HERE opens a very distinct section of the epistle. It is not God’s thoughts of grace unfolded, reaching forth from before the world’s foundation unto the inheritance of glory when all things shall be subjected to Christ, the Church being one with Him in His supremacy over them all. Neither again is it the means whereby God takes up souls that were dead under the power of Satan, and by nature children of wrath, one as much as another, quickening them with Christ, raising them up and making them sit together in Him in heavenly places. We have had this in the earlier part of chapter 2. But now we have the present working of the plans of God in the world. Chapter 1 gave us the counsels of God about them; chapter 2:1-10, the way in which He wrought in them; but now we have the manner of His plans upon the earth. Accordingly, this brings into very distinct relief the condition in which man had been before. There had been already dealings of God here below. After the flood, when the whole world had departed from God, and set up a new form of peculiarly malignant evil—the worship of false gods—the true God called out one man into a place of separation from all others, and made him to be the depository of the promises and the testimony upon the earth. This was Abraham, and Abraham’s seed. Accordingly there it was that from the call of Abraham we find the scene of the workings of God’s power, goodness, and government. But the cross of Christ terminated these trials. God might linger for many years after, as we know, in forbearance, but the fate of the Jewish nation was sealed in the cross of Christ; and from that very moment God began to bring out these much deeper purposes of His love. For the Jewish people, at the very best even, had they been converted and received the Messiah, would never have been more here below than an earthly people. They might have been regenerate, but they would have been earthly. The promises that were so fully and richly accorded them in the Old Testament had to do with the earth. I do not say that they had nothing deeper, or that there was not in the hidden mind of God something outside this present scene. But, I repeat again, they were an earthly people; they had the “earthly things” of the kingdom by the distinct gift of God; and it is in reference to this very circumstance that God declares that His gifts and calling are without repentance. He had given earthly blessings to the Jews, and He had called them out for the purpose of enjoying the land. It is in a condition of glory under their Messiah. He will never repent of His purpose, nor withdraw His gift. But meanwhile the whole history of Israel’s rejection of God has come in; their worshipping of idols, and finally the crucifixion of their own Messiah; and for the time being they are dispossessed of their land, and scattered over the face of the earth.
But during the time of the dispersion of Israel, and even before it began, from the moment that their guilt was consummated, this heavenly purpose of God was gradually manifested upon the earth. But we must remember that the Church, beside being the object of God’s eternal counsels, and having a glorious place in heaven along with Christ, for which we are waiting, has also an existence upon earth, and enters into the dealings of God here below. This is the point at which we are arrived in this epistle. We have had the deeper thoughts of God, but as the epistle does touch upon the ways of God on the earth, we should not have had a full view of the Church’s place if it did not give us the dispensational succession here below. Accordingly we have the elements which compose the Church: “Wherefore remember that ye being in times past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by that which is called the circumcision in the flesh made by hands.” Here we are on totally different ground. It is no longer “children of wrath,” (vs. 3) persons that were by nature one as bad and dead as the other; but here men are distinguished on earth: the uncircumcision on the one hand, and the circumcision on the other. So that you are on earthly ground, the ground of dispensational dealings, where you have God separating one part of mankind from another by His own will; not because the one was better than the other, but for the display of His own wisdom and purpose. The great mass of the Jews were just as bad in the sight of God as the Gentiles; and some of the Gentiles were converted, such as Job, while there were many of the Jews that perished in their sins. But for all that, God did put a difference between Jew and Gentile; and He says, “Remember that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh” (vs. 11). You were among the rest of mankind, left out of the call of God; you were not brought into a place of separate witness for God as Abraham was; you are called the uncircumcision by that which is called the circumcision. “At that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel” (vs. 12). They had no part in the polity of God set up in Israel; “and they were strangers from the covenants of promise.” God gave glorious promises in the form of a covenant, and bound Himself to accomplish them. The Gentiles had no part nor lot in them. There were promises about Gentiles, but none to them. Israel were the direct parties concerned in the promise—they, and they only. And we must carefully remember what these promises meant. They were not made to Abel or Enoch, much less to Adam and Eve, though it is common to speak of the promise made in the Garden of Eden, but Scripture never talks of promise there. And if you examine Genesis 3, you will find the wisdom of God in this, for it could be in no sense a promise. To whom could it be a promise? To whom was it said? To that old serpent. No believer could imagine a promise to him. It was a threat of the extinction of his power. God was judging the sin which had just entered the world, and that is not the time when promises are made. It is strictly a revelation of God, not in the form of a promise at all, but a revelation which comes out in denouncing judgment upon the serpent, and which showed that the seed of the woman was to bruise his head.
“The promises,” then, do not go up higher than Abraham: they are connected with the dispensations of God. It may be asked, Have we not promises? I answer, We have all the promises of God; but how and where? They are yea and amen in Christ Jesus. If we have Christ, we are Abraham’s seed, and inheritors of the promises, though in a way totally differing from that in which the Jews had them of old, or will have them by and by. We come in on the ground of pure mercy, and as outside covenant altogether. There is no such thing as a covenant with the Church, or with us Gentiles. I do not mean that we receive not the blessings that are in the new covenant. We have all that is blessed in it, and better too; but not as Israel. They come under them as subjects of the promises of God; whereas we are sought and reached and blessed by sovereign grace—having a title to nothing, and yet some better thing provided for us. We come in as filling up the gap between the rejection of the Messiah and His reception by Israel by and by; and we form part of this parenthesis rather than the dealings of God here below, in a very interesting manner, as I hope to show. But here the difference is first brought out. He wants us to know what our condition was. We have right to nothing; we have not the smallest claim upon God; we had no such prescriptive place conferred upon us as Israel had through the promises. They had a place even as unconverted men in the world; and the day is coming when, being converted, they will have a signally conspicuous position in the world, an earthly distinction and glory which never was and never will be our portion. Do not suppose that we shall not have far better, but we shall never have such a place on the earth. We shall have one with Christ over all things; but then it will not be while we have our bodies here below. It is in the resurrection-state that the Church’s glory is destined to be brought out, in all its fullness as far as manifested to the world. So that here he reminds the Ephesian saints of what their condition had been as Gentiles: “At that time ye 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” (vs. 12). They had no hope. They were not expecting any divine intervention to deliver them on the earth: they might dream of what people dream still—a perfectibility of man upon the earth. They had no connection with God in the world; whereas the Jews had Him to direct all their movements—how they were to live, and how their inheritances were to be settled—God entering into all their domestic affairs as well as their worship—everything was entirely under the distinct ordinance of God. If they had God thus in the world, the Gentiles knew nothing of the sort. Out of this miserable condition, what are we brought into? Into the position that Israel had? That is treated of elsewhere. In Romans 11, the great point is to show that the natural branches of the olive tree were broken off, that we who were wild branches might be graffed in. The subject here is not the Church, but merely the possession of promises, and the place of testimony to God here below. These are distinct things. Every baptized person—that is, every one who outwardly professes Christ—belongs to the olive. All such have a special responsibility, as not being heathen (nor now Jews), but in possession of the oracles of God, and as bearing the name of Christ in an outward manner. But in Ephesians 2 there is a far deeper line: the apostle treats of the body of Christ and the assembly of God. And we must remember, that at the beginning of Christianity these two things closely approached each other: in other words, the assembly consisted of hardly any other than the members of Christ’s body, true believers united to Christ by the Holy Spirit. But soon individuals crept in, not born of God, and of course not members of Christ, who nevertheless entered the assembly of God. Thus, by a Christian now is meant one who is not a Pagan or a Jew. Hence, in Romans 11, you read of branches being cut off; hence the branches that are grafted in are said to stand in the goodness of God, and warned to continue in it, lest they also should be cut off. It is a question of profession, of its danger, and its sure doom if faithless. But in Ephesians there is no such thing as cutting off, because there the main subject is the membership of the body of Christ. Some now talk of not rending the body of Christ; but there is no such phrase or idea in Scripture. You will find passages that insist much upon the firm standing of true believers, and others which warn of professors coming to nothing of themselves or judged of God. There is no such thought as cutting off a member of Christ’s body. There are solemn warnings to Christians for preserving them from evil, but no such a thing as their insecurity.
Proceeding with the chapter, the positive side of the question appears. The Gentiles did not possess the privileges of the Jews by nature. “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometime were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, who hath made both one,”—both Jew and Gentile, “and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us” (vs. 14). There we have it plainly set forth, that the very institutions God set up in His dealings with the Jews are now cast down. God Himself has destroyed the middle wall of partition. He alone is competent so to do. It would have been a sin for any one else to have attempted it. On the other hand, you will find persons who, in their ignorance of Scripture, will argue that, because God had commanded these things once, He must sanction them always. Nothing can be more unfounded. It is entirely limiting God, and shutting their eyes to the plainest statements of His Word. Throughout a large part of the New Testament God Himself sets aside the Jewish institution, in all its parts. Doubtless there are moral principles that were true before the law—revealed ways of God from the first that always must regulate man’s conduct with God; but these have nothing necessarily to do with the law. Under the legal institution they might be more or less embodied into the law and take the shape of commandments; but their roots lie far deeper than the law given to Moses. It is founded upon this misconception, that when you speak of the Christian’s deliverance from the law, some think you are going to destroy morality, and overthrow God’s holy standard of good and evil. But it does not become us to judge what is most for the glory of God. Humility is found in, and proved by, obedience; and obedience depends on subjection to the Word of God. The same act in different circumstances is a duty or a crime: the only unerring test for the believer is God’s Word. It was a sin in the Jews not to destroy all the Canaanites: God commanded them to do so, the only one competent to judge, and entitled to command of His sovereign will. For a Christian now to do the same thing would be to mistake His mind. The world is bound to deal with murderers as stringently now as ever: God has not revoked in any wise the word He uttered as to the sanctity of human life. That is what God had set up long before the law of Moses, or any distinction between Jews and Gentiles. It is annulled neither by the law given to Israel, nor by the gospel that now flows out in grace to the world. Government among men stands upon its own foundation and was involved in the commission given to Noah; but the Christian is outside and above it all. He is called unto a new calling, and this we have here. “Now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ” (vs. 13). Our task is not the preservation of the world’s order or the punishment of its disorder; but a new building grows up on the blessed, holy, divine ground of the blood of Christ, by which we are brought nigh to God. Nor is it only what we shall be by and by, but what we are now. We are made nigh by the blood of Christ.
Nothing can be more distinct, “For He is our peace;” (vs. 14) a most wonderful expression. Our peace is not merely a thing of enjoyment within us, but it is Christ outside us; and if souls only rested upon this, would there be anxiety as to fullness of peace? It is my own fault entirely if I do not rest in and enjoy it.
But even so; am I to doubt that Christ is my peace? I am dishonoring Him if I do. If I had a surety whose riches could not fail, why should I doubt my standing or credit? It depends neither on my wealth, nor my poverty; all rests on the resources of him who has become responsible for me. So it is with Christ. He is our peace, and there can be no possibility of failure in Him. Where the heart rests upon this, what is the effect? Then we can rest and enjoy. How can I enjoy a blessing before I believe it? And I must begin with believing before I enjoy. The Lord in His grace does give His people betimes transports of joy; but joy may fluctuate. Peace is or should be a permanent thing. That the Christian is entitled to have always; and this because Christ is our peace. He is not called our joy, nor God the God of joy, but of peace, because He Himself has done it; and it rests entirely upon Christ. “He is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us” (vs. 14). There prevails a notion (unknown to the Bible) that Christ was making out our righteousness when He was here below. Now the life of Christ was, I do not question, necessary to vindicate God and His holy law, as well as to manifest Himself and His love; but the righteousness that we are made in Christ is another thought altogether—not the law fulfilled by Him; but the justifying righteousness of God founded on Christ’s death, displayed in His resurrection and crowned by His glory in heaven. It is not Christ simply doing our duty for us, but God forgiving my trespasses, judging my sin, yea, finding such satisfaction in Christ’s blood that now He cannot do too much for us; it becomes, if I may so say, a positive debt to Christ, because of what Christ has suffered. It is not seen that the law is the strength of sin, not of righteousness. Had Christ only kept the law, neither your soul nor mine could have been saved, much less blessed as we are. Whoever kept the law, it would have been the righteousness of the law, and not God’s righteousness, which has not the smallest connection with obeying the law. It is never so treated in the word of God. Because Christ obeyed unto death, God has brought in a new kind of righteousness—not ours, but His own, in our favor. Christ has been made a curse upon the tree. He has been made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. Were the common doctrine on this subject true, we might expect it to be said, He obeyed the law for us, that we might have legal righteousness imputed or transferred to us. Whereas the truth is in all points contrasted with such ideas. Surely Christ’s obeying the law was not God’s making Him sin. So, in the passage that is often used, “by His obedience many are made righteous.” How is His obedience here connected with the law? The apostle does introduce the law in the next verse, as a new and additional thing, coming in by the way.
Further, Adam would not have known the meaning of “the law,” though undoubtedly he was under a law which he broke. What, for instance, could Adam in his innocence have made of the word, “Thou shalt not lust” (Rom. 13:9) or “covet”? No such feeling was within his experience. Accordingly, as we see, it was only after man was fallen that the law in due time was given to condemn the outbreak of sin. But Christ has died for and under sin—our sin. And what is the consequence? All believers now, whether Jews or Gentiles, in Christ Jesus are brought into an entirely new place. The Gentile is brought out of his distance from God; the Jew out of his dispensational nearness; both enjoy a common blessing in God’s presence never possessed before. The old separation dissolves and gives place by grace to oneness in Christ Jesus. When did this begin? An important question, for it is really the answer to the question:—What, according to Scripture, is the Church? Ask many of God’s children. Would they not say, The aggregate of all believers. But is this the body of Christ as shown us here? There were saints from the beginning, all who were born of God; but were they formed into an united assembly on the earth? Did anything under the Old Testament correspond to one body? It never was heard of, excepting as a thing promised, till the day of Pentecost. It awaited the cross of Christ. Therein God abolished the enmity. Before that God had commanded the Jew to be apart from the Gentile and our Lord maintained it most strenuously when He was upon earth. He forbade His disciples to go into any city of the Gentiles. He told the woman of Syrophenicia that He was not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. She had gone on the ground of promises, but He shows her that she had no part or lot in the promises. Had she addressed Him as Son of God, would our Lord have kept her waiting? She appealed to Him as the Son of David; and as such His connection was with Israel. She had to learn the mistake of going on the ground of promises that she had no title to. And this is often the reason why people do not enjoy peace. They plead God’s promises, but what if I cannot say that they are promises to me? Need I wonder that the answer tarries? Hence, too, there is in general little solid peace. How well for the poor woman, how well for us to know and confess what we really are! She owns that she was not a child nor a sheep at all. “Yet the dogs eat!” (Mark 7:28). She sees why it was that she could not get what she wanted on the false ground of privileges she did not possess. She is brought to own herself as having no promises at all; and then there is no limit to the blessing in the grace of Christ. “O woman, great is thy faith; be it unto thee even as thou wilt” (Matt. 15:28).
The two instances in which the Lord admires the faith of those who came to Him were of Gentiles—the centurion and the Syrophenician. Our Lord cannot gainsay His love, and they knew it. They pressed their suit consequently. It was in the midst of dense ignorance; but then the eye was single in the main, and the object on which it rested was a blesser beyond all thought. The blessing consequently could not be lost, and though it might be delayed, it was infinite.
So in this epistle we have the Gentile in a most deplorable condition of distance from God, and separation from all that God had chosen upon the earth. But the cross of Christ has annihilated all such distinctions. It has proved that the favored Jew was, if possible, more iniquitous than the poor Gentile. They had rejected and crucified their own Messiah; and if there were any among the Jews more urgent for His death than others, it was the priests: and so it always is. There is nothing so heartless as the religion of this world; and if it was so then, still more now. What so bad under the sun as spurious Christianity? It may be fair-spoken, and have a good deal of truth mingled with it: but it is without a purged conscience and without divine affection; and the more fearful will be its end. We need take care what we sanction at the present hour: the time is short. The Lord has brought out what His Church is. The will of man has raked up the law of Commandments out of the grave of Christ, and enacts it over again. This is what is found throughout all Christendom. It is inconceivable, except through realizing the power of Satan, how Christians can take up the peculiar institutions of God to His people, curses and all, in the face of such a chapter as this, where we find that all this is gone, even for Jews who believe, by the authority of God. It is a practical denial of the blood and cross of Christ. What a solemn proof of the ruined state of the Church of God! The truth is plain indeed: “Having abolished in His flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances, for to make in Himself of twain one new man, so making peace: and that He might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby” (vss. 15-16). To this figure of one new man Christians answer. You will find that such a state of things never was known during the Old Testament times, nor even during our Lord’s life on earth. It is only after the ascension that Jew and Gentile are united upon earth, and worship God on the same level. This is the Church. It is not merely that they are all believers, but they are members of Christ and of one another on earth. Of course, when we get to heaven, it will still be the Church; but it begins here, and that with Christ crucified and ascended to heaven. When He thus takes His place there, the work follows of forming the body in union with the Head. All distinction is gone, as far as its own sphere is concerned. The nature of the Church is most plain from this: “That He might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby” (vs. 16)—which enmity was in the commandments of the law, which straitly and wholly separated one from the other.
But Christ “came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them which were nigh.” All is attributed to Him, because founded on the cross; and it is Christ, by the Holy Spirit, who now proclaims this heavenly peace to the Gentiles once afar off, as well as to the hitherto favored Israel. Where this truth is unknown, men may preach Christ more or less, may be descanting much in general on the promises of God; but a Jew would do that; and to them especially it will be given by and by to sing the song that “the mercy of the Lord endureth forever”—the great burden of the millennial psalms. The practically Jewish position taken by most Christians makes them turn the Psalms of David into the staple of Christian communion, and the expression of their own condition before God. All Scripture is, of course, given of God for the profit and blessing of the Christian. But am I to offer a bull and a goat, because of old it was commanded? To imitate Leviticus is one thing; to understand it is quite another. “By faith we establish the law,” but we are not under it. So, speaking about my walk as a Christian, Paul says that sin shall not have dominion over me, for I am not under law, but under grace. How sad to see that the Evangelicals as a body now diligently preach the contrary! They may preach a measure of truth about other things, but they cannot preach the gospel, and they deny the Church of God. A Christian is under the law for nothing whatever, because he is under Christ dead and risen. Christ was under it once; but then I had nothing to say to Him. He passed out of it on the cross; and my association with Christ begins thenceforward. I am united with Christ in heaven, not on the earth. What has Christ in heaven to do with the law? Hence we are said to be under grace, not under law. Further, this doctrine is most practical. The walk is amazingly lowered where a mistake is made about it; and Satan tries to bring in the law after believing, if he cannot pervert it to hinder believing.
Here, then, it is peace that is preached, “to you which were afar off; and to them that were nigh. For through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father” (vss. 17-18). There, instead of the law which drew a distinction between Jew and Gentile, the Holy Spirit unites them on a common ground, and puts them on a common relationship as sons, having to do with the Father. This is our position. When God was acting as a governor, He chose a nation; He had His own servants. But now when He has a family, all that order of things vanishes. He has His children, and wants to have them near Him. The end of all the Jewish forms of holy places and days, of priesthood, and of sacrifice, was the cross of Christ. God has fully tried and given up any working upon men by a religion that is visible, or by sight and sounds that act upon the senses. The Holy Spirit sent down from heaven leads the children of God to draw near to the Father. How can a Christian acknowledge that this is what God has given to guide him, and yet be found taking part, were it only by his presence, in that which is positively Jewish? What God has provided for the Jew, and what He enjoins upon the Christian are very different things. We are not Jews but Christians. What He presses upon Christians is far more cutting to nature and more honoring to Christ than anything that He ever did or will give to Israel. He has brought us as His family to Himself, and through Christ we have access by one Spirit unto the Father—we both—Jew and Gentile. How far are we carrying it out? Are we to sanction the unbelief that turns back to the weak and beggarly elements of the world? or are we cleaving only to Christ, worshipping God in the Spirit? We may suffer; but happy are we, if it be so.
He adds further, “Now, therefore, ye [Gentiles] are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God” (vs. 19). They were brought out of all that condition of distance, and made part of His household, “and are built upon the foundation” (vs. 20)—not of the law—but “of the apostles and prophets” (vs. 20). What prophets? Of the New Testament only. God was not taking up an old foundation, but laying down a new one; and this new one He begins in Christ dead and risen. It is the foundation, not of the prophets and apostles, but “of the apostles and prophets” (vs. 20). The phrase in Greek means that these classes, the apostles and prophets, were united in this joint work. They were together employed in laying this common basis. Read chapter 3:5 of the mystery of Christ, “which in other ages was not made known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed unto His holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit” (ch. 3:5). These words set aside all controversy. So in chapter 4:11, “He gave some apostles and some prophets.” Some of the New Testament writers were not apostles, and yet they were just as much inspired. We are said, then, to be built upon this “foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone” (vs. 20). Not merely prophecy or promise, but “Jesus Christ Himself” (vs. 20)—His person. It is what the Apostle Peter learns from the lips of our Lord: “Upon this rock I will build my Church;” (Matt. 16:18) that is, upon the confession of Christ as the Son of the living God. And so here you have Jesus Christ as the chief corner-stone. But it is not here, as in Matthew, Christ building; but these apostles and prophets are used in a subordinate way, because they were the instruments of revealing the Church. Thus Scripture confines the Church to that which followed the death and resurrection of Christ, and makes it depend on the Holy Spirit sent down to form them into one body upon earth. “In whom all the building, fitly framed together, groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord” (vs. 21). It is not yet complete. “In whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit” (vs. 22). God had once a dwelling-place on earth—the temple; and there He dwelt, not by the Spirit, but in a visible manner. Now God dwells on earth in a more blessed way still, even through the Spirit. The Holy Spirit constitutes the saints the divine habitation and unites them as one body. He dwells in the Church, making it thus the temple of God. It is not His indwelling in the individual that we have here. This also is most true and important; but, besides, He dwells in the Church: He makes the Church to be God’s dwellingplace. What a truth! It is plain that God looks for it, that we should be walking faithfully in the truth, and according to Christ.