![]() ![]() I do not believe that any future consummation could make sense of all the irrationalities of preceding ages. In one of his epigrams, the Irish playwright and poet Oscar Wilde said: ‘You give the criminal calendar of Europe to your children under the name of history.’ The historian and poet Sir George Clark, in his inaugural lecture at Oxford, said: ‘There is no secret and no plan in history to be discovered. That is by no means what every historian or thinker has been able to see. ![]() It is the Christian conviction that history is the working out of the will of God. It is which literally means household The oikonomos was the steward who saw to it that the family affairs ran smoothly. The word which Paul uses for this preparation is intensely interesting. He says that all through the ages there has been an arranging and an administering of things so that this day of unity should come. Paul says that all history has been a working out of this process. Here, we have another tremendous thought. It was God’s purpose that all the many different strands and all the warring elements in this world should be gathered into one in Jesus Christ. Jesus came into the world to wipe out the divisions. All over the world, there was strife and tension. There was division between Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and barbarians. There was division between the animals and human beings. Up until now, people had been living in a divided world. Now Paul, in one sentence, introduces his great thought. In Jesus, God has revealed that his love and care, his grace and mercy, are meant not only for the Jews but for the whole world. What, for Paul, was the mystery of the will of God? It was that the gospel was open to the Gentiles too. So, in the New Testament sense, a mystery is something which is hidden to non-Christians but clear to Christians. But to anyone who knows the story and the meaning of the Last Supper, the whole service has a meaning which is quite clear. To that person, it would be a complete mystery he or she would not understand in the least what was going on. Suppose someone who knew nothing whatever about Christianity was brought into a communion service. It is something which has long been kept secret and has now been revealed, but is still incomprehensible to the person who has not been initiated into its meaning. It is not something mysterious in the sense that it is hard to understand. The New Testament uses the word mystery in a special sense. He says, as the Authorized Version has it, that God has made known to us ‘the mystery of his will’. IT is now that Paul is really getting to grips with his subject. The secret was a purpose which he formed in his own mind before time began, so that the periods of time should be controlled and administered until they reached their full development, a development in which all things, in heaven and upon earth, are gathered into one in Jesus Christ. This happened because he made known to us the once hidden, but now revealed, secret of his will, for so it was his good pleasure to do.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |