Ephesians 3:10

In this verse St. Paul passes on to consider the manifestation of God in Christ as brought home not only to the race of man but to the angels — “the principalities and powers in the heavenly places” — who are described (1 Peter 1:12) as “desiring to look into” the consummation of the gospel mystery. In the same sense the Apostles, in their ministration of the gospel, are said to be a spectacle to angels and to men (1 Corinthians 4:9); and in a magnificent passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Hebrews 12:22), Christians are encouraged in their warfare by knowing it to go on before “the city of the living God” and “an innumerable company of angels.” The angels are, therefore, represented to us as not only ministering in the Church of Christ, but learning from its existence and fortunes to know more and more of the wisdom of God. Hence we gain a glimpse of a more than world-wide purpose in the supreme manifestation of God’s mercy in Christ, fulfilled towards higher orders of God’s rational creatures, aiding even them in progress towards the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, which is life eternal. (There is a notable passage on a kindred idea in Butler’s Analogy, Part i., c. Iii. § 5.) This world, itself a speck in the universe, may be — perhaps as a scene of exceptional rebellion against God, certainly as a scene of God’s infinite goodness — a lesson to other spheres of being, far beyond our conception. Possibly this view of angels as our fellow-learners in the school of Christ may have been specially dwelt upon in view of the worship of angels of which we read in Colossians 2:18; but it accords well with the wide sweep of thought characteristic of this Epistle, literally “gathering up all things in Christ.”

The manifold wisdom. — The word “manifold” (properly, many-coloured, or wrought in many details) is used here (and nowhere else) for the wisdom of God, as “fulfilling itself in many ways” (the “sundry times and divers manners” of Hebrews 1:1). It is manifested, therefore, in the infinite variety both of the teaching and the life of the Church — manifold, yet one, as embodying but one life, the life of Jesus Christ.