Ephesians 2:19-22

Introduction

What’s up, OC? If you’re relatively new to One Church, you may not recognize me because I haven’t preached in a few months, so allow me to introduce myself: My name is Ben, and my wife Lauren and I are two of the leaders here. Please introduce yourself to us if we haven’t met us. One of our main passions (dare I say it is our main passion?) is meeting new people and having friends and building community. So say hi.

Anyway, I want to begin this morning by putting on my guide and historian hats and give you a little tour of ancient Jewish temples. It’s like we’re going on a field trip in the Magic School Bus. I’ll be your Miss Frizzle. Temples were really common in the ancient world and in ancient religions that were way more sensitive to the spiritual realm than we are today. The closest modern comparison that we can make to an ancient temple is a church, but temples were so much more than just a gathering space for religious people like our churches are today. Back then, people believed that the god or the gods that you worship physically resided in the temple. It was an extremely sacred space.

So here we have this first picture which is an artistic rendering of King Solomon’s Temple. This is specifically what is called the outer court of the temple and it contained an altar for sacrificing animals, the basin where the priests would wash their hands because sacrifice is pretty messy work, and ten little stands where they would wash the animal. This was a temple that was built by the Jewish king Solomon, David’s son, and was the first temple ever built by the Jewish people, and it was built in roughly 957 B.C. (or B.C.E., whichever you prefer). You can’t tell here, obviously, because it’s a 3D rendering, but everything here was intricately designed with imagery from the garden of Eden like angels, animals, trees, flowers, and fruit, so that even as you entered this outer part of the court, you would be reminded of God’s presence in the garden of Eden and his presence in the temple itself.

If you were a priest in Israel, and only if you were a priest, you could go into the inside of the temple, which is our second picture. In here there are a lot of symbolic pieces of furniture like the table with bread of presence, which symbolized God’s provision for his people, the golden lampstands symbolizing God’s glory and Israel’s anticipation of his full presence to shine on them, and an altar where incense would be continuously burning. But there was an inner inner room called The Most Holy Place which is where God’s Spirit physically dwelt on the Ark of the Covenant between two statues of angels called cherubim.

Ephesians Introduction

The book of Ephesians was written by the apostle Paul to the Christian church in the ancient city of Ephesus. We know from several comments throughout the book of Ephesians that the Christian church in Ephesus was made mostly (or totally?) of Gentile converts to Christianity. The first three chapters are deeply theological about who the church is in Christ and the last three chapters are accessibly practical about how we live out of our new identity in Christ. Whenever I start studying a book of the Bible, I always like to read through it first and come up with a one-sentence summary to the entire book, which can be quite hard and often becomes quite wordy. But it’s still helpful for me to dilute the main points of the book to something much shorter than the book itself. Here is my summary for the book of Ephesians:

Because you have been redeemed through the blood of Jesus, been predestined to receive a spiritual inheritance, and sealed with the Holy Spirit, you, Jews and Gentiles, have come alive in Christ to be united as the new temple where God’s indwelling glory is shown through the Spirit’s work in your hearts to walk in love towards one another, in your homes, and in your workplaces as a way to stand faithfully against Satan and his evil spiritual forces in these evil days.

The phrase highlighted in bold is where we are this morning, and it’s incidentally the main theme of the book on which everything else rests.

Ephesians 2.19-22: Explanation

So, then, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with the saints, and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole building, being put together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you are also being built together for God’s dwelling in the Spirit.