I N D E X
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With the earthly kingdom in abeyance, God now takes the opportunity of revealing truth which He had kept
absolutely secret, hidden in Himself, and when God hides truth in this way who can find it until He is pleased to
reveal it?
In spite of this, there are those who persuade themselves that they can discover this hidden truth in the Old
Testament, the Gospels, in fact anywhere but where it actually is revealed in the Word of God. It should be obvious
that such conceptions must be wrong, however skilfully they are presented or however right they may appear to be.
The Apostle Paul was inspired by the Holy Spirit to write seven more epistles after the Acts and Israel's failure.
Five of them are stamped with prison and are marked with an asterisk. They are *Ephesians, *Colossians,
*
*Philemon, *Philippians, 1 Timothy, Titus, and *2 Timothy.  The two pastoral epistles of 1 Timothy and Titus
were evidently written during the short period of Paul's release from his first imprisonment at Rome. 2 Timothy was
his last epistle, written just before his martyrdom and the whole tone of the letter bears this out.
There are those who dispute this and maintain that Paul thought he had come to the end and finished the race
when he wrote this epistle, not knowing that there was further ministry ahead of him. If this is true, then it must be
stated that Paul was deceived in many respects, and made statements that were obviously false. This is serious
indeed, for if it is so, how can we accept any statement in this epistle as being God's truth? Or for that matter
anything else in his other epistles? The very foundations of Truth are undermined by such ideas and they are only
made to bolster up false theological schemes. It is beyond comprehension how anyone who subscribes to the full
inspiration of the Word of God and the need to obey the command of 2 Timothy 2:15 could concoct and put forward
such false notions which just play into the enemy's hands.
It is in the Prison Epistles of Paul that we get the full revelation of the church which is the Body of Christ with
Christ as its Head. No amount of quoting 1 Corinthians 12 can alter the fact that there is no headship of Christ
revealed in this chapter and it is quite impossible to have the supreme fulness of Ephesian and Colossian teaching
without this absolutely necessary Headship and relationship with Christ.
All life, light and spiritual wealth, riches of grace and riches of glory flow from the Head, and without Christ as
such they cannot be realized. We have before stressed the absolute accuracy of the time element in the purposes of
God, and those who fail to take this into account and read later truth into earlier passages of Scripture before it was
revealed, make their own problems and difficulties.
The fact remains that the apostle Paul as the prisoner of Christ Jesus, states that by special revelation, the Lord
Jesus had made known to him a secret (Mystery in the A.V.) which had been hidden from ages and generations, that
is hidden in all past time and from all previous generations of people. The full implications of this must be faced if
we desire to get the fulness of revealed truth with its exceeding spiritual riches, yet so few apparently seem to be
willing to accept this and put it into practice.
Paul wrote in Ephesians 3:1-11 :
`For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles, if ye have heard of the dispensation of the
grace of God which is given me to you-ward: how that by revelation He made known unto me the Mystery
(secret) ... that the Gentiles should be joint heirs, and a joint-body, and joint partakers of His promise in Christ
Jesus (J. N. Darby) by the gospel (glad tidings) whereof I was made a minister ... that I should preach among the
Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all (men) see what is the dispensation (administration
R.V. and J.N.D.) of the Mystery (Secret) which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God ...'.
In his seven earlier epistles written during the Acts of the Apostles Paul had revealed nothing like this. Although he
claimed to be the `steward of the mysteries (secrets) of God' (1 Cor. 4:1), he never used the word `mystery' once to
describe the church or the churches then in existence, nor should we expect him to do so. As we have seen, those
churches were intimately linked with the earthly kingdom of Israel into which Gentile believers had been `grafted'
*
For a verse by verse exposition of these Prison Epistles of Paul see the author's Letters from Prison, (Berean
Publishing Trust, 52a Wilson Street, London EC2A 2ER).