A chief cornerstone to a builder in the first century was that stone without which the building could not stand. It's in Christ that the whole building is knit together through and by the cornerstone. Ephesians chapter two paints a very dark picture of the state of humanity. We're dead in our trespasses and sins. Unbelievers are said to follow the prince of the power of the air and that by nature we are children of wrath. But Ephesians chapter two also features good news, in fact the best news.
That's what R.C. Sproul will consider today on this Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. We're currently in a short series in Ephesians, messages R.C.
Sproul gave at St. Andrew's Chapel in Sanford, Florida. These messages, along with all of his teaching on Ephesians, form the basis of his expositional commentary. And if you'd like to add this hardcover volume to your collection, you can request a copy with your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the unity that Christians have in Christ. Before I begin with the exposition of the text, let me just review a little bit of what we have seen so far. Paul in the second chapter at the beginning spells out the radical need for that grace by giving us a perfectly accurate but somewhat grim account of our fallen humanity and our natural deadness in sin. And now he's been turning his attention to what I regard to be the central theme of the entire epistle, which is Paul's teaching concerning the nature of the church, and particularly how Gentiles in the first century fit into this body that we call the church. And so now when we look at this in the New Testament, the New Testament has much to teach us about the nature of the church, and the Bible uses several different metaphors. The body of Christ is one of the most prominent, and other such metaphors, the people of God, the layouts, the ohs, and so on.
And each one of these metaphors gives us some insight as to the nature of the church. Last time we looked at that section of the text where Paul had contrasted the former situation of the relationship of hostility between Jews and Gentiles, saying that now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. And then he says in verse 14, for He Himself is our peace. In this case, Jesus is not merely the peacemaker.
It's not as though Jesus Himself brings the Jew and the Gentile to the bargaining table and affects a successful negotiation for the cessation of hostilities. It's not simply that He brings peace or that teaches peace, but He Himself, Paul is saying now, in a remarkable way, is our peace. Now what does Paul mean by that? He speaks elsewhere of Christ being our righteousness. That is, His righteousness is imputed to us. But Jesus Himself but Jesus Himself brings peace between these warring parties, not only because He is peaceful but because He is the very incarnation of peace. You remember His last will and testimony, His legacy pronounced to His disciples in the upper room on the night before He was crucified when He said to His disciples, Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you. Not as the world gives, give I unto you.
Let not your hearts be troubled. Now how does this work? I think Paul here is alluding at least to a very core doctrine that He teaches throughout His epistles, and that is the doctrine of the mystical union of believers with Christ. When we recite the Apostles' Creed, one of the affirmations that we make in that creed is that we believe in the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints.
Have you given much thought to that? What does it mean? Again, if I can break down the word, it's a simple word, another compound word. There is the prefix com, which means what? With.
And then the root unio. So a communion is a uniting of people together with each other. There is a certain witness, a unified witness that we all share as Christians. Now the foundation for the communion of saints is our mystical union as individuals with Christ. As I've said before when looking at this epistle, when you become a Christian, you believe into Christ. And when you believe into Christ, Christ comes in you.
He is now in you, and you are in Him. But this mystical union goes far beyond the individual. If I am in Christ, and Christ is in me, and you are in Christ, and Christ is in you, then our peace, our reconciliation, our union is found in Him, so that He is our unity. He is our peace. He Himself, that's the emphatic reference here to Christ, is our peace, who has made both one, that is Jew and Gentile, and has broken down the middle wall of separation. We remember that the day of our Lord's death, that when He satisfied the demands of God's holiness and justice, that the veil of the temple of the temple was rent vertically, opening up access from the holy place to the Holy of Holies.
But that wasn't the only separation. There was the porch of the Gentiles, the area that separated the Gentiles from the Jews, and that was a place of separation. And now that wall of separation, not only the curtain between the holy place and the Holy of Holies has been torn asunder, but the separation between the Jew and the Gentile has also been broken down, having abolished in His flesh the enmity. Now we know, I think, what the word abolish means. We went through a war in this country to abolish slavery. And to abolish means to get rid of, to terminate, to end, particularly with respect to legal requirements. And so the enmity that the enmity that exists between the Jew and the Gentile is not only overcome by the peace of Christ but by His authority has been abolished.
It's over. There is no justification to continue any enmity between Jew and Gentile once Christ has abolished that enmity. And how did He do it? He did it in His flesh. That is, He did it on the cross. He did it by suffering both for the sins of the Jewish elect as well as the sins of the Gentile elect. And so in the sacrifice of His physical death, He set aside not only the enmity between God and us, but also the enmity between Jew and Gentile. He abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments as contained in ordinances. Again, the big stumbling block between the Jews and the Gentiles were those particularly ceremonial laws that dealt with the liturgical cultic life of Israel that distinguished them from all the nations of the world.
And so one of the things that the Gentiles hated about the Jews were all these Jewish rituals and rites and ceremonies and regulations that they did not participate in. So as too, that is for the purpose here, to create in Himself, again you see that this is an act of creation by Christ. That is an act of creation that is not only by Christ, but it is in Christ. And you might say it is for Christ, just as the world itself was created by Christ, for Christ, and He is the One who holds all things together. So now He's creating in Himself one new man.
Now that singular use of man there may mislead us for a moment, and we may miss the point. But what Paul is speaking about here is that Christ has introduced a new humanity, a new humanity that abolishes this wall of separation between Jew and Gentile so that now in Him there is no Jew nor Greek, only one common humanity. Now again, this is not just abstract theology, but in the first century church one of the biggest questions that the early Christian community had to face was what place do the Gentiles have now in the new covenant community? And the Apostle Paul is making it abundantly clear that the place they have is one of equality with the Jewish converts and that there's no priority given to Jewish converts and there's no second-class citizenship in the kingdom of God. So in Himself He created one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, therefore putting to death the enmity.
These images are simply repeating by way of emphasis what He's already said here. And so He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. He preached the same message both to the Jews and to the Gentiles of the presence of the kingdom of God. For through Him through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. If there's ever a Trinitarian passage that you're going to run into, here it is because it says that this work of reconciliation, this making peace between Jew and Gentiles is a Trinitarian work.
It was through Christ by the Holy Spirit unto the Father so that all three persons in the Trinity are working for the same purpose and to the same end here. He says, Now therefore, you're no longer strangers and foreigners. You know the Old Testament saw the Gentiles as foreigners and strangers and strangers to God's covenant community.
That old system is gone. It no longer stands. But instead of being strangers and foreigners, Paul says that this unity manifests itself fundamentally in three ways, and let's see if we can discover them. Now therefore, you're no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints. What's a citizen? A citizen belongs to some political group.
A city really comes from the word city or a nation. I told the story at some point on Sunday morning about what happened to Vesta and me and two of our friends when I was doing a three-week series of lectures in Eastern Europe right after the wall came down and the communists had departed, and I had lectured for a week first of all in Czechoslovakia, which is now the Czech Republic, and then a week at the seminary in Budapest and Hungary, and from there we were traveling to Romania to do another week of lectures there. This is shortly after Ceausescu had been overthrown. But we were warned in our journey that things at the border between Hungary and Romania were difficult and that we might encounter trouble by the authorities at the border. And so when our train, which was an antiquated train I believe, World War II vintage, crossed the border from Hungary into Romania and came into the first stop, we were met by the border patrol. And two somewhat rough and crude soldiers got on the train and demanded that we open up our luggage, which we did.
And they were being very aggressive and unfriendly towards us. And then a moment later, the head officer got on, a great big burly guy, and he walked over to see what was going on here and looked down, and one of our persons that were with us had a Bible in a brown paper bag. And this chief of the border patrol saw this Bible and said, what's that? And she pulled it out, and she said, it's a Bible. And he looked at the Bible and he said, you Christians? We said, yes. And then he said, looking at our passports, you know Americans. We said, oh, we're in trouble now. He said, you're not American.
I'm not Romanian. And then he opened the text of Scripture and said, what does this say? We are fellow citizens of the kingdom of God. And here he was a Christian, and he told to these other guys, he says, leave these people alone.
They're fine. They're fellow citizens with us of the kingdom of God. That was a wonderful taste of the mercy of the Lord.
Wonderful taste of the mercy and grace of God. But what he's saying is that the Gentiles now, through the ministry of Christ, have been brought into the city of God. Now in this metaphor, he speaks about, first of all, that this house has been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. If you ask the average Christian on the street, what is the church's foundation? They will say the church's foundation is Jesus Christ.
Now that's usually because they've heard the hymn. The church's one foundation is Jesus Christ, our Lord. Well, the Bible teaches us that the only foundation that can be laid is the one that is laid in Christ Jesus. But again, the main metaphor for the foundation of the church is not that Jesus is the foundation, but the foundation is built upon the prophets and the apostles. Now what does that mean?
And why is that important? We have seen in the last two hundred years a wholesale assault against the authority of the Bible, and that assault has not come simply from unbelieving secularists, but in the main it's come from within the church, from critics of the Scripture who claim to be Christians. And speaking of the higher critics of the academic world who have leveled this assault.
The founder of the university where I did my doctoral studies was also the prime minister of the Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper, said at the turn of the century that biblical criticism can no longer legitimately be called biblical criticism. It must be called to be accurate to the accurate biblical vandalism, that the attacks upon biblical authority have been so severe it betrays the work of vandals. Now to say that the church is built on the foundation of the prophets and the apostles is to say that the foundation of the church is based upon the truth that is revealed by God through His agents of revelation. Those agents of revelation in the Old Testament were the prophets. In the New Testament they are the apostles.
We see that same imagery found in the book of Revelation, for example. And again when the Psalmist wrote, he raised the question, if the foundation of the house be shaken, how can the building stand? And the foundation of the church is the teaching, the words of the prophets and the apostles. To put it another way, the church is built on the Word of God.
And when that foundation is shaken, the building cannot possibly stand. But again the prophets and the apostles do not serve merely on their own power and even on their delegated authority as the whole of the foundation of the church, but that foundation in order to be able to support the building has to be neatly fit together and built upon a sound basis, and that which knits it together is the cornerstone, the cornerstone without which the building will not be unified. And so that foundational imagery of the prophets and the apostles is seen to be knit together and unified by the Lord, Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone. And a chief cornerstone to a builder in the first century was that stone without which the building could not stand, in whom the whole building being fitted together. Again it's in Christ that the whole building is knit together through and by the cornerstone. So this image now, we've gone beyond citizen, the family, to the building which is knit together by Christ Himself. And it grows, here the building is organic, but it grows into a holy temple. This foundation really makes the old temple of brick and mortar to be obsolete because we now have a holy temple in the Lord in whom you are also being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. Again, you have the foundation and then you have the cornerstone. But what makes up the rest of the building?
Who are the stones, the bricks that are knit together to make this magnificent building? We are, as the Apostle Peter said, we are the living stones that Christ uses to knit together, and He's taking Gentile stones and Jewish stones and knitting them together to build together a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. If we just would believe those last words, that last phrase of this last verse of chapter 2, I believe the life of this church would be transformed. I believe we would have revival like we've never seen. I believe that our worship experience on Sunday morning would undergo a metamorphosis.
Why? Because we have been built together as a people to be a dwelling place, a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. You see, if we really believed that, we would know that when we come together on Sunday morning for worship that we're coming into the manifest and manifold presence of God. And if we really believed that, if we really believed that God was here in the power and presence of the Holy Ghost, our worship experience would go through the roof, and we would experience a renewal of our souls, a refreshment of our spirits, a fullness of reverence and adoration, because we know that we have spent time with the Lord.
What an incredible truth and a reminder of why it's vital to gather together as the people of God. Today's message on Renewing Your Mind was from R.C. Sproul, the founder of Ligonier Ministries. It was thirty years ago this month that Dr. Sproul launched Renewing Your Mind and brought trusted and deep Bible teaching into the homes and into the vehicles of Christians thanks to radio.
Today that reach has extended globally thanks to the rise of podcasting, and all of this is possible through your generous and regular support of this program. Today, when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast show notes, we'll send you R.C. Sproul's expositional commentary on Ephesians so that you can continue studying this letter from the Apostle Paul. Use it to further enrich your devotional reading or use it to deepen your study of God's Word. Give your gift at renewingyourmind.org before this offer ends at midnight. Next time, R.C. Sproul will conclude our study in the book of Ephesians. That's next Sunday, here on Renewing Your Mind. you
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