Ephesians 3:6 - Denigrated denizens no more!

"...to being the nations [are] co-heirs and co-body members and co-sharers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the Good News..."

-So, the precise point that God was revealing to the apostles and prophets - trying to get across to them, these custodians of the early church - was that yes, other nations (goyim) besides Israel were including in God’s promise of salvation in Jesus Christ.  In 21st century western (Gentile) Christendom, this seems like a no-brainer, a universally-accepted truth, but not so for the Jewish mind.  God pretty much had to twist their arms to embrace the (other) nations, in fact, as accustomed as they were to thinking of non-Jews as being unclean, unacceptable, and excluded from God’s purposes.  To a Jew, God only had use for a Jew, or at least that's how their spiritual sensibilities had evolved.  There was no place for an uncircumcised Gentile (i.e. filthy idolatrous pagan) among God’s people.  The best a non-Jew could hope for was to receive circumcision and begin to observe the law of Moses, and even then they would not ascend to the status of one of God’s chosen people.  Good Jews would have no dealings whatsoever with despicable goyim (which is the Hebrew word simply meaning nations but which had taken on rather pejorative connotations over the centuries), those denigrated denizens of the rest of the world.  And this is precisely what we see as the early church began to spread its wings and spread out from Palestine - those first Jewish believers carried the Gospel only to Jews.  The dramatic breakthrough came when God had to force one of the apostles - Peter, their leader to be exact - to go to the home of an unclean and despised Gentile in order to bring him and his household the Good News about Christ (Acts 10.9-20, 10.34-35, 11.2-4, 11.17-18).  Only by repeated direct revelation was God able to convince Peter to first go, and only when He poured out His Spirit on that household of Gentiles and manifested sign gifts through them was He then able to convince Peter that He fully intended to included the Gentiles in the assembly of God’s people.  The Lord subsequently used Peter to initially convince the leaders (apostles and prophets) in Jerusalem of this, and later used Paul to confirm and clarify His plan to include the Gentiles in the Church, on which the entire leadership subsequently signed off (Acts 9.15, 13.46-48, 14.26-27, 15.1-29 - especially Act 15.28).

-Same inheritance, same body, same promise - every way that God chooses and blesses the nation of Israel He now chooses and justifies and blesses those of every other nation, all through faith in Christ.  There is no longer any distinction between Jew and Greek or anyone else for that matter (Acts 15.8-9; Romans 3.21-24, 10.11-13; Colossians 3.10-11).  No dividing line, no tiers or levels of acceptance or benefit, no separation or division - Christ is indeed all, and in all.  Or should be.  How the heck are we doing?  This whole same-body thing is so messed up, so fractured.  Perhaps it was inevitable that as the Church grew and assemblies multiplied out of practical necessity that within certain more populous locales you would find different assemblies developing along ethnic lines due to custom and language, etc.  Nevertheless, so many unnecessary divisions within the body of Christ.  But I digress.  Gentiles are in, everyone’s in, case closed.