087 - The Mystery Doctrine Revealed [B]

The Mystery Doctrine Revealed
Ephesians 3:3
Ephesians Lesson #087
October 11, 2020
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org

Opening Prayer

“Father, again we’re thankful for another day, another opportunity to learn Your Word, another opportunity to glorify You, another opportunity to grow spiritually, to have our priorities reoriented according to Your priorities for our lives, and our thinking transformed by the renewal of Your Word.

“Father, we pray that as we study today, we may come to understand that these things that You have revealed, recorded and preserved down through the centuries are vital for our understanding, for spiritual life, and to rethink our perspective on life. We do this in Christ’s name, amen.”

Slide 2

Let’s open our Bibles to Ephesians 3:3; we’re looking at the Mystery Doctrine. This whole section is dealing with that term and has the idea of new revelation—revelation that has not been revealed before even a little bit.

It was, as we’ll learn, in the secret counsels of God: He gave no hints. Although, when we look back at the Old Testament we see that it perfectly coordinates, is perfectly consistent with the Old Testament revelation, but it was not even hinted at. As we go through the lesson, we will talk about why it is that God does that.

Slide 3

Let’s remind ourselves of where Paul is going in this passage, thinking our way through what he says. Ephesians 3:1, “For this reason,” a term that takes us back to what he said in Ephesians 2:11–22, where he talks about how the Gentiles had been separated from the Jews, that they were distanced from the prophecies, the promises and the covenants of God. As a result of that there was a barrier—because of the Law—between Jew and Gentile, as well as a sin barrier between Gentiles and Jews and God.

Both of these barriers are then broken down through the cross, through the death of Christ, so they will no longer be strangers from the covenants of promise. That is true for us today.

I have been teaching through this, starting on February 11, 2020, several months ago. Paul is so emphasizing this that he spends half of Ephesians 2 and all of Ephesians 3 working out the implications of it.

That’s a lot of words and a lot of Scripture. God clearly believes that this is necessary for us to understand in our spiritual life—not something that’s just some sort of theological doctrine in the great by-and-by. But in Paul’s thinking, in God’s thinking, this is how we should think about situations that occur in life. This is fundamental, it is foundational, it is necessary.

I think our modern world tells us what our priorities should be. The world tells us how our problems should be identified and what our real problems are, and the world tells us how those solutions should come about and what the solution should be.

In so many churches today these sermons that are built on what they call “felt needs.” I think that a lot of those “felt needs” have their origin in our sin nature. When we come to Scriptures, we learn that God tells us what the problems are, and He tells us how we should be thinking about the situations in life: what our priorities should be.

For many people priorities are problems at the job. People today are so worried about this pandemic, that they’re going to get sick, they’re going to die; there’s just such fear everywhere. People focus on financial problems: how am I going to pay the bills, how am I going to go forward? People focus on all of these different problems, and yet God says those aren’t the real problems, and that’s not the real issue, and those solutions are tertiary at best.

We have to think about life differently. We have to think about God’s plan and purpose for life differently, and that’s what’s going on here because, as I’ve pointed out, Paul is going to leave this verse and take what appears to be a divergent, but is really not, in Ephesians 3:2–12.

Slide 4

In Ephesians 3:13 he gives us the application of what he says in Ephesians 3:2–12. This is not something you’re going to hear from a lot of pulpits today, where you go by and they have their marquees out front, and they talk about the message having to do with five ways to improve your marriage, or eight ways to be financially successful, or 10 ways to have your full life now; all these different kinds of things.

Paul concludes this lengthy digression into the teaching about this Mystery in the New Testament in Ephesians 3:13, “Therefore—as a result of you knowing these things—I ask that you do not lose heart at my tribulations for you, which is your glory.”

That’s a great point of application. I pointed out before, and we will review again in the next lesson, is that this is the Mystery Doctrine rationale. We have to understand what that is because it is not something that most of us have gone to, myself included, but that’s what Paul is doing here.

Slide 5

It’s based on the fact of his commission as an apostle and his mission in terms of his apostolic message. Also the fact that his commission as an apostle is specifically to the Gentiles. I keep pointing it out because people don’t always get it, that it doesn’t exclude ministry to the Jews. It was primarily to the Gentiles, and Paul is the one who exposes more about this Mystery teaching because it’s related to this new man, this new body, this new temple where Jew and Gentile are united together in Christ. That is his message and ministry that is the foundation for this.

Slide 6

Ephesians 3:2, “if indeed you have heard of the dispensation—I pointed out that it’s not the dispensation of grace, but it’s the dispensation or the dispensing of something, the administration of something; we will look at those words a little bit more in a minute—of the grace of God which was given to me for you—that’s the phrase that has to be locked down.”

It’s developed later on in Ephesians 3:7, “of which I became a minister according to—there’s the phrase—the gift of the grace of God given to me.”

This isn’t just saving grace. It isn’t just, what I call “the gospel related to Phase 1 salvation,” how to be saved from the penalty of sin. It is related to the fullness of the gospel, which is to give us the fullness and the abundance of life. The mission and message of the apostle is described by this particular phrase.

Slide 7

“… the dispensation of the grace of God which was given to me …”

In dispensationalism, the way in which the King James and New King James Version have translated this word OIKONOMIA has caused a little bit of a misunderstanding or misappropriation of this verse. It is not really talking about the Church Age as the dispensation of grace. It is the dispensation of grace, but this isn’t the verse you go to for that.

Slide 8

We talked last time about this idea of what a dispensation is, because that’s an archaic word now. It is not used that much, and a lot of people wonder just exactly what it means. You can ask people, “Well, do you believe in dispensations, do you believe in dispensationalism?” Many are so poorly taught, that they do, but they don’t know the vocabulary.

Slide 9

It comes from the Latin word dispensatio, which means to deal out, to weight out, to dispense something, or to distribute something.

This is a very interesting concept! I know that some people don’t get all caught up in words, but words communicate ideas, and specific words communicate specific ideas, and all ideas have consequences as we know. This idea has to do with administration.

Slide 10

I did a little more thinking on that. Last week I used a definition I got from the Webster’s Third New International Dictionary that a dispensation has to do with three things that they point out here.

1.      “a divine ordering and administration of worldly affairs.” That’s how we usually define dispensations: that in different periods of time God administers or oversees the affairs of human history in different ways.

Some things stay the same, but some things are different. For example, in the first Age, the Age of the Gentiles, there are three dispensations. The first is perfect environment: there is no sin; thus, there is no need for a gospel, there’s no need for salvation, but there’s a need for obedience. That dispensation ended with the fall of Adam, because of sin.

There are new things that come in, and when God spoke to the serpent, to Eve and to Adam, He wasn’t completely negating the responsibilities He gave to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:26–28, but He is saying that those things are modified. “You were to rule over the planet, you were to rule over the fish of the sea the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. But now because of sin, that’s going to be difficult; there are going to be problems.”

They were to be fruitful and multiply, but now that’s not only going to have pleasurable aspects, there are going to be difficult aspects. There’s going to be consequences, especially for the woman as a result of sin, and there’s going to be increased pain and difficulty in childbirth.

The man is going to be responsible for tilling the earth, for working the earth. He’ll be outside of the garden and there are going to be thorns and thistles and all of these other things that are going to come up. And his work is by the sweat of his brow now.

So there are some things that are the same, but some things are different, and I can go on and trace that all the way through history.

Salvation has certain things that are the same. It is always by faith alone. It is not faith plus works. It is not faith plus a certain kind of works or fruitfulness afterwards. It is just simply trusting in God’s promise.

In the Old Testament God promised, “I’m going to provide the seed of the woman who will defeat the seed of the serpent,” the seed of the woman first hinted at in Genesis 3:15. Going through Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, more and more is added to the understanding of this promise of the seed. But it is still trusting in God to provide salvation through a future Deliverer, the Messiah.

Once that future deliverer came, that is, the Lord Jesus Christ when He entered into human history. When He entered into His public ministry, He was proclaiming the same gospel, teaching those that were alive then, like Nicodemus in John 3 that they had to be born again to see the kingdom of God. “You have to be born again because you’re spiritually dead.”

Which is what Paul talks about at the beginning of our study in Ephesians 2, that we are all born spiritually dead, which means that we are alienated from the life of God. It doesn’t mean we’re a spiritual corpse, it means we’re alienated from the life of God, and we must have that life. So Jesus is telling Nicodemus that you have to be born again, you have to receive this new life.

We studied in the first part of Ephesians 2, and Paul highlights it, that when we trust in Christ as Savior, God first of all makes us alive together in Christ: that’s regeneration. Then He raises us up together and He seats us together in the heavenlies.

We talk about that a little more because it specifically relates to Ephesians 3:6, that part of this Mystery Doctrine that “the Gentiles should be joint heirs, of the same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ through the gospel.”

What we see in dispensations is that God administers or dispense His grace, His goodness in different ways, but it’s always the same even though there are some differences. In the Old Testament that was faith alone in the promise of the future Deliverer alone. Now it is faith alone in the fulfillment of that promise, the promise of the gospel that Christ has come, the Messiah has come and He paid for our sins. There are things that stay the same and things that are different.

A second meaning from Webster is,

2.      “A system of principles, promises, and rules divinely ordained and administered.” We have to look at the meaning of that word “administered,” which we will look at it just a minute, but that really has the idea of dispensing something or applying something.

3.      “A period of history during which a particular divine revelation has predominated in the affairs of mankind.”

I thought that was just an absolutely brilliant observation from a secular dictionary. It takes place within a period of time. The word “dispensation” doesn’t particularly mean a period of time, it means administration, but it takes place within a period of time. It is God’s way of overseeing human history.

“a dispensation takes place in time, but it isn’t necessarily related to time” in terms of the core meaning, the semantic value, of the word.

Slide 11

Two other dictionary words to look at:

“Dispense,” look at the highlighted #2 meaning, “to prepare and distribute something,” as in medicine, you dispense medicine. When you go to a doctor’s office sick and the doctor gives you a prescription, he is dispensing or administering medication.

What’s interesting is the second part of the slide, I looked the word “administer” up on Dictionary.com, and it gives as a couple of meanings, the idea is “to bring into use or operation.”

Paul as the administrator is bringing something into operation. What is he bringing into operation? He’s bringing into operation the teaching that is revealed now in this Mystery Doctrine, that Jew and Gentile are now together united in one new man, one new body, and one new temple.

Second, it has the idea of “making application of something,” so this is all about applying to real life situations the significance of the Mystery Doctrine.

That is important because it fits the context here. Remember in Ephesians 3:13 Paul says, “Therefore I ask that you not to lose heart.” Don’t get discouraged, don’t give up! No matter what trials, tests, problems you face in life, don’t give up, because God is doing something in this dispensation, this time period that is phenomenal. Paul’s job is to apply that, help them to understand why it is phenomenal.

If you don’t think this is application, then the problem isn’t with me (it might be; I may just not be a good communicator)! Usually the problem with most of us is that we think application is often these other areas, and God is saying, “No, you’ve got to get a lot deeper.

“You’ve got to think more profoundly because if you get your thinking right at this more fundamental level, then you’ll understand why that changes how you think about your marriage, it changes how you think about your money, it changes how you think about the priorities of your life, it changes everything,” We have to get to these fundamentals.

This is where real application takes place, but, of course, we have the naysayers around in many, many churches that say, “Oh, no, no! You don’t need all that doctrine, you don’t need all that teaching; you need something that is much more practical. For the Apostle Paul, therefore for God, nothing is more practical than learning this material.

The concept of “dispensation” has to do with the administration, or the dispensing of what God has revealed in each particular time period in which He is administering human history.

Slide 12

We can define a dispensation as:

• a stewardship—that involves a responsibility;
• an administration—that is dispensing of information, a dispensing of how God’s grace is used during that time, the application of the Word to life;
• the management of property— we are now God’s property.

We’ve been bought with a price, we are now His, so we have to understand how to manage our lives. And that involves accountability and faithfulness on the part of the steward to God—not to one another, not to the church, but to God.

Slide 13

The idea of a dispensation: a distinct and identifiable administration in the development of God’s plan and purposes for human history.

Slide 14

We’ve looked at Ephesians 3:1-2; now I want you to look at Ephesians 3:2–3 together on this slide, because this shows the relationship of Ephesians 3:3, which is the section on the lower left of the slide, to Ephesians 3:2. In fact, all the way through Ephesians 3:7 is part of one sentence.

It starts off in Ephesians 3:2 with the conditional statement at the beginning, “… if indeed you have heard.”

According to the Greek this construction is a first-class condition, which means if and we’re assuming is true that you’ve heard it. Why does Paul assume that? Because Paul spent two to three years teaching in Ephesus and he knows that he’s taught all this material before. So he says, “if indeed you have heard—and you have heard it.”

The clause that comes after, “of the dispensation of the grace of God which was given to me for you …” is all about his apostolic commission, his apostolic mission, his apostolic message.

Next, Ephesians 3:3, the New King James translates one word “how that.” I think that’s awkward. I don’t think that’s the best way to translate it. It should just be translated with a single word “that.” In Greek, as in English, this word indicates the content of the verb, the content of what they heard.

“… you have heard,” talking about his ministry, his mission. But there’s a second explanation of the content and that is “that by revelation He made known to me—that is God made known to me—the mystery as I have briefly written already.”

The main clause is, “if indeed you have heard that by revelation He made known to me the mysteries I have briefly written already.”

Slide 15

In Ephesians 3:3, we start off looking at a couple of textual issues that come up, which is why some translations may read a little differently than the King James or the New King James. The first has to do with the first word which is translated “that;” the second has to do with the verb “made known.”

Slide 16

The first is the simpler one.

In some ancient manuscripts the Greek word is left out, and some people may say, “Well, that’s not so important.” Well, I think it is because the function of this word indicates the content of the verb. You’ve heard what? What’s the content of what you’ve heard? That content is this revelation that has come.

1.      The Greek is HOTI, and it introduces the content of what was heard. This is in most manuscripts.

There’re two different views to textual criticism. There is the view that the critical test—and this is a gross oversimplification, but it’s basically true—that older is better, so the oldest manuscripts are more accurate.

The basic problem with that is you can have a 4^th century manuscript that is flawed, and so it’s not as good as a 9^th century manuscript that faithfully, accurately copies a 3^rd century manuscript that is older than the 4th century manuscript. It really is a misnomer to think that older is better. Older is not necessarily better.

Interestingly, because of a question I was asked recently, you can look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, written somewhere around 200 to 100 BC, then look at the oldest manuscripts we have on which the Hebrew Bible’s based, because in the Jewish and the scribal culture when a manuscript became old or if you made a mistake in copying a manuscript, you were to burn the manuscript where there was a mistake.

They were very, very faithful; they were very diligent and obsessive, and counted every word and every syllable, every letter on every page. So they could easily, quickly spot if there was a mistake: if a letter was left out, if a word was left out. Those things happen.

When the Qumran Scrolls were discovered in 1948 and they began to investigate them, one scroll was intact: the Isaiah Scroll. One of the scholars who looked at it noted that there were a number of minor differences—word order, spelling, things of that nature, but he said there’s about 17 or 18, I forget the exact number, that are really significant, and at that time, he said they should all be included and revise our Hebrew text.

After 10 years of study, he said none of those should be accepted. So he’s got a 1000-year-older document from Qumran that is basically 99.9% the same as the Masoretic Text of the 8^th and 9^th Century AD, and initially he thought we ought to go with the older one because it’s probably better. Then afterwards as a result of study for a lot of different reasons, he discarded all of those differences and said no, we have a better copy—better based on a number of different factors. So older is not necessarily better.

The alternate view is that the majority text, which is the vast majority of manuscripts, will record the accurate reading. That too is an oversimplification.

Slide 17

This really doesn’t change the word meaning a lot. You have two variances in the documents. One is to take the word “made known” as passive. So, in the New American Standard, NIV, ESV, and other translations that are based on the critical text, they will say that it is “by revelation the mystery….” so mystery becomes the subject.

The Greek MUSTERION is the same whether it’s in the accusative case or the nominative case, the subject or the accusative. It can switch around, so it could be this way.

2.      The verb “made known” is in the passive in the Critical Text: by revelation the mystery “was made known to me.” Or the active voice in the majority of manuscripts, “He made known” to me the mystery.

“… by revelation the mystery ‘was made known to me.’ ” Who made it known? The one who made known isn’t stated, but it’s assumed it is God. Again, in the majority of manuscripts, in the majority of texts, it is an active-voice verb where the subject would be “He.” It’s a third person singular, “He made known to me the mystery.”

Slide 18

What I like about this is the word order in the King James or the New King James. First of all, it introduces the content of what they heard. You can change this around and say, “… that He made known the mystery to me by revelation,” or you could say, “… that He made known to me by revelation the mystery.”

All of those are acceptable, but I think that there is clarity in putting it in this word order in the English.

First of all, it tells us how Paul learned this: it is by revelation.

Secondly, it tells us who did the revealing: it was God.

How did He do it? He made it known. That’s a knowledge word, not an emotion word; it’s not a feeling word. He didn’t make me feel it; He made it known to me.

What did He make known? The mystery.

I think this word order is the best word order for clarification.

This first word we have to understand because it emphasizes the fact that this is what Paul is teaching. It didn’t come from Paul. He didn’t originate it. It was according to a standard. Literally in the Greek it is KATA, the preposition which denotes the standard. And the standard is always God speaking to us, disclosing to us information that we would not otherwise be aware of and couldn’t arrive at through our own rational capacities or through our experience.

Paul says this in other places, an example is Galatians 1:12, “For I neither received it—that is, the revelation of the gospel. I didn’t receive it from man—no human being gave this information—nor was I taught it—no human teaches it to him—but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

That happened on the road to Damascus where Jesus Christ revealed Himself and the gospel to Paul—something he’d heard many times before and denied many times before. Now he had the greatest revelation of all in that appearance of Christ on the road to Damascus.

This word is used 13 times in Paul’s epistles, 19 times in the whole New Testament. So the vast majority are Pauline. He really emphasizes the importance of this disclosure from God, and God is the One who is unveiling something. That’s the basic idea.

The noun form refers to a revelation, a body of revelation, a disclosure or an unveiling. The verb has the idea of disclosing something, unveiling something, exposing something, revealing something. The opposite is to make it obscure, to cover it, to hide it. This is to expose and to reveal something.

Slide 19

A good passage that enhances this is Romans 16:25, in Paul’s closing comments, his benediction, his prayer to God at the end of Romans,

“Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the proclamation of Jesus Christ …” The way it is written, those two are identical. It’s not like Paul’s got his own gospel. It is that which was proclaimed by Jesus Christ, and it’s according to a standard. Same phrase, same preposition as in Ephesians, “… according to a standard that is the revelation—the unveiling of what?—of the mystery—that is previously unrevealed. Information that what that had been—kept secret since the world began.”

What is this mystery? When did it happen? How did it happen? Why did it happen?

This gives us a clue by the context what the mystery was. It’s something that was a secret knowledge. It was kept secret; it was in the hidden counsel of God. It was part of His plan, but it was not disclosed, not revealed to man. It was hidden, it was veiled; it was obscured. It was not information given to man, and it was kept secret since the world began.

One of my favorite illustrations about the limitations of human knowledge has to do with Adam in the Garden of Eden. Adam was told to name the animals. Adam was told that all of the fruit of the trees was good to eat and was for him except for one that he could not eat from, and if he ate from it he would immediately die. Of course, that death was a spiritual death and alienation from the life of God, it wasn’t physical death.

What I point out is that Adam who’s brilliant—he had an IQ probably in the 500s somewhere, much brighter than anybody on the planet today—just unbelievably brilliant. He is given the task of naming the animals, and it doesn’t take him long before he realizes that the animals are in pairs, there’s a male, there’s a female, and he’s all by himself.

God is letting him discover the fact that he is alone and there’s no one comparable to him, and then God will fulfill that by giving him a wife, a perfect wife, and they will be there together in the garden until they sin.

But of all the things they could learn by observation, by experience—known as empiricism—they couldn’t learn that there was something about that one tree that meant that they shouldn’t eat from it. All the others looked great. It probably did too. It wasn’t a thorn bush; thorns don’t come in until after the Fall. It wasn’t ugly; it didn’t look wilted. When he looked at it, he didn’t hear bass notes from some musical rendition indicating the villain is coming on the scene.

It looked like all the other trees; it was attractive and pleasant to the eyes. There was nothing in his experience that could tell him there was something wrong with the tree. Nothing in his reason. He couldn’t argue from logic. He had no known assumptions. He had no evidence from which he could reason that that tree, “I can’t eat from that tree.”

He couldn’t get information: apart from God telling him that there was something wrong and he couldn’t eat from that tree, he wouldn’t have known it. That’s the way it is with revelation. We can know lot of things, we can know a lot of true things, we can know a lot of things that are accurate, but our overall understanding of reality needs God’s revelation. God needs to speak to us and God needs to tell us certain things; otherwise, we’re missing key elements.

That’s what the Mystery Doctrine is: that there has to be something special. There’s no way that you can go back to the Old Testament and discover that God was going to create a new people of God that would be comprised of Jew and Gentile equally as one new man, one new body, one new temple. You couldn’t get it from experience, you couldn’t get it any other way other than from revelation. God had to disclose this; otherwise it would remain a secret.

Slide 20

I think we’re just going to look at a couple of other passages before we get into this next topic which may have to wait for a while.

Paul uses this term APOKALUPSIS several times. He says in 2 Corinthians 12:7 that he has had an abundance of revelations, and that God gave him this thorn in the flesh, allowed that to happen. I believe it’s a persecution that came as a result of Satan stirring up people against him, and God allowed that to continue, permitted that to continue because of the abundance of information that God gave to Paul, so that he would not be proud or arrogant.

He was given a thorn in the flesh, an AGGELOS—a messenger—of Satan. I believe that’s a demon who is orchestrating this opposition, which you pick up in subsequent verses.

Galatians 1:12, “For I neither received it from man, nor was I caught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

His understanding of the gospel, in the narrow sense and in the broad sense, came from the Lord Jesus Christ.

Galatians 2:2, “And I went out by revelation.” God gives him special revelation to go up to Jerusalem to meet with the other apostles.

Slide 21

“What the Bible Teaches about Divine Revelation.” This is so important and is foundational to understanding what’s going on in this passage. Today I will focus on a couple of the keywords at the very beginning.

Slide 22

1.      Key Words

APOKALUPSIS, meaning revelation or disclosure, is the noun.

APOKALYPTO is the verb, meaning to uncover, to disclose, to reveal. It is the opposite of cover-up. It’s the opposite of conceal. It’s the opposite of obscuring.

GNORIZO, if God makes something known. We have a group of people that we refer to as agnostics. GNOSIS, which is the core of the word from which it derives, is the noun form for knowledge.

GNORIZO, ending in “O” is a verb, and it has to do with making something known. Agnostics, say, “We can’t know these things. We’re not sure.”

I like Norm Geisler’s response. The agnostic says, “Well, I don’t know for sure.”

You say, “Well, do you know that for sure? Now if you know that for sure, than that’s our starting point, that you can know something for sure. So maybe there’s something else you can know for sure. Maybe there’s other things you can have certain knowledge about.”

GNORIZO is the fact that God gives us knowledge, it is not feelings, it’s not emotions, it’s not mysticism. God gives us knowledge, God gives us information, and that is critical to being able to understand life, to being able to interpret the events around us, and to know about our salvation and our eternal destiny.

Slide 23

It is used in Luke 2:15 where the angels have been given the information that the Savior has been born in Bethlehem:

“So it was—after the angels had appeared to them—when the angels had gone away from them into heaven that the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us now go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has come to pass, which the Lord has made known to us.’ ”

That doesn’t mean that the Lord appeared to them, but the Lord sent His angels to give them that information. They would not have known it any other way. So they went to Bethlehem to see the infant Jesus.

Slide 24

PHANEROO, which means to make something known, or to reveal, to enlighten, to manifest something, and this word also is used in this passage.

PHANEROSIS, the noun form, means a revelation of manifestation or disclosure.

Slide 25

It is used in Romans 16:25, which we just examined, that it is “according to the revelation of the mystery kept secret since the world began.”

This manifestation, this disclosure of information that is the foundation of understanding that which has been concealed from eternity past and is now revealed to the Church is what we understand as the Mystery Doctrine.

Closing Prayer

“Father, we thank You for this opportunity to study Your Word, to be reminded of Your plan and purposes. From eternity past You had this plan, you had this purpose of our salvation and the uniqueness of the Church Age. You knew it. It was not a surprise to You that Israel would reject the Messiah. You always had a plan and a purpose, a phenomenal plan, and as a result of this plan we as Gentiles are included in a unique way with the Jews in this new man, this new body, this new temple.

“Father, we pray that You help us to understand why that should transform our understanding of who we are, that we should not think in terms of all of the secondary issues that distract so many people, that they are disappointed in themselves with what the world calls a poor self-image and what the Bible just calls carnality or sin. We need to be transformed by the renewing of our mind that we have a new identity in Christ, and that’s what should focus us on our mission and our ministry in this life.

“Father, we pray that the gospel’s been made clear today to those who are listening who may not be saved, that all you must do is to trust in Christ as Your Savior, to believe in Him, that He is the unique God-man who died on the Cross for our sins. He suffered for sins, He was buried and on the third day He rose from the dead, and that He is the One who paid the penalty, so all we have to do is trust in Him, to accept Him, to believe Him, and that at that instant You know what we believe and You give us eternal life, Father, for which we are so grateful.

“We ask that You would help those who have studied this today to think about it, to reflect upon it, that God the Holy Spirit can use it to transform us into the image of Christ, in Whose name we pray, amen.”