The Lights Come On

01 · What "apocalypse" really means

Say the word "apocalypse," and most of us picture the world ending. That's a shame, because that isn't mainly what the word means in the Bible. In Ephesians, what God reveals isn't a timetable for the end. It's God's saving plan, made known in Jesus.¹

In Ephesians 3:3, Paul says God showed him the secret plan "in a revelation." The Greek word behind "revelation" is apokalypsis, where we get "apocalypse." Its basic picture is an uncovering. In the New Testament it means making something fully known, usually something God reveals.²

Think of something hidden under a towel. You lift the towel, and there it is. It was there all along. Now you can see it.

Or think of the first job you ever had. Until you tell me, I don't know it. Once you tell me, you've uncovered something that was hidden from me. In a small way, you've "apocalypsed" it.

That's the feeling of the word: the lights coming on. The oh-now-I-see-it moment. And Paul has had the biggest one of his life, and he wants us in on it.

So here's the question to carry through this study. What exactly did Paul see when the lights came on?

02 · Knocked down by light

Before he wrote this letter, Paul was the last person you'd expect to write it. In another letter, to the churches in Galatia, he says, "You heard about my previous life in Judaism, how severely I harassed God's church and tried to destroy it" (Galatians 1:13).

Then everything turned. Paul was on his way to the city of Damascus to arrest followers of Jesus (Acts 9:1–2). The book of Acts, the Bible's history of the first churches, tells what happened three times. Years later, on trial before a king named Agrippa, Paul put it this way: "While on the road at midday, King Agrippa, I saw a light from heaven shining around me and my traveling companions. That light was brighter than the sun" (Acts 26:13).

We love to call this Paul's conversion. But listen to how Paul himself describes it: "But God had set me apart from birth (from my mother's womb) and called me through his grace. He was pleased to reveal his Son to me (in me), so that I might preach about him to the Gentiles" (Galatians 1:15–16). Paul doesn't describe it as leaving one religion for another.⁴ He describes it as a revelation and a calling. As I read it, something that had been there all along was finally uncovered. In Galatians he uses the same word family he uses for his revelation in Ephesians 3:3: "revelation" in 1:12, "reveal" in 1:16.⁵

Even "from my mother's womb" is borrowed language. It's how God called some of the prophets before Paul. God told the prophet Jeremiah, "Before I created you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I set you apart; I made you a prophet to the nations" (Jeremiah 1:5). In the book of Isaiah, the one God calls "my servant" says the LORD "called my name when I was in my mother's womb." Then God appoints him "as light to the nations" (Isaiah 49:1, 3, 6). "The nations" means the peoples outside Israel, the Gentiles. Paul's calling echoes theirs, and like theirs, it was a calling to the nations.⁶

And notice the job Jesus gives him. In Acts 26, Jesus says he is sending Paul "to open their eyes. Then they can turn from darkness to light" (Acts 26:18). Something that had been invisible to Paul was now uncovered. And now his job was to help other people see it too.

That's what Ephesians is. It's Paul turning the lights on for us.

03 · Where heaven and earth meet

Long before Paul, Jacob, Abraham's grandson and one of the fathers of Israel, had a moment like this. He stopped for the night at "a certain place," put his head down near a stone, and dreamed of a staircase reaching from earth to the sky (Genesis 28:11–12). When he woke up, he thought to himself, "The LORD is definitely in this place, but I didn't know it" (Genesis 28:16). He realized it was "God's house and the entrance to heaven" (28:17).

That's a good picture of what an apocalypse is. The curtain gets pulled back, and you see that heaven and earth are closer than you thought. God was in this place all along.

So what did Paul see when the lights came on? He tells us in chapter 1: "God revealed his hidden design (mystery) to us." The design is this: "to bring all things together in Christ, the things in heaven along with the things on earth" (1:9–10).

Everything coming together. Heaven and earth, joined in Jesus.⁷ And on earth, people who never belonged together becoming one body. That's the secret of chapter 3: "the Gentiles would be coheirs and parts of the same body" (3:6). Paul even says God has already "seated us in the heavens with Christ Jesus" (2:6), while we're still right here.

So there's our answer. When the lights came on along the Damascus road, God revealed his Son to Paul, and from the start he was sending Paul to the Gentiles (Galatians 1:16). Paul may well have spent years taking in all that the light showed: God pulling everything together around Jesus, and bringing in people who never belonged together.⁸