00:00:00:41 – 00:00:34:32
Clint Loveall
Hey, friends. Welcome. Thanks for joining us as we continue here. Just day two of a walk through the book of Ephesians. We will probably break into the text of Ephesians tomorrow, but we have been doing some, some pre work and some kind of background work on the church in Ephesus. The authorship of this letter and, if you didn’t catch that yesterday, it might be helpful to go back and listen to that one just to get that background information.

00:00:34:37 – 00:01:01:24
Clint Loveall
And then today we kind of, I think you could say, Michael, that there is perhaps a, a main issue that undergirds a lot of the material of the book of Ephesians. And, to be honest, it’s one that I think is difficult for us to resonate with this idea of the tension and the conflict and the complicated relationship between Jews and Gentiles.

00:01:01:24 – 00:01:29:57
Clint Loveall
And I think that’s just it, it it seems outdated to us. We understand the language, but I think most of us don’t live that out with any kind of experiential. We could perhaps talk about the racial tensions in our country, black and white, other kinds of divisions, conservative, liberal, almost any kind of agenda group versus the anti agenda group.

00:01:30:01 – 00:02:26:25
Clint Loveall
But I think, you know what makes this one a little different? The Jewish Gentile conflict is there’s some religious overtones in it. There’s some, pseudo ethnic kind of stuff in it. It it’s just I think it’s a hard thing for modern reader to resonate with. And I think therefore we underestimate both how shocking and how difficult it must have been in the early church to find this fledgling Christian faith welcoming both groups and trying to get them to live together, worship together, function together, and lay aside that that past painful, longstanding history of conflict.

00:02:26:25 – 00:02:29:18
Clint Loveall
I think that’s really hard for us to get our heads around.

00:02:29:29 – 00:03:01:28
Michael Gewecke
So let’s start maybe with an aspect of the Gentile. And I think one of the reasons this conversation so hard that there’s many overlapping circles here, but let’s just talk quickly about even just the relationship between the the Roman Empire and the Jews. There would be other groups that would be Gentile as well. But just to give an illustration, if you were a Roman, that does not mean that you were racially, ethnically from Italy.

00:03:01:28 – 00:03:28:01
Michael Gewecke
And I think that sometimes we in the modern world, where we think of nation states as being very much defined by geography, you have to understand that in the ancient Roman world, Rome was a conquering empire. So they would go into another region and there were a variety of outcomes when they would conquer a land, some would be subjugated and slavery would happen, but it was often a economic slavery.

00:03:28:06 – 00:03:52:49
Michael Gewecke
And so you would be sold, but you could actually work off that debt that was owed, and then ultimately you could become a free person. There was also ways that you could buy your citizenship, from the Roman Empire. So there would be wealthy people who would be people of Philippi, say, for instance, but they would also be Roman citizens, and it would come with its own sort of kinds of social status and protections.

00:03:52:49 – 00:04:15:03
Michael Gewecke
And there were different ways that laws overlapped. So all of that is happening, and that’s as you can already tell, that’s a mixed experience. You could be a Gentile, but you could be from the, from a radically different people group. But you had come into Roman citizenship and that would offer for you some benefits. And then you have the Jews and the Jews.

00:04:15:03 – 00:04:49:17
Michael Gewecke
Clint, are unique in the ancient world because of their their theological commitment to one God, that most people that Rome conquered were also polytheists. They believed in multiple gods, and in fact, Rome really flourished with that. The idea that there was multiple gods was the thing that the Romans were comfortable with for a very long time. And so the ones who stuck out in that equation were the Jews, and they were caught in the midst of trying to navigate, just like today, Christian kids try to navigate living in a worldly culture and they, you know, where’s my faith?

00:04:49:17 – 00:05:11:47
Michael Gewecke
Stop and wear my wearing the same clothes and doing the same things. The Jews struggled with that because here you have all of these different kinds of people participating in civic government and what’s happening in the world, and in the questions of where those lines got blurred, became very, very messy. And so within Judaism, there’s a lot of differentiating movements.

00:05:11:47 – 00:05:35:13
Michael Gewecke
There’s a lot of different ways that that Jews themselves tried to separate out their own culture and their own spaces, and in some ways were pushed back on by Rome, and in other ways they became more isolated and zealous, and it became very tumultuous. And so that’s just one aspect. There’s this larger, sort of empire thing happening here.

00:05:35:13 – 00:05:46:50
Michael Gewecke
And when the Jews are thinking about we’re not even yet talking about Christians as a subset of Judaism in the early church, there’s a lot of conflict and question and culture overlap, which is really messy.

00:05:46:55 – 00:06:10:59
Clint Loveall
Yeah. If you if you think about what, which perspectives or the variety of perspectives you’re trying to integrate there in the early church. And, and really, Paul, we know is the leading advocate for bringing Gentiles in. And and to their credit, there were many Jewish Christians in that early wave of the church that were open to the idea.

00:06:11:04 – 00:06:45:16
Clint Loveall
But think about their perspective they had for their entire life been taught things like Sabbath and diet laws and the legal code of Judaism, and that defined how they lived, circumcision being a massive of massive importance to them. And the idea that they were physically marked as different from the world around them. And thereby distinguished as Jews.

00:06:45:21 – 00:07:11:02
Clint Loveall
And now, coming into that mix, you have people whose background is polytheistic. Many gods. They think, well, why don’t we worship on Sunday if that’s Jesus’s day rather than Saturday? They think we should be able to eat whatever we want. Those things don’t matter to us. In fact, we’re not sure that any of the Abrahamic Jewish story means anything to us.

00:07:11:02 – 00:07:52:58
Clint Loveall
Because now you’re telling us about Jesus. Why don’t we just start there and you have this sort of powder keg of differences, and the early church is trying to manage that. And Paul as the primary voice for the Gentiles, at least, that we have recorded certainly through our eyes, he becomes the arbiter of that. And so much of this book is about that idea that God in Jesus Christ is not only reconciling people to himself, but is reconciling, bringing together Jews and Gentiles and that is I.

00:07:52:58 – 00:08:22:07
Clint Loveall
Again, it’s a stunning development, and I think it’s hard for us being so far removed from it to realize how shocking it is, how difficult it is. But I think that Michael gives Ephesians an interesting flavor for us, because it really becomes the go to book when we look at how do different people come to Christ and learn to deal with one another?

00:08:22:12 – 00:08:42:34
Clint Loveall
How is it that brothers and sisters with different ideas and different backgrounds and different conclusions can meet together at the cross and be church together? And I do think we have to understand where that starts initially. But as we do understand that, I think it offers us a lot.

00:08:42:39 – 00:09:09:36
Michael Gewecke
So part of the division then when you have these Gentiles coming into the church, and I think maybe Corinthians illustrates this most clearly with some of the concrete details that Paul works through in that letter. We, I think, make the mistake of thinking that Gentile means not religious. And that’s absolutely not the truth. And thought, you know, religion was a central part of the ancient world.

00:09:09:41 – 00:09:33:36
Michael Gewecke
If you were Jewish, of course, you stood in line with the Abrahamic tradition and all of these things that Clint mentioned. You have Sabbaths. You have the fact that there is one God, monotheistic religion. You have all of the laws that you’re expected to follow. And no, but say you’re a Gentile. Likely you are just as fervent in a religious practice.

00:09:33:36 – 00:10:07:53
Michael Gewecke
Now, that may involve a different kind of sacrifice, certainly to a different God. It likely includes family gods as well as national or regional gods. It becomes a very sort of mixed bag. But here’s the thing. And to your point, Clint, what you have is these Gentiles who are accustomed to the religion of my profession and the religion of my region, and the religion of my city, this very intermixed plurality coming into faith in Jesus Christ, who becomes this central figure.

00:10:08:06 – 00:10:32:06
Michael Gewecke
And they become not just mixed. I think it’s very much like waves hitting the shore. There’s this sort of impact of that coming into the church with with thousands of years of monotheistic Jewish faith. And suddenly these two groups have to figure out how does Jesus change this equation? How are things different? Because Jesus is at the center.

00:10:32:06 – 00:11:00:33
Michael Gewecke
And for Jews who had been practicing that Abrahamic religion for all of those years, suddenly things that were laws, things that were expected now are coming to the field of grace. And for these people who would have been thought of by the Jews as pagans, these Gentiles, now they bring in all of these different sort of synchronous fluidity, and suddenly they’re expected to find that well-ordered inside the kingdom of God.

00:11:00:37 – 00:11:19:15
Michael Gewecke
That’s the there’s a beautiful tension that exists in a text like this. There’s no, empty blank check. It’s not anything that you want to do. Goes. And on the other hand, it’s not hey, if you do all of these things and you do them in the right order and you do them often enough, then you’ll be fine.

00:11:19:15 – 00:11:41:43
Michael Gewecke
It it’s a very a balanced and vital and very sort of intensive relationship. And you see that lived out in a book like Ephesians. But you’re seeing that be not just because of this book and its context. You’re seeing that because this book comes to us in the time in which the church is. That is the chief thing it’s wrestling with is how how do we follow Jesus Christ, all of us?

00:11:41:48 – 00:11:47:40
Michael Gewecke
How do we respond to this call which is greater than any call we had heard before? And they’re wrestling with that?

00:11:47:43 – 00:12:17:13
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And there’s something beautiful in that, that Christ is a word to all of those people from all of those backgrounds. I mean, imagine you have Jewish people who for generations, for centuries, for millennia have lived with the idea that they are God’s people because they’re Jewish. And now they’re being told, well, yes, but that’s not the whole story.

00:12:17:18 – 00:12:43:49
Clint Loveall
God is in grafting the Gentiles into the covenant, but not the covenant through law, the covenant of grace through Jesus Christ. And they have to wrestle with all of that. And what it means now, simultaneously, you’re speaking to Gentiles and saying, no, you have to leave all of those false gods behind, all the gods, all the ways you’ve worship, those are all untrue.

00:12:44:04 – 00:13:09:09
Clint Loveall
And you have to come to the one God who is Jesus Christ. So you’re simultaneously trying to convince one group that Christ isn’t different from God, and that is the expression of God, while you convince the other group that Christ is significantly different from every God that they’ve ever known and goddess they’ve ever known, and you’re doing that together in the same family.

00:13:09:14 – 00:13:36:15
Clint Loveall
While some of them won’t eat pork, and some of them won’t do anything on Saturday, and some of them think the other ones should be circumcised, it is, again, I just think it is staggering that this is where the church went and that it managed to navigate that. And I think it largely did to whatever extent it successfully navigated it, it did so with Paul’s help.

00:13:36:19 – 00:14:02:21
Clint Loveall
So when we look into a book like Ephesians and we get to see what are the arguments, what are the what are the encouragements, what does this man say to these people who are trying to live out this very difficult experiment, where they come together and understand themselves to be connected in Christ? There is so much for us to learn from this, and I think it’s particularly appealing.

00:14:02:25 – 00:14:26:37
Clint Loveall
Michael, in an era this isn’t. We are not unique. Every generation likes to think that no one else has lived here before. There have been divisions in the church, there have been divisions in society. We’re go. We’re going to see it in spades. We’ve been talking about it. But the reality is, we do live in a time where division is front and center.

00:14:26:42 – 00:14:50:15
Clint Loveall
There’s a lot of disagreement. There is a lot of tribalism. And Ephesians gives us a great opportunity to say, how is it that we find reconciliation? How is it that we find oneness in Christ with brothers and sisters who may be vastly different, who may come from different places and think different things and have a very different story than we do.

00:14:50:15 – 00:15:01:18
Clint Loveall
And how is it that we set aside the things that aren’t of primary importance to follow Jesus together? That’s a real challenge of this book.

00:15:01:22 – 00:15:33:14
Michael Gewecke
This is very hard to do, but it’s worth keeping in the back of our mind as we go through this study together. It would be easy to fixate on the concrete details when when we get talk of male and female or slave and slave owner, or when we get to some of the that this is how we live together stuff, it would be easy to look back on that stuff and and make it about the thing itself, thinking about, well, why look at that line that was drawn.

00:15:33:14 – 00:16:14:49
Michael Gewecke
What do we do with the line? What we would miss if that’s all that we focused on, Clint, is we would miss some of the unbelievable wisdom of compromise for the sake of unity in the church. There’s this amazing practical concern that the church, with all of its diversities, operates with enough grace and structure and freedom, but also clarity that that we can worship together, that we can serve together, that we can be this thing that might even be called the body of Christ, that might seem to us to be a easy or simple statement.

00:16:14:49 – 00:16:41:22
Michael Gewecke
Because as Christians, thousands of years later, we say things like that often. But imagine that image. Imagine that these people who from any earthly vantage, have almost nothing in common except when they come under the cross of Jesus Christ, they become knitted into a body. And the argument in this letter that Christ is the head of that body, that Christ unifies everything else.

00:16:41:22 – 00:17:08:47
Michael Gewecke
I mean, the intended purpose, that kind of image is shocking in some ways it’s laughable. But and realistically, if we can understand that this is always simultaneously describing a thing that existed, but also calling the church to be something more than what it was, that’s always happening at the same time in this text. I think that’s how this text reaches into the today is it’s doing the same.

00:17:08:47 – 00:17:23:45
Michael Gewecke
The church under Christ does exist today, but we’re also still called to live in to that in new and meaningful ways that we’re still called ahead in that task. We have work to do. Just like the churches who received this letter, the world.

00:17:23:45 – 00:18:10:42
Clint Loveall
And by that I mean people are exceptionally good at separating. We can separate by color, by class, by country, by creed, by who we voted for, by where we live, by what we do. We have the ability to draw tighter and tighter circles, defining who’s in and who’s out and and then push back to that. Paul takes the cross and says that when the cross is in the center, the circle goes out around all of those that you may not have thought would be inside it.

00:18:10:42 – 00:18:52:54
Clint Loveall
It that God’s love that God’s action brings together people who would, in any other circumstance, find themselves in different groups in different tribes, in different circles. And those groups then find their oneness, find their true identity as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. That is that’s an incredible message. But it’s incredibly difficult. And and, interesting that, you know, a couple thousand years later, we continue to struggle with that, even in the church where we draw circles around which church you go to.

00:18:52:58 – 00:19:04:19
Clint Loveall
And we actually even separate in Jesus name from others who also claim Jesus name. And so, yeah, challenging, challenging stuff and a lot for us to learn.

00:19:04:21 – 00:19:22:34
Michael Gewecke
I was just going to point that out, only just to add to that comment. Clint. Just note if this was a letter passed from church to church, think about what that means, that there are churches who need to hear they are part of the body to, you know, those people who handed this letter to you so you could read it in your church, right?

00:19:22:39 – 00:19:47:00
Michael Gewecke
We do. We we have this conversation about Jews and Gentiles. That’s a tension within the church. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that churches plural, haven’t also struggled with the reality of the early church friends. Some churches had this gospel and others had the other gospel. We know scholars talk about all the time the tensions between this community and that community.

00:19:47:00 – 00:20:09:37
Michael Gewecke
And so that also exists here. Let’s let’s name that as Jesus Christ is the head and the center of of who we are, we always have to grapple with the fact that even when the boundaries of faith itself, that the lines that we’ve made and say, this is our family, our faith, that we have to recognize that Jesus Christ is the head of something larger than that.

00:20:09:46 – 00:20:11:58
Michael Gewecke
And that’s a struggle for us today, as it was then.

00:20:12:01 – 00:20:38:40
Clint Loveall
Yeah, perhaps not everyone, but it is humbling to recognize that whatever walls we’ve built between us and others, whatever separations we might try to hold between us and some other group or some other person or some other people, Jesus exists in part to knock many of them down. And I, I think that, that is a, as I said, humbling.

00:20:38:45 – 00:20:45:22
Clint Loveall
And it’s a good place to start. It it’s a helpful reminder.

00:20:45:27 – 00:21:04:40
Michael Gewecke
It’s helpful reminder not all always an easy thing to keep in mind. I hope that you will as we continue on this study. We jump into the text together tomorrow. So certainly if you have a friend who you think might be interested in going through this amazing book with us, invite them. We are in the midst of a transition, in terms of where you might get these episodes.

00:21:04:40 – 00:21:13:48
Michael Gewecke
So for right now, Facebook and YouTube are always reliable. Check our website for the latest information, and we look forward, friends, to continuing on this study together.

00:21:14:02 – 00:21:14:45
Clint Loveall
Thanks to everybody.