V - HOME AT LAST - Ch. 2.11-21
THE GOSPEL OF RECONCILIATION
There is no passage in the Bible more
relevant to the situation of conflict our world faces today than
Ephesians 2.11-21.
It contains one of the proofs Paul puts
forward to show that the Gospel is right on target, that it is the
answer to one of the most urgent problems in the world - racial
conflict. At a time when America's confrontation with the Taliban has
been added to the conflicts already going on in Northern Ireland, and
in South America, and between Israel and the Palestinians, there is
no more timely word from God to which we could give our
attention. The hostility between Gentile
and Jew in the apostle's day was of exactly the same kind as those
we've mentioned. And the one place in the whole of the Roman Empire
where the conflict was resolved was the church. It really was
resolved there. The hatred simply died, and in its place there sprang
up a true brotherhood.
It was Christ Who did it. In v.14, speaking
as a Jew to Gentiles, Paul says, "He is our peace, who has
made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of
hostility." He goes so far as to say, "Christ has created in Himself
one new man in place of the two, so making peace."
It had really happened; and it really was a
miracle ... as great a miracle as if Mr Mugabe and Tony Blair were to
sit down in a church pew together today and be real
brothers.
The way that happens, Paul says, is when men
are reconciled to God. To be reconciled through Christ to God is to
discover that at the same time you are reconciled to all others in
Christ - even those who may have been your enemies.
The personal experience of salvation by
grace through faith is the only means on earth to social and national
and international brotherhood. It really is. The Gospel of Salvation
and the Social Gospel, rightly understood, are not two gospels at
all: they're one and the same gospel. You can't have either without
the other.
At the last Baptist Union Assembly meetings
I attended in England before I returned to Australia I heard the
President that year say a thing I've never forgotten:
"A gospel that doesn't begin with
the individual doesn't begin:
A gospel that ends with the individual ... ends!"
Let's begin where the apostle
began.
THE PROBLEM OF RECONCILIATION
In verses 11-13, he writes to his Gentile
readers, "You outsiders are 'in'." It's the same thought Peter
expressed in I Peter 2.10, "Once you were nobodies, but now you are
somebodies because you are God's bodies". You're secure in the family
... you're home at last!
Now how does a man get "in with God" like
that?
In the previous chapter the question Paul
tackled was how to get in to the first arm of that diagram - how to
find acceptance with God.
Remember that the people Paul took the
Gospel to were not loving mothers and their innocent infants; they
were grown men and women seething with hatreds, and objects of God's
righteous anger. That's where the gospel has to begin - that's where
it always has to begin. The Gospel is concerned with the relations
between guilty men and a holy God.
The bond of relationship suggested by the
first upright arm of that diagram - Acceptance - is broken. For
all of us, it's been broken. We have broken it by our unbelief
and sin and disobedience. Our sins separate us from
God.
How can the break be joined? How can God
receive a sinful man into His fellowship? Everything in God is
hostile to the sin that's in us. There's a repulsion between God in
His holiness and man in his sin which nothing a man can do can
remove. How can God and men be brothers? How can the enmity be
removed and peace be restored?
It simply can't happen - it can't even begin
to happen - until our sin is somehow dealt with ... any more than you
can be friends with someone who hates you until something's done
about their hatred.
Our sin angers God; how can He be
friends with us? "We were all 'children of wrath' was Paul's way of
saying that (2.3). God doesn't shut His eyes to our sin, like some
sentimental old blind fool. He can't. It offends Him, it angers Him.
He is enemy to the sin that is in us - that is in me - that is in
you. He can't help it: He's God and He's righteous: He loves
righteousness. He can't overlook our iniquities, or be indifferent to
them, or condone them, or excuse them.
How then can He gather us ... us with the
iniquity in us ... into His embrace?
THE ACHIEVEMENT OF
RECONCILIATION
Do look now at the way Paul says He does
it.
He says God does it ...
1. v.13 - by bringing us near in
the blood of Christ;
2. v.15 - by abolishing in the body of Christ's flesh through
death the law of commandments and ordinances; (Jodl
illustration)
3. v.16 - through the Cross of His Son;
What does all this mean?
Quite obviously it means that the process is
a costly one, a painful one; blood gets shed, a body gets pierced and
broken.
If it's really true that when you look at
Jesus you're looking at God, then when you look at Jesus on the Cross
you're looking at God suffering ... suffering some kind of death at
the hands of sinners while He hungers for them to find forgiveness
and be brothers to Him.
The way God deals with sin is in His own
pain. That's how He puts it away from between us. "There's no
forgiveness without shedding of blood"; it's true.
God must destroy sin; and there are only two
ways He can destroy our sin - either He must destroy it by destroying
us: or, He must destroy it by receiving it, when He receives us, into
Himself, and suffering its destruction in His own Being
somehow.
Do you understand what it costs God to love
you ... to go on loving you? There's no way He can accept you but as
He suffers your sin to inflict the Cross on Him. You're "brought near
in the blood of Christ." There's no other way He can bring you
in.
The evangelical experience of repentance and
faith always testifies to this. There is laid upon our hearts a
grievous sense of our own sinfulness, which makes us aware of the
cost to God of forgiving it ... and of the great love He bears us
since He's willing so to suffer to relieve us of that
burden.
Only the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ can
rejoin that broken bond of relationship.
I feel I must use again the illustration
that I've used in other pages on this site. I make no apology for
doing it; repetition is a necessary ingredient of all teaching (even
Jesus Himself demonstrated that!).
I know the illustration is not adequate to
convey the whole truth about the Cross. No illustration is adequate
to do that. The Cross is so huge a reality that no attempt we ever
make to spell it out in all its fulness will be adequate. What I
share with you now illustrates only one aspect of the Cross - but
it's the aspect that's relevant to the problem of enmity and
hostility, and that's what Paul was concerned with in this passage.
It's better anyway to say a small thing well
than a big thing badly; and this has been for me a wonderfully
helpful way of understanding what the New Testament says about our
reconciliation with God, and our reconciliation as a result of that
with others. For it's as we learn how God loves us who were His
enemies that we begin to find that we can love our
enemies.
1. There can only be evil
where there is an evil will; so it is active wills that have to be
reconciled.
2. Let an open hand represent a
man of goodwill and a closed fist a man of illwill.
Man of illwill ... 
... Man of goodwill ... 
3. Love renders us vulnerable.
When illwill is expressed ... 
.
.. love must 'take it.'
4. When we cease to 'take it' and
retaliate, the evil will in the person hostile to us wins its
victory in us, so we become a carbon copy of him.
When love fails … 
... it turns into an answering illwill.
Evil has won its victory. Sin wins its
way in the world by this process, growing into a chain
reaction.
5. If the man of goodwill sustains
his attitude, it will render him vulnerable. But only if he does
sustain that attitude, suffering inescapably until he shames the
other into a recognition, confession and disavowal of his wrong,
can his goodwill overcome the other's evil will and conquer
it.
When love
wins its victory,
it turns the evil will into ... 
... an answering goodwill.
The change of heart is repentance ......... 
..........
...Trust in the other's love is faith.
In the face of hostility, suffering is
love's only path to victory.
6. When the man of illwill does so
answer to the other, the change of heart in him is in the Bible
called repentance. And along with the repentance goes trust; the
repentant person has to believe in the steadfastness of the
other's love and the genuineness of his forgiveness. So repentance
and faith together "rightwise" (justify = dikaiow [Greek])
the man of illwill to the man of love.
7. This is how
reconciliation is achieved by Christ through His Cross; for
where two enemies are opposed to each other with hostile intent,
what is needed if they are to be reconciled is a man of love to
interpose himself between the two, soaking up the hurt from both,
until in their reconciliation to him, they become reconciled to
each other in his person.
A man of goodwill interposes himself
between the hostile parties .. 
.. standing in the cross-fire between them and soaking
up the illwill of both until he brings both to repentance and
faith 
... He reconciles them to each other "in himself".
This is precisely what Paul says in
Ephesians that Christ does. This is how He achieves reconciliation
between Jew and Gentile - v. 14, "He is our peace"; v. 15 "He created
in Himself one new man in the place of two, so making peace." He did
it literally at the Cross, where He stood in the cross-fire between
Jew and Gentile. He went on doing it in the 'Assembly of the
Reconciled', the Church, where "there is neither Jew nor Greek."
(Gal. 3:28)
This material is
copyright; it may not be published, quoted or reproduced without
permission, nor may it be preached without acknowledgment!