Of all the spiritual dishes offered in the New Testament, Paul's letter to the Ephesians must rate as one of the richest.
The key verses to the whole epistle are ch.1 v.9-10: "God has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of His will, according to His purpose which he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth."
Paul's theme is nothing less than God's programme for the whole of human history - and the key rôle the Church has in it. If God enables us really to grasp hold of this letter ... better, if He grasps hold of us with it ... we shall become a congregation of people who thrill to a real sense of purpose in our life together.
We shall know where we're going, and why ... and with a Spirit-inspired excitement.
What those key verses tell us is that a Divine intention runs clear through human history from beginning to end.
That's not an easy thing to see; for on the face of it, human history looks to be such a muddle. To look for some clear thrust in it all is like looking for an ocean current in Hong Kong harbour! There's so much clutter on the surface, you can hardly see the water, let alone a current running in it. But there are signs, if you know where to look for them.
Paul would have us understand that there are three such signs - three clear, convincing signs which are enough to show God's drift through all the surface confusion of life.
The first is Christ.
The second is the Church.
The third is Paul's own call to apostleship.
Do let's be clear what Paul means by the Church. He does not mean the institutionalised church as we commonly think of it, organised as Baptist Unions and Anglican Synods and State Conventions and all the rest. All too often the institutionalised church is a sad parody of the real thing. One is inclined to adapt the disclaimer novelists make in their prefaces - "Any resemblance between the characters in this book and real persons is purely coincidental." Any resemblance between the institutional church and the real thing is purely coincidental!
The true church is the world-wide company of people on earth and the redeemed company of people in heaven gathered out of all ages who have received as the gift of God a vital, personal relationship with the risen, living Christ which began in radical repentance, is expressed in obedient faith, and is sustained by the indwelling Spirit of God.
You may be a member of a local church and not be in the true church at all. And there may be some in the true church who are not found in any institutional church ... though I don't imagine there are many such, because in anyone who is truly Christ's there is born such a spirit of fellowship as forbids him to stand aloof from his brothers and sisters.
Now ... the goal God is working towards - and the church is vital to the process - is Community: a knitting together into universal harmony of all the conflicting elements throughout the whole creation; and that knitting together will be achieved by getting everything and everyone rightly related to Christ. "His plan for the fulness of time is to unite all things in Christ - things in heaven and things on earth." (1:10)
You can call it "the Big Un-bang!" Cosmologists tell us the universe started with a "big bang". All matter was at first compressed into a single mass which then exploded, and the scattered fragments have been rushing off into space ever since, congealing into galaxies and stars and planets and what-have-you, producing the expanding universe as we know it. I don't know if they're right or wrong - it's my hunch they're wrong: it isn't in the style of the Creator-God the Bible reveals to start everything off with a massive explosion! But what I do know is that the job God has taken in hand is like the reverse of that: to bring everything back into one united whole.
I used to watch a programme on the BBC called "Tomorrow's World". In the opening sequence there was always a bit of film showing a motor-car that had been blown to smithereens by a bomb that had gone off in it ... only they ran the sequence backwards, so that you saw all the flying bits - not exploding - but imploding ... so the sequence ended with all these fragmented bits of metal rushing together to form a finished vehicle in shining perfection.
That's Paul's vision of history.
God is working back together all the scattered bits of His creation that have been blown apart by the exploding bomb of sin in human life. He is working them all back together again so as to fashion them at last into a finished vehicle of shining perfection.
ONLY ... what God has to do is to fit back together again, not inert bits of machinery, but the conflicting wills of men (and women, of course ... and of other creatures in other realms of creation outside our material universe too, for that matter; for there are orders of being beyond our local zone of the cosmos, if you like, of which we know very little - "principalities and powers in the heavenly places", Paul calls them - and they have to be fitted into the Grand Final Community as well).
God's Grand Design is a thing far bigger and far more splendid than any of us can at present guess.
Now Paul knew very well that a vision like that takes some believing. Yet he believed it absolutely. The day will come when all things - "things in heaven and things on earth" - will be re-attached to their proper centre ... to the hub of the whole created order of things; and that hub is Christ. He, the Cosmic Christ, is God's key to the redemption of His whole creation.
That's not how things are now.
Christ is God's appointed centre. But by no means everything is rightly related to Him. Sin, and all the evils that explode like shrapnel from it, have wrecked the wholesome order which God imparted to His creation at the beginning. Sinful men and fallen angels, all at loggerheads with one another and at enmity with God, have turned the divine order into a an unholy disorder; what God created a cosmos has become a chaos. That's not how God created it (Isaiah 45:18 - He did not create it a chaos), that's what man has made of it.
"All the children of men are children of wrath," says Paul: "sons of disobedience, swayed by unruly passions, and led through the nose by the prince of the power of the upper realms." (2:23) That's how Paul sees it.
By himself, mankind is quite unable to bring peace and harmony out of all this dreadful chaos and conflict. Bless my soul, we can't even pull ourselves together, let alone pull the world together.
But God can. Only God can. And God will. Indeed, not only will He ... He is already doing it. For those with eyes to see through all the mists of confusion that lie over the face of life, God can be seen at work, pursuing His magnificent goal.
This is the "mystery" (as Paul calls it in 1:9) which the Gospel unveils. By the word "mystery" he doesn't mean an insoluble riddle, an impenetrable secret: he means rather the full disclosure of something that's been hidden until now.
God's secret is out. What He's after is clear at last.
There's no way it could have been clear
until Christ appeared; but now that He has appeared, we can
see what the end is towards which God is working: and that is the
reconciling of all things to His will through Christ, by way of the
Cross:
... through no other, mark you: through Christ and Christ alone;
... and in no other way: by way of the Cross ... that way; no other
way.
Not by education, not by social revolution, not by national planning, not by world government, not by religious syncretism ... but by Christ ... through His Cross.
The Christ of the Cross is this world's only hope.
It is by God's good pleasure that this is so: and, by raising Him from the dead, God has served notice on the world that it is by Christ that He will accomplish His Grand Design, and at His Second Coming, He will execute the Master Stroke of His programme.
Jesus of Nazareth was not merely the Messiah of the Jews; He is God's key to the whole programme of world history. And the Cross of Christ is the means by which that key unlocks the doors of division.
Let me remind you briefly what is meant by the Way of the Cross. The Way of the Cross is the way of unconquerable love - love that suffers, unprotected, from the unbelief and the hate and the hostility that's flung at it, and persists through all the hurt till by the sheer persuasion of its own power of good it wins its enemies over to repentance, and faith, and a love that answers to its own.
The way of the Cross looks like weakness - it looks doomed to failure. In the eyes of men it is foolishness. But it is God's way - the "One Way" to the peace and blessedness for which all men crave, and for which "the whole creation groans".
And the evidence for it is to be found in the fact that already the power of the Cross is producing just the harmony God proposes in that bit of human society which is the Church - the true Church.
In the Church, for example, are to be found Jews and Gentiles: racial hatred has there been overwhelmed by the pouring in of a new and reconciling power of love (2:11-22). Racial tension is healed.
The slave and the free man, too, to take another example, there lose their suspicion of one another and clasp hands across the barriers of class in a vital and all-embracing brotherhood. Class prejudice is overcome.
These are only two examples - but real ones - of Paul's conviction that it is through the love of the crucified Christ, as men are reconciled to God through Him, that they are reconciled to each other.
This is the way in which all the conflicts that embitter human life ... personal conflicts, social conflicts, sexual conflicts, work conflicts, racial conflicts, national and international conflicts ... are fully resolved.
They are not resolved, and never will be resolved, except as men are reconciled first to God. And the only way to be reconciled to God is first to accept His verdict of condemnation on your sin and lovelessness, and then find release from it through faith in His forgiving love.
That's why Paul saw his apostleship as such a significant thing. God had sent him to the Gentiles ... to the world. He wanted the whole creation in.
Now this is no mere dream, Paul goes on. The thing is happening before our very eyes. The Church of Jesus Christ is living proof of God's power to fashion broken humanity into a true fellowship. Out of all the scattered bits, God is building a harmonious structure that is growing together into a "holy temple" - a "dwelling place of God Himself through His Spirit." (2:21-22)
That's why Paul spends the second half of the letter spelling out what it means to be the church in real life. The whole thrust of chapters 4-6 is: the love that reconciles.
The very first four qualities Paul underlines are lowliness, meekness, patience and forbearance. (4:1-2) Why those qualities first? Because they are the qualities that make for harmony and preserve it.
It calls for honesty, and self-control, for the control of your tongue, 4:25-30; it calls for the abandonment of bitterness and resentment and grievances, 4:30-31.
It calls for the practice of kindness and forbearance and tender-heartedness, 4:32; it requires that we respond truly to the forgiving love of God so that in His daily forgiveness of us we live in daily forgiveness of each other, 5:1-2.
It means the pursuit of practical righteousness in life, for unrighteousness in all its forms is the enemy of love and of that wholesomeness of heart in which alone we can dwell together in harmony, 5:3-20.
It means putting your neighbour's interest and advantage above your own, whether you're a husband or a wife, a parent or a child, a worker or a boss (Paul calls that attitude "submissiveness" as we shall see), 5:21 - 6:9.
The love that reconciles.
In that love the church is born, and in that love and by that love we must live and grow.
Let that love disappear from our life, and the Church as God creates it in Christ Jesus to be goes up in a useless puff of smoke.
The love that unifies - the love that has its roots in the forgiveness of our sins and the gift of the Spirit through Christ ... that's what the Church is all about.
God has created it to be both a demonstration, and an instrument of the reconciling power of love in the world. We have to put on love and truth like a suit of armour till we are absolutely impregnable in it. (6:10-18)
And if we do not embrace that as our chiefest goal, we sabotage God's programme for the world!
That's what this letter to the Ephesians is
about.
This is the heart of the matter.
This is what "being a church" means - peace through a love that is
righteous and reconciling.
Without this ... without this unconquerable goodwill between Christians, so that in the power of Christ we really love one another, all we do is waste ... sheer, downright, pointless, utter waste.
"If we have not love, we are nothing" ... remember the "Love Chapter"? Prophecy, wisdom, utterance, faith, miracles, tongues, healings, self-sacrifice, giving to the hilt till we beggar ourselves ... you can have it all, you can be doing it all: but if you have not love - the love that God begets in our hearts through Christ - as the beating heart of it all, it's so much junk. It's all expensive waste - a pile of garbage.
That's why Paul says, "Be eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." 4:3
That's why he says, "Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us." 5:2
That's why he says, "Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven us." 4:32
That's why Christian marriage, family and workaday life is essential to God's purpose. 5:21-6:9If we don't see this ...
if we don't espouse this ...
if we don't make this our real aim from day to day ...
if we don't commit ourselves body and soul to this, we've missed the point.
We've been born ... we've even been born again ... to no purpose.
The body grows to completeness and co-ordination, you notice only when "each part is working, properly."
Let it be the resolve, born of His Spirit, that we embrace with our whole hearts the purpose of God for which He gave us birth in Christ ... that "we may walk worthy of the calling wherewith we have been called".
This material is
copyright; it may not be published, quoted or reproduced without
permission, nor may it be preached without acknowledgment!