Ephesians 1:8b-10
Though Ephesians 1:3-14 is one continuous sentence, the placement of a period in the middle of verse 8 by the NASB translators is appropriate for our understanding. “All wisdom and insight” (1:8b) is best partnered with the mystery of God’s will being made known to the church (1:9a). We could connect “all wisdom and insight” with the forgiveness that is granted according to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon us (1:8b), but the book of Ephesians uses the word “mystery” six different times referring to four separate “mysteries” (1:9; 3:3, 4, 9; 5:32; 6:19- more times than any other of Paul’s letters), all of which are now made known to the Church during the Church dispensation. With the larger context being considered, the believer has been blessed by God to now understand that which was previously unthinkable. Seeing that this wonderful “mystery” has now been made known, it is best to understand “all wisdom and insight” to be referring to the contents of v.9-10, understanding that it is those who are in Christ who have been given such a gracious privilege, now being able to look into the plans of God’s future stewardship of all things in Christ.
When Paul speaks of “wisdom,” he uses the Greek word sophia which means “the capacity to understand and function accordingly.” Don’t miss this, saint! The grace of God overflows to you and I in the capacity to understand things about Him, which is something that the world cannot do. In addition to this new understanding, believers now have the ability to function in accordance with this knowledge of the supernatural. God’s grace gives us heavenly comprehension, which comes by means of the Spirit (John 14:26; 16:13). We also find Paul employing the word “insight” (φρόνιμος- phronēsis) which BDAG understands this in two ways. First, “the faculty of thoughtful planning, way of thinking, (frame of) mind.” The second definition provided states, “the ability to understand, understanding, insight, intelligence.” Unpacking these definitions yields three areas of grace on the mental capacity of the believer.
First, we have been given the ability, by His grace, to understand Him. Of course, this does not mean that we can understand everything about God, but God has granted us an understanding of Him that this world has been willingly blind toward (Rom 1:18-21). This “understanding” that He has graced us with is a sign of the intimacy that He desires to share with us. He invites us to get to know Him on a deeper level, providing the keys so that we can let ourselves as far into His house as we are willing to go. When we read, “Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb 4:16), we cannot help but to rejoice at such a divine invitation. As seen in the preceding verses (4:14-15), it is the great High Priest who sympathizes with us in our weaknesses and frailty. He understands us and He invites us to find relief through a greater understanding of Him at the foot of the throne of grace! This is an understanding that the world does not have, and often despises.
Second, we have the fact that His grace has allowed us to think differently. This is where the word of God becomes crucial to our lives. This is the true essence of the word “repentance.” God has allowed us to have our minds’ changed according to His truth so that our minds can think along the lines of absolute, objective Truth! Being that this world spends its time rationalizing the sin that it so freely participates in (Rom 1:18-32), God has called us to “fresh air” in our thinking and to see things according to a divine mandate; that being His Truth. The very process of our mind has been blessed with the possibility of renewal according to His Word (Rom 12:2). Our meditation upon the Scriptures creates new neuropathways that bring God’s truth to the forefront of our thinking and decision-making. We have been graced to think the thoughts of God according to His ways and will!
Finally, we have been graced to function according to truth. When our thinking is changed, our being, existence, motivations, and desires change as well. Our daily practice in life begins to reflect our position in Christ. Mind-renewal finds our direction in life changing. God’s desires become our desires. We begin looking for ways to please Him and glorify Him because our value system has been rewired according to a great plane of reality than we were previously privy to. Jesus expresses this when He tells His disciples, ““If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (John 14:15) and “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him” (John 14:21). We have a knowledge of His commandments that allows for our value system to readjust to the truth of His Word. We can now show our love for the Savior by obeying Him. His grace has rescued us from futile thinking and trivial endeavors, sending us on to great heights of obedience that were previously unknown. Again, we must remember that God is preparing us for His presence (Eph 1:4)!
This new realm of “all wisdom and insight” has a definitive direction. Before elaborating on this, it may be helpful to show the distinctions between the Father and the Son in the pronouns that are used from Ephesians 1:8b-10a. They are as follows:
In all wisdom and insight He (the Father) made known to us the mystery of His (the Father’s) will, according to His (the Father’s) kind intention which He (the Father) purposed in Him (the Son) with a view to an administration suitable to the fullness of the times, that is, the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth.
The Father has made known to us the mystery of His will. As seen before in 1:5b, it is God’s “kind intention” (“good pleasure”-HCSB) to reveal such things to those “in Christ,” but it is also His purpose “in Him” to do so. To put it plainly, it pleases God to make His will known to His children and it is only possible for them to know such a thing because they are “in Christ.”
The thing that has been “made known” to those in Christ is the “mystery” of God’s will in a particular matter (Eph 1:9a). What does this mean? The word for mystery is more of a transliteration, coming from the word mystērion meaning, “the content of that which has not been known before but which has been revealed to an in-group or restricted constituency.” Strauss and Longman note that this word is used 28 times in the New Testament.
The noun mystērion refers to God’s intentions heretofore unrevealed. Contrary to a connotation of the similarly spelled English word “mystery,” a mystērion cannot be solved by human reasoning. Curiosity must wait for divine revelation. “Secret” is a preferable translation.
Peterman writes, “Mystery refers to some aspect of God’s plan that was previously hidden but that has now been made known.” This concept is not uncommon in the New Testament (Rom 11:25, 16:25; 1 Cor 4:1, 15:51; Eph 3:3, 4, 9, 5:32, 6:19; Col 1:26-27, 2:2, 4:3; 2 Thess 2:7; 1 Tim. 3:9, 16; Rev 1:20, 10:7, 17:5, 7). Hoehner notes that in the LXX (the Septuagint), the Greek phrase “making known” is used “of God making known His will,… and making known that which is secret.” J. Armitage Robinson gives his thoughts on Paul’s use of this word:
It is tempting to regard St Paul’s employment of the word ‘mystery’ as one of the instances in which he has borrowed a term from popular Greek phraseology and has lifted it into the highest region of thought. The word was everywhere current in the Greek religious world. When the old national spirit died out in Greece, the national religious life died with it, and the ancient national cults lost their hold on the people. About the same time there came into prominence all over the Greek world another form of religious worship, not so much public and national as private and individualistic. It had many shapes, and borrowed much from Eastern sources. Its aim was the purification of individual lives; and its methods were (1) the promise of a future life, and (2) the institution of rites of purification followed by initiation into a secret religious lore. With some of the mysteries much that was abominable was connected: but the ideals which some at least of them proclaimed were lofty. The true secret of divine things could only be revealed to those who passed through long stages of purification, and who pledged themselves never to disclose ‘the mysteries’ which they had been taught.
He then states,
As a matter of fact the word has come to St Paul from a wholly different source. We now know that it was used of secrets which belong to God and are revealed by Him to men, not only in the Book of Daniel, but also in a book which presents many parallels to the Book of Daniel, and which just failed, when that book just succeeded, in obtaining a place within the Jewish canon. Portions of the long lost Greek of the Book of Enoch have recently been restored to us, and we find that the word ‘mystery’ is used in it again and again of divine secrets which have rightly or wrongly come to the knowledge of men. And even apart from this particular book, we have ample evidence for this usage in the Greek-speaking circles of Judaism. The word, with its correlative ‘revelation’, was at hand in the region of the Apostle’s own Jewish training, and we need not seek a heathen origin for his use of it
In short, Paul’s use of this word is not to be misunderstood as having been associated with the “mystery religions” of the day. This word is perfectly at home in relation to the lofty and unknown things of YHWH Elohim. Whether it be found outside of the canon of Scripture, but in relation to the Creator of all things, we still find its mark in the early Judaistic tradition and training that Paul would have received in his youth.
God’s grace has been lavished on the saints in wisdom and insight in that God has made known to them the mystery of His will. Note again that Paul includes himself in this “already blessing,” using the personal pronoun “we.” The Father’s will, being His desire of what He would see come to pass, is something that has been made known to every believer in Christ equally. Being stated as a mystery, this was previously unknown, having been brought forth at a particular time of the Father’s choosing, being measured according to His good pleasure. This particular time is known as the Dispensation of the Church, which means that the mystery therein has a particular bearing on that dispensation.
This brings us to the beginning of verse 10. The key word under consideration is “administration” in the NASB95 (also Darby, HCSB, LSB, NET, LEB). This is the Greek word “oikonomia” and is translated as “dispensation” (KJV, NKJV, Young’s). There is much controversy surrounding the word “oikonomia” and its use, seen most notably in the rendering of “plan” in the more recent translations (NASB2020, MEV, ESV, CSB, NRSV, NLT). Oikonomia simply means “responsibility of management, management of a household, direction, office,” or a “state of being arranged, arrangement, order, plan.” For a detailed understanding of “oikonomia,” we look to Charles Ryrie:
The Greek word oikonomia comes from the verb that means to manage, regulate, administer, and plan. The word itself is a compound whose parts mean literally “to divide, apportion, administer or manage the affairs of an inhabited house.” In the papyri the officer (pikonomos) who administered a dispensation was referred to as a steward or manager of an estate, or as a treasurer. Thus, the central idea in the word dispensation is that of managing or administering the affairs of a household.
Ryrie goes on to write,
The English word dispensation is an Anglicized form of the Latin dispensatio, which the Vulgate uses to translate the Greek word. The Latin verb is a compound, meaning “to weigh out or dispense.” Three principal ideas are connected to the meaning of the English word: (1) “The action of dealing out or distributing”; (2) “the action of administering, ordering, or managing; the system by which things are administered”; and (3) “the action of dispensing with some requirement.” In further defining the use of the word theologically, the same dictionary says that a dispensation is “a stage in a progressive revelation, expressly adapted to the needs of a particular nation or period of time.… Also, the age or period during which a system has prevailed.”
When we look to Ephesians 1:9-10, we see that the purpose of uniting all things under the Headship of Christ was set forth in Christ as a dispensation (or administration) that would be in full effect when time reaches its fulfillment. The phrase “an administration suitable to the fullness of times” gives the reader a greater understanding as to when this concept of “uniting all things in Christ” will occur. The word “fullness” means “that which is brought to fullness or completion,” meaning that with the culmination of time will also come the reconciliation of all things. This understanding is also reinforced by the fact that in the phrase “the fullness of time,” the word for “time” (kairos) is plural in the Greek as accurately reflected in the NASB95 translation. Beal and Radmacher state, “God’s plan for the fullness of the times look to a point when the various epochs of history will be consummated. The times, that is the point when the realization that His purposes are completed, will be when the Messiah comes to rule on earth. Is not this the end-point for which biblically-minded believers are longing?” To this we say,
Amen!” Paul is pointing to a future time when all will be summed up in Jesus as He rules with a rod of iron upon the throne of David (Psa 2:9; 2 Sam 7:13, 16; Matt 19:28-29).
As good Bible students, we must guard against the thinking that sees everything through a “justification salvation” lens when reading this passage. William MacDonald writes, “Verse 10 is sometimes used to support the false doctrine of universal salvation. It is twisted to suggest that eventually everything and everyone will be restored and reconciled in Christ. But that is quite foreign to the passage. Paul is speaking about universal dominion, not universal salvation!” We must also warn against the understanding that the cross of Jesus Christ is what unites all things, with reference specifically to His salvific work. Holding this view, Merkle writes, “God’s perfect plan was “to unite all things” through his Son. This phrase describes the content of the mystery hidden in the past but now revealed in the gospel.” It is certainly “good news” that all things will be summed up in Christ our Lord, but the dispensation is not in reference to Calvary, but the reign of Messiah on the throne of David from Jerusalem for 1,000 years. The exaltation of Christ as King will occur regardless of the response of each individual to the free offer of forgiveness of sins by faith in Jesus. His rule is prophesied to occur and is firmly rooted in the Scriptures (Psa 2:6; 89:20-37; Jer 23:5-8; 23:17).
If this view of God’s great purposes for the exaltation of Jesus Christ above all things, along with the “summing up” of all things in Heaven and all things on Earth are understood in light of the eschaton (things concerning the End Times), we can confidently pinpoint this culmination as taking place at the return of Christ, when He establishes His physical, literal Kingdom on the Earth, reigning from David’s throne in Jerusalem (Luke 1:32-33; Rev 19:11-20:6; Psa 110). All opposition will be laid waste and all who adore Him will be received with gladness by the Master who has bought them with His blood. It will be an occasion for joy; one which has been set forth in Christ, fulfilling the “mystery” that was made known to the saints.
If a mystery is in reference to that which was previously unknown, but has now been revealed, what is the big revelation that God has set forth for a future dispensation? Vlach explains:
Everything God is doing has a forward-looking goal. There is a coming “administration” or dispensation, “a fullness of times” where God will head up or sum up all things in Christ… When this kingdom occurs “all things” are summed up or headed up “in Christ.” This involves all things in the universe, whether in heaven or on earth. Whether it is angels or humans, spiritual things or material matters, all things will come under the headship of Christ.
In Old Testament times, the revelation of a Messiah who would rule over the people was certainly put forth and often linked to King David (2 Sam 7:10-16; Psa 2; 89:20-37; Isa 11:1-9; Jer 23:5-8; 23:17). But it is the fact that Jesus Christ is the One who is both Messiah and King with Whom all things will culminate is the previously unknown facet of this mystery. Those in the Church Dispensation know His Name! Abraham did not know the name Jesus, nor did David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or anyone else before the time of Matthew 1:1. The privilege of the Church is to know the Name of the Savior of God and soon-coming King, Jesus- “YHWH is salvation.”
God’s goal is to bring all things will be brought to a full culmination in the Lord Jesus Christ (Isa 11:10 makes a profound statement in this regard). This will end in glorification, being the outplaying of the Father’s purpose as set forward in Christ. It would serve us well to consider a few passages for a better understanding of the role of Christ in the summing up the totality of all history. We start with the earliest recorded marker in all of existence.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.
–John 1:1-3
Jesus Christ was an active and essential figure within the Godhead when creation took place. He has always been in a constant, integral relationship with God, for He IS God. We see in the next passage that Christ’s humble faithfulness to God’s purposes in Him have resulted in His exaltation.
Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. For this reason also, God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow, of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and that every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
–Philippians 2:8-11 (emphasis added)
The next passage provides a greater scope as to the magnitude of roles in Jesus’ relationship to the creation.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything. For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.
–Colossians 1:15-20 (emphasis added)
Jesus makes this peace possible by His death, but the time of this full reconciliation pertains to a future dispensation, the Dispensation of the Millennial Reign of Christ. The emphasis on all things being reconciled in Christ is synonymous with Paul’s concept in Ephesians 1:9-10.
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
-2 Corinthians 5:17-21 (emphasis added)
This universal reconciliation is only possible through the cross of Christ. This is what makes the cross so pivotal to all human thinking, regardless if one believes in Jesus as the Christ or not. It is the cross that makes reconciliation to God a possibility because the multiple offenses of all people (sins) have been paid in full by the blood of the Lamb (John 1:29; Rom 5:12-21; Heb 2:9; 1 John 2:2). As discussed before, the only barrier that prevents one from experiencing the divine blessings of the reconciling work of the cross of Christ is one’s refusal to believe the message that Jesus has died in their place for their sins and has risen from the grave (1 Cor 15:3-4). Apart from faith, the full joy and blessing of this reconciliation cannot be enjoyed; only those who are “in Christ” can partake of this blessing, which becomes an “already blessing” for the saint in Christ. With the sins of the world being vanquished by the bloodwork of Jesus, an eligibility is created for anyone in the world at any time to become a saint “in Christ,” once they hear the Word and believe it (Rom 10:17; Jas 1:18; 1 Pet 1:22-23).
When we speak of this purpose of God’s mystery, we are speaking of the out-flowing implications of all that the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ is, and His triumphant work on the cross in relation to the entire created universe; that being reconciliation. This is why there is an urgency in sharing the Gospel due to the fact that the ministry of reconciliation has been given to the saints (2 Cor 5:17-21). It is only through this initial reconciliation that the future reconciliation of all things will be favorable since those who have believed are now in Christ. Again, we see the importance of understanding the three tenses of spiritual salvation.
While this “mystery” mentioned in Ephesians 1:9 is not the Gospel, it is plain to the reader that the Gospel is essential in bringing about the fruition of the mystery; that being “to unite all things in Him, things in the heavens and things on the earth” (Eph. 1:10). Hoehner writes, “According to His good pleasure God purposed to unite, under one head, all things in Christ.” This is seen in the “summing up of all things” in the NASB95 (1:10b). Beal and Radmacher note that,
The word for “unite” (anakephalaiosasthai) is an interesting word used only one other place in the New Testament, Romans 13:9. It is a word used for what a Roman or Greek orator did when he summarized his points at the end of a speech. The summary brought all his points together coherently under one head. This is Paul’s announcement here. God is going to unify everything in the universe under one head. This will be for Himself, and this will be done in intimate connection with the Lord Jesus Christ. Everything will have purpose and meaning, even the necessity of eternal judgment itself, when all of God’s purposes are seen “in Christ.”
This is the mystery. God will bring all things, whether on earth or in the heavens, whether seen or unseen, to a glorious conclusion and unification in the Person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As stated before, the Church Dispensation is most privileged to understand this.
God is extremely patient (we know this from how He deals with us). But even something like the “summing up” of all things in Christ, which will bring Him immense satisfaction, is something that has an appointed time, of which God can patiently wait. It is profitable to understand that God does not run on man’s timetable and that God is transcendent, being outside of time. “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). God’s does not need instant gratification. His patience is seen in the light of a greater good being demonstrated. Therefore, He is holding off on the uniting of all things above and below, the natural and the supernatural, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is an act of grace. The Father desires that the world “should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them” (Acts 14:15). Praise YHWH Elohim that He has told of the coming Millennial administration, and has named the coming King!