The Final Restoration of all Things.
There are several passages in the New Testament and this is one of them which make it clear that the Divine mercy is ultimately to achieve a complete triumph over misery and moral evil; and these passages, if they stand alone, might give us the impression that all who in any age, in any land, in any world, have erred and strayed from God are to be brought back by the Good Shepherd to the flock and to the fold.
I. But this Epistle, like the other documents contained in the New Testament, was not written for persons who were uninstructed in the Christian faith. If anything is clear about the teaching of Christ and His Apostles it is that they warned men not to reject the Divine mercy and so become irrevocable exiles from God's presence and joy. They assumed that some would be guilty of this supreme crime and would be doomed to this supreme woe. Some men will inherit eternal life; some men will be punished with the second death. When therefore Paul spoke of God's purpose to sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth, the Ephesian Christians would not misunderstand his meaning. It would be understood that while those who had incurred irrevocable exclusion from the life of God were to receive the just punishment of their sin and to perish, the rest of the moral universe was to be organised into a perfect unity for eternal ages of righteousness and glory.
II. The universe was created to reach its perfection in Christ, and the eternal thought of God has been moving through countless ages of imperfection, development, pain, and conflict towards this great end. Crossed, resisted, defied, apparently thwarted, by moral evil, the Divine purpose has remained steadfast, has never been surrendered. Its energy has been wonderfully revealed in the incarnation and death of the Lord Jesus Christ. Its final triumph is secure. God will "sum up all things in Christ, the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth." In Him the discords of the universe will be resolved into an eternal harmony; its conflicts will end in golden ages of untroubled peace; it will find God, and in finding God will find eternal unity and blessedness. What we hope for in the endless future is a still more complete participation in whatever knowledge and love of God, whatever righteousness, whatever joy, may exist in any province of the created universe. Race is no longer to be isolated from race, or world from world. A power, a wisdom, a holiness, a rapture, of which a solitary soul, a solitary world, would be incapable, are to be ours through the gathering together in one of all things in Christ.
R. W. Dale, Lectures on the Ephesians,p. 90.
Reference: Ephesians 1:6. Spurgeon, Morning by Morning,p. 267; Ibid., Sermons,vol. viii., No. 471; vol. xvi., No. 958; vol. xxix., No. 1731; G. Brooks, Five Hundred Outlines,p. 95.Ephesians 1:6; Ephesians 1:7. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 93.