The Renewed Mind pt 4 : THE MYSTERY OF GOD’S WILL

Posted on By

Can we make any sense of history, other than “Well, it’s what God has planned?” Has He revealed His purposes in history? And, if so, how can we understand them?

Having seen that the One New Man and the renewed mind are central to God’s will and purposes, we need to see how the Holy Spirit, through Paul, wants to renew our minds and open our understanding, even while going over some territory, familiar to the New Testament reader.

When, in Ephesians chapter 1, Paul deals with The Mystery of God’s Will (v.9), he is immediately taking our eyes of ourselves and focusing us on Christ. As most regular Sword readers will already know, a mystery in the New Testament is not something which was, and remains, hidden, but something that was previously hidden but is now revealed.

In the frst section (vv. 3-8), we discover that all the blessings we enjoy are in Christ and we only get to enjoy them because God chose us in Christ. In the next section (vv.9-14), we discover that the great purpose of God is not the blessing of humankind as an end in itself, but His Own Glory focused in Christ, which is the Mystery of His Will.

Later in the chapter, we discover that all the power of the Godhead is directed to the end that Christ may be all in all (v. 23). In his book, Shalom – God’s Masterplan1 , Steve Maltz shows how this is pre-fgured in, and worked out in and through, the One New Man.

Union with Christ

Ever since Eve saw that the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was ‘good for food, and that it was pleasing to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise’ (Gen. 3:6), the human heart has been focused on itself and what it considers to be good for itself. This is reflected in the very man-centred and need-centred ways the gospel is presented today.

In contrast to this, in verses 3-14 Paul emphasises that:

  • Our spiritual blessings in the heavenly places are in Christ.
  • We are chosen in Him.
  • We are predestined to adoption as children by Christ Jesus.
  • This is to the praise and glory of His Grace.
  • We are accepted by God (taken into His favour) in the Beloved (Christ – Matt. 3:17).
  • In Him we have redemption through His blood.
  • It’s according to the riches of His grace.
  • He has made known to us the mystery of His will.
  • According to His good pleasure.
  • Which He purposed in Himself.
  • That eventually everything is to be gathered together in Christ.
  • It’s in Him that we have obtained an inheritance.
  • Being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His Own Will.
  • It’s all to the praise of His glory.

At least sixteen times in these 12 verses, Paul points to the purposes of God in Christ and points out that we only share in the blessings because we are in Christ. In chapter 2 we are raised together with Christ, seated together in the heavenly places in Christ, and the Father will demonstrate His grace in His kindness through Christ Jesus. The One New Humanity is in Christ and our life is hidden with Christ in God (Col. 3:3). Hallelujah!

However, we cannot appropriate these blessings to ourselves apart from being in Christ, and the fact that we are in Christ is nothing to do with ourselves, it is entirely of God’s grace – chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world!

Bishop Handley Moule, in his lovely little book Thoughts on Union with Christ, points out that it is Christ who is the chosen One, Christ who is loved and accepted by the Father, Christ who is seated in the heavenly places, Christ who possesses all the riches of the Father, and so on. And we only share in those things as we are in union with Christ (Calvin had the same revelation – Institutes 2.16 para.19 ) 2 – the concept of being united with Him, which later in Ephesians is pictured in man and woman becoming one in the union of marriage (it’s that intimate, and much more than just a transaction we enter into through faith).

Yes, Christ’s righteousness is ‘credited to our account’, to summarise the frst 8 chapters of Romans, but Paul will tell us in 2 Cor. 5:21 that we ‘become the righteousness of God in Him’ [that is, in union with Christ – the One who was made sin]. So again, we trace the blessing back to its source and see that the blessings are not possessed by us outside of Christ.

When my wife and I were married, I endowed her with all my worldly goods. We became a single entity in the eyes of the law. And she cannot possess my ‘worldly goods’ apart from that union with me. So we Christians cannot possess our spiritual blessings and heritage outside of union with Christ. In modern divorce, property is shared between the divorcing parties, but not so with the blessings Paul is speaking of. If it were possible to be divorced from Christ, we would take nothing with us. It’s all Christ’s, and Christ’s alone!

The Mystery of History

As we move through chapter 1, the Holy Spirit through Paul again and again directs us away from our self-preoccupation and shows us that the whole purpose of God is moving towards a universal acknowledgment of His glory (Isa. 11:9; Hab. 2:14; Phil. 2:11; 1 Cor. 15:28), not because He is some powerhungry megalomaniac (as parodied by Richard Dawkins), but because the glory of God is the ultimate ‘good’ for the human race. He can bless us with nothing greater than Himself, and His glory is essential for the health and happiness of the whole Creation (Rev. 4:11).

The whole of history is moving towards the climax of the ages described in vv.9-10, and if we fail to comprehend this, much of what has gone on in history, and is going on in our world now, will be a mystery – the mystery of history as Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones puts it in his commentary on Habakkuk ‘From Fear to Faith’. He goes on to say:

“Why are people troubled about it? [what was going on then – he was writing against the background of WW2 – Ed.] The main reason, it would seem, is that there are those who use the Bible in a narrow sense, as being exclusively a text book of personal salvation. Many seem to think that the sole theme of the Bible is that of man’s personal relationship to God. Of course that is one of the central themes, and we thank God for the salvation provided without which we should be left in hopeless despair. But that is not the only theme of the Bible. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that the Bible puts the question of salvation into a larger context. Ultimately the main message of the Bible concerns the condition of the entire world and its destiny; and you and I, as individuals, are part of a larger whole … The great and noble teaching of the Bible is concerned with the whole question of the world and its destiny.” (from the Introduction, 1957 edition).

And we note that all this is the activity of God – “His will”, “His good pleasure”, “He will gather” and “the working of His mighty power”. We only contribute our weakness – a hard lesson for the human heart to learn, but over and over again emphasised in Scripture!

And so Paul prays for the renewing of our minds, not that we will be just in-formed, but re-formed, that ‘the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of Him, the eyes of your mind having been enlightened’ (vv.17-18).

From the next few verses we note that:

  • It all springs from the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory (that is, the Source and Origin of glory).
  • It’s the hope of His calling.
  • His inheritance in the saints (the saints as His inheritance? [1 Pet. 2:9-10] Glory!)
  • The surpassing greatness of His power, and His mighty strength.
  • He worked in Christ, raising Him from the dead.
  • He seated Him (i.e. Jesus) at His right hand in the heavenlies.
  • He has put all things under His [Jesus’] feet.
  • He has appointed Him [Jesus] to be Head over all things (the same ‘all things’ that Jesus created, sustains, and reconciled back to God at the Cross Col. 1:15-20).
  • So that Jesus will fll all things in every way.

What place for man in this scenario? Prostrate before the throne ! As one hymn-writer of yesteryear put it:

The Bride eyes not her garment, but her dear Bridegroom’s face; I will not gaze at glory, but on my King of Grace; Not at the crown he giveth, but on His pierced hand; The Lamb is all the glory of Immanuel’s land.

But, as Paul says elsewhere, “… we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.” (2 Cor.3:18)

The purpose of God for believers is that we are to be “transformed by the renewing of your mind”, which is itself for a purpose “in order to prove (ascertain, approve, engage with)… that good and pleasing and perfect will of God.” (Rom.12:2) – which includes the cosmic mystery of the Father’s Will that Paul is revealing in Ephesians!

1 available from all good Christian bookshops, and sppublishing.com

2 Available to read at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes.iv.xvii.html – scroll to bottom of the pageAuthor/Teacher: 

David Serle