Paul asserts that this “mysterious plan” was hidden
throughout the ages, and he was given the honor of revealing it to all
creation, specifically to “the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly
places.” When the Bible speaks of “ages,” it is important to understand that it
refers to certain periods of time when God dealt with His creation in different
ways. The age of Eden was short-lived. We assume this because children of Adam
and Eve did not appear until after they were kicked out of the Garden. This
makes their stay there something less that nine months, one imagines.
Eden was followed by the Patriarchal Age, which was
punctuated by the flood but continued when Noah and his sons restarted the “be fruitful
and multiply” command. Not long after the flood, God did something that was
earthshaking, but few Christians recognize it. We know about the Tower of
Babel, but we seldom consider its importance. God had a definite purpose for
scattering the people who built the tower. He was about to select one group as
His own and let the rest go their own way for a time – their appointed time as Paul
told the Athenians. Abram’s call recorded in Genesis twelve sets the stage
for the culminating act of God’s redemption plan for all people.
To be sure, most of the history recorded from Genesis twelve
through Revelation twenty focusses on the nation of Israel, God’s chosen
people. Part of the mystery Paul mentions is why God took so long to accomplish
His purpose. It was roughly two thousand years from the fall of Adam to the
call of Abram. Then it was almost two thousand years to the coming of the Second
Adam, Jesus Christ, who completed God’s plan of redemption. In Peter’s
second epistle, he responds to people who think God is working too slowly;
they were bemoaning a brief twenty-to-thirty-year delay. Step back, and you can
see it is more like a four-thousand-year delay.
I will not pretend to know why God let the clock run so
long. I don’t think He was expecting people to change. The record shows that we
are pretty much the same now as they were shortly after the Garden was closed.
True, Peter says that God’s “slowness” reveals His patience which gives people
time to repent. But if we learn anything from the history of Israel, it is that
as a race, humans are deaf, dumb, and blind to the workings of our Creator. They
were then; we are now.
I suppose you might say that God needed fourteen generations
of Mosaic covenant breakers to prove that we could never make it on our own –
that our deceitful and desperately wicked hearts needed a supernatural transplant.
Back when God pulled Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees, He
told him that his seed would ultimately bring His blessing to all nations.
Paul uses a grammar lesson (which is why I believe in word-by-word inspiration
of the Scriptures) saying that Seed
was singular not plural – the Seed being Abraham’s descendant, Jesus of
Nazareth. The seed (plural) as a national entity failed miserably.
The mystery that was hidden from everybody, even the Jews
who played a pivotal role, was that all the nations would one day be brought
back into fellowship with their Creator. The tabernacle/temple era was a
millennial object lesson playing off the Tower of Babel experience: people
cannot reach up God on their own; God must reach down to people. Because even
the acts we consider righteous are despicable to God, He had to make His
righteousness available unilaterally. When the sinless Son of God offered His
own life during the Passover festival, He became the Passover Lamb that takes
away the sin of the world – the whole world not just Israel’s world. His
righteousness is now on offer.
Any thinking person would wonder why God would do such a
thing. The answer is found in one of the most
well-known verses in the Bible: “For in this way God loved the world, so
that he gave his one and only Son, in order that everyone who believes in him
will not perish but will have eternal life.” Everyone born in Adam is doomed to
perish (suffer eternal separation from God) if they die apart from the saving
blood of the Lamb. Where Adam disobeyed and cast the whole world into its sorry
state of rebellion, the Second Adam, Jesus, was perfectly obedient, which
qualified Him to pay the price for all sin for all time. He did it because God
loves all people and wants them to come back into fellowship with Him.
There is one other aspect of the mystery Paul was called to
reveal. In the Ephesians
passage I mentioned earlier, Paul says the mystery was made known “in order
that the many-sided wisdom of God might be made known now to the rulers and the
authorities in the heavenly places through the church.” As I
have written before, the Church of Christ has a cosmic purpose: we are
demonstrating God’s love not just to our earthly neighbors but to the hosts of
heaven as well. I imagine God saying, “Hey everybody! Let me show you how much
I love my creation.” Why did He do that? The answer may be found in John’s
statement that God is the embodiment of love – biblical love, which means
caring concern. God cares; that is no mystery. The fact that we are to demonstrate
His love to heaven and earth – that is amazing.
Related Posts: Who Are
the Other Gods; The End
of Always; Do
We Really Need God
No comments:
Post a Comment