Prayer: Lord, this morning we ask You to give us a trance that transfers us from the visible circumstances into the invisible scene. We want to see something that is invisible to us. We want to see You. We want to see Your Spirit. We want to see Your economy. We want to see Your doing and Your working to dispense Yourself into our being. Thank You, Lord Jesus; thank You, God the Father; thank You, the life-giving Spirit. Thank You that You all are working within us. Especially in these days, we are enjoying Your intensified presence. Give us a trance. Amen.
We need to see something more than the physical universe created by God. In this universe there are two scenes, two views. One scene, one view, is visible. We can see the visible universe with the heaven, the earth, the sun, the moon, and millions of items. But the Bible shows that behind this visible scene, there is a scene which is altogether invisible to our senses. The Old Testament book of Daniel shows us these two scenes. On the one hand, the Greeks were fighting against the Persians, and the Persians were resisting the Greeks. That was seen by everybody with their physical eyes. But behind that scene were the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece. Daniel 10 records the fighting in the unseen world between Michael, the prince of Israel, and the evil princes of Persia and Greece (vv. 10-21). This is an example of the two scenes in the Old Testament.
In the New Testament Jesus came. He was altogether visible for people to see. One night a ruler of the Jews named Nicodemus came to see Him and said to Him, "Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a teacher, for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him" (John 3:2). All the things which Nicodemus spoke about were in the visible realm. But the Lord Jesus answered him by telling him that he needed to be born anew to see the kingdom of God (v. 3). He told Nicodemus that he needed regeneration. At that time on earth, no one understood what regeneration was. Nicodemus did not understand because he was in the visible realm. He asked, "How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born, can he?" (v. 4). The Lord spoke of regeneration in the invisible realm, but Nicodemus tried to understand it in the visible realm.
The divine revelation in the holy Word, especially in the New Testament, speaks altogether of invisible things. All the things which we have covered from Ephesians 1—3 are invisible to our eyes, invisible to our natural understanding, invisible to our natural realization, and invisible to all of our physical senses. Many readers of the Bible understand it merely according to the letter in the visible realm, but they never see anything invisible.
Ephesians is a book mainly on invisible things. In Ephesians 5 Paul charges the husbands to love their wives (v. 25), and he charges the wives to submit themselves to their husbands (vv. 22, 24). Do you think such a word is concerning something visible or invisible? Humanly speaking, everybody knows what this means. A husband's love and a wife's submission are visible to our senses. But what the apostle speaks of here is altogether invisible.
The apostle's teaching of submission is absolutely different from the teaching of Confucius. Confucius also taught submission, even a threefold submission. However, what Confucius taught is something visible, but what the apostle taught is something invisible. Why is it invisible? It is invisible because the submission taught by the apostle Paul is not a natural submission.