What is Paul’s mystery in Ephesians 3 and Colossians 1?

Question 9112.

The mystery of the church is one of those phrases that sounds forbidding until you discover what Paul meant by it, at which point it becomes one of the most liberating ideas in the New Testament. Paul uses the word repeatedly in Ephesians and Colossians, and he treats it as the thing that explains his ministry, his imprisonment, and his astonishment at what God has done.

A mystery in Paul’s vocabulary is not a puzzle to be solved by clever people. It is something that was previously hidden and has now been disclosed. The question is what exactly was hidden, why it was hidden, and what difference the disclosure makes.

What the word actually means

The Greek noun is musterion. In the pagan religions of the day it referred to secret knowledge available only to initiates, and Paul takes the word and turns it inside out. For him a mystery is a truth that God kept to Himself and has now announced publicly through the apostles and prophets, so that anyone may know it.

That is why Paul can speak of the mystery being made known to him by revelation and then written down so that when you read this you can perceive my insight (Ephesians 3:3-4). There is no inner circle. The whole point of the mystery of the church is that it has been published.

So whenever the word appears in Paul, the question to ask is not what is being concealed but what has just been revealed. A mystery in this sense is an announcement, not a riddle.

What the mystery of the church actually is

Paul states it plainly: the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel (Ephesians 3:6). Not Gentiles blessed alongside Israel, which the Old Testament had promised repeatedly, but Gentiles and Jews joined into one new body on equal terms. That is the mystery of the church.

The Old Testament had said a great deal about Gentiles coming to the light of Israel, about the nations streaming to Zion, and about the servant being a light to the nations. What it had not said is that God would form a single body in which the distinction between Jew and Gentile no longer determined anything about a person’s standing.

Paul says the dividing wall of hostility has been broken down, and that Jesus created in Himself one new man in place of the two. The word new there is emphatic. This is not Israel enlarged. It is something that did not previously exist.

The mystery in Colossians

Colossians gives a complementary angle. There the mystery hidden for ages and generations is now revealed to the saints, and Paul summarises it as Christ in you, the hope of glory (Colossians 1:26-27). The indwelling of Jesus by His Spirit in Gentile believers is the striking element for a first-century Jewish reader.

Put the two letters together and the mystery of the church has two faces. Ephesians emphasises the body formed from both peoples; Colossians emphasises the presence of Jesus within those who could never have expected it. Both are aspects of the same disclosure.

Why it had not been disclosed before

This is where my dispensational convictions do real work. The church did not exist in the Old Testament. It began at Pentecost, when the Spirit was poured out and believers were baptised into one body. Nothing that does not yet exist can be the subject of previous revelation, and Paul says the mystery was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed.

That statement is difficult to accommodate on any view that treats the church as the continuation or replacement of Israel. If the church were simply Israel renewed, the mystery of the church would be an unfolding of what the prophets had already described rather than something hidden for ages.

Israel and the church remain distinct in God’s programme. The covenants made with Israel will be fulfilled literally to that people, and the church is a separate work with its own beginning and its own destiny. Holding both without collapsing one into the other is exactly what Paul’s language requires. See the difference between Israel and the church and whether the church has replaced Israel.

Why Paul found it so astonishing

Paul had built his life on the distinction between Jew and Gentile. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, blameless under the law. For that man to write that Gentiles are members of the same body, on equal terms, without becoming Jews first, represents an upheaval we can barely imagine from this distance.

It also explains his imprisonment. He is a prisoner for the sake of the Gentiles, and the riot that led to his arrest broke out over the accusation that he had brought a Greek into the temple. The mystery of the church was not an abstraction to Paul. It cost him his liberty.

What difference it makes now

It settles the question of who belongs. No believer is a second-class member of the body on grounds of background, nationality, or lineage. Paul says through the church the manifold wisdom of God is now being made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places (Ephesians 3:10), which means the very existence of a mixed congregation is a display of God’s wisdom to watching angels.

It also shapes how we read our Bibles. Recognising that the mystery of the church was genuinely hidden protects us from flattening the Old Testament into a coded version of the New, and it keeps the promises made to Israel intact rather than spiritualising them away. Further reading: when the church began and what dispensationalism is.

Other things Paul calls a mystery

Paul uses the word in several places, and it is worth noticing the range. He speaks of the mystery of the resurrection body, telling the Corinthians that we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed (1 Corinthians 15:51). He speaks of the partial hardening of Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in as a mystery. He speaks of the mystery of godliness.

Each of these follows the same pattern: something God had not previously disclosed, now announced. So the mystery of the church belongs to a family of disclosures given through the apostles, and reading them together prevents us from treating any one of them as an isolated curiosity.

It also shows that the word carries no sense of vagueness. Every one of these mysteries has definite content. Paul is not gesturing at something ineffable; he is reporting what God has said.

What this does not mean

Recognising the mystery of the church does not mean the Old Testament has nothing to say to us. It remains Scripture, profitable for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness, and Paul quotes it constantly in the very letters where he announces the mystery.

Nor does it mean God changed His plan. What was hidden was hidden in God, who created all things, according to the eternal purpose that He has realised in Jesus. The disclosure is new to us; the purpose is not new to Him.

And it does not mean Israel has been set aside. The promises made to Abraham’s physical descendants stand and will be fulfilled to that people. The mystery of the church sits alongside those promises rather than replacing them, which is precisely why Paul can spend three chapters of Romans on Israel’s future after writing Ephesians.

Why this changes how a congregation sees itself

There is a practical consequence to all this that congregations rarely draw out. If the church is a body formed from peoples who had no business sharing a table, then the ordinary diversity of a congregation is not a management problem to be handled but the very thing God intended to display.

Paul says the manifold wisdom of God is made known through the church, and the word he uses suggests something many-coloured. A congregation of one background, one class, and one temperament may be comfortable, but it displays rather less of what the mystery of the church was meant to show.

That should shape how we welcome people who are not like us. It is not a matter of hospitality technique. It is a matter of whether we understand what God has actually made.

So, now what?

Read Ephesians 2 and 3 in one sitting and watch how often Paul returns to the two becoming one. Then look around your own congregation on Sunday and ask whether anything about it would have astonished a first-century Pharisee. If not, why not?

And if you have ever felt that you are on the edge of God’s people rather than at the centre, the mystery of the church is addressed to you specifically. Fellow heirs, members of the same body, partakers of the promise. There is no lesser category in that sentence, and Paul went to prison to make sure we knew it.

This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

Ephesians 3:6, ESV