EPISODE 178 EPHESIANS CHAPTER 3 "Breaking down walls"

Welcome. I can't stress enough that as a Great Commission project, our focus at Share the Word is not only bringing you an incredible chapter-by-chapter New Testament Bible study, but also focusing on the gospel of Jesus Christ and removing any barrier between God and the unbeliever. So, as you listen today, I ask you, is there a barrier in your faith? Ephesians chapters 2 and 3: Breaking Down Walls. The temple in Jerusalem in the first century, during the era in which the New Testament was being written, was the very heart of Israel culturally and religiously. It was built on the spot the Jews believed that 2,000 years earlier God had severely tested their forefather Abraham's faith before providing him a sacrifice in the place of his own son.

And it was on that same spot, hundreds of years later, King David, their greatest ruler, envisioned building a temple for God, and where his son Solomon fulfilled that dream. Although that first temple was destroyed when the Babylonians overran Jerusalem in the 6th century B.C., on that same spot again, several hundred years after that, a second temple was built by King Herod the Great, and that was the temple standing in the days of Jesus and during the first decades of the Christian era. It was built on a leveled plateau on the northeast corner of Old Jerusalem, an approximate 37-acre holy site, and remains of its retaining wall are still visible in Jerusalem today. In Jesus and the apostles' time, there was an exterior wall around the whole temple complex with several gates which led to a very large open plaza. This is where people gathered during the major religious festivals.

It's where rabbis taught, where Jesus often taught too. It was called the Court of the Gentiles because Gentiles were welcomed there. Beyond that, moving toward the temple proper, was another smaller area called the Court of Women, where Jewish women gathered. And still closer to the actual temple, the Court of Israel, where Jewish men approached for worship. And then there was another wall enclosing the temple proper. Inside that wall was the Court of the Priests, where the great stone altar stood.

This is where the priests of Israel offered up animal sacrifices for the people's sins. From there, the priests could enter the Holy Place, the interior of the temple itself where special ceremonies took place. And in there, cordoned off by a large hanging tapestry, a thick brocade curtain, was finally the Most Holy Place, the Holy of Holies, a room 35 feet by 35 feet by 70 feet tall. There the Jews believed the actual presence of God dwelt. And into that space, only the high priest of Israel could go, and only once a year on the Day of Atonement, and even then, only after elaborate preparations and precautions were made. But let's back up for a moment on our temple tour.

Between the plaza, that large open courtyard where anyone could go, and the courts for Jewish women and Jewish men, there was something called the soreg. It was a five-foot-tall stone barrier that divided the area Gentiles were allowed. From the courts of the Jews and their priests and the presence of God, ultimately. By the way, we know about these sayings not only from the biblical record, but also from Jewish writers who were contemporaries of Jesus, like the historian Josephus and the philosopher Philo. They each described this. There were twelve openings or gateways in the soreg so Jewish worshipers could move from the open plaza to the Jewish courts.

And above each of these entrances was an engraved, painted red stone plaque. Red, so it would not be missed. And the sign read, No foreigner is to go beyond this balustrade and the plaza of the temple zone. Whoever is caught doing so will have himself to blame for his ensuing death. Yikes! This warning was written in Greek and Latin, Latin for the Romans and Greek for most everyone else because Greek was a near-universal language in the Mediterranean world in the first century.

And what I just read, that's exactly what the warning signs said. You know how we know that? Because two of them have actually been found in archaeological digs, one completely intact, which is housed today in a museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Were they serious, threatening the lives of non-Jews who might approach closer to the temple than that barrier? Oh yes. Do you remember when we were going through the early church history book of Acts?

Described in chapter 21 how Paul was arrested at the temple. Do you remember why? A riot had started when someone accused him of taking a Gentile past that barrier, past the warning signs and into the area no Gentiles were allowed to go. Incidentally, the person involved, a man named Trophimus, was an Ephesian church leader who Paul had brought with him to Jerusalem. Trophimus certainly remembered this when years later he heard this letter we call Ephesians read at his home church, and realized Paul wrote Ephesians, this epistle we're studying now, from imprisonment in Rome, an imprisonment that resulted directly from his arrest that day at the temple in Jerusalem after the uproar caused by the false charge he had taken Trophimus beyond the sorek. Cool story, Paul, but why are you telling us all this?

Because it has everything to do with what Paul writes about in the second half of Ephesians 2 and into chapter 3. Listen to chapter 2, starting in verse 11. See if you see what I mean. Therefore remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called uncircumcised by those who call themselves the circumcision, remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, you were excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of promise, that is the promises God had made specifically to Israel. You were without hope and without God in the world. But now, in Christ Jesus, you who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

For he himself is our peace. He has made the two groups, that is Jews and Gentiles, one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, for Jesus abolished it in his flesh. That means by his death. He abolished the law, referring to the law of Moses in the Old Testament with its commandments and its regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body reconcile both of them, again Jews and Gentiles, to God through his cross, by which he put to death that hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away, Gentiles, and peace to those of you who were near, Jews.

For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit. Consequently, you Gentiles are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. Boy, there is a lot there. But notice first the line in verse 14: He, that is Jesus, has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.

Paul's making a direct reference to the soreg in Jerusalem's temple precinct, the stone barrier that marked how far the Gentiles could go in approaching God. On pain of death, all Gentiles go no further. That's what the sign said. The apostle is assuring the early Gentile Christians, and explaining to the Jewish Christians as well, these members of the Ephesian church, that Christ has broken down that barrier which had always separated them. And along with it, abolished the basis for hostility and prejudice that always existed between them. Paul says he came to declare peace between you, not only to make you equals before Almighty God, like separate but equal, but to make you one, because the power of the cross broke down the wall of separation and destroyed the basis for any hostility between them.

It's hard for us to, from our vantage point 2,000 years later, grasp how revolutionary this idea was. The Jews took tremendous pride in being God's covenant people. He was their God. They had been given His law. Theirs were the ceremonies and the annual religious convocations in Jerusalem that marked the significant events in their nation's past, and theirs was the holy temple. These things were not for the uncircumcised pagans from the nations around them.

They had been given a unique relationship with God. They possessed His law, and they worshipped in that temple where He dwelt. This brings to my mind something the apostle John overheard in the days he was with Jesus. He and the other disciples were with the Lord traveling through Samaria, an area where people lived the Jews considered unclean. Do you remember this from one of our earlier podcasts, John chapter 4? Stopping to rest at a well there outside the village of Sychar, Jesus engaged a Samaritan woman in a fascinating conversation who would come to draw water.

The other disciples had been sent into her village to buy food, and only John was there to overhear this conversation. This mixed-race woman, who most Jews would never have acknowledged, much less conversed with about important things, asked Jesus if he thought the Jews were right in insisting that it was only in Jerusalem and at their temple that God could truly be worshipped. Jesus told her, The day is coming, and now is, when neither at your people's temple on Mount Gerizim nor at the Jews' temple in Jerusalem will men need to worship God. But true worshipers will worship Him in spirit and in truth. Jesus was foretelling what Paul is now explaining. Through his coming and his death in particular, Jews and Gentiles alike could be reconciled to God, and once reconciled to God, the hostility between them done away with.

They would become one new humanity, as Paul put it. God was going to create something entirely new that rose above nationality and ethnicity and any of the other things that divided people. Those in Christ, no matter who they were, what they looked like, where they lived, would all be one before God, just Christians. As we saw in Acts, the earliest Christians were pretty much all Jews at the beginning, and most of them had trouble accepting this new reality when it arrived. The Judaizers, who we discussed in Galatians, were examples of those who couldn't let the old ways and old thinking go. It's understandable from a human perspective.

It would be like if you were an only child, say, doted on by your parents for years, and then, for some reason, they decide to adopt a baby, and that kid starts getting a lot of the affection and attention that you're used to getting. You can imagine that, can't you? And that's exactly how many Jews at the time felt. So this was very hard for them to accept, even the Jewish Christians. But tell me, who better to break the news, to bring the revolutionary message than Saul of Tarsus, slash Paul the Apostle? I mean, had anyone ever been a prouder Jew?

Had anyone ever loved the law and been more zealous for the tradition of Israel than him? He was a Pharisee of the Pharisees before Christ changed his heart. It was a stroke of genius for God to choose that man to become the apostle to the Gentiles, who by his own words proclaimed and his own behavior demonstrated that the old walls of division and hostility had been abolished by the cross and should never exist anymore between Christians. He was speaking modestly when he writes in chapter 3, verse 8, Although I am less than the least of all the Lord's people, this grace was given to me, to preach to the Gentiles the boundless riches of Christ. Think about this. It was less than a decade after Paul wrote all this that the walls literally came down when the temple in Jerusalem that represented the old way was utterly destroyed, torn down stone by stone.

The Roman soldiers who had besieged and brought Jerusalem to its knees had no idea how symbolically significant it was when they battered down those walls and they broke down that stone barrier and they knocked those engraved warning signs from atop its gateways. No more would God seem confined to a 35-foot room inside a temple. And as Paul writes here, no longer would Gentiles be foreigners and strangers, but now through Christ could become fellow citizens with God's people and members of His very household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone. In Him now the whole building is joined together and is rising to become a holy temple to the Lord. That holy temple to the Lord, God began building that on the foundation of Jesus and the apostles and prophets in the first century, and it was something entirely new and different.

There was no longer any place for a physical temple. We believers, Paul is saying, from every race and nation, we are the temple of God now. Everyone who is in Christ by faith. Churches are not temples, by the way. Cathedrals are not temples. This religion or that denomination do not have the corner on God's presence.

All of us who are in Christ, who, as Jesus put it, worship God in spirit and in truth, we are the holy temple of God that is rising. Since the cross, He's been building this new spiritual temple. We call it the universal church, living stone by stone, one believer after another. And it's in this holy temple, temple not built by hands, that God now dwells by His Spirit. I hope that imagery makes sense to you. I hope you see what He's saying.

I watched a beautiful video from Israel the other day of a worship service. It looked like it was being held in a large school classroom or maybe a lecture hall. That doesn't matter. The church at Ephesus we're reading about now began in the lecture hall of Tyrannus we read in Acts 19, the church where Tony and I are members met for several years in a school cafeteria. Believers are the temple of God, and wherever we gather, He is present. But what was so beautiful to me as I watched the video was that the very young-looking congregation was made up of Christians who were both Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Jews, and they were singing joyous worship songs to the Lord together.

I realized watching that they were not Arabs and Jews there, only Christians united because of their common faith in Christ. It had abolished for them the hostility going on in the world all around them. But there were no walls between the believers in that room. I watched, realizing what a beautiful example of what Paul is teaching here in Ephesians chapters 2 and 3 that was. It reminded me of when the still at the time very prejudiced Apostle Peter came to Antioch on a mission from Jerusalem to see what in the world was going on there, and he witnessed Jewish and Gentile believers worshiping together for the first time. And Jewish and Gentile didn't even seem to matter.

For the first time in his life, it didn't matter. They were just Christians, and Peter knew instantly that this was a new thing God was doing. As Paul called it in chapter 3, verse 6, this mystery is that through the gospel, Gentiles are now heirs together with Israel and members together in one body. And shareer together in the promises in Christ, who is our peace. By mystery he meant something new God was doing in the world, which nobody saw coming. You know, I am sure it's very hard to force this kind of peace, this kind of harmony on anyone, much less groups of people where long-standing hostility has existed.

Governments try to do it; they try over and over, but it doesn't happen from the outside. It was happening, though, in Antioch, in Ephesus in the apostles' day. It's happening still, like in that lecture hall where Jewish and Palestinian Christian kids are worshiping together in Israel, and in multiracial churches in America where black and white Christians worship together as one family, as brothers and sisters in Christ, and in prison chapels where once rival gang members now worship together as fellow believers and followers of Christ. This kind of remarkable change only happens from the inside, as God the Holy Spirit, through the power of the cross, breaks down the walls, the barriers that have been erected in men's hearts. He melts the hostilities that too long have divided people. Hence the beautiful thing.

In the first part of Ephesians 2, Paul's explaining how people can be reconciled to God, and it's only by grace through faith in Jesus, he says. In the second part of chapter 2, and now into chapter 3, he is explaining the basis on which and the reasons for which believers should be reconciled to one another. This is something amazing and important that the gospel of Christ accomplished between Jews and Gentiles in places like Ephesus and many others long ago. But he's still accomplishing it today. I guess by way of application, we should ask ourselves, are there any walls or barriers, any hostility that I'm holding in my heart against other Christians who are different than me? If so, I hope you can see from this passage of God's Word how inconsistent that is with the gospel and with the Spirit of Christ.

One of the things that made early Christianity so attractive is when they understood how Jesus is our peace, our reconciler, the one who came to knock down old walls and build something new unlike the world had ever seen before, his church, a holy temple made up of people, people from every tribe and nation, people of every color and economic group, joined together from their hearts because of their common faith in Christ. Don't you think our broken and divided world would benefit from seeing more of that? I certainly think it would. Thanks for listening. This is Paul for Share the Word. Paul, as always, I learn so much with each and every episode.

So, have you built a wall between you and the others in your church or your faith or even your church itself? Jesus's focus was about building a unified humanity and church, and yet we seem to stick a wedge of separation where it doesn't belong. Adam and Eve, once unified with God, were separated, and throughout generations, man has perfected their ability to allow the enemy to mask that wall in the name of religion. They just keep building it higher and higher. You know, the blood of Christ brought the ability for that barrier to be removed. And yet, like the Jews in the time of Christ, who took pride in the fact that they were the chosen people of God, were not willing to relinquish or even consider that the God of love would unify the Jews and Gentiles.

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