Plan A

Click the picture above to listen to ‘I love Your Presence‘ from Bethel Live Album, ‘Here is Love’, buy here

‘God’s purpose in all this was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was his eternal plan, which he carried out through Christ Jesus our Lord.
Because of Christ and our faith in him, we can now come boldly and confidently into God’s presence.’ (Ephesians 3:10-12 NLT) It’s worth reading all of Ephesians 3, it’s a wonderful passage!

I got a great iPhone app called ‘Accordance’ which comes free with the ESV version of the bible and when you touch and hold a word it gives the Greek (or Hebrew). When I did this for the word ‘purpose’ in the verses above I got the below . .

purpose:
4286. πρόθεσις prothesis; from 4388; a setting forth, i.e. (figuratively) proposal (intention); specially, the show-bread (in the Temple) as exposed before God: — purpose, shew(-bread).

This led me to do some research on the show bread:

The 12 loaves of baked bread symbolized the 12 tribes of Israel as they stand in the presence of God. In Exodus 25:30, they are called “the bread of the Presence.” From http://leviticus-the-law.blogspot.co.uk/ This bread was always fresh ie it was swapped regularly and the word perpetual also features in the Hebrew from Exodus 25:30

I got from this that the fresh, perpetual, presence of God in our lives, through the work of Jesus Christ and the continual working of the Holy Spirit, was always God’s plan for our lives! It was His ‘Plan A’ and there is no ‘Plan B’ !

Why ‘display his wisdom’ v10 ? I took this to mean to show the way things are going to be. The evil one’s intention is deceive people and show them things are different to that, ie they don’t deserve God’s presence or they wouldn’t want it because God is cruel or indifferent or uncaring. So for us as believers and for those who do not believe yet, this battle goes on . . As believers we need to be aware that our enjoying the presence of God is not just some self satisfying endeavor or selfish indulgence, it is core to God’s purposes for the world. In other words our enjoying being in God’s presence is the plan. It’s a wonderful freedom once we get hold of this! It’s ok to chase hard after God and want the joy and peace that comes from being ever more intimate with a Father whose whole plan was precisely this! Everything else flows out from our being in his presence . . or as someone has said all our doing must come from being . . and because it says ‘through the church’, then we can know we are supposed to be doing this!

We can also know that this does not just refer to our final state in heaven . . because later in Ephesians 3 we see Paul’s prayer that we would have the power to know God’s love in all its width, depth, height, etc. Why would Paul be praying this if it wasn’t for now? After all we know that is definitely going to happen when we get to heaven. No, Paul is praying they know it now. And to further point out just what this means Paul says, ‘to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God’, Ephesians 3:19 NKJV So knowing the love of Christ means we can be filled with all the fullness of God. Who is the other person we know of in the bible who was filled with the fullness of God? Jesus! And Jesus himself said we could do all the things he did and greater . . so the more we are in the presence of our Father, the more we are filled with His presence, the more we are ‘knowing’ the love of Christ in our lives, the more we become like Jesus . . who we are called to follow and ‘be like’ ie His disciples

So I pray we can really get hold of this and ‘spiritually learn’ to experience more and more of His presence where ever we are, at any time

Thanks for reading
Andy