Our Exalted Identity in a Holy Church

Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Church Mission in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library

Now in the three primary expositions we will be looking at various passages in Ephesians. The two other sessions will be more topical, dealing with more immediately practical things and running from a range of texts, but in these expository sessions we’ll focus on set texts. The first is Ephesians 1:3–14. I will begin by reading it. Hear, then, what Holy Scripture says:

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“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth together under Christ.

In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.”

This is the Word of the Lord. Let us pray.

Open our minds and hearts, Lord God, to see the wonder of this gospel, the incalculable privilege it is to be the church of the living God. Expand our minds and hearts, our grasp of the truth and therefore also our adoration, our obedience, our faithfulness. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our Redeemer. For Jesus’ sake, amen.

What is it today that calls forth our most heart-felt and spontaneous praise in private devotions, in the family? What do we most naturally praise God for? Oh, I’m sure there are a lot of things, some of them merely formulaic. Some might praise God that the surf is up or that finally you have enough income to secure a mortgage, the baby is arriving safely, and then, of course, for every small success in the planting of a church, you thank God for that. But, in fact, what we thank God the most for is likely to indicate what God is for us because it’s what we most cherish.

There is no passage in all of Holy Scripture more central than this one if we are to gain insight into what we should thank God for, preeminently. Oh, I know there is a sense in which we must be thankful for everything. Just as all of our cares are to be cast on God because he cares for us, according to the apostle Peter, so also our thanks must be as sweeping as all of the gifts of God. He is the God of grace in whom is no darkness due to shifting shadows, the source of all good gifts, so our praise must be very wide.

Yet there is something pulsating at the center in these verses, which not only open up what the gospel is, again, but also explain more fully what the church is and where the pulsating heart of our thanks ought to be. Verse 3 offers a kind of survey of the whole. It’s the sweep of praise. Then the rest of the verses I read break it down into several components. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.”

Of course, some translations that are more direct use blessed or blessing three times: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with all spiritual blessing in Christ.” What that means, of course, is that, in some sense of other, there is blessing going both ways. We bless God: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ because he has blessed us with every spiritual blessing.” What is going on when the blessing goes both ways?

When we bless God, we’re praising him; when he blessed us, he’s not exactly praising us. What’s the commonality? The heart of it is this: It’s the notion of approval. When we bless God, when we praise God, we are approving him, not because we stand in judgment of him and have the right to sanction or disapprove what he says, but in adoration and worship we approve what he does and who he is and what he says and say, in effect, collectively and individually, “Yes! Amen! Let it be so! You are God!”

When he blessed us, he likewise is approving us, but now not as praise but as condescension, grace. “This is the person whom I approve. This is the person whom I bless. This is what my blessing looks like.” So there is approval running both ways, but one as an act of adoration, the other as an act of gracious condescension. The apostle Paul looks over the range of things God has blessed us with, and he says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praise to him because he has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.”

Now the specific spiritual blessings Paul has in mind when he says “every spiritual blessing” are these: election to holiness, adoption as the children of God, redemption, forgiveness, knowledge of God’s gracious plan to sum up all things in Christ, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the hope of glory.

We’re in perennial danger of being so used to these expressions as theological “God talk” that they don’t stir us anymore. We need to probe them again and say, “Why does Paul use such exuberant language when he unpacks these things?” Now before we go through them, in order, it’s worth observing three more details in verse 3.

1. We are the ones who receive these spiritual blessings.

“… who has blessed us in the heavenly realms …” That turns out to be Jews and Gentiles, the church of the living God. (We’ll come back to that later.)

2. The sphere in which these blessings are enjoyed is the heavenly realms.

“Blessed be the God and our Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praise be to the God and our Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” The expression is used only five times in the New Testament, all of them in Ephesians. What does it mean?

I think it’s worthwhile looking at all five occurrences before we decide. There’s this passage, then 1:20. Begin halfway through 19, which speaks of God’s incomparably great power. “That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms.” Now that makes sense enough. In the abode of God, at God’s right hand, one with the Father, vindication stamped all over him. Christ at the Father’s right hand in the heavenly realms.

Chapter 2, verse 6: “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” Now that’s a little harder to understand because most of us don’t think of ourselves as at God’s right hand already in the heavenly realms. We’ll hold on to that one just a wee bit. Chapter 3, verse 10: “God’s intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In other words, God’s wisdom in the gospel, manifested through the church is proclaimed to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, in the heavenly spheres. Does this mean angels? Does this mean good angels or fallen angels? From this text you can’t say. But there’s one more passage. Chapter 6, verse 12: “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

Not merely what’s taking place on this earth right now, but in this cosmic, spiritual sphere where God is, there’s another entire dimension to this struggle in which we are engaged as we are planting churches and evangelizing and preaching the truth. There is a counterpoint to the struggle in the heavenly realms in which the gospel of God that comes upon us, in our world, is a proclamatory witness of judgment even to the darkest forces of power in the heavenly realms. It’s a shatteringly sweeping vision.

So what does it mean in chapter 1, verse 3, when we’re told that God has blessed us in the heavenly realms? Well, if this were a talk in a seminary, I would say in the heavenly realms means a kind of spiritual equivalent of inaugurated eschatology. I’m paid to say stuff like that, you know? It’s my job. But I can’t think of a better summary. It’s worth understanding what the expression means. A kind of spatial equivalent of inaugurated eschatology. Eschatology is the Word of God with respect to what takes place in the eschaton, at the end. It’s last things.

Eschatology deals with the final consummation of things. On the other hand, the New Testament is full of the reality that what takes place at the end has already started now. It has already been inaugurated. We don’t have our resurrection bodies yet, but we’re already adopted as sons of God. That has already taken place right now. We already have eternal life, even if we don’t have eternal life in the full, consummated glory of the new heaven and the new earth yet to come.

Eschatology, inaugurated eschatology. We deal constantly with the fact that we already have so much because of what Christ has secured. But there is more toward which we press because the end is not yet and the consummation is still around the corner, still the fruit of Christ’s cross work. So we’re used to living between the already and the not yet. That’s a commonality amongst Christians who read their Bibles.

But to speak of being with Christ in the heavenly realms is a kind of spatial equivalent of that. Inaugurated eschatology pictures a kind of timeline. The consummation is here, but it’s already lapped back so the power that raised Christ from the dead is already power that is bestowed upon us to transform us through the gospel. It’s lapped back. We don’t have to wait ‘til the end for life to come upon us. We have eternal life already, now. It’s along this timeline that we speak of inaugurated eschatology.

The talk about in the heavenly realms is a kind of spatial equivalent of that. One day, we shall ourselves be in the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness. We shall see God in his unshielded glory. As far as I can see, the angels of God, the unfallen angels of God, never gaze on the face of God. The highest order of angels in Revelation, chapter 4, hide their faces with their wings as they cry, “ ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.’ ”

But we’re told in Revelation 22 that redeemed human beings, on the last day, will see his face, and we will have resurrected bodies, but all of that has already been secured by Christ and his resurrected body. Already in a measure we see him by faith! We’re not there in resurrection existence around the throne yet, but we’re so identified with Christ that if he is at the Father’s right hand, then we are so identified with him that we are there, too. He identifies with us.

“ ‘Saul! Saul! Why are you persecuting me?’ ” he asks. Not, “Why are you persecuting my church?” He identifies with us, and we are identified with him. If he is there, then we are so included in him there’s a sense in which that’s our home base, too. We are already with Christ in the heavenlies. All these blessings have been poured out upon us because they’re all mediated through Christ, and Christ is in the heavenlies.

So, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing …” Secured by Christ, who has gone to the Father’s right hand before us. We are identified in him, a kind of anticipation of being literally there, in physical resurrection existence, on the last day. There’s one more detail.

3. All of these blessings are secured in Christ.

This language of in Christ or in whom or in him occurs 11 times in the verses we read. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” In other words, the blessings are secured by Christ, and then a little farther on we’ll see they are mediated by the Spirit, and they have been granted by God the Father so we give praise to him.

The passage is profoundly Trinitarian. We’ll come back to that point. That’s the survey of the sweep of praise in verse 3. Now the particular items for which Paul offers praise can be grouped in several ways. I’ll group them in four.

1. We have been chosen and adopted.

Verse 4: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.” The doctrine of election, of course, makes a lot of people nervous, but it’s what the text says. He chose us. He chose us in Christ.

At one level, it’s not too difficult to understand. We can make it difficult by introducing all kinds of philosophical considerations. Yet, at one level, it’s pretty straightforward. When God chose Abraham, how did that work? Was Abraham having his devotions one day, as it were, and then he paused and said, “You know, God, this world seems to me to be going to hell in a handbasket. It’s pretty disgusting. I know you sent the flood and wiped just about everybody out, but it’s just as bad as it always was.

Now we’ve just come through the Tower of Babel, and I don’t see a lot of hope. But I do have a suggestion. I think you should start a kind of new humanity within the old humanity. I can be the great-granddaddy. Let’s call them Israelites, and you make my seed as numerous as the stars of the heaven, as the grains of sand by the seashore. We’ll enter some sort of covenant, and we’ll do what you say. You bless us, and we’ll show the world what a really good humanity looks like. Isn’t that a great idea, God?” Is that the way it worked? No. God chose Abraham.

Well, what about Moses? Moses tried to offer his ideas to God, as it were, as a young man. He believed the people of God ought to be free. That got him into a murder charge, and he fled the country and for the next decade spent his life on the backside of the wilderness shepherding sheep. When God finally did approach him, when Moses was 80 years old, Moses had not learned much, except humility, which is enough.

Now he doesn’t even want to go! God has to argue him into it! But certainly Moses, as the founder of Israel as a nation, is not a volunteer. He’s chosen by God, picked up, and turfed in! In fact, when you look at all the great turning points in redemptive history, what you discover is God insists on preserving the initiative. When David, for example, wants to build a temple, God says, “No, no, no, no. I didn’t tell you to do that. I’ll choose the person who builds the temple for me.”

Oh, there are a lot of other considerations, but there’s no way David is going to get away with, as it were, doing God a favor by making a suggestion. So also in this passage. Whatever the complex means by which we come to faith, the fundamental premise behind all genuine conversion is the sovereign election of God. We have been chosen in Christ, and this before the creation of the world, which means it is finally, completely independent of us, and we are dependent upon his grace.

In the little book I wrote about my dad, I mention that during those hard years in Quebec when things were really, really difficult and Baptist ministers spent time in jail and we kids would get beaten up because we were maudits Protestants and things like that, the Belgian Congo, as it was then called, erupted in the violence that produced national independence. The Belgian Congo became Zaire and then eventually Congo and then the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In that violence in 1959, a lot of American missionaries who had spent years of their lives in the Congo and had learned not only tribal languages but the national language, which was French, fled the country and then looked around to find another part of the world where they could use their command of French to serve.

So some of them came up to French Canada. We weren’t African, but at least we spoke French. Not one of them stayed more than six months. Not one. I was in my mid-teens then when, of course, I knew just about everything. I asked my father, “Why don’t these people stay? Why are they chickening out? Why are they calling it quits like this?”

My father, who was the mildest of men, said, “Well, Don, you have to understand in their years of service, they have seen many, many converts, entire denominations formed, hospitals built, education advanced, schools formed. They’ve seen fruitfulness in their ministry, and they come up here and they see only difficulty and challenge. They stay here for six months and haven’t seen a single convert, and they infer from this that maybe they have misread the Lord’s guidance. They need to go somewhere else.”

So I said to my father, as only a 14-year-old can, “Then why don’t you leave and go somewhere where you can be more productive?” My father wheeled on me and said, “I stay because God has many people in this place.” Which is, of course, exactly the encouragement God gave to Paul when he was contemplating Corinth. Assurance that God has many people in this place keeps you pressing on: the doctrine of election turned to good use.

Moreover, we are called not simply to be privileged, but to be holy and blameless. That’s what we’re called toward. That’s a pair of words Paul uses elsewhere. Christians are holy, blameless, and irreproachable in his presence. (Colossians 1:22) That’s what he has called us toward, which brings us so quickly to the way we gain this holy status before God, bound up with the gospel of God, which is mentioned explicitly a few verses farther on.

Or to put the whole matter slightly differently, verse 5: “In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ.” It’s the same sort of theme, put in a slightly different key. Now this is an experiment I’ve done in many, many places in the Western world. Sonship is bound up in the Western world, because we watch CSI programs on television, with DNA. It’s not bound up with cultural status, familial identity, your job, or the like.

It’s bound up with your DNA. Just ask any CSI. But in part, in the ancient world, it was really different because most sons ended up doing what their fathers did and most daughters ended up doing what their mothers did. If your father is a baker, you become a baker. If your father is a farmer, you become a farmer. If your father’s name is Stradivarius, you make violins; that’s the way it works. Do you see? It’s part of the heritage.

But how many of you men (just you men now) are now doing, vocationally, what your fathers did at the same age. Let me see your hands. Impressive, isn’t it? How many of you women are now doing, at your age, exactly what your mothers did at the same age? Yes, I see that hand. Two hands. Isn’t that remarkable? Whereas 95, 97, 98 percent in the ancient world were identified with what their fathers did.

Jesus was known as the son of the carpenter. In one passage in Mark, he becomes known as the carpenter, himself. Presumably, his father has died. He takes over the business. Do you see? That’s your identity. That’s your social status. That’s where you get your education. If your father’s a farmer, you don’t go to agricultural college to learn how to farm. Your father teaches you how to put in fence posts and when to irrigate and when the seed goes in and how to weed, all the rest. He teaches everything. Your identity is there in the family.

That’s the background that stands behind many biblical metaphors: sons of Belial, sons of worthlessness. It’s not saying your father is worthless. It’s saying, “You’re such a disgustingly worthless person the only explanation is you belong to the Worthless family.” Who are the real sons of Abraham? Not those with Abraham’s genes; those with Abraham’s faith, who act like Abraham, who talk like Abraham, who respond like Abraham.

When some people in Jesus’ day try to claim they really are sons of God, Jesus says to them, in John, chapter 8, “No. Not really. You’re the sons of the Devil himself because, after all, he was a murderer from the beginning, and you’re trying to bump me off. He was a liar from the beginning, and you can’t say the truth about me. You’re sons of the Devil himself.”

Do you see? Now if we are to be adopted as sons, sons of God.… It’s not just a status; it’s saying we must be like God, show ourselves to belong to the God family. Oh, I know you have to put surrounding warnings against that, but Jesus himself says as much. He says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.” The presupposition is God is the supreme peacemaker, so if we make peace we’re acting like God, which shows that in that respect, at least, we belong to the God family. Do you see?

That’s why the king in Israel could be called a son of God, in a special sense. God reigns! Insofar as a human king reigns like God with justice and integrity, then he shows himself to belong to the God family. He’s a son of God! Do you see? Now transparently, we’re not sons of God in every domain. The Bible does not say to us, “Be omniscient, for I am omniscient.” There are incommunicable attributes of God.

But on front after front, we are to act like God in every way it is appropriate for image-bearers to act like God. Which means the final description of those who are triumphant in Revelation 21 and 22, is this: he shall be my son. In other words, in one sense or another, we’re sons of God, now. Both men and women are sons of God. But ultimately, we will be sons of God where so perfectly will we reflect our heavenly Father that in every domain where it is appropriate for his image-bearers to be like God we will show ourselves to belong to the God family.

That’s what God has chosen us to. “In love he predestined us to be adopted as sons. For adoption of sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.” Praise be to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because we have been chosen and adopted.

2. We have been redeemed and forgiven.

Verses 7 and 8: “In him [Christ] we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us.” Now 50 to 100 years ago in the Western world, redemption was common economic language. It’s just about gone now. In some technical papers you can still speak of the redemption of a mortgage, but it’s not common talk anymore.

Redemption has become God talk. It used to be you could go to a pawn shop and hock a watch and then go back later and redeem it. But we just don’t have a lot of pawn shops anymore. We don’t use that language. Now we buy it back. In the first century, redemption was common economic talk. It was not theological God talk. Nowhere was it more tellingly used than in the redemption of slaves.

Many people became slaves in the ancient world not from raiding parties or because they lost in a war or skirmishes or the like.… You could become a slave that way, but that wasn’t the only way. In many cases, people became slaves in the ancient world because there were no bankruptcy protection laws.

You borrowed some many, and then the economy went belly-up, or you made a mess of the business and as a result, you lost everything. You owed the money, couldn’t pay it, and had no other recourse, legally, in the Roman Empire but to sell yourself and perhaps your family into slavery. You’re an economic slave, an economically caused slave.

But if, then, you had a well-to-do cousin 30 kilometers away (don’t forget … 30 kilometers in those days was a day’s journey, and there were no cell phones to tip them off about what had happened to you) eventually he might hear what had happened to you, and he might come and decide to redeem you. That meant to free you from slavery by the payment of a price.

So also in the New Testament. We are freed from a certain kind of slavery by the payment of a price. We have been bought, not with corruptible things but with the blood of Christ Jesus. That was the price paid to free us from slavery to sin. Not only slavery’s curse, which damned us, but this slavery’s power, which enchains us. Christ’s cross work, by the price he paid, freed us. It liberated us by redeeming us.

Because he paid the price, we become free both from the curse and from the chain of sin. Or, to put this another way, we have forgiveness! Verse 5: “In love he predestined us for adoption …” Verse 7: “In him we have redemption through his blood …” Through his death on our behalf. “… the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us.”

The worst factor in our enslavement is we stand under the curse and are utterly and totally unable to free ourselves. We sin by our nature. We sin by our choice. We sin persistently. We sin rebelliously, and we are damned for it justly. Christ, by his blood, frees us from such slavery. He redeems us by the price of his own blood. All of this, this immeasurable benefit has been secured to us by Christ Jesus. Praise be to God because we have been redeemed and forgiven.

3. We have been shown God’s high mystery.

That expression “with all wisdom and understanding,” some translations link with the preceding line. The 2011 NIV, rightly in my judgment, links it with the following line, but even if you take it the other way, it won’t make any difference to the understanding of verses 9 and 10.

“With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth together under Christ.” If I had to put this in non-technical terms in one simple clause, it’s this: God wants us to understand his saving purposes.

He could have saved us without explaining much. That he should explain so much is, in fact, a mark of incredible grace. Now let me unpack that a bit. The term mystery, as you well know, does not refer to that which is mysterious, nor does it refer to a whodunit. Some of our translations use the word secret, but that’s not quite right either. The word is used 27 or 28 times in the New Testament.

Most of them (in my view, all of them) refer to that which has been hidden in time past but which is now disclosed in the coming of Christ. It’s hidden in time past but now disclosed. But that does not mean it was not actually there in time past. It was there in the text, but hidden. People didn’t see it even though it was there. Now in the fullness of time, it is unpacked. It is made clear.

To take the easiest of all examples, does the Old Testament promise us a suffering servant King? Well, if you are a Christian, you will say yes. A promised Davidic Messiah who must suffer and die on our behalf. Therefore, we think not only of texts like 2 Samuel 7, which sets up the Davidic dynasty, but Isaiah 53, which promises a suffering servant. Moreover, there are some Davidic texts, like Psalm 69, often quoted in the passion narratives, three times, where David himself, the king, is the one who is despised and rejected by his friends.

Psalm 22: “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” is on David’s lips before it’s on Jesus’ lips. David himself because the paradigm of the Davidic King who suffers and dies and feels rejected by his Father! We’re Christians. We know these things. Did the apostles know them before the cross?

In Matthew’s gospel in the famous scene in Caesarea Philippi where Jesus asks the question, “Who do people say that I am?” Peter eventually pipes up and says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Of course, Jesus says, “You are blessed because you know this, Simon son of John, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.”

On the other hand, what Peter means by confessing Jesus is the Christ is not exactly what you mean. When you and I confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, we cannot unthink the fact that he is the messianic hero and the suffering servant. We cannot unthink the cross and the resurrection.

For us, Christ means Christ crucified and resurrected and vindicated. We cannot manage to separate those notions, but clearly, at this juncture, Peter didn’t have those pieces together. For when Jesus goes on to talk about his impending death, Peter, having scored once theologically, thinks he will do so again, and says, “Never, Lord! This shall not happen to you!” prompting Jesus to turn on him and say, “Get behind me, Satan! You do not understand the things of God.”

When Jesus is hanging on the cross and then buried, are the apostles in an upstairs room saying, “Yes! I can hardly wait ‘til Sunday!” or are they hiding for fear of the Jews? They still don’t have it together, prompting Jesus, according to Luke’s gospel in Luke 24, to say to his followers after the resurrection, “O fools and slow of heart to believe all that the Scriptures have written.”

And he turns to the Scriptures and explains things in the Scripture concerning himself, showing that the Christ had to suffer.” Which means he pointed not only to the passages I’ve just alluded to but things like the significance of the Passover lamb, the significance of Yom Kippur and the entire sacrificial system. He points to all things in Scripture concerning himself, showing them the Christ had to suffer.

These truths are there in the Scripture, even though they were not perceived to be in the Scripture. They remained mystery. To take another example, most conservative Jews in Palestine in the first century believed when the Messiah came, he would come with a bang. That is, the big bang was not at creation; the big bang came when the Messiah came and cleaned it all up at the end.

But a lot of the parables Jesus tells in the Gospels are designed to show that’s not the way the kingdom comes. The kingdom comes like yeast in dough. It comes like seed that is sown in the ground and produces various percentage increases. It comes slowly. A lot of the parables Jesus tells are parables of the kingdom to show the kingdom is coming in an unexpected way. Jesus calls these things the mysteries of the kingdom, the same word as here.

What does he mean by that? Not that the kingdom is secretive or sinister or mysterious. What he means is the kingdom, as I’m unpacking it to you, has been taught in the Old Testament that way but you didn’t see it, and now you will see it at this juncture. When you ask, “Well, in what Old Testament passages do you find that kind of tension between the kingdom coming with a bang and the kingdom coming slowly?”

Well, you could turn to Daniel, for example, and observe on occasion the coming kingdom is presented as a great rock coming down a mountain that smashes all the kingdoms of this world. There’s the big bang approach. But it can also be seen as a little thing in the east that grows and grows and grows until it swallows up the whole earth. Do you see? Both notions of the kingdom are presented in Daniel alone. But that doesn’t mean people saw it.

The gospel is regularly presented, in many of its faces, as that which has been hidden in some measure in the Old Testament and is now disclosed. That’s why the gospel can be presented in two very surprising ways. Look at the last three verses of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Romans, chapter 16, verses 25 to 27. There we read, “Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel …” That’s what we’re talking about: the gospel.

“… the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed …” Now that’s the mystery theme. It was there! It was in the text but hidden for long ages past, but now revealed. “… revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of God.” In other words, it was not made known as brand-new revelation that had to be thought up from scratch! It was there in the prophetic writings and is now made known.

The gospel is presented in the New Testament as simultaneously that which God has predicted in the Old Testament and which has now been fulfilled and as that which has been hidden in the Old Testament and is now revealed. It’s always both! Because it’s been hidden, we have to ask ourselves, “And when was it unpacked? When was it disclosed for what it was? What gave us the insight that showed us what the Old Testament was really dealing with?” That came with Christ.

Paul writes, “With all wisdom and understanding, he made know to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment.” That’s why Peter reminds us elsewhere in 1 Peter, chapter 1, that Old Testament writers longed to look into these things. Even angels wanted to understand how they were put together, but it is come to us, in the fulfillment of times.

The particular element here that is so central is this: to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. For the fact of the matter is there was a tendency in so many Jewish circles to think of the big bang as introducing a time when Israel would be supreme on the earth and there would be some trickle-down blessings for some Gentiles here and there.

But Paul looks at the Old Testament Scriptures afresh, and he says, “No. Don’t you understand? There’s that blessing to Abraham: ‘In him all the nations of the earth will be blessed.’ There’s the protoevangelium, the first announcement of the gospel, all the way back in Genesis 3. ‘The seed of the woman will crush the serpent’s heel.’ Not to see that all of these movements end up in a fulfillment in which Christ is not only king of Israel but King of the cosmos, King of all.

Oh, the roots of it are already there in the Old Testament. Don’t you see? But now in the fulfillment of time he has made known this mystery to us so we may better see Christ for who he is.” That’s why these themes keep coming up and Paul again and again and again. Thus, Christ is one with the heavenly Father in creation. Colossians 1 says, “All things were made by him and for him.”

He is the goal of creation, as he is also its Creator and its source. In God’s great mercy, he has enabled us who live at the end of the ages to see these things, understand the mind of God, and peer into this great mercy in adoration and reverence that previous ages had never put together. Praise be to God because we have been shown God’s high mystery.

4. We have been claimed as God’s portion for God’s glory.

Verses 11–14: “In him we were also chosen …” Most of our translations say chosen, but the verb rendered chosen is not the usual one. It’s normally bound up with appointing someone by lot. When it’s used in the construction it is found in here, it means something like this: we have been chosen as God’s portion.

The root of the idea comes from the song of Moses in Deuteronomy, chapter 32. “For the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance.” So all the nations of the earth are the Lord’s, but the Lord’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted inheritance. Now we’re told, the people of God, the church, is God’s portion. We have been chosen as God’s portion.

“… having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will …” Who, then, are the we? “… in order that we might be for the praise of his glory.” In verses 11 and 12, the we, it seems to me, are Jews. “… that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory.” And then in verses 13 and 14, it turns to you, with you Gentiles.

“And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession.”

Today we mark possession with a signature or with impossible-to-remember passwords, the more complicated, the better. We’re being warned all the time not to use anything with sequence, with our name in it, with the user-name in it, or anything that’s used anywhere else. That’s one of the ways we mark possession of something.

In the ancient world, it was very common to have a roller seal that you carried on a string. It would be hard-baked clay with some symbols on it, and you could run it over a piece of soft clay and that would be your seal. The document, then, you had approved. Or you could run it on some ink and run it over a sheet of papyrus. So what stamps us out as God’s possession, us Gentiles? Well, what stamps us out as God’s possession, God’s portion, is the Holy Spirit.

“When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance.” Now that changes the metaphor. He’s not only the seal that stamps us out as his, but he’s the down payment. He himself is the down payment of all the inheritance that will be ours on the last day: resurrection existence, the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness, one with Christ in glory. Already the seal of all of that is the Spirit himself given as the down payment of the promised inheritance.

In other words, what we have here is Trinitarian thinking. It shows up again explicitly in verse 17. “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better.” And all of this, we’re told again and again and again (I’ve skipped over the clauses every time) is to the praise of his glory or to the praise of his glorious grace.

I’ve been doing university missions now for about 35 years. In the last 15 years, I’ve started listening to a question I never heard before 15 years ago. Now it’s very rare for me to do any sort of extended university mission without hearing the question. The question is this.… Why is your God so keen on getting praised? “He always wants to be praised. You Christians are rabbiting on all the time about, ‘Praise God for this’ and ‘Praise God for that’ and ‘We owe him our praise.’

I mean, in our world if somebody wants to be praised all the time, they’re monomaniacal, they’re stuck on themselves, they’re selfish, they’re ridiculous, but your God, all the time, wants to be praised. Right through here, all of these good things he has done, all these blessings he has given us in Christ, are for the praise of his glorious grace. What kind of a God is that?”

Well, it’s possible, of course, to start saying, “God alone deserves that kind of praise. We don’t like that sort of self-focus amongst ourselves because we’re peers. God has no peer. To praise God is to acknowledge God is God. Not to praise God is to deny his God-ness.” All of those things are true, but there is something more glorious yet about this insistence of the Scriptures that we praise God.

The praise of God that God insists upon is for our good. It is a mark of his love that he insists on it. If we do not come to praise God, it’s because, for us, God is not God. That’s idolatry. God insists we praise him not because he needs to be praised, needs to be stroked. “Ooh, it’s Thursday afternoon. I can hardly wait ‘til Sunday comes and they break out those guitars and drums again. I can hardly wait.”

He doesn’t need our praise, but he commands it and demands it, not only because it’s his due (it is; he’s God!) but because this is part of the very means by which all of our orientation is turned away from self and from a passing world to eternal things, to the blessings we receive in Christ. Hidden in time past, now disclosed. The forgiveness of sins. The adoption of sons. To be God’s portion.

And in great mercy, he turns toward us and he says, as it were, “Don’t you see? You can’t be fully human, you can’t be who you are called to be, you can’t be reconciled to me unless with your whole heart you love me with heart and soul and mind and strength, unless you praise me.” Then in his mercy, he provides the means by which we may be reconciled to him, and we have redemption and forgiveness through the blood of his Son.

Now in a conference on the church, why have I expounded this passage? Because in all of our church planting, in all of our thinking through new responsibilities and new forms of outreach and establishing the elementary structures and then changing the structures as the church gets a little bigger and teaching and disciplining and catechizing and preaching some more.… In all of this we must have before us, constantly, a single-minded, rich, thick view of what the church is.

We speak of church planting, and because we’re practitioners we immediately think of how to go about it, how to do evangelism, how to reach out to neighbors who are not interested, how to get Bible studies going. What kind of tools can be used? All of those questions have to be raised! But you must constantly hold at the forefront of your thinking that what we’re doing, what we’re attempting is to stretch out the kingdom of God and plant new outcrops of the church of the living God.

Christ’s blood-bought community, chosen before the foundation of the world to be holy, adopted as sons, forgiven, freed from sin, redeemed, instructed in the mind of God, God’s own portion, God’s peculiar people, crossing all ethnic and other barriers, God’s community, the church of the living God. Small wonder Paul writes later on in this epistle, “Christ loved the church.”

What astonishing mercy and power:

In accord with his pleasure and will

He created each planet, each flower,

Every galaxy, microbe, and hill.

He suspended the planet in space