Ephesians 2:21 - On building a NOT-a-building...

"...in Whom [the] whole building being fitly framed together is growing unto a holy temple in [the] Lord..."

-No ordinary building, this.  A holy temple, set apart, wholly other, unique and special and sanctified, clean, pure, undefiled, a remove-your-dirty-shoes kind of place where God puts His Name and where He is present, where people can learn about Who God is, what He is like, where all the nations of the earth can see and access and worship the one true God.  And yes, scattered throughout the Old Testament, are glimpses of a holy place of worship which serves as a beacon to all the peoples of the earth (Micah 4.1; Isaiah 56.7, 2.2-3; 1Kings 8.43).

-Indeed, the entire universal Church of Jesus Christ is one big temple, a place where worship and celebration can (should) be found and where God is present, where He has caused His Name to dwell, where the nations can come to glimpse and learn about God - or should be able to.  Any unbeliever should be able to show up at any localized expression of this Temple and get a glimpse of what God is like and how to know Him.  The building and framing process is still happening, the Master Architect has a master plan which He is steadily carrying out, more and more people and peoples are being added in and all the more in these last days, people from every nation tribe and tongue, from all walks of life with all kinds of backgrounds and abilities, and each one is gifted in various ways to join in on this magnificent mother of all construction projects.  But again, the Church is NOT a building, not some physical edifice manufactured with human hands, with hammer and saw and chisel.  It is a living entity, a growing assembly of the redeemed, of those who have bowed the knee to Jesus Christ and in whom His Spirit now lives and reproduces the very life of Christ.  This is true for both the worldwide Church as well as the localized expressions thereof.  And the raw material which causes the growth and which holds it all together?  Neither nails nor screws nor any kind of earthly gorilla glue - it's love.  The love of God which those who have received from Him manifest to one another.  Build well today...!

Ephesians 2:20 - Blood, sweat and tears...

"...having been built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, being [the] cornerstone Himself Christ Jesus...”

-No brick and mortar edifice, this.  We’re talking heart and soul and real flesh - and real blood which was poured out in order to begin building this house that is the family of God.  

-And of course for these readers there was no brick and mortar whatsoever.  Theirs was to meet in homes.  Yes, they were perhaps in many cases small enough to pull that off, but they were also poor enough and persecuted enough that building a building was neither practical nor wise.  Not to say that what they had was better but for them it was all about people.  People loving people, people reaching people, people who need people.  For us, the modern western Church, it tends to be more about buildings and programs.  And the preacher.  Preacher does the heavy lifting while we watch and listen.  Or until we find him wanting and find ourselves a better preacher with a better program.

-But to the point, we have the foundation of this family home being built on the backs of the apostles and the prophets - their blood and sweat and tears, their lives, and their words.  Most commentators tend to agree that these are New Testament prophets, by the way.  But what these guys did was drive the growth and expansion of the body of Christ in the first century after He was crucified, beginning with Christ as their jumping off point and carrying on through the enabling of the Holy Spirit.  They are our example, and their words - aka God’s Word delivered to us through them - is our spiritual milk and bread and meat (along with the Old Testament too, of course).  And most importantly there is no other starting point than Christ.  He is the Chief Cornerstone, the first and primary brick that must be laid in the heart and life of every would-be believer and assembly.   It is said that the ancient traditions associated with the laying of cornerstones for buildings or temples included the offering of a sacrifice which would be buried under the cornerstone and whose blood it was believed would give strength and stability to the entire building.  In this case it really is the blood of Christ which He Himself offered up that kicked off the entire enterprise to begin with.  He it is Who both inaugurates and perpetuates this new household of faith, this new temple, this new way even to enter in.  There is no starting without Him, no growing or continuing apart from Him.  Yes, progress in the Christian life begins with Christ, and is fueled by God's Word and by being in community (i.e. doing life) with His people.  How are we doing?

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...