Fellow Heirs: God’s Plan for Jews and Gentiles

“Which in other ages was not made known to the sons of men, as it has now been revealed by the Spirit to His holy apostles and prophets: that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, of the same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ through the gospel, of which I became a minister according to the gift of the grace of God given to me by the effective working of His power.” (Ephesians 3 :5-7 NKJV)

Gentiles as Fellow Heirs of the Promise

Paul uses the concept of a mystery religion to help his readers understand how God operates. God hid knowledge from previous generations of humankind but has now revealed it through the Holy Spirit to the apostles and prophets. They communicated that hidden knowledge to first-century Christians. By likening God’s methods to those of the mystery religions, Paul conceptualizes the revelation of the gospel in a manner his Gentile readers would understand. This revealed knowledge was that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, of the same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ through the gospel.

Prophetic Evidence for Fellow Heirs

The Jews believed they alone were God’s chosen people and the sole recipients of God’s promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Paul says these beliefs are wrong because God, from the beginning, intended to save both Jews and Gentiles through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The Jews fundamentally misunderstood God’s intentions because they missed the message embedded throughout the prophets. In Genesis 22, God promised Abraham that in his seed, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. As Paul explains in Galatians 3, through Abraham’s seed, Jesus, both Jews and Gentiles can partake of these blessings.

The Global Scope of Being Fellow Heirs

God declared through the prophet Isaiah 11 that a Root of Jesse would stand as a banner for the people, and the Gentiles would seek Him. Similarly, God predicted through the prophet Hosea 2 that He would say to those who were not His people, “You are My people!” Before the cross, Gentiles were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel” and had not obtained mercy. But after the cross, God shows mercy to the Gentiles and declares those who believe in Jesus to be His people. Paul was chosen to fully reveal this foreordained purpose to the world.