01.08. ESSAY NO. 8
ESSAY NO. 8 The long parenthesis with which Paul prefaces his prayer in Ephesians 3 is largely about himself. He knows that the prayer will have more meaning when his readers better understand that he is the chosen of God to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. God’s "wisdom and prudence" are shown in his selection of Cosmopolitan Paul for the difficult task of welding Jew and Gentile into "one new man." With his exceptional native endowment plus his Hebrew religion, Greek culture, and Roman citizenship, Paul must have been the best raw material on earth for God to use in forging his instrument to carry Christ to all men. Although Paul is in prison, he, inasmuch as Christians do not fight a losing war, closes this parenthesis on a note of triumph. Can saints write discouraging letters?
Paul’s "That" Prayer
Paul’s first prayer is built around three "whats" (Ephesians 1:18-19). This second prayer (Ephesians 3:16-19), built around three "thats," is, if possible, more comprehensive, elevated, and energetic. Paul prays God, "According to the riches of his glory" to grant Ephesian saints three tremendous things. To Paul nothing is too great or too good for God to do. Knowing that he was working with the grain of truth and reality, geared into eternal spiritual forces and verities, articulates with God, and that the whole universe was backing him, Paul, with a child’s trust and hope, asks superhuman things of God and expects superhuman answers. If a man can be measured by his prayers, Paul was a superlatively big man.
"All the Fullness of God"
Paul’s first prayer stresses "the exceeding greatness" of God’s power toward saints. The first "that" in this second prayer—"that ye may be strengthened with power through his spirit in the inward man"— continues the theme. The second "that"—"That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith" is the very blood of saintly living. The third "that" is twofold: First, "To the end that ye ... may be strong to apprehend . . . and to know the love of Christ"; second, really the distillation of the whole prayer, "That ye may be filled unto all the fullness of God." This twofold "that" is related to the former "thats" as fruit to root. They involve it; of necessity it grows too, as they grow. Paul prays that Christians may live Spirit-enabled, Christ-indwelt, and God-filled lives. This prayer does not make sense unless man is a large being capable of holding much. That God in all his power, through Christ, in the Spirit, by faith takes up his fixed abode "in the inward man" to impassion and to enable from within is the great advance Paul’s second prayer makes over his first. These prayers are not to be "explained and argued" intellectually; no elucidation is possible or necessary. "There’s no other way . . . but to trust and obey."
If Paul in his first prayer feels the inadequacy of language to set forth God’s power, and piles up five synonyms in trying to describe it as exhibited in God’s raising and setting Christ as "head over all things" (taking a dead man and making him ruler of the universe), he feels it more in this prayer as his words, "to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge" and "filled unto all the fullness of God" stagger under their load. But most of all, he feels it in his doxology: "Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be the glory in the church" (3:20, 21). Men may think of ages of blessedness and paradise of bliss, but God can go beyond even all their thinking. Paul is anxious that saints carry all the voltage of God’s almighty power they are capacitated to carry.
Men’s endless quest for power may cease only when they stop seeking within themselves and seek God’s filling. When they do this, God is convenanted to see that they are filled with true power and greatness. God’s whole universal, eternal, immutable system, however, turns on their cooperation. Both God’s grace, glory and power, and man’s sin, emptiness and death are full orbed in Ephesians. What a God! What an opportunity for man!