3. “What is God Doing?” (Ephesians 1)

 

“What is God Doing?”

Ephesians 1:3-14

 

A few years ago a former Google strategist named James Williams wrote an essay entitled “The Age of Distraction,” talking of course about our present time. He speaks of how he began his work at Google with an idealism around the idea of organizing information. Over time he became disillusioned by the awareness that what really was being organized was people’s attention.

Perhaps you’ve heard that we now live in an “attention economy.” Countless sources of information and entertainment are competing for your views, your clicks, your pagescrolls. Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix famously said that they were competing not only with YouTube or social media, but even sleep to keep people’s attention. By now we’ve probably become accustomed to the ways of hacking our attention: The anxiety and moral outrage every news article seems to channel. The continuous-play short video clips trying to keep you glued to your phone. The clickbaity titles like, “When you read these 19 shocking food facts, you’ll never want to eat again.” Life has become one nonstop distraction.

This exploitation of our impulses does a number on us. As Williams goes on to say, “In the short term, these can distract us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, they can distract us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, they make it harder for us to “want what we want to want.” Put differently, these distractions dehumanize us. They turn us away from love, from beauty, from what is transcendent to dumb, meaningless trivialities. To put an even finer point on it, these distractions are turning us away from God. They are turning us away from the joyful worship that comes in knowing our Creator and resting in his love.

For us to be human, we need to fight back. Which is why Ephesians 1 is so very good for us to just slow down and ponder. Because its entire point is to turn our attention to God. Rather than yelling for our attention, it gently invites us to lift our gaze and wonder at who God is, what he wants, and what he is doing in this world.

We began looking at this passage two weeks ago, listening to Paul overflowing with admiration at God, rejoicing in how God has chosen to bless us in Christ. He begins listing how God has blessed us: he chose us, he made us his sons and daughters, he forgave our sins. All of this really comes to a climax in verses 9 and 10, where Paul says that through the coming of Jesus God made known to us the “mystery of his will.” Mystery here is not like a murder mystery; it’s a word the Bible uses to speak of something previously hidden, but now made clear. For a long time, many, many centuries, people didn’t really understand what God was doing. They didn’t understand how it all fit together. But now, Paul says, that’s changed. Through Jesus, God has made known the mystery of his will: now we get to see the big picture—verse 10: as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in Christ.”

This morning, as we are allowing our attentions to be fixed on God, I’d like us to consider three important truths that we are meant to see here.

 

The first thing I want us to notice is, very simply, that God is alive and personal. 

You might say, “Well that seems like a strange thing to point out.” But the reality is that one of our deepest human tendencies is to hide from our eyes this very central, significant truth.

When I was in 8th grade I had my first real crush on a girl. She was athletic—we ran track together, she had long blond hair. In my mind, she was perfect. She was perfect, because I didn’t really know her. I was awkward, I kept my distance, and in doing so I allowed myself to construct an ideal picture of this girl that was pretty disconnected from reality: it wasn’t really her I was attracted to but the person in my head.

Now by way of contrast, marriage is way, way better than an 8th grade crush, because it’s a real relationship with real love. But it’s also harder. Because in marriage you are married to a real, live person who has her own opinions, her own ways, and sometimes they’re different from yours. At times, that can be challenging!

When it comes to how we think of God, it is the easiest thing in the world to let our relationship with him be more like an 8th grade crush than like marriage. It’s the easiest thing in the world to create in our own minds what to us is an idealized version of God—where the God we pray to is God as we want him to be: unthreatening, pleasant, perhaps always wanting what we want. 

But God is real and living and different from what our minds might naturally make up. He existed entirely apart from us for all eternity. To speak in human terms, our God has his own personality, his own desires. He chooses. He acts. He takes pleasure in things. He is living.

Let me tell you how you can know when you’re beginning to have a real relationship with God: when you find yourself having to accept something about God that is hard to understand; or when you find his ways and his words sometimes confusing and difficult to understand; or even when you sometimes find it hard to difficult to believe. See, those struggles are evidence that you are wrestling with someone who is real, who isn’t just your own projection. 

It is only when we get to the place of allowing God to show us who he is that we can truly know God and worship and delight in him. Our God is alive and personal.

 

The second thing this passage tells us is that our God is guiding and directing our world according to a plan; everything in our world is part of God’s plan. We already saw hints of that two weeks ago when we noticed Paul speaking about God choosing and predestining, and now it’s even more explicit in verse 10’s language of “a plan for the fullness of time.” Everything in our world, including our lives, is part of God’s plan.

The pastor Tim Keller points out that if we take this verse seriously, then at least two influential philosophers are just completely wrong. On one hand, Bertrand Russell is wrong. Bertrand Russell was a 20th century philosopher, an atheist, and here are the cheerful words he said about human existence: 

“Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; (that is, there is no design). His origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms…all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system…Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.” You understand what he’s arguing? If there is no God, there is no design; and if there is no design, there is no meaning. Embrace despair, Russell is basically telling us with a wicked grin, and find a way to enjoy life.

That is a choice, I suppose. But Paul is inviting us to consider a different possibility. No, Paul says, everything actually has meaning, because it’s all part of our living God’s plan.

This also contradicts another philosopher—the great “Dr Emmett Brown,” or as he is better known, “Doc” from Back to the Future. At the very end of the trilogy, what are the final words of wisdom he has to offer, “Your future hasn’t been written yet. No one’s has. Your future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one!”

Now, this sounds way more cheerful than Bertrand Russell. If I’m having a beer, I’d likely prefer to hang out with Doc. But when you think about it, is it really any more comforting? “Your future is whatever you make it.” It’s all up to you. 

How many millennials grew up on nonsense like this—maybe hearing a compelling graduation speech, “You get to create your own future! Make the world a better place!” They go out full of idealism, only to crash against the realities of a world that won’t suddenly conform itself to your own personal desires.

But imagine if this were actually true. Imagine if you got to completely create your own future. When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a high powered lawyer—but of course God changed my plans and led me into ministry. When I was in college, I deeply wanted to be an RA. But I didn’t get the position, and it was because I found myself in a different position the following year that I met Jennifer, who is now my wife. As I’ve mentioned before, 17 years ago I was sure I was supposed to plant a church in Massachusetts, but God instead brought me here. At each of those points, if I were the one creating my future, I am confident that my life would be much poorer.  

When Paul tells us that God is working all things toward his play, he is saying, “No, it’s simply not the case that your future is whatever you make of it. You’re not that powerful, which is a really good thing. Your future and this world’s future is in the hands of someone else—in the hands of the living, personal God; it’s all part of his plan.”

Now I should say, without going too far down a rabbit trail, this doesn’t mean the choices we make are meaningless. This doesn’t mean that everything is just an impersonal fate and there’s nothing we can do. This is a place where Christianity is different from most other religions: it holds two important truths together. On one hand, the Bible clearly teaches that we do make choices, and those choices do matter. “Choose you this day whom you will serve,” Joshua told Israel. You choose. You are responsible—your decisions have meaning. You can do something stupid that has some real negative consequences. Or you can choose to do something heroic. And yet, and here’s a paradox that we won’t fully understand, even your choices are located within something bigger; they are part of God’s great plan. 

One of the best pictures of this in the Bible is found in the story of Joseph. If you’re familiar with it you might remember that Joseph made some choices with consequences: he told his brothers about a dream where he was going to be more important than them—probably not a wise move in terms of family dynamics. And his brothers made choices that had consequences: they took him captive and sold him into slavery in Egypt—talk about a dysfunctional family! And yet, somehow, even in the midst of all of these decisions and their consequences, God was at work, bringing Joseph into an important position in Egypt, eventually saving the whole family from famine. Joseph sums it up to his brothers this way: “You meant this for evil, but God meant this for good.” Do you hear that? Yes, you made real choices. And yet somehow, it fit into the plan of God, a God whose sovereignty is so mysterious and so great that he can both give us this freedom and also work all things according to his design. All things are part of God’s plan.

 

And this plan of God—is a plan of grace. That’s the third point I want us to consider.

When you start thinking about God’s plan, what God is doing in this world, it really focuses your attention on who God is. What is God doing in all of this? Why did he even make the world and where does he want to see it go? What does he want? What motivates or pleases God? What actually is God like?

I’ve mentioned that one human tendency is to imagine God to be pleasant and unthreatening. But that’s not the only way our minds make things up about God.   

One of the most ancient texts we have other than Scripture is Enuma Elish, an ancient Babylonian account of how the world was created. It gives us a picture of another way humans have of thinking about God. Or in this case, about gods. For it tells a messy story of gods fighting each other and then making gods out of the remains of other gods, before later making our world out of the remains of one particular god. And there comes to be one point in the story where you get the sense that the gods are looking around and saying, “Well, I think the fighting is over—now we have to just go on living. But honestly, we’d prefer not to have to work too hard.” And so one of the gods says, “I will create man, On whom the toil of the gods will be laid that they may rest.” It goes on to say that through the creation of man—again, from the remains of yet another god, the gods were set free from labor.

Now, I don’t know anyone who still believes in the myths of the Enuma Elish. But I do think it highlights one of the most common ways people view our relationship to God. We think we exist to serve God, whoever or whatever he is—we exist to make his life easier or happier.

For some, God can be like a very demanding and somewhat unloving father, who only likes you when you are doing what he wants, when you are giving him the respect and honor he is owed. I once knew someone like this, where I always felt like every conversation had an angle—if I was able to answer a need or a desire of his, he was super nice. But when I wasn’t, I got the cold shoulder. And sometimes I think this is how we can view God. If we’re serving him, telling people about Jesus, doing things that are useful to him, we’re good. But if we’re not producing anything, well, God’s less invested in us. Is that how you think of God?

Others can experience God as an intense and demanding perfectionist who won’t be happy until all flaws are removed from his work. I think of stories about Steve Jobs who was so demanding in getting things like the iPhone exactly right that people who worked for him speak of being treated terribly. Sometimes people can view God that way—where who they are and what they want is relatively unimportant to God—God will only be happy with perfection. Is that how you think of God?

So what does Ephesians tell us about God? Let’s return to verses 9 and 10 and consider what they’re telling us about God. God, as we’ve already noted, has a plan, and it’s a plan for the fullness of time. This plan tells us God’s purpose, what he’s been working at since the beginning, what was in his mind when he made the world. And what is that final destination for everything? “To unite all things in Christ.” The word translated here means to sum everything up, to bring everything to culmination.  Maybe sometimes you’ve seen a movie where the ending just lands, and you feel like everything in the whole story was there just to get you to that point. That’s the idea here: God’s plan that he is working out through every detail, every part of this world, is to bring everything to its destiny in Christ. To make it so that in the end, all people, all things will submit to his kingship: every knee shall bow and every tongue will be united in confessing that Jesus is Lord. 

Now why is God pursuing this outcome? Why does God want the whole world to be united under the Lordship of Christ? Well consider what Paul has already said about Jesus. “Christ” is the person through whom God blesses us with every spiritual blessing. Christ is the Son of God taking on flesh as the fullest, most complete expression imaginable of God’s grace extended to us. When Scripture says that God is bringing all things to a climax in Christ, he is saying that God is working everything so that on the final day, everything will be saturated with God’s grace.

This is it. This is the reason God made this world. This is the reason Jesus came into this world and died and rose again. This is why the church is on mission to every corner of human society. Because God wants us to experience his overflowing goodness. He is guiding and directing this world to its conclusion so that we can together be overwhelmed by the goodness of his grace.

If any part of you believes that God cares for you because you’re useful to him, you need to understand that this is a harmful lie. If any part of you thinks that God wants your worship because he somehow needs it; he wants your attention because he’s somehow lonely, you are believing in a false God.

Verse 5 tells us that when God adopted us in Christ, he did it why? According to the purpose—or as other translations better have it, the pleasure of his will. God adopted us because it made God happy to give us this privilege.  Same thing in verse 9: He made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his pleasure. Why has God designed this whole plan to bring everything together in the love of Christ? Because it brings him joy.

See, our God is not lacking. He is not hungry or lonely or needy in any way. Our God is supremely, overflowingly happy. In another passage, Paul speaks of the gospel of the glory of the blessed God—our God is blessed. He is joyful. Being the Triune God of eternal love, he lacks absolutely nothing. He is not unsatisfied with life, he is not frustrated. He is already happy beyond our imagination. He is doing all of these things in his plan, not because he is missing something, but because he overflows with grace.

He is at work in all of this because it brings him great delight to share.

Have you ever found a TV show or movie that you saw and you really liked and right after, maybe the next day you text your friends and family and say, “You gotta see this.” Why do you do that? You’re not getting some commission, some kickback from the show or your friends. No, what drives you is a sense that something this good should be experienced by others.

And this is how God is. For all eternity God experienced the delight of being the blessed God of love, Father loving Son in the communion of the Spirit, eternally, unimaginably joyful. And God said, “Something this good, this beautiful should be enjoyed by others.” I want others to experience this joy with me. And so he made us.

Which means our primary calling above everything else is to enjoy God’s grace. The chief end of man, we are reminded in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. And we see that idea here. Verse 6 tells us we were adopted: “to the praise of his glorious grace. Verse 12 and then again in verse 14 speak of being saved “to the praise of his glory.” Again, this is not saying that God needs our praise because he is somehow insecure. No, he is doing this for our sake. Praise is what happens when we enjoy. It’s about savoring something so much that it overflows into our words. When it says “to the praise of his glorious grace,” it’s saying that God is doing all of this, everything, his whole plan, so that we can be filled with delight as we experience his kindness.”

That is who our God is. And that is what he is doing. This is what he wants for you: your joy in him. 

And what that means is that our greatest need is to know this. To know this God. To be able to recognize and trust in his grace. Even amidst all the distractions, even amidst all the broken and hard things of this sinful world, to turn our gaze toward God and delight in him. Let’s turn to him now.