Some New Testament Food for Thought
if indeed you have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace which was given to me for you that by revelation there was made known to me the mystery, as I wrote before in brief. By referring to this, when you read you can understand my insight into the mystery of Christ, which in other generations was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit … To me … this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unfathomable riches of Christ, and to bring to light what is the administration [plan] of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God - (Ephesians 3.2-5, 8-9a)
In closing out the year, I thought I’d toss out some food for thought about the “big picture” of the New Testament.
1. Earlier this week, I talked with my wife about the fact that the New Testament is more about revelation than it is commandment. In these verses in Ephesians, we see that Paul was given revelation of a “mystery” that had been hidden in God to all previous generations. The Pauline epistles are the revealing of the “mystery of Christ” and were written so that we “could understand his insight” into that mystery. The mystery was not a new set of commandments, but a revealing of just what the Father accomplished through Jesus in the Plan of Redemption. A Christian’s grounding in the faith and spiritual maturity all emanate from walking in the reality of that revelation.
2. It has been brought up before so I thought I’d address it here with these verses in Ephesians. Today’s Word preachers appear to derive much of their preaching and doctrine directly from the Old Testament. Indeed, if you go to a Word church these days, Jesus is preached more or less as an annotated footnote to sermons on Adam, Abraham, Joseph, or Jacob. Topical sermons rarely address His works of redemption at all. As demonstrated in these Ephesian verses, real Word preaching should be firmly grounded in the Pauline revelation of the mystery of Christ - the facts of redemption and what those facts effectuated in and for us. Consequently, the Old Testament should taught through the lens of the “plan of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God” (see my essays on the redemptive voiceover).
3. In Colossians Paul writes of preaching the mystery:
so that I might fully carry out the preaching of the word of God, that is, the mystery which has been hidden from the past ages and generations, but now has been manifested to His saints, to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1.26b-27, NASB)
If one sat down for three hours and surfed the Christian blogs, Christian sites and sermons, he’d be lucky to find more than a couple of writers or preachers whose material intelligently preaches “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (One illustration: Saved? Not Saved? Who Knows?)