Ephesians 3:4 - The Marvelous Mysterious Message

-’...toward which you [all] are empowered [when] reading to understand the insight of me in the mystery of Christ...’ 

-The mystery of Christ... The mystery of Christ.  A Message which is strange indeed, difficult to explain and understand.  In this instance the difficulty arises because man in his fallen state instinctively and simultaneously tries to hide from God and make peace with God.  We feel guilty (because we are guilty), and so we try to avoid the One Who will hold us accountable.  But then our corrupted native impulse is to try and work our way back to God, using our own efforts and on our own terms.  In this state our minds are completely unable to divine what is necessary to restore Divine favor, to rebuild what was lost, that personal relationship with the God Who made us.  Thus the need to be able to understand what is the extent of the guilt (all have sinned), what is the just and necessary punishment for the guilty (the wages of sin is death), and more specifically how our Creator God planned to satisfy the requirements of righteousness and holiness by punishing an innocent substitute in our stead (His only begotten Son).  All these concepts are beyond intuiting really, beyond the capacity of fallen man to glean on his own (and sadly he is too often loathe to lend them much credibility if he ever gains so much as a glimpse).

-Yes, it was always going to be necessary for God Himself to reveal to us this mystery, these hard-to-understand truths, for Him to explain precisely how we can/need to be restored to fellowship with Him, and by extension how He plans to gather from every nation an assembly of restored worshippers who will be with Him forever in glory.  Fortunately God has been more than willing to reveal these truths - to His prophets and apostles and in this case to Paul himself.  But what became further necessary was to be able to explain both to the people God chose first (Israel) and to the rest of the peoples (referred to as Gentiles by the ‘chosen’ people) that the plans always included all the nations, every one of them in fact, the ends of the earth hearing this marvelous Mysterious Message of salvation through faith in that long-ago promised seed of Abraham, the very Son God sent to be our all-sufficient Sacrifice (Genesis 22.18, 26.4; Psalm 2.8, 22.27, 65.8, 67.1-7, 86.9, 96.3, 117.1, Isaiah 42.10, 45.22, 49.6, 52.10; Daniel 7.14; Micah 5.4; Luke 2.10; Matthew 28.19; Acts 1.8, 13.47; Revelation 5.9, 7.9).