Paul's saying, remember where you were.
You're separated from Christ, alienated from the Commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. This is the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind, as each week we feature the preaching and teaching ministry of R.C. Sproul. We're currently in a short series beginning in Ephesians chapter 2. You can own Dr. Sproul's complete study of Ephesians when you request his hardcover expositional commentary with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. And know that your generosity today is helping take the truth of God's Word to the nations. Paul had bad news to share with us last week, and as Dr. Sproul begins at verse 11 of chapter 2, Paul again reminds us of who we once were.
Here's Dr. Sproul. We're going to continue our study of Paul's letter to the Ephesians, and we are in chapter 2, and I will be reading beginning at verse 11 through the end of the chapter. Therefore, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands. Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that He might create in Himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.
And He came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near, for through Him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you are also being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. Keep in mind that one of the major themes of Paul's letter to the Ephesians is the theme of the nature of the church of Jesus Christ.
And so what he teaches in this lesson tonight I think is critical for our understanding of what is the church. So he starts this portion by calling the Ephesian Gentiles to remember something. He says, remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, let me just comment briefly on that phrase, in the flesh, because Paul uses the term flesh in two different ways. Sometimes he refers simply to a person's physical human nature without any particular reference to their fallen condition in original sin.
Other times he uses that term flesh to describe our fallen nature where we are in bondage to sin. But now I think here when he talks about the Gentiles in the flesh, he's not talking about their fallen condition, but that those who are defined as Gentiles in terms of their ethnicity, the fact that they are not Jewish by nature, but that they are in fact non-Jewish in their physical and personal background. Remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh called the uncircumcision by what is called circumcision. Now actually this is kind of a euphemistic and polite translation that we have here because we know that the term that was used by the Jews to describe non-Jews or Gentiles was not simply that they were uncircumcised, but they referred to them in a pejorative sense as the foreskins, because they still had foreskins which had been removed from the Jews by the right of circumcision.
So that was a little bit more crass than simply being called uncircumcised by what is called the circumcision, which of course refers to the Jews, which is made in the flesh by hand. Now again he calls the Gentiles to remember their former situation and their former estate. And I would ask us to pay close attention here because he lists specifically five things that separated the Gentiles from the Jews. Remember that you were at that time, first of all, separated from Christ. Being Gentiles, you had no relationship with the Messiah that was promised to Israel.
Remember the term Christos or Christ is the Greek translation of the Hebrew term for the anointed one, which referred to the Jewish promise and hope of the coming anointed Messiah. And the Gentiles, being non-Jews, did not have this historic background and preparation for the coming of the Messiah. And so in their circumstance and whatever religious involvement they were in, they were completely separated from Christ. Now for the Apostle Paul to describe people's condition as being in a state of separation from Christ is one of the most grim diagnoses that he could make about any human's condition. There are millions and millions of people in our country today, both Jew and Gentile, who remain separated from Christ. And that's a dreadful thing, and if it was the only thing that Paul introduced here to describe their previous condition, it would be ghastly enough.
But he doesn't stop at that point. He continues to spell out the further ramifications of what it means to be separated from Christ. Remember that. Remember the time before Paul came to Ephesus and planted that church there. Remember before you heard the gospel. Remember before you were converted. Remember before you were made alive by the Holy Spirit.
What condition you were in. First off, you were separated from Christ. Second of all, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel.
Now, not only were they separated from Israel, but there existed tension and conflict between Jew and Gentile that can be described in terms of alienation. Alienation is often rooted in ethnic differences. And you know we have lists of phobias that you learn about in freshman psychology class. These deep-rooted fears that are often irrational, but nevertheless powerful fears that produce deep agitation within our souls. You know there's hydrophobia, fear of water, and agoraphobia, fear of going out into public places.
And you have all these kinds. Arachnidophobia, fear of spiders, and we could go on with them. And do you know what xenophobia is? It's fear of foreigners. Fear of people who are different culturally, racially, religiously. And we have a tendency to be frightened by those apparent differences. And so here Paul is speaking of that kind of deep-rooted alienation between the Gentile community of that period from the Jewish community.
Indeed there was not just a discomfort and a fear, but there was again much hostility that was generated between the two groups. And so he said separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel. And there the commonwealth of Israel is that what's called the polity or the cultic life of the Jewish people. The Gentiles didn't understand Jewish traditions, didn't understand Jewish practices, didn't understand Jewish religion. And, go on here for a second, and strangers to the covenants of promise. So that the ones who were aliens, who were separated, were also strangers. Not just strangers to Jewish customs, and not just separated from Christ, but strangers to the covenants of God.
What does that really spell out? They didn't know the specific content of the covenant promises of God. Because what is it that they didn't have that would have taught them of the covenants that God made with Israel? They didn't have the Scriptures. They didn't have the Word of God. You remember elsewhere in Romans when Paul talks about he who is a Jew is one who is a Jew inwardly.
And it's not merely by being circumcised in the flesh, but you have to have the circumcision of the heart. And when he talks about both Jew and Gentile are together under sin, and then he gives such a grim evaluation of the behavioral patterns and the status of first century Judaism, he then asks a rhetorical question, what advantage then is there in being a Jew? And the way he goes through all of these things that show that this is an advantage, and that is an advantage, and this doesn't really get you into heaven, that won't get you into heaven. You expect him to answer his question, what then is the advantage of the Jew to say, not much, or there's none.
But that's not what he does. He says, much in every way, and chiefly what? They had the oracles of God, that they had the Word of God. They had the canon of the Old Testament. So working without the oracles of God, without the special revelation of sacred Scripture, the Gentiles were consigned to a serious disadvantage, and were left in so much more darkness than being without the light that God gave to Israel.
And so Paul's saying, remember where you were. You're separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. Those last two really spell out the depths of their lostness and of their condition. Being without the knowledge of Scripture, being without Christ, being strangers to the commonwealth of Israel, they were in a condition of hopelessness. Imagine a life without hope. Thoreau said that the vast majority of human beings, men, live their lives in quiet desperation.
I think about this a lot, particularly with respect to my friends and acquaintances and family even, who are without Christ. And I'm thinking, how can they live? How can you live in a situation of hopelessness? Well, they are without, really what is being said here is that they're without any meaningful hope, without any substantive hope, but they still conjure up worldly hopes. And they think, you know, they still go through life and they say, well, I don't like school, but as soon as I'm 16, I'm going to get my driver's licenses. So that sustains them through earlier hopelessness. But they get their driver's license and it doesn't satisfy them. They say, well, as soon as I graduate from high school, then I'll be happy.
They graduate from high school, that doesn't happen. As soon as I'm 21, as soon as I get out of college, as soon as I get married, as soon as I have a baby, as soon as I have a job, as soon as I get my bank account to a certain level, as soon as we own our own house mortgage-free, and I keep postponing happiness, putting it to the future. But then there comes a time when you realize you're really caught in a vortex of hopelessness, you know, and you start putting bumper stickers on your car that say, He who dies with the most toys wins. That's a philosophy of hopelessness. That's a philosophy of despair.
And never, I think in the history of the West, has hopelessness more permeated a culture than it does today. That's one reason why we're a drug-ridden and suicidal culture, because without the covenants of promise, we have no hope. And without Christ, we have no hope.
And then the final thing, without God in the world. The way it's translated in the Greek is not without God in the world, it is kai otheoi ento kosmo. The word there that is translated in English, without God, is the word otheoi, from which we get the English word atheist, or atheism. Now when you think of the nature of atheism, what do you think of? You say an atheist is a person who says, I will not affirm the existence of God. I'll put it in the other way, I don't believe in the existence of God. I'm not persuaded of the existence of God.
And it has to do with a philosophical conviction. But in any case, the point I want to make here is that when Paul is describing the situation of the Gentiles before this period and is asking them to remember what they were, he's not simply saying, remember that you were atheist, but that you were as an atheist without God in the world. You were godless. And that's the description of everyone who is outside of Christ. They're godless. And Paul is saying, that was your circumstance before.
And he's not just talking to a group of people in Turkey. He's talking about us. This is our pedigree.
This is our background. Nobody is ever born a Christian. You may be born into a Christian home, but you're DOA. You're dead on arrival, spiritually.
You're a pagan when you take your first breath. You're not aware, at least, of the Scriptures. Yet, you're dead in sin, you're without Christ, and you're godless.
That's our natural fallen condition. Now, I mentioned earlier, when Paul, in the beginning of chapter 2, in verse 4, after he said, you were dead in trespasses in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind. And then, after this terrible indictment, we breathe a sigh of relief when Paul says, But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ by grace, who you say, through faith, and so on. Well, after he just did that in the early part of chapter 2, after describing the fallen human condition, he interrupts that grim evaluation with the words, But God. I remember I emphasized this so much in a Bible study I gave 42 years ago.
Some ladies that were in the class did needlepoint, and they needlepointed me a little thing with the words, But God. And I had that hanging on the wall in my office, because that's, in a nutshell, the history of my redemption. Because it wasn't that I was dead in sin and trespasses, but Sproul resolved to change his ways, to turn over a new leaf, pull himself up from his bootstraps.
No, salvation is over the Lord fully and completely. And so now, after Paul talks about these five things that were missing in the condition and the lives of the Gentiles saying that they had no hope and were without God in the world, But now. But now, he says, remember where you were, but now understand where you are. But now, in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near. You were so far away from the kingdom we couldn't see you with Galileo's telescope. You were so much strangers and foreigners to the things of God that the only way to describe it is not that you were jammed up close to it, just on the threshold of coming to faith, just on the doorstep of the kingdom of God. No, you were far away in the distance. But you've now been brought near by dromedaries, by horses, camels. No, what has allowed you to pass over that distance? He said the means, the instrument that has carried you from afar to near is the blood of Christ.
That's what's changed my situation. From death to life, from hopelessness to hope, from godlessness to God is the blood of Jesus Christ. He's talking about the atonement. The atonement is the great equalizer. If Christ dies for a Gentile, that Gentile is now no longer separated from the Jewish believer. He's no longer an alien to the commonwealth of Israel because the blood of Christ has made him clean. Remember, again, the most common designation of the Gentile in the Old Testament is that he's unclean, is impure with a filthiness that couldn't be cleansed by soap. It required blood, a bloodbath of the cross.
You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul in Ephesians chapter 2. If you're looking for additional teaching to supplement what you heard today in your local church, remember that there's hundreds of resources available to you right now in the free Ligonier app. Listen to podcasts, read articles and devotionals, and watch your Listen to Select teaching series.
Simply search for Ligonier in your favorite app store or visit ligonier.org slash app. Today's message in Ephesians 2 and all of Dr. Sproul's teaching in Ephesians over the years form the basis of his expositional commentary on Ephesians, the latest in his commentary series. You can add this hardcover volume to your collection when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you use the link in the podcast show notes. Read Dr. Sproul teach on the gospel, our unity in Christ, and the armor of God when you request this commentary on Ephesians. Visit renewingyourmind.org to request yours before this offer ends at midnight. From bad news for fallen humanity to the good news of those who are in Christ, that's next Sunday here on Renewing Your Mind. .
