Ephesians 3:2-6 (p. 1820)
Int.: Can you keep a secret?
Some people can, and some people can’t.
For some people, knowing a secret that other people around them do not know is such an overwhelming feeling of power that they just have to share that secret with other people. They can’t keep a secret, and soon everyone will know whatever you tell them.
But other people can keep a secret hidden within their hearts and minds and they can be trusted not to tell anyone. Counselors, pastors, physicians and bankers have to be people like that. You certainly don’t want them telling other people everything they know about you.
But what about the people who keep secret what is not supposed to be a secret at all? They keep to themselves a message that they were supposed to spread around to everyone.
St. Paul speaks in our text about a great mystery that was never supposed to be a mystery at all.
The mystery St. Paul is speaking about is the gracious love of God for our human race and his plan of salvation that will lead us out of death to life. This is the greatest treasure our human race has ever had or ever heard of. How could such a message from God himself become a mystery that was hidden from almost all the world for generations? Why was it hidden from people in the first place? That is a great mystery in itself!
My friends, we shall explore that mystery this morning, along with the far greater one – the mystery of God’s grace and salvation. Today, on the day of Epiphany on which we remember the arrival of the Wise Men to see Jesus in Bethlehem, we celebrate the revealing of God’s own Son as the Savior of the whole world. And on this day of Epiphany, which means “enlightenment”, we celebrate the fact that finally …
God’s Mystery Is Revealed.
I. The Mystery Was Hidden For Many Generations.
God never told anyone to hide his love, his grace, his Savior and his salvation. In fact, this treasure was to be shared with the whole world. But those who had it often did not want to share it.
Part of that was jealousy – they wanted to keep it all for themselves. It was treated as THEIR precious treasure and THEIR precious secret, and they felt that it would be more valuable to those who had it if fewer people had a share in it. That might be true of physical treasures, but it is not at all true of love and of life, especially of the love and the life that come from God.
The people of Israel, and especially the tribe of Judah, were chosen by God to be his special people in this world – people with a mission. They were chosen by God to be his conduit of love to the world. God’s word of grace and salvation was given to the world through them, and God’s own Son, the Savior of the whole world, was to come into the world as one of them. What an honor that was, an honor and a trophy to be displayed throughout the whole world! What great honor and respect the world would have poured out upon them had they actually done that.
But instead, the people of Israel took that word of God and promise of salvation and locked it up inside their own nation, as though they had locked it up inside a bank vault where only they could sneak in and take a peak at it once in a while. The prophet Jonah is the prime example of this attitude by the Israelites toward the rest of the world. When God sent Jonah to Nineveh to call those pagan people to repentance and saving faith, Jonah took off in the opposite direction. It took being thrown into the sea and being swallowed by a huge fish to change Jonah’s mind about his assignment from God. But when he finally went to Nineveh and the Ninevites listened to Jonah and repented of their sins, Jonah was so angry that they had listened to him, that he wished he were dead. Jonah considered the gospel to be the Jews’ treasure, and he wanted the Ninevites to go to hell.
So the Jews took God’s great treasure and they hid it from the rest of the world, and then they replaced it. They took the gold of God’s love and the shining jewel of God’s promise of salvation through faith in his own Son, and they replaced them with the mud of man’s ideas and the clay of human works. Then they told themselves that their precious treasure was the great wisdom of their teachers and the wonderful goodness of their own works, mere mud and clay, and they imagined that these would open the doors of heaven to them!
Now it must be admitted that most of the rest of the world did not really want a share in God’s treasures.
After God confused their languages at Babel and forced the descendants of Noah to spread out over the earth, most of them continued the defiance of God that had led them to attempt to build the world’s first skyscraper. They made up their own gods to worship, gods who were made in their own image and whose demands reflected the desires of their own hearts.
As for the LORD, the Creator of heaven and earth, most people forgot all about him. Those who did know about the LORD because of their proximity to the land of Israel or their interaction with the Jewish people – well, most of them tried to confine the LORD to the land of the Israelites while they went on merrily worshipping their made up idols.
Yet here and there were islands of true faith in an ocean of unbelief toward the LORD. The nation of Ethiopia in Africa held true to the Lord as their God after their queen made a trip to Israel to meet Solomon and to investigate his great wisdom, which was legendary already during his lifetime. For a thousand years the Ethiopians worshipped the Lord until an official of their government met the apostle Philip along the desert road in the Sinai Peninsula. There he found out about Jesus, and he took that knowledge back to Ethiopia, and soon his whole nation became Christians. That is the power of the word of God, for in that teaching from the Lord …
II. The Mystery Was Revealed By God’s Holy Spirit.
As St. Paul says in our text this morning, it was revealed by the Holy Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.
The mystery was never really a mystery to those whom God called to proclaim his word to the world. Over and over again we read in the writings of the Old Testament prophets that God’s message of love and salvation will reach “the nations” and “the islands” the “the people” of this world. These were terms that referred to the Gentile races and nations of the earth, those who did not have God’s word given to them as the Israelites did, but those with whom the Israelites were supposed to share God’s precious treasure.
In his prayer at the dedication of the temple to the LORD in Jerusalem, King Solomon prayed, “As for the foreigner who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of your name—for men will hear of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm—when he comes and prays toward this temple, then hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel.” (1 Kings 8:41-43)
In Psalm 9 King David declares, “Sing praises to the LORD, enthroned in Zion; proclaim among the nations what he has done.” (v. 8) The 67th Psalm tells us, “May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you. May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you rule the peoples justly and guide the nations of the earth.” (vv. 3-4) And Psalm 98 declares, “all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.” (v. 3)
In prophesying the coming of the Savior Isaiah wrote, “In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his place of rest will be glorious.” (Isaiah 11:10)
These are just a few of the many places where the Old Testament prophets refer to the LORD as the God of all the earth and promise that all people on the earth will hear about him and many of them will come to him to share in his salvation.
The true flowering of the revelation of the mystery came through the apostles of Christ in the New Testament.
Those men did not at first embrace the idea that Jesus was the Savior of all people. They were steeped in the brew of national pride and the idea that because the Savior came from the Jews he was only the Savior of the Jews. God had never said any such thing, in fact just the opposite. But their rabbis had held to such ideas and taught them to those apostles all their lives – at least until Jesus came along.
To the shock of his disciples, Jesus reached out to all people. He approached even those whom other Jews shunned and avoided, and he shared the promise of salvation by faith with them. First it was Samaritans, then a Phoenician woman and a Roman centurion. Finally, strangers from foreign lands came to Jerusalem in search of Jesus.
But this all began much earlier; it started with the appearance of a star in the western sky, a star that did not move in the night sky as the other stars did. This star was prophesied by Balaam, the prophet from Ur in Chaldea, who foretold, “I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near. A star will come out of Jacob; a scepter will rise out of Israel.” (Numbers 24:17) The appearance of that star 1,500 years later proclaimed the birth of a great King, and beckoned those who study the stars to follow it in order to find him. That star led the Magi from their homes in the east, probably Iran, to the land of Israel and the city of Bethlehem, where it finally stood right over the house where Jesus and his parents were living. What do you suppose those Magi did when they went back home after seeing their Savior? Well, I’ll give you a hint – thousands of Christian Chaldeans have fled from the Muslim clerics who rule modern Iran and they moved to Michigan. Most of them live within a hundred miles of here. I wonder what kind of celebration they are having in their church services this morning?
After Pentecost the mystery of salvation became very clear to Christ’s apostles. God made it clear with a vision to St. Peter and his call to apostleship to St. Paul. Then Christ sent those men who once thought that salvation was only for the Jews into all the world, to proclaim the gospel to every nation. As St. Paul tells us in our text, …
III. The Mystery Is That God Loves, And Saved, All People.
Jesus Christ paid for the sins of the whole world.
In his first epistle St. John says of Jesus, “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1 John 2:2) And St. Paul told the Christians in Corinth, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.” (2 Cor. 5:19)
Because Jesus paid for the sins of all people, he wants all people everywhere to hear the message of that salvation and to come to faith in him. That is precisely why Jesus told his disciples just before he ascended into heaven, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.” (Mark 16:15-16)
St. Paul told Timothy, a young pastor on the island of Crete, “[God] wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.” And, “we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe.” (1 Timothy 2:4 & 4:10)
Because God justifies us through our faith in Jesus Christ, Paul told the Christians in Rome, “We maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law. Is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles too? Yes, of Gentiles too, since there is only one God, who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith.” (Romans 3:28-30)
In our text this morning St. Paul explains the mystery of the gospel in this way: “Through the gospel the Gentiles are heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.”
Just think of what God is telling us here through Christ’s apostle: we “are heirs together with Israel.” We are also the children of God, heirs of Jesus Christ who have inherited the perfect righteousness that he earned with his perfect life on earth, and also the total forgiveness of sins that Jesus earned for us with his sacrificial death as the payment to God for our sins. That is huge! Many of the early Jewish Christians wanted to keep those blessings for themselves, but God has made us equal to them in his kingdom and heirs together with them of his gift of eternal life.
We are also “members together of one body,” as St. Paul says. Paul tells us in Ephesians 5:23, “Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.” That church is the “communion of saints,” as we confess in the Apostles’ Creed. All Christians are members of that body of Christ, attached to Jesus through our faith in him. Because we are members of the body of Christ through faith in Jesus, St. Peter tells us, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” (1 Peter 2:9)
As Paul says in our text, we are also “sharers together in the promise in Christ Jesus.” That promise is God’s gift of eternal life to all those who put their faith in Jesus Christ for salvation. What a wonderful gift that is from God! The Magi gave Jesus gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, but he gave them the gift of everlasting life.
No wonder Epiphany is such a joy-filled festival in the Christian Church. Now the mystery of salvation is revealed, and the gifts of the Savior are given to all people throughout the whole world. That Mystery Was Hidden For Many Generations both by those who knew the true God and by those who didn’t. But The Mystery Was Revealed By God’s Holy Spirit to his prophets and apostles, and they have revealed it to us in God’s word, the Bible. The Mystery Is That God Loves, And Saved, All People through his Son Jesus Christ. By faith in Christ we become God’s children and share in the salvation that he has earned for us. What a wonderful Christmas gift that is! Amen.