Ephesians 2

Ephesians 2:1-22

THE THREE OF Ephesians 2:1-22. THREE times it was my privilege to give audience to America’s best Bible student and teacher, Dr. A. J. Gordon. Many years ago I heard his eloquent appeal for the Congo mission. Grattan Guinness had come back from Africa and asked the Baptists of the Northern States to take over that great territory, and there was grave doubt whether they should do it, and much debate against it. Gordon’s address turned the tide and American Baptists have been made richer by their experiences upon that field. Two years later, in Philadelphia, I gave audience to him the second time, and shortly thereafter, in Chicago, I heard him as he stood before the Minister’s Conference and spoke on “The Jew, The Gentile and the Church of God.”That speech impressed me more than did either of the others.

The subject was new to me. Until then I knew no difference between “the Jew”, “the Gentile”, and “the Church of God”, and consequently was not equipped to teach the Word. To be sure, I had finished a theological seminary course, but in that I had heard but little of this distinction so plain and palpable that it becomes a wonder that even a way-faring man could walk through the teachings of sacred Scripture and not see it. As Dr. C. I. Scofield remarks, “More than one half the contents of the Bible relates to one nation—Israel. They have a distinct place in the dealings and counsels of God; and the Old Testament is devoted to their history, and the development of their Divinely appointed religion.

The New Testament, to a considerable extent, reports the out-reach of the Gospel to the Gentile world, and elaborates upon the circumstance that out of converted Jew and regenerated Gentile there came the Church of God”.As, then, in the first chapter of this Epistle we saw “the three Authors of salvation,” so in this second chapter we are to study “the three subjects of salvation;” and no man has a key to the Scripture until he knows the difference between “the Jew,” “the Gentile,” and “the Church of God.”The first chapter of this Book concludes with attention riveted upon the fact that the Holy Spirit raised Christ from the dead, and set Him at God’s right hand,“far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come, “And hath put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be the Head over all things to the Church, “Which is His Body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all”. The opening of the second chapter is to remind us that in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave, the believer’s resurrection from the death of sin was also accomplished, hence the language, “You hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins”.Here the Apostle deliberately binds the Jew and the Gentile together in the act of sin, and the certainty of condemnation. “We all had our conversation,” for Paul was a Jew; and so it is that the Jew needed redemption by Jesus; the Gentile had no hope save in Christ, and the Church of God cannot exist apart from Him who is its Head.I want us to consider these three in order.THE JEW A little search will show you who he is. Paul, writing to the Romans, speaks of Israelites—“to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises: “Whose are the fathers, and of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, God blessed for ever” (Romans 9:4-5). Jesus said to the woman at the well, “Ye worship ye know not what; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews”.Of the Jew let me make three remarks, and advocate them from the Sacred Scriptures.He was the Lord’s own by election. The record of it is in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the Book of Genesis, and involves the call of Abraham and all the promises made to him; for those promises swept far beyond the individual and anticipated the nation of Israel. Did you ever stop to analyze them, and think how altogether different they are from any of the promises made to the Church, or even to the Gentile converts? They are the promises of earthly inheritance. If faithful and obedient they were to be great, rich, and powerful; if unfaithful and disobedient, they were to be scattered among all people, even from one end of the earth to the other. And God has made His word good, in a literal sense.

So long as they were faithful to Him, no matter what adverse circumstances, no matter what enemies rose to trouble them, they prospered, multiplied, grew rich, dominated; but when they became unfaithful to the Lord, arid finally rejected and put His Son to a cruel death, even from that time until now the Jew has been scattered and peeled; the very inheritance promised him, taken away; the very land he once owned has been stripped from him, and he is the one nation of the earth that has not a solitary inch of space to call his own. The Jew came into favor by grace; he lost that favor through sin.

He has illustrated the law of life. All favor is of grace; all judgment is against sin. When God made promise of lands to Abraham he was a sojourner among strangers; when He made promise of children to him he was childless, and his wife past maternity by reason of old age; when God declared to him that he should be a blessing to the whole world he counted himself a benediction to nobody! But this election to the grace of God made all these things possible, and Abraham’s descendants became the occupants and owners of the riches of the world; he himself became the father of a family as numberless as the stars of heaven, and through him, every bit of light that has broken upon the world has come—Christ the Lord, included.His generation was God’s household. “When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the hounds of the people according to the number of the Children of Israel”. They were His own! Jesus Christ reminded them of that fact when they began to reject Him, by saying of Himself, “He came unto His own, and His own received Him not”.

In the old day, remembering the covenants and promises, when men wanted to boast being children of God, it sufficed to say, “We be Abraham’s seed”. When Paul writes his Epistle to the Romans he raises with them the one question, “Hath God cast away His people”? and no man debated what the Apostle meant.

If so, Paul would have put him right by adding, “God forbid; for I am an Israelite. God hath not cast away His people, which He foreknew”. Jesus Christ declared that when He came, He came “not but to the lost sheep of the House of Israel”; they were His own. That is the thing to which the Apostle refers in his Epistle to the Ephesians when he speaks of that “middle wall of partition” that formerly existed between the Jew and the Gentile— a wall which the Jew himself had made more thick and high than ever was intended by God, by reminding himself that he was “Abraham’s seed”, “the chosen of the Lord”, and by insisting that Gentiles were only dogs.The grace of God came to the Jew by covenant and promise. “The law of commandments contained in ordinances”, to which our text refers, is the very same of which the Apostle writes to the Romans, when he raises with them the question, “What advantage then hath the Jew? or what profit is there of circumcision”? and answers it, “Much every zvay; chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God”. And when one remembers the part the oracles of God have played in human history and all moral and mental development, it makes Paul’s term “much” simply unspeakable.We may hate the Jew as much as we like; we may compel him to go to war against his own desire and be slain upon the battle-field; but it forever remains a fact that the world owes a debt to him undischarged; and yet, the Jew ought to be reminded of the fact that he was made subject to the grace of God by election, and to him God made covenant and promise, and through him brought the oracles of wisdom unto the world.But the opening sentence of this chapter deals withTHE GENTILE and we may be pardoned if we make three remarks concerning him, basing them upon the text. They are remarks that will sound in no wise complimentary; and yet they are true to the facts of history.He was the child of this world. The phrase evidently does not refer so much to the fact of having belonged to the world, as to the circumstance that his whole tendency was in the world-direction. “The course of this world” is a phrase quite up to date, and is probably a parallel with “the spirit of the times.” That is the very thing that many men are now lauding; and we are told that they are even looking for ministers who are “abreast of the times”, or who are “keeping pace with the world,” who are “in touch with the world” and so on. All of this indicates that people who speak after this manner have been poor students of the Scripture. John, penning his First Epistle, wrote: “The whole world lieth in wickedness”. And one does not need to go far before he finds a confirmation of the Apostle’s indictment.

The spirit of the times is commonly in direct opposition to the Spirit of God, and the age in which Paul lived was peculiarly so. One describes it as “godless in the last degree” and says: “The stream of the world’s life then ran in turbid course toward moral ruin.”The political world and the system of pagan society seemed to be in the throes of dissolution,” and of it the poet wrote:“On that hard Pagan world disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated lust Made human life a hell.” That is the age to which the Apostle refers and of which he spoke as “the course of this world.” We imagine that ours is vastly better; that two thousand years have marked progress, and men and women have reached a higher level; and yet a close examination would prove that “the course of this world” is not Christward but away from Him rather. How easy it is for men to spin philosophies that have neither scientific nor Scriptural basis. When Robertson Nicoll was editing “The Expositor’s Bible” a few years since, one of his safest and best authors, said: “Science and Commerce, those two strong-winged angels and giant ministers of God, are swiftly binding the continents together in material ties. The peoples are beginning to realize their brotherhood, and are feeling their way in many directions towards international union.” If our “two strong angels— Science and Commerce” ever had any flight, their wings are now broken; or worse still, they have ceased to use them in trying to bind continents together, and like black angels indeed, fresh from the infernal pit, are employing them to beat into insensibility their foes. Science has apparently reached its highest endeavor by creating the most deadly and hellish instruments of destruction known to the world, and Commerce has reached its acme by getting the world into a hopeless conflict. One of the greatest subjects now being discussed by Americans is how we can make the most out of the late conflict from a material standpoint, and we are daily advised by the materialists of the world to get rich, to profit by the present pandemonium and to pluck all possible profit from the bleeding and exhausted Old World Nations.

It was science and commerce combined—the so-called advance of immigration and civilization—that took America from the hands of its rightful owners, the aborigines, finding it cheaper to banish them to a burying ground than to buy from them at a fair price. It was “the course of this world” that made England—once counted so noble as to banish slavery from her territory—willing, at a later time, to curse China with opium; and the “course of this world” that compelled the same American ships that carried missionaries to foreign lands to bear also alcohol that destroyed her peoples without number.

It was “the course of this world” that led the king of Belgium to believe that he ought to profit by his commerce in Africa even to the extent of cutting off hands and otherwise mangling the men who did not provide him with rubber and ivory in sufficient amounts. Have we forgotten that it was written in the Book even before the late war broke out, “When He maketh inquisition for blood, He will remember”? When one falls to praising the world that lieth in the Evil One he will do well to read the characterization by the pen of inspiration; and if he have no taste for Scripture, then let him turn at least to Philip Mauro, who, illumined by the same Spirit, hath spoken things sufficient to shatter one’s confidence in the things of “this world.” They are not in line with God’s Word. The commerce of the hour is not acknowledging Christ; the civilization of the time is giving Him scant attention, if any at all. “The course of this world” is not influenced by the Cross.Sometime since a writer in the “Examiner” of New York said: “A few years ago a picture was placed on exhibition in the Royal Academy of London, which made a profound impression. It was entitled ‘Despised and Rejected of Men.’ The painter was Sigismund Goetze. And on it was inscribed ‘Erected to an Unknown God.’ Bound to the altar is the Christ, thorn-crowned, with bowed head and sorrowful face.

Beside Him stands an angel, holding a cup from which He must drink. Is it still that bitter cup of Gethsemane?

Filing past, on either side of the altar, is a procession, representative of the present-day world: the Roman Catholic priest and the Protestant minister, the scholar and the scientist, the politician and the laboring man, the soldier and the sport, the society man and woman, the mother and the child, the newsboy and the flower girl, the sister of charity and the hospital nurse. Of all these, only one, the nurse, sees the Christ, bound to the altar, and she is startled and alarmed. All the others are absorbed in their own thoughts and interests. Above this group, hovering in mid-air, is to be seen a circle of cherubim, gazing in open-eyed amazement on the self-absorbed crowd beneath.” The message of the picture is, of course, that Christ is despised and rejected to-day, as the suffering Saviour of the world; He is the unknown God; and it is a true picture of the “course of this world”, or “the spirit of the times” of which the Apostle Paul speaks.But he makes a second indictment of this Gentile company.They had also been the subjects of the Adversary. “Wherein in time past ye walked according to the 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 prince of the power of the air” is a phrase all Scripture students understand. It can apply to but one person. He is the leader of the hosts of hell.

His name is Satan! He rules in the lives of unregenerate men.

We do not mean to say, at all, that every unregenerate man does nothing but at the devil’s dictation; but we do mean to say that he has not God in his thoughts; does not inquire of God what he shall do, and consequently is not the subject of the Father’s will. Such men are described also by the Apostle in this same Epistle (Ephesians 4:18-19) “as having their understanding darkened, and as being alien from God through ignorance, because of blindness of heart; who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness”. So, we do mean to say that wherever uncleanness is wrought, with greediness, wherever the understanding is darkened, the life is alienated from God; wherever the higher moral sensibilities are benumbed, and lasciviousness is common, Satan reigns, and all such as are subject to him, are influenced by his will and wiles, for it is “the prince of the power of the air”, that, “now worketh in the children of disobedience, among whom we also had our conversation in times past”.What Christian ever thinks of it without confessing it with shame?But even this is not the end, for the Apostle concludes by declaring the Gentile to have been the victim of fleshly lust. “The lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others”. How men can contend for natural good, we have been unable to understand. Jesus, on one occasion, said: “Those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; for out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies; These are the things which defile a man”. And when Paul was writing to the Galatians he gave us another picture of what the works of the flesh meant, consequently a definition of his own phrase in this text: “Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like”.Poor Voltaire lived his life without God and probably imagined that he could die his death without Him.

But when he came to that event at last, he is reported to have said to his physician, Dr. Trochin, “I am abandoned by God and man; I will give you half of what I am worth if you will give me six months of life.” And when told that his life could not be restored, he replied, “Then I shall go to hell!” Tom Paine, in his last hour, cried, “I would give worlds if I had never written ‘The Age of Reason.’ Oh, Lord, help me, Christ help me.

Stay with me! It is hell to be left alone!”But now, out of all this hell, the Gentiles have been redeemed, and the figure that the Apostle Paul employed in describing that redemption is the figure of the One risen from the dead, and here employed as quickening those “dead in trespasses and sins”. The great type of resurrection is Jesus’ resuscitations; and upon whom did He work them? Jairus’ little daughter, type of the fact that the child also is dead in trespasses and sins; the widow’s son, doubtless her solitary hope, as well as her dependence and pride, a type of the fact that the moral man, in the midst of his splendor and strength, is still dead and needs to be quickened into life, and Lazarus, not only dead, but decomposition having set in, a type of the fact that though men be advanced in years and sin; yet even they may have life, for such hath He quickened; brought back from the dominance of the devil, from the dominance of the flesh, to live such lives as to be worthy a place inTHE CHURCH OF GOD What a marvelous phrase the Apostle here introduces concerning even the resurrection from the dead, involving both Jew and Gentile, saying, “Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved). And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: that in the ages to come He might shew the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus”.The word “us” is employed with discretion. It involves both Jew and Gentile, and as they united in crucifying the Christ, so they must unite again in paying Him tribute and in creating the Church of God.The Church of God is the blood-bought from both. “For by grace are ye saved through faith”. “Created in Christ Jesus unto good works”. Brought from having no hope and being without God in the world to Divine nearness “by the Blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). That is the significance of the Old Testament lamb. The shedding of his blood never sufficed to take away the sins of Israel, but it did point Israel to the Lamb of God, slain from the foundation of the world, in whom alone was their hope.

The Law had only a shadow of good things to come, and not the very substance of the things. It could never, by the sufferings of those sacrificed, be final; but must be offered year by year.

It is not possible for the blood of bulls and goats to cleanse, but “the Blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin”. The late war has lent new emphasis to the vicarious atonement. Again it has been illustrated that salvation can only be had by the shedding of innocent blood.The red soaked fields of France are a protest against that sacrilegious denomination of His self-offering as “the Gospel of the Shambles”. It was not only expedient for the nation, that one man should die; but it was expedient for all nations that that one man should be none other than Jesus—the Christ! He alone had the infinite merit that sufficed for the sins of both Jew and Gentile, and His Blood both cleansed them and thereby united them in one Blood-bought brotherhood—“the Church.”Christ is the comer stone of that Church. It is built upon the foundations laid by Apostles who were also Prophets; but Christ was, and must forever remain, its “chief corner Stone”.

A corner stone not only “joined two walls” as Thayer contends; but it also holds the whole fabric in place and poise!Christ did unite Jew and Gentile “in one body” “the church;” and more, without Him, there is not only disunion, but disintegration. Deny Christ and the Church dies!

You may have buildings and organizations left, and you may call them churches, but it is a misnomer! Apart from Christ, Christianity perishes. The rejectors of Christ are trying to keep Christianity. It is a walking corpse! They are also trying to retain “the Church.” It is a headless ghost!Nearly fifty years ago, the great Dr. Dale said truly—“If only a theory of inspiration were breaking down, if men were discussing nothing more serious than the precise and minute accuracy of the four Gospels, if we were threatened with nothing more formidable than the demonstration of the historical untrustworthiness of a few chapters here and there, in the Old Testament, we might look on calmly and wait for the issue of the conflict, with indifference.

But it becomes plainer every year that the real questions in debate are far from these. The storm has moved around the whole horizon; but it is rapidly concentrating its strength and fury above one Sacred Head.

This, then, is the real issue of the fight. Is Christendom to believe in Christ any longer, or no? It is a battle in which everything is to be lost or won. It is not a theory of ecclesiastical policy which is in danger; it is not a theological system; it is not a creed; it is not the Old Testament nor the New, but the claim of Christ Himself to be the Son of God and the Saviour of mankind.” Dr. Dale’s clear presentation of the issue raised by Modernism, gives occasion to the logic of the great M. Guizot addressed to his Synod long since, when this Modernism, in another form, swept over France. He said, “As for me, I am a Christian! I know what my symbol is!

There are men sitting by my side who do not accept the Christian Religion. They have a sincere belief in God. I have been careful not to deny that these men have a religion. Let them form a deistical church! I shall be glad of it. But assuredly the difference is great between them and Christians.”If the Moderns of this moment, in America and other countries, believe as they teach, the time has come for them to find a new name for their religion. It is nothing short of traducing the Christ to deny His Deity and yet continue to traffic in His dear Name, and claim a place in “the Church” purchased by “His precious Blood.”Finally “the Church” is the one earthly temple to Father, Son and Spirit. In the first chapter we studied the three authors of salvation.

In this second chapter we have found the three subjects of salvation. The first and second, the Jew and Gentile, when saved, make up the third—“the Church”.It is most natural since Father, Son and Spirit wrought in salvation, that all three should inhabit the temple of the saved. So we find them united in the life of the Church, even as they were in bringing her to being. “In whom all the building, fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together, for an habitation of God through the Spirit”. This threefold relationship to salvation and to the saved, we have already elaborated, and may now properly conclude this study in the words of that great singer Charles Wesley,Come, Thou almighty King, Help us Thy Name to sing, help us to praise! Father all glorious, o’er all victorious, Come and reign over us, Ancient of Days! Jesus, our Lord, arise, Scatter our enemies, and make them fall; Let Thine almighty aid our sure defense be made, Souls on Thee be stayed; Lord, hear our call. Come, Thou incarnate Word, Gird on Thy mighty sword, our prayer attend! Come, and Thy people bless, and give Thy Word success, Spirit of holiness, on us descend! Come, holy Comforter, Thy sacred witness bear in this glad hour; Thou Who almighty art, now rule in every heart, And ne’er from us depart, Spirit of pow’r! To Thee, great One in Three, Eternal praises be, hence, evermore; Thy sov’reign majesty may we in glory see, And to eternity love and adore!