Ephesians 2:19 - More than just a meeting

"So therefore no longer you [all] are strangers and aliens but rather you [all] are fellow-citizens of the holy ones and family-members of God.”

-There is a new citizenship, a new national identity, one which trumps temporary earthly nationalities and ethnicities - those in Christ are now citizens of Heaven, they belong to God’s country.

-But it’s not just a new country.  It’s a new family.  The word here is oikeios.  It refers to an oikos, a dwelling where a family dwells (think of a rather large extended family!), and the oikeios refers to those who dwell there as part of the family.  This is God’s house, His home, His family, His clan, His people, into which centuries of goy were forbidden any access or part whatsoever.  Fast forward to the called-out-people under this new covenant - the predominance of Gentiles in this assembly in Ephesus were now part of God’s extended family.  Before, they were aliens, strangers, non-members, but now they belonged, they belonged to God’s family.  forever!  They had a permanent seat at the dinner table of Heaven, a place in paradise, a room with their name on it.

-And yes, it is a family... to many, their experience of ‘church’ is just a meeting, or perhaps like some kind of a business or civic club, where they spend part of their time and derive some personal benefit.  Or perhaps they view it as a team, where there is some level of mutual cooperation for the furtherance of some stated goal.  But these approaches all have one thing in common - whatever connectedness exists is sporadic, seasonal at best, part-time relationships which result in partial impact and incomplete transformation.  But family - family is enduring, constant, loyal, rootedness, faithfulness.  Family is acceptance which is unconditional.  Family is warmth and love.  The world is dying to see a family, desperate for more than a meeting and a creed, not compelled in the least by formal ritual and cold polite handshakes, its curiosity barely piqued by slick preachers and fancy programs and new buildings.  They want real, authentic relationships with people who really care, who accept them without precondition and who will journey with them through thick and thin.  They say blood is thicker than water, but ours is a family whose lifeblood is thicker still, flowing from the veins of almighty God, coursing through the lives of His children whose hearts beat to the rhythm of His Spirit.  God’s household, what we call "the Church", is a forever family, with doors and hearts that are open, open to our neighbors and to the nations, ready to love and embrace any and all who would believe.

Ephesians 2:18 - When 2 x 1 equals 1...

"...since through Him we are having the approach the both in one Spirit toward the Father."

-Everybody now, Gentiles and Jews, those who were far away and those who were in the neighborhood, now approach God together, and together in one Spirit through Christ make it all the way...!  And don’t miss the Trinity sighting!  Jesus - God the Son is the Way, God the Father is the Destination, and God the Spirit is the catalyst, the impetus, the unifying force.

-Two groups, one Spirit, resulting in one body.  Which gives us the equation, (1+1)x1=1.  In fact, you could put any number you want in those parentheses, any number of otherwise disparate groups or individuals, and the Holy Spirit will make them one.  In math, there is would be what is called the Inverse Property of Multiplication, and, like that mathematical expression, in a sense the Spirit does flip the natural order of division on its head.  The same Holy Spirit Who indwells each and every person who truly trusts in Christ is indeed the supernatural unifying force between believers and between otherwise disparate groups of the same.  History, ethnicity, race - all temporal differences and relational roadblocks are made of no effect by the Spirit of God.  And to be sure, there may be no greater divide than that which grew up (and which still exists outside of Christ) between Jews and Gentiles, since by very definition the latter group is defined simply as those who are NOT the former, the distinction becoming extremely important to the Jewish people, going back for almost as long as the very beginnings of nations themselves.  With a one-of-kind culture derived from an exclusive long-standing religious tradition, and a parallel strict prohibition against racial intermarriage, the ancient divide emanating from Jews towards Gentiles and back again is long-standing and wide.  The divide seems rather a non-starter in modern day Christendom, dominated as that is by Gentiles who have grown up with post-holocaust sensibilities (altho there was a time when even some well-meaning Christ-followers could have held onto a strain of anti-semitism against the ones who "killed Christ"), but it was quite real in Paul’s day, and today is still very real to most who are of the seed of Jacob aka Israel, having been widened and exacerbated by centuries of additional subjegation as well as occasional genocide on the part of Gentiles, even those in the guise of Christians (think the ‘holy’ Crusades and Hitler’s ‘final solution’).  But this divide of divides (and all others) is totally abrogated and superceded by the Holy Spirit.  There is no divide too wide, no wall too high, no rivalry too ancient but that the Spirit does not difuse the hostility and overflow oneness and unity and love in its place...

Ephesians 2:17 - Glad tidings!

"...and having come He evangelized peace to you [all] to the [ones] far and to the [ones] near."

-Paul here quotes Is 57.19, but the whole section is tremendous (Is 57.15-21): 

For thus says the high and exalted One 

Who lives forever, whose name is Holy, 

“I dwell on a high and holy place, 

And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit 

In order to revive the spirit of the lowly 

And to revive the heart of the contrite. 

“For I will not contend forever, 

Nor will I always be angry; 

For the spirit would grow faint before Me, 

And the breath of those whom I have made. 

“Because of the iniquity of his unjust gain I was angry and struck him; 

I hid My face and was angry, 

And he went on turning away, in the way of his heart. 

“I have seen his ways, but I will heal him; 

I will lead him and crestore comfort to him and to his mourners, 

Creating the praise of the lips. 

Peace, peace to him who is far and to him who is near,” 

Says the LORD, “and I will heal him.” 

But the wicked are like the tossing sea, 

For it cannot be quiet, 

And its waters toss up refuse and mud. 

“There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked.” 

-No, there is no peace for the wicked, they know no true peace, but this Evangel, the Good News which Christ came to proclaim and procure is all about peace - peace not only between God and man but also peace between these two disparate groups - Jew and Gentile.  Peace with God, and peace on earth - this is the message of the Advent, is it not, the Coming of the Promised Peacemaker whose birth was announced by a mighty chorus of angels?  Shalom, lasting, everlasting peace and overall well-being to those who have been near to the life and promises and blessings of God, AND also peace to those who are far from Him.  They are far away both religiously, and also geographically, as we are talking about the entire earth to the ends of the earth, to the distant islands, to places and peoples who have never heard, who need to know the Way of peace.  Peace, peace - peace today, in this moment, and forever.  Glad tidings of comfort and joy for those in desperate need of peace, whose hearts and spirits are sorrowful and humble, creating lips overflowing with praise, all peoples united in one group, one body in a great chorus of praise to this One Who is high and exalted...!

Ephesians 2:16 - World peace

"...and [that] He should reconcile the both in one body to God through the cross, having killed the enemy-hatred in it..."

-Good news!  God Himself has removed the barrier between God and man as well as between Jews and Gentiles.

-The instrument of nullification, with which God abolished the Law?  The cross.  Both the ultimate representation of Roman (think Goy) imperial occupation and power, and a brutal, bloody, horrific symbol of torture and execution.  Fast forward a couple millenia and it’s a long-standing symbol of reverence and worship for multitudes who trust in God’s Messiah.  And again, it is Who was crucified that makes all the difference.  This ancient means of punishing criminals beame the locus for punishing the collective crimes of humanity against God.  God Himself laid our many many crimes on His own Son, and allowed the guilty to execute the Innocent One Who stood (and hung) in our place.  But such perfect irony, that God would choose such a glaring figure of the age-old enemy-hatred that existed between Jews and Gentiles, a cruel Roman cross, one which during that time had been used to torture and execute many Jews and to ultimately help keep them in subjection - God chose this symbol of the enemy-hatred on which to kill the enemy-hatred.  Perfect.

-And so God actually put to death the enemy-hatred.  He killed it when He killed His Son.  The crimes which separated man from God - and the Law which highlighted them - now no longer even separate humanity from itself.  Note that the Law itself was not killed - the enemy-hatred was killed.  The Law was not abrogated or repealed in any way - it has been fulfilled.  Jesus both lived into and fulfilled it perfectly, and then perfectly filled up every divine legal requirement for justice in order to bring us all (back) to God.  And thus we have reconciliation.  To reconcile, to restore friendly relations between, to cause to coexist in harmony - in this case, a dual reconciling, where Jews and Gentiles now have been brought together to coexist harmoniously in one body, and altogether all the nations as one are restored to friendship and fellowship with the God Who made them.  Shalom.  Breathtakingly good, glorious (and potentially global) peace.

Ephesians 2:15 - THE New Deal

"...the law of the commandments in ordinances having abolished, in order that the two He should create in Him unto one new man making peace..."

-Paul here pinpoints the actual cause of the enemy-hatred which existed between the Jews and the Gentiles:  The Law.  It was the Law.  God gave the Jews the Law, more than 600 commands in fact, and that made them better - in their eyes.  Special.  Cleaner.  Cleaner in God’s eyes than the other nations (providing they actually kept the Law).  The word ‘clean’ is used 198 times in Leviticus alone.  And as if being chosen by God didn’t already make them more special, the fact that He entrusted His Law to the Jews only made it moreso (cf Romans 3.1-2).  They were doubly chosen by God, called out to be His people and the sole recipients of His Law.  Ultimately they proved completely incapable of fully following it in its entirety (as was to be expected) - but two out of three is still pretty good.  Thus we have a fertile seedbed not only for extreme ethnocentricity but also for religious bigotry which naturally devolved into the kind of enmity which was never a part of God’s original plan.  Unfortunately the more the Jews tried to pursue a relationship with God through the Law, the more they kept themselves aloof from Goyim and related to them as religious inferiors, the more they were subjegated and persecuted by the nations, the greater the enemy-hatred grew.  But at the heart of this divide was the Law.  Even in the hardest times, knowing they had God’s Law, knowing they had the only known way to try to be clean in God’s eyes still reinforced everything.  But in truth what they were suffering from was a bad case of spiritual pride and blindness...

(Some commands in the Law were far easier to keep than others as a matter of habit.  So for example, God said to the Jews, don’t eat pork - it’s dirty, and it makes you dirty.  So we can just eat beef or chicken, no big deal.  Everyone who eats pork is dirty.  Oh how dirty are the Goyim who eat pork.  We never eat pork - we’re not as dirty as they are.  We’re cleaner.  We’re better.  And so on and so forth ad nauseum.  But the sad truth is that no one is able to keep the whole law and all are hopelessly dirty, filthy rags at best (Isaiah 64.6).  How about the greatest command in the whole Law - love the Lord with all your heart (Deuteronomy 6.4-5, repeated 9 more times in Deuteronomy, restated throughout the OT, and finally reiterated by Jesus Christ Himself, cf Matthew 22.36-38)?  Throw in the second one to love your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22.39-40) and the case is close-ed.  Each and every person on planet Earth falls so far short on just those two that we wind up only talking about degrees of moral filth and culpability.  One single command is all it takes (James 2.10).  No, the law doesn’t remove dirt.  It highlights dirt - or at least is intended to - and the need for a Savior, the Ultimate Dirt-remover!  Thus the need for a new covenant, a new arrangement between God and man... THE New Deal!)

-Imagine then how Paul's next words might feel to a self-respecting Jew: in Christ, through His blood, God ABOLISHED the law.  Really, He nullified it, this thing which was both the spark and the fuel on the fire of the enemy-hatred to begin with, the Law which made the Jews think they were even more special, cleaner than the all the rest.  Technically He fulfilled the Law in Christ, but in nullifying the enemy-hatred, God has made the two groups - Jews and Gentiles - into one new people.  He has created a new ‘man’ if you will, a spiritual body, an entirely new group of people where there is no difference between Jew and Goy, none whatsoever at least in so far as it relates to relating to God.  Not all good news to the Jews, this?  Definitely a hard pill for many of them to swallow, at least on a religious and social level.  But to the nations?  Cause for celebration!  And it really should be that for the Jews as well.  Because we are talking about a way for all the nations to finally glorify the God of Abraham.  That, and peace, peace on earth (Luke 2.14), Shalom, the peace in which all men aspire to rest, a real and enduring peace and place of total well-being, both between God and man (all people) as well as between people, individuals, tribes, nations - beginning right here.  Peace between Jews and Gentiles.  No more reason to hate each other, look down on each other, distrust each other.  Now Paul does an excellent job elsewhere in Scripture of unpacking how God has not entirely nullified His special relationship with Israel, but that is for another day.  For now, we’re focusing on peace...

Ephesians 2:14 - Better than Coke

"For He Himself is the peace of us, the [One} having made the both one and the middle wall of the fence having removed, the enemy-hatred in His flesh..."

-Yes, it’s about two groups being brought together and made one.  And the one group only existed as a group because they were the ones excluded from God’s family, whereas now they are no longer excluded.  Collectively those referred to by the Jews as ‘Goyim’ were many peoples, but they had one thing in common - God did not choose any of them.  They had many languages, many customs, many beliefs, but no knowledge of God and no hope.  God initially made the nations at the Tower of Babel, confusing the languages and scattering the peoples throughout the earth from there.  Then as part of the first covenant, God chose the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to be His people, a new nation, His nation (goy) - one that would bless (with a distinct call to do so in fact) all the other nations/goyim (Genesis 12.2-3, 18.8, 22.18, 26.4), one that would help the world know what God was truly like (Psalm 67.4-7).  What happened instead is that the relationships between Jews and non-Jews went straight downhill.  Things became politicized, militarized, adversarial.  Self-righteousness reared its ugly head, and the Hebrew word for nations - Goyim - came to refer to all non-Jews in a derogatory sense.  Jews looked down upon the Goyim, disrespected them, saw themselves as being better since they were supposedly so in God’s eyes.  Standards of ethical treatment did not always even apply towards Goyim.  Contrary to the edict to bless the nations, the prevailing perspective came to be such that self-respecting Jews were not actually supposed to have any dealings with Goyim - never go to their homes, never eat with them, walk around their region if you can, and never associate with them.  And gentiles returned the favor of mistrust and mistreatment with regularity.  This is one practical reason why Jesus was ultimately rejected by the Jews as Messiah - the Jews wanted a zionist Messiah who would deliver them from subservience to the dirty rotten Goyim, one who would defeat the Gentiles and kick them out of the promised land God had only given to His chosen people.  They wanted Jesus to clean out their country, clean out the Gentile riff raff, not clean out their temple.  They would never embrace a Messiah who would make peace with the Goyim, much less let Himself be killed by them or bring them wholesale into the fold.

-And so into this racially-charged divide plunged Almighty God, the consummate Peace-maker forging an unlikely peace between two parties who had come to hate each other going back hundreds of years.  God sent an emissary, an Ambassador of peace - His only Son, to blow up the barrier and create peace where there was hatred and hostility.  Christ removed the barrier separating the two.  That’s what He does - He removes barriers of separation.  Barriers of personality, of economic disparity, of racial diversity, of familial disharmony.  Remember that peace is not simply absence of war or conflict.  We must harken back to the Jewish concept of shalom.  It is overall well-being and harmony, completeness.  Peace on earth - announced by angels at His birth (Luke 2.14), that is why He came in the first place.  World peace, peace and harmony - an elusive Shangri-La, this.  Many seek it, some promise it (the old Coke jingle would have us believe that Coca Cola could somehow produce it), but only Jesus actually delivers.   In Christ, in the Prince of peace Himself, both groups, all the peoples of the earth will be finally brought together in real and deep abiding shalom towards one another as well as towards their Creator.

Ephesians 2:13 - The price of admission

"But now in Christ Jesus you [all] the [ones] formerly being far came to be near in the blood of Christ.’ 

-But now...  Complete transposition.  We were far, now we are near.  We had no hope.  No God.  We were strangers to the promises of God, excluded, having no place among God’s people whatsoever.  But now...all that has changed.  Now we have hope, we have God, we have His tremendous promises, and now we are members, we belong to His people, no longer excluded.  We are near, and we are in - and it is all because of Jesus Christ.  We are in the club, so to speak, and the price to join, the membership fee if you will, was paid by Him.  The fee was not waived.  He paid it - in blood.  His blood which He shed on the Cross made all the difference.

-Yes, blood.  This was the price of admission.  Blood is the life of all flesh (Genesis 9.4), and it is the only way to atone for sin (Leviticus 17.11, Hebrews 9.22).  Where you have transgression against deity, there must of necessity be some payment for that to make amends - assuming that deity is holy and just and omnipotent.  Which of course in this case He is.  But what we see in Scripture is that from early on, God began showing the world how HE was going to be the One to make this atonement.  HE was the One Who killed one of the animals He created (shedding that blood in effect) in order to make suitable clothes for Adam and Eve after THEY transgressed against HIM (Genesis 3.21).  Then it was the blood of the spotless lamb by which the destroyer passed over (Exodus 12.13), it was the blood of a bull and a goat which would temporarily and imperfectly atone for the sins of the high priest and all Israel (Leviticus 16.11-19).  These rituals, though imperfect (Hebrews 10.4), were to be repeated every year in perpetuity in order to prepare God’s people (and the nations really) to embrace the Messiah HE would eventually send to make the perfect once-and-for-all atonement for the sins of the world (cf 1Peter 1.19, Colossians 1.20, Romans 3.25).  O the blood, the o-so-precious flood, crimson flow, makes me white as snow.  Nothing.  Nothing else, nothing but the blood of Jesus could accomplish and secure my rescue.  However - it turns out that this passage is not as much about me personally - it’s about the integration of two groups of people into one.  Paul continues on this in the next verse...

Ephesians 2:11-12 - The way we were (redux)

"Therefore, you [all] be remembering that formerly you [all], the nations in flesh, the [ones] being called uncircumcision by the [ones] being called circumcision, in flesh [being] hand-made...that you [all] were being at that time without Christ, having been alienated from the citizenship of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and godless in the world.’’

-A command to remember something means we are apt to forget it, when keeping that something in mind will actually help us.  Here Paul tells (us) Gentiles to keep in mind that at one time we were not part of God’s chosen people, not part of His family.  The way we were.  Remembering the way we were helps us to appreciate where we are, as well as what has been accomplished in order to bring us to this different way-better place, helps us to be grateful for and even humbled by the work which was done as well as who did it.  The way we were - the point of that old song is that the hard stuff tends to fade from our memories, we forget the bad and the ugly or gloss over it, but when we do we lose the understanding of how hard or bad off things really were.  And to be sure, we were without Christ, far from the life of God, no access to Him whatsoever.  In fact we had no real god and had no real hope.  We perhaps lived under a delusion of hope, possibly devoted ourselves to some false idol, but it was emptiness.  We were aliens, strangers, completely shut off and shut out from the blessings and promises which God gave to His people.

-It’s interesting to note how Paul here shines a light on the historical distinction between Gentiles and Jews.  For hundreds of years, only one group of people enjoyed any kind of a real relationship with the one true God, and it was marked by the rite of circumcision, the physical cutting off of the foreskin of every male 8 days after their birth.  Only the Jewish nation did this as part of demonstrating that they were God’s people, a part of His family.  At the time Paul wrote this, some of the distinction still remained in that circumcised Jews were still calling the other nations ‘uncircumcised’, but the distiinction had been rendered surface only.  Physical circumcision was now something which man did with his own hands, relevant only to the ones who prided themselves on having been circumcised.

-One might ask if a delusion of hope, a false hope, might actually be a better or more preferrable state than having no hope.  Being hopeless.  Paul says we had no hope.  For many people, up to their necks in brokenness, life is indeed hopeless.  They feel hopeless.  But I think false hope is a far worse state, because you are apt to be less (or totally) unaware of your neediness.  You may have no clue as to the desperate nature of your situation.  When I am hopeless I am far more likely to reach out for help, driven out of desperation to find a remedy.  Which is exactly what Christ did...

Ephesians 2:10 - Greetings, Good Work-lings!

"For we are what He made, created in Christ Jesus upon good works which God prepared before, in order that in them we should walk.’

-Those who thus trust in Christ and follow Him are created FOR good works, not BY good works.  God Himself prepared these good works before we ever heard of Christ, and He intends for His people to be living a life characterized by these good deeds, yet they are not means of grace but rather by-products of it.  But wait,  there’s more...

-The Greek word here for ‘workmanship’ is the noun form of the verb ‘to make/do’ (poieo).  There multiple nouns in the Greek actually.  There is the one who is doing the making - that english word is ‘maker’ (poietes).  And then there is the thing they are making (poiema) - but we have no English noun for this, at least not one which derives directly from the verb.  We have ‘to do/doer/deed’, but not a noun for what is made (so, a doer does a deed, but a maker makes a ____?).  But in this case, those who believe are clearly having been made by God Himself - we are "what He made" - twice, in fact!  Those who believe are His creation (where incidentally English does have all three words - create/creator/creation-creature).  They are what they are because of what God did - again, not because of anything they did.

-Note also that while most English translations use the phrase "created UNTO good works" or "FOR good works", that is not what it says in the Greek.  One would expect a different preposition (the Greek word eis) for that.  But the word Paul uses is epi - meaning "above" or "upon".  When refering to creation, it means the place where the Creator creates His creation, where He intends it to live.  God created man upon the earth (Isaiah 45.12) - as His creatures we were meant to live on, to inhabit the earth. (the very first command God ever gave to man speaks to this - Genesis 1.28).  But now in this instance, God has (re)created those who believe in Christ UPON good works, intending for His people to live ON good works, to inhabit them, to live into them and fill them up, which is exactly what Paul says in the next phrase - "in order that we should walk in them".  The meaning is essentially the same, but the word picture is certainly more nuanced than what we get in the English.  It is not just what we do, it is who we are.  It is our life.  It is as if God pre-formed this planet named Good Works, and He breathed the breath of spiritual life (His Spirit) into so much spiritual dust and formed those who believe in Christ Jesus to live on planet Good Works.  We are now Good Work-lings.  Good works are our life, they are where we live, we live into them, inhabit them, and fill them up.  It is as much about identity as it is about function, if not moreso.  And again, good works are not any kind of rocket ship that takes us to the planet - they are the skin in which we live having now been born upon that world.  They are not the means to the destination - they ARE the destination.  Or part of it, at least...

Ephesians 2:9 - The way back

"...[it is] not out of works, in order that not anyone should boast."

-Man’s default posture in relation to deity is one of works, trying to curry favor with whatever god we believe we have to do by whatever means we believe to be necessary.  Atheists and skeptics generally excepted, of course.  But the native instinct of fallen man is to try to work his way back to paradise.  For all his hiding and hurling, he wants to get back to the garden, and he assumes it is on him.  Generally be a nice person, throw in some good deeds for favor, and (hopefully) you’re good to go.  For those who are convinced that there is some greater being who has at least some level of authority over the things that concern them, the way to relate to said being is by trying to do whatever good works are perceived to be required in order to cultivate right standing in their eyes or otherwise appease them.  Whatever it takes to make them happy.  Or at least to not make them angry.  But it's all on me.

-One inevitable byproduct of such a system is the tendency for man to ‘broaden his phylacteries.’  In other words, to show off to my fellow man how successfully I am performing the prescribed good works within whatever religious system I happen to be operating.  Fallen man in his insecurity desperately wants to feel better about himself in relation to deity as well as compared to his fellow man.  No doubt there is no end to the ways we might invent to cast ourselves in a better light, to show off our progress and relative superiority to those around us.

-None of this in true Christianity, however.  It’s all out the window (or is supposed to be).  Turns out there is not one good deed we can do, not a single thing we could ever do to help effect any rescue from the eternal consequences of our sins or otherwise do anything to improve our standing in the eyes of our Creator.  He is the One True God, and He is holy beyond compare or comprehension.  Totally perfect in every sense, and His standard is perfection.  You are perfect, or you fall short - there is no middle ground, no degrees of separation or some sliding scale of spiritual progress.  A level playing field, this.  And it is readily apparent that there is not one work (or any combined amount of works) that anyone could ever do to attain the moral perfection required to get back to paradise.  The way back is through the foolish-looking narrow door, simply to believe - in Jesus.  He is the Way, the only Way.  For those who do make it - based solely on the gracious gift of God through Christ - once there, there will be no boasting, no bragging about what he did or she did to get there.  No, all who make it back to paradise will be fully aware that they had nothing to do with it.  All they did was believe, and theirs is a completely unrepayable debt of gratitude.  Unending celebration, yes, but boasting - no way.