GOD’S NEW COMMUNITY:

MADE ONE IN CHRIST

Ephesians 2:11-22

INTRODUCTION

My dad turned 89 a week ago. During the past few years, during family reunions, he has frequently remembered how he thought and felt when he was going to Europe to fight in WWII. He is the oldest child and only son of Swedish immigrants. When he went to Europe at the age of 24 he was unmarried. He remembers thinking that his father’s name, the name of Swanson, was going to perish with him. He did not expect to come home alive. He will remember the loneliness and the futility he felt at that time. Then, usually with tears in his eyes, he will look at his five children and spouses and 16 grandchildren and he will exclaim, “Now look at all these children. Can you believe it? This is amazing!” He is full of gratitude and joy over his present condition as he remembers his former condition.

If you will notice in Ephesian 2:11, the apostle Paul exhorts the Gentile Christians who are part of the church in the town of Ephesus to remember their former condition. He wants them to remember their former condition so that when he describes their present condition their eyes will well up with tears and they will shake their heads and they will be amazed. That’s my goal this morning. The apostle Paul aims in vv. 11-22 to show them and us that belonging to the church of Jesus Christ is the most amazing thing that could ever happen to a human being. We humans have an astonishing capacity to take incredible realities for granted. We easily forget the difficulties we have escaped and the blessings we have been given. We are notorious for complaining even when we are the recipients of the most astounding gifts. We are known for our ability to find fault with our circumstances even when we are living in the lap of luxury. Much of the Bible is written to remind us of what God has done for us in Christ in order to stimulate gratitude and joy for what God has done; and confidence in what he will do so that we will not spend our time complaining but worshipping and loving. Such is Paul’s goal in Ephesians 2 and such is my goal this morning. It is my goal to convince you this morning that…

MAIN POINT

Belonging to the church of Jesus Christ is the best thing that could ever happen to you because…

I. To not belong to the church is to be without hope (vv. 11-13)

Notice that all the way through this passage Paul reminds the Christians in Ephesus what used to be true and then explains to them what is true now. Look at vv. 11, 12, 13, & 19. Actually all of chapter two is based on a contrast between our condition prior to becoming a Christian and our condition after becoming a Christian. Verses 1-10 describe the contrast between being a dead person, excluded from the life of God and being a living person, given the very life of God. Verses 11-22 describe the contrast between being excluded from God’s church and being a part of God’s new community. In verses 11-13 he emphasizes the hopelessness of the condition of the Gentile Christians prior to their becoming Christians, prior to their becoming a member of Christ’s church. Please note that vv. 11-13 and v. 19 are addressed specifically to Gentile Christians.

As far as I know, everyone sitting in this room is a Gentile. To be Gentile is to not be Jewish. The world as God sees it and therefore as presented in the Scriptures is comprised of three groups of people. First there are the Jewish people, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. These are the race of people God chose and with whom he made covenants and through whom he brought the Savior to the world, Jesus Christ. Second there are all those who are not Jewish and who are Gentiles by birth and called, as an insult, “uncircumcised” by the Jewish people. You may remember the shepherd boy David using this very insult when he heard the Gentile, Goliath, cursing and mocking the army of Israel. He said, “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the Living God?” The third group of people that exists in the world as God sees it, is the church of Jesus Christ. Every human being belongs to one of these three groups.

Now what Paul attempts to do in vv. 11-13 is remind us Gentile Christians of just how bad off we were before we became Christians, before we became members of the church of Jesus. If you are here this morning and you are not yet a Christian, then what Paul describes here is your current condition and so you should use this description as a motivation to change your situation. Paul lists six deficiencies of being a Gentile, six horrible realities. First he says that every non-Jewish, non-Christian is without Christ. When he uses the term “Christ” he is using the Greek term for the Messiah who is promised throughout the OT as the Savior of God’s people, Israel. Consider this one description of the Messiah and of his rule from Ezekiel 34: “I will place over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he will tend them; he will tend them and be their shepherd. I the LORD will be their God and my servant David will be prince among them. I the LORD have spoken. I will make a covenant of peace with them… They will know that I am the LORD, when I break the bars of their yoke and rescue them from the hands of those who enslaved them. They will no longer be plundered by the nations, nor will wild animals devour them. They will live in safety, and no one will make them afraid.” To be a Gentile is to be without this promised Savior and to be outside his protective care. To be without Christ is to have to live in fear and terror, ruled over by enemies, vulnerable to the ravages of wild beasts.

Second and following upon the first, to be a Gentile is to be outside the commonwealth of God’s people, Israel. Since you are without the Messiah, David’s son who will rule over the kingdom of God, Israel, then you are outside of God’s kingdom. You have no country, no security. You are a homeless refugee in a war torn land. You are at the mercy of Satan, his demons and the sin and misery of which he is the author. You are like the Kurdish people after the first Gulf War. They were not citizens of the U.S. or its allies and so could not leave their own country. Therefore, after Saddam Hussein had left Kuwait they were at his mercy. They were forced to flee into the mountains. To remain in their villages was to be wiped out by the dictator. They had no defense, no one to help them. They were defenseless refugees. That is the condition of every Gentile, non-Christian.

Third, every Gentile non-Christian is a foreigner to the covenants of the promise. The promise that is being referred to here is the promise God made to Abraham and to all his descendants that he would be there God, they would be his people, he would dwell with them and give them their own country where they would live forever in peace and prosperity. It is the promise that Israel would be the greatest of all nations and would come to rule over the entire planet. It is the promise that they would be God’s treasured possession, forever. It is the promise of a secure future. Every Gentile, non-Christian is outside of this promise of God. The future for the non-Jewish person who is outside of Christ is a dark and dismal future. God has made no promise to them. There is no security, no hope of a bright and glorious future. Rather there is only the fearful expectation of judgment and eternal destruction as they are outside the promise of God.

Then, at the end of v.12 and in v. 13, Paul describes the condition of being without Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise as hopeless, God-forsaken and far away. It is to be like the person living in a refugee camp on the border of Liberia, which has been in the throes of a civil war for over a decade. Your homeland is destroyed and there are fierce and cruel soldiers who rule over you. You only live at their discretion. You live in a continual state of fear and despair with no way out. You have heard of the life of ease and plenty and peace that exists in the U.S. However, you have no hope of ever reaching this haven of security. You are far away in a hopeless, forsaken condition. No one cares about your situation. No one has any interest in helping you. You have no way to communicate with or to influence the government of the U.S. to rescue you out of your situation and bring you into the safety and prosperity of its borders. This is the situation of every non-Jewish, non-Christian in the world.

There are over five billion non-Jewish, non-Christians living in the world. Very few of them would describe their situation in these terms. Most would protest if you described their life in this way. They don’t feel hopeless, God-forsaken and far away. It matters little to them that they are without Christ, excluded from Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise. So, who is right, the apostle Paul or the vast majority of human beings? The vast majority of the world is like the person who has cancer but who has not developed any of the symptoms of the disease as of yet or his symptoms are so mild that he thinks he has the flu. He hasn’t been to the doctor yet to get the test done because he feels fine. Yet, the fact is that the deadly disease is growing and is going to kill him unless he gets to the doctor in time and gets the disease diagnosed so the treatment that will cure him can be administered. Every Christian knows that this was their condition prior to becoming a Christian. Paul wants every Christian to remember this was our condition so that we will be grateful for what God has done and trust his promises for the future.

 

Belonging to the church of Jesus Christ is the best thing that could ever happen to you because…

•  To not belong to the church is to be without hope

•  And because…

II. Christ died to create the church (vv. 14-18)

After describing the condition of every Gentile non-Christian as being excluded from citizenship in Israel you would think that the solution to the problem is to figure out a way to become Jewish. However, that is not the answer that Paul gives. That is the answer that the Jewish nation has always given to the Gentile world. If you want to be near to God and be a recipient of the promise of God, then you must become Jewish. It is what the Jewish religious leaders told Jesus and what they told the early Christians. The Jews are God’s chosen people and only by becoming Jewish can you come under the protection of the Messiah and gain the safety of the city of God and the glorious future that God promises to her. However, the coming of Jesus Christ revealed that the popular understanding of the OT by the Jewish people was wrong. They missed the point of the OT, which is the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus told the Jewish leaders, “You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life… Your accuser is Moses, upon whom your hopes are set. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?” Paul, in vv. 13b-18 describes how Jesus has made it possible for Gentiles and Jews to gain the promises of God.

He begins his description of what Christ has done by fixing our attention upon the death of Jesus in v. 13. It is the cross of Christ that stands as the center of God’s bringing homeless refugees into the security of his eternal city. How is it that the blood of Jesus Christ, which he shed upon that Roman cross almost two thousand years ago, brings near, we who were far away? The first thing to notice is that Paul does a very subtle thing between vv. 13 and 14. Verse 13 is addressed to the Gentile Christians in the church at Ephesus. But notice in v. 14 he says that Jesus himself is our peace. Who makes up the “our”? It is Gentile and Jewish Christians. Immediately Paul wants to communicate what he hinted at in v. 11 when he adds the little comment about circumcision, “that done in the body by the hands of men”. The way to come near to God, to gain Christ, to become a citizen of God’s community and an heir of the promise is not to become Jewish but to enter into what Christ has done. God has done something new in Jesus for both Gentiles and Jews.

In vv. 14 and 15 Paul describes what Jesus has done by his death on the cross that makes him to be “peace” for both Jews and Gentiles. (You will notice that the word “peace” shows up four times in vv. 14-18 and the condition of peace is also expressed twice in the language of Jew and Gentile becoming one, in the language of reconciliation of verse 16 and in the language of both Jew and Gentile drawing near to God in v. 18.) The way that the death of Jesus makes peace between Jew and Gentile and between God and man is by destroying, doing away with the law. (This is a bit of an oversimplification but when you seen the term law, I want you to think of the Ten Commandments.) In v. 14 and then again in v. 16 the law is seen as that which creates hostility between Jew and Gentile and between God and man. It is the law that is the fence which keeps Gentiles from belonging to the people of God and which keeps both Jew and Gentile from being at peace with God.

Before we see how Christ’s death does away with the law we need to consider how is it that the law erects a fence of mutual hostility between Jew and Gentile and between God and humanity. The death of Jesus makes peace between warring parities: Jew/Gentile and Humanity/God. Throughout the OT the primary thing that separates the Jewish people from all the other nations of the world is that God gave to the Jewish people his law. On Mt. Sinai, God delivered to Moses for the Jewish nation the Ten Commandments and all the rest of the law that would govern Israel as the people of God. Moses in the book of Deuteronomy expresses the uniqueness of the gift of God’s law when he says, “And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today?”

What happened to Israel, however is that they did not pay any attention to the purpose for which God gave them his laws. They presumed that because God gave to them and not to any other people his laws that they were automatically in God’s favor. They used the possession of the law to prove that God loved them and hated everyone else unless they would become Jewish. You see this quite clearly in the OT prophets and in Jesus’ discussions with the Jewish religious leaders. In Romans 2 Paul challenges this presumption of favor by telling the Jewish nation, “It is not those who hear the law who are regarded as righteous in God’s sight but those who obey the law who are declared righteous.” The possession of the law caused Jewish people to look down their noses at everyone else and to treat Gentiles like “uncircumcised dogs”, one of their favorite racist descriptions. Gentiles for their part have despised the Jews with the same intensity. The history of the world is full of stories of the persecution of the Jews by Gentiles. Hitler is only the most notorious of a long line of Gentile persecutors of the Jews.

However, the law not only creates hostility between Jew and Gentile but it also creates hatred between all human beings and God. The law causes God to justly hate us because he is our Creator and the righteous judge of the universe. His law is the expression of what it means to live a good life. His law is the expression of his purpose of human beings. Every human being, every day violates, on purpose God’s laws. Like the perfect Judge that he is, he doesn’t play favorites. Jews, who have the law and Gentiles who don’t have the law are all guilty before him and under the penalty of his wrath. Again as Paul says in Romans 2, “But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath when his righteous judgment will be revealed. He will give to each person according to what they have done… There will be trouble and distress for every human being who does evil, first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.”

Not only is God justly angry with us because of his law but also we are unjustly angry with him because of his law. Human beings, by nature hate God and his law. Imagine you are in a conversation with a Moslem and say to him, “God says, ‘you shall have no other gods before me’. Allah, the god you worship, is not the God who exists, who is a Trinity. You worship a false god.” How will most Moslems respond to this statement? They will become furious. They hate the command to worship the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who is the only God who exists. Imagine having a conversation with a young man who is living with his girlfriend. You say to him, “God says, ‘you shall not commit adultery.’ Jesus said that every form of sexual immorality, including having sex before marriage is a violation of God’s command. God hates all who do wrong and you are doing wrong.” How will he respond to God’s requirement that he not have sex with his girlfriend? He will become furious. He hates God for commanding him to not have sex. Imagine having a conversation with a neighbor who is telling you how horrible another neighbor is. You say to him, “God says, ‘you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.’ Gossip and slander are a violation of that command. God hates all who gossip.” How will your neighbor respond to your assertion? He will become furious. He hates God for telling him to not gossip. The law creates a mutual hostility between every human being and the God who gives the law. No good judge loves law-breaking criminals and no criminal loves the law or the judge who enforces the law. (I know that in each of these scenarios we would be told that God doesn’t really hate those who were false gods, have sex outside of marriage or gossip. People would say they are angry with us, not with God. However, the fact is that God does hate all who break his law and their anger with us is evidence of their anger with God.)

Notice that Jesus, by his death destroys the law as the fence of hostility that separates Jew from Gentile. How does he abolish it? By his death he shows that having the law or not having the law does not in any way affect your standing with God. You are not automatically a part of God’s safe and secure kingdom because you have the law and you are not automatically excluded from God’s city if you don’t have the law. Rather, acceptance with God is through the death of Christ on the cross. From God’s point of view the possession of the law is the greatest distinction within the human community and if the possession of the law does not give you an inside track, then no human distinction is of any consequence in determining who is “near” and who is “far”. Jesus, by his death, destroys the power of the law to condemn us and he destroys every human pretension to be on the inside track in relation to God. The cross is the great leveler of human society. The cross of Christ puts every human being on the same footing. All are sinners and all are in need of a Savior. No other human distinction matters. The cross eliminates all ground for human pride and prejudice.

Notice at the end of v. 15 the reason Jesus breaks down the law with the hostility it creates between Jew and Gentile is so that he can make Jew and Gentile into one new humanity. He makes a new community, the church, in himself through his death. He destroys every possible reason for human pride by destroying the power of the law to condemn or to justify. He doesn’t make Gentiles into Jews and he doesn’t make Jews into “super-Jews”. He makes both Jew and Gentile into members of his own body. He makes them into a new community, the church.

Notice that it is this body, this new man, which he reconciles to God. He makes peace between this new humanity and God. He makes it possible for both Jew and Gentile to come into the very presence of this God whom we have offended, but who has now become our Father. Both Jew and Gentile become the ultimate insiders by the death of Jesus. There is no other way to gain the Messiah, to become a part of God’s people, to become an heir of the promises. Rather than being hopeless and God-forsaken, every person, both Jew and Gentile that is in Christ is in the most hopeful and God-loved position by being a member of the church.

 

Belonging to the church of Jesus Christ is the best thing that could ever happen to you because…

•  To not belong to the church is to be without hope

•  Christ died to create the church

•  And because…

III. To belong to the church is to know God (vv. 19-22)

What Paul does in vv. 19-22 is begin to unpack some of the amazing privileges that have come to all who have become part of this new community. Please don’t miss that while each of us experience these benefits personally, yet they are benefits that come to the entire people of God. There is no distinction among God’s people. All of us have the fullness of all these benefits. Pastors don’t have them more than lay people. Men don’t have them more than women. Jews don’t experience them more than Gentiles. The college educated don’t possess these privileges more than those with high school diplomas. Every human distinction is obliterated in the experience of all that God has done for us in Christ. The first thing he says, in v. 19, is that we are no longer homeless refugees but have been made not only citizens of God’s country but actually members of his own family. It is like the Liberian refugee, living in the filth and despair of the refugee camp has not only been granted U.S. citizenship but has also been adopted by President Bush and has moved into the White House. Where he used to sleep under a tattered piece of plastic he now sleeps in heated and air-conditioned serenity. He used to eat scraps of bread and a cup of rice each day. Now he can have whatever he wants, prepared by the most gifted chefs in the world. He used to live in fear of his life, now he is surrounded by the best security forces in the world. If you are a Christian, this is what has happened to you. You have been taken out of the most frightful situation imaginable, without hope and without God in this sinful world and made into citizens of his country and members of his very own family. This happened to you not because of anything you ever did or because of who you are but as a free gift through the death of Jesus Christ destroying the law and the hostility it creates.

In vv. 20-22 Paul shifts his metaphor to describe another aspect of the new condition that every Christian now enjoys. He describes us as a new building, a dwelling place of God, as the temple where God is known and worshipped. There are several things to note about this new building. First , all the verbs are passive, though its hard to show that in the English translation. What that means is that this building is being constructed by God, not by man. We are merely the bricks in the building, we are not the builders of the building. God is the one who is building the church, not man. The success of this enterprise does not depend upon us. As Jesus said in Matthew 16, he will build his church and the gates of hell will not be able to stand against it. Second , the church is being built upon a foundation. The cornerstone of that foundation is Jesus Christ. The cornerstone of the building is what determines its shape and it stability. It is the first stone laid and every other stone must fit in line with it. Notice that the apostles and prophets comprise the rest of the foundation of this temple God is building. This refers not so much to the people as to the message they communicated. The church is founded upon the Word of God that the apostles and prophets spoke. The only church that exists is the one that is built upon God’s word revealed in Jesus, through the apostles and prophets.

Third , notice that his temple, the church, is the place where God dwells on earth. Heaven touches earth in the church and only in the church of Jesus Christ that is built upon him and his apostles. Paul is picking up all of the OT pictures of the temple as the place where God is encountered and known. Consider this prayer of David’s from Psalm 27. “One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.” God promised the nation Israel that he would dwell among them in the temple. The temple was the place where he “put his name.” If you wanted to know God and worship God you had to go to the temple. Now, in Christ, the church is the temple. We don’t worship the temple, we worship God in the temple. We don’t worship the church, we worship God in the church.

All that can be known about God can only be known in the church. God only reveals himself in his beauty, majesty, and love in the church. When we gather Sunday after Sunday, God is present here in ways that he is present nowhere else on the planet. This is true of every local church as it is gathered upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone. If you want to know God, you have to come to church. You must be vitally joined to the church. While vv. 20-21 are talking about the universal church of Jesus through the ages, Paul shows in v. 22 that you cannot be connected to that universal church without being connected to a particular, local church. Every local church is a dwelling that God is building in which he lives by His Spirit. In all of our goofiness and weakness and sinfulness, God is present among us by his Spirit. He is revealing in us, among us, and through us the glory of his majesty and of his power and of his love. He is not doing this anywhere else. All who refuse to be vitally connected to God’s church through a local church are refusing to be connected to God. Here is the reason to persevere in living with this difficult group of people gathered together here. You come to church, you develop relationships with other members of this church because you want to know God. You don’t want to live as a homeless refugee any longer. You want to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord in his temple, the church of Jesus, the Messiah.

 

Belonging to the church of Jesus Christ is the best thing that could ever happen to you because…

•  To not belong to the church is to be without hope

•  Christ died to create the church

•  To belong to the church is to know God