The Mystery of His Will
- David Fairchild
- Feb 28, 2010
- Series: Ephesians
The Mystery of His Will
Ephesians 1:9-10
David Fairchild
February 28, 2010
Ephesians 1:9-10: “making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”
In this book, God shows us a view of comprehensive salvation: from before the creation of the world, into creation and up the hill to Calvary where Jesus, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, became the sacrificial lamb of Passover. These truths are intended to shape and form not only the identity of the Ephesians, but our identity along with them.
But if all we did was consider God’s love for us before time, and God’s greatest act to prove that love on the cross, we’d be missing a great deal of the Gospel. Of course we’d be thankful that our sins are truly forgiven and our guilt and shame removed. To some degree our present reality would be shaped and changed by that news. But it wouldn’t bring us hope.
You see, hope is the stuff eternity is made of. Hope is a confidence of what’s to come. Hope is the promise that what was accomplished on that dark hill the day Jesus died will echo through eternity. That the massive, cosmic-shaping, universe-altering wake of Jesus’ death is rippling out and reshaping how we understand history and how we should understand our future.
Why? Because the Gospel isn’t only concerned with having our personal and individual sins forgiven. The Gospel is the “good news” of where God is taking all of history and our role in that “good news” story.
Paul is showing us not only the Gospel past, before time, and the Gospel present, at the cross where we find redemption today, He’s telling us about the Gospel future, the “good news” of where everything is heading. This morning I want you to see that the Gospel is bigger than our own individual salvation. In fact, Paul is saying here that the Gospel is restoration, redemption and recovery of His world that He made good.
Making the Mystery Known
Verse 9: “making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose…”
How do we know this is true? He has revealed it to us. The benefits of Jesus’ work upon the cross would have no effect if we didn’t know them. In God’s wisdom and insight, He has chosen to make this incredible mystery known to us, according to his sovereign purpose.
We worship a God of revelation, not a God of mere speculation. God is there, and He is not silent. I find it interesting that hundreds of the world’s space scientists are spending millions of dollars from their own national budget to make contact with imagined beings living deep in space. What is driving them is the unquenchable thirst for a word from another world. So far, this pursuit has produced nothing.
What we have as God’s children is a confidence that we have been given a word from another world, a word from beyond space, a word from the triune God of Heaven himself. The living God by His Spirit breathes His living word so that we would truly know Him.
This God is unlike the moody spirits of Ephesus and Asia Minor. This God doesn’t leave us guessing. He reveals Himself. This Word that we hold in our hands is no less than God’s personal self-disclosure.
This mystery is not about the mystical. It isn’t about amulets and incantations. It’s about revealing to mankind how He’s accomplishing His plan for the world. The plan He set out on before the fall, and the plan He’s accomplishing after the return of our King.
The Need for Bookends
The great challenge with making a statement like, “the Gospel is bigger than our own personal salvation,” is that it sounds foreign to us. If you’ve been taught the Gospel, then that might be all you’ve heard. You may come to believe that the Bible begins at Genesis 3 and ends at Revelation 20, that it’s only about God, man, sin, and Christ.
The church should continually teach the reality of our fallen nature and the need for a Savior who is coming to judge the living and the dead. But is that the whole story? No
We have to read the bookends of our Bible or we’ll miss the point of the story.
Travel back to Genesis 1 and 2 to see what God intended for the world He made for His glory. In this account we’re told of only one good and sovereign God that made everything and rules over creation. This God is unique because He is not only good, but He’s kind and righteous, wise and loving (unlike the wicked and petty gods of various tribes and nations).
This God makes every atom and each atom is His rightful property. This world was made with color and texture, with smells and sound that fill the senses of those He made in His image.
Where it was dark, unformed and empty, God made it beautiful. He speaks everything into creation by His powerful word and His powerful word continues to uphold all we have. Creation is dependent upon Him and if He were to withdraw His powerful word, everything would slip into non-existence. It only has life because it is given life every moment by the Living One.
This God is involved in creation. He cares for it and gives His first children the task of tending and keeping His world and then cultivating it and multiplying so that they will enjoy being like their Father. Every day was to be lived in the presence of God with Him in mind and with their identity and work being fully found in Him.
When God made them and everything else, He stepped back and enjoyed His work as an artist would enjoy His masterpiece. God said it was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). His children were to love what He made and enjoy it. This world was supposed to benefit from their activity because they were responsible for filling it and acting as rulers over it under His authority. They are lovingly connected to creation.
The World We All Want
There was shalom. Shalom is more than peace as the absence of hostility. The universal shalom is a life of flourishing where each thing is properly related to God and to one another. Shalom is justice, love, thankfulness, and joy:
“It is the webbing together of God, humans, and all creation in justice, fulfillment, and delight…In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight—a rich state of affair which the natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder…Shalom, in other words, it is the way things ought to be.”
-Cornelius Plantinga, Not The Way It’s Supposed To Be
This is the world we all want. This is what we were made for. When we cry out against what’s wrong, we’re doing so because there is an echo of the garden left in us. We were made for this kind of world and our souls won’t be satisfied until we have it. We will never be happy with a world that is dislocated.
Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be
Why is it necessary that we remember this? Because we tend to forget that this world is not really about us; it’s about Him. In fact, this same tendency slithered into the garden and ruined everything.
In the opening act of this story, the Bible shows us the way it’s supposed to be. Everything is exactly as it should be. But something went terribly wrong. The shalom of God is vandalized as Adam and Eve forget they are not the center of the universe.
Instead of being content with their status as creatures who are loved by their Creator, they listen to a lie from one who assumed this world was about him. This liar slithered into the garden and began to question God’s goodness. “Did God really say…?” is followed with, “Surely you won’t die…” A seed of unbelief is planted by this liar and they water it with their imagination as they think their eyes will be opened and they’ll be like God.
Comprehensive Sin
What happens instead is that they become very unlike God. This seed of doubt that grew into sinful rebellion affects every aspect of their life and this world. Since we are their children, it has and is affecting us each and every moment. We have fallen and our fall is great.
Four Falls and False Hopes
God and Man (Spiritual)
The greatest result of our treason is the severing of the tether that connected us to our God. This is the reason for all other separations we experience today. We no longer have the close, intimate sonship that we were meant to have. Because of this, we can’t fulfill our purpose for our existence which is to love God with everything we are and have. The Bible says in Romans 8:7 that because of sin, we aren’t just passively resistant, but actively “hostile to God.”
We’re yearning for hope and restoration. Our souls are both drawn to home and at the same time repulsed by it. We know something is missing, but we run to find anything but the One who can satisfy us.
In Ephesus, they ran away from God by being very spiritual and religious. They made shrines and worshipped their gods with their time and money. They sought out spiritual experiences and tried to find the meaning of the universe.
Like them, we are all running to our various shrines where we bow to worship our gods. We are seeking out spiritual experiences and religious activities because we know it’s not supposed to be this way. But instead of finding God, we’re further from Him. Instead of getting closer to home, we’re thousands of miles away. We’re trying to find something or someone to be big enough to fill the void of God’s absence. In doing so, the void only grows.
The second great separation is:
Man from Man (Social)
The loving tether that connected us together as humans has been cut. We no longer relate to one another the way we were meant to. Envy, greed, jealousy, control, wars, racial conflict, gender conflict, slavery, and every other broken social relationship is a result of the fall. We follow Adam and Eve by blame-shifting and are unable to walk side-by-side and consider one another greater than ourselves.
James 4 says that we fight and murder one another because our passions are at war within us. But we are built for God and for the shalom He created, so we long for peace and closeness to one another.
We build coffee shops, clubs, bars, gyms, and movie theaters so that even though we have physical closeness to others we can retain our distance. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, E-Harmony, and are ways we’re trying to deal with our isolation in the midst of a crowd. We’re surrounded by many but feel totally alone.
We’re also separated from ourselves.
Man from Himself (Psychological and Physical)
We now are gripped with fear, self-loathing or self-absorption. We have a number of psychological problems and are coming up with more each day. Why? This separation of ourselves is because of our separation from the one who gave us our only true identity. We have self-deception by lying to ourselves. We no longer know who we are or who we’re supposed to be.
Not only are we inwardly lost to ourselves, we’re physically broken. Diabetes, MS, heart disease, arthritis, cancer, loss of sight, loss of hearing, and a loss of energy are all the results of the fall. Our bodies are winding down and as we grow older, the pain of this broken body increases.
But we all feel that we are not as we should be. There is something in us that tells us we are not what we were made for. We try to suppress this voice by telling ourselves how great we are or by giving in to despair.
Our hope today is either found in a pill or from self help books that fill every book store. We work out, diet, take our vitamins, and attempt to keep our aging bodies young and healthy looking through a variety of means. We want to be well and we want to live forever with healthy bodies. We know we should and this need drives us into frustration and even depression when we sense the futility of trying to make ourselves what we were 10 or 20 years ago. Each of these failures leaves us without rest and without peace. Some of you have come to loathe your bodies.
Self-hatred and self-obsession are close friends.
And lastly, the tether that connected us to creation is severed.
Man and Nature (Creational)
We have lost our dominion, and now instead of nature being that which we can rely on, it is often a means of judgment. There is wonder and fear of it. We find it beautiful and yet cruelly repulsive at times. It attracts us and yet we walk carefully afraid of what’s around the corner. We no longer have freedom with creation.
Because of our close link to nature, when we fell, it fell as well. It is no longer free either. We’re told in Romans 8:
Romans 8:20-22: “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
Creation is groaning because of sin. When we fell, it radically affected creation. Instead of lovingly caring for it, death was brought into this world and it is waiting to be set free from bondage and decay so that it can enjoy the glory of the children of God.
We know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. We shouldn’t shrug our shoulders to pollution of our world and the loss of entire species being made extinct. Who are we to wipe out entire species of animals that God made for His glory? Dominion of this world did not mean raping its resources for our own selfish over-consumption.
We shouldn’t over-protect it and turn it into a museum, but we also shouldn’t overuse its resources without any care for it or the future of our children. Because we’re built to care for what God made, we create Greenpeace, PETA, and a number of other environmental and animal rights groups to protect this world and its creatures. The problem with this solution, like all the others, is that it’s not working.
These groups become an alternate religion where they can judge and condemn anyone else who doesn’t hold to their same standards. They can often be self-righteous and hateful towards anyone that isn’t like them.
In every way we’ve fallen, we try to find a way to restore what’s been lost. If we’re not numbed by entertainment or hobbies, we feel the loss of the way it’s supposed to be. Instead of bringing us hope, our excitement is often short lived because we fail to find what we’re looking for.
Our fall is comprehensive and the restoration we’re looking for is comprehensive. We want renewal, restoration, recreation, resurrection, recovery and redemption.
But we’re looking for hope in the very creatures that caused the problem in the first place. It’s no wonder we feel so hopeless that things will ever change. It’s no wonder that to live “happy, happy” Christian lives, many of us have opted out of even recognizing the problem. It feels so overwhelming that we throw our hands up and say, “It’s all gonna burn, get ready for the rapture!”
Is that what God wants from us? To give up on any real hope for change in these four areas? Do you think God wants us to throw up our hands and say, “I know I’m fallen, but it looks like I’ll just have to wait for Jesus to come back before I stop abusing my children.” Or, “I know I’m fallen, but I’ll just have to wait for Jesus to come back before I love my wife.” Of course not! That is ridiculous.
At the cross, God not only dealt with our personal sin, but the effects of pervasive sin. He was not only saving me as an individual, He was beginning His campaign of reclaiming and restoring everything back to what He initially intended.
He gives us a completed picture to look at in Revelation 21 and 22. The other bookend of the Bible is there, so we know what He promises here in Ephesians 1:10 is going to look like.
Comprehensive Salvation
Verse 9b-10: “which he set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”
This salvation is as far as the curse is found. It’s a salvation that unites and sums up everything in Christ. This is the plan of God. He is taking everything that is wrong in the spiritual realm, and everything broken on earth and He is answering His own prayer, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10).
Four Hopes
This means that Jesus has not only begun his cosmic and comprehensive restoration, but, at the right time, He’s making right everything that is wrong. He is able to say, “Behold, I’m making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
If you’re hopeless because you sense that your relationship with God is not as close as it’s supposed to be, I want you to remember your Savior, Jesus. Bloodied and broken upon a cross. Cut off from God. His Father’s face turned from Him as He was treated like a complete stranger for your sake. I want you to think of the hell He endured as He traded places with you. Your distance, your rebelling, your treason against His Father was being poured out upon Him so that you could be forgiven and set free.
I want you to remember the words He prayed to His Father the night He was betrayed.
John 17:22-23: “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, 23 I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”
If you’re hopeless because you have felt the cold distance from someone you love, I want you to think about Jesus’ experience of His closest friends leaving Him, denying Him, and one of them betraying Him. I want you to remember the night that He was in agony and His friends didn’t comfort Him. He felt true loneliness, true distance with those He loved. I want you to think of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem because she wouldn’t receive Him. I want you to see your face in the crowd as they shamed Him and ridiculed Him in front of everyone.
He was doing this for you. He was abandoned by His friends, and more importantly, He cried out to heaven, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” All so that He could say to you and me—even if everyone leaves you, even if your husband walks out—God says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5).
If you’re hopeless because you feel like you’ve lost yourself, I want you to remember Paul’s promise that we will be given resurrected to bodies to dwell with a resurrected Jesus on a resurrected Earth.
1 Corinthians 15:52-55: “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. 53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. 54 When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ 55 ‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’”
No more death, no more decay, no more emotional and psychological distress, no more diseases, no more memory loss. In fact, our senses will be used to full capacity. Our eyes will see without sin and without the curse. We will hear sounds that we currently can’t. Our taste buds will taste to their fullest abilities. Our bodies will be brought into a state of glory that we can not currently fathom. CS Lewis said this in The Weight of Glory:
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship…There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal…Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
Imagine that, our bodies being glorified to such a degree that if we were to see each other today as we will one day be, we would be tempted to worship one another. What God has in store will take all our suffering and pain and bend it back upon itself as He turns it into glory and joy. This slight and momentary affliction can not compare to the eternal weight of glory being prepared for you and me (2 Cor. 4:17).
This came at the cost of Jesus’ own body. He allowed His body to experience death so that we would no longer have to fear it. He experienced the emotional turmoil on our behalf so that we would be made whole.
Jesus’ death on the cross dealt with our sin and the curse of the world, but in His resurrection, the dawn of a new creation came. He ushered in a new age.
If you’re hopeless because this world only seems to be decaying and dying, I want you to remember Jesus’ promise that He is “making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
Sin does not belong to God’s good creation. It has stained the fabric of God’s creation, but that stain is going to be removed, and God himself has promised to remove it.
Even though the power of sin is great and deadly, the power of the Gospel is greater still. Sin stands no chance against God. This is the good news of God’s broken world.
Our place in this biblical story is to embody the good news that God is restoring all of creation and uniting it all in Jesus. This Gospel of grace extends as far as the curse is found, and our job is to announce this good news and call others to turn from their false hopes and sinful rebellion and trust in the One who has and is conquering sin, Satan, death, and decay.
We are to live as a community of people who have hope in the certainty of what’s to come. We are to be a preview to the world of what God is doing and promises to finish. Our collective witness in deed and word is our Gospel mission. This mission joins God’s story as He reweaves everything back together again for His glory and purpose in Christ.
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