The Sacred Secret (Mystery of God)

(Eph 3:9-11) and should make men see how the sacred secret is administered which has from the indefinite past been hidden in God, who created all things. This was to the end that now to the governments and the authorities in the heavenly places there might be made known through the congregation the greatly diversified wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose that he formed in connection with the Christ, Jesus our Lord.

Before the beginning

God's purpose was complete before he began to create, and you can't add to perfection (Ecclesiastes 3:14). Genuine free will, given with no artificial limits and left to run over time, was bound to show its full range sooner or later. So sin was a certainty, not a surprise. A wise builder counts the cost before he lays the foundation, and Jehovah did the same: he formed the answer ahead of time and kept it hidden within himself. The Sacred Secret wasn't created at Genesis 3:15 as a reaction to sin. It was there already. Sin was only the condition that set it in motion.

A seed

Everything a plant will become is already inside its seed, and the seed sits dormant until the right conditions arrive. The Sacred Secret held the full design for restoring creation: Christ, and the 144,000 foreordained to be patterned after his image (Romans 8:29). It lay dormant until sin appeared in Eden, and then it germinated. Its roots grew through the nation of Israel, the root of Jesse. Its sprout was Jesus Christ, born through Mary as the new means of everlasting life after access to the tree of life was lost (Zechariah 3:8; John 6:54). And its firstfruits are Christ and, afterward, those who belong to him (1 Corinthians 15:23).

A mother

(Ga 4:26) But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother.

Jehovah entered his sacred day of rest after the sixth creative day, and he hasn't gone back to direct creation. But new creations still had to come into existence, so the Sacred Secret was formed as a creative generating force that works inside that rest. To be born is to be created, and "born again" is literally "generated from above." The woman of Revelation 12 is the Sacred Secret. The male child she bears is Christ, brought out of death as a new creation, the firstborn from the dead (Revelation 12:5; Colossians 1:18). That same mother will give birth to the 144,000 at the opening of the 1,260 days.

Why it matters now

Because the Sacred Secret was complete from the beginning, Jehovah never moved from a plan A to a plan B. Every prophetic event is the working out of one unchanging purpose, and the chosen ones were "called with a holy calling... in connection with Christ Jesus before times long lasting" (2 Timothy 1:9). Satan's counterfeit of it is a hidden knowledge kept for initiates, and it drives the systems the end-times studies on this site identify.