The mystery revealed by God is the gospel and its effects.
The mystery that was not known in the Old Testament and has now been revealed by the Holy Spirit through the apostles and the prophets.
Specifically, this mystery is the working of the gospel to include the Gentiles into the plan of salvation, according to the will of God. And this mystery is accomplished by the person of Christ.
Christ is the means by which the Jews, God’s chosen people, and Gentiles alike are saved. No one is saved apart from Christ. That truth is familiar and acceptable to a great many people.
What is not realized so readily with this truth is that not only is Christ the means by which salvation is accomplished, but He is also the goal of that salvation. That’s why Paul says that all things are summed up in Christ (Eph. 1:10). Jesus Christ is both the source and object of salvation. Life and salvation are summed up in the person of Christ.
He is all. He is the One to whom all of heaven and all of earth and all of time have been pointing. He will be the eternal preoccupation of all men (as an object of love for those in heaven and the object of hated submission for those in hell) and is worthy now of our consuming passions.
It is because Christ is all that John MacArthur has written that “Our Sufficiency [is] in Christ.” It is because Christ is all that A. W. Tozer wrote a generation ago:
There must be somewhere a fixed center against which everything else is measured, where the law of relativity does not enter and we can say “IS” and make no allowances. Such a center is God. When God would make His Name known to mankind, He could find no better word than “I AM”. . . . Everyone and everything else measures from that fixed point. “I am that I am,” says God, “I change not.”
As the sailor locates his position on the sea by “shooting” the sun, so we may get our moral bearings by looking at God. We must begin with God. We are right when and only when we stand in a right position relative to God, and we are wrong so far and so long as we stand in any other position.
Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and bring Him nearer to our own image. . . . It is no use. We can get a right start only by accepting God as he is. As we go on to know Him better we shall find it a source of unspeakable joy that God is just what He is.
In contemporary times, perhaps few have spoken as articulately as John Piper in commending Christ to us as the full object of our affections. So it is that he notes, “Believing in Jesus means coming to him for the quenching of our soul’s thirst. Faith in Christ is being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus.”
The disparity between Paul’s call and our compliance is not in theology — we don’t disagree with the text that Christ is all — but in practice. We just are prone to not give Him the daily recognition of His worth. Why?
Isn’t this simply because our thoughts and affections are tuned to a different channel? Our minds are accustomed to other entertainment and aren’t in shape for the faith-work of reflecting on Christ. That may be why most of us live at low spiritual tide, powerless and joyless in our religion.
But if we we were in love with Christ, so that we couldn’t wait to see him again — and if we were in the spiritual habit of gazing on him and marveling at him — then our lives before God would be sweeter to us. Day by day our spirits would grow stronger. We would more faithfully represent Christ to the world. Strange as it sounds, death would begin to sound inviting to us, as the final release from everything that distracts us from the sight of our Lord.
It really is no mystery. The purpose of God in salvation is to bring us to Christ — to love and affection and adoration and joy and delight in Christ — by the death and resurrection of Christ.
Words of Grace 