A Glorious Mystery Revealed

One thing about me personally is I love a good mystery. I have read a lot of mystery books. I have watched a lot of mystery shows on TV. Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s characters Hercules Poirot and Miss Marple, and Ellery Queen to name a few of my favorites.

They always investigate crimes to solve the mystery, the secret that keeps people from knowing who did the evil deed.

There are mysteries of other kinds as well. There are mysteries in the Bible such as Paul speaks about in the book of Ephesians.

I would like to start by talking about some of these mysteries in the Bible. The first mystery is -

A. The mystery of How Christ Would be Available to all

When I was still young, I actually did go to a Bible College for about 2 years. Though I never graduated, I did learn a few things.

I had one professor who taught theology who liked to teach on the topic of mysteries in the Bible. He would often have us recite a quote he had about what a mystery is which I think was originally written by the theologian Charles Ryrie.

The quote I still remember perfectly because we had to say it so many times.

The quote says that a mystery in the Bible is “a hidden sacred secret, hitherto concealed, but now revealed.”

There were many mysteries or secrets about the first coming of Jesus that the people who lived in the Old Testament had no clue.

One of the mysteries we celebrate every year and that is the birth of Jesus.

1. The mystery of the Birth of Jesus.

In the Old Testament there were prophecies about the coming Messiah. Most Jewish people waited for the Anointed one to come from God to rescue the Jewish people and to set up an eternal kingdom.

They were expecting a prince, someone who would fight for them. Instead, Jesus came as a poor man, preaching peace and teaching others to love their enemies.

Jesus was called Immanuel by Isaiah in the Old Testament. Immanuel means ‘God with us’. Nobody realized that Isaiah was being literal.

The God of the universe came in the form of man. He walked among us and experienced thirst, hunger, pain, and even death. By being born into this world, God gave us the best present by giving us His very presence and that is the whole meaning of Christmas.

The second mystery those in the Old Testament were not aware of was –

2. The mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

There were writing about the Messiah around the time Jesus lived and even before that spoke about the expectations of the Messiah. These writings were by a group known as the Essenes and were a religious order who preserved their writings as well as copies of the Old Testament that are now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. People back then wanted to be free of the Romans. People wanted the nation of Israel to be reborn and become a great kingdom ruled by the Messiah.

The Messiah was to live, not die. He was to rule. Not be beaten up by the soldiers.

And as far as the resurrection, not even His own disciples were expecting that. Even though He said He would die and raise from the dead, they didn’t believe Him.

When the day of the resurrection came, do you remember what happened

? In Luke’s account, some women went to the tomb to prepare the body for burial, but when they got there they found the stone rolled away.

Also two angels were there and told them that Jesus had risen.

We pick up the story in Luke 24:9-11 where it says,

9 Then they returned from the tomb and told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest.

10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them, who told these things to the apostles.

11 And their words seemed to them like idle tales, and they did not believe them.

The disciples had to physically see the risen Lord before they believed.

Even after the resurrection and after the disciples had time to be with Jesus they didn’t know what God had planned. They were still thinking that the Messiah will set up a Jewish kingdom. Just before Jesus ascended back into heaven they asked Jesus in Acts 1:6

Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, "Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?"

Instead of setting up the kingdom as they had thought, God created something else and that is the third mystery the Old Testament people never saw coming.

3. The mystery of the church

On Pentecost, some 40 days after Jesus ascended to heaven the Holy Spirit came and indwelt the believers. That was something new, totally unknown. The Church age was never revealed in the Bible until it happened.

The biggest mystery that concerns the church is the fact that Gentiles, non-Jewish people were included into the church. That was a major change. If you think racism is a big thing today, you haven’t seen anything compared to back then.

A devout Jewish person was told they could not enter the house of a non-Jew. If he did he would be considered unclean and excluded from worship until he was declared clean again.

If a Jewish person back then went traveling abroad and then came home by a ship, it was the common practice the moment they stepped off the boat to shake their shoes to knock off any foreign soil so they didn’t defile their homeland.

Now trust me, the Romans were no angels themselves and thought they were superior too.

The thought of Jews and Gentiles worshiping together was something completely new, but that is what God did with the church.

In Ephesians 2:13-14 Paul said this,

13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

14 For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation,

What these verses are saying is that through Jesus, the Messiah, the Gentiles have been brought into the church. When the church started it was all Jews, but now Jesus has made the both, Jews and Gentiles one.

When Paul mentions the breaking down of the middle wall of separation he is referring to something that anyone who ever visited the temple in Jerusalem would have known. There was a wall around the temple. Above the gates of this wall was a sign warning that no Gentile was allowed to go through these gates. If they did it meant their death.

Paul says that this middle wall that separated the Jews and Gentiles from worshiping God no longer exists because each one of us can boldly come before the throne of grace. There is no difference, whether Jew or Gentile, whether man or woman, whether rich or poor. All are one in Christ.

Paul goes on to say in –

Ephesians 3:8-9

8 To me, who am less than the least of all the saints, this grace was given, that I should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,

9 and to make all see what is the fellowship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the ages has been hidden in God who created all things through Jesus Christ;

Here is where that professor I think got the idea of his definition for a mystery, a hidden sacred secret hitherto concealed, but now revealed. The mystery was hidden in God until the time was right. The whole world was now able to hear and believe the message of Jesus.

This is the same theme that Paul is talking about in Colossians. The fact that the Gentiles were receiving the gospel. He also was speaking about –

B. The Mystery of Christ in You

Colossians 1:24-27

24 I now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up in my flesh what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, for the sake of His body, which is the church,

25 of which I became a minister according to the stewardship from God which was given to me for you, to fulfill the word of God,

26 the mystery which has been hidden from ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints.

27 To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

At first Paul is talking again how he has been made a minister with the ministry to preach to the Gentiles the good news that Jesus is the Savior of mankind. Something hidden until now, but now revealed by God.

But there is a mystery within a mystery here. In verse 27 he speaks about “the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles”. What are the riches of the glory of this mystery? It is Christ in you.

When you receive Jesus as your Lord and Savior several things happen. One of the things that happens is you are indwelt by the Holy Spirit.

Ephesians 1:13-14 says,

13 In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise,

14 who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory.

When the Holy Spirit comes, He does not leave. The fact that the Spirit of God indwells a believer was a totally new concept than what happened before the church started.

In the Old Testament the Spirit came upon someone to aid them when they needed help and when the task was done He would leave. We see that throughout the Old Testament. Here are a few examples

Judges 6:34

But the Spirit of the LORD came upon Gideon; then he blew the trumpet,

Judges 14:19

Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon him mightily, and he went down to Ashkelon

2 Chronicles 15:1

Now the Spirit of God came upon Azariah the son of Oded.

1Samuel 16:14

But the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul,

We even see King David in Psalm 51:11 pleading with God saying.

“Do not cast me away from Your presence, And do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.”

There is a very nice spiritual song that uses this verse, but when I was a pastor I asked my music team to stop singing it, because though it was true that David could lose the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, we can’t now. He is our guarantee.

We can grieve the Holy Spirit. We can cause Him anguish if we refuse to listen to His leading but He will never leave us who are truly born again.

Because the Holy Spirit lives in us, than we can also say Christ is living in us since they are both part of the Trinity that is God.

In Galatians 2:20 it say,

"I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

The effect of having Christ living in us will change the way we live and the way we think. If you say you are a Christian and there has been no change in your life since you asked God into it, then you really need to consider whether you really gave your life to Christ or not.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the amazing preacher in the late 1800’s, who would preach to 10,000 people on Sunday morning in an age before microphones, had this to say about what happens when Christ comes and lives within you.

“When Christ once enters into a soul, by degrees He occupies the whole of it. Did you ever hear the legend of a man whose garden produced nothing else but weeds, till at last he met with a strange foreign flower of singular vitality. The story is that he sowed a handful of this seed in his overgrown garden, and left it to work its own sweet way.

He slept and rose, and knew not how the seed was growing till on a day he opened the gate and saw a sight which much astounded him. He knew that the seed would produce a dainty flower and he looked for it; but he had little dreamed that the plant would cover the whole garden.

So it was: the flower had exterminated every weed, till as he looked from one end to the other from wall to wall he could see nothing but the fair colors of that rare plant, and smell nothing but its delicious perfume.

Christ is that plant of renown. If He be sown in the soil of your soul, He will gradually eat out the roots of all ill weeds and poisonous plants, till over all your nature there shall be Christ in you. God grant we may realize the picture in our own hearts, and then we shall be in paradise.”

What a beautiful illustration of how Christ little by little takes over until He becomes our very nature itself.

I started reading some electronic books on my tablet recently. They are the writings of men who are call the Church Fathers. These writers lived from the point that the Apostles died up until around 400 AD.

One short letter I read the other week was by a man named Mathetes. That may not have been his real name because the word mathetes in the Greek means disciple. He claimed to have been a disciple of the Apostles and scholars date his letter around the year 130.

In his letter he described who Christians were to someone who didn’t know. He described Christians this way.

“They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh.

They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.

They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives.

They love all men, and are persecuted by all.

They are unknown and condemned;

they are put to death, and restored to life.

They are poor, yet make many rich;

they are in lack of all things, and yet abound in all;

they are dishonored, and yet in their very dishonor are glorified.

They are evil spoken of, and yet are justified;

they are reviled, and bless;

they are insulted, and repay the insult with honor;

they do good, yet are punished as evil-doers.

I submit to you that only someone with Christ living in them could possibly live lives like that. The early Christians could live like that because they understood what Paul understood when he wrote in –

Romans 8:18

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.

This life is temporary. This life doesn’t even compare to what is in store for the believer. There is a glory coming for us that will be revealed in us someday.

In the passage in Colossians we see not what that glory is but who that glory is in -

C. The Mystery of Jesus, Our Hope of Glory

Let’s look one more time at Colossians 1:27

To them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Because Jesus left heaven, came to earth and took the form of a man. Because he came to take the penalty we deserved and died in our place. Because he rose from the dead, ascended to heaven again and sits at the right hand of the Father. And because He is coming back one day to take us to be with Him forevermore, He has become our hope of glory.

This verse talks about the riches of that glory. Earlier I spoke about how the indwelling of the Holy Spirit was one of those riches. There are many more.

When we receive Christ as our Lord and Savior we receive His righteousness. We are justified, or made righteous before God. We are pardoned and reconciled to God so that we can have the relationship we were meant to have. We were adopted as sons and daughters of God. We were given eternal life, which starts the moment you believe.

We were given the so many rich promises both in this life and in the life that is to come in eternity that we can count on, because God is faithful to do his promises.

We, who before were aliens, enemies, exceeding wicked, poor, blind, and miserable, are now, through the Gospel, are made rich and glorious, wise, knowing, and happy.

Those are what we have now, but what about the future. Let me just touch upon that for a moment.

One definition of the word glory I found said that glory is the condition of blessedness into which is appointed and promised that true Christians shall enter after their Savior’s return from heaven.

Our Lord Jesus Christ gives us the hope of glory. The expectation of a future blessed life.

There are terms that are used to describe the church. We are called the body of Christ, the firstborn of Christ, a spiritual house, a royal priesthood, and the people of God. But I want to focus on one name we are also called; the Bride of Christ.

Paul alluded to this term in 2 Corinthians 11:2

For I am jealous for you with godly jealousy. For I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.

Also the idea of the church being the bride of Christ is seen in Ephesians 5:25-27

25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her,

26 that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word,

27 that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.

What is truly amazing is how God used the whole Jewish custom of marriage to demonstrate His plan of salvation and plan of prophecy.

During the time of Jesus, a marriage started by the future groom, who would leave his father’s house and negotiate with the father of the potential bride. A purchase price was paid for the bride at that time. In the same way Jesus left his Father in heaven and came and paid the price for us on the cross.

Once the price was paid and the covenant established the groom went back home and prepared a place for his bride at his father’s house. Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

John 14:2-3 says,

In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.

The bride is declared sanctified and set apart for her groom. She spend her days preparing to be married.

The groom can take up to a year to prepare a place for his bride. During that time they are separated.

When the time of the wedding comes, the groom with his wedding party usually comes at night. The bride needs to be ready because she is not told what night he will come. It’s just like the church. We do not know when Jesus will return to take us to His Father’s house, but we need to be ready.

The groom and bride, the groomsmen and bridesmaids all go back to the groom’s father’s house where all the wedding guests are waiting.

After the ceremony the bride and groom are taken to the bridal chamber where they consummate the marriage. The bride and groom actually stay in the bridal chamber for seven days while the wedding party celebrates outside. I see the 7 days as corresponding to the 7 years of tribulation where the church is hidden in heaven.

After the 7 days are up the groom comes out, bringing his bride with him with her veil finally removed so everyone can see who she is.

When we look at Revelation 19:6-9 we see this unveiling of the bride.

6 And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, as the sound of many waters and as the sound of mighty thunderings, saying, "Alleluia! For the Lord God Omnipotent reigns!

7 "Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come (past tense, completed action), and His wife has made herself ready."

8 And to her it was granted to be arrayed in fine linen, clean and bright, for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints.

9 Then he said to me, "Write: ‘Blessed are those who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb!’" And he said to me, "These are the true sayings of God."

We are truly blessed as the body and bride of Christ.

One last thing to say about the bride of Christ.

In Revelation 21:9-10 we read this,

9 Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls filled with the seven last plagues came to me and talked with me, saying, "Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife."

10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God,

The angel told John that he would show him the bride and then showed him the New Jerusalem instead. Why? Because that is where the bride will dwell.

Its description is amazing. It never says the New Jerusalem actually comes to earth, just descending. I believe it is actually like a moon or satellite in the sky shining God’s glory on the earth. That’s because its size is enormous, 1500 miles long, 1500 miles wide and 1500 miles high. If you go 68 mile up and you are at the edge of space. That is why I think it will be more like a satellite above the earth.

There is so much more about the New Jerusalem but you can read it for yourself. The point is that is where we will be when we are with the Lord forever. Jesus is our hope of glory.

Conclusion

We have been truly blessed because we have a sure hope of glory and that hope of glory is because Christ is in us and guarantees our future with him as long as we are truly believers in him.

I would like to quote one more thing from Mathetes that I found interesting. Speaking of God the Father he said.

"He gave His own Son as a ransom for us,

the holy One for transgressors,

the blameless One for the wicked,

the righteous One for the unrighteous,

the incorruptible One for the corruptible,

the immortal One for them that are mortal.

For what other thing was capable of covering our sins than His righteousness?

By what other one was it possible that we, the wicked and ungodly, could be justified, than by the only Son of God?

O sweet exchange!

O unsearchable operation!

O benefits surpassing all expectation!

that the wickedness of many should be hid in a single righteous One,

and that the righteousness of One should justify many transgressors."

If you haven’t taken that exchange and given your life to Jesus for His righteousness, do it today, before it’s too late.