"All around us in the world today men are doing things, and it is right and proper that they should. Men are to work and to plan, they are to dream and to hope, and they are to try to accomplish things. It is right for the government to try to govern and for statesmen to try to accomplish their goals. All of us have something to do.

But what our age has tragically forgotten is that the only activity which will change anyone ultimately is what God does, not what man does. That is where we need to focus our thoughts. And we need to see what it is that God is doing. One of these days, we all recognize and know, even though we hate to admit it, all the vaunted, proud, symbols of our civilization as we know it today are going to be brought low, to crumble into dust, to be lost in the debris of the ages. All the knowledge on which we pride ourselves today will be lost in some forgotten tomb. Man's glory shall fade. All the accomplishments of our present day which give us such self-satisfaction will become nothing but obscure references in some future history, if anything at all. And what will endure in that day is the work of God.

These great facts, revealed in this letter (to the Ephesian Church), will still be as brilliant and untarnished in their reality as they are today. Rudyard Kipling once wrote about the British Empire, Far flung, our navies melt away, on dune and headland sinks the fire. Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre.

America's greatness is going to fade, as is Russia's, and as is that of all the nations of the earth. But one day, when that day comes, the things which will be true are these great facts. Therefore, if we want to endure, if we want to lift our eyes above the plodding, puny circumstances of our own present experience to the greatness of what God is doing, we must give our attention to these great thoughts -- planned before the foundation of the world, begun even before there was an earth, designed to reveal the greatness of God's grace, his compassion, his tenderhearted love, his forgiving ability, his power restore, available through the one Person who in all the scope of history is able to accomplish what no other man could do, Jesus Christ himself, and resulting at last in the healing of all division and the breaking down of every barrier. That is what Ephesians is all about. It is a story of how God is breaking down division.

We are so aware of division, aren't we? We are divided within our homes, divided in our work, divided into cliques and camps and nations, all against one another, with all the consequent hurt and injury and malice and hate and prejudice. God is at work to remedy that. He is healing it. He has already begun. He is breaking down the barriers, removing the hate and enmity, restoring and bringing together.

Remember what Jesus said: "All those who are with me gather, and all those who are against me scatter," (Matthew 12:30, Luke 11:23). You can tell whose side you are on by the effect of your life. Are you gathering, or scattering? Are you healing, or hurting? Are you bringing together, or breaking up? Which is the direction of your life? Well, God's great movement in our lives, as individuals, and in history at large, is to heal and make whole, to bring together all things in Christ, to restore harmony once again in his universe.

The exciting thing about that, according to this letter to the Ephesians, is that it has begun already. It has begun in us. We are the first ones to set it forth. We, the church, have felt the force of this great movement of God. We have found it in our homes -- the barriers are beginning to break down there, the divisions are beginning to be healed. The harmony is beginning to emerge in our church life. And the more visibly it is evident, the more the world will see God at work. That is what this letter is all about -- how to allow this healing flow from the great God behind all things, through his Son Jesus Christ, to touch our individual lives and heal us of all our illness and injury. No wonder this great apostle cries out,

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies." God at Work

From Ray Stedman: I found some interesting things recently. I focused upon this phrase,“the times and the seasons” which Our Lord mentions in Acts 1:7 and which is also referred to by the apostle Paul in First Thessalonians, the fifth chapter. He says: “But of the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need that I write unto you.” (1 Thessalonians 5:1)

What did Our Lord mean when he said “The times and the seasons are not for you to know”? Particularly what are these divisions, times and seasons?

I began to investigate the meaning of this from the actual Greek words. Times is the word chronos (or chronoi in the plural) from which we get words like chronology, chronometer and other instruments and sub-sciences that have to do with time. The word seasons is the word kairos (or kairoi in the plural). These words have very distinct and different meanings.

I found that the word time simply refers to the succession of moments, to duration. It is just a period of time, marked out and it has reference to the length of that period, whether it be a few years, a few moments or a few decades or centuries. These can be called a time. The word is used in Galatians when it says, “When the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his son, made of a women, born under the Law.” [Galatians 4:4]

It simply refers to the succession of moments, to the length of time in which any event may occur. The word seasons has to do more with the character of what is happening during that time. We use the word in this way in our own English vocabulary. We speak of the four seasons of the year: summer, fall, winter and spring. In each of these seasons something different is occurring. A different mode of life prevails. Certain human activities are restricted to various seasons. We have the winter and summer sports seasons, the harvest season, the planting season, all of these relating to the various divisions of the year that are commonly known as seasons. They are characterized by something that is going on during that time.

These are divisions of times and relate to the characterization of that which is occurring within it. I discovered something interesting concerning the use of these two words by the great authority on New Testament words, Bishop Trench. He compares these two words. He also points out that that time is simply a word expressing duration, limited to no particular length of time but simply meaning the number of moments, ages or years in which an event occurs. And then he stated something that I found to be most interesting. The seasons (or the kairoi), he said, are "the joints or articulations in these times, the critical epoch-making periods, foreordained by God, when all that has been slowly and often without observation ripening through all the long ages is mature and comes to birth in grand, decisive events which constitute at once the close of one period and the commencement of another."

In view of some of the grand decisive events that we have been seeing in the Near East, this was most significant to me. Bishop Trench wrote in the nineteenth century, long before any of these things were happening. He went on to refer to certain events of Christianity as seasons of this nature.

The pronouncement by Constantine making Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire constituted the end of a season and the beginning of another. The rise of the Protestant Reformation constituted a season within the times of the gentiles in which a great and significant event came into being. One epoch closed and another one began and later on ran its course and then closed and another began.

When Our Lord uses the term “the times of the Gentiles” the word he employs is really the seasons of the Gentiles, the kairoi of the Gentiles. He said,“Jerusalem shall be trampled underfoot by the Gentiles”, which is a phrase that obviously signifies sovereignty and supremacy. Jerusalem would be under Gentile domination and control until the seasons of the Gentiles have run their course, have been fulfilled. Any student of history looking across the centuries recognizes various seasons the nations have had. We can recognize times when God has moved in a quieting way in human history with seasons of rest, refreshment and enjoyment that have come upon the earth. The nineteenth century was a season like that, when for a time men thought they were solving all their problems.

I remember even as early as the first two decades of this century that men still thought that way. I can remember during my childhood the atmosphere of optimism that still widely prevailed. Even after World War I, men thought that they were on the verge of solving all the great problems which mankind had been confronted with and that we were on the edge of a golden age that would soon dawn with peace, prosperity and plenty for all. Some of you who are older can recall how there was an excitement, an attitude of anticipation that ran throughout the earth. During those days men really thought we were in a time when we were right on the verge of rushing in the millennium by virtue of man’s efforts.

Then the dark days of the Depression hit, followed by the catastrophic blows of World War II and the nations seemed to go out of their minds with a madness that pervaded the earth. Men were at one another’s throats in the greatest war history has ever known and all men’s beautiful golden dreams were shattered in the blood, sweat and tears of World War II. You hardly hear anyone talk with that kind of optimism anymore. Now a great despair grips people’s hearts all over the world. The violence that stalks our cities’ streets has made our President this very week (July 1967) set aside today as a day of prayer. It is almost unprecedented in American history that the President would call for national prayer in the face of an emergency like we are facing in our country today. All of this, coming hard on the heels of the greatest catastrophe and convulsion the world has ever seen, has served to dispel all the fatuous dreams of man’s accomplishments and they are long forgotten.

We moved from the season of peace into the season of controversy and of war. This has occupied the whole course of gentile history. There has been the rise and fall of nations, of kingdoms and of empires, coming to their zeniths and reigning for a brief time and then fading out of the picture. Then another great world power would come onto the scene, move in and take over with its variation of civilization, leaving its imprint upon the nations. Then it would also fade out. All the time in this great convulsion of the nations of the earth there come what the New Testament calls “perilous times.” The apostle Paul predicted this. He said perilous times shall come in these last days.

Unfortunately many Bible students read that as though he meant the “last days” as only the final days before the Lord returns. However, any careful study of the New Testament will show that the “last days” began with the coming of Jesus Christ to earth and we have been in the period called the last days ever since that time. It has stretched now for almost two thousand years. What the apostle says is that in these last days repeated cycles of perilous times will come, characterized by men being lovers of their own selves, truce-breakers, fatuous, violent, and cruel, etc. We are going through one of those seasons now (1967). If we adopt Our Lord’s phrase referring to these seasons, then what he meant when he said that Jerusalem would be trodden down by the Gentiles until the times (the seasons) of the Gentiles be fulfilled is clear. It is simply that when Jerusalem was recaptured by Israel and the temple site again came under the sovereign domination of a nation of Jews, this would be the last of the seasons marked out for the Gentile nations.

This would mark the end of their appointed seasons and Gentile supremacy would run its final course and, as we have predicted in various sections of the scriptures, would express itself in a terrible blasphemous exaltation of man that would find symbolic expression in the glorifying of a man in the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem. Paul calls him“the man of sin” in 2 Thessalonians 2, “who shall be revealed, who will exalt himself above all other gods” and who will offer himself as God in that temple. (2 Thessalonians 2:3-4) This is what the Lord Jesus referred to in Matthew 24 when he says: “When you therefore shall see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet,” (and Matthew adds in parenthesis "let him who reads understand" – that means search your scriptures, read the book of Daniel the prophet and you will know what he is talking about) “standing in the holy place (as Daniel the prophet predicted),” then you know that you are in the last of the seasons of the Gentiles. (Matthew 24:15 RSV)

That is the mark. It isn’t the thing that begins this season. It is simply the characteristic mark of it, which identifies it as being the culmination of all the blasphemous systems that have underlain the philosophies and religions of man, that man is his own god. This exaltation and deification of man is the crowning characterization of the last of the seasons, the seasons of the Gentiles being fulfilled. If this is the case, then it means that we have approached and entered into what Daniel calls “the time of the end.” Events will move with rather frightening rapidity and the course of human events will find their culmination as outlined in the prophetic program of God. We can expect the fulfillment of God’s promise to his own, reiterated again and again throughout the New Testament. His promise to the Church that he will come and receive them unto himself will be fulfilled. It will be in an appearing to the church, which is distinguished by the use of a peculiar word, the parousia, the presence of Christ.

It is my personal conviction that this presence of Christ will take a form very much like the post-resurrection ministry of Our Lord. That is, he will be present with his own, appearing and disappearing as he did in those forty days after the resurrection. He was with the disciples from time to time and they never knew when he was going to appear. It culminated at last in the ascension into heaven.

It is also my personal conviction that the prophetic program will begin with a sudden (like a thief in the night) appearing of the Lord Jesus for his own, when the words of Paul are fulfilled: “The Lord shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17 RSV)

I don’t believe that means that we are transported off to some other planet or some place in space. I have come to see that the heavens is a wonderful way the Bible has in referring to the realm of invisible realities. I do not mean it isn’t a place, it definitely is a place – it is all places, really – but it is what we would refer to as another dimension of life – a fourth, sixth or tenth dimension which we are not able to enter into as three-dimensional creatures. In that dimension, which is everywhere, unseen and invisible, we are constantly surrounded by a spiritual kingdom which is making its effect felt in the realm of visible realities. As Paul puts it, it includes even the dark powers –“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and wicked spirits enthroned in high places.” (Ephesians 6:12 RSV)

This is where our battles lies and this is the explanation of what is happening in life and world history. Our newspapers reflect the mere external amplification of these forces that move behind the scenes. If we want an understanding of them we have to recognize the existence of this other dimension of life.

It is into this dimension that we pass when the Lord comes for his own and it is very likely that the Church in that capacity will be here present on earth, with the Lord during all the days of the Great Tribulation which is to come to try those that dwell upon the face of the earth.

We will be ministering behind the scenes to God’s people, the Jews, and to the great band of Gentiles that will believe the Jew’s message as they herald forth the gospel in the terrible days of tribulation. That is the last season of the Gentiles, the time when Gentile power reaches its zenith. The underlying philosophy of Gentile supremacy and the exaltation of man will find its symbolic expression in the man of sin at the temple in Jerusalem. All the terrible dark powers of earth will be unleashed and the Holy Spirit will no longer be operating as a restraining force among the nations of men. A tide of evil will be loosed upon the earth. The dam that has held back the terrible powers of human evil will be taken away and there will come a great flood of violence, revolt, rebellion and wickedness accompanied by the judgments of God as detailed in Matthew 24 - 25, the prophecies of Daniel and the book of Revelation. Ray Stedman: Have the Times of the Gentiles Passed?