A Mystery Revealed

Ephesians 1:9

We continue forward in our deep dive in Ephesians, looking now at verse nine. In the last two verses we have seen God’s sovereignty, love, and grace in sending Jesus to die for our sins. Today we look at what is described as a mystery.

Verse nine says, “having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself.” We will look at what was revealed in our next article since verse ten goes into more specifics. For this article we will see what Paul means when he uses the word “mystery.”

When a mystery is mentioned in the new testament it is typically referring to something that was stated in the Old Testament but revealed in the New Testament. 1 Peter 1:10-12 helps explain this to us. It says,

“Of this salvation the prophets have inquired and searched carefully, who prophesied of the grace that would come to you, ¹¹ searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ who was in them was indicating when He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. ¹² To them it was revealed that, not to themselves, but to us they were ministering the things which now have been reported to you through those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven—things which angels desire to look into.”

Verse twelve specifically shows us that those who prophesied in the old testament did not always understand what they were prophesying. To them it was a mystery.

The mystery we are seeing in this sentence in Ephesians speaks of how we can be saved. We have seen previously how Jesus’ death, the shedding of His blood for our sins, is that way. The fact is, He has always been the way, the only way. The men and women in the old testament got saved the same way that we do today, by trusting in Jesus. They did not always understand it, but they knew it came down to His sacrifice.

We are fortunate to be able to look back at His sacrifice. We may not be eyewitnesses of it, but we know that He has already died for our sins. Those in the old testament had to look forward to His sacrifice. They had more mysteries that did not make complete sense. In fact, the belief was that Jesus would come to rule, not to die. That was why the disciples expected Jesus to defeat the Romans and takeover His kingship. That is probably why they all fled when Jesus was captured. They were ready to fight; they were not expecting His death (though Jesus had told them on several occasions that He was going to die). We now have the benefit of understanding what God’s will was (we have already looked at that extensively in this chapter) and we ought to be abundantly grateful that the disciples were wrong. If they were right we never would have existed. We would never have the benefit of spending eternity with Him.

I want to conclude this article by reveling in the end of this verse. We see yet again that this was God’s perfect will. It pleased Him, and it was His purpose, to save us. We ought to be exceedingly, abundantly grateful for what He has done for us, and the fact that He did it because He wanted to makes it that much more unbelievable. When I see this I go back to verse four where we saw that He has called us to be holy and blameless and I want to obey. It is a great challenge to be holy and blameless, but it really is the least that we could do for our great Saviour.

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