The Text: Ephesians 2:11–22
Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision which is made in the flesh by hands — remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ.
For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.
So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
Introduction: Walls and Divisions
Pawson opens with a personal memory. A few months before preaching this sermon, he and his wife were staying in Gibraltar, in his brother-in-law’s flat about twenty yards from the border with Spain — a border that had been tightly closed for many months. In a no-man’s land of about fifty yards between two lines of barbed wire, little groups of people on either side stood with binoculars, waving to one another. They could not meet. They could not talk. So near and yet so far.
He had seen this twice before: in Berlin, with the crude line of concrete blocks and stepladders either side for relatives to wave at one another across the wall; and in Jerusalem before the Six Day War, looking across no-man’s land from Jewish territory to Arab territory.
There have been divisions in the human race ever since the human race began. Demilitarised zones, iron curtains, bamboo curtains — North and South Vietnam, North and South Korea, North and South Ireland. But two thousand years ago, the very deepest division that had ever existed was the one that filled the horizon of the man who wrote this letter to the Ephesians. And that division was the division between Jew and Gentile.
The Deepest Division: Jew and Gentile
Of all the divisions that have separated human beings, this one is unique in one crucial respect: it came from God. All the others have been man-made. But this distinction between Jew and Gentile, God himself made. And that made it deeper than any other distinction — and goes a long way toward explaining the extraordinary emotions that have centred on this division throughout history, and the long and bitter history of antisemitism, which has had its counterpart in the Jewish attitude toward Gentiles also.
This very deep division was the largest gulf Paul had ever known. He had been born on one side of it. He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, claiming descent from the most exclusive little tribe of all — the tribe of Benjamin, named after the first king of Israel. Saul grew up proud that he was on the right side of that gulf. As a Pharisee, if he had brushed against a Gentile in the marketplace, his reaction would have been to go home and take a bath.
And now he is writing a letter that crosses that gulf. He is writing to Gentiles. In itself, that is a miracle. Before he became a Christian, he would never have thought of sitting down and writing a letter to those on the other side, and certainly not a letter in terms of love like this. Something has happened. The middle wall of partition has come down. Smashed. And it is the story of that which this passage explores.
If Christ can bring Jew and Gentile together, he can bring anyone together. That is the gospel of peace — preachable to those who are near and to those who are far off.
The Gentile Condition Outside Christ (Verses 11–12)
Paul, writing as a Jew to Gentiles, does not soften the picture. He tells them exactly where they stood. Outside of Christ, Paul describes the Gentile condition with two words: aliens and atheists.
Aliens
We have tended in our narrow-mindedness to think of the Jew as an alien wherever he has gone. This is the root of the deep and uncomfortable relationships that have existed wherever Jewish people have settled — felt to be strangers, sojourners, misfits, people who don’t really belong. The truth, as Paul sees it, is precisely the opposite. It is the Gentiles who do not really belong. It is we who are the aliens, the strangers, the sojourners — just passing through, without a final home.
No Christ. The word Christ is a Jewish word — or rather a Greek word, but it translates a Jewish word. The Hebrew is Messiah; the Greek is Christ. Both mean anointed. The reason oil was placed on the forehead of Queen Elizabeth II at her coronation, and called the chrism, is that this is precisely the ancient anointing. The Hebrew people have looked for three thousand years for an anointed one from God. That has been their hope. And the tragedy is that when he came, the majority did not recognise him.
For Gentiles, however, the word Christ carries almost no content. Because we have not been waiting through thirty generations for the Messiah, the word Christ is to most of us little more than a name, a title. We do not get excited at the sound of it. But for a Jewish person hearing for the first time that Jesus is the Christ — the Messiah — their heart begins to beat. We’ve found him! The excitement of that word is something most Gentiles have never felt. Outside of Christ, you had no Christ. You were separated from him.
No Commonwealth. The Romans had Roman citizenship. The Greeks had Greek citizenship. But Rome is gone, and Greece is gone, and the British Empire is largely gone, and every empire will go in turn. There is only one citizenship that is permanent in this world: the citizenship of Israel. It is the only nation that will survive all the way through to the end. We Gentiles were strangers to the commonwealth of Israel — without permanent citizenship of any kind.
No Covenant. A covenant implies a marriage, a close relationship, a binding commitment from God that carries his promises with it. The Bible is stacked with promises — thousands of them. But until Christ came, to whom were those promises given? To those within the covenant — those married to God. The promises made to Abraham, to Isaac, to Jacob, to Moses — these were promises to the nation of Israel. As Gentiles, none of it was ours.
Atheists
The second word Paul uses is even more challenging. We tend to use the word atheist to mean someone who does not believe there is a God. But the Bible uses the word differently. The word appears in this passage in Ephesians — the only time it occurs in the New Testament. It is spelled atheos in the Greek: theos meaning God, and the prefix a meaning without. You can believe in God and be without him. You can believe there is a God and spend an entire week without him. That is what atheos means.
You can have plenty of religion — temples, shrines, daily prayers, sacrifices — and be without God. And according to Paul, even in their religiosity, Gentiles are atheos. Without God. Because God has chosen to make himself known through one particular nation, Gentiles are, as Paul puts it, without God in the world.
No Future.And because they have no God, Gentiles also have no future, no hope. J. B. Phillips translates verse 12 this way: ‘Remember you had nothing to look forward to and no God to whom you could turn.’ That is the Gentile condition. A Gentile in the flesh and in the world has no Christ, no citizenship, no covenant, no future, and no Father in heaven. That would have been the lot of every Gentile if Christ had never come.
Why did God choose to work through one nation? He could, presumably, have created every nation independently and sent each one its own Messiah. But in his wisdom he chose otherwise — to send one Messiah to one people, through whom all the other nations would be blessed. It is like a parent who, having sweets to give to three children, can either give each child their own, or hand one child the bag and say: share this with the others. The second method does more for family life. God wanted a family. And so he said to Israel: I give you the Messiah, the promises, the Scriptures, the covenant, the commonwealth. Now share it. One of the great tragedies of their history is that they did not learn to share as God intended. But when Christ came, that was put right.
But Now in Christ Jesus (Verse 13)
The turning word again. But. But now in Christ Jesus, you who were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. As soon as you cease to be merely in the flesh and in the world, and are in Christ Jesus, the whole picture changes. You have stepped over the gulf. You are now in a Jew. And because you are in him, everything is yours in him.
From a disunited mankind, separated by barriers, walls, barbed wire, stone fences, there is now one new humanity in Christ Jesus. If the deepest division God ever made has been dissolved in Christ, then every other division can go in him too.
Three Unities in Christ (Verses 14–22)
Paul now shifts from the word you to the word we, and from we to our. A Jew is writing to Gentiles and talking about us. Again and again he uses the word one. Three great pictures emerge: one blood, one body, one building.
One Blood
To the Jewish mind, blood meant two things: the blood inside — the Hebrew bloodline, the racial identity he kept carefully through his family tree, down through generations of pure Jewish descent; and the blood outside — the blood of the sacrifices God had given his people, sprinkled on them as a sign of atonement and covenant.
But Paul is talking about neither of these now. He is talking about the blood of Jesus — the one perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. And through the blood of the cross, peace and harmony have been made between Jew and Gentile. The blood of Jesus Christ is in the hearts of both. That makes them brother and sister. When you come to God through Christ, you have come not only to a Father, you have come to a family. Every time you take the cup at the Lord’s Supper you remember that you are one blood in him.
How did this happen? Paul says that Christ, in his flesh on the cross, abolished the things that made Jews different from Gentiles — the circumcision, the ceremonial and ritual laws, the Sabbath regulations, all the ordinances that marked the Jew as distinct. He abolished the law of commandments and ordinances. And with what did he replace them? With himself. Just as Martin Luther, when asked what he would put in place of all the aids to Catholic devotion he wished to abolish, replied simply: Jesus Christ. Man only needs Jesus Christ. He is now our law. He gives us moral guidance. Where he repeats one of the Ten Commandments, we accept it — not because it is one of the Ten Commandments, but because Christ has laid it upon us as a law of liberty that springs from a personal relationship. The moral standards of God have not changed; but we receive them from Christ. And that is what has made Jew and Gentile one blood.
One Body
You cannot have a greater picture of unity than one body. Paul speaks of the one body of Christ that was broken on the cross — and which has created one new body, the church. We are not separate people. We are one body in Christ Jesus.
Pawson recalls a story of a girl who, after becoming a Christian, was asked: do you think you can keep it up? She said: I hold the hand of Christ. But supposing your grip slips? Her answer: I can’t let go, because I am one of his fingers. Part of his body. And Jew and Gentile are now one body, and both have access to God in one Spirit. For a body must have a spirit in it to live; the one body we now are has one Spirit in it, and in that one Spirit we can come right through to God. When Jesus died, even the veil of the temple was ripped in two. We have access right into the Holy of Holies — nearer to God than even the Jews could approach in the days of the temple.
One Building
Paul now sees that God has made the old stone-and-timber temple obsolete. Where will God live on earth now? And then Paul saw it: out of Jew and Gentile, God is building one building on the foundation of prophets and apostles, with Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone holding the walls together. Jew and Gentile are being built together into a habitation fitted together, a temple for God to inhabit by his Spirit.
The physical temple in Jerusalem had a court of the Gentiles — the outermost area, which is the court that was filled with money changers and animal sellers when Jesus arrived and cleared it out, saying: do you not know that this was meant to be a house of prayer for all the nations? Beyond the court of the Gentiles was a dividing wall, and on it stood a notice: on pain of death, no Gentiles beyond this point. Jesus did not take a Gentile through that gate during his lifetime — he had not yet died. But when he died, that gate became obsolete. Now Gentiles can come right into the Holy of Holies with Jews.
The physical middle wall survived Jesus by forty years — it was torn down by the Romans in AD 70 and has never been rebuilt. Paul wrote this letter about eight years before that happened, without knowing it would occur. And do you know why Paul was eventually arrested and sent to Rome? He was accused of taking a Gentile through that gate — a man called Trophimus. It was a false charge. He had done no such thing — in the physical sense. But in reality, he had been bringing thousands of Gentiles through that middle wall all his life. Not through the building, but through to God. His whole ministry had been bringing Gentiles through the middle wall of partition.
Paul had two emotions when he thought about the temple. One was joy — how glad he was that Gentiles were now right in. The other was grief — how sad he was that so many of his own people were right out. The simple fact is now that believing Jews and believing Gentiles are one on one side of the gulf, and unbelieving Jews and unbelieving Gentiles are one on the other. The division has shifted.
The New Division
If the cross is the key to this whole passage — and it is — then it is also the cross that creates the new division. The deepest division among mankind now is not between East and West, between black and white, between rich and poor, or between young and old. The deepest division is between those who believe and those who do not. You are no longer on the wrong side of the gulf because you are a Gentile. You are on the wrong side if you are an unbeliever. And if you are a believer, you are one with every other believer, be they Jew or Gentile.
Pawson closes with a vision: a church in which there is no distinction whatsoever. He was once invited to become a minister in a church in another country, and was told he would be expected to conduct a service for black people at nine o’clock and for white people at eleven. He could not go. In Christ there is no wall of partition. All cultural differences, all traditions, fall before the Lord Jesus Christ. And the church is to be for young and old, for every colour and class and culture — one building, one body, built together into a holy temple in the Lord.
Closing Prayer
O God, we are your temple. What an indescribable privilege. We are here this morning, both Jewish and Gentile, according to the flesh and in the world. But in Christ Jesus, we are one. We praise you for making this passage live to us this morning, for translating it into the lives of people, so that we become living epistles. We pray that your church may be one in Christ Jesus. Unite the saved, we pray. We know that the unsaved cannot ever truly be united, but we praise you that in Jesus all people of every kindred and tribe and tongue from all over the world can become one family in him. Amen.
© David Pawson Ministry CIO
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© David Pawson Ministry — Transcript prepared for Koinonia.nu | koinonia.nu