Revised Notes of a Bible Reading on Ephesians 3.
We have just been singing "God and Father we Thy children would in meekness hear Thy word," and this address to the Father and other thoughts in our hymn have suggested the third chapter of Ephesians for our Reading. The "Unsearchable riches of the Christ" are brought before us, and in the prayer addressed to the Father we read of the riches of the Father's glory. These divine riches that belong to the glorified Son of God and to the Father are opened out to us to engage us in heart and spirit with what lies outside of this world, with what shall engage us for ever in the presence of the Lord in heaven.
The opening verses of chapters 3 and 4 show that chapter 3 is a parenthesis, and in it the apostle Paul pauses to develop the truth of the great divine revelation that God had given to him. The wonderful divine secret that God had made known to Paul he had already spoken of briefly in the opening chapters, and he was about to exhort the saints in relation to what he had opened out in these chapters, when, by the Spirit, he returns to give further details of the truth of the mystery.
In oral ministry the apostle had doubtless spoken of these heavenly secrets, for he said to the elders of Ephesus, "I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God." But in the wisdom of God, the Lord had allowed His devoted servant to he a prisoner that there might be left on record in his writings, for the saints of succeeding centuries, the truths relating to the purpose and counsels of God.
At the call of Saul of Tarsus the germ of the truth of the mystery is found in the words of the Lord Jesus. He did not say to the persecutor, Why are you persecuting my followers? but "Why persecutest thou Me?" In assailing the disciples of the Nazarene, whom the Jews had rejected and crucified, Saul was persecuting the glorified Christ in heaven. What a revelation this must have been to the ravening son of Benjamin! He was to learn, and teach, that the saints on earth are livingly united to Christ in heaven; they were His body, and He was their Head.
By the Holy Spirit believers are formed into "One body" — Christ's body, and the revelation of this cardinal truth of Christianity was given to Paul "to complete the Word of God." In making known this secret of the ages Paul "filled up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ … for His body's sake, which is the church" (Col. 1:24-25).
Paul's ministry, the truth of which was recovered for the church during last century, gave character to the great movement of the Spirit that brought so many out from the systems of men to endeavour to keep the unity of the Spirit in the uniting bond of peace. The peculiar features of Paul's Gospel, including as it does the rapture of the church to heaven, and the soon coming of the Lord, were truths that lived in the hearts and lives of the saints. There was also the recovery of the truth of the mystery, and saints rejoiced in the knowledge of their living links with all saints in the One Body, and with Christ their Head in heaven.
We can be thankful that the truths concerning the coming of the Lord were accepted by many godly saints in the systems who had not been affected by the truth of the mystery. Even today, there are godly men in "Sardis" who preach the coming of the Lord, but who seem to have little or no knowledge of what the church really is in the thoughts of God.
Great changes have taken place among those who profess to value and hold the great truths recovered last century. The doctrines concerning the Headship of Christ and One Body may still be ministered, but there has been marked departure from the practice consonant with these truths. Leaders have been allowed to come between the saints and their heavenly Head, and they have displaced Christ from His true place in the minds and gatherings of His own. The warning of the apostle to the elders of Ephesus has not been heeded: "Of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them" (Acts 20:30).
Others have lost, in practice, the truth of the One Body. This precious truth was not only given to show that each individual saint was united to every other saint on earth, but to control the relations between the gatherings of the saints throughout the world. There are not different bodies of saints on earth: there is but One Body. The church is not a voluntary organization into which men may come, but is a living organism, formed by the Holy Spirit, and only true believers, who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, have part in it. The gatherings and relations of the gatherings of saints are to be ordered according to this vital truth.
How salutary for us are Paul's words to Timothy, "Keep, by the Holy Ghost which dwells in us, the good deposit entrusted." The truth encompassed in the outline of sound words which Timothy learned from Paul, and which we have in the words of his epistles, can only be maintained in truth through exercise of soul produced by the Holy Spirit. It is absolutely essential for us to hold the doctrines of Scripture as God's word, and to acknowledge the Scriptures as God's unerring standard of truth; but these things are to be held in our hearts and in practice in the power of the Spirit. It is possible to acknowledge these things in a formal way without the soul being gripped by the power of the truth.
The truth of the mystery in Colossians is presented as "Christ in you, the hope of glory." This contrasts Christ's place now in Christianity with the place He shall take with Israel in the day to come. Christ is now found among the Gentiles who believe in Him, for God has in grace visited the Gentiles, "to take out of them a people for His Name" (Acts 15:14). In the day to come, Christ will be found among His earthly people, according to the promises of old, Israel then being blessed on the ground of the New Covenant. Israel will be blessed and share the earthly glory of Christ's kingdom, but the church that is even now blessed with every spiritual blessing in Christ, and among whom Christ is found, will share His heavenly glory according to the purpose of God in eternity.
In our chapter, the mystery does not contrast the church's place with Israel's, but shows that believers of this dispensation, from among Jews and Gentiles, form a joint-body, being joint-heirs and joint-partakers of God's promise in Christ by the Gospel.
God's sovereign call had brought Abraham from the land of his fathers into the land of promise, which his seed were to occupy afterwards. He was to be "heir of the world," and to be a stranger in the land of his inheritance. Now the divine call has come to the saints of this day, Jew and Gentile, to make them joint-heirs, not of the earthly inheritance promised to Abraham and to his seed, but of the vast inheritance spoken of in Ephesians 1, where everything in heaven and on earth is brought under the headship of Christ. It is in Christ "we have obtained an inheritance," and God would have us now know "the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints" (Eph. 1:11, 18).
This joint-body of Jews and Gentiles had never been spoken of or even hinted at in the Old Testament. The nation of Israel was composed of twelve tribes, and these were represented before God in the twelve loaves on the table of showbread, in the holy place; but the Christian company is represented by one loaf, even as we read in 1 Corinthians 10:17, "We being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread." This is the only company owned of God today. Israel is still "Lo-ammi," that is "Not my people," and every believer in whom the Spirit of God dwells, whether Jew or Gentile, is part of this joint-body.
God's promise in Christ, the Messiah of Israel, will yet be fulfilled to the nation of Israel. Every promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob awaits the coming of the Lord to reign on earth; but God's promise in Christ, now proclaimed in the Gospel, is of an entirely different character. This promise belongs to the eternal purpose of God; it is the "eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began" (Titus 1:2). There are divine blessings which, like the best robe for the Prodigal, came out of the Father's House, and which did not belong to the inheritance from which the elder brother, the Jew, had his portion.
An administration of grace had been communicated to Paul for the saints of this dispensation. All connected with Paul's Gospel, and with the truth of the mystery, set forth the wondrous grace of God. Nothing that God has given to us in Christ is on account of our merit, but in rich, sovereign grace. The apostle is the vessel of this grace, not only as having the truth concerning it to minister, but as having been wrought upon effectually by God.
Paul would never have chosen to be the minister of Christ: the call on the way to Damascus was not of his choosing. Not only did Christ call him, but His grace wrought in the heart of Paul to make him the suited vessel for the work he had to do. God had His eye upon him long before his call, even as we read in Galatians 1, "When it pleased God, who separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by His grace, to reveal His Son in me, that I might preach Him among the heathen" (Gal. 1:15-16). As he views himself in the light of God's wondrous grace, the apostle speaks of himself as "less than the least of all saints."
How highly Paul valued the privilege of preaching Christ! He was not ashamed of the Gospel, whether as thinking of it as setting forth God's righteousness, or as proclaiming the fame of Jesus. It was a Gospel that spoke of the Lord Jesus as the Son of God with power, a power displayed in resurrection; but it also announced the unsearchable riches of the Christ. The prophets of the Old Testament rejoiced to foretell the glories of the coming Messiah. Isaiah wrote of the excellency of His Person, and of the glory of His earthly kingdom, saying, "He shall be exalted and extolled, and be very high" (Isa. 52:13).
Paul, while assuring the saints of the fulfilment of all the earthly promises concerning Christ, reveals by the Spirit an entirely new range of heavenly glories that belong to Jesus, glories that are connected with His place at God's right hand as the Man of His counsels. Jesus in heaven is the Head of every man, the Head of the church which is His body, the Head of every principality and authority, and soon shall be displayed as Head over all things in relation to the church. In these, and other glories that are now His, we learn something of the unsearchable riches of the Christ.
It is good to observe that in the Old Testament we have more than the Messianic glories of Jesus. His personal glories as "Wonderful, the Mighty God, the everlasting Father," and such, are clearly set forth; also His glory as Son of Man and Son of God; but His unsearchable riches in relation to the revelation of God's counsels are not to be found in the Old Testament. These awaited His coming to reveal the Father, and His place at God's right hand in heaven.