The Secret of His Purpose

Chapter 8: The Revelation of the Mystery

In chapter one of the epistle Paul has been concerned primarily with God's dealings with the individual believer, and has shown that the fulfilment of our individual spiritual experience is found in the church. In chapter two we are taken a step further. Paul shows that personal salvation means, above everything else, death to self, and that the church alone gives full expression to that unity of mutual love and corporate responsibility into which we have been drawn through God's abounding grace. In both these chapters, therefore, the emphasis has been on the assembly as the fulfilment of God's work of grace in man. The purpose of God is viewed from a subjective angle. In chapter three, however, we see the assembly, not only as the fulfilment of man's greatest good, but as the fulfilment of the character of God Himself. In the assembly it is not simply that spiritual life in man finds its consummation, but God Himself is glorified. The church then is something unique, and the opening verses of chapter three lay emphasis on that fact.

The first thirteen verses are taken up with an explanation of 'the mystery.' This, as we have already seen, is a phrase used exclusively by the apostle Paul. It sums up the ultimate in God's purpose, all that He has meant to do through Christ and in the church. It has the character of a 'mystery' since, as we are told in v. 5, it has remained hidden through the ages. Not that God has ever had a desire to withhold His revelation from man, but in His wisdom He saw that it would require many centuries of preparation before the full light of His purposes in Christ could be made manifest. All was given over and over again in type and symbol in Old Testament times, but the complete understanding of what it all meant had to await the time appointed by God Himself when He sent His Son. Says the writer to the Hebrews, "God, having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us in His Son....the very image of His substance" (Hebrews 1:1-3). The shadow of things to come had given place to the 'image of His substance' Christ. The mystery, the riddle locked up in all God's dealings with the Jews in a past dispensation, had been brought to light.

In the following verses Paul explains how the mystery was given to him, what constitutes the mystery, the opposition which it arouses in man, some of the responsibilities accruing from it, and the reason for the mystery's being revealed. This is not the order in which Paul deals with these questions, but it is the order in which we will consider them in the following pages.

In v. 3 "As I wrote a little before" (marg.), Paul hearkens back to the mention of the mystery he has already made in ch. 1:9 and explicitly states that the mystery was given to him of God by revelation. In this connection we should keep in mind what we have already learned in ch. 1 v. 17, namely, that revelation along with 'wisdom' combine to bring us into an understanding of the knowledge of God. It is the illumination of the Spirit which finally enlightens the truth of God to our hearts, but that illumination is based squarely on a willingness and capacity to understand what God has already said in His Word. It is true that the truth of the church is a revelation fresh to the New Testament. Paul states this in v. 5. On the other hand, it was not a fresh idea to God, but 'from all ages hath been hid in God.' Inasmuch as all God's dealings in Old Testament times foreshadowed Christ and His eternal purposes, the mystery of the church is all there locked up in the Old Testament Scriptures, to be brought to light by the revelation of the Spirit in God's own time. This is the meaning of the parable of the Treasure recorded in Matthew 13:44. God, in creation, saw the potential of His divine order being revealed through the church, and 'hid' it in His dealings with Israel till such time as He 'buyeth the field.'

Paul's statement that the truth of the church was granted unto him through revelation, therefore, does not mean that, at some time, he was the object of some supernatural visitation in which God told him things which were completely independent of anything he had, up to that time, known of God's ways. He could hardly so flagrantly deny a principle which he had already emphasised in the same letter. There can be no doubt whatsoever that all of Paul's background as a Pharisee and his wealth of understanding of the Old Testament Scripture formed the basis upon which God was able to grant him the revelation of the mystery. When he states simply that it was given to him 'by revelation' he is in no wise denying the place that his knowledge of God's Word played in his being brought into an understanding of the church. He is, however, making a humble admission that all of his learning, of itself, was insufficient to enable him to penetrate into the deeps of the divine purpose. Great as he was, from a human and intellectual point of view, he could never boast. His understanding of the mystery was due to the enlightenment of the Spirit, not to the facility of his own mind. At the same time, he could not boast that God had imposed upon a listless and empty mind the treasures of His knowledge. This would have been the most deadly and dangerous boast of all. Paul was no dullard. A reading of his epistles will quickly show how his quest for further revelation stimulated his agile mind to range far and wide over what he knew of the Scriptures.

Of what is the 'mystery' composed? Briefly, it is composed of two things: the gospel and the church. As Paul explains in v. 6, "To wit, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs, and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel." To the Gentiles and, therefore, to all men, is open the door of relationship with God through Christ; on the strength of that relationship they are united together as one body, the church; the peace and eternal hope which all this personal and corporate blessing entails is their inheritance.

It will be remarked that these two aspects of the mystery have really been the subjects of the first two chapters of the epistle. Chapter one has dealt pre-eminently with the gospel of redemption, God's working in the individual in preparation for His use. Chapter two has dealt with the church, the gathering together of the body of Christ. Even in the figures of the church which we have been considering, we have seen a combination of these two vital factors: spiritual life and the means through which that life is expressed. It is these two elements which Paul sums up in chapter three as the mystery.

The importance of the mystery lies simply in the essential combination of gospel and church. In fact, in its fullest sense, the gospel must be said to include the church also. Paul obviously uses the term inclusively when he speaks of "the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel" at the end of v. 6. Yet in speaking of the mystery to the Colossians he separates the two and claims that God has made him a minister of each. In the eyes of God, however, there can be no divorcing of these two aspects of His purpose. The gospel of individual redemption must inevitably lead to the expression of the church, otherwise it is incomplete. We have already seen this demonstrated in chapter two. Since self is the basis of sin, there can be no true salvation which still leaves man to pursue his own isolated existence, making himself the centre of the little world in which he lives. The importance of this fact Paul brings out very clearly in his discussion of the mystery in his epistle to the Colossians. Although as already stated, he claims that God has made him a minister both of the gospel (Colossians 1:23) and the church (Colossians 1:24-25), he does so obviously not to emphasise their independence, but in order to emphasise that the first must essentially lead to the second.

Paul recognised very clearly that unless his preaching of the way of redemption resulted in the calling together by God of the church, his ministry was only half complete. It never seems to cross his mind that his commission was to be limited to the setting forth of the way of personal escape from divine judgement. In all his writings a place is given to the purpose which underlies God's work of redemption, namely, the gathering out of a special people, the church, to display the workmanship and glory of God. With what poignancy he exclaims to the Colossians his concern for them that 'their hearts may be comforted, they being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the fullness of understanding, that they may know the mystery of God, even Christ' (Colossians 2:2). It was for this that Paul longed and laboured, not simply that man himself might be safe, but that God might be glorified, and that glory was to be revealed only in the church. This, surely, is the force of the great ascription of praise with which Paul ends Ephesians 3: "Unto Him be glory in the church."

On meeting the elders of the Ephesian assembly at Miletus Paul reminds them, "I shrank not from declaring unto you the whole counsel of God." This is a remark from which we could learn much in these days. There is a lamentable lack of fullness in the teaching of the things of God, and there are certain truths of the Word which, down through the centuries, at times seem to have been almost completely lost. Surely one of Satan's most successful ruses has been to keep people content with half a gospel, a most important half maybe, but only half nevertheless. Christianity has suffered for many centuries from an uncomplemented emphasis on the negative, escape aspect of the gospel, that the work of Christ means deliverance from the penalty of sin. The criticism of this is not that it is wrong but that it is incomplete. If salvation means anything at all, it must be more than relief at an escape from the consequences of the past; it must set our eyes on the goal of the glory of God which is to be realised in the establishment of God's order among the redeemed. God's emphasis to Abram was not that He wanted to take him out of Haran, but that He wanted to take him into Canaan.

Evangelism, in the commonly accepted meaning of the term, is not an end in itself, and it is because this fact has been practically, if not theoretically overlooked, that the result of so much preaching of the gospel remains unconserved. People make a profession of faith in Christ, so they are left 'to the churches,' and it is becoming increasingly evident that 'the churches' have very little idea what the church is all about. The feverish activity of ecumenicalism has brought very pointedly to the fore the question, "What is the church?" This question may be very far from being scripturally answered within the ecumenical circle, but its being asked at all has demonstrated the extent to which, in the past, the conception of the church has been buried under a mountain of human tradition, and it is also a tacit admission to the possibility that maybe much that goes by the name of Christianity in these days is not the church after all. It can hardly be said that Paul's ministry suffered from this lack of clarity. On the contrary, his understanding of the 'whole counsel of God' was clear and full. The ultimate purpose of preaching the gospel of redemption was not the emergence of a human organisation, but that God Himself should fuse together those whom He had redeemed, and work out His will in and through them. That fusion is the church, and the sum of God's great purpose is the mystery.

The very first verse of chapter three shows us something of the implacable opposition which the revelation of the mystery arouses in the heart of man. Paul in fact, writing from Rome, states that it was the reason for his imprisonment. In his letter to the Colossians he repeats this assertion. "Withal praying for us also that God may open unto us a door for the Word, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am also in bonds" (Colossians 4:3). How this actually came about we can easily see from the account of Paul's experiences in Acts 21-22.

Dragged out of the temple in Jerusalem and almost beaten to death, he was rescued by the Roman authorities and, from the steps of the castle, made his defence to the Jews. When the crowd heard that he spoke in Hebrew there was silence. He recounted to them his experience as a Jew, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel, one of the greatest teachers of his day, and zealously persecuting the followers of Christ. They listened attentively as he told how he had been present at the martyrdom of Stephen, how then he met, on the Damascus road, the Lord whom he had been persecuting, and how that same Lord had commissioned him to be a witness of what he had seen and heard. It was when Paul stated that the commission included also the Gentiles that the uproar broke out again with even greater fury, and the Roman soldiers quickly hustled their captive indoors to ensure his safety (Acts 22:21-24). This was the beginning of the imprisonment which led Paul ultimately, as a Roman citizen, to exercise his right of appeal to the Emperor Caesar, for which purpose he was eventually taken to Rome.

The Jews were ready to listen attentively to much of the apostle's experience, but immediately he touched their pride of community, their opposition was fierce and relentless. They would listen with respect to the recounting of his own experience, but they could not tolerate the thought that, through that experience, God was laying an axe at the root of all their proudly and jealously guarded traditions.

Opposition to the church may take different forms today, but it is no less widespread and no less fierce than ever. One of its main strongholds is within Christendom itself which, from early times, has accommodated itself to man's pride in giving place to heathen traditions and in some places has even allowed the growth of congregations on the basis of community distinctions. But this is what man, by nature, wants. The so-called church in the world today is based largely on tradition of one kind or another, of ritual, of community, of the ministry of some great man, tradition of which it is inordinately proud. Yet the basis of the true church, as the Ephesian letter is continually showing us, is life in Christ, before which no human tradition can stand. It is little wonder, therefore, that the proclamation of the mystery is resisted on every hand. It must inevitably be so. The church, the mystery as set forth in the Word of God, can never find a popular place in the gallery of human religion, because it can never exist where man wants to exert his human ideas and control; it can only exist where there are people who are totally cast upon the grace of God, and who recognise that the best in human nature (and what is tradition but man's attempt to crystallise what he feels to be the best in human nature?) is a complete failure. The basis of tradition is pride; the basis of the church is Christ. The two can never go together.

A secondary but related reason that the presentation of the church is always destined to opposition is that it curtails, as man thinks, his liberty. The church, as we have already seen in some of the illustrations used in chapter two, means responsibility and service. Not only, man instinctively feels, will regeneration through Christ fuse him with people with whom he does not want to be associated, but it will bring him into a place of inevitable responsibility towards them. To the ordinary person of the world this adds injury to insult. Is not this, he thinks, bondage of the worst order? A person may willingly subject himself to every conceivable type of inconvenience in order to render service to a man of status, and consider it all a privilege. If, however, he is asked to undergo a fraction of that inconvenience for some poor and unknown person who yet may have a much greater need and be much more deserving of service, he will consider it an imposition on his time, resources and freedom. There are many who are willing to serve God and others provided they themselves lay down the conditions of service. The church is where God's people serve Him and one another on His conditions of service. Man thus has no choice in the matter. Choice is relegated to God, and it is in subjection to Him that real freedom lies. Because this subjection is so foreign to man, he must ever oppose the church so vehemently. It seems to turn every human law which has been the stay of human society from time immemorial upside down. Natural man has no alternative but to array himself against it, which of itself only shows again that the church must be brought into being by the grace and mighty power of God.

Paul's being entrusted with the revelation of the mystery was a privilege which brought along with it an increasing sense of his own unworthiness. That such an honour and responsibility should be granted to him only leads him to exclaim, "Unto me who am less than the least of all saints was this grace given." The heart of a humble Paul was a ready and fit lodging place for God's greatest treasure. Paul was under no illusions as to his own ability to be a guardian of spiritual truth. He had none. His sufficiency was all of God and would vanish the moment he took his eyes of dependence off the divine Guide. As a steward, therefore, he would handle with a measured care and purpose what had been committed to him, mindful ever that the purpose of his stewardship was that it should produce a like attitude of responsibility in others.

Paul makes two mentions of the stewardship of the mystery in the present passage: the first in vs. 2-3, the second in v. 9. Stewardship implies not a gift to be used as one pleases, but a trust to be guarded and used to a specific end. This trust had been given first to Paul himself as he says in vs. 2-3, and his duty was 'to make all men see what is the stewardship of the mystery,' v. 9. Having accepted the responsibility of this trust, it was his duty to pass on that same sense of duty and responsibility to others. Knowledge is not an end in itself. A teacher teaches not to display how much he knows, nor simply to pass on what he knows to his students, but in order that his students might develop what they have received and pass it on to another generation for further development. The revelation of the mystery given to Paul was not something to be learned automatically, committed to memory and finished with; it was something to be worked out, and in its being worked out, to develop as the expression of Christ on the earth. This could only take place in a spirit of complete dependence upon the Lord. The spirit of 'I know it all' is death to any form of knowledge. To learn means to be dependent upon the source of instruction. Those who would be stewards of the mystery, therefore, must before anything else be endowed with a spirit of humility and subjection to Christ which in turn they pass on to God's household; otherwise the knowledge of the mystery will die out and the church cease to exist.

From whatever angle we view the question, pride in any form spells death to the church. Christ must be exalted, and where His rightful place is taken by another, the assembly cannot exist. How Satan contests the Lord's place of pre-eminence in the midst of His people! It was no doubt pride in some subtle form that ultimately became the downfall of the Ephesian church, maybe pride in the very light which God had given to them. Pride demonstrated in the guise of authoritative spiritual teaching will produce pride and insufferable bigotry as a result. Such an atmosphere is not conducive to the presence of the Lord who dwells 'with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit' (Isaiah 57:15).

In his parable on the subject of stewardship recorded in Luke 12, our Lord lays down some basic principles for those who are charged with the custody of divine things. A steward is first faithful and wise (Luke 12:42) and according to his capacity receives authority to dispense what is given into his charge. Faithfulness and wisdom, that is, subjection to Christ and spiritual understanding, however weak it may initially be, are the marks of those who are in Christ, and bring with them the responsibility to dispense these same qualities to the household of God. Faithfulness in this responsibility in subjection to Christ brings greater understanding and an increase in spiritual authority (Luke 12:42). Here we have the circle of divine activity, responsibility, faithfulness, authority, all born and fostered in the unquestioning acceptance of Christ as supreme.

The stewardship of the mystery leaves us with a picture of the assembly growing together in the knowledge and likeness of Christ, each member both giving and receiving, and all under the authority of the Lord. Paul gives beautiful expression to this spirit when introducing himself to the Romans. "For I long to see you," he says (Romans 1:11-12), "that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established; that is, that I with you may be comforted in you, each of us by the other's faith, both yours and mine." The great Paul was not going to Rome to dominate the assembly scene and to impart to the poor Romans who knew so little something from his own vast store of knowledge. He was but a steward of what God had given him, as they also were stewards of what God had given them. He was going to edify and to be edified. If the Romans needed him, he needed them just as much, and his sense of the stewardship of the mystery had taught him that we are able to teach in proportion to our willingness to be taught.

What is the purpose of the revelation of the mystery? It is that principalities and powers in heavenly places might know the manifold wisdom of God (Ephesians 2:10). Peter tells us that we are heirs to an inheritance in the gospel 'which things angels desire to look into' (I Peter 1:12). The church is to be a witness before powers both earthly and heavenly of God's skill and wisdom. It is not simply a testimony to what man has received, great though that may be, but to what God has done, the greatest of His power and majesty. It is He who receives the glory in the church.

Next: Chapter 9: Fellowship and Witness