Ephesians 2:11-22, The Death of Division in the Death of Christ

You only begin really to understand how valuable something is when you feel how much it costs.

Responsible parents know this. One of the reasons we like to have our kids work and have them buy the things that they earned with the money that they earned is so that they'll get a feeling of how much it costs, whatever it is they want.

Instead of just giving them a new car on their 16th birthday, if you can afford that, we tell them to work for it so that after they've toiled at some low -paying job, maybe at a fast food place, flipping burgers, or landscaping, mowing lawns, or at a

Chinese restaurant, taking orders, they'll get a feel for how much a dollar is worth, how much work goes into every cent as their savings gather dollar by dollar.

And then when they finally have enough to buy some used car, they'll value it, that, like a prize.

Waxing it and cleaning it, checking the oil. It's precious because they can feel every cent that went into making it possible.

Now, sure, you could be told how much it costs. It's $2 ,000. But until you sweat for every dollar of that, you don't really understand what that means.

That's why we're meeting right now. We've heard what was purchased, life and peace and reconciliation.

We've been told that it costs the cross. We just heard a song about that.

But that can strike us all as like telling a child the price of something. It's $2. It's $2 ,000.

It's $200 ,000. For a little kid, all that is basically all the same to them, to the one who's never felt how much it costs.

That's why to finally really appreciate the resurrection, the life, we need to feel a good

Friday. We need to get a feeling of how much was paid so that we can sense the enormous value of what was bought for us.

And Ephesians to the second half of the chapter that we read. The Apostle Paul shows us how much was paid by showing us how much we owed, how deep in debt we were before the cross.

Notice beginning of verse 11, five expressions of that debt. Remember what we were.

We're told to remember. Remember. Because we so easily forget.

Remember in verse 12, we were five things separated, alienated strangers without hope and without God.

We were separated from Christ at one time. I says at that time in verses 11 and 12.

This is when we were dead in the trespasses and sins in our natural condition left to ourselves. In that first verse of the chapter, we looked at last week.

That is the condition we were born into. What in theology is called original sin. The guilt of our first parents,

Adam and Eve, was passed down to us, to which we have added our own guilt. But an

Israelite in those days, prior to the original Good Friday, could still avail himself of the covenant.

God made a covenant with Israel. He could, the Israelites, they could come near to God through that covenant.

But we, I think all here are non -Jewish people. We had all that same original sin.

And then we heaped on our own sins. But we had no covenant. We had no access to Christ.

We had no way to deal with our sins. So we were not only sinful, which is bad enough.

We are separated. He continues. We were alienated from the commonwealth of Israel.

That is, we were not citizens of the chosen people. We don't have anything going for us. We have no way to get to God, no advantage with God.

No grounds on which to approach God. We're separated from Him.

We're separated from His people. Now, it's hard for modern people to understand this. Because we've heard so often, just people commonly say it, that all people are

God's children. And so we take access to God for granted. Everybody can go. Everyone's one of His children.

Like a kid who just got car keys handed to him for his 16th birthday. We think we just got reconciliation to God just handed to us.

That is cheap. That is easy. We all think we have a right to approach God. And that He just has to accept us.

But that's not so. The Bible does not teach that. The Bible does not teach the universal fatherhood of God or the brotherhood of man.

Instead, we're told that we are in our natural condition, without access. We have no relation to God.

We have no approach to God. We're actually God's enemies. We were alienated.

That means He had something against us. We're strangers. We have no hope. And no matter how much the world today likes to tell us that we're all

God's children, according to the Bible, we're actually instead without Christ and without God.

That's the condition we were in before the cross. Separated, alienated, strangers, hopeless, and godless.

And then in verse 13 comes another great turning point.

But. But now. Remember before? At one time, at that time, you were separated.

But now, in Christ Jesus, that is because of what He did on the cross, you who were once, before He did that, at one time, at that time, but in Christ Jesus, you were once far off, once separated, have been brought near, have been reconciled by the blood of Christ, by what happened on that first Good Friday.

Even when we were separated, alienated, strangers, hopeless, and godless, God chose, He graciously chose to do for us what we had no basis to ask

Him to do. We had no grounds to which to approach Him. God chose, graciously chose to do it for us.

He brought us near. Remember, there was absolutely nothing about us. We're separated, alienated, strangers, hopeless, and godless.

Nothing about us that could in any way compel or deserve or even encourage

God to bring us near. But He dealt with our sins by having

Christ shed His blood for them. On the original Good Friday, God the Father brought us near by covering our sins in the blood of Jesus.

First, He brought us near to Himself, to God. Yes, we were separated from Christ, but notice here, not all the estrangement in this passage, not all the estrangement is from God.

Now, too many modern people today only think of God, of Jesus, as providing something personal for them.

Making it possible for them maybe to be best buddies with Jesus, just hanging out, just the two of us.

You know, the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known. They accepted Jesus, they say, as their personal

Savior, and now are on their own personal walk with the Lord. All that is language you will not find anywhere in the

Bible. They are one with God, but they don't think they need to be one with other of God's people. Here, yes, the first thing that we're separated, the first separation we experience is from Christ, and we are now brought near to God, but there is in the cross a healing of other alienations, other separations, human estrangements, of being brought near to other people, to other believers, whether Jewish or Gentile, black or white, or Asian or Indian.

We've so disvalued that, devalued that, because we don't understand the price that was paid for that.

We think it's kind of cheap. We think it's kind of easy. That one of the things that Jesus bought on the first Good Friday was a reconciliation of all kinds of people around himself.

One of the things killed on that Good Friday was the division between believers.

In the death of Christ, division died. Christians have been made one.

In verse 14, Jesus has broken down this dividing wall of hostility.

Many assume this refers to the wall of hostility between us and God, that the right anger of God had in our sins was like a wall keeping us from approaching him, and that that was broken down when

Christ bore that anger on the cross. And that's true, that that is what Jesus did on the cross. That is even the most important thing he did on the cross.

He took the lashes and the beatings that was prodded uphill to drag that cross, and finally, so bloody to brutalize, he couldn't carry it anymore.

And then when he reached the top, they threw him down on that beam and drove a spike through his wrist, and fastened to that cross.

He hung between heaven and earth and looked down and saw only his mother and a few other women.

And after all the time he had spent building relationships with the disciples, washing the disciples' feet after Peter had insisted that he would never forsake him, no matter what happened, only one disciple was left.

And it wasn't Peter. The worst of all, first he looked down, and that's what he saw.

Enemies, his mother, a few women, only one disciple. And then he looked up, and he knew.

He was separated, alienated, stranger. For that time, even he was without hope and without God.

And so he cried out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He took the separation, the alienation, the estrangement that we deserved, and then the

Father, that the Father, could then bring us near. He could break down that wall of hostility.

That's the price that was paid. But that's not all that Jesus bought.

Notice in verse 14, this is written to Gentiles, and he tells us that the

Father has made us both. Both who? He's made us both one.

Both who? Both we Gentiles, we non -Jews, with no covenant with God, no heritage of God's law, no right of access to the

Father. Both we Gentiles and Israelites. He has made us both one.

He, on the cross, he broke down the dividing wall of hostility. What wall? Who is the wall between?

Yes, there was a wall of God's righteous wrath between us and God, and he has broken down that wall for all people.

But that's not really the wall he's talking about here. The dividing wall is between Jews and Gentiles, between one group of people and another.

In the literal temple in Jerusalem, there was a wall separating the outer court for the

Gentiles from the inner court for the Israelites. And on it, these words were inscribed.

No one of another nation to enter within the fence and the enclosure around the temple, and whoever is caught will have himself to blame that his death ensues.

Now, that's a wall of hostility. That literal wall is symbolic of a wall that ran through humanity, separating some people from another.

And it was broken down here. The apostle Paul says in Christ's flesh as he died, the wall had been broken down as his body was broken down.

One blow, one punch, one lash, one strike, one nail at a time, breaking down the walls between all the people that God would call to himself.

That meant so much to the Lord that he sent Jesus to suffer for it, to pay for it.

Jesus died so that division might die with him. No separation means reconciliation.

Christ has reconciled us both, both kinds of people to God. In verse 16, both

Jews and Gentiles, all of us, he has brought us near to God and then near to each other in one body, he says.

Reconciliation to God and reconciliation to formerly separated people, to one another, those are intertwined.

Now, once you understand the high price that was paid to make us one, then you understand how much

God values unity of all those he has bought.

Division died in Christ because we all had a hand in killing him.

In just the space of a few hours, the Lord Jesus was beaten by the Jewish authorities, in part because he had told them that the kingdom of God would be taken away from them and then given to those who bear its fruit, to the church, and because he had told them that they could destroy this temple, meaning his body, and he would raise it up in three days.

And then he was handed over to the Gentiles, to us, people like us, and we beat him too, severely lashing him to a point that could have killed many men.

And as he was beaten and he was lashed, the Roman soldiers mocked him for the, you know, you call yourself the king of the

Jews? This was their time, their opportunity to vent all their pent -up hatred at the

Jews. And so they pressed down a crown of thorns into a scalp and letting the blood seep into his hair and down his head, and then he was crucified.

That was the hostility. Both sides poured out on him. That's why, in Christ, the hostility of one people for another, one race for another, has been killed.

It has been exhausted. There is, for us who believe, no hostility left, whether for Jews or for blacks or for whites or for Asians or for any other.

There's just none left. Jesus paid it all.

Now, imagine what this means for us. The division between Jews and Greeks, it was not small or simple or shallow.

It was a real division, not just based on complexion, which is really kind of shallow, or based on past wrongs.

It was first religious. The Jews knew the one true God. They had the word of God as part of their culture. They were raised on it in their synagogues.

The Gentiles had their pagan idols. They had the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the Epicureans, and the

Stoics. Wisdom, they called it, while the Jews expected a Messiah with miracles. Then the divide was cultural and social, with lots of ceremonies and practices, like circumcision and dietary regulations and rules for cleanliness, all of which set the

Jews apart from the other people. The Gentiles had the grand history of Alexander the

Great and the might of the Roman Empire. And then the divide was racial. There was a bloodline going back to Jacob, not

Esau. Isaac, not Ishmael. Abraham, not any other father.

And so the divide here between Jews and Gentiles was bigger than any divide that we face today, between black or white or Asian or African -American.

And yet that division, which was so great, was healed at the death of the

Son. On those separating walls, which were so high, were broken down in the death of Jesus.

Recently, just over the past couple of years, some Christians have begun to scorn, I think mostly for political reasons, to scorn any attention to racial harmony, integration.

They'll scoff at it as, quote, woke and dismiss anyone who talks about it as if it were a distraction from the gospel.

Not that they're racist. Most of them aren't. They just think that reconciliation is cheap. It's easy.

It's just a matter of ignoring things. One new man, a unified body that overcomes racial and cultural differences is easy, they think.

It's not something a church really needs to focus on, they think. They don't understand the high price that was paid to make one new man.

It says in verse 15, one new humanity, not united anymore by ethnicity or by color or by culture, but by Christ.

How much is that worth? Jesus thought it was worth enough to die for.

Jesus unites his people as those whom he has saved find that they have been brought near, first to him, and so to other of his people.

And the result, all facts of race and history and tradition fade.

Maybe not fade away altogether, but they become surmountable. They become understandable.

They become bridgeable with Christ himself being the bridge. But the world will still have its hostility.

In this world, Christ says he brings a sword that divides and divides because some will believe him and some won't.

He'll divide families sometimes right down the middle between those who believe him and those who won't.

And the lesson of Good Friday is that we will still, if we've been brought near to Jesus, have to bear the same cross, the same hostility from the world that he did.

On Good Friday, we will remember our cross too. Please understand, this isn't some kind of social gospel, some modernized, trendy, quote, woke message.

Here we see that one of the reasons Jesus died on the original Good Friday was to reconcile all kinds of people, first to him, and then to each other.

This isn't a new option for the church. Kind of now that times have changed, people are more accepting, and now we can kind of experiment with this.

No, it's not. It is of the essence of what being a church is in the first place.

And here it is an essential reason why Jesus went to the cross. In verse 18, for or because, because through him, through what he did on that original

Good Friday, we now have access in one spirit to the Father. Then in the very next verse, verse 19, that reconciliation, that peace with God has resulted in us becoming the household of God.

That is God's family. So then, because of that, because we're

God's family, we're no longer alienated, no longer strangers, without Christ, without God.

All of that was killed on the cross. Because of the cross, believers become citizens together of the same nation, even if they are citizens of different nations on earth.

The foreigners, the other people, they're the unbelievers, even if we share the same citizenship on earth with them.

We believers are now all God's family and shouldn't be separated by our natural families or race.

So for those who believe, for those who've been brought near, near to each other by the blood of Jesus, the body of Jesus, broken on that cross for us, for you, is his great family.

That's what Jesus paid for. Imagine how valuable it must be to God to break down the hostility between races, groups of people, between nations.

Imagine how valuable that is to God if he gave his only son to do that.

So now as we consider what Jesus paid for, not just for you, not just me, but us together, as we look at the cup and we hold the bread in our fingers, as we sit here in such a racially divided area, let's remember the body of Christ broken for us to bring us to God and into one family.