Ephesians 1:9–10

"Making known to us the mystery of His will." This does not mean something you cannot understand. It means something you could not know before God told you. Do not turn away and say, All I want to know is to be saved. We ought to desire to learn all God is willing to teach us. The word "mystery" means something God chose to keep secret. He had not revealed it before, but it is perfectly understandable once He unfolds it.

The mystery of His will is what has always been near to His heart, for it involves the glory not of the church only but of Christ. It is "according to His good pleasure which He has purposed in Himself." No one suggested it. It was His own will. And what is the mystery of His will? It is that when the times are complete, God will gather together into one all things in Christ, both the things in heaven and the things on earth. Under Christ He will reunite all these things that Satan has scattered.

God has always acted according to His own will. In the presence of sin and the ruin it caused, He chose for long ages to keep the main purpose of His will a secret, a mystery. Yet the pleasure of His will and His purpose has always been good, for He is good. This is a great fact, and we do well to hold on to it. The "pleasure of His will" is good (v. 5). The "pleasure which He has purposed in Himself" is good (v. 9). God's pleasure and purpose is not tied to judgment. That work is necessary, and He will carry it out at the right time, but He calls it His "strange work."

It is not said, "abounded toward us in forgiving us," because full forgiveness is a positive need. But "wisdom and prudence" is a matter of God's counsels about His Son. These stand above any thought of what we need, and do not depend on it. He says, as it were, You are able now to enter into My thoughts, and understand them when I speak. You are delivered from anxiety about your sins, and are free now to enter into My purpose.

When God reveals His thoughts to us like this, it is not about our own direct blessing. It is the sign of His confidence in us, whom He has brought into such a close relationship with Himself. As Christ said to His disciples, "I do not call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing. But I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you."

In the glory of Christ and of the church, God has given us a future full of His own designs. Studying it now fills our hearts with associations with Him... He reveals it to us as His friends (John 15:15; Eph. 1:9), making us sharers of the thoughts that occupy Himself... If the ends men pursue show what they are, our conduct in this present life will carry the stamp of the future we expect. Our life here will be coloured by the foretaste of things there.

The word "dispensation" appears twice in the older English translation of the letter to the Ephesians — in Ephesians 1:10 and Ephesians 3:2. In both places the Greek word means the law or arrangement of a house. It is close to the word for steward, so it is sometimes translated "stewardship." In general, a dispensation is the order of affairs that God chooses to set up at any given time.

The "fulness of times" can hardly mean the eternal state, for then God will be all in all. It seems rather to have in view the world to come — the thousand-year reign of Christ — when the full result of God's ways in government will appear in perfection. God has entrusted men with all the principles of government at different times, and men have failed completely in each of them. Under the rule of Christ those same principles will appear in perfection. The government of man has shown the ruin of the times. The reign of Christ will show the "fulness," or perfection, of the times.

Many have supposed that this means the present dispensation. They confuse it with another expression used in Galatians 4:4: "But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth His Son." But "the fulness of time" and "the dispensation of the fulness of times" are two very different expressions… The Church is now reconciled; but things in heaven and on earth are still to be reconciled.

What marks it out is the gathering together — literally, the heading up — of all things in heaven and on earth in the Christ… Have you ever seen a barrel-maker heading up a cask? He stands the wooden staves on end around the head, or end piece, of the cask… That head is the centre that holds them all together. Once it is in place, the harder he presses the staves in, the firmer and better the work.

The verse says nothing about the things in hell, because this promised gathering belongs to a world of blessing… Sin is lawlessness. It turns every man into a little unit on his own, with his only centre in himself. So through all these ages of sin's reign, however cleverly men build their unities, everything has fallen apart. God has His unity. He is working towards it.

Elsewhere we read of the reconciliation of heavenly things as well as earthly ones (Colossians 1:20). That word implies they were estranged before. And here it rests on the cross: "making peace by the blood of His cross"… Sin has defiled not the earth only but the heavens. The work of Christ has glorified God about that sin, so He can step in, deliver what is to become the inheritance of Christ and His "joint-heirs," and bring it back to Himself.

But the church is not included in any of these things… We are heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ — not just heirs under Christ, but heirs with Him. It is the picture given at the very start of man's history. Adam had the glory of being head over this lower world, and his wife shares that rule because she is joined to him. The church is the spiritual Eve of the Lord Jesus, the bride of the last Adam.