A mystery-lover took his place in the theater for opening night, but his seat was way back in the theater, far from the stage. So the man called an usher over and whispered, ’’I just love a good mystery, and I have been anxiously anticipating the opening of this play. However, in order to carefully follow the clues and fully enjoy the play, I have to watch a mystery close up. Look how far away I am! If you can get me a better seat, I’ll give you a handsome tip.’’
The usher nodded and said he would be back shortly. Looking forward to a large tip, the usher spoke with his co-workers in the box office, hoping to find some closer tickets. With just three minutes left until curtain, he found an unused ticket at the Will Call window and snatched it up. Returning to the man in the back of the theater, he whispered, ’’Follow me.’’ The usher led the man down to the second row, and proudly pointed out the empty seat right in the middle. ’’Thanks so much,’’ says the theatergoer, ’’This seat is perfect.’’ He then handed the usher a quarter.
The usher looked down at the quarter, leaned over and whispered, ’’The butler did it in the parlor with the candlestick.’’
Most of us love a good mystery, especially when the revelation of the mystery comes at the appropriate time. There is a sense in which our walk with God is a mystery, and fortunately for us, God reveals that mystery to us at just the right time. That’s the point that Paul makes as he continues writing his letter to the church at Ephesus. Let’s read out loud together our passage for this morning:
In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to men in other generations as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets. This mystery is that through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.
Ephesians 3:4-6 (NIV)
Last week, we discovered that when Paul uses the word “mystery”, it means something quite different than the way we might use it. In addition to the 7 times he uses the word in his letter to the Ephesians, Paul uses the term 8 other times in his other letters. And in each case, the word “mystery” describes something that God has revealed in the past that He is now choosing to review more fully.
The specific mystery that Paul is writing about here is the fact that the Jews and Gentiles have been brought together in the church through Jesus Christ. It is a mystery since it was a concept that was revealed in part in the past, but it had not been fully made known to men in past generations.
As we saw briefly last week, Paul and his fellow Jews were not completely in the dark about the idea that God desired to bring Jews and Gentiles together. We can trace that concept all the way back to God’s call of Abraham in Genesis 12:
The LORD had said to Abram, "Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."
Genesis 12:1-3 (NIV)
It was always God’s plan to bless all the peoples of the earth, including the Gentiles through the offspring of Abraham – the Jews. But until Jesus came to the earth, died on a cross and arose from the grave, there as no way that any human could have fully understood how God was going to accomplish that. Before Jesus, Paul and his fellow Jews did believe that the Gentiles could receive the promise of God – but only by becoming Jews and observing all the Jewish laws, including circumcision.
It was always God’s plan to bring the Jews and Gentiles together, not by requiring one group to convert to the other, but by creating a an entirely new body called the church in which both groups would be indentified not by the old labels of Jew and Gentile, but by the name of the One who would make it possible for them to become one – Christ.
We’ve already seen in chapter 2 that Jesus broke down all the walls that divided the Jews and the Gentiles, but Paul emphasizes once again in this passage just how completely Jesus has removed those barriers. In Jesus the Jews and Gentiles are equal partners and have equal access to God because of what Jesus has done for them.
As we have seen, when Paul needs a word to describe something and there isn’t a common word that is adequate, Paul just creates his own words. And that’s what he does here in verse 6. He creates three compound words that all begin with a Greek prefix that means “together with.” This is one of those places where the NIV does a really nice job of bringing that out in their translation. Paul describes three aspects of this mystery of joining together Jews and Gentiles in the church:
• Heirs together
Paul seems to be thinking back to his prayer in chapter 1 where he prayed that his readers would know the riches of God’s glorious inheritance in the saints. You’ll remember that when we looked at that passage we determined that inheritance Paul wrote about there includes both the idea that we will one day experience the complete fulfillment of God pouring all His spiritual blessings into our lives and the idea that we are God’s inheritance, precious to Him. In Christ, both the Jews and the Gentiles share equally in that inheritance.
• Members together of one body
The fact that Jews and Gentiles are members together in one body emphasizes not only what they share in common but their dependence upon each other. In both Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12, Paul goes into much more detail about how the body of Christ only functions as God intended when every member fulfills its role within the body.
• Sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus
In Ephesians 2:12, Paul had reminded his Gentile readers that before Jesus, they had been foreigners to the covenant of the promise. In both of these verses Paul uses the singular “promise” and not the plural as we might expect. You may remember that when we looked at the verse in Chapter 2, we determined that by using the singular, Paul was probably referring to the specific promise given to Abraham in Genesis 12 – a promise which has now been fulfilled for both the Jews and the Gentiles in Jesus.
The passage this morning is actually pretty easy to explain. But the challenge, as is usually the case, is to determine how we can apply this passage to our lives. Let me share with you four observations about this passage that we can use in our journey of life.
WHAT THIS MEANS FOR US:
1. Life is a mystery
I know what most of you are thinking right now – Pat, tell me something I don’t already know. And although we all know intellectually that life is a mystery, the fact is that many of us don’t live our lives like we really believe that. If you doubt that, just look at how many people are trying to take the mystery out of their lives by consulting psychics, tarot card readers, fortune tellers, horoscopes, and fortune cookies.
But the Bible is clear that we can’t know exactly what is going to happen in the future because that’s the way God ordained it. James makes that very clear:
Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
James 4:13, 14 (NIV)
I’m not sure that I would want to base my theology on the words of Gilda Radner, the actress and comedienne who was part of the original cast of Saturday Night Live¸ but maybe she had a better perspective on this principle than most Christians.
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned the hard way that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the most of it without knowing what’s going to happen next.
- Gilda Radner
We need to learn to embrace the fact that life is a mystery. I’m convinced that if we could really do that, it would eliminate so much of the frustration and worry in our lives. When we know that life is a mystery, we don’t get so bent out of shape when things don’t go exactly the way we planned. And we don’t worry so much about what might happen or not happen tomorrow.
When Mary and I went to Kauai for our anniversary last month, I had planned in advance a romantic dinner for 2 on the beach on the evening of our anniversary. But that afternoon, it began to rain pretty consistently. Finally, just about a half hour before we were supposed to be at the beach to start our dinner, the server called to say that it was still raining, but that there was a covered area nearby that she could set up for us. And so we had dinner near the beach, not on the beach. We couldn’t have our bonfire on the beach as I had planned. And our poor server had to keep going back and forth in the rain from her vehicle where she was preparing our meals.
If we hadn’t looked at life as a mystery that evening, our special day could have been ruined. But we just went with the flow and had a very memorable evening together. I guess we did what Gilda Radner suggested and took the moment and made the most of it without knowing what would happen next.
2. God reveals as we need to know
God didn’t reveal his entire plan to bring the Jews and Gentiles together in Christ until His people were ready to understand and apply that truth in their lives. Certainly Abraham would have been completely unable to understand those details of God’s plan since Jesus wouldn’t even appear on the scene for thousands of years. So God just revealed to Abraham the part of His plan that Abraham needed to know in order to be obedient to God and fulfill God’s plan for his life.
God still works that way today. As much as some of us think we want to know exactly what the future will hold, the fact is we couldn’t handle it if we did. So God reveals as much of his plan for us each day as we need to live out our lives one day at a time. Jesus made that quite clear in the Sermon on the Mount:
Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.
Matthew 6:34 (Message)
Jesus is telling us that life is a mystery that God unfolds in our lives one day at a time. God reveals to us today what we need to live our lives today. And when tomorrow comes, he’ll give us what we need then.
Many businesses apply an inventory strategy called “just in time” or “JIT.” That strategy calls for them to obtain their raw materials only when they are actually needed for production rather than storing large quantities of those items. The idea is that they can save on the costs of storing those materials and avoid large outlays of cash to purchase supplies that won’t be needed for some time.
God uses the “just in time” method when it comes to revealing His plan for our lives. Because he knows it would be unproductive to give us more than we need right now.
Let me give you an example. Let’s suppose that God knows that you are going to have a heart attack and die six months from now. If God were to reveal that to you right now what do you think would happen in your life? [Wait for responses.]
That’s right. Although there might be some benefit in knowing that right now – so that we could make sure our financial orders were in order, for example – the overall effect of knowing that right now would be devastating. You wouldn’t be able to think of anything else for the next six months. You’d worry. You probably wouldn’t be able to sleep very well. You’d probably develop a fatalistic viewpoint.
But by not knowing that right now, God would allow you to go on with your life and enjoy those last six months. And when the heart attack finally came, God would be there to carry you home to be with Him and to take care of those you left behind.
3. God’s revelation never violates His Word
Verse 4 begins with this phrase:
In reading this, then…
Although Paul’s readers didn’t realize it at the time, what they were reading right then would actually become part of the Bible, God’s Word. And one of the main criteria that would be used later to determine whether Paul’s letter would in fact be included in our Bible is how what Paul wrote lined up with the rest of Scripture. And as we’ve seen, this mystery of the Jews and Gentiles being joined together in Christ is certainly consistent with the rest of the Bible.
We live in a culture today where many people claim to have some new or special revelation from God. Most of the cults that we are familiar with are based on such claims. Even in the church, we have people who claim that God has spoken to them and given them some kind of new revelation. But the problem with this kind of new or special revelation is that it isn’t consistent with what the Bible teaches.
Those same kinds of false revelation were common in Paul’s day, too. And since Paul was concerned that the followers of Christ wouldn’t be deceived by that kind of false teaching, he wrote some pretty strong words to warn against being deceived by false teaching:
I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel - which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!
Galatians 1:6-9 (NIV)
The revelation that Paul received from God about the mystery of the church was completely consistent with everything that God had previously revealed in His Word. It was merely a further revelation of what God had already made known to his people and which had been recorded in the Scriptures, as we have clearly seen this morning.
Today, God’s revelation primarily comes through His word. It is true that as we read, study and meditate on the Bible that God’s Holy Spirit can help us to better understand and apply what is written down there. But we can be assured that we will never have any revelation from God that is not consistent with what is already written down in His Word.
Let me just give you one example. From time to time, I’ll have a Christian young man or woman come to me because they are considering marrying someone who is not a believer. And I’ve even had them ask me to pray that God would reveal whether he or she should marry an unbeliever. But there is really no need to do that because God has already clearly revealed His will in that area in 2 Corinthians 6:14 when Paul writes that believers are not to be yoked together with unbelievers.
God’s revelation will never violate what he has already revealed in His Word!
4. The mystery is to be lived out in community
As he has consistently done throughout Ephesians, he once again emphasizes that in living out this life of mystery we are not alone. God intends for us to live out that life within the community of believers. We’ve already seen how Paul even comes up with some new words to emphasize this idea of being together with other followers of Jesus Christ.
I’m not going to belabor this point since we’ve already discussed it throughout our journey through Ephesians. But let me just say that there is absolutely no Biblical precedent for trying to live out this mystery of life on our own. God intends for all of His children to be connected together with others in this body of Christ we call the church.
Life is a mystery, one in which God reveals that mystery at just the right time, a mystery that is consistent with what God has already revealed in His Word and a mystery that is to be lived in community with other believers.
