Christ in You the Hope of Glory
To whom God was pleased to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.—Colossians 1:27.
1. The word “mystery” is one which has acquired in modern English a sense remote from its original signification. No one who recalls the original sense of the word—the sense which it bore for pagan ears—will suppose that when St. Paul talks of the mystery of the Gospel he means a doctrine which it is difficult or impossible to understand, and which has just to be accepted on authority. When an ancient Greek was initiated into the mysteries at Eleusis or Samothrace, he was not told something which he could not understand. The rites were called mysteries because they had a secret meaning—not known indeed to the world at large, but quite known and intelligible to the privileged body of the initiated. And so, when St. Paul borrows the word to express a Christian meaning, it is never a difficult or unintelligible truth that he has in view, but some truth which was once hidden, but is now revealed—revealed to all who have accepted the revelation of God in Christ. What he calls a mystery is always, indeed, a truth known only to the initiated, but the initiated for St. Paul are the whole body of baptized believers in Jesus.
As when, in the early morning of a glorious summer day, the wreathing mists hide the mountain slopes and cover the valleys beneath, then, under the breath of the freshening wind, gradually lift and open, revealing some giant mountain top lost in the sky or woods and rocks on the hillsides, a ravishing vista of varied landscape, delighting the eyes and stimulating the imagination, showing that what was at first seen was cloud-like appearance only, and making manifest the solid realities and dawning splendours behind and beyond—so a glimpse has been granted to us of the great purpose of God, seen in Christ, but only so far seen as to hint at unimagined reaches beyond—Christ in you, the hope of glory! St. Paul can hardly control his feelings as he approaches this theme. You have watched a smouldering match when plunged into a jar of oxygen burst into bright flame. So, when this messenger of Christ breathes the atmosphere of this Gospel, he flames forth in its celebration—“preached in all creation under heaven; whereof I Paul was made a minister!”1 [Note: W. T. Davison, The Indwelling Christ, 270.]
In our own little world we have glorious sun-light flooding ourselves and bathing all things round about us, flooding ourselves and bathing us every day of every year. It is a most wonderful thing, this light. In many respects it is an impenetrable mystery and incomprehensibility. But it is not a secret. It lies open to the perception of all.
Nor are flowers secrets. In many respects there are secrets in them, and incomprehensibilities too. But in actual fact they lie open to the perception of all, and are not secrets. Nor are trees, although laden with wonders. Nor is grass, or grain, nor is winter with its frosts and snows, or summer with its fragrances, or spring with its anniversary springings, or autumn with its rainbow tints. While there are scientific and philosophic mysteries and incomprehensibilities in all these terrestrial phenomena, not one of them is a mystery in the classic sense of the term. They are, as matters of fact, things unveiled, un muffled, unmantled, lying open in Nature to every one’s perception, so that he has but to look and see.
It is different with the Gospel. It does not lie quite on the surface of things around us, above us, and within us, especially in its glorious amplitude and universalities, and hence the Apostle, in his use of the word, calls it a “mystery.” It had once been a secret, but it was now a secret no longer, at least to him. It had once been so much of a secret that to no mind but One was it known. It lay, as the Apostle expresses it in his Epistle to the Ephesians, “hid in God.”2 [Note: J. Morison, Sheaves of Ministry, 37.]
2. The particular mystery which the Apostle here stands amazed at is the introduction of the Gentiles to equal privileges under the Gospel with the Jews; and, in particular, to this privilege—that Christ should make glory sure to them by dwelling in them.
Now this was what set Paul at variance with his nation. They had no quarrel with many of his opinions, but when he threatened their pride of separation they struck at his life. He might talk as he would of God, of sin, of forgiveness, but when they heard that he was bringing a heathen man into the Temple, and when they saw that, on his theories, there was no need of a Temple at all, the worshippers in Jerusalem were transformed into a murderous mob from whose clutch he had to be rescued by Roman troops. Wise men do not run the risk of martyrdom in mere stubbornness, and when Paul speaks of “
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