Timely Ingathering-The Gospel of the Kingdom

                   

Ephesians 1:10- That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him:

That in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ.
Heaven and earth united in Christ
Heaven and earth are to be restored to each other as well as to Him. The knowledge of God and the sanctity which have come to us in this world of conflict and sin are to flow into the great stream of pure angelic life; and the joy, the strength, the wisdom, and the security, alike of angels and of men, will be indefinitely augmented. As yet, we and they are like countries so remote or so estranged from each other that there has been no exchange of material or intellectual treasures. What the poverty of England would be if we had been always isolated from the rest of the human race we can hardly tell. It is by the free intercourse of trade, and the still freer intercourse of literature, that nations become rich and wise. Sunnier skies and more luxuriant soils give us more than half our material wealth, and we send in exchange the products of our mines and the works of our industry and skill. From sages who speculated on the universe and human life in the very morning of civilization, from poets whose genius was developed in the ancient commonwealths of Greece, our intellectual energy has received its most vigorous inspiration; and our religious faith is refreshed by streams which had their springs in the life of ancient Jewish saints and prophets, and of Christian apostles who lived eighteen centuries ago. What we hope for in the endless future is a still more complete participation in whatever knowledge and love of God, whatever righteousness, whatever joy, may exist in any province of the created universe. Race is no longer to be isolated from race, or world from world. A power, a wisdom, a holiness, a rapture, of which a solitary, soul, a solitary world, would be incapable, are to be ours through the gathering together of all things in Christ. We, for our part, shall contribute to the fulness of the universal life. To the principalities of heaven we shall be able to speak of God’s infinite mercy to a race which had revolted against His throne; of the kinship between the eternal Son of God and ourselves; of the mystery of His death and the power of His resurrection; of the consolation which came to us in sorrows which the happy angels never knew; of the tenderness of the Divine pity which was shown to us in pain and weariness and disappointment; of the strength of the Divine support which made inconstancy resolute in well doing, and changed weakness and fear into victorious heroism. And they will tell us of the ancient days when no sin had cast its shadow on the universe, and of all that they have learnt in the millenniums of blessedness and purity during which they have seen the face of God. The sanctity which is the fruit of penitence will have its own pathetic loveliness for righteous races that have never sinned; and we shall be thrilled with a new rapture by the vision of a perfect glory which has never suffered even temporary eclipse. Their joy in their own security will be heightened by their generous delight in our rescue from sin and eternal death, and our gratitude for our deliverance will deepen in intensity as we discover that our honour and blessedness are not inferior to theirs who have never broken the eternal law of righteousness. Our final glory will consist, not in the restoration of the solitary soul to solitary communion with God, but in the fellowship of all the blessed with the blessedness of the universe as well as with the blessedness of God. (R. W. Dale, LL. D.)


Timely gathering of all in Christ
I. God has set seasons in which He will accomplish all His will (Ecc_3:1; Ecc_3:17). As He brings things natural, spring, summer, autumn, winter, everything in season, so all the works He will do about His children, whether it be the punishing of wickedness for their sake, the delivering of His children from evil, the giving them benefits, He will bring them all forth in the fit appointed seasons.
1. To design times is His prerogative: as a master of a fatally has the right to fix the particular time at which this or that shall be done.
2. He only knows the fittest seasons for the accomplishment of His plans.
(1) Let this reprove our weakness in thinking God sometimes delays too long.
(2) Let us learn to wait on God. We would not in winter have midsummer weather, for it would not be seasonable; so in the winter of any trial with which we are visited we should not wish the sunshine of this or that blessing before God sees it may be seasonably bestowed, remembering that the man who believes does not make undue haste.
II. God, by opening the Gospel, brings us His Christ.
1. By nature we are severed
(1) from God: prodigal sons;
(2) from Christ, like sheep in the valleys of death, running after the wolf, and leaving the Shepherd of our souls;
(3) from one another, a man being by nature a wolf to his brother-man, his feet swift to shed blood.
2. The order in which we are gathered.
(1) The opening of the gospel gathers us into one faith.
(2) By faith, as a spiritual sinew or nerve, it unites us to Christ, making us one person with Him, as in law man and wife are one.
(3) It unites us with God, inasmuch as we are one with His Son.
(4) By being gathered to Christ, we are gathered to the whole Body of Christ, to all who exist under Him. What a wonderful power of union is there in the gospel!
III. All who shall be gathered to Christ are brought to Him by the Gospel. Only one gospel, and that gospel is for all.
II. Observe—who it is in whom we are gathered. In Christ, who—
1. Has abolished the enmity between God and us, and so removed that which divided us; and—
2. He calls us, and effectually draws us home in His time.
(1) Let us then, to preserve our union, walk with Christ, and keep by Him. Even as it is in drawing a circle with compass and lines from the circumference to the centre, so it is with us: the nearer they come to the centre, the more they unite, till they come to the same point; the further they go from the centre in which they are united, the more they run out one from the other. So when we keep to Christ, the nearer we come to Him, the more we unite; but when we run forth into our own lusts and private faction, then we are disjoined from the other.
(2) Since in Christ, our Head, we are joined as members of one and the same body, we mug act as members. The members of one and the same body have no mutual jealousies; they communicate with each other; the mouth takes meat, the stomach digests, the liver makes blood, the eye sees, the hand handles; they wilt not revenge themselves one against another, but mutually bear each others’ burdens, so that their affection each to other is not diminished. God, who is love itself, teaches us these things. (Paul Bayne.)


All things in Christ
Jesus Christ is the fulness of
(1) knowledge;
(2) time;
(3) law;
(4) nature;
(5) grace;
(6) man;
(7) God. (A. F. Muir, M. A.)


The plan of redemption
This is a disclosure of the magnificent and sublime design contemplated by God through means of the gospel. It is the “mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He hath purposed in Himself.” Our own individual salvation constitutes but a fragment of a vast and glorious scheme, which in due course shall be fully achieved. The influence of that atonement to which we owe our redemption is here seen extending itself far and wide in the universe of God, and forming the grand harmonizing and uniting bond among all the objects, however various, of His goodness, mercy, and love. Nay, we are perhaps here taught that its power is to be exerted and displayed in the final subjugation of all things without exception, including the reduction of sin and evil to their own place, as well as the ingathering of all that is good—under the universal sovereignty of God.
I. There is a general plan or scheme, promoted by the Gospel, and here called “the dispensation” or economy “of the fulness of times.” It is, with reference to a plan, or dispensation, or economy, which God has in view, that He has made known to us the mystery of redemption. Every intelligent householder has some plan, according to which he directs all his energies and Jays out all his arrangements. His house, his farm, his estate, are managed and controlled for some definite object, and all his operations are conformed to some view or idea which he has formed for his own guidance. Different seasons of the year and various times come round upon him, but he keeps intelligently and firmly to his ruling purpose, and is not satisfied until the result of his plan has been fully realized. So God Himself, in the government of His whole household—the universal Father and the Lord of all—is represented as having a certain plan or economy, in accordance with which He is pleased to work through successive times, until the result He contemplates be finally attained.
II. What, then, is this grand result contemplated by the dispensation of the fulness of times? It is “to gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth even in Him.” But what are we to understand by this? What is the import of “to gather together in one”? And what maybe the full scope of “all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth”? The word rendered “to gather together in one” occurs once again in Rom_13:9, where it is rendered “briefly comprehended.” “If there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” There its import is plain; for all the commandments are summed up, “briefly comprehended,” “reduced to a head,” “gathered together in one” in those two great commandments, love to God and love to man, of the last of which the apostle was giving instances. These two commandments are heads on which all the rest depend, from which they hang, in which they are summed up. This idea of summation, representation, headship, seems to belong essentially to the import of the word, and must not be lost sight of in the passage before us, where we read of the gathering up in one of all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth. But as it is plain that “all things” do not naturally belong to Christ, but on account of sin the things on earth at least are in a state of alienation, separation, revulsion, we must here necessarily suppose that the word implies the idea of “bringing back” from that state and gathering up into the opposite state of union, harmony, love.
1. The angels may be included in this gathering together in one. Although the unfallen angels do not stand in need of redemption from sin or misery, yet they need to be preserved from the risk of falling, and may well be supposed to owe their security and infallibility in some way to Christ.
2. There is no question concerning the including, or gathering up in one, all the redeemed of mankind. Separated though they may have been in life—according to the times in which they have existed, the countries they have dwelt in, the names and outward distinctions they have borne—their union to Christ, and to each other, has been real. It will, at length, become visible.
3. But it seems intended in this passage, as it is in keeping with the representations of Scripture elsewhere, that the material creation is to share in the glorious ingathering of “all things in Christ.”
III. This gathering up of “all things” is “is Christ,” even “in Him.”
1. Consider the wondrous person of Christ as the God-man, joining mysteriously the Creator and the creation—the Maker and His work in one—by an indissoluble and eternal union.
2. But consider, secondly, that Christ, thus completely fitted to represent the creation of God, by the assumption of the human nature, has been actually constituted head of all things, with all-sufficient power to accomplish the whole plan of God. (W. Alves, M. A.)


All things to be gathered together in Christ
He will yet gather together again, in one, all things in Christ, filling them from His own fulness laid up in Him; gladdening them with His own joy; quickening them with His own life; beautifying them with His own glory; and sustaining them with His own power and resources. Great indeed must be our Lord, in whom and through whom such purposes are to be fulfilled! And divinely inspired must be the record in which they are revealed! Towards the fulfilment and manifestation in us of that purpose, all God’s past dispensations of grace have tended. Note their order.
1. By the Holy Ghost given us and through the gospel, He gathers His people into one faith and one baptism.
2. By faith, as by a spiritual nerve or sinew, He unites us with Christ, making us to become one flesh with Him, as it is written (Eph_5:29, “No man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth it and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the Church”).
3. He doth so unite us with Christ as to make us sons-in-law and daughters-in-law; nay, He makes us so much nearer to Himself, by how much God and Christ are more nearly united, than any natural father and son can be. As it is written: “I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one.”
4. By our being thus gathered together in Christ, we are gathered into the whole body of Christ, and to all that exists under Him, and His angels become our “ministering spirits”; nay, more, we are gathered to all, who in God’s predestination belong to Christ, and all things are ours.
Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and goodness of our God! There is a climax in our text.
1. His grace in creating us, as Adam in innocency and angels before they fell.
2. His upholding grace, in preventing the fall of elect angels; and His long-suffering grace towards fallen sinners.
3. But beyond all, was that manifestation of the exceeding riches and glory of His redeeming grace, in the gift of His Son, and His revealed purpose to regather us again to Himself in Him, the purchase of His blood, and the partakers of His Divine nature. Creating grace has been surpassed by preventing grace; and preventing grace again by restoring and adopting grace; and thus God has made known unto us the mystery of His will, and “His thoughts which are to usward.” (M. Rainsford, B. A.)


Relation of the Atonement to the universe
The mediation of Christ is represented in Scripture as bringing the whole creation into union with the Church or people of God. In the dispensation of the fulness of times it is said that God would “gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth, even in Him.” Again, “it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness dwell; and (having made peace through the blood of His cross) by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself; by Him, I say, whether things in earth, or things in heaven.” The language here used supposes that the introduction of sin has effected a disunion between men and the other parts of God’s creation. It is natural to suppose it should be so. If a province of a great empire rise up in rebellion against the lawful government, all communication between the inhabitants of such a province and the faithful adherents to order and obedience must be at an end. A line of separation would be immediately drawn by the sovereign, and all intercourse between the one and the other prohibited. Nor would it less accord with the inclination than with the duty of all the friends of righteousness, to withdraw their connection from those who were in rebellion against the supreme authority and the general good. It must have been thus with regard to the holy angels, on man’s apostasy. Those who at the creation of our world had sung together, and even shouted for joy, would now retire in disgust and holy indignation. But, through the mediation of Christ, a reunion is effected. By the blood of the cross we have peace with God; and being reconciled to Him, are united to all who love Him throughout the whole extent of creation. If Paul could address the Corinthians, concerning one of their excluded members, who had been brought to repentance, “To whom ye forgive anything, I also”; much more would the friends of righteousness say, in their addresses to the Great Supreme, concerning an excluded member from the moral system, “To whom thou forgivest anything, we also!” Hence angels acknowledge Christians as brethren, and become ministering spirits to them while inhabitants of the present world. (A. Fuller.)
Ephesians 1:10

in the dispensation, &c.] Lit., in view of the stewardship of the fulness of the seasons. The word rendered “dispensation” is lit. “stewardship, house-management.” Its special meaning here seems to be that the eternal Son is the True Steward in the great House of the Father’s spiritual Church; and that into His hands is to be put the actual government of it as it stands complete in the “fulness, or, fulfilment, of the seasons” (cp. for the phrase Gal_4:4); i.e. in the great Age of the Gospel, in which the universality of the Church, long indicated and prepared for by successive “seasons,” or stages, of providence and revelation, is at length a patent fact. In other words, the Father “purposed” that His Son should be, in a supreme sense, the manifested Governor and Dispenser of the developed period of grace, of which “glory” is but the outburst and flower.
gather together in one all things in Christ] This clause explains the clause previous; the “stewardship” was to be, in fact, the actual and manifested Headship of Christ. The Gr. may be literally represented by “that He might head up all things in Christ.” The verb is only used elsewhere (in N. T.) Rom_13:9, where A. V. reads “it is briefly comprehended,” summed up. The element “head” in the compound verb need not appear in translation; as it does not in either A. V. or R. V. (which reads “sum up”). But the Lord is so markedly seen in this Epistle (Eph_1:22, Eph_4:15, Eph_5:23; and see 1Co_11:3; Col_1:18; Col_2:10; Col_2:19) as the Head of the Church that a special reference to the thought and word seems to us almost certain here. We render, accordingly, to sum up all things in Christ as Head.—“In Christ” will here import a vital and organic connexion; as so often.
both which are in heaven, &c.] Here, and in the close parallel, Col_1:20, the context favours the reference of “all things” to the subjects of spiritual redemption who are in view through the whole passage; not explicitly to the Universe, in the largest sense of that word. More precisely, regenerate men are specially intended by “the things on earth,” as distinguished from “the things in heaven,” the angelic race, which also is “made subject” to the glorified Christ (1Pe_3:22, and see Col_2:10). The meaning here will thus be that under the supreme Headship of the Son were to be gathered, with the “elect angels” (1Ti_5:21), all “the children of God scattered abroad” (Joh_11:52); the true members of the universal Church. So, nearly, St Chrysostom interprets the passage; making the meaning to be that “both to angels and to men the Father has appointed one Head, according to the flesh, that is Christ.” (He has previously explained the verb (see last note) to mean “sum up,” “gather together;” but here recognizes an additional reference to the Headship of Christ.)—See further Appendix A.
A. HEADSHIP OF CHRIST WITH RELATION TO THE UNIVERSE
In the Commentary, on ch. Eph_1:10, we have advocated the restriction of the reference of the Headship to the Lord’s connexion with the Church. This is by no means to ignore His connexion with the whole created Universe; a truth expressly taught in the Holy Scriptures (see esp. Joh_1:3, and Col_1:16, though the latter passage makes its main reference to personal existences, not to merely material things). The connexion of the Eternal and Incarnate Son with the created World is indicated to us, directly and indirectly, as a profound and manifold connexion. But on a careful view of the whole teaching of the Ephesian Epistle we think it will be seen that the Epistle does not, so to speak, look this way with its revelations and doctrines, but is occupied supremely with the Lord’s relations with His Church, and with other intelligent existences through it. And we doubt whether the imagery of the Head is anywhere (if not here) to be found used with reference to the Universe at large, material and immaterial alike.

Ephesians 1:5-10

The Final Restoration of all Things.

There are several passages in the New Testament—and this is one of them—which make it clear that the Divine mercy is ultimately to achieve a complete triumph over misery and moral evil; and these passages, if they stand alone, might give us the impression that all who in any age, in any land, in any world, have erred and strayed from God are to be brought back by the Good Shepherd to the flock and to the fold.
I. But this Epistle, like the other documents contained in the New Testament, was not written for persons who were uninstructed in the Christian faith. If anything is clear about the teaching of Christ and His Apostles it is that they warned men not to reject the Divine mercy and so become irrevocable exiles from God’s presence and joy. They assumed that some would be guilty of this supreme crime and would be doomed to this supreme woe. Some men will inherit eternal life; some men will be punished with the second death. When therefore Paul spoke of God’s purpose to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth, the Ephesian Christians would not misunderstand his meaning. It would be understood that while those who had incurred irrevocable exclusion from the life of God were to receive the just punishment of their sin and to perish, the rest of the moral universe was to be organised into a perfect unity for eternal ages of righteousness and glory.
II. The universe was created to reach its perfection in Christ, and the eternal thought of God has been moving through countless ages of imperfection, development, pain, and conflict towards this great end. Crossed, resisted, defied, apparently thwarted, by moral evil, the Divine purpose has remained steadfast, has never been surrendered. Its energy has been wonderfully revealed in the incarnation and death of the Lord Jesus Christ. Its final triumph is secure. God will "sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth." In Him the discords of the universe will be resolved into an eternal harmony; its conflicts will end in golden ages of untroubled peace; it will find God, and in finding God will find eternal unity and blessedness. What we hope for in the endless future is a still more complete participation in whatever knowledge and love of God, whatever righteousness, whatever joy, may exist in any province of the created universe. Race is no longer to be isolated from race, or world from world. A power, a wisdom, a holiness, a rapture, of which a solitary soul, a solitary world, would be incapable, are to be ours through the gathering together in one of all things in Christ.
R. W. Dale, Lectures on the Ephesians, p. 90.
Reference: Eph_1:6.—Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 267; Ibid., Sermons, vol. viii., No. 471; vol. xvi., No. 958; vol. xxix., No. 1731; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines, p. 95. Eph_1:6, Eph_1:7.—Clergyman’s Magazine, vol. iii., p. 93.


Ephesians 1:9-11

Christ the Justification of a Suffering World.
Such words as these of St. Paul spring out of that first bewilderment of joy which belongs to the sense of discovery. Christ is still a newly discovered wonder, and the wonder of the newness still fascinates, still overwhelms. What, then, is the mystery of God’s will in gathering together all in one in Christ? Why was the Incarnation the true and only secret, the fit and only instrument? What did it actually do? Why was it such an immense relief to St. Paul?
I. Let me take it very broadly. What is the primary plan of God as we see it in nature? For this is the plan that Christ came to fulfil. We gaze and wonder at the terrific process of creation; and if we ask in awe and amazement, What is the end of all this? What is the purpose to be achieved? we are told, "Man." Man is the final achievement in which all this preparation issues; man is worth all this infinite toil, this agelong effort, this endless struggle, this thousandfold death. He is the justification; it is all very good since it all rises up into his crowning endowment. We turn to look at man, then, man as this world’s fulfilment. What has he done to be worth it all?
II. The one nation in all the world which discovered the permanent purpose of God in history; the one nation which succeeded in finding a path through its own disasters, so that its own ruin only threw into clearer light the principles of God’s ordained fulfilment—this unique nation pronounced that the fulfilment, the justifying purpose, was to be found in holiness of spirit, the union of man with God, whose image he is. Accept this as man’s end, and no destruction appals, no despair overwhelms, for this is the higher life, which is worth all the deaths that the lower can die; this is the new birth, which would make all the anguish of the travailing be remembered no more. But to know the secret was one thing; to achieve its fulfilment was another. The one possible end— the achievement of holiness—was itself impossible to the only people who recognised it as their end.
III. The holiness of God incarnate in the flesh of this labouring humanity, the holy image of God’s perfect righteousness taking upon Himself the whole agony of man, dying the death which justifies all death—but it turns death itself, by the honourable way of sacrifice, into the instrument of the higher inheritance, into the sacrament of righteousness, into the mystery of holiness, into the pledge of perfect peace—this, and this only, makes a consummation by which the effort of God’s creation achieves an end; this and this only, is a secret and a victory worthy of the merciful God in whom we trust. I need not spend many words on the practical application of this. It is practical enough sometimes just to draw out and study God’s truth; and if we meditate on it, it will enforce on us its own applications. Only let us seek to realise that we are saved only by being well-pleasing to God; and we are well-pleasing only if He can recognise in us the fruit and crown of all this long travailing, the satisfaction of all this immense effort of creation; it is the holiness of Christ.

H. Scott Holland, Logic and Life, p. 81.
References: Eph_1:10.—Homilist, 3rd series, vol. x., p. 121. Eph_1:11.—R. Thomas, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xvii., p. 86; Spurgeon, Morning by Morning, p. 215; Ibid., Evening by Evening, p. 30. Eph_1:11-14.—Homiletic Quarterly, vol. v., p. 456.

Ephesians 1:10

dispensation of the fullness of times 

The Dispensation of the Fulness of Times. This, the seventh and last of the ordered ages which condition human life on the earth, is identical with the kingdom covenanted to David. (2Sa_7:8-17); (Zec_12:8). 

Summary; 

(Luk_1:31-33); (1Co_15:24); and gathers into itself under Christ all past "times": 

(1) The time of oppression and misrule ends by Christ taking His kingdom. (Isa_11:3-4). 

(2) The time of testimony and divine forbearance ends in judgment. (Mat_25:31-46); (Act_17:30-31); (Rev_20:7-15). 

(3) The time of toil ends in rest and reward. (2Th_1:6-7). 

(4) The time of suffering ends in glory. (Rom_8:17-18). 

(5) The time of Israel's blindness and chastisement ends in restoration and conversion. (Rom_11:25-27); (Eze_39:25-29). 

(6) The times of the Gentiles end in the smiting of the image and the setting up of the kingdom of the heavens. (Dan_2:34); (Dan_2:35); (Rev_19:15-21). 

(7) The time of creation's thraldom ends in deliverance at the manifestation of the sons of God. (Gen_3:17); (Isa_11:6-8); (Rom_8:19-21). 

Ephesians 1:10

in the: Isa_2:2-4; Dan_2:44, Dan_9:24-27; Amo_9:11; Mic_4:1-2; Mal_3:1; 1Co_10:11; Gal_4:4; Heb_1:2, Heb_9:10, Heb_11:40; 1Pe_1:20

he: Eph_1:22, Eph_2:15, Eph_3:15; Gen_49:10; Mat_25:32; 1Co_3:22-23, 1Co_11:3; Phi_2:9-10; Col_1:20, Col_3:11; Heb_12:22-24; Rev_5:9, Rev_7:4-12, Rev_19:4-6

heaven: Gr. the heavens