Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the Death of Christ from Ephesians 2:11-22
“Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called ‘uncircumcised’ by those who call themselves ‘the circumcision’ (that done in the body by the hands of men)—remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.
For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”
This is the Word of the Lord.
In the great passage that precedes our text (that is, the first 10 verses of Ephesians 2), Paul reminds his readers of the shudderingly dramatic change that has taken place in their lives, especially with respect to the vertical dimension; that is, with respect to their relationship to God. All of this is cast in a kind of “once, but now” structure. “Once you were in this situation, but now you’re in another situation.”
Thus, in the earlier paragraph, beginning in chapter 2, verse 1, once (verses 1–3). “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.”
But now (verses 4 and following) something has changed. “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.” In our passage, Paul again reminds his readers of the shudderingly dramatic change that has taken place in their lives, but now, in large part, on a horizontal plane with respect to their relationships to Israel, God’s ancient covenant people.
Again there is this “once, but now” structure that drives the entire argument. Once (verses 11–12). “Remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called ‘uncircumcised’ by those who call themselves ‘the circumcision …’ ” Verse 12: “Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.”
But now. Now the rest of it. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.” This sustained argument, repeated once primarily in a vertical dimension and once primarily in a horizontal dimension.… All of this follows the great prayer of chapter 1, verses 15–23. Among its petitions is the prayer that Paul’s readers might better be able to grasp God’s unimaginably great power in the gospel.
Pick it up at chapter 1, verse 18. Paul writes, “I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead.”
Indeed, that mighty power has seen us reconciled to God and now sees us reconciled to one another. In other words, chapter 2 is the outworking of the demonstration that Paul has asked for in his great prayer of chapter 1, verses 15–23. What all of this suggests is that Paul desperately wants true believers in Jesus Christ to appreciate more and more how transcendentally wonderful the gospel really is.
Indeed, he will go on to argue in this book (he hints at it here) their ability to live the life of faith in maturity, in stability, in faithfulness, in love, in genuine community, with the coming of Christ in view, turns on such deepening appreciation of how spectacularly wonderful the gospel is. Paul’s argument in chapter 2, verses 11–22, focuses on three main themes. First, our pre-Christian past (verses 11–12); second, our transforming Savior (verses 13–18); and finally, our Christian present. There is a flow to the argument you will quickly discern.
1. Our pre-Christian past.
Let me reread for you verses 11–12. “Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called ‘uncircumcised’ by those who call themselves ‘the circumcision’ (that done in the body by the hands of men)—remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.”
Paul begins with a “Therefore, remember.” The remember command begins verse 12 as well. “Therefore, remember.” That is, in the light of the glory of what God has done for you in the gospel, outlined in the preceding verses, removing your status as objects of wrath, pouring out grace upon you so that you have faith to believe.… “Therefore,” he says, “in the light of the glory of what has happened to you in the gospel, it is imperative that you remember what you have been saved from.”
That point is made implicitly in verse 3 a little earlier. “All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.” Now verse 12. “Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.”
When you work through biblical passages on remembering and forgetting, it’s remarkable that the Bible tells us there are certain things we should remember and certain things we should forget. For example, in Philippians, chapter 3, Paul says he forgets certain things. He determines to forget certain things. “Forgetting those things which are past,” he says, “I press on for the prize of the upward call in Christ Jesus.”
In the context, the things he wants to forget are, in fact, the things he might be puffed up with pride over. He wants to forget all of his intrinsic advantages. He wants to forget something of the spectacular triumphs he has seen in the gospel, because he knows full well that at bottom we’re not more than unprofitable servants. We could all have done better, done more, been more consistent. We’re all debtors to grace.
What on earth is the point, then, of patting ourselves on the back with some momentary triumph? We’re going to need more grace tomorrow anyway. Forget that, and press on to the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. On the other hand, we must remember certain things. Amongst the functions of the Lord’s Supper is remembering. “Do this in remembrance of me.” You take the bread and remember the Lord’s broken body. You take the cup and remember his shed blood. “Do this,” he says, “in remembrance of me.”
One of the things we are to remember is the pit from which we have been dug, for the truth of the matter is unless we grasp our lostness apart from Christ, the glory of Christ, what he achieved on the cross, the power of the gospel, the dimensions of the love of God will seem diminished. If we see ourselves as more or less not bad, you know, maybe in need of a little bit of grace to tip us over the top sort of thing, then correspondingly the gospel will not seem like too much.
If instead, with Paul, we see ourselves as all by nature objects of God’s wrath; that is, legitimately, rightly, justifiably under God’s condemnation, doomed to experience his wrath apart from his own gracious intervention, by nature and by choice choosing to shake our puny fists in the face of our maker and insisting on doing it our way and wanting to think of God as a sort of senior colleague but not as our maker and redeemer, quite prepared to tell him what to do, quite prepared to dispute whether or not he exists on occasion, and then deigning to give him a certain probability of existence according to our modern epistemology …
If that’s the way we think of God, it is hard to be moved by the gospel itself. So Paul writes in particular now to the Gentiles, to those who stand removed from the whole heritage of God’s covenant people, and he says, “You must remember the pit from which you have been dug.” In particular, he says, “You were Gentiles in the flesh,” quite literally. That is, Gentiles by birth and, therefore, shut out from the circumcision.
Because Paul himself uses that expression circumcision in a variety of ways, he explains which way he means it here. That is, it’s the physical circumcision. He says, “That done in the body by the hands of men.” After all, Paul himself elsewhere says that when he was a practicing, conservative, confessional Jew, he was very proud of the fact that he was done legitimately on the eighth day according to the stipulations of the covenant. Read what he says about that in Philippians 3.
But now, as a Christian, he says elsewhere, he no longer thinks this marker of the old covenant is critically important, so he can write in 1 Corinthians, chapter 7, verse 19, that for the Christian circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. That’s not the heart of the issue. He says the same thing in Galatians 5.
Indeed, he perceives what the Old Testament Scriptures themselves insist, that circumcision of the heart is far more important than circumcision of the flesh. He argues that point in Romans 2, but, of course, he is really citing Deuteronomy 10, Deuteronomy 30, Jeremiah 4, and other passages. The point of circumcision in verse 11 here is simply that it marked out who belonged to the Old Testament covenant community; that is, families in which the male members were circumcised. To this group, the Gentile Christians in Ephesus never belonged.
Well, who cares if they ever belonged? Well, Paul then signals for us what it meant to belong and what it means not to belong. He spells it out for us and shows five severe deficiencies, five massive disadvantages, if you don’t belong to that group. First, he says, “You were separate from Christ.” I think he means here that in the earliest days of fledgling Christianity, the Gentiles were removed from this covenant group.
After all, what does Christ mean? Christ is not a proper name like Carson. Christ was a title. Messiah. Messiah is a Jewish category. He was the Anointed King, the long-promised one. When Jesus was on this earth in the days of his ministry, he restricted himself almost entirely to ministry amongst his fellow Jews. In fact, when the Syrophoenician woman and one or two others stretched the boundaries a bit, there are glimpses of where this gospel is going, but he himself insisted in the strongest terms that he came in the first instance for Israel.
Who were the apostles? A bunch of Gentiles? No, they were Jews. Who were the earliest Christians in Jerusalem? Jews. Maybe the odd Gentile proselyte who had converted to Judaism. That was the heritage. After all, the Messiah was a Jewish Messiah who came for Jewish people. That meant, then, that they were excluded from citizenship in Israel. Not merely citizenship of the nation, but citizenship that was bound up with this covenantal allegiance. They were foreigners to the covenants of the promise.
This does not mean God did not reach out and save some people who were outside of those boundaries occasionally in the Old Testament. Think of the Ninevites in Jonah’s day, for example, and the odd other account in the Old Testament. But the whole heritage of those who received the covenants from Abraham on was the heritage of Israel … the Abrahamic covenant, then the Mosaic covenant, and then the Davidic covenant … in each case, God making his covenant with one or two leaders and, through them, the entire nation.
They were excluded from all of that. Oh, it’s true that some of those covenants spoke of spectacular advantages for the Gentiles to come. Think of the Abrahamic covenant. Yes, in Abraham and in his seed, all of the nations of the earth would one day be blessed. Nevertheless, for all of the years that the Abrahamic covenant was in force and that promise had not come to fulfillment, those who were Gentiles were excluded from this covenant of promise. More fundamentally, as this heritage crystallized in the coming of the long-promised Messiah, as it finally issued in the death of the Lamb of God, these people were without hope, we’re told.
Oh, this doesn’t mean they were without psychological hope. Many of them had all kinds of psychological hopes bound up with their own religion, their own background, their own heritage, their own natural enthusiasms, their own optimistic outlook, or whatever. We all live with some kind of hope or else, ultimately, we go and commit suicide. Paul does not mean they are without psychological hope. He means they are without hope of salvation. They are without a grounding in the ultimate hope. They are without the hope.
Then he puts it more bluntly yet. “Without God in the world.” It’s not because they didn’t have other gods. Very few of them were atheists. There were some atheists in the first century, people like Lucretius, but not many. Most of them believed in a lot of gods. But Paul goes so far as to say they were without God in the world. He’s not saying there was no insight at any point whatsoever in their inherited religions. He is saying that they are without knowledge of the true God, who is the ultimate maker and redeemer.
Now there are three features of this list we dare not ignore, as unpleasant as they are to some of us. First, all five have to do with being outside Israel and, therefore, outside God’s saving power or the community of God’s saving power. Second, there is very little support here for the view that countless millions of people who are outside of God’s covenant or God’s people are really saved anyway.
There’s very little to encourage that view here. “Separate from Christ, without hope and without God in the world.” If that’s not strong enough, read the first section, chapter 2, verses 1–10. “All of us also lived amongst the disobedient, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature, following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.” The assumption is that God is dealing with a lost race of human beings.
It’s not as if God is coming to neutral people and saying, “I think on balance I’ll opt for that bunch. That bunch … tough. They’re morally neutral, but I’ll condemn them to sin. This group is morally neutral; I’ll choose them.” That’s not the picture at all. He comes to a lost race, lost in wickedness and sin and self-love, justifiably under God’s wrath, and he saves broken men and women anyway. Not to be in the community of that salvation is dreadful.
In the third place, note that the fundamental features of this salvation (both in the first part, verses 1–10, and here in verses 11–22) are described in reference to sin, to self-focus, to the wrath of God without eschatological hope. It’s salvation understood in classically biblical terms. Do you know why that’s important today? This is a generation that finds it harder and harder to talk about sin.
I still do quite a lot of university missions, and the hardest thing to get across by far on the university campus today is not high-flown doctrine but the nature of sin. By far. When you read the Old Testament, just read it through quickly, and ask yourself, “What human activity is it that really makes God narked? What is it that is connected with mention of God’s wrath again and again and again?”
When you read through it quickly, you discover that the answer is predominately idolatry. That is, it’s the vertical dimension that is at issue. It’s the de-Godding of God. It’s the reducing God to the level of the created order. It’s reducing God so that we ourselves can be lifted up relative to him. It is the dethroning of God. Out of that, in Old Testament terms, flow all of the things that are antisocial, which we think of as sin.
Our problem is that when we try to show that our message is relevant to our world, we so often focus on the horizontal dimensions of sin. “Don’t you realize that perpetual promiscuity breeds a whole raft of socially bad effects?” It’s true, of course. “Don’t you realize that if you are dishonest on your income tax and dishonest in your deals sooner or later you get companies like Enron and the Harvard Business School teaching a course on ethics without any ethical foundation?
No wonder people are greedy. No wonder we have a litigious society of people suing one another every time they turn around, because honor has disappeared and integrity has dissolved. Don’t you realize that if we returned to Christian basics, these sorts of things also would largely dissipate?” All true, but it’s nowhere near the heart of how sin is understood in Scripture.
Sin is understood in Scripture not in terms of the breaking of the odd rule but in terms of fundamental revolution in which I am the center of the universe, and God, if he, she, or it exists, jolly well better serve me or, quite frankly, I’ll find another god or I’ll redefine him or her or it, as the case may be, because I want a god in whom I may believe, a god whom I will choose, thank you.
Thus, we domesticate God. We de-God God. We invent idols, or we squeeze him to the periphery of life so that he might be socially useful for a nice company for my children to grow up in on Sundays, but it shouldn’t affect my business, my priorities, my pocketbook, my time, my prayer life, my morals, or whom I’m sleeping with, and God is de-Godded.
The reason we are under the wrath of God is not because we’re not nice people. It’s not because fundamentally the deepest wrong is we have a few of our horizontal relationships slightly out of whack. As important as those things are, at the heart of the issue is the sad truth that we are lost and in rebellion and under God’s righteous condemnation because we won’t have God as God. The outcome of all of that is the social morass that affects society after society and culture after culture, emerging in one mess or another.
Thus, the fundamental features of this salvation (both in chapter 2, verses 1–10, and in chapter 2, verses 11–22) are described in reference to sin, self-focus, the wrath of God, without eschatological hope. Our salvation is not first and foremost to make us nice but to reconcile us to God. The niceness, if I may put it that way, emerges out of the restoration of that union once again. Here, then, is the mess. That is to say, here then, in the first instance, is our pre-Christian past.
2. Our transforming Savior.
Verses 13 and following. But now. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.” The contrast, thus, is not first and foremost salvation historical; that is, what once pertained under the old covenant and now pertains under the new.
There is a dimension of that here, but the focus here is rather the change in these people to whom Paul is writing. This is a change that is bound up with their conversion. It’s a personal, experiential change. “This is where you were, and now you are somewhere else. But now in Christ you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.”
The blood of Christ in Scripture, when it functions in this broad way, refers to his life violently and sacrificially ended. In Scripture, that which the blood achieves we are elsewhere told, the death of Christ achieves or the cross achieves. Does the blood win our justification? So does the cross. So does the death of Christ. Does the blood win our reconciliation to God? So does the cross. So does the death of Christ.
That is, the blood is a powerful way of speaking of Christ sacrificially and violently giving up his life on our behalf. That is what brought us to God. That is what won, what effected our reconciliation. “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.”
Now then, there is a line of thought running through verses 14–18 at this point that unpacks what Paul has said in brief compass in verse 13. First, what Christ has done in verse 14 and the first part of verse 15; then second, what Christ has purposed (verse 15b and 16); and then third, what Christ has preached. You will see that very easily as we work through it.
First, what Christ has done. Verse 14: “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law and its commandments and regulations.” He has made two one. What two? Well, he means in the context, of course, Jews and Gentiles. He has now made them one.
Now we’d better not misunderstand that. In Jewish thought, there were two fundamental people. Only two: Jews and Gentiles. Jews and everybody else. In Roman thought, there were two kinds of people. Well, perhaps three. There were Romans, and then those who lived outside the domain of the Roman Empire, barbarians.
Then the Romans could be broken down into various subgroups: those who were truly Roman citizens, those who were free but not citizens, and those who were slaves, but they were all within the Roman aegis. Then outside the Roman aegis were barbarians. But for Jews, there were just two groups: Jews and Gentiles.
Now Paul sees three groups. Elsewhere (for example, in 1 Corinthians 10:32), he sees Jews, Gentiles, and the church of God. That’s interesting, isn’t it? In 1 Corinthians 9, verses 19–23, he says, “To the Jews I became like a Jew, that I might win the Jews. To those without the law I became like one without the law, that I might win those who have the law.” Those without the law.… He turns to the Gentiles. That’s the same thing on their side as well.
In other words, Paul does not see himself as a Christian Jew who has to flex to win the Gentiles. He sees himself as a Christian in what theologians have called the tertium quid, the third position, the third place. He sees himself as a Christian who then has to flex to win the Gentiles and flex to win the Jews. He has to flex both ways.
In other words, when Paul here says that God has made one new humanity out of Jews and Gentiles, he is not suggesting that God has done this by sort of fusing all Jews and all Gentiles so that all human beings, without exception, Jews and Gentiles alike, are now squished into one new humanity and everybody is saved. That’s not it at all.
The way God has done this in Paul’s view is that he has taken some Jews and some Gentiles to make a new group, a new humanity. We read, “His purpose was to create in himself one new man.” We might better read perhaps today “one new humanity.” It is in this connection that Christ, he says, is our peace.
Now when we use the word peace, we often think of it in psychological terms. If we have a lot of stress, we don’t have a lot of peace. You have a holiday by a lake somewhere for three weeks with a lot of sleep and a bit of fishing. Or maybe you’re not that kind. Maybe for you a holiday is trekking 15 miles a day through the Lake District in Britain. Or maybe for you holidaying and getting rid of stress is going on a canoe trip in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.
Whatever it is, you come back tanned and stronger or fitter or more relaxed, having knocked off three or four novels, or whatever it is, and you feel less stressed out and, therefore, more at peace. “The kids have really been acting up this week. I’d like to have a little peace around here.” Or you find bad tempers rising because there’s not enough sleep. Sometimes the godliest thing you can do in the whole universe is go to bed. People get a little tired and, therefore, a little grumpy, and what we want around here is a little more peace.
The Greek word for peace, eirene, from which we get the woman’s name Irene, is grounded, in fact, on the Hebrew shalom, Arabic salaam. It’s still used in the Middle East today. Sometimes it’s just a greeting. If you greet somebody in the streets of Jerusalem you say, “Shalom.” Yet the notion is rich. It can refer to harmony amongst human beings. That’s the use, for example, in chapter 4 of this book, verse 3.
There we’re told, “Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” Harmony amongst human beings with courtesy and respect and the like. That’s a not infrequent use in this New Testament book. Sometimes it can refer to messianic salvation, everything that comes with the coming of Christ. Think, for example, of Zechariah’s song when he knows about the impending birth of John the Baptist, the forerunner.
“And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercies of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.”
Or again, Luke, chapter 2, verse 14, something we quote at Christmas or we quote very often according to the Authorized Version, the King James Version, which has it slightly wrong. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.” That’s exactly what the original says. “Peace to those on whom his favor rests.”
The peace here is the peace of the whole messianic blessing, being rightly related to God, rightly related to other people. For the notion of shalom conjures up images of wholeness, of being in right relationships with God and with others. Peace. That’s why on occasion the New Testament writers speak of the gospel of peace.
Hence in Ephesians 6, verse 15, that is exactly the expression we find. There Paul speaks of the armor of God that we’re to wear. “Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.” For this gospel of peace reconciles men and women to God and to one another, Jews and Gentiles alike, and a whole lot of others too, as we’ll see.
It is in that sense, then, that Christ himself is sometimes said to be our peace. He brings in this peace. He is our peace. He reconciles human beings to God and to one another. That’s why we read in Romans 5:1, “Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Or in the great hymn of Colossians, chapter 1, this hymn to Christ. It ends up Colossians 1:19. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross.”
We were so distant from him, alienated from him, rightly under his wrath, but now because Christ steps in and by his sacrificial death on our behalf absorbs the wrath, takes the condemnation, declares us just, reconciles us to God, by his death we have peace with God. As we are rightly related to God, we become rightly related, likewise, to each other. That’s the great vision that is laid out for us here.
Then the text goes on to say that he has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. What is this? He explains it in the first part of verse 15. “By abolishing in his flesh,” we’re told, “the law with its commandments and regulations.” You can well believe that this half verse has generated endless discussion. Has God in Christ Jesus abolished the law? Is that what is meant?
Well, people have disputed that one and have offered many interpretations. Let me simply give you my conclusion on the matter. I don’t have time to go through the options. As far as I can see, what he means here is Christ’s death has abolished the law covenant. We are not under the law covenant anymore. This does not mean there is no set of connections between the law covenant given to Moses and the new covenant under which we live, but you and I don’t live under the law covenant anymore.
Moreover, it was the law covenant that erected all kinds of barriers. The law covenant includes the holiness code, which demands that Jews wear a certain kind of clothing and eat certain kinds of foods and don’t mix, for example, meat products with milk products, and that means they keep separate pots for cooking that way. There are endless markers, circumcision itself, that separate out the people in a self-identifying way so that they do not see themselves and we do not see them as somehow part of us.
That’s the way the old covenant works. In fact, the people, if they were to be faithful to the covenant, had to preserve those markers. That’s what made them different. To join them you had to submit to the markers of the holiness code or else you were not considered part of Israel. But now Christ by his death has brought that entire law covenant, as a whole covenantal structure, to an end.
On the night that he was betrayed, he took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” We are under the new covenant. There are all kinds of connections between the new and the old covenant, but strictly speaking, we are not under the old covenant; we are under the new covenant. This does not mean, therefore, that there is no sense in which we have joined Israel.
In another metaphor in Romans, chapter 9, he can picture us as wild branches grafted into that tree, but here the imagery is a little different. Here the imagery is there was this group under the old covenant that was marked out in a whole variety of ways, and there was this group without the law and the covenant and the promises of God, and now in Christ he has brought men and women from both groups together to constitute a new humanity, a new people of God, in which those distinguishing things are removed. He has abolished those barriers.
That brings us, then, to the very purpose of all of this on this horizontal plane. We’re told (verse 15b) Christ’s purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body, this new man, this new person, to reconcile both of them first of all to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.
After all, Romans says very emphatically the Jews are under the curse of God because they do not live up to the knowledge of God they have in the law. Gentiles are under the curse of God because what we receive in nature, what we receive by virtue of the fact that we’re made in the image of God, what we receive from our own culture, we know something of right and wrong. We don’t live up to it.
We are all under the curse of God, and in our hostility to God and to one another, in our racism and prejudice and blindness (first of all generated from the fact that God himself is under suspicion from us), where is there any hope? But in Christ Jesus, God’s purpose was to make a new race, a new humanity.
He would take the two, Jew and Gentile, and make one. That was his purpose. And in this one new body to reconcile them first to God (that was what the cross was about; that’s the point of chapter 2, verses 1–10), and then to bring their own hostility to death. That was what God purposed in Christ Jesus.
What was it, then, that Christ preached? Verse 17: “He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.” We might well ask, “When did Christ preach this message of peace?” In some measure, of course, he was preaching it along with messages of judgment during the days of his flesh, but I think here this means what Christ preached in the wake of his death and resurrection.
Do you remember what he says to the disciples when he first meets them after the resurrection? It’s clearest in John’s gospel, but it shows up everywhere in one fashion or another. He comes and stands amongst his disciples as they’re in a locked room, both the first week and the second week when he’s there with Thomas, and he says, “Peace be with you.” If he spoke in Aramaic, he probably said, “Shalom,” with a grin on his face.
It showed that this was more than “Hi there.” This is shalom, wholeness, reconciliation to God, peace to them, and therefore peace with one another. Moreover, his preaching continues. It continues through the apostles and others. Do you remember how Acts opens? Acts is really part 2 of a two-volume work. Volume 1, Luke’s gospel, takes us through the life and ministry and times of Jesus, all the way through to the passion narrative and the resurrection and the Great Commission.
Then Acts begins, “In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until he was taken up to heaven.” In other words, we’re to understand the book of Acts is that which Jesus continues to do, even though he’s taken up and gone by the end of chapter 1. He continues to do it precisely by his Spirit through the apostles and prophets. That’s the whole point.
This wording is deeply grounded in two further great Old Testament texts. Isaiah 52:7: “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news [gospel], who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation.” Or Isaiah 57:19. God says he will create praise on the lips of the mourners of Israel. “ ‘Peace, peace, to those who are far and near,’ says the Lord.” That great promise is now extended to Jew and Gentile alike. “He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.”
In short (verse 18), “Through Christ we both, Jew and Gentile alike, have access to the Father by one Spirit.” Did you hear that? Did you hear how deeply Trinitarian that is? “Through Christ we both, Jews and Gentiles alike, have access to the Father by one Spirit.” In other words, this Trinity-shaped salvation creates a new humanity operating under a new covenant. Jews and Gentiles alike are reconciled not only to God but to each other. Here is our transforming Savior.
3. Our Christian present.
Verses 19–22. “Consequently …” There are huge social consequences to this salvation, huge consequences in our understanding of who we are. Paul writes, “Consequently, you Gentiles are no longer foreigners and aliens …” There’s this “once, but now” argument again. You see it resurfaces. “You are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household.”
You belong to the people of God. That was not yours by race. It was not yours by birth. It was not yours by ancient covenantal alliance, but by the death of Christ. You belong to this group. This community, this household, this group of God’s people, are themselves built, we are told, on the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Jesus Christ himself as the chief cornerstone.
You have to understand something here about the way ancient buildings were built … the big ones, the temples, and that sort of thing. Nowadays if we’re going to build a building, a skyscraper or the like, we put down huge pylons all the way down to the bedrock to support the weight. Then we have these massive lattice structures or the like to support things. But of course, they didn’t build buildings that were all that tall in the ancient world.
Now you’re talking about a building with a cornerstone. What is meant by that? The cornerstone had to be cut absolutely perfectly and laid out absolutely perfectly, for this massive stone was laid out in such a way that it constrained the shape of the entire building. That was the stone that laid out the lines of the entire building. That was the stone that had to be so perfectly flat that however many stories this thing went up it was built on this constraint. This was the shaper of the entire building.
For example, in 1 Peter, likewise, where we’re told that Jesus is the cornerstone and precious, we might get a conflicting image. When we think of precious stones, we think of diamonds, rubies, and things like that, but this stone is precious, costly, expensive, precisely because it took great skill and an enormous amount of money to get right. Jesus is saying we are the temple, the building, and Christ Jesus himself is the cornerstone who shapes the entire building. He is the one who is so laid out that the shape of the entire building is constrained by Christ himself.
Then to change the metaphor a bit, the apostles and prophets by their teaching and proclamation and bearing witness to this revelation of God in Christ Jesus are the sort of foundation, and then we are all built up from there. That is exactly the image the apostle Peter uses in 1 Peter 2. You may read this at your leisure. “In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.”
In the Old Testament, the temple (first of all the tabernacle, then later the temple) under the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant, was the place where God met with sinners. It was the place of sacrifice. It was the place where the Passover lamb was slaughtered. It was the place where the high priest once a year took the blood of bull and goat and went into the Most Holy Place to meet God. It was the great meeting place. It was the center of cultic worship.
Are we to think of this magnificent structure as our temple? Oh no, no, no. This is a fine old building, but this is not the temple of God. In the New Testament, the antitype of that old temple is one of three things. It’s never, never, never a building. Never, not once. The chief antitype, of course, is Christ himself. So he says, “Destroy this temple,” referring to his own body, “and in three days I will raise it again.”
That is, Jesus himself is the ultimate meeting place between God and human beings. He is our temple. He is our sacrifice. He is our priest. That’s why when we get to the last chapters of the Bible, John looks around the new heaven and the new earth, the city of the New Jerusalem, and he says, “I saw no temple in that city, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” There’s no mediation necessary. We’re now forever in the presence of the Lord. That’s one antitype use.
The second is found here. The church is the temple of God. Not this building … the church, the great meeting place between God and human beings. This is where others come into contact with God, is it not? This is where we mediate the truth of God to others, is it not? This is where the sacrifices of praise are offered, is it not?
The third use, found in only one or two passages, is our very bodies are sometimes seen as the temple of God. In 1 Corinthians 6, for example, “For God by his Spirit takes up residence within us.” Here it is the second usage that dominates. “In him the whole building [the church, us] is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”
This is a great vision, and to make this personal, the author goes on in the following verses to shape his whole prayer life by this vision. Thus, for example, in chapter 3, verses 14 and following. He says in verse 16, “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”
You say, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. Why do you have to pray that when, in fact, we’re already told that if we’re Christians (chapter 2, verse 22), we are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit? Why do we have to pray for this, then?” Well, the answer is the verb for dwelling here really means to take up residence and take it over.
Those of you who are in your second or third house now, over time, do you remember when you bought your first cheap little shack? You stretched the budget to the limit, maybe borrowed a bit from Mom and Dad, and bought something in the back end of nowhere. It’s called a handyman’s special. It means the furnace is about to go, the roof is going, it’s too small, there might be termites, there are certainly mice, and there’s a lot of stuff to fix up. You start with the plumbing.
Maybe it was owned by some people with some really disreputable tastes … there’s black and silver wallpaper in the bedroom. You know, it’s not very nice, but it’s yours. Then time passes. Your earning power increases a bit. You do a bit of decorating and change the plumbing, put in some decent electricity, redo some walls, knock out a wall, put an extension out the back, finish off the basement. Three children are there.
You look around, and there’s nothing that you see in the entire house that you haven’t touched or changed or developed or decorated, and you look to your spouse and say, “You know, this is our dwelling. This is our house.” Even if you move on, there’s a big part of you that will never be detached from that dwelling, that place where you’ve taken up residence.
So God by his Spirit moves in on us individually, corporately, the temple of God, and he finds it full of rats and termites and black and silver wallpaper, morally speaking. Paul prays that God might strengthen you so that he will dwell in your hearts by faith. He takes up residence. He cleans you up. Isn’t that the image you want? Part of this reconciling work by which we are transformed by the power of the Spirit of God.
There are huge practical implications. In chapter 4, Paul goes on to say, “As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.” This calling he has described so powerfully in chapter 2. What does it mean, then, to live a life worthy of this calling that we have received? He tells us. “Be completely humble and gentle. Be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit,” and so forth. There are huge practical implications.
For understandable reasons, all of this passage is cast in terms of reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles, but I would be remiss if I did not spell out two further implications for us. First, our world is increasingly threatened by disparate groups. If you want to read more of that, if you’re a reader, read the book by Samuel Huntington called The Clash of Civilizations in which he argues that far from becoming more unified in a global economy and the like, our very proximity on the Internet forces people to think how they’re different.
So you have more and more Hindus proud of being Hindu in India with corresponding outbreaks of violence in the North, more and more Muslims proud of being Muslim, more and more Chinese proud of being Chinese, more and more Anglos in the West proud of being Anglo. We’re not a global community. We’re a world of diverse disparate communities, and we spend a lot of time and thought and energy on how we can prove we’re the best and how we can gain the upper hand.
What is the Christian solution? Well, the Bible is realistic enough to insist that until Christ comes there will be wars and rumors of wars. There will be hate and animosity. We are not going to create the ideal political system, whether at the national level or the international level. Those who think we will create this utopia forget that utopia is utopia. That is, it doesn’t exist. It’s the place that doesn’t exist. There is no perfect place until Christ returns.
But insofar as there is hope at all, it will take place when men and women from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation gather around the throne of Jesus and love each other for Jesus’ sake. I love to be in churches where you find Muslims and Hindus in India worshiping together. I love to be in churches where there are blacks and whites, rich and poor, educated and non-educated, Asians, Latinos, Anglos, Europeans, and Africans, not coming together because they’re so intrinsically alike that they just can’t bear to be apart, but because they have Jesus.
That brings me to the last reflection. It is critical. All of this horizontal reconciliation works only if the parties see the grandeur and scale of what this new humanity looks like to God. You see, we are far too eager to rush toward horizontal reconciliation without grasping the primacy of being reconciled to God and seeing what sin looks like to God.
If you think somehow that Christianity is just a little bit of icing on the top, then what incentive is there to love people in this church who you don’t really love? Do you want a church that is full of reconciled people? Then do not focus on reconciliation itself. Focus on how ugly sin is apart from Christ, the cost Christ has paid on our behalf, the glory of this new humanity, and what we will look like in a new heaven and a new earth.
Focus on the fact that we are all debtors, that every sin, every resentment, every bitterness, every refusal to talk to some member of the church and go to another door because frankly you can’t stand his or her face.… In every case, it is repulsive, vile, God-dishonoring, and Christ-defying. But if we stand near the cross, we see the God-man writhing in agony for us because of our sin. What place is there left, then, for one-upmanship and nurtured bitterness?
It is only when our fundamental Christian commitments become so dissolute, so dissolved, that they no longer have the power of transformation anymore. Some wag has said, “For our grandparents, Christianity was an experience; for our parents, Christianity was an inheritance; for us, Christianity is a formality; and for our children, Christianity is an inconvenience.” It’s a bit harsh, but there’s some truth there, is there not?
“Remember, brothers and sisters in Christ, that at one time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.” Let us pray.
Lord God, these are such simple truths they are the ones we most easily forget. Return us afresh, we pray, again and again and again, to that old rugged cross by which we were reconciled to you, our maker and redeemer. Teach us again and again how ugly and evil sin is, how guilty we are, how utterly lost and without hope we would be apart from his death on our behalf.
Such renewed recognition to live our lives with gratitude and adoration and, therefore, also with forbearance and love for one another, as we are constituted the new humanity, the new people of God, in defiance of all the cultural pressures and norms around us, walking with humility of mind. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
