Address—D. Buchanan
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I'd like to continue with Ephesians.
We didn't finish chapter one, but we'll have to go on to chapter 2.
Like to begin reading with chapter 2 verse one. And you hath he quickened.
Who were dead in trespasses and sins.
Wherein time passed, ye walked according to course of this world, according to the Prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.
The apostle Paul here goes back after describing the councils of God unfolding it to us and then making this wonderful prayer that they, the Ephesians and all of us would lay hold of it. Let it get ahold of your soul and this is our desire that.
The known established fact of what God has done and purposed for each of us is going to take place one way or another.
You know, I remember.
Speak Hearing of a Saint of God who was on a course of departure.
And a brother came along and spoke to that person.
Reminding them that he was not. This person was not going to get away.
And that the Lord was going to always have the last word in his way with that person, and it exercised that person so much that he he returned to the Lord.
You know, young people, God is going to have his way with us no matter what.
Let's not give him a hard time about it.
He's going to have his way. But now where we started reading, he goes back and reminds them of where they came from, goes back and tells us what he started with.
Dead sinners.
This is different than the book of Romans. In the book, in the book of Romans, you have the believer or the one that's struggling there for deliverance. He's alive in his sins. He hasn't been delivered. He hasn't seen himself completely rid of his sins and of that sinful nature, and he's miserable.
Richard And that's what happened to it, to us when we get occupied with what our flesh, what our Adam nature can produce and trying to deliver ourselves from that.
You know, death isn't all bad.
Death does something that I don't know if anything else can do.
It's very permanent. Our brother warned us faithfully about it last night in the Gospel. It's so solemn and it's so real.
But there's one thing it does. It stops sin, definitely.
You've never yet seen a dead man sin.
That's why Christ died. That's the end there of our Adam life.
So go out here starts with dead sinners and quicken. Quickening means simply imparting life, giving life.
Something that's dead and imparting life quickening it makes it alive. God.
Doesn't use anything of the 1St man.
In bringing us into His purposes and counsels. Blessing as sons to know a relationship with Him.
He starts out with dead things, dead people. Of course it's spiritually dead here. It's there's no fruit for God, there's no life for God. That's the sense here of being dead.
If you if you remember in the Gospels on some on several occasions.
When there were sick people that were brought to the Lord, even in the case of Lazarus.
The people thought, well, as long as there was still some life, they could call the Lord and he could come and heal that person. But if they cross that threshold of death.
All it would be too late. You know, that's our that's the natural tendency of our heart.
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But it's just the opposite with God.
He purposely waited in Lazarus case four days.
Because he wanted to show and prove to the world and to those dear Saints that he had the power over death.
And so if you go back to the first chapter, might just go back in the 20th verse and notice what it says.
Ephesians 120.
Which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead and set him at his own right hand in heavenly places. This was the beginning of this new creation that God was putting into order to take and be with him in glory, the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. That's when this new creation began of which we now partake.
And every every dead Sinner that turns to the Lord Jesus.
To be saved and receives that new life is born again.
Receives.
Of what? The Lord Jesus?
Did when he died and rose again. And so when death comes in, it does not stop the life that we have in Christ. It's actually it was the beginning of our existence, death, because it that resurrection comes in. And so in the new life, dear, dear fellow Christian, death can never touch him.
Never separate. We have enrollments, no separation. It's it's already passed that event.
That Jesus died and rose again, and we partake then.
Of the resurrection life. And so he goes back and says he quickens dead sinners. Verse 2, wherein in time past you walked according to the course of this world, according to the Prince of the power of the air. That's Satan, that's that heavenly that that that's evil spirit that is there seeking to hinder that.
Souls enter into the heavenly blessings of God's.
Purpose for you and me. You know Satan always opposes.
The work that God is doing.
And when God chooses to take a people up into heaven, then that's the ones that Satan is going to attack.
And so that's why he's looked as the Prince of the power of the air.
The spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience, that's.
We are not free moral agents to choose.
As we wish, and maybe we think we are if you don't know the Lord Jesus as your Savior.
You're not free, you're not out there just doing only what you want. You are a puppet being controlled by a power that is dominant over you. And be careful, dear young Christian, to think that.
Just because we have been protected in Christian homes from doing some of the things in the in this list here that you don't have a nature that if let go, if God would let you go, that's the course you would go down. Never say I would never do this such and such a thing.
Because that is really a denial of.
Improper estimate of what you are or are not capable of doing.
When we read these verses, it ought to make us thankful we've been delivered from this kind of a course, and this is the very kind of people that God has chosen to work with.
The ruined ones, the most destitution. And that's what we had in the first chapter about the riches of his grace.
If God wants to show how rich his grace is.
Take two people. One of them here has a certain amount of nobility, or a certain amount of worth or goodness in his Adam nature, and another in his totally bankrupt and destitute and ruined. Now which one of those two, if you show favor to, will display the most grace?
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Picking up the one that's destitute, ruined. That's why God has chosen to save sinners, because it magnifies the riches of his grace.
So we don't need to be ashamed of that past in a certain sense.
That is that as if it carried over to us now. No Count it for what it was, what it really is, before God ruined.
Filthy awful.
But a thing of the past.
And so in verse three it continues, among whom also we all had our conversation.
Just because we have been sheltered by Christian parents from being brought up in an environment as many here, perhaps not all have been.
Dear, dearly beloved, doesn't mean that that's where we would have been had God not intervened. Maybe with our grandparents or our parents or our great grandparents. What's a great thing to be sheltered from that kind of a life?
But it doesn't mean our hearts are any different. We're all 500 pence debtors, as a brother said, and let go. That's what we would have been. The grace of God has kept us.
Children of Wrath.
Even as other the wrath of God, just because God is showing favor and grace to certain ones in the world A to all really doesn't mean that his character of holiness has changed one bit. He's just as angry with the wicked as he ever was, even though he preaches the gospel the grace of God.
To reject that leaves one under the wrath of God.
Well, that's what they were. They've been. They were delivered though.
Verse four but God.
A contrast here. Oh, it's nice to get to this part of the chapter, but God.
God is the author of all this. He's the one that's changed that. He's the one that started this whole plan.
Who is rich in mercy for his great love, wherewith he loved us even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ. By grace ye are saved. It's only in Christ. And that's why we magnify Him. And that's why it's important to lay hold of what he has done and who he is. Because.
All our future, all our present standing depends on.
What he is before God and what He has done there to satisfy God about our past.
Mercy. God is rich in mercy. Mercy is great in that it looks upon the need.
Of those who are lost and destitute.
Grace is great in that it gives according to the heart of the giver, in this case God.
God, in showing grace, doesn't lookout and see what kind of need we may have and then pull out of His storehouse and give according to that. That's mercy. When God looked down and saw us so destitute, He was merciful to us, and He poured out of His great mercy to us because He saw how bad we were.
That's, that's wonderful. But Grace says, oh, I have this tremendous storehouse of wealth and blessing and love that I want to pour out. Where can I do it? And so he goes, and according to his own heart of love and goodness, he just indiscriminately goes out, as it were.
Or maybe not indiscriminate, but he goes out and pours it out on those.
That will receive heaven. That's grace. We have both as believers, wonderful God who is rich in mercy.
Even when we were dead in sins hath quickened us together with Christ we have life. By grace ye are saved. So you have mercy and grace both here verse 6 and hath raised us up together and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. And so you have these, these dead sinners, these lost destitute beings.
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Brought.
And made to sit together in heavenly places in Christ.
Not just given a place here on earth a blessing. That's not our proper hope.
It's wonderful to have a time here where we have these conveniences and a nice camp and good food, clothing, good weather and all these things for this life. Those are mercies of God. They come from the Lord too. He gives them, but they're not are what we really are, true life or what we really what is really ours, all these things that we enjoy.
That are really temporal.
Our temporal mercies, their cares along the way. He doesn't, God didn't.
Choose out of people and say now I'm going to take them and they're going to sit with me in glory for all eternity to behold the glory of my Son the Lord Jesus. But in the meanwhile, while they're here on earth waiting until I come and take, I'm just going to leave them off to my own. No, the Lord didn't say that. He doesn't do that with his children. He cares for us along the way.
But our real portion and let's not get too short sighted and justice because the Lord is good to us.
And, you know, there's a lot of young people that don't have the nice things, that we have a long life, they're poor. And if there's somebody in here that thinks that they're being ensnared by these things and the Lord had opened up the way, I'd suggest you go off to a country where they don't have these things and witness.
How God takes care of the poor and the destitute of this life, and the mercies along the way of this thing, and find out first hand that these things, though good in themselves, are not really our life.
Christ is our life. Heavenly things are ours. We are made to sit there.
And we can enjoy this to a certain amount even now. We don't have to wait until the Lord comes.
He's unfolded enough for us to enjoy some of those things.
It's already ours. It's just to surely ours, as if we were already there.
Verse seven that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. Now we have the future, the ages to come, or I believe this is really the millennial age. I believe it would connect up with the 10th verse of the first chapter where you have.
In the dispensation of the fullness of times, he might gather together in one all things in Christ.
And so the Lord is going to take his people then and make them a display in that in that age to come.
Of his grace.
We are going to be on display as those witnesses testimonies to what Christ did and how He brought a people there and made them his own.
I just like to connect that with our contrast that with the verse in the third down in the third chapter, in the 10th verse, just just to kind of couple these two verses together because you in in in our in our.
Seventh verse, we have what he's going to do in the age to come, but let's read the third chapter in the 10th verse to the intent that now not the age to come.
Unto the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.
Might be known by the church or through the church, the manifold wisdom of God. That's something, beloved, that's going on right now. There are heavenly hosts that are looking down on this world and seeing what God is doing and gathering a people together in Christ the church. And this is the mystery of God, what he's doing.
And they are observing.
The manifold wisdom of God. The multi colored wisdom of God.
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There's a I don't know if I can quote it fully, but there's a hymn we often sing in the gospel come to Jesus calling, I think, and one verse says come for Angel hosts are musing or this sight so strange God beseeching man refusing to be made forever. Glad you know the angels are looking down and seeing how the gospel is being preached and sinners are saved.
And when they see.
A human that is presented with this tremendous offer of mercy and grace that doesn't cost anything, that's given out freely because of Christ. They are astounded to see that anybody would reject it.
They've never been made that offer and they never will get it if they're fallen in their nature.
They will never have that opportunity, but you and I have it.
And so they, those heavenly hosts now in what God is doing, they now already at this moment in chapter 310, they are learning the manifold wisdom of God in what he is doing with us.
In the future it's going to be put on display and the whole world is going to see it, I believe.
Back to our chapter.
Verse 8.
For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves. It is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast.
Not of works. We began speaking about dead sinners.
And here we learn that there is no place.
For works in this.
Our hearts are so deceitful into thinking that we can add something or gain some favor before God.
In that he would be disposed to bless us.
No, it's not that way. By grace, are you saved through faith? Faith itself even isn't some way of.
Love of man himself, that would.
Help to get what God is offering.
It's by faith, and anything that's by faith, it can't be by words because they're contrasted. They're the opposite in a certain sense.
Faith is just simply the hand that reaches out and takes God for what he says and accepts it and believes it. And that's how we become saved, just accepting God for His word. And that faith in itself really even came from God.
It's wonderful that he would do that with us.
Not of works, lest any man should boast. There's no room for glorying in any of this thing. He's going to have all the praise. There's not going to be one there in glory that's going to add anything to what Christ has done to get us there or to keep us along lifes way.
How wonderful it is then to distrust Him about our lives. And I really think this ought to help us, you know, in our problems of life and the struggles and in the tests that God allows us to happen.
Just to trust him more than you trust your own senses about things. Maybe you look out and you see certain problems in your life or some things you you don't know how to resolve, or you don't know how it's going to end up and you're worried about it.
If God knew how to plan this whole thing out.
And to fulfill it and get it done, can't we then just trust him about the outcome of it and lean on Him for his guidance through our problems? I really feel that's a great victory for us.
Verse 10 For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained, that we should walk in them.
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We are his workmanship. He's done all this to save us, to make his his own. This is the new creation. This is the born again Christian.
It's his workmanship. He's done it. He's given us this new life, and it's for the purpose of good works. It's for the purpose that we would glorify Him and fulfill what nobody had fulfilled in all those past 4000 years of different kinds of trials.
God always wanted that out of man. He hasn't changed the standard, but what he's done, he's taken out the props and the helps that he gave to the old man, the 1St man, and he's given a totally new life.
That life, the life's to please God, the lights to do his will. He did a good job when he converted us, when he gave us a new life. It's a perfect life. It never sins, we read in first. John can't sin.
Born of God.
Still have the old nature though, don't we? And that's about all they can do.
Which God hath before ordained, that we should walk in them. That is, He always wanted this out of man, and in the Old Testament he gave, and he delineated out in 10 commandments.
And so the following verses that speak about.
The difference between the Jews and the Gentiles. These Gentiles had never been put under the law and all these ordinances that were given to help them to try to produce what God wanted out of them.
Now he sets all that aside, and so you have a lot of.
Religious jargon, I'm going to call it.
About the.
And I don't say that disparagingly about the past ordinances.
In the following verses.
Verse 11 Wherefore remember that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncirculated uncircumcision by that which is called the circumcision in the flesh, made by hands, that was part of the ordinances that God gave.
To Abraham and to his seed, to distinguish and mark them out as the separate people, to try to get fruit out of them, to try to help them the best he could find, do what he had desired from them. But these were Gentiles, the Ephesians, and they hadn't.
Been under any of those things, they were even farther off and away from God.
They didn't even have a known relationship with God, probably other gods.
But the true God.
Verse 12, that in that time you were without Christ being aliens from the Commonwealth of Israel and this and strangers from the covenant, covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in this world, just totally way out there, far out lost, deprived aliens, no access to God, no relationship with God in any way.
These are the ones that God chooses.
To take and to bring into blessing.
Verse 13 But now in Christ Jesus, ye who sometimes were far off.
Are made nigh by the blood of Christ. Now this is the Gentiles.
They're brought into relationship with God.
Made nigh.
It's a wonderful thing to be near God in a proper relationship.
When you're near the Lord and you see yourself as Christ has forgiven and made you, you can be comfortable in God's presence in all His Holiness.
Through by the blood of Christ.
Verse 14 For he is our peace, who hath made both one, that is, Jews and Gentiles. Now there's no difference in them, because the Jew, he never attained anything.
By all the those ordinances that were given. And so now God is setting all this, is setting all this aside and that was hard for the Jews to give up all those things. And I think we noticed in Christianity Today that same tendency to always go back to things that would culture and help the atom nature to become better.
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More pleasing to God.
That's what all those ordinances were for.
But as we noticed.
Those people that were under those things rejected, totally rejected the Lord Jesus Christ, the perfect man here on earth, and he died under the sentence of their wish. Away with this man.
God is righteous now in setting all that side and saying now.
All those means and helps. They weren't of any use.
I got to set it all aside. Now man has proved himself totally the bankrupt in every way, and so all those things are set aside, but it doesn't mean that you can't get saved. No, he actually, and throughout the book of Acts, after those things had been set aside, he says to the Jew first. So often he gave even the Jews the first chance that salvation after the Lord Jesus was risen.
But he didn't stop there. He wanted to make it free to all. And so that's how we come in.
And so there's no distinction anymore whether you're a Jew that had received all those ordinances and favors and blessing and they were near to God. They had a relationship with God, at least externally, and there was a way of approach and God came down and Welt among them.
But the glory soon had to be taken away. Couldn't go on there.
And so now you have all made one no distinction anymore.
You have the testimony that in the day of Pentecost.
It even goes back farther than the covenants of Abraham.
It even goes back as far as the dispersion of the Tower of Babel on the beginning of the nations that were formed, because on the day of Pentecost, even though there were many different nations, there about 14 different nations and tongues that they spoke languages, they all spoke and heard or heard each one in his own. That was a testimony to them that God was beginning something that passed all those.
Of distinction called nations and tongues or languages.
And he was forming one body out of many different ones, and there was number distinction anymore.
An undoing of what took place, The tower of Abel when the nations were first formed. It's wonderful.
One church, one people.
For the Lord.
It could only be that way because it's nothing of ourselves, but it's all of what Christ makes us. That's why there can be no there's why there is no difference anymore like in Romans, for there is no difference for all have sinned. They're all. Everybody's reduced to 1 low common denominator.
Bankrupt, lost Sinner. Therefore God is not unrighteous.
In Blessing.
Indiscriminate to all if he chooses.
Verse 14 For He is our peace, who hath made both one, both Jews and Gentiles, and has broken down the middle wall of partition between us. That is, the Jews were a separated people, and there was, as it were, a wall of distinction, and they couldn't eat, and they wouldn't eat in pride of their heart with Gentiles, because they looked down upon them as an inferior people, the ones who weren't.
In relationship with God, and to a certain extent rightly so, if they had attained to A to a measure of righteousness before God through all those covenants and relationships that God had established, but when all they ever did was break the law.
What good is it? Was it to them? It only condemned them. And that's all the law ended up ever doing. It never made anybody righteous. Nobody ever attained even the first base, as it were, before God.
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Through those means, so God does away with it all now. No distinction, nothing to separate these different peoples.
Oh, how wonderful that He does that, beloved, so He can bring us into blessing.
Having abolished in his flesh the enmity, there was enmity, There was feelings between those, those different ones. You find it in the book of Jonah. Why wasn't it? Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh.
They were gentiles.
He had a pride of race.
Beloved, there's no room for pride in any of us before God.
It's been his grace that has made us what we are.
And that it's.
The rejection of Christ has brought all that down.
It came tumbling down, it ruined itself when they rejected the Lord Jesus. And he's done away with it all, but he's making one new man in Christ, and so everything we have is in him. Verse 16 and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body, by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby, and came and preached peace.
To you that were a far that far off, and to them that were nigh the Jews.
Four verse 18 For through him we both have access by 1 spirit unto the Father.
Now, therefore, ye are no more strangers and foreigners.
That fellow citizens with the Saints and of the household of God. And so in these last verses we have the household aspect of the church, the body of Christ brought out. And whenever we think of a house, we think of the place where there's a where there's administration, authority, conduct, rule. And so the church here has looked in that in that view.
We're brought into this close relationship with God.
No longer looked at as a Gentile or as a distant nation, but of the household of God. No longer a foreigner, a stranger, somebody far off from God with no relationship. No, we're in the very closest relationship that can be made that'll ever be made with man and God, the family of God.
The household of God, fellow citizens with the Saints, no distinction anymore of nationality were made one in Christ. And so you go off to a foreign country and you meet a believer and you feel just like the same family. You are the same family. You may have different cultures and speak different languages, but there's a bonding, there's a oneness there.
One family in Christ.
Then we have the basis of it in verse 20, the foundation that the apostles lay Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone. God used the apostle Paul and the others to to lay the groundwork of all this. And that's why I believe Paul was so burdened to be able to get this out because he realized the importance that believers.
Know what God was doing and the relationship that He wanted to bring them into.
With himself.
And there's many other aspects of it too. Here it's the House of God. The foundation is the apostles.
And prophets, that is God used them to lay the groundwork of this. They didn't have the New Testament at that time. The apostles and prophets laid it out and they traveled around by word of mouth. They explained these things to the new believers and that that, that that basis, that foundation has never changed.
For all the ruin and everything that comes in, and the unbelief and division and problems.
God hasn't had to readjust the basic principles of Christianity.
No, they're still the same as they ever were, and they'll never have to change them.
It's a dwelling place.
We had we didn't touch on it in verse in chapter one. We had the ceiling and the earnest of the spirit. That is an individual thing. The moment one believes he sees all these, that's this. That's this approval of God, the stamp of approval on a believer and the earnest is that is that down payment or that promise of what is yet.
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Unseen.
The future of the glory. But here we have the the in the last verses, the dwelling place of God.
By the Spirit. Well, let's just read the last two verses. In whom are all the building fitly framed? This is the church together groweth unto the holy temple, and holy temple in the Lord, in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God.
Through the Spirit, this is the collective indwelling of the Spirit of God in the house to take charge and to direct collectively amongst all. And so you have the two kinds of two different ways. The Spirit of God is down here individually indwelling each believer. They're sealed and they'll never leave them, he says in John, but collectively he's here to guide and direct. And that's one reason, for example, we don't have so.
Of the human ordinations and directions in our assemblies, it's the Spirit of God that directs, and we ought to always give him liberty, and he will occupy us with what we need and of Christ, and he will direct. He's present, and we don't need to.
Supplement Him with human things and systems to make this thing go on to the end. Those are detriments to the real function of a proper house or a proper family and the relationship with our God. How good that God dwells among us.
May the Lord bless His word. Let's close his prayer.