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In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Catherine, God be praised that though you are dead, that’s how Paul talks about us today in the text—we are dead in trespasses and sins, and yet the Lord has made us alive in Christ for you and for all the baptized, be raised from the dead through the waters of holy baptism.
Paul says, don’t you know that you who were baptized with Christ were buried with Him through baptism into death, that just as Jesus is risen from the dead, we too might live a new life, walk in a new way. We are part of the new humanity in Christ that is not bound to sin and to death and to corruption, but who are bound to the Lord Jesus in glory. And that is the hope that He sets before us. God be praised for you and for all the baptized.
I would like, dear saints, to accomplish three things in the sermon this morning. We’ll see how it goes. First, number one, I want to catch us up from last week. We skipped over a couple of passages and I want to make sure we’re up to speed. Number two, I want to know what Paul’s talking about here in this text in Ephesians chapter 2, verses 11 to 22. And then number three, I want to dig a little bit into one little phrase that he uses about being without hope. So let’s see how it goes.
Last week we started on Ephesians and it occurred to me this week, it’s kind of amazing that Paul is writing this letter like a lot of his letters, he’s writing it from jail. We normally think for prison, we think that, you know, when people are in prison, we want to go and visit them and encourage them, and that’s right, but Paul is encouraging us from prison. He just is an overflow of encouragement, and he’s writing this letter of encouragement, and he started out in chapter 1, we talked about it last week, listing the seven blessings that we have in Christ.
The end of chapter 1, which we skipped, was Paul’s letter of… or his… his accounting of… of what he prays for the church. He says, I thank God always for all of you, for your faith and for your love, and I pray that God would give you the Holy Spirit so that the eyes of your heart would be opened so that you would know that the Holy Spirit who worked in Jesus to raise him from the dead also works in us. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead, the same power that seated Jesus at the right hand of the throne of God, the same power through which Jesus rules and reigns all things in the church, that that power is also at work in you. And the problem is we can’t see it, so we have to have the eyes of our heart open. But that’s how Ephesians chapter 1 ends with this picture of Jesus sitting on the throne, ruling and reigning all things for the sake of the church.
As I was looking at it this week, I think it occurred to me that there’s no other passage in all the Bible that I used more this last year than Ephesians 1, 22 and 23. I think probably every day, I would read it to people, I would remind people of it. And why? It’s because when things are falling apart, we’re tempted to think that Jesus is not on the throne anymore, that He’s not in charge, that He’s taking a break or something. No, no. Jesus is on the throne, and He is ruling and reigning, and He’s doing all things for the sake of His body, the church. It’s just fantastic to remember.
And then, in chapter 2, Paul’s asking the question, how did we get here? How did we get all these blessings, faith and love and hope and the Holy Spirit and this new life that we have in Christ? How did it come to us? Did we earn it? Did we deserve it? Did we somehow capture it ourselves? Paul says, no, you—this is Ephesians 2.1—were dead in trespasses and sins. Not sick, not weak, not whatever else you want to put in there that doesn’t mean dead. You’re not those things, you’re dead. Which means that you can’t do anything to be alive. A dead person cannot raise themselves. Lazarus could not have said, “Alright, I think I’m tired of this tomb, I’m out of here.” No. Dead is dead.
In fact, Paul goes on to say not only are we dead, but that we are, by nature, children of wrath, Ephesians 2.4, which means that we deserve, even as little babies—as cute as the babies are, and I got a good view of the babies—now, as cute as they are, we have to say that they were born children of wrath, inheriting sin from their parents all the way back to Adam and Eve. Even though we don’t think it, we deserve God’s wrath, we deserve His anger, but instead of giving us what we deserve, the Lord Jesus takes it upon Himself.
He takes all of the bad things that we deserve, and then He gives us His righteousness and His perfection so that we are, in fact, born again; we’re part of this new humanity. And that’s where Paul gets to, in Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, this verse that every Confirmation student memorizes: “By grace we are saved through faith, and that, not of yourselves, it’s the gift of God, so that no one can boast.” We’re saved by grace and by grace alone. No works, no efforts, no earning, no deserving, no trying, no deciding, no nothing. Jesus does it all. He comes down and He dies for us. He’s raised for us. He grabs ahold of us. He puts His name on us. He calls us to be His own. He rescues us and delivers us. And there’s nothing for us to boast of, nothing for us to brag about. Christ Jesus has done it all.
And that takes us to our text. So, Ephesians 2, verse 11, Paul is going to apply that idea of grace alone to a big controversy that was in the church in that day. Now it’s not as big a controversy nowadays, but it has some application. But the big controversy is, what does it mean to be Jew versus Gentile? As you read through the Gospels, especially as you read through the Epistles, and as you read through the Acts, you realize this is a big controversy. God had chosen the Jewish people. He’d put His name on them. He’d blessed them. He’d given them the Word, the promise, the covenants. He’d given them the sacrifices. He’d given them all these blessings.
But why? The Lord had set them apart from all the other peoples through things like circumcision and their dietary laws and the clothes they could wear and the priesthood and the sacrifices. But why? Now, we know that the reason, the purpose, was Christ, but here’s what happened. The Jewish people began to boast in their own works, their own Jewish identity, their blood. “We’re the children of Abraham,” they say. “We’ve never been slaves. We are the apple of God’s eye” and so forth and so on. They were boasting in themselves, and this became a big problem when the gospel of grace came along, because can you be a Christian without being a Jew? Do you have to become a Jew first?
Remember just a couple of the controversies. Remember, for example, when God called Peter to go to preach to Cornelius the Gentile, and to get him to go, the Lord had to give him this vision of the unclean animals coming down and says, “Kill them and eat them.” And Peter says, “I’ve never eaten anything unclean.” And he says, “What I call clean, don’t call unclean.” Or remember this controversy when Peter goes up to Damascus and he’s eating with the Gentiles, but then the Jews come up from Jerusalem, and then Peter stops eating with the Gentiles because he’s now going to keep the kosher law so that he can be clean, and Paul has to come and confront him to his face and say, “You’ve done wrong here.”
Or remember in Acts chapter 15, the first church council, the first church meeting, the first voters’ meeting. They get together in Jerusalem, and what are they debating? Can you be Christian without being Jewish? That’s the big debate. Can you be Christian without being circumcised? The answer? Well, we know this now. Yes, I mean, of course, it doesn’t have to be… but this was the big controversy there.
In fact, when you read Paul’s letters, one of the reasons why Paul was writing his letters is because everywhere he would go, he would establish a church preaching the grace of God and the free forgiveness of sins, and then the false teachers would come behind him, the teachers that the Bible scholars now call the Judaizers, and they would—when Paul would leave, they would come into town and they’d say, “OK, now Paul was pretty good about grace and mercy and this Jesus stuff, but he didn’t give you the whole picture. The whole picture is, if you really want to be a Christian, you first have to be circumcised. If you really want to be a Christian, you first have to keep the laws of Moses. If you really want to be a Christian, it’s not all grace, it’s grace and works, grace and efforts, grace and something that we do.”
And Paul would write these letters back to the churches and he would say, “No, no, salvation is by grace through faith.” And that means if that’s true, if salvation is by grace through faith, then there is no distinction between the Jew and the Gentile, between the Jew and the Greek. We are all saved the exact same way.
Now this has application for us, right? Because, I mean, the way that… You guys know that works righteousness is like June bugs. I mean, they’ll get into the house any way they can, you know? I mean, they’ll get in the front door, they’ll get in the back door, they’ll get in the window, they’ll get in the… in the dryer exhaust vent, they’ll get in any way… works righteousness will creep its way into your heart any way it can get in, and it creeps in for us too. And I’m a Christian because of whatever, because I decided, or because I didn’t reject it, or because I grew up in the church, or because I’m just a better person than the person out there that’s not a Christian. Repent. That’s false. It’s by grace. For you, for me, it’s by grace and by grace alone. There’s nothing that we’ve done. There’s nothing that you’ve done to deserve or earn or even to keep the grace of God. It’s completely free in Christ, completely free.
And the result is that if this is the case, then there is no such thing as Jew and Gentile. We’re all together in Christ. And that’s what Paul is talking about in our text. He says, “Remember, one time, you Gentiles in the flesh, you were called the uncircumcision by what’s called the circumcision. You were separated from Christ. You were alienated from the commonwealth. You were strangers to the promises. You had no hope. You were without God in the world. But now, in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. He Himself is our peace, having made us both one.” Jew and Gentile. One in Christ. He’s broken down in His flesh the dividing wall of hostility.
And verse 15, meaning He has created in Himself one new man in place of two, no longer two, but one in Christ, so making peace. And Paul, who’s talking a lot about how the church is His body, changes the picture for us at the end, and he says not only are we the body of Christ, united in one body, but we’re being built into one church, one temple. He says we are built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus, the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure being joined together grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In Him you are also being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Holy Spirit.”
So Paul says, if you’re saved by grace, how are you to separate from anybody? If you’re saved by grace, how are you to think that you’re better than anybody? If you’re saved by grace, how are you to build up these walls of hostility between you and anyone? The Lord has broken them down in His body by His blood on the cross. God be praised.
Okay, next week we’ll carry on in Ephesians chapter 3. But I want to bring your attention to one little phrase at the beginning of this text and dig into that just for a couple of minutes here at the end, and that is this word hope, or maybe better, this phrase having no hope.
In verse 12, as Paul is talking about our condition before becoming Christian, the condition of the Gentiles, he said that you had no hope and you were without God in the world. Now I want this to sink in a bit because I don’t think we think like this. A lot of us, you know, a lot of us were baptized as babies. A lot of us have been in the church our whole lives. A lot of us don’t know what it’s like to have a pagan life and then a Christian life. We just don’t have that comparison. We all have the sinful flesh, and so we all have a little pagan living inside of us. But that pagan didn’t kind of run the show for a long time, like a lot of the Ephesians who would have been converted as adults. And he says, “Remember how it was before you knew Christ, you had no hope.”
Now, this is what I want you to know, is that the life of the non-Christian is a hopeless life. Your neighbors who don’t know Christ, your friends that don’t know Christ, the family members that you’re praying for that have left the church and have abandoned Christ, they are hopeless. Now, they might have little hopes. I mean, we all have little hopes, right? I mean, you hope that things might get better. You hope that you might get a better job or that you might get a raise or that you might get a good grade in school or something like this. There’s these kind of little hopes, but those hopes are all bounded by severe limitations. In fact, they’re bounded especially by death. Because for the unbeliever, for those who do not know God, death is the end of everything. It’s over. That’s it. You have to collect all of your good things between now and then because that’s the end.
Their horizon of hope only extends as far as the cemetery, but this is not the case for the Christians. The Lord Jesus comes and He expands our horizon of hope. He gives us hope, not just in this life, but most especially in the life to come. Paul says, for those of us who have hope in Christ, “In this life only are the most to be pitied.” Our hope extends. Extends past death. Extends past the grave. It extends past your own funeral. It extends all the way to eternal life. And this lifts us up. This buoys us. This gives us strength to fight on. Luther says that faith is a teacher. It tells us what God says, what’s right and what’s wrong. But hope is a captain. It rallies the troops. It gives us strength to fight against the darkness of this age. It gives us strength to endure crosses and trouble and tribulation because we know that the best is yet to come. And our hope is grounded in God, and it’s securely fastened to salvation and the resurrection that’s on the way and the eternal life that the Lord Jesus has given to us.
One time, says St. Paul, you were without hope, but now, Catherine and the baptized, you have hope because God cannot lie, because Jesus is risen and ascended, because all your sins are forgiven, because God is not mad at you. He should be. He’s not. God is not mad at you for the stuff that you’ve done wrong, for the things that you’ve failed to do right. He’s not upset. All your sins are forgiven so that when you die and you open your eyes in the resurrection or in eternal life, you will see one day soon the face of Jesus, and on that face is not going to be a scowl but a smile. That’s His—oh, can you believe it? That’s His promise, and it’s coming soon.
Things now are hard in this life. You will have trouble, Jesus promised it. The world is dark; it’s getting darker. There’s sickness all around. There’s death all around. There’s trouble all around. The day is coming when there is no more sorrow, no more tears, no more dying, no more sin. Can you think of that? There’s a day that’s coming when you’re not going to be able to sin even if you want to. And you’re not going to want to. No more temptation, no more cemeteries, no more hurricanes, no more viruses, no more wars and rumors of wars. The day when the glory of Christ comes to earth and we are joined to Him. And it’s coming soon, and that’s your hope. We were, again as Paul says, at one time, hopeless, but not anymore.
Now the God of hope has filled you with all joy in believing, and our hope in Him sustains us. God be praised. Amen.
Peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
