Untitled Sermon (2)

I hope everyone had a Happy Mother’s Day. This evening we are continuing our study in Ephesians. So if you would please turn you bibles to Ephesian starting at verse 11. Last Sunday, Bob Rumbaugh preached on the first half of Ephesian 2, and tonight we are looking at the second half. I am not using any slides tonight and for the most part, will be staying in our text, except for a couple of exceptions. 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-- 12remember 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. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

Before we start going through the text, I would like to tell a short story about that happened to me when I was 7 years old that hopefully illustrates where we are going tonight with the theme of the text. My parents met each other in Spokane, Washington when my Dad was in the USAF stationed at Fairchild AFB. My Mom had grown up in the Lutheran Church in Spokane. And she practiced her faith for the most part. On the other hand, was Dad was a marginal Catholic. When I say marginal Catholic, his mother (my grandma Tyler) was Catholic and tried to raise my Dad that way, but it had little effect. When my parents decided to get married, and my dad told his mother on the phone he was getting married to a woman that his par had never met and she wasn’t a Catholic that was a big deal to my Grandma Tyler. Even with my grandmothers objections, they decided to get married. The agreement my Mom and Dad had was that their children would be brought in the Lutheran church. I was baptized in the church in which my mother grew up and where my parents were married. After my dad got out of the USAF, our family moved to my Dad’s hometown of Stockton, CA. Because my Mom didn’t drive, and my Dad was real interested in getting us to church we didn’t get to church all that often. When I was about 7 years old, I didn’t know much about religion except there was a God and I was a Lutheran. A Lutheran who didn’t go to church much. But when I was seven, I had friend that lived next door to us, who was Roman Catholic and had started attending catechism classes. He would often share with me what he was learning in these classes. Because I didn’t know anything about my faith, his Roman Catholicism was intriguing to me. One day when I was over at his house I said something like, I would like to go to church with you, and my friend’s mother immediately, “you can’t to church with us, you are not Catholic, you are a Protestant”, and she said with a certain disdain, like there was something wrong with me because I was a Protestant. I wasn’t sure what a Protestant was, but I asked my Mom and she said being a Lutheran meant I was a protestant. A couple weeks later, I was visiting my Grandma Tyler (who was Catholic) and my two cousins Connie and Debbie who were at Grandma Tyler’s house, visiting from out of town. Connie and Debbie were being raised Roman Catholic. As we sat down for dinner, they did their catholic version of grace and were crossing themselves and I had no idea of what was going on. After dinner, they told me they were going to go to church with Grandma the next morning. I told my Grandma I would like to go but she said, “No, you can’t go with us, you are not Catholic”. And she said it in such a way, that was frightening like I was really persona non grata. Needless to say, after both of these experiences I felt very alienated from my friend next door and from my Grandma Tyler and my cousins. Whatever they had as a religious experience, I couldn’t have it, because I was a Protestant. In fact, I felt very alienated, and very far from God. I didn’t know the Lutheran God very well and I was not allowed to know the Catholic one either. I am going to end this story for now, but will explain what happened later at the end.

If we had to pick a word to that describes the big idea we are going to look at tonight in our text, it is the word would “alienation”. The 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language (Noah Webster’s dictionary) defines alienation as “a withdrawing or estrangement, as of the heart or affections.” Let me repeat that, a withdrawing or estrangement, as of the heart or affections.”

In Ephesians 2, there is a double alienation that is being described in the text. this first alienation is between God and man. Bob Rumbaugh covered this last week. Bob emphasized grace in explaining how God reconciles all people who believe in Christ to himself. And if we look a little closer at text in Eph 2:1-10, we see that all people, is expressed in two people groups, Jews and Gentiles. This will become important when we look Eph 2:11-22, so I want us to look at it in that context.

In 2:1-2. Paul tells the Ephesians, “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.” When Paul uses the word “you” to the Ephesians, the “you” is not used here as a generic human, but a Gentile. A Gentile is a person who isn’t a Jew. The Jews were God’s covenant people, they had the promises and the law. The Gentiles did not. And according to Paul, it was the Gentiles who lived as part of this present age, ruled by evil forces and sinful attitudes.

But In 2:3, Paul adds himself (and others) the Jewish people “In among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” The Jews were not innocent of wrongdoing as they operated under the influence of the flesh.

Both groups of people (Jews and Gentiles) are dead in sin, then Paul writes in verses 4-6, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. Paul’s point here is Jews and Gentiles are equally guilty before God, but they arrive at their guilty status from different paths. Gentiles are idolaters; they have forsaken the one true God and follow idols. Jews know God’s revelation, and have the advantages of the Law, the prophets, the temple, the promises, the covenants (see Rom 9:4–5), but they have not all acted from faith. So in the end, all are in need of God’s grace, both Jew and Gentile, and the only way both groups can be reconciled to God is through God’s grace to bring us to faith.

In our text, Ephesians 2:11-22, we see a second alienation as human beings are depicted as alienated also from each other. It is almost impossible in the early Twenty-First Century to think ourselves back to those days when humanity was deeply divided between Jews and Gentiles. But there it was. The Jew had an immense contempt for the Gentile. The Gentiles, said the Jews, were created by God to be fuel for the fires of hell. God, they said, loves only Israel of all the nations that he had made … It was not even lawful to render help to a Gentile mother in her hour of sorest need, for that would simply be to bring another Gentile into the world. Until Christ came, the Gentiles were an object of contempt to the Jews.

In verse 11-12, we see the first point of our text, Alienated Humanity. The enmity between the Jews and Gentiles. Paul reminds the Ephesians of what they Jews called them. 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. One wonders why Paul would want to bring this up. That the Jews called the Gentiles names like “the uncircumcised”. Now the big idea we want to explore is alienation between Jews and Gentiles and not circumcision. But we need to look at it briefly. Circumcision had been given by God to Abraham as the outward sign of membership of God’s covenant people, but circumcision didn’t actually save anybody, only faith did. Abraham had faith before he was circumcised. When we look at the words of verse 11 more closely, we see this circumcised group, is only circumcised by human hands, which is really not a true circumcision. We find the physical signs point to In Deuteronomy 30:6, which is the true circumcision: And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.

But this name calling does point to the underlying problem that Gentiles did have which is found in verse 12: “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.”

Five things: separated from Christ, alienated from Israel, strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God. That sounds pretty desperate. William Hendriksen in his commentary summarizes it as: Christless, stateless, friendless, hopeless and Godless.

They were ‘hopeless’ because, although God had planned and promised to include them one day, they did not know it, and therefore had no hope to sustain them. And they were ‘godless’ because, although God had revealed himself to all mankind in nature and therefore had not left himself without witness, yet they suppressed the truth they knew and turned instead to idolatry. It was no exaggeration, therefore, to describe the ancient non-Jewish world as ‘hopeless’ and ‘godless’. The people were godless not in the sense that they disbelieved (on the contrary, they had a plethora of gods), but in the sense that they had no true knowledge of God such as he had given to Israel, and (because of their rejection of the knowledge) they had no personal fellowship with him.

But the good news comes beginning in verse 13. This is our second point, what Christ has done.

13But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.

There are three things in this passage that Jesus does to break down the wall of hostility between the Jew and the gentile. The first one in v. 15, is that he abolishes the law of commandments expressed in ordinances. When we first read this, we may wonder how can this be? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says in Matthew 5:17 "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” It seems like there is a discrepancy here, but there is not. In substance Jesus and the Apostle Paul were referring to the law in two different senses. In the Sermon on the Mount the context shows that Jesus was referring to the moral law. He was teaching the difference between Pharisaic righteousness and Christian righteousness, and urging that Christian righteousness involves a deep and radical obedience to the law. Paul’s primary reference here, however, seems to be to the ceremonial law expressed in what the ESV calls the ordinances and to what New English Bible calls ‘its rules and regulations’, that is, those referring to circumcision (the main physical distinction between Jews and Gentiles, verse 11), the material sacrifices, the dietary regulations and the rules about ritual ‘cleanness’ and ‘uncleanness’ which governed social relationships. The parallel passage in Colossians 2:16 alludes to circumcision, and also to ‘questions of food and drink’, and regulations regarding ‘a festival or a new moon or a sabbath’ (2:11, 16–21); so it seems probable that these were the commandments and ordinances which Paul has in mind here. They erected a serious barrier between Jews and Gentiles, but Jesus set this whole ceremonial aside. And he did it in his flesh (surely a reference to his physical death) because in the cross he fulfilled all the types and shadows of the Old Testament ceremonial system. Jesus certainly did not abolish the moral law as a standard of behavior (it is still in force and binding on us); but he did abolish it as a way of salvation.

The second thing Jesus does is he creates a single new humanity, in the second part of verse 15, “that he might create one new man in the place of the two, making peace. Jews and Gentiles were alienated from one another and at enmity with one another. But once the divisive law had been set aside, there was nothing to keep the two parts of humanity apart. Instead Christ brought them together by a sovereign act of creation. Literally, he ‘created the two into one new man, so making peace’. What Paul is referring to, in fact, is not a ‘new man’ but a ‘new human race’, united by Jesus Christ in himself. For although potentially the single new humanity was created when Jesus abolished the divisive law on the cross, actually it comes into existence and grows only by personal union with himself. This new unity through and in Christ does more than span the Jew-Gentile divide. In other passages Paul says that it also does away with sexual and social distinctions.

Colossians 3:11 Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.

Galatians 3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

The facts of human differences are not removed. Men remain men and women remain women, Jews remain Jews and Gentiles remain Gentiles. But inequality before God is abolished. There is a new unity in Christ.

The third thing Jesus does in verse 16, is to reconcile us both (Jew and Gentile) to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. Here the ‘hostility’ is clearly between God and men, just as in verse 14 it was chiefly between Jew and Gentile. And just as there the ‘hostility’ was mutual, I think we need to see a certain mutuality also in the hostility between men and God. It is not just that our attitude to him has been one of rebellion; it is also that his ‘wrath’ has been upon us for our sin (verse 3). And only through the cross have both ‘hostilities’ been brought to an end, for when Christ bore our sin and judgment on the cross God turned away his own wrath, and we, seeing his great love, turned away ours also. This does not mean that the whole human race is now united and reconciled. We know from observation and experience that it is not. There is a further stage in the work of Christ, which he is what we see in v.17, And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. Which is fulfillment of Isa 57:19 as the gospel goes out to those who are near (the Jews) and those who are far away (the Gentiles), we are reconciled to God and ourselves.

The third point is Paul’s description of how the Gentiles fit into this new humanity.

19So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. 22 In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.

The first sub point found in under how the Gentiles fit into this new humanity (found in the first part of verse 19), is that Gentiles become part of God’s kingdom. The Gentiles had been stateless and disenfranchised outsiders, ‘alienated from the commonwealth (politeia) of Israel’. But now, he says to them, you are fellow citizens with the saints. The words no longer strangers and sojourners but … citizensemphasize the contrast between the rootlessness of a life outside Christ and the stability of being a part of God’s new society. The way Martin Lloyd-Jones expresses it, ‘We no longer live on a passport, but … we really have our birth certificates, … we really do belong.’

The second subpoint (found in the second part of verse 19) Paul changes the metaphor and it becomes more intimate as the Gentiles becomes part of God’s household or a better word, family. A kingdom is one thing; a household or family is another. And in Christ Jews and Gentiles find themselves more than fellow citizens under his rule; they are together children in his family. We are no longer a part of this world but are part of the eternal family of the Triune Godhead. And it says in Eph 3:14-15 “We are children of the heavenly Father and joint-heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:17).]

Mixing metaphors is a trademark of Paul and we see in the third subpoint, where both the new citizenship and the household of God are spoken as a building that grows into a temple of God. The foundation of that temple is the apostles and the prophets with Jesus as the chief cornerstone. The stones of that temple is the invisible church, or “living stones”. All believers whether they are Jew or Gentile, are united to Christ, and because we are united to Christ, we are united to each other.