One in Christ

A Sermon on Ephesians 2:11-16

11 Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh -- who are called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made in the flesh by hands --
12 that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from 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.
14 For He Himself is our peace, who has made both one, and has broken down the middle wall of separation,
15 having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one new man from the two, thus making peace,
16 and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity.

What's the solution to the Palestinian/Israeli struggle? Is it some sort of giant containment wall? Perhaps yet another treaty that won't be worth the paper it's printed on? Given the tremendous burning hatred between these two groups, is there any solution other than genocide? Or how about the Kosovars and the Serbs? They've been at each others throats for literally hundreds of years. I could go on and on naming rival ethnicities, Hutus and Tutsis, Turks and Armenians, Indians and Pakistanis, Spanyards and Basques.

Can anything put a permanent end to the enmity that exists between these groups?

Yes. There is one thing and only one thing that can end the enmity that exists between members of these groups; The Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now please don't misunderstand me, I'm not preaching liberal Christianity here. This isn't a "can't we all just get along" message. And that certainly isn't what Paul is talking about in his letter to the Ephesians, he's not saying we all need to just give everyone a Coke, join hands, and sing "Kumbaya" in perfect harmony. But he is talking about real reconciliation between irreconcilable parties, in and through Jesus Christ.

Paul is writing to the churches in Ephesus, a large Greek, or Hellenized, city in Asia minor - modern-day Turkey. The racial make-up of these churches was very different from the churches in Judea or Galilee. The vast majority of the people in Ephesus were not of Jewish extraction. They were Gentiles and they had been raised in families that didn't worship God or read the Law and the Prophets, they were raised amongst a people who worshipped pagan deities – Zeus and Diana, and even the Roman Emperors. They were raised on myths and legends, and it's likely that a good percentage of them were simply either superstitious or atheistic.

It's a situation which isn't all that different from our own society today. I'm struck as an ex-pagan myself at how pervasive Wicca (that is to say witchcraft) and the occult are amongst young people right here in Fayetteville. I can't tell you how many bumperstickers indicating that the driver is a Wiccan I've seen, and Chaplains tell me that now Wicca is even spreading amongst the military population on the post. As someone who was very familiar with all that, I don't find the idea that our nation is being defended by witches to be all that comforting.

Superstition is also as rampant in our culture today as it was in ancient Ephesus. We see it in the psychic hotlines, the horoscopes, the Eastern Mysticism and so on. And we too are awash with worldly atheists. The difference between our nation and Ephesus though, is that the Ephesian society was pre-Christian while ours is post-Christian. But we too are rapidly becoming a society where all too many families don't worship God or read the Bible. And as the Word of God is being thrust out of our society, it isn't that we are ceasing to believe altogether, its that now we'll believe anything.

But take heart, there's no reason to despair. Not only do we know that Jesus has triumphed over the world, the flesh, and the Devil, and that He will surely return at the end of this present evil age as He has promised, we know that Paul and the apostles were ministering in a society similar in so many ways to our own. And we know that under their ministries the Gospel spread like wildfire, so that their enemies called them men who have "turned the world upside down" in Acts 17:6.

That same Gospel that changed the lives of so many in their time, can and will change the lives of countless multitudes in our own time, because it still goes forth with God-given power to penetrate stony hearts, to bring the spiritually dead people to life, and to call them to faith in Christ Jesus.

That's the miraculous thing that Paul is reminding the Ephesians of in these verses. He reminds them that they were not raised in Jewish families. They weren't born into the visible church of their age. At one time, Paul's Gentile readers had neither the Word of God, or the Promises, nor even Circumcision, the sign of the Covenant.

On the contrary they were despised by the people of God, and called the "uncircumcised ones" which pointed to the fact that these were not the people of God. They were without Christ the promised Messiah, and they had no hope. All they had were delusions.

They were, as Paul puts it in the Greek Atheoi, from which we get our English word Atheists. They were without God, and consequently without hope. They were estranged from God, His enemies, and under His wrath and curse.

But God is a God of abounding mercy, and His only begotten Son Jesus was not the Savior of the Jews only but of the Gentiles also. Jesus died on the cross not only for the sins of elect Jews, but for elect Gentiles as well. He died for the sins of men from every race, and nation, and tribe, and time. And then he sent His disciples out with the great commission telling them to "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations."

Through the blood of Jesus, these Gentiles who were once far from God, strangers to the Covenant and the promises, were brought near. As Paul says in Romans 5:1 "Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ". They are now as fully saved, and as truly the people of God as any Jewish believer in the Old Testament. They even have the new sign of the Covenant Baptism, applied to them to show that they are members of the visible church.

They have been reconciled to God. The blood of Jesus has brought peace with God, and the irreconcilable parties, God and sinners, have been reconciled by Christ's perfect atonement. But when Paul speaks of the middle wall of separation being broken down by Christ. He isn't speaking of the division between God and man, he is talking there about the division between Jews and Gentiles. In Christ, there are no longer the old walls of division between believers. But through His sacrifice they are all now one in Him. As it says in Gal. 3:26-29:

"For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise."

What Paul was saying, that in Christ all believers were one, was as radical a concept, if not more so, than the idea that God and Sinners could be reconciled. You'll probably remember from the Gospels that the boast of the Pharisees of Christ's time, was that Abraham was their father. They were saying that they would inherit the promises of God because they had been born Jews. But what Christ and the Apostles answered them is that a man is not Jew who is one outwardly, but that it was the heart that mattered.

Simply being ethnically Jewish and physically circumcised did not make you an heir of the promises made to Abraham. That is why Paul wrote in Romans 2:28-29

"For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God."

Although the Ephesian Gentiles were not ethnically Jewish or physically descended from Abraham, through Christ they had become heirs of all the promises made to Abraham by God. Through faith in Christ, they had become inheritors of the promised Kingdom of God and coheirs with Christ.

But on the other hand those Jews who rejected Jesus Christ, the very Messiah promised by God, and who trusted instead in their racial identity, were as far from being truly God's children as any unbelieving pagan. The very idea that Gentiles could be saved and become Abraham's true children, without first becoming Jews, enraged them. Because of course from their perspective, the Gentiles were the problem!

We've been studying the Gospel according to Matthew in our Wednesday evening Bible Study and one of the frequently recurring concepts that we've grappled with are Jewish misconceptions about the Messiah. As you read the gospels you can't help but see that tragically, many of the Jews of Christ's time did not desire and were not looking for the kind of Messiah who was promised in Scripture.

You see Scripture promised a Messiah who would save His people from their Sins and who would be the Savior not only of the Jews, but of the Gentiles. Isaiah 11:10, for instance, speaks of the day of this coming Messiah: "And in that day there shall be a Root of Jesse, Who shall stand as a banner to the people; For the Gentiles shall seek Him, And His resting place shall be glorious."

No, from the perspective of far too many of these Jews, the problem wasn't their own sin, because they were under the impression that they could actually keep God's Holy Law, and therefore didn't need the forgiveness of God.

The problem they perceived was the Romans, and the Messiah they were looking for was a glorious earthly king like David, who would destroy their Gentile oppressors and restore the earthly glory of the Jewish nation. They weren't interested in a Messiah who was born in a lowly estate, the Son of a Carpenter, who told them that what they needed most was to be Born again, and that through faith in Him they could obtain forgiveness of Sin. They certainly weren't interested in a Savior who died the death of a criminal, being put to death on a Cross. And when the Apostles preached that all believers, even Jews and Gentiles were one in Christ, they responded only with disgust. Can you believe it? One with people who weren't circumcised, who didn't obey the ceremonial law, who ate unclean animals? No, that's not what we want at all! We want ethnic purity and earthly dominion. We want what's coming to us!

God's Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, was rejected by the majority of the Jewish nation, and finally the Jews got tired of waiting for the kind of Messiah they wanted and revolted in 70 A.D. Sadly, they refused the mercy of God and instead they received His judgment. The Romans stamped the revolt out, they sacked Jerusalem, they burned the Temple, and the sold thousands of Jews into slavery and sent many others into exile.

But while the nation of Israel was destroyed, the Church of Jesus Christ continued. And in the churches of Christ Men and Women, Greeks and Jews, Scythians, Barbarians, Slaves and Free men enjoyed sweet fellowship and communion and grew in grace and the knowledge of the Lord. Despite persecution, they endured, and the bonds that united them to Christ and to one another grew stronger. For in Christ they were all One.

Christ himself fulfilled the Ceremonial Law and therefore its observance could no longer be grounds for separation between Gentiles and Jews. Even the outward sign of the Covenant, circumcision, had been replaced by Baptism. There was now nothing outwardly that should divide believers regardless of their ethnicity.

As Christians, even though we dwell here on earth, "our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ." to quote Philippians 3:20. And in heaven, the communion of believers, that we only have a brief foretaste of here on earth, will be perfect. There will no longer be divisions according to nation or race or color or tongue. All of the earthly things that separate us, will be gone forever, even the Sea which physically separates nation from nation will disappear in the New Heavens and New Earth as it says in Rev. 21:1.

Now that doesn't mean we're supposed to become Amish and deny all affiliations with our nation and go off and live in a commune. We are told specifically to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, and to be the best of citizens, serving our nations cheerfully. But we don't ever forget that we are Christians first and Americans or in my case Englishmen, second. Your highest allegiance is to your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and no authority on earth should ever or can ever compel you to disobey him.

That also means – and this is critical – that we shouldn't seek to re-erect walls of division between believers that Christ has forever destroyed. Its said to our shame that "11 AM on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America", but that shouldn't be the case. We have Black Churches, White Churches, Latino Churches, Messianic Jewish Churches, and churches that reflect in their make-up every kind of worldly division imaginable. But that shouldn't be the case! In Christ all believers are one. In Him we have a bond that is stronger than even the bonds of family. We are the family of faith, and we should be preaching a universal gospel, and yet even our church planting efforts are mono-cultural. We actually go out now to plant Hispanic churches or black churches, or even implicitly white Suburban churches, and then we kid ourselves that we are integrated when in fact what we really are is much too comfortable with maintaining ethnic divisions that shouldn't exist in Jesus Christ.

My prayer is that this particular church wouldn't be that kind of church, that we wouldn't be respecters of person or ethnicity. But that we would think of the world in terms of only two categories, the saved and the unsaved, and that we would be doing everything in our power to see that people in the second category are moved into the first. But that will require earnest prayer on your part, because the Devil loves to see us dividing over things that are ultimately meaningless, and then ignoring the things that are truly important for the sake of peace. The sad thing is that historically, we've had churches that are divided by race, but tolerate horrendous theological errors in their body.

Faith in Christ is the only thing that can reunite sinful men too a justly offended God. It is the only thing that can bring the wandering sheep back home to the Shepherd and restore the prodigal Son to his father. And it is only in Jesus Christ that men can be truly reconciled to one another.

In a world marred and torn apart by sin, only in Christ can men of every race and tongue enjoy true peace and communion. In Christ a believing Arab can have fellowship with a believing Israeli, because they experience Christ destruction of the middle wall of separation and an end to the enmity that divides. But my friends, it is only the Gospel of Jesus Christ that has the power to effect that kind of union. And lets never forget, men will never be reconciled to one another until they have been reconciled to God through union with Christ.

I pray that this knowledge will lead you never to put your hope in worldly and ultimately hopeless plans for world union, but that it will instead spur you on to tell people about the only true source of Peace on Earth – the Lord Jesus Christ.

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