Question: Acts 26:22, 23. This text is urged to set aside the apostle’s distinct assertion of a mystery hidden from the ages, and not in other generations made known to the sons of men, as it hath now been revealed to His holy apostles and prophets (clearly and exclusively those of the N.T. so called, Eph. 2:20). Kindly explain: on the face of it such an allegation arrays one scripture against another, which must be of the enemy. What then did the apostle mean before Agrippa? Surely not to contradict what he wrote to Ephesian saints? X.
Answer: The context of each proves that both declarations are perfectly true, and therefore in divine harmony. For in the Acts he defends his public testimony in preaching the gospel and the kingdom of God, both of which rested on the basis of Christ’s death and resurrection, and, as he said of the righteousness of God now manifested, “witnessed by the law and the prophets” (Rom. 3:21). But to the Ephesian and the Colossian saints the time was come to open out the mystery of Christ in His exaltation to the heavenlies, God summing up the created universe, all things in the Christ, the things in the heavens and the things on the earth; and the saints, now called (Jewish and Gentile naturally), united to this heavenly Head as His one body. As he tells us in 1 Cor. 2:6-10, he did not preach this wondrous truth to the Jews any more than Gentiles, nor even to immature saints. God’s hidden wisdom in a mystery he spoke only to the perfect or full-grown, which was then and is now far from being true of all believers. Hence, as the Jews arraigned him for his public appeals to themselves or others, the passage in the Acts in no way clashes with what he avowedly taught only to full-grown saints, of which they knew nothing and to which the apostle made no reference. The inference, confidently drawn to deny that he taught the new revelation characteristic of the N.T., is entirely at fault, and betrays fundamental ignorance of what every full-grown Christian ought humbly to learn.