“The Mystery of God”


BIBLE READING: Ephesians 3

 “…and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.”
The word that we properly translate "fellowship", was used among the Greeks to signify their religious communities.  Here it may imitate the association of Jews and Gentiles in one Church or body and their agreement in that glorious mystery now so fully opened relative to the salvation of both. Instead of "fellowship", many of the manuscripts, as well as that of the chief Greek fathers, read "dispensation” or “economy".  Some of the best printed editions of the Greek text have the same reading, and our common text has very little authority to support it.  Dispensation or economy is far more agreeable to the scope of the apostle’s declaration.  He wished to show them the mystery of bringing Jews and Gentiles to salvation by faith in Christ Jesus, which God had kept hidden in his own infinite mind from the beginning of the world and did not think it proper to reveal even when He projected the creation of the world which had respect to the economy of human redemption. And although the world was made by Jesus Christ, the great Redeemer, yet at that period this revelation of the power of God, the design of saving men whose fall infinite wisdom had foreseen, was not then revealed.
Some very cautious critics are of the opinion that this does not refer to the material creation and that we should understand the whole as referring to the formation of all God’s dispensations of grace, mercy, and truth, which were planned, managed, and executed by Christ, from the foundation of the world to the present time. The text, therefore, should be read: which from the beginning of the world had been hidden in God who created all things. No inferiority of Christ can be argued from a clause of which there is strong evidence of its incorrectness.

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