This Scripture passage from Ephesians has been one of the most pivotal in helping me gain a new revelation about God as our Father. And maybe one reason for this is that the Holy Spirit moved Paul to interrupt his train of thought to elaborate on things he ‘already wrote’ about, but only ‘briefly’. The first sentence above, an incomplete one in Greek, also suggests an interruption. Compare also two sentence phrases in it with the last two sentences:

Paul's interruption is thus an important confirmation of several things we have already seen about the Father in earlier meditations. Yet it, and the introduction in it to his concluding prayer both add some crucial new insights about knowing our Father. First: only by ‘revelation’ can believers fully understand how God is our Father. While Paul had been thoroughly trained in the Hebrew Scriptures, he himself still needed to receive such a revelation. The name he gives this revelation—the Mystery of the Messiah—explains why. God had kept something hidden since the creation. Even in the Scriptures that he had given to the people of Israel over the ‘previous generations’, he had not revealed certain things to them— though there are some references to God as ‘Father’, and to the coming ‘anointed one’ (Messiah) in their Scriptures (Med.#A-E). Our Father's full purpose for creating human beings as his children would only be revealed when the Spirit came.

Second, Paul's interruption confirms that there has been a Time change in our relationship with the Father (see Med.#3 & #4). There was a Time, beginning at the creation, during which ‘the Mystery’ was ‘kept hidden’. But ‘now’ a new Time has arrived in which God makes known this ‘Mystery of his will’ by his Spirit—a time when believers of all the ‘nations’ [Gr. ethne] ‘come of age in Christ as ‘heirs-together’. Thirdly, God's ‘intent’ for the ‘administration of the Mystery’ is that these ethnic groups in the church will ‘now’—through their multi-cultural worship together—make known ‘the many-and-varied [Gr. polu-poikilos] wisdom of God’. Polu means ‘many’, and poikilos means ‘varied’. This is the same multi-ethnic worship of the Father that Jesus spoke about during his visit to Samaria (Med.#3).

Yet Paul's interruption in the above text reveals some additional things that were previously hidden. What Christ ‘accomplished’, bringing us into this new relationship with the Father by the Spirit, is according to God's ‘eternal purpose’. God's plan for the ‘coming together’ and the ‘coming of age’ of people from all nations was established in eternity—before the creation of the world, and therefore before sin entered the world. Thus, Jesus did not come only to bring redemption to a world broken by human sinfulness, but also to add something new to humanity. Paul understood from the Scriptures that God had made each nation [ethnos] by giving each one a separate territory (Act.17:26). But now, by the Spirit, he comes to understand God's mysterious ‘eternal purpose’ for creating all this diversity. ‘In Christ Jesus’ and ‘through the Gospel’, all the nations would be gathered ‘together as one’ in order to worship God as ‘heirs-together’ and in ‘one body together’ (Med.#70). As ‘fellow-citizens’ of a ‘Jerusalem from above’ (Gal.4:26), nations and ethnic groups—including Israel—would bring in their ‘glory and honor’ (Med.#44 & #92). This city is thus a multi-ethnic one that is not just something for the future. God's ‘intent’ is that his ‘many and varied wisdom’ will already be made known ‘now through the church’!

Paul’s experience, however, is that God's intent does not automatically become a reality in the church simply through the proclamation of ‘the riches of the Messiah’. Paul also needed to ‘enlighten’ everyone about ‘the administration of the Mystery’. The cross of Christ has not only broken down the wall of separation in the Temple, the guardianship power of the Law and all inter-ethnic hostility; but the Spirit has made all ethnic groups in the Church ‘heirs-together’. As adult sons and daughters—regardless of ethnicity, gender or social class—all disciples have equal access to the Father in Christ, by the Spirit (Med.#4 & #44). It is this part of ‘the Mystery’ that is the hardest to turn into reality in most churches.

Why? Look at the introductory words to Paul's prayer, after the interruption. Here, he describes the Father as the One ‘from whom all ‘fatherhood’ [Gr. patria] in heaven and on earth derives its name’.[i] So it is only natural to think of God's fatherhood in terms of our own cultural ideas or personal experience with human father figures. Yet people who have had bad fathers, also many theologians, often miss that Paul is not saying that God is like our fathers. Rather he is saying that God is our real ‘Father’ (Med.#A), and that human fathers were supposed to be in some ways like him! As one of my students remarked: ‘Instead of saying God is Father, we can better say Father is God.’

This revelation can be a big help to all those Christians who grew up with bad cultural images of fatherhood or hurtful personal experiences with human fathers. They no longer need to look at God through these, or first get healed from these, before they can know him as their real Father. All they need to do is look to Jesus. For he is not just our Savior, but he is also the perfect reflection of what our real Father is like (Jn.14:9, Med.#10). And the way he walked with the Father as an adult Son, after the Holy Spirit came, is the perfect model of how we can do the same after becoming adult sons and daughters through Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

So if your human father was absent, negligent, abusive, unfaithful, or one who deserted his family, meditate on what is recorded in the gospels about how Jesus treated people. If you had a father or step-father who was still controlling and critical of you even after you became an adult, you can meditate on how Jesus mentored his disciples as adults—even though he sometimes affectionately called them ‘little children’. Meditating on Jesus in this way is also essential if you have experienced religious abuse or controlling ‘father figures’ in the Church. If you still have to deal with the controlling ‘father figures’ who dominate life in your family, church, tribe or ethnic group, meditate on the texts in Chapter 4 (Med.#25-32) and Chapter 9 (Med.#68-77).

At any rate, whatever your bad experiences with ‘fatherhood’ in your society—even if it involves pressure to conform to the ways of dead ‘forefathers’ (ancestral spirits)—in Christ you have been restored to your true Father's ‘household’. You have come into a new relationship with him as an adult son or daughter by the Spirit—as a co-heir with your Eldest Brother and with brothers and sisters from many nations. How the Gospel frees us into this new family relationship will be the subject of the next meditations.