Essays in Ephesians #18

Note: This essay on Ephesians is quite long. I wrote it for readers who are interested in knowing more about God’s historical plan. While writing, I thought of curious unbelievers, of sincere seekers, of new believers and of Christians who don’t know much about the Bible view of history.
  

In reading  Ephesians 3:2-4 I hear Paul’s humble, lovingly chiding voice saying,

Ephesians! Remember? You already know God’s given me a special grace—one just for you. He Himself told me how to look after you, how to invest in you. Didn’t you read the letter I wrote you about the mystery of Christ that God revealed to me. When you read it again, I’m sure you’ll understand my insight.

The Bible puts it this way—

Surely you have heard about the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for you, that is, the mystery made known to me by revelation, as I have already written briefly. In reading this, then, you will be able to understand my insight into the mystery of Christ. Ephesians 3: 2 – 4. (ESV)

It’s can be even harder for us to understand Paul’s insight into the mystery of Christ. A huge culture gap divides our twenty-first century world from the first century Mediterranean cultures. The first century Ephesians lived in a world that was intensely divided between Jew and Gentile. We don’t. To more fully understand why Paul is so excited, almost astonished, about his revelation of God’s plan for the human race, we need to fill in the gap with a bit of history.

In the long view of time, we all woke up this morning somewhere in the second act of God’s plan for humanity on earth. Act I began in the eternal now, before the Big Bang, before the “In the beginning . . .” of time and matter, before the moment in recorded in Genesis One when God spoke and said, “Let there be light.”

In this “before-time,” God and other spiritual beings lived in a timeless realm we call Heaven. In this realm, Lucifer, a high-ranking angel (also known as Satan, the Devil and the Destroyer) rebelled against God’s rule. When Lucifer and his followers rejected God’s grace and truth,  they changed from holy-light-bearing-God fearing angels into deceptive, destructive dark beings we name demonic—beings who are, at times, masters at masquerading as angels of light.

God doesn’t tell us much about anything that happened before our world of time and matter, but here are a few facts from Scripture

• The Heavenly realm exists outside of time. Time began with the creation of matter.

• From God’s point of view outside of time, God “looks down on” or “into” time and always knows everything there is to know.

• God’s son, Jesus lived before time. He was co-existent with His Heavenly Father and was the agent of creation.

• God already knew us and loved us long before time began.

• One reason God created our material world was for loving companionship with us.

• God created us “in His image,” that is, similar to Himself in our capacity for creativity, reason, emotion and relationship.

• God wants both earthly and eternal relationship with us. He wants us to share His eternal life.

• Satan wants to destroy our relationship with God. Separation from God’s life is death.

• Satan aspires to usurp God’s rule and jealously competes with Him for our souls, for our affections, obedience and worship.

• From before “the beginning” both God and Jesus knew about Satan’s goals.

• Just as God knew us and loved us before the beginning, God also had a plan to help us save humankind from death to thwart Satan’s plan to separate us from His eternal love.

Packed into that small taste of information about “before-time” are enough facts to reveal what matters for Act 2.

Act 2  opens with “In the beginning . . .”, with the creation of a habitable world for mankind. However long “seven days” of creation might have been in Greenwich time and however God did it, at some time after establishing the material world as a fit place for us, God breathed His own Holy Spirit and breath of life into human beings, creatures with a spirit and attributes similar to His own.

Although Rosseau’s noble savage has proven to be leaky and imperfect like the rest of us, God’s plan began well. The first humans lived in loving harmony with their Creator. Innocent and free from evil, they were filled with God’s Holy Spirit and enjoyed a rich relationship with God. Our first ancestors trusted His wisdom and agreed with His one and only request—to abstain from eating fruit off the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (If the tree is a metaphor or if it was an actual fruited tree is not relevant to the outcome— the main point is our earliest ancestors disobeyed God.) Before then, like creatures we call “dumb beasts,” our earliest parents lived nakedly transparent in body, soul and spirit; they did not hide from one another or from God.

At a point in time (specific or gradual is moot) Satan came along and led the first man and woman to doubt God. The woman broke the only command God had given them and she ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. She liked it and temptingly encouraged her man to join her. He did. The Holy Spirit withdrew from both of them and, in consequence, their natural, restful, harmonious, loving union with God and with one another was broken. For the first time in human existence, our ancestors experienced death, an independent separateness from God.

It was tragic. All of God’s mammals are created with bodies and souls. But, humans are a bit different. Unlike other mammals, our species, homo sapiens, is created not only with bodies and souls, but also with spirits. Our spirits are created to function in cooperative union with the Holy Spirit. But  the Holy Spirit is pure and, like His name, He is holy. God’s Holy Spirit can’t fully live in people who willfully reject Him and choose to live apart from God’s love.

Loving God and others has little to do with church membership, with striving to “be good” by the world’s standards or holding correct theology. It boils down to honestly accepting the truth that ever since the Holy Spirit left Adam, every single person on earth except Jesus has, at one time or another, fallen short of God’s perfect love.

We may feel or believe that our capacity to love may be limited our Karma, by a curse, or by destiny, DNA, woundedness or tradition. But in truth, we are always free (despite feelings)  to ask for God’s help. If we sincerely choose to trust in God, His Holy Spirit will show us our own lovelessness, give us the courage to face it honestly, forgive us for all our failings, fill us with His own great love for us and help us to love God and others.

Separated from God’s Holy Spirit of love, human choices tend to become self-centered and to widen the separation between us, others and God. Without God’s Spirit, other spirits can invade or influence us. Evil, pain, suffering, and death have multiplied across the earth because, like Adam, men and women have freely chosen to doubt and mistrust God and to reject the love that comes to us through God’s Holy Spirit.

In Act 2 of God’s plan for humanity, God slowly moves through history toward the goal of restoring His Holy Spirit to everyone who wants Him. And God’s goal, my readers, is all wrapped up in the marvelous mystery, the wondrous mystery that God had revealed to Paul.

What was that mystery? Like any exciting detective story, God’s hidden plan unfolded step by step. Central to divine strategies wasJesus’s  incarnation, the greatest event to take place in human history. The incarnation has been described as the glory of the ages, the pivotal moment in God’s plan, and a mystery that even the angels had longed to see? At this point, some readers may be asking, “What is the incarnation?” Simply, the word incarnation means in carne, or in flesh. God’s son, Jesus, by supernatural means beyond all human understanding, came to live on earth, in the flesh, as a tiny, vulnerable baby boy. His conception was by the Holy Spirit and he was born from the womb of a young woman, a virgin.

Eyewitness accounts of life and death of Jesus Christ of Nazareth fully support His claim to be the only begotten Son of God who lived with His Father God before the beginning of time and who was present at the  creation of the earth. In loving obedience to His father, Jesus left His heavenly home and limited His divine power to live as a man who was led by God’s Holy Spirit here on earth. Although Jesus knew all the temptations known to men, He refused them. Not once did He fail in trusting, loving obedience to God. In  As a fully human man, Jesus lived and died to show us God’s love and to bridge the gap between us and our Heavenly Father. Because of his sinless life and death, because He was a perfect vessel through whom the Holy Spirit could move without hindrance, God will now give the Holy Spirit to every person who will identify in faith with Jesus’s life and death.

In the messy human progression of human history, the timing of Jesus’s birth and death were exactly right—the Bible says that He came “In the fullness of time.” A brief history lesson suggests that we earthlings, sons and daughters of Adam, needed to be prepared for God to come to earth.

 In pre-history God watched our human race drift away from His love; evil spread and increased across the earth. Eventually, God intervened by washing the accumulated evil from earth with a cleansing flood and starting fresh with a man named Noah and his family. Moving into recorded history, most of Noah’s descendants followed their natural tendencies to independent thinking apart for God that lead us to reject faith in God’s loving ways. God wasn’t surprised. Without abrogating or compromising our human freedom of choice, He quietly intervened. He needed to prepare a people, a culture, to receive Him. We know more about this, because the next developments of God’s plan took shape in recorded history.

Briefly, the historical facts unfold like this. God revealed Himself and reached out in friendship to a man named Abraham. Abraham listened to God, believed Him, worshipped Him and taught his sons about God. God made covenant promises to Abraham to multiply his family, to give him the land of Israel, and to bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham’s seed. As years, decades and centuries passed, God continued to reveal Himself to Abraham’s sons and daughters. Through hardships, a branch of Abraham’s family through his grandson Jacob, ended up as slaves in Egypt. Despite the cruel adversities of slavery, Jacob’s family multiplied until, under the leadership of a prophet named Moses, God set them free from slavery and gave them land He had promised to Abraham. Thus, Jacob’s descendants became the nation of Israel—the people we call Hebrew and Jewish today.

The Hebrews or Jewish people differed from the rest of human kind because God chose to work out key parts of his plan through them. It’s true that throughout early human history men like Enoch, Noah and Job, had relationships with God. And many peoples, like Hagar and Ishmael knew God’s love and had partial revelations of His ways. In the Fertile Crescent, the code of Hammurabi contained many good and Godly laws. In Egypt, Aknatun had instituted monogamy and realized that God was light. Ever since our first parents appeared naked in God’s presence and God had killed an animal to cover them, sacrifice had been an accepted way to approach God. Yet all these bits of revelation (like much of our churchianity today) were contaminated by human ideas and culture; all were partial and imperfect. When God choose to speak to Abraham, and later on to Moses, it was different.

Although God spoke within the language of the Hebrew culture, His words had an accuracy, a purity and a prophetic reality that all other religions lacked. God backed up what He spoke to Moses by acts of divine intervention and power. Since God’s words to Moses fulfilled His promise to Abraham, they were both historical as well as personal. At the same time, God’s words pointed ahead with unerring prophetic accuracy to the coming of Jesus Christ.

That’s significant. Judaism did not begin as a human invention, a grass roots bottom-up revelation from earth-bound man, but it began with a top-down message from God in Heaven to a believing man. Three generations later, one of God’s grandsons named Jacob wrestled with His father’s God for a blessing. God then changed Jacob’s name to Israel. The nation of Israel was born from the descendants of Israel’s twelve sons.

Thus, from the beginning, Israel, blessed and chosen by God, was distinct from other nations from. More than 400 years after Abraham, God spoke to Moses, one of Israel’s descendants and through him gave Israel’s children a code of loving conduct and a plan of worship, that, if followed, shared with and accepted by other nations could have brought lasting peace to men on earth. But, that didn’t happen. It sounds like a mean set up by a cruel God—but it wasn’t. It was a loving lesson. God knew that the nation of Israel and all of humankind needed to learn that without His Holy Spirit, it is impossible for human beings to love Him and one another as He loves us.

History reveals our need for God’s love. Through the centuries of Israel’s early history, God’s spirit rested upon men of faith. But although prophets like Samuel, David, Elisha, Daniel and others continued to speak God’s word, do His will and keep His plan alive, the majority of Israel’s kings and priests were corrupt. Under their leadership, many Israelites choose idolatry and ignored God’s good rules of love. Eventually, as a consequence of widespread idolatry, the nation lost strength. It was conquered and most of the population was carried into temporary exile in Babylon. Yet, through it all, a remnant of Abraham’s children were faithful and the Israelites never forgot that God had once visited them and chosen them for His own.

When the nation’s captivity in Babylon ended and Israel’s people returned to their own land, their leaders were determined to enforce faith in God and obedience to the law God had given to Moses. In time, their determination led to extreme religious legalism and authoritarian control. Not only did God’s choice of Israel separate Israel from all the other nations of the earth, so did Israel’s legalistic code of restrictive laws. Laws governing minutia like how far a man could walk on the Sabbath and the need for separate dishes for various foods increased the differences between Israel and the other nations.

For some observant Jews, being God’s chosen fed a certain arrogance—after all, they were God’s chosen people. Though the truth, it was also off-putting. Legalistic religious Jews drew a clear line between Israel and all other peoples—anyone who was not Jewish and did not obey the laws of Judaism was a Gentile. In first century Israel, when Jesus lived in Judea, the divide between Jew and Gentile was wide; extreme bigotry and racism thrived. Many Jews did not want to admit Gentiles to the community faith. They thought Gentiles were unclean and refused relationship with them unless they converted to Judaism and a kept the law—which, over time had grown to be an impossibly heavy burden of religiously legalistic practices. When Jesus came to Israel, He taught the multitudes that “His yoke was easy and His burden was light.” He taught that the law was summed up in the simple command to love God with all of your heart and soul and to love your neighbor as yourself. As you can imagine, this did not sit well with religious leaders who gained their wealth and and prestige, and maintained their authority over the people, by control and fear.

Paul had once been a zealous, legalistic religious man. He had persecuted believers in Jesus’s love. But when, in a divine vision, he met Jesus for himself, Paul was struck blind by a dazzling light, set free of the burden of the law, and filled with love for God and others. Paul knew first hand that God didn’t require men and women to convert to religious Judaism and obey a ton of restrictions to get right with God. He knew that entry into God’s family, God’s community, was by God’s grace through faith and not by obedience to dozens of outward forms.

The mystery God revealed to Paul was His plan to bridge the divide between Jew and Gentile by uniting Jews and Gentiles into one faith, into the one body of Christ. Without withdrawing His promises to Abraham’s natural sons, God’s plan was set His people free from every law but the law of love and its corollaries —to tell the truth and not hurt others. His plan for Abraham’s family to bless the world meant that the Gentile nations could be grafted into Abraham’s family of faith. This dissolution of the wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile is the revelation Paul refers to in Ephesians 2.

How did Paul’s revelation come? We don’t know. Perhaps Jesus sat down with Paul and they talked together. Perhaps Paul was caught up to Heaven and heard it. Perhaps the Holy Spirit imparted knowledge to Paul. Revelation is rarely some heavenly parting of the skies or hearing voices thundering out of heaven. Revelation is often a simple quiet receiving of thoughts that come from the Holy Spirit while meditating, contemplating and pondering the Word of God. Paul knew the Old Testament Scriptures like Psalm 22 and Daniel 7

All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will worship before You for the kingdom is the Lord’s and He rules over the nations.
Psalm 22:27-28 ESV

In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. Daniel 7:13,14 NIV

Paul wrote to the Galatians,

The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the nations will be blessed in you.” So then those who are of faith are blessed with Abraham, the believer. Galatians 3:8-9 NASB

God loves all men and women everywhere and He always has. He loves us so much that He became one of us and chose to die rather than compromise His  love. Because of His obedience of faith and love, death could not hold him. When He cried out upon the cross, “My God, my God! Why have You forsaken me?” He did not forsake God. Thus, death could not permanently separate Him from God. After three days in the tomb, Jesus rose again from death. His resurrection from the dead proves the triumph of love over eternal separation from God.

Because of Jesus’s  faith and love, those who love Him and choose to live in His love can ask for and receive His Holy Spirit. His love for us has bridged the gap between us and God that grows when we invariably follow in Adam’s footsteps and seek our own way rather than God’s way.

The Holy Spirit’s love in us is strong enough to bridge the gaps between old and young, rich and poor, intelligent and mentally challenged. It bridges gaps we make between us and others by our religious and ethnic prejudices. In Jesus Christ, Jew and Gentile, black and white, easterner and westerner can be one in love.

In Act 3, this universe, as we know it, will change. We don’t know what it will be like or when it will happen. We know that before then God will fulfill all His promises to Abraham’s children. The time for us—both Jew and Gentile—to choose forever-life with God will end. If we say no to God, He will still love us and long for our obedience of faith—like parents long for lost children—for God IS Love.