The Difficult Mystery of the Gospel
Bible Reading
Ephesians 3:1–13 NLT
1 When I think of all this, I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the benefit of you Gentiles … 2 assuming, by the way, that you know God gave me the special responsibility of extending his grace to you Gentiles. 3 As I briefly wrote earlier, God himself revealed his mysterious plan to me. 4 As you read what I have written, you will understand my insight into this plan regarding Christ. 5 God did not reveal it to previous generations, but now by his Spirit he has revealed it to his holy apostles and prophets.
6 And this is God’s plan: Both Gentiles and Jews who believe the Good News share equally in the riches inherited by God’s children. Both are part of the same body, and both enjoy the promise of blessings because they belong to Christ Jesus. 7 By God’s grace and mighty power, I have been given the privilege of serving him by spreading this Good News.
8 Though I am the least deserving of all God’s people, he graciously gave me the privilege of telling the Gentiles about the endless treasures available to them in Christ. 9 I was chosen to explain to everyone this mysterious plan that God, the Creator of all things, had kept secret from the beginning.
10 God’s purpose in all this was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. 11 This was his eternal plan, which he carried out through Christ Jesus our Lord.
12 Because of Christ and our faith in him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God’s presence. 13 So please don’t lose heart because of my trials here. I am suffering for you, so you should feel honored.
Introduction
Let’s pray.
Several years ago I was talking with my best friend from high school and uni. He’s always been an atheist, and still is. He’s a very faithful atheist, and even belonged to the Australian Skeptics Society for a while. One day we were hanging out and he suddenly expressed his wonder over how an otherwise intelligent person like me could believe in a book full of fairy tales. He was, of course, referring to the Bible. This was not an unexpected statement, but it was very direct.
Many years before I had quite a different encounter, this time in a Bible Study. We were studying one of Paul’s letters, and I think we were wrestling with what Paul means by wives submitting to their husbands. One of the young women in the group (we were all young adults) insisted that we should simply ignore Paul on this. He had no monopoly on the truth, and since he merely reflected the culture he lived in we were wasting our time trying to apply his ideas to ourselves.
These two encounters are not unusual. If we try to share the mystery of the Gospel in Australia we are likely to get a reaction like one of these.
(By the way, the term “mystery” here means something that has been secret, but is going to be revealed, such as in a murder mystery.)
Paul’s struggles
Having problems sharing the Gospel is hardly a new thing, though. Look at Paul’s situation while he was writing to the Ephesians.
Ephesians 3:1 NLT
1 When I think of all this, I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus for the benefit of you Gentiles …
In this verse, we find Paul was writing from prison “for the benefit of you Gentiles.” Why was Paul a prisoner? Let’s flash back to Acts 22. Paul had just returned to Jerusalem after his third missionary journey, and he visited the great temple of Herod. There some hostile Jews from Asia (modern-day Turkey, the area in which the city of Ephesus is situated), accused Paul of defiling the temple by bringing Gentiles into it, and he was then beaten up until the Romans “rescued” him by arresting him. As Paul was being taken away (the Romans thought he was an Egyptian terrorist leading four thousand desert-hardened assassins) he couldn’t resist taking the chance to speak to the crowd.
So Paul shared his testimony. It was going well, everyone was listening respectfully, until, and I’ll let Dr Luke, the author of Acts, describe it, jumping into the end of Paul’s speech:
Acts 22:19–22 ESV
19 And I said, ‘Lord, they themselves know that in one synagogue after another I imprisoned and beat those who believed in you. 20 And when the blood of Stephen your witness was being shed, I myself was standing by and approving and watching over the garments of those who killed him.’ 21 And he said to me, ‘Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’ ”
22 Up to this word they listened to him. Then they raised their voices and said, “Away with such a fellow from the earth! For he should not be allowed to live.”
So Paul was in prison precisely because of his mission to the Gentiles—he was not merely using a figure of speech in his letter to the Ephesians. He ended up in prison because of the implacable opposition of the Jewish religious system. The idea that God could bypass the Law and the Temple and relate directly to the Gentiles was anathema to the religious Jew, because it undermined their unique identity. (Of course, if they had known their scriptures better, they would have understood that this was God’s purpose all along, as we’ve seen in this letter to the Ephesians.)
But it wasn’t only the religious Jews who had it in for Paul. He faced another daunting foe: the Greco-Roman religious system. The Ephesian Christians were under no false illusions about this, because they had witnessed a major riot against Paul’s teachings in their own town! It was the reason Paul had left them after two years of ministry! Let’s flash back again, this time to Acts 19.
New Living Translation Chapter 19
23 About that time, serious trouble developed in Ephesus concerning the Way. 24 It began with Demetrius, a silversmith who had a large business manufacturing silver shrines of the Greek goddess Artemis. He kept many craftsmen busy. 25 He called them together, along with others employed in similar trades, and addressed them as follows:
“Gentlemen, you know that our wealth comes from this business. 26 But as you have seen and heard, this man Paul has persuaded many people that handmade gods aren’t really gods at all. And he’s done this not only here in Ephesus but throughout the entire province! 27 Of course, I’m not just talking about the loss of public respect for our business. I’m also concerned that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will lose its influence and that Artemis—this magnificent goddess worshiped throughout the province of Asia and all around the world—will be robbed of her great prestige!”
28 At this their anger boiled, and they began shouting, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” 29 Soon the whole city was filled with confusion. Everyone rushed to the amphitheater, dragging along Gaius and Aristarchus, who were Paul’s traveling companions from Macedonia. 30 Paul wanted to go in, too, but the believers wouldn’t let him.
In the end, Paul left Ephesus for the sake of the church.
So this was Paul’s experience. And yet he never stopped sharing the mystery of the gospel. Despite these two powerful and deadly forms of resistance, Paul spoke of the “privilege of serving [God] by spreading this Good News.”
And he encouraged the Ephesians, who were given the same great privilege, not to lose heart because of either Paul’s sufferings, or their own.
Our struggles
Now in a moment I want to unpack what it is that motivated Paul to persist in his great calling, but first I want to explore our own situation. What opposition do we have in sharing the Gospel?
I have been reading an excellent book by Sam Chan, a Sydney evangelist, called “Evangelism in a Skeptical World.” Sam has some telling observations about our situation here in Australia. Let me quote him:
In the 1700s, as one of the features of the Western Enlightenment, German philosopher Immanuel Kant divided what we know into two realms of knowledge—the noumenal and the phenomenal. The noumenal is the realm of God, ethics, and values. … The phenomenal, on the other hand, is the realm of facts, evidence, and data. ...
Kant’s point wasn’t to say that the noumenal realm doesn’t exist. Kant believed in the existence of God, ethics, and values. But Kant’s point was that we have no epistemological access to this realm. We can’t verify that there is God or that it’s wrong to gamble or that capitalism is better than socialism. In contrast, in the phenomenal realm, we do have epistemological access. We can verify that one plus one equals two, the sky is blue, and that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. ...
In the Western world, this noumenal-phenomenal divide has led to another divide, a sacred-secular divide. Sacred statements belong in the noumenal realm. And the sacred should be discussed only in private space. Secular statements belong in the phenomenal realm. Secular statements are safe and can be discussed in public space.
That’s why, in the West, we are told that we are free to believe anything we want about religion so long as it’s in the privacy of our own homes. No one should dare impose their views of religion or values on others in public. As a result, we are what I refer to as a defacto closed country. A closed country usually is a country where you cannot openly engage in missionary or evangelistic activity. You cannot talk about your religion in public. You cannot proselytize. And while this is true in countries that are officially closed, it is also what happens in the West because of our cultural history. While we have the freedom to share our faith and evangelize, as a practical matter it’s not culturally acceptable.
Now, this belief that sacred statements cannot be verified, which comes from the Enlightenment, is still a major part of our culture. It’s called “modernism,” and it is usually part of a worldview called “Secular Materialism.” We’ll be looking at Secular Materialism in our Tuesday night Bible Study in a few weeks, so if you want to know how to share the Gospel with people holding that worldview, make sure you’re at the Bible Study. For today, I just want to point out that this is a major opponent to our mission, just as the Greco-Roman worldview was to Paul.
And we have another major opponent in our context, as Paul did. This one is a newer worldview, called Postmodernism. Postmodernism, is a reaction to, you guessed it, modernism. In response to modernism’s arrogant claim to know all about the material world and what we can and cannot determine, postmodernism claims that all knowledge is personal. You can only know something from your own perspective, your own history, education, psychology, spiritual views, etc. And therefore your knowledge, your truth, is unique to you. You cannot insist that other people share your truth. Sam Chan explains:
In this way, postmodernity recognizes that knowledge is power. The one who gets to tell the story and impose it as a metanarrative upon others is playing a power game. In postmodernity, there is deep mistrust of organized religion, government, and other forms of established authority because that is exactly what authority figures do: they impose their metanarrative upon all peoples and use truth as a weapon to force people to conform to their metanarrative. That’s also why, in postmodernity, we employ a hermeneutic of suspicion upon a narrative or truth claim. We deconstruct the narrative or truth claim by asking, “What power game is this person playing?”
Now, you can see how this is as big a barrier to the Gospel as Secular Materialism, right? After all, Jesus claims to be the truth for everyone, not just Christians. Of course, we’re going to address this worldview in our Tuesday Night Bible Study as well, in one of it’s newest forms, called Critical Theory. So there’s a second Tuesday night you’ll need to set aside!
So, like Paul, our culture presents us with two formidable opponents. Why, then, should we share the Gospel at all? (Remember, we’ll be talking about the how on Tuesday nights.)
Why we don’t lose heart
If you’ve been following our teaching series on Ephesians so far, you will have heard how Paul is constantly marveling at God’s incredible plans for us Christians. He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms (from before creation we were chosen, adopted, redeemed, informed, made an inheritance, sealed, and guaranteed), he has granted us supernatural wisdom to live life well, he has saved us despite ourselves, and he has united a bitterly divided humanity as Christ’s body on earth, the church, a community in which God himself chooses to dwell.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like some pretty amazingly good news to share.
Think about it.
People in Melbourne are hoping for good news like this:
5km limit lifted!
People in many villages and towns in developing countries are hoping for good news like this:
Water safe to drink!
Tens of thousands of Grade 12 students are hoping for good news like this:
You got a job/got into your course!
And yet we’ve got news like this:
The all-powerful God loves you so much he has chosen you, yes you, to be his precious child, and died for you so that you can live a perfectly healthy, joyful, fulfilling life with him and your brothers and sisters forever!
Do you think that’s worth sharing? Do you think that people already know this, or is it still a mystery, a secret for them?
Paul puts the icing on the cake by saying,
Ephesians 3:10–12 NLT
10 God’s purpose in all this was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. 11 This was his eternal plan, which he carried out through Christ Jesus our Lord.
12 Because of Christ and our faith in him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God’s presence.
In other words, the mystery we have to share is so important and revolutionary, that Satan and his armies are learning from us how God brings the best good out of the worst evil! And that best good? We are no longer mere creatures, mewling about trying to hurt one another in our pathetic and tragic rebellion. Instead, we are God’s children, able to run into our dad’s throne room knowing that he’s going to crouch down and listen to us and help us and love us.
The legend of the first marathon is that Pheidippides, a Greek soldier, ran non-stop from Marathon to Athens to deliver the good news of the defeat of the Persians, upon which he fell down dead. We have news of much greater importance and joy than Pheidippides could even imagine. How much more effort, then, should we expend to share it?
Let’s pray.