Verse 10 continues, “In order that now to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenlies the multifarious wisdom of God might be made known through the church.” God’s wisdom is manifold; it has many aspects and many directions. This wisdom is expressed to the rulers and authorities in the heavenlies, mainly to the evil powers of Satan. God desires to demonstrate to the powers of Satan how wise He is. Thus, the riches of Christ display His wisdom in a multifarious way.
According to verse 10, it is through the church that God’s multifarious wisdom is made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenlies. As revealed in verse 8, the church is produced from the unsearchable riches of Christ. When God’s chosen people partake of and enjoy the riches of Christ, they are constituted with those riches to be the church, through which God’s multifarious wisdom is made known to the angelic rulers and authorities in the heavenlies. Hence, the church is God’s wise exhibition of all that Christ is.
The church as the Body of Christ is composed of those who once were ruined, corrupted, and damaged. Before we were saved, we were dead in trespasses and sins, and we were scattered and divided, utterly unable to be one. We all were in a hopeless situation. Nevertheless, in His wisdom God is able to make us the church. Now we are not only redeemed, saved, cleansed, freed, liberated, and regenerated—we are one with God and with one another. Therefore, we are the church.
The church is God’s greatest boast. God cares very much for the church. In His wisdom God has taken the people whom Satan ruined and has made them into the church. After God had created man and had put him into the garden, Satan intervened, convinced that the best way to ruin the man created by God for Himself was to inject his own evil nature into him. At the time of man’s fall, Satan as sin entered into man and, in many respects, caused man to be the same as he is. For this reason the Bible refers to fallen men as the offspring of vipers (Matt. 3:7; 12:34). Having come into man as sin, Satan has made himself one with man and has transmuted man’s body into the flesh. But one day God became flesh (John 1:14). Eventually, Satan caused this One who had become flesh to be crucified. First, Satan instigated Judas to betray the Lord Jesus, and then he stirred up the Jews and the Gentiles to cooperate in crucifying Him. What Satan did not realize, however, was that in putting this One on the cross, he was actually crucifying himself. As Hebrews 2:14 says, “Since therefore the children have shared in blood and flesh, He also Himself in like manner partook of the same, that through death He might destroy him who has the might of death, that is, the devil.” Through His own death on the cross, the Lord Jesus destroyed Satan. This is a display of God’s marvelous wisdom.
Even the rebellion of Satan is within the realm of God’s wisdom. If it were not for Satan’s rebellion, God’s wisdom could not be made known in a full way. Satan has created many opportunities for God’s wisdom to be manifested in a multifarious way, that is, in various ways and aspects and from many angles.
God’s wisdom is exhibited in His redemption of fallen man. God foreknew that His enemy would rebel against Him, and He was prepared to face that situation. God also foreknew that the man created in His image for His purpose would be induced by Satan to sin, and He was also prepared to face that situation. Seemingly, the fall of man presented a great problem to God. However, this simply afforded Him an opportunity to express His wisdom in His redemption.
Because man was poisoned by Satan and corrupted by sin, God not only redeemed man but also regenerated him with His life. God redeemed man so that He could regenerate him with the divine life. Now God is working continually to sanctify His regenerated people with His holy nature and to transform them with His element. The divine life is for regeneration, the holy nature is for sanctification, and the divine element is for transformation. Furthermore, God will conform His regenerated, sanctified, and transformed people to the image of His Son. Eventually, He will glorify them with Himself. Therefore, the divine life, the divine nature, the divine element, the divine being, and the divine glory will all be used to form fallen and corrupted man into a Body to express Christ, the embodiment of the Triune God. How much wisdom is required for this!
No human words can tell the greatness of God’s wisdom in redemption, regeneration, sanctification, transformation, conformation, and glorification. Nevertheless, by His mercy and grace, in our spirit we can apprehend with all the saints such a marvelous wisdom. In our spirit we can realize that God uses all He is and has to produce His family so that He may have a Body prepared and formed for His Son to express the Son as the embodiment of the Triune God. Such a Body is prepared and formed through regeneration by the divine life, sanctification by the divine nature, transformation by the divine element, conformation by the divine being, and glorification by the divine glory.
According to 1 Corinthians 1:30, Christ is our wisdom with respect to righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. As our righteousness, Christ has dealt with our past, which was altogether unrighteous. For our present situation, Christ is our sanctification, and for the future, He is our redemption. One day our body will be redeemed, that is, transfigured (Rom. 8:23). For Christ to be our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption requires much wisdom on God’s part. Although Christ is our righteousness for the past, our sanctification for the present, and our redemption for the future, He is also our daily righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.
In order to understand this adequately, we need to see the full scope of God’s economy. After the creation and the fall of man, God became flesh through incarnation. Then the Lord Jesus went to the cross and there crucified the flesh. After passing through death and resurrection, He ascended into the heavens, then descended and entered into us as the life-giving Spirit in order to enliven our deadened spirit and to regenerate us. Having regenerated us, He now dwells in our spirit as life. In this life, the divine life, we have the law of life, the sense of life, and the fellowship of life. The Lord, however, is not only life to us; He is also the anointing within us. Furthermore, He is daily sealing us, saturating us, anointing us, and permeating us. As this takes place, we spontaneously live Him, and He becomes our righteousness. This is God’s wisdom.
Through the work of the Spirit of life, a change is taking place in our nature. It is a metabolic change, a change that sanctifies and transforms us. Thus, Christ is not only our righteousness but also our sanctification. Furthermore, we are daily being redeemed, and eventually we will be glorified. Christ is our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, not only in an objective way but in a very subjective way—in the way of mingling and changing us metabolically. All this is a testimony to God’s multifarious wisdom. Many aspects of God’s wisdom are manifested in His making Christ our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. Our experience of Christ in these matters is according to God’s manifold wisdom.
Because of His wisdom God can boast to Satan of what He has done with the man Satan corrupted and ruined. Have you ever realized that what we are as believers today is of God’s wisdom? Only God has the wisdom to initiate such a wonderful thing, to make sinful and corrupted people the members of Christ.
The church through which God’s wisdom is so marvelously displayed is God’s masterpiece. In the eyes of God the most wonderful thing in the universe is the church, for through the church God’s multifarious wisdom is made known to Satan and his angels. The day is coming when Satan and his angels will be put to shame. They will realize that everything they have done has given God the opportunity to manifest His wisdom.
Ephesians 3:11 goes on to say, “According to the eternal purpose which He made in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The eternal purpose is the purpose of eternity, the purpose of the ages, the eternal plan of God made in eternity past. It was made in Christ with a threefold intention: for God’s glory, for the blessing of God’s chosen people, and for the shame of God’s enemy. The main intention of God’s purpose is to glorify God, to express Him through His chosen people. This is the greatest blessing to us. In this, God’s enemy is shamed to the uttermost.
God made His eternal plan, His eternal economy, in Christ. The Christ revealed in the Bible is the embodiment of the Triune God and all the processes through which He has passed, including incarnation, human living, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and descension. In such a Christ, God made His eternal economy. Christ, therefore, is the center, circumference, element, sphere, means, goal, and aim of God’s eternal economy. Christ is everything in God’s economy. In fact, all the contents of the eternal economy are simply Christ.
In brief, we all should believe that in Christ we are the fellow heirs of God, fellow members of the Body, and fellow partakers of the promise through the gospel with His unsearchable riches in order to enlighten all that they may see what is the economy of the mystery hidden in God throughout the ages, which is the mystery of the church as the Body of Christ.