing of thy love, and of the faith which thou hast toward the Lord Jesus, and towards all the saints" (v. 5). Like the epistle to the Ephesians, the Colossian letter is concerned with the subject of the church, and Philemon, as we know, was a brother of considerable spiritual standing in the Colossian assembly.

Devotion to the Lord and devotion to His people form the basis of any understanding of the church. Unless there is a sense of committal in both of these loyalties together, the purpose of God in the church will ever remain an unfathomable mystery.

The root of sin is self. The basis of sin is self-will. This was the sin of our first parents when they chose to do as they themselves pleased, instead of what God had commanded, and from this same self-will have sprung even the most heinous crimes which are perpetrated in the world around us. Self-willed independence is deeply ingrained in the nature of man. Regeneration, of course, demands a surrender of the will to Christ, and where there is no surrender of the will there can be no salvation. Yet how the remnants of the old nature cling to us, and how the arch-enemy strives to see that they ever remain. Surely the last thing of all to relinquish its hold is our independent spirit. We will give up property, money, health, life itself, as long as we can cling to the right to determine our own way, or can be allowed to pass the final sanction on God's will for our lives. Self is what we prize more than anything else, and so subtle is the human heart that even the devotion we give unto the Lord can be purely because of what He has given us. We love Him not because of a desire for His glory, but because we personally are benefited. If God's people took to examining themselves honestly, how much of their devotion would they find to be motivated absolutely by self?

When all is said and done, this is a mark of the religion of the heathen. The idolater bows before his image of some spiteful deity oblivious to any relationship with others around him. His concern is that he himself will, by some means or other, gain his god's favour, and that his own soul will be safe. In Christ there certainly is personal safety, but much more than that. Salvation is not simply freedom from hell, it is the entrance into a new life of fellowship with God and His people where the seat of all sin, self, has been dealt with, and those who are born of the Spirit learn to give themselves for one another as Christ gave Himself for the church (5:25).

Devotion to the Lord and devotion to His people go together. Neither can find its full expression independent of the other. "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God: and whosoever loveth Him that begat loveth him also that is begotten of Him" (I John 5:1). It is this to which we are supposed to testify when we meet round the Lord's table, a relationship established not only with God through Christ, but with one another (I Corinthians 10:16-17). It may be remarked how the latter significance of the Lord's table has become largely lost in present-day Christianity, and the whole weight of emphasis is laid on the aspect of fellowship between God and the individual. Is this not a pertinent indication of the prevalence of a faith whose devotion has never really reached out beyond self? Regeneration means being born into the family of God, and into a realm, therefore, of concern and responsibility for one another. The joy, unity and solidity of the family relationship is not in each one's concern for his own welfare, but in a concern rather for the other members which will not shun any personal sacrifice that might bring about their blessing and their good. Apart from this, the whole concept of the family is practically meaningless.

Devotion to the Lord and devotion to His people coupled together in a divine harmony are the essential prerequisites of an understanding of the church. It is on this basis that Paul prays for the realisation in the Ephesians of the fullness of Christ. To this end he makes request to God for 'a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him' (v. 17).

An entrance into the mind of Christ requires both an application of our mental powers and a readiness to receive the enlightenment which comes by the Spirit of God alone. It is precisely this combination that Paul now brings before us. It has always been the tactics of the devil to push God's people to one extreme or the other, to emphasise the intellectual appreciation of the Word till it becomes a dead letter, or so to emphasise the Spirit's revelation that the Word is ignored. God's way requires both. God has given us our minds and expects us to use them. We must never despise the plain, down-to-earth study of the Word of God and the mental appreciation of its contents. Bible knowledge can never be other than good, and there is a greater need today than ever there has been to apply our minds to the Scriptures. We can expect little from God if we are unwilling to use the facilities He has placed at our disposal. Nothing worthwhile either in the physical or the spiritual world can be gained without persistence and effort. God has ordained that it should be so, and we would be wise not to seek an effortless way to spiritual blessing.

While the 'spirit of wisdom' is important, however, it is the Holy Spirit who finally interprets the Word to our hearts in granting the revelation of God. Knowledge of the Word alone will ever remain dead without subjection to the Spirit. The intellect by itself can never grasp the secrets of divine revelation. Yet it must also be remembered that revelation is according to the written Word and not independent of it. The day of completely independent revelation is past. That we find in the Scriptures of the Old Testament. The New Testament Scriptures themselves are almost entirely dependent upon what was already written, or upon the Word as it was actually spoken by our Lord. A notable exception to this is, of course, the last book of the Bible, but even here the symbolism used is deeply rooted in the Old Testament writings. Even the revelation to Paul of 'the mystery' (Ephesians 3:3) may not have been wholly independent, but a lightening up by the Spirit of God of the amazingly clear types of the church in the Old Testament with which, of course, Paul was very familiar. Certainly in this present age direct revelation has been entirely superseded by the written Word which was completed, as Paul tells us, by the revelation to him of 'the mystery' (Colossians 1:24-26).

Revelation is now dependent on a knowledge of the Word, and is granted to the people of God according to their measure of spiritual maturity. It is sometimes overlooked that Paul was one of the most highly learned Jews of his day, a man steeped in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, and it was on this basis of knowledge that God was able to reveal by His Spirit the glorious truths which crowd Paul's epistles. The same is true in varying degrees of the other apostles. We do read in the book of the Acts that the multitude perceived Peter and John to be 'unlearned and ignorant men' (Acts 4:13), but this does not mean that they were illiterate. The humblest of Jewish children were taught in the Scriptures which were given a place of great importance in their upbringing. Peter and John, though 'ignorant men,' probably had a knowledge of the law and the prophets that would put to shame many of God's people in these days who have had every advantage of a liberal education. It was because of this fundamental knowledge that God was able to impart further revelation by His Spirit, and both wisdom and revelation developed apace. The claim to revelation without a corresponding knowledge of the Word of God is both dangerous and unscriptural. It has been the cause of much of the false teaching that has marred the testimony to Christ down through the centuries. To the extent that a person is not firmly grounded in the Word of God, he is particularly open to the delusions both of self and of Satan.

This combination of wisdom and revelation, then, leads to that spiritual enlightenment whence the whole vista of God's purposes opens up before us. The hope of our calling, His inheritance in the saints, the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who believe (vs. 18-19) all become clear. God is a God of purpose, and He desires not to hide the hope of their calling from His people. That hope is not simply that we should have an inheritance of eternal safety in Him, but that He should have an inheritance in us, that His eternal love and divine skill should be manifest as He saves and purifies His people, bringing them together under His complete control, till they are fashioned and moulded to reveal the fullness of His glory. Nor does God lack in power that one whit of His purpose should be left unaccomplished. The Lord who raised Christ from the dead and set Him at His own right hand far above all rule and authority and power both in this age and ages to come, shall He not bring to pass everything He has set out to do in us His children?