Not long ago someone pointed out that very little was said in our publication about what he called "Ephesian truth." The later issues of "Things to Come" and the earlier issues of "The Berean Expositor" some forty years ago were cited, and this was made the basis of a suggestion that in some way our ministry was therefore inferior in quality.
This notion is based on a misunderstanding, the idea that Ephesians exists detached from the Scriptures that were written before it. This is the very notion that my first contributions were written to dispel. Paul's Epistles form a unity, and any attempt to split them between two “Dispensations" can only spoil them.
The reason why I have said comparatively little about the truths specially set out in the Prison Epistles is that I have had plenty to do clearing and repairing the foundations. It is no use to live in cloud-castles. However celestial our standing may be, we have got to keep in mind that it is solidly based on terrestrial history and truths revealed to us on earth. That is why I am so strongly opposed to the (untrue) "Acts 28.28 frontier" teachings which involve putting such stress on so-called "Ephesian truth". The exponents of these ideas are like men who have climbed up on to a roof by a ladder, and then kicked it away. Everything they teach about "Ephesian truth" is vitiated by the unsound assumptions beneath and behind it.
The trouble with these attempts to dwell in "Ephesian truth" is the same as that with people who regard material things and the resurrection of the body as "unspiritual". They are, in actual fact, attempting to be more "spiritual" than God Himself. If the Word did not shrink from becoming flesh, we most certainly ought not to assume a disdainful superiority over material things as the self-styled "spiritual" folk do.
It is most strange that people who admit that the Secret of Ephesians 3:6-12 is through the Evangel of which Paul became dispenser, nevertheless in practice treat that Evangel almost as something beneath notice. The chief exponent of the "Acts 28:28 frontier" theory found himself forced to build his "Ephesian temple" with "Roman stones"; but Romans is not a ruin to be disposed of in such a way. It is an integral part of a superb edifice of which the Prison Epistles are the completion. It is not as if any of us fully understood the Evangel. None of us do, least of all those who in practice are so ready to put much of it away into a past "dispensation”. If we did, we would not want to leave it out of reckoning; we would instead want to study its manifold relations with the glories founded upon it. Realization of these facts makes me exceedingly cautious about accepting anything at all set out by these writers concerning the Prison Epistles; not that it is necessarily wrong but because it is based on a false general view of Scripture.
R. B. Withers
