On Mystery

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, commenting on Ephesians 3:2-7

“Let us look at it again. A Babe is born in Bethlehem and put in a manger. That must have happened frequently. A babe born! Thousands of babies are born daily. But the Babe of Bethlehem is the greatest mystery the world has ever known because that child, that babe is the eternal Son of God. The mystery is that of ‘two natures in one person!’ He is God, He is man. He is truly God, without any limitation. He is also truly man. Those two natures are in Him, and yet He is not two persons, He is one Person. ‘I do not understand that’, says someone. Of course you don’t, you are not meant to do so! If you think that your mind is big enough to grasp and to span such a concept you had better think again. This is ‘the mystery of godliness’. This man, the Apostle Paul, who probably had a deeper insight into it than anyone who has ever lived, simply stands back and says, ‘Great is the mystery of godliness’. It has been revealed to him, so he knows that there are the two natures in the one person. He knows now who that is; not by any mental process of his own, but, as he tells us, by the revelation which came through the Holy Spirit. Indeed the Son Himself had said to him, when on the road to Damascus he asked, ‘Who art thou, Lord?’, ‘I am Jesus whom thou persecutest’. That is the mystery of Christ! This is God’s way of salvation. God is the Almighty, the eternal and everlasting God, to whom ‘the nations are but as the small dust of the balance’, vanity, less than and lighter than vanity. It is He who made everything out of nothing and said ‘Let there be light, and there was light’. So we would have thought that, when He desired to save man and to save the world, He would again have uttered some great word which would cause the whole universe to shake and quake. We would have expected some dramatic exhibition of power by which God would save men and would destroy evil. But God did not act in that manner. His way of salvation is found in this mystery of Christ, in a helpless babe. Nothing can be weaker or more helpless; nothing smaller, nothing more defenceless. That is God’s way!”

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Unsearchable Riches of Christ: An Exposition of Ephesians 3 (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1972), 42–43.