This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Ephesians 5-6” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, September 22, 1996.
We are beginning our scripture reading this morning in Ephesians chapter one. Ephesians chapter one, and we are reading the first fourteen verses. Let’s give our attention now to God’s infallible word. Beginning at verse one, Ephesians chapter one, Paul, an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to the saints which are at Ephesus, and to the faithful in Christ Jesus, grace be to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who have blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ. according as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love, having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the Beloved, in whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace, wherein he hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known unto us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in him in whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will, that we should be to the praise of his glory who first trusted in Christ, in whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth.” the gospel of your salvation, in whom also, after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance, until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory.”
Submit yourselves to one another in the fear of Christ. Why? Submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord. Pray with me now.
Our God, we would not shy away from nor be embarrassed by the gospel and its full declaration. Surely in it, O Lord, we are brought up against the enormity of our sin and the hopelessness of our situation, apart from you and apart from Christ. For Lord, we are not simply buried beneath the deluge of our own offenses. We are joined to our Father Adam and in him condemned. But what glory and grace is obvious now in the gospel the good news which has come in Christ, that we, by him, through his death and resurrection, might be delivered from our sins and saved unto eternal life, and, Father, in this gospel we glory. Bless us, your children, as we give our attention to your word this morning, and may we be built up in our confidence that we know and love our Savior, But also, Lord, may we be built up in our resolve to live for him. We ask also that you would be gracious to those who do not believe that they would be brought to faith through the preaching of the gospel here and throughout the world. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
Let me tell you once more what stands at the center of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. You will find it in chapter 1, verses 9 through 11. God having made known unto us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure which he has purposed in himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of times he might gather into one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth, even in him in whom also we have obtained an inheritance.”
Now, I recognize that what Paul says here is truly a mouthful. In fact, this mouthful is hardly the whole story, for some of you might well know that in the Greek, his sentence runs from verse 3 to the conclusion of verse 14. A mouthful, indeed. But possibly, as these phrases are strung together and as they run along, you may well feel that Paul is here being more the poet than the preacher, that he is more interested in the emotional impact and power of his words than in their content. meaning to carry you along by the music of the thing, rather than the message particularly. Therefore, it may well be that you have not concerned yourself too much with the meaning of Paul’s words here, but I ask you to look again at what he has to say in setting before you this chief concern. First of all, you will have to understand what Paul means by the word mystery. He doesn’t mean here mystery in the typical religious sense of the word.
You know, mystery as associated with the religious secret arts that pertain to the hidden workings of spiritual reality as they impact natural reality. such mysteries as have been discovered by, or have been revealed to the enlightened and passed on to their initiates in the interests of worshipping, anticipating, protecting oneself against, and even manipulating the spiritual realities that work in and behind the natural world.
In its primitive form, such an approach to mystery expressed itself in religious magic, witchcraft, wizardry, shamanism, necromancy, astrology, etc. Those things spoken against, condemned in the law of God. In Paul’s day, the mysteries had graduated into sophisticated popular religious movements, overlaid with a rather affected philosophical sophistication and justification. Even to the construct of systems, and one system in particular that was eventually known as Gnosticism, In our own day, we witness the great-great-grandchildren of the ancient pagan mystery religions, and even of Gnosticism itself, in a resurgent neo-paganism in the New Age movement, and in the various attempts to Christianize the basic religious impulse at work in these phenomena. the attempt to Christianize in the nineteenth century, particularly observed in the Christian science movement overseen by Mary Baker Eddy, and the offshoots of that movement in our own time, in Norman Vincent Peale’s religion of positive thinking and in Robert Schuller’s gospel of possibility thinking. Here is religion of the mind, religion of the mind, by which people attempt, through emotive, mental method and technique, to gain access to the secrets and mysteries that lie behind and within nature.
The secrets and the mysteries have always been there, determining world affairs and the details—yes, even the minute details—of the individual life. They have always been intuited by the Illuminati, always accessible to anyone who has been chosen by them for initiation, and would be subjected to their methods and their techniques.
Paul’s declaration of the mystery in Ephesians 1 verse 9 stands deliberately opposite such a religious posture. This means the attempt to read Paul’s position as if it were essentially an effort by a Christianized Jew to marry his religious heritage to Gentile religious practice in order to gain a hearing, in order to make an impact, is utterly, categorically wrong.
J. Gresham Machen, in his 1921 book, The Origin of Paul’s Religion, stated the case well and convincingly against such a synthesis. What we need to see in the Apostle is not an accommodation by the Church to her pagan but a refutation of that pagan environment. Mystery for Paul, therefore, is not the secrets of the universe always held from view until revealed in the minds of the favored few. Instead, mystery for Paul is bound to the hidden counsel of God, now and only now brought to light. That’s the point. not in an event in the inner mental illumination, but by the direct work of God himself in history, by which history itself has been dramatically, decisively, finally transformed. You want to talk about New Age? I’ll give you New Age. The New Age has a calendar date. It is marked from outside Jerusalem’s city walls on a cross. and it is dated from the empty tomb.
In other words, the mystery was not at all times available, accessible, in the air somewhere, to be grasped, grasped by those minds properly attuned, as Gentile religion taught. Rather, the mystery, in keeping with the sovereignty of God over history, was concealed until it was brought into clear view by the act of God in sending His own dear Son for the redemption of His people, accomplished by the shedding of His own blood. through his vindication in his resurrection from the dead and his exaltation to glory into what Paul describes here as the heavenly places. To put it so safely, Paul sees things in the first order in terms of B.C. and A.D. before Christ, and in the times of his established Lordship, in the year of our Lord.
He does not approach things then, first of all, in terms of religious ideas. I will hammer away at this as long as I have breath. And you may be a bit weary of the pounding, but I am not going to stop. Paul does not approach things, first of all, in terms of a religious idea, a thought in That is not what is going on with the man. The Apostle Paul neither is approaching things, first of all, in terms of an ethical ideal. That is the furthest thing from his mind. Nor does he approach revelation as the divulging of specific truth, or the disclosure of information about facts and events, be they even related to the universe’s secrets. Hang with me in this now.
His interest, first of all, primarily concerns the great revolution that has taken place in history. No, not a revolution in history, but the revolution of history itself, of time, of existence. The historical reality of that which, until now, did not exist as such, it having been kept back by God until in the giving of His Son, the fullness of the times, that is, the end of time, the goal itself had arrived, had come. According to the Apostle, here is the true and central content of his ministry.
To underscore it once more, he is not going to preach, first of all, a religious idea, or an ethical goal, much less is he going to preach his own experience. For the issue is not his history, but history itself and what has happened to it because of Christ. I am taking exception, and I make no apology for it, I am taking exception to the general theme of the evangelical world today. I will not preach testimony.
You can catch it on TV on Saturday nights, but you will not catch it here. Why? Because it will eventually obscure and eclipse the history of Christ. That’s why. You will eventually reduce the gospel to telling your story and your history, and you will not be able to understand appropriately and rightly what has taken place in history because of Jesus Christ himself.
I plead with you on this. I am claiming Paul for my corner, and you might judge that that is presumption. I hope it’s faithfulness. to the text. And trust that by so I am honoring the gospel and the Savior himself. Here is the true and central content of his ministry. Something has happened, an event has taken place.
And in describing his ministry, he speaks of himself later in this epistle, chapter 6, verse 20, as an ambassador in chains for the sake of this very message. His being a ministry of proclamation, of witness to that which took place in Christ, and instruction to the end that we all might grasp well our place in this dispensation, this administration of the end of the times, the fullness of the times.
It is in this connection with Paul’s proclamation of, witness to, and instruction in, the revelation of the mystery. that his commands to wives and husbands, to children and parents, to slaves and masters are to be understood. People do not get what Paul says to wives and husbands, children and parents, and slaves and masters, because they do not get Ephesians 1, 9 and 10. However, before we move into a fuller exposition of those latter verses in Ephesians, we want to finish out our remarks on this key text in the first chapter, particularly that tenth verse. Here Paul explains, or maybe even better at least, provides entrance into what he means by the administration of the fullness of times.
This administration is what he calls a summing up of all things in Christ, things of heaven, things on earth. King James has gathering together into one. The New American Standard has summing up all things in Christ. Now, we might gain better understanding of these words if we give them a bit fuller translation, one suggested by Herman Ritterbos. What is in mind is the summing up of all things, or a summing up anew of all things in Christ. Again, event front and center. What Paul has in mind is the gathering together in and by a concrete historical event. the gathering together of all things in Christ, and this made necessary because the integrality, the interrelationships, and the meanings of all these things lacked their proper definition and expression until Christ came, died, was raised, and ascended. For the Apostle Paul, this summing up has everything to do with the fact that Christ, the eternal Son of God, became man.
But as man, he became second Adam for us. This is the focus of his effort and ministry and work on our behalf. The prospect of the integrality, the interrelationships, and the means of all things of heaven and in earth, lost to humanity in Adam, our first covenantal head, are now summed up anew, finally and conclusively, in Christ, the second Adam, the new man, the head of the new humanity. Harmony and peace are to be found in him. such harmony and peace as are lost in our first Father.
Harmony and peace are to be found in him by whom God is reconciled to humanity, and humanity to God. even to the point of pulling down partitions between peoples, between Jews and Gentiles, even to the point of fitting man to his environment, and that perfectly, and that environment to man in the heavenly places for which man was originally destined. even to the point of making plain the meaning of creation itself and of life in all of its vast details and particularity, hence all that is true in science, culture, and philosophy, even to the point of making plain and intelligible all the strands of world history, but in particular the history of redemption, the biblical revelation, as they converge in him.
Christ, in the accomplishment of his work as the second Adam, the head of the new humanity, becomes the formation of kingdom, rule, throne, palace, kingship itself. All categories are to be understood in relationship to him—temple, tabernacle, sanctuary, altar, sacrifice, mediation, and the priesthood. Pulpit, proclamation, commandment, prophetic suffering, and prophetic office. head, headship, body, individual members, assembly, people, congregation, church. Christ, in the accomplishment of his work as the second Adam, the head of the new humanity, becomes the summary meaning of creation itself, of the front, of patriarchal history, of the exodus, pilgrimage, conquest, establishment, theocracy, exile, restoration, and gospel presentation.
And Christ, in the accomplishment of his work as second Adam, head of the new humanity and of the new creation, is the summation of being to all created things, all created beings, visible and invisible, whether they be principalities, powers, mighty ones or dominions, angelic or demonic. For they too have their meaning only in relationship to him and the design to which God has ordained them. Here truly is the one whom Paul describes in Colossians as all in all. Two things remain in conclusion for this message.
What Paul says here stands opposite, to be sure, a Gentile understanding of mystery, but it also stands opposite myth. Myth creates a history for the sake of meaning, so that the story constructed has no actual historical validity. In fact, myth needs no history.
Paul sees Christ as truly and genuinely historical, and as the summation of all actual creational historical development. And I might add, that Paul has no more doubt about the first Adam’s historicity than he does about the second. Modern theologians have claimed that biblical writers have clothed their essential message in myth, and that we must extract the meaning from the myth if we are to get a proper understanding of it. Actually, the biblical writers are exposing the mythologies of the world and answering them with the proclamation of what God has done in the history of redemption, even as He brings that history to summation in His Son, Jesus Christ. We believe in the God who acts.
But finally, what Paul has to say here stands opposite the notion of system. I realize I’m getting myself into trouble here. Because if the Reformed faith, the Reformed Church, has stood for anything through the ages, it has stood for a well-defined, well-crafted system. I don’t want you to misunderstand me. I am not the enemy of systematic theology, and I am not opposed to systems. I believe our confession is systematically laid out, and I have taken an ordination vow with regard to the system of doctrine taught in the Westminster standards.
Nevertheless, it is important for you to see that what the Apostle Paul is saying here does, in a certain sense, stand opposite the notion of systems. This is just an amplification of what I said earlier. You must realize that Paul’s intention is not to introduce you to a system of thought.
His intention is to introduce you with the reality of what God has done. System will flow forth from the act. It will be a construct. It will be, yes, a genuine mental activity in which we place organization to the facts of life and organize them as best we can.
But Paul’s intention is not, first of all, to introduce you to a system of thought. Rather, his interest is to introduce you to the reality of what God has done. Neither is his interest to introduce you to a so-called world and life view, if you mean by that an intellectual construct by which you set before yourself a central idea from which all other ideas can be deduced and inferred in proper equilibrium and balance. Paul’s interest is the gospel, the good news.
Hear what that word communicates. It’s news about an event. That’s what makes it news, and it’s good news. It’s the good news about what God has done in Jesus Christ, about what has actually come about in space and time because of God’s great grace to us. It is about what actually is. It is about the state of affairs that God has made because he has acted in Christ. Paul’s interest, then, is in what is actually so because of God’s activity in bringing to light the mystery of his will, now in the fullness, the end of the times, in which all things are summed up as if afresh, anew, reaching the exposition of their true meanings and destiny in and through the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Here is Paul’s message to the Ephesians, it is what lies behind his comments to wives, husbands, children, parents, slaves, masters, and I trust that it informs you. in all that you say and do. God has come. He has acted. He has acted for you. And now everything is different. And all things are being made new.
Father, we pray that we might be attuned well to the message from your Word and the message of the Apostle. We thank you for the uncompromising way in which he sets forth his concern, that which drives him and motivates him. Truly, the revelation in the Gospel of what you have done of what you have accomplished, this even bringing time itself to its proper conclusion, and thus, Lord, setting before us the proper and even appropriately exegeted meaning of all things, truly as those things are summed up in Christ our Savior. Lord, may our Savior then be front and center to us even as he is the central figure of this drama that has been played out on the plane of this creation. And Lord, may it please you to grant us mercy even as we tailor all of our words and works
The sermon text provided above is derived from the sermon audio recording making use of generative tools. It has not been manually edited. While transcription tools have a high degree of accuracy, the output may include generative textual, punctuation, and/or formatting errors.