Ephesians 1:9–10 This happened because he made known to us the once hidden, but now revealed, secret of his will, for so it was his good pleasure to do. The secret was a purpose which he formed in his own mind before time began, so that the periods of time should be controlled and administered until they reached their full development, a development in which all things, in heaven and upon earth, are gathered into one in Jesus Christ.

IT is now that Paul is really getting to grips with his subject. He says, as the Authorized Version has it, that God has made known to us ‘the mystery of his will’. The New Testament uses the word mystery in a special sense. It is not something mysterious in the sense that it is hard to understand. It is something which has long been kept secret and has now been revealed, but is still incomprehensible to the person who has not been initiated into its meaning.

Let us take an example. Suppose someone who knew nothing whatever about Christianity was brought into a communion service. To that person, it would be a complete mystery; he or she would not understand in the least what was going on. But to anyone who knows the story and the meaning of the Last Supper, the whole service has a meaning which is quite clear. So, in the New Testament sense, a mystery is something which is hidden to non-Christians but clear to Christians.

What, for Paul, was the mystery of the will of God? It was that the gospel was open to the Gentiles too. In Jesus, God has revealed that his love and care, his grace and mercy, are meant not only for the Jews but for the whole world.

Now Paul, in one sentence, introduces his great thought. Up until now, people had been living in a divided world. There was division between the animals and human beings. There was division between Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and barbarians. All over the world, there was strife and tension. Jesus came into the world to wipe out the divisions. That, for Paul, was the secret of God. It was God’s purpose that all the many different strands and all the warring elements in this world should be gathered into one in Jesus Christ.

Here, we have another tremendous thought. Paul says that all history has been a working out of this process. He says that all through the ages there has been an arranging and an administering of things so that this day of unity should come. The word which Paul uses for this preparation is intensely interesting. It is oikonomia, which literally means household management. The oikonomos was the steward who saw to it that the family affairs ran smoothly.

It is the Christian conviction that history is the working out of the will of God. That is by no means what every historian or thinker has been able to see. In one of his epigrams, the Irish playwright and poet Oscar Wilde said: ‘You give the criminal calendar of Europe to your children under the name of history.’ The historian and poet Sir George Clark, in his inaugural lecture at Oxford, said: ‘There is no secret and no plan in history to be discovered. I do not believe that any future consummation could make sense of all the irrationalities of preceding ages. If it could not explain them, still less could it justify them.’ In the introduction to A History of Europe, H. A. L. Fisher writes: ‘One intellectual excitement, however, has been denied to me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discovered in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following another, as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations, only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.’ The French novelist and biographer André Maurois says: ‘The universe is indifferent. Who created it? Why are we here on this puny mud-heap spinning in infinite space? I have not the slightest idea, and I am quite convinced that no one has the least idea.’

It so happens that we are living in an age in which many people have lost their faith in any purpose for this world. But it is the faith of Christians that in this world God’s purpose is being worked out; and Paul’s conviction is that it is God’s purpose that one day all things and all people should be one family in Christ. As Paul sees it, that mystery was not even grasped until Jesus came, and now it is the great task of the Church to work out God’s purpose of unity, revealed in Jesus Christ.

William Barclay,   The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians (New Daily Study Bible) (pp. 95-98). Westminster John Knox Press. Kindle Edition.