Biblical Mysteries
This week Theology 101 draws our attention to what the Bible calls the mystery of God’s will. In Ephesians 1, after speaking of “the good pleasure of His will” (v. 5), the passage later speaks of “the mystery of His will” (v. 9). As we have been emphasizing the past two weeks, a biblical mystery is something God has disclosed or made known, which we mortals would never have known or understood apart from that divine disclosure.
Redemption
In this passage from Ephesians, God’s will is that people experience redemption, which God has made known and available through Christ’s atoning blood. At the heart of this revealed truth of redemption is God’s “forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace” (v. 7). Who would have ever dreamed for a moment that a Holy God would choose the shed blood of His incarnate Son as the basis for offering repentant sinners an eternity of forgiveness? What we would have never discovered, God has freely disclosed in the gospel.
Furthermore, God’s provision of and disclosure about sin’s forgiveness is not based on human goodness but His own “good pleasure which He purposed in Himself” (v. 9). When we ponder the greatness of God’s love in that He gave His only begotten Son because He does not desire that anyone should perish but have eternal life, it is a disclosure we could never have imagined or discovered. We can only conclude that His action is to the praise of His own glory and not called forth by our deserving it. It is one of God’s most blessed mysteries.
Gracious plan
From all eternity, God had in mind this gracious plan He would carry out in Christ. In the fullness of time, He unwrapped this mystery when His only-begotten Son was wrapped in swaddling clothes at His birth and in a loincloth at His death. The realization of God’s revealed plan awaits its full achievement in the “fullness of the times” when He gathers together “in one all things in Christ both which are in heaven and which are on earth” (v. 10).
God will achieve the fullness of His will, including a miraculous conception and virgin birth, an incarnation of Himself, a sinless life and a sin-bearing death, a bodily resurrection and exaltation to God’s right hand.
The fullness of God’s will still awaits Christ’s return for the redeemed and their endless fellowship in the beauty and purity of new heavens and a new earth.
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