00:00:00:30 – 00:00:33:41
Clint Loveall
Hey everybody happy Monday. Thanks for being back with us as we continue through the book of Ephesians. We’re in the second chapter. In verse 15 and in Paul. Well, this is an interesting passage that we can come back and talk about it later, but, Paul says some things here that he unpacks other places. Here they just kind of dropped in and, we get to them fairly quickly.

00:00:33:41 – 00:00:40:16
Clint Loveall
But let me read for a few verses and then we’ll we’ll circle back.

00:00:40:21 – 00:01:06:33
Clint Loveall
He God has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death the hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed, peace to you who were far off, and peace to those who were near.

00:01:06:37 – 00:01:44:49
Clint Loveall
For through him both of us now have access in one spirit to the father. Let’s stop there, Michael. We may get further, but so, here, as Paul talks about the work of Jesus, he says, what is a, not controversial, probably certainly controversial in his day. But this phrase abolish the law is this is a monumental idea in Paul’s writing.

00:01:44:49 – 00:02:17:01
Clint Loveall
It’s one of his primary conflicts with other early Christians, particularly those of a Jewish background. He spends a great deal of time trying to unpack what he means in a book like Romans. The word abolish may not help us a great deal. That has the context of destroyed the Greek word here probably leans more toward he set aside or annulled is even is even a translation at times.

00:02:17:06 – 00:03:08:22
Clint Loveall
But he abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances. Michael, I think this language historically makes Christians nervous because the idea is we need guidelines, we need law. Certainly, coming out of the Jewish context of Paul’s day himself having been a Pharisee, these are almost unthinkable words for a man like Paul to say that the law has been set aside, that all of the commandments that the legal code that they have inherited as Jewish people has been, annulled, has been rendered unnecessary, and I, I don’t want to overdo it, and I don’t want to get, you know, a mile deep and something that people probably aren’t interested in.

00:03:08:27 – 00:03:30:38
Clint Loveall
But this is a major contention between Paul and other early Christians. And it is one of, I think, the incredible transitions that the Christian church has to make growing up in Jewish soil and to get from one place to another, is no small matter.

00:03:30:43 – 00:03:55:17
Michael Gewecke
No doubt. I think actually this is a very contemporary word, though still, because we do need the context. And so let’s start there. Let’s remember that sometimes we’ve learned in Sunday School that the law was a bad thing, that it hung around the neck of the Jews and that they hated it. They pushed against it, and in fact, that it could not be further from the truth.

00:03:55:17 – 00:04:27:19
Michael Gewecke
The truth is, the law, as it was given to the Jews, was cherished because it was the defining factor that made them the people of God. God bless them with the way of living in the world. And so they tried to order their lives as best as they could around that insight, that wisdom. And at its best, it allowed them to create a culture, a kind of a greenhouse where they could flourish as the identity of the people who have received the laws of God.

00:04:27:19 – 00:04:51:50
Michael Gewecke
And now hear that this word in verse 15, the fact that the law is no longer necessary for the task of being identified as a child of God is a radical reimagining of what it means to be inside the circle, because before, the way you knew you were in the circle was you knew the law and you did the law.

00:04:51:50 – 00:05:16:43
Michael Gewecke
And of course, everyone was all the different stage of the journey of doing that, whether well or poorly. But yet still everyone understood the basic bounds of that task. One of the problems that Paul experiences, Clinton we see this clearly in a book like First and Second Corinthians. He talks about the abolishing of the law or the but certainly the transformation of the Christian understanding of the law.

00:05:16:48 – 00:05:55:48
Michael Gewecke
And people go wild with it because they misunderstand the that Paul’s not saying there’s no boundaries. He’s saying the boundaries have shifted fundamentally from the law to the giver of the law. And I think what’s striking in the contemporary ness of this is the fact that Christians, though we don’t often celebrate the law in the same identity making way that the Jews did, Christians who are now several thousand years after the earliest church, we too are very tempted to identify ourselves by our unique theologies, by our unique practices of the faith.

00:05:55:48 – 00:06:22:58
Michael Gewecke
Right? Things like, do you go to worship with an organ, or do you go to worship with a praise band? These things, though we at our best don’t think of them as the deal makers of whether you’re in or not, these become substantial external markers of the faith, and for us, we would have to come back and be reminded that it’s not those external markers either, because the point underneath this text is it’s not the stuff that tracks on the outside.

00:06:22:58 – 00:06:34:08
Michael Gewecke
It is the work of Jesus Christ, who by definition is above and beyond all those things that our faith sees. That reality is something other than the thing right in front of us.

00:06:34:22 – 00:06:58:13
Clint Loveall
I think that it may be helpful for people to walk backwards a little bit because as if we’re familiar, if we’re Christians or if we’re familiar with Christian language, the idea of grace, the idea that Christian church has very much affirmed that people are not righteous without Christ, that we don’t have our own righteousness. But keep in mind that that’s very different.

00:06:58:13 – 00:07:27:38
Clint Loveall
Through the Jewish lens. The law is the path to righteousness for the Jewish people of Paul’s day and to the to the better that they are able to keep the law. And to the extent that they follow all the commandments, they are then accorded as more and more righteous. And here Paul is saying that measurement system no longer matters.

00:07:27:43 – 00:08:02:24
Clint Loveall
That’s not how in a post Christ experience one attains righteousness. So I think you use the word necessary, Michael. And I think that’s the exact right word, I think on the whole. And you’d have to, you know, you couldn’t get there from this verse, so you’d have to do lots of other reading. But if I could summarize what I think, Paul, where Paul lands is this the law is not negated, but it is unnecessary because Christ has now delivered righteousness to us.

00:08:02:29 – 00:08:39:38
Clint Loveall
The law tried to do that. The law wasn’t able to do that because we were unable to keep the law. And so instead of a path that ultimately couldn’t take us to where we hope to be or where God wanted us to be, now the path of Christ has given us a righteousness that is not our own. And as such, Paul can then speak of, and this is wonderful language, that it creates a new humanity, a new mankind in place of two.

00:08:39:43 – 00:09:20:33
Clint Loveall
There is now one humanity. So the separation between righteous and unrighteous law and no law, Jew and Gentile. We now see that that those boundaries, those divisions are erased in Jesus Christ, making peace. And he might reconcile both groups to God. This this is beautiful language. This is wonderful theological language that underpins our understanding of the church, that insiders and outsiders are all brought in and all brought to Christ, and therefore in Christ they are one.

00:09:20:33 – 00:09:29:39
Clint Loveall
And and, you know, we’ve been honest, Michael. The church has not always done a very good job of living this out, but it is a beautiful vision.

00:09:29:43 – 00:10:03:10
Michael Gewecke
Well, and it’s also a challenging vision, interestingly, because we have to reconcile the difficulty that we have here in the hostility that need to overcome. And we’ve said that before, earlier in this book, there’s some strong language about the state of where we start. We don’t start pretty good. We start in a place of being convicted, condemned where our brokenness is enough to justify our complete severed connection with the creator of the universe.

00:10:03:10 – 00:10:25:03
Michael Gewecke
And yet, when we get to a text like this, verse 16, this idea that when we’re reconciled, we’re not just reconciled as individuals, we’re reconciled as groups. And that is tough for Western Christians, I think, at large, to get our minds around, because we think of this as being such an individual address that Jesus Christ came for us.

00:10:25:08 – 00:10:49:57
Michael Gewecke
It is, yes, of course, for you. But you are part of a larger family, right? But it’s even more challenging than that. If you’re able to see it, it’s because here Paul’s addressing two groups, the people who thought that they had it and were in, and the group who now thought that they had gotten a free pass to get in, but had made the assumption that it held an exclusion.

00:10:50:02 – 00:11:15:21
Michael Gewecke
The other group now, both of these groups are in and unfortunately, and I do choose that word carefully. Unfortunately for both groups, the wall between them is gone, which means at that point, you have to learn to live in a new way of thinking of who your identity is. Because both of these groups were to define themselves against and opposed to the other.

00:11:15:21 – 00:11:51:10
Michael Gewecke
But here, and it is abundantly clear that we are now able to experience peace. We’ve had peace proclaimed to us, those who were far off and who those who are near. Clint, this is astonishing because it has something to say to both groups that neither group, if we’re going to be honest, really want to hear that bad. This is fundamentally an invitation for us to consider that the gospel has done something at the very foundation of our understanding of how we are with the other, right?

00:11:51:10 – 00:12:15:38
Michael Gewecke
Whatever the other is here. It was defined through the law of God, through the racial family line, through all of these different distinguished chairs, all the way up to modern times. Today, we don’t exactly know. We don’t natively think of these being bound together in one body, where those categories suddenly get juggled together and they come out in a different form.

00:12:15:43 – 00:12:21:43
Michael Gewecke
We have to use some imagination, even today, to really understand the force of what this is saying.

00:12:21:48 – 00:12:47:49
Clint Loveall
And maybe this doesn’t need said, but I think there would be two pathways to get to a place like that. Right, Michael? And the first would be, I think, rather shallow to just say, oh no, we misunderstood. Everybody’s included. It works for everybody. You’re all good. That’s not what Paul says. He says there was a time that you were outside of God.

00:12:47:49 – 00:13:20:58
Clint Loveall
You you didn’t know God. You lived in the world. And even the language here in the passage, you who were far off and those who were near. So Paul does understand or at least accepts the the division of his day. But he he then goes on to understand that in Christ that division simply no longer exists, that regardless of how you got to Christ, you got there from a place of not worthy of it.

00:13:21:03 – 00:13:56:08
Clint Loveall
And therefore we all join together at the cross. Jew, Gentile, whatever else label one might carry. The only label that then matters in the in the church in the body is that of redeemed, that of saved. And I think it is a challenging vision. We no longer I mean, it’s not as though the distinction Jewish and non-Jewish doesn’t exist any longer, that it certainly still does.

00:13:56:13 – 00:14:34:50
Clint Loveall
But we don’t live in which that division is probably our primary experience. Right? We that is no longer the kind of major wall that has been built in the church. There are there are many others. I think that in our day and age are far more, common. And passages like this where Paul is encouraging people to meet at the cross and where Paul is explaining to people what the unity of Jesus Christ looks like in real terms.

00:14:34:55 – 00:14:38:42
Clint Loveall
I think these are wonderful gifts to the modern church.

00:14:38:47 – 00:15:11:51
Michael Gewecke
I don’t know how to not trivialize this, Clint. I think it would be really easy to sign off and to honestly make this sound a little bit like a pie in the sky. Kumbaya. Let’s just be friends kind of conversation. And if that’s your takeaway, I, I believe you’ve missed the revolutionary force of what is being said here because humans are innately bound to this idea of the tension that the upper the things that are opposed to each other.

00:15:11:51 – 00:16:00:48
Michael Gewecke
Right. You have it in every sphere. You’ve got the nice kid in the mean kid. You’ve got the hometown team and the opposing team, your rival team. You’ve got, in politics, you have different philosophies left and right. You you see all of these tens of these things are opposed type relationships. You have to see here that all who were far off and all those who were near, they all find unity, accessing what one spirit, the kingdom of God reorients all of these things that we are accustomed to in our human way of looking at the world, there is one God, and that one God is big enough to make one place of peace for

00:16:00:48 – 00:16:41:45
Michael Gewecke
all of these things that we take for granted as being opposed and so well. Whatever you think when you hear this text and you say, well, that’s too good to be true, I think the hearing of it should move us to think maybe there is more ground for us to go in our understanding and our shaping of our imaginations as to what God truly wants to do in this world, because this is a turned upside down kind of statement, it should rattle us a little bit that God is capable of making unity in a world where we have taken for granted all of these supposedly tentative relationships between things, so we are going to talk

00:16:41:45 – 00:16:42:16
Michael Gewecke
about it. Clint.

00:16:42:23 – 00:17:16:08
Clint Loveall
It’s a challenging reminder to all of us, I think, Michael, that God rarely I won’t say never. God rarely calls us to separation and constantly calls us to unification. That is, that’s a challenging idea because it’s easier to separate. It’s much easier to find your own enclave, find your group, find your tribe, dig in wall off and stay.

00:17:16:10 – 00:17:32:37
Clint Loveall
Stick to yourself in your own ideas and judge those who don’t share them. But that’s not the vision that Paul has for the church. And, I think that’s humbling. I think that’s convicting. But I also think if we give it a hearing, it’s compelling.

00:17:32:42 – 00:17:50:06
Michael Gewecke
We certainly hope that there’s something encouraging, maybe challenging even today in the text for you. We are looking forward to seeing you as you continue with us along the study. Certainly. Give this video a like if you found it helpful, helps others find it in the midst of their own study. Subscribe so you can see more studies like this one.

00:17:50:11 – 00:17:52:19
Michael Gewecke
And we will see all of you next time.

00:17:52:26 – 00:17:53:04
Clint Loveall
Thanks everybody.