God's Dwelling Place - Ephesians Part 5

This morning we're looking at the last half of Ephesians chapter 2.

In retrospect, after I got done with the message, I went back and changed my title from "Abominable Alien" to "God's Dwelling Place."

This chapter, the last part of this chapter, has almost completely changed its meaning to me in the last month or two.

Often I've thought of it as a discourse on how God blends people groups together and ethnic differences, and I realize that that actually is not really what it's talking about. That has some to play, and there are other places where it talks about that, but this has a lot deeper meaning and implications. So let's read verses 11 through 22 of Ephesians chapter 2. This is from the New King James. You're welcome to follow along in the translation you use; it helps keep you queued.

"Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision in the flesh by hands, that at that time you were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from 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 both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in Himself one man from the two, thus making peace, and that He might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near, for through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father.

Now therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building being fitted together grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit."

Let's bow our heads and pray. Father, thank You for Your Word and for the revelation that You want to give us through this portion this morning, and I pray that You would honor Your Word and open our understanding to it through the message this morning, and that You would guide what's said and filter out things that might be in error and help us all to learn things that will help us to grow.

In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.

So my head often feels like a funnel, and at the bottom of the funnel is my mouth, and I have all this stuff stewing around up there, and I'm trying to get it to come out without coming out in clumps or getting just plugged up. So the message this morning is trying to summarize and connect together some things that I've been learning a lot about. And whenever you are talking about ideas that are relatively new to you, it's not as easy to articulate them and connect, and I feel a little bit that way about this this morning. Some of the things about the spiritual realm, for example, are things that just have become part of my perspective on things, both reality and on the Scripture, just in the last two or three years.

So bear with me this morning, and I pray that God can help to use some of these things to start understanding in your minds, and if you're far beyond me in your understanding, that can still be an encouragement to you.

How many of you are Jews? I'm not. I don't know what all I've got in me. I've got some German in me. I've got some Indian in me. I'm not sure what else is in me. Are any of you part Jew? This is a good audience for this morning because this morning is talking to the message is talking to Gentiles, the people in Ephesus. A large percentage of them in the church of Ephesus anyways were Gentiles, and both the Jews and the Gentiles needed a Savior, but Paul is focusing on what God did for the Gentiles to bring them to God this morning.

To start out, I want to think a little bit about Stephen and his defense before the trial because I think this kind of pulls some of this together in a nutshell, some key concepts that then we'll expand back out from. So when Stephen is on trial, the indictment they brought against him, the accusation, was, "This man does not stop speaking blasphemous words against this holy place, which was the temple and the law, for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this place and shall change the customs which Moses delivered us." So they were accusing him of speaking evil against the temple and against the law and saying that it was all over.

So Stephen asks for a moment to share a few things, and he launches into this history review, starting with Abraham and talks about the covenant that God made with Abraham. And then just different of the story out, they went down to Egypt and they suffered, and now God brought them out of Egypt and different experiences in the wilderness, and then he talks about the law that was given them. And then he talks about the tabernacle that was made and how the tabernacle was brought with him into the promised land. And then years down the road, Solomon builds a temple for him, and then he concludes his message with a quote from the book of Isaiah, and it seems like it feels almost like he just stopped and it's like, "What?"

So we ramble through these different seemingly disconnected people in history, and then we quote this verse and then yell at him and say, "You guys are a bunch of belligerent whatever else." It's kind of the way it feels. And a few years ago, studying that, I had a eureka moment and I realized, "Ah, this actually makes sense, and it's actually a very important point that he was making." So he concludes by saying, "But Solomon built him and him," that's God, "and house, howbeit the Most High dwells not in temples made with hands," as says the prophet, "Heaven is my throne, the earth is my footstool," and I'm just going to go ahead, well, hang on. "What house will you build me," saith the Lord, "or what is the place of my rest?

Hath not my hand made all these things?" And Stephen is quoting from the book of Isaiah chapter 66, and in good Eastern fashion, he doesn't make the punchline. That's an insult to your intelligence to go and point-blank tell somebody what the truth is. He leaves it obvious, and often these are people who know the law, who know the prophets, they have this stuff memorized, and he stopped just short of the punchline.

And if we go to Isaiah chapter 6, he's quoting there, "Thus says the Lord, 'Heaven is my throne, and the earth is the footstool of my feet.'" And by the way, this is from the Septuagint, which is what Stephen would have been quoting. "Heaven is my throne, and the earth is the footstool of my feet. What kind of house will you build for me, or what place is the place of my rest? For my hand made all these things, and all these things are mine," says the Lord. "And upon whom will I show respect, but to the humble and the peaceful and to him who trembles at my words?"

And then Stephen goes on and says, "You have trod underfoot the law, and you've killed the Messiah who is going to bring redemption." But God's point here, that was the next verse that Stephen left unsaid, was that what God really wants is not some glamorous building to represent Him and to live in, but He wants to live with people. He wants people to become people, places that He can live and be known through. And so a couple of takeaways from Stephen's message is, one is that God has always wanted to dwell among His people.

The tabernacle was a reminder of God's desire to live among them and that His presence was indeed there, whether it was in their hearts or not, and they needed to live up to that. God gave them the law to help them to be a people that He could dwell among.

And they rejected the law, and God's presence left Israel as a nation.

And then they rejected and killed the deliverer, Jesus, the Messiah, who would make them people of God's presence again. So Ephesians 2:11 through 22 deals with this concept of the law and what it did and this concept of a dwelling place for God. So this may seem like a gear switch, but what I want to do is I want to review a little bit of what's happening in the background through the Old Testament story from the Tower of Babel up into the prophets because the apostle Paul talks about it as very important. It's just assumed concepts that he is building on for all these things. So a little 101 on spiritual powers. Paul keeps referring to these, and we get the impression that these are big players in what's going on in the world and what God is interacting with and what we have to interact with.

We start out in chapter 1 with Jesus being given dominion over the powers and God's purpose to demonstrate to the powers His wisdom through us as we follow Jesus. In chapter 2, the beginning of the chapter, we are under the power. We are enslaved to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that works in the children of disobedience, and we've been delivered from that.

In chapter 3, there's going to be more references to that. Chapter 4 talks about how Christ, when He ascended on high, He led the captive and gave gifts to men. And then we get on to chapter 6 as Paul wraps up, and he tells us that we are in a warfare against these powers and how to prepare ourselves to be able to be successful in taking back earth for God and His kingdom.

So the first thing that's important to understand about the spiritual powers, which is what Paul refers to these as, is that we don't know very much. And I want to keep that foremost because I'm learning some things, but in this whole thing, there are certain things we know, but most of it we don't know. And we need to keep that we need to really keep that before us because often people get into this stuff and they start creating doctrines and concepts that are building off on a ledge, off on a branch from some little point that they think they've found and are creating things that actually contradict other things in Scripture.

We do know, though, there's a lot more going on than we know, and that's obvious as we listen to Paul writing here in Ephesians that there are forces in place and in play that we can't see and we really don't know a lot about except that they're there and some of what they're trying to do and how they interact with us.

Paul talks about the powers as supernatural beings who control the physical and spiritual realms through their influence on people, and this is really a very deep subject. When Paul saw a Roman centurion bullying people, he said, "That's the powers at work." There's something behind him that he is giving himself to and that's running him. When he saw the immorality in the temples, it was the power. When he saw division and strife in the church, he said, "That's the powers.

They're running this show and creating discord." This is a lot more than just some little winged beings in the sky causing people to not sleep at night and stirring up covetousness or anger and things like that.

And Paul talks about the powers as though they are a major part of what is going on.

One of the passages that gives us a window into this thing is Deuteronomy 32:7 through 12. This is the end of Moses' life, and he's trying to impress Israel with who God is and what God wants to do with them and what has generally happened and how they're going to be different, how the future could possibly be different. And so he's reviewing this, and he says, "Remember the days of old. Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he'll tell you." He's saying this is common knowledge that everybody's known about what happened back there. "When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel.

For the Lord's portion is His people. Jacob is the lot of His inheritance. So the Lord alone" and then he goes on and tells about how He found Israel, how He has dealt with him, and then in verse 12 he says, "So the Lord alone did lead him, and there was no strange God with him." There's one problem with that, and that is that phrase there in bold face there is one of these terms that gets mistranslated or misunderstood a lot, and that is this concept of the children of God, the sons of God. In the Old Testament, many more modern translators and theologians have taken, for example, the Nephilim in Genesis chapter 6 and tried to make that refer to humans.

But in the Old Testament, whenever it has this term the sons of God, it's always talking about supernatural beings, not humans who are God's chosen or something like that. Now in the New Testament, it refers to humans as the sons of God as we follow Jesus and are born again into God's family. If you look at this passage in the Septuagint, it says something quite different, and there is one or two English translations that give this idea, and it makes a lot more sense.

For example, if you look at that, does it make any sense to divide up the sons of Adam so all the humans to divide them up according to the number of the children of Israel?

I'm not saying it couldn't, but why in the world would you do that and how many of the children of Israel were there? But you read in the Septuagint, "Remember the days of old. Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will tell you. Your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High divided the nations, when He scattered the sons of Adam, He set the boundaries of the nations by the number of God's angels.

For the Lord's portion became the people of Jacob. The allotment of His inheritance is Israel. So the Lord alone led them, and there was no foreign God with them." When did God divide up the people and scatter the nations?

Yeah, the Tower of Babel. And that event came about because there was this mass rebellion, a unified effort to rebel against God, and so God created a natural dispersion there by changing languages. And it says here that He did that. He divided them up according to these other spiritual beings, and these are creatures we don't know a lot about, but they're out there, and there's different places in Scripture that talks about them. One is the book of Job. So we have this thing about this meeting where the sons of God come and present themselves. There's different places in Psalms that refer to the sons of God, God being the greatest among the gods. Among the gods, there's no one like you.

So there are these other beings that are they're not angels like we think about Gabriel and Michael, but there are other powers that God works together with, creatures that have free will and that are part of governing the world, and some of them are good and some of them are not. I'm going to stop there because I don't know a whole lot more about them, but there's many places through the Old Testament that give this picture that there's another layer. See, we have a very simplistic, and maybe I should say infantile, a baby-like view of the spiritual world. It's kind of like saying that the government of the United States consists of the governor of Pennsylvania and the state police.

Well, the governor of Pennsylvania is one prominent ruler, but there are other ones. He's not the head ruler, and the state police are a force, but there's I don't want to waste my time discussing all the other layers and divisions that are in there.

So there is a group of creatures that have rule, are part of ruling the world with God. Before you cast me out as a heretic, please talk to me some more about this. The reason I'm bringing this into play is because this is an important part of the picture that Paul talks about in the book and in chapter 2.

So yes, that took place at the Tower of Babel. I want to point out how this makes more sense. So God is dividing up the people. As the people rebel against Him, He's dividing them up and turning them over to other gods. He chooses Israel and says, "There's one group of people, this guy Abraham. I'm going to grab him because his heart is towards me. I'm going to interact closely with him and through that bring a redeemer to earth." And then it says the allotment of God's inheritance was Israel, and then he concludes by saying, "There was no strange God with him. It was just the Lord that took care of Israel."

So after the flood, humanity again demonstrated their deliberate will to not be ruled by God. God divided up the ungodly humans, giving the powers, sons of God, some level of angels that they had been serving, jurisdictions over humans. And then God chooses His inheritance, and God chose Abraham and his family to rule and to focus on bringing redemption to all of humanity through them. God called Abraham out from among the nations under the powers; in other words, the nations were under the powers and made a covenant with him marked by circumcision, and that's what circumcision was a sign that they were the apple of God's eye. They were God's special, chosen, intimate; they belonged to Him.

They were part of Him. You poke God, you poke Israel, you poke God in the eye. So circumcision was a sign of that special calling and possession and of their response of accepting that and being loyal to that by being obedient to Him.

So the covenant of circumcision, and then God protects His inheritance. Later, God gave them the law to be a protection to keep them from falling into the ways of the nations under the powers who ruled them, the other nations. And this created a fierce barrier between the faithful Jews and the nations because God was protecting His treasure from the powers, and then the Jews protected that royal inheritance that God had given them of being His chosen people and being lifted up among the nations.

Well, we might wonder why we have to be so harsh about this. Why do we have to make this kind of a barrier between the Israelites and other nations? Well, there are stories that explain why this happens. Deuteronomy 23:3 says, "An Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord, even to their tenth generation shall they not enter into the congregation of the Lord forever."

That's pretty stiff.

I'm glad I wasn't born a Moabite. We do know about a Moabitus who walked right in, which shows us that it's not that God hates people. There's a story behind this, why God says this. "Because they met you not with bread and with water in the way when you came forth out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam, the son of Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse you."

And we know the story, most of us there, how they went and hired Balaam because they were afraid of this, and they were very crafty in how they attacked and tried to undermine the people of Israel. It gets worse than just this. Part of what Balaam taught them, he says, "Behold these," which is referring to the Moabite women that they weren't supposed to have anything to do with, "caused the children of Israel through the counsel of Balaam to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord." So this is referring to a time that we find out after the fact was inspired by Balaam when the Moabites began hanging out with the Israelites and drawing them into their worship, into immorality, and there was this plague in the camp.

And the elders had gotten together at the door of the tabernacle and were saying, "What's going on? Why is there this plague?" And somebody said, "Oh yeah, well, you know, our men have been going over there to Moab and hanging out with them." And a spark went off in Phineas, the son of Aaron's mind, and he grabs his javelin and takes off for a certain section of the camp because he realized what had been happening. And he gets there, and there's a man, a Hebrew man and a Moabite woman fornicating in the tent, and he barges in there and runs his spear down through both of them.

And then there was another slaughter, and the wicked people were killed, and the plague was stopped. There are stories here about what happens when Israel mixed with the other nations.

There wasn't a, or for the most part, as a nation, they weren't guided from the inside. The people who didn't love God from their heart and serve Him from their heart just kept sliding that direction. So God puts up this wall to keep them from going that direction and becoming under the powers that ruled the nations again.

So in Ephesians 2, it talks, it uses this term enmity to describe what this law, this protection did between the Jews and everybody else who were called the Gentiles. They were poisonous people. They were like animals to the Jews. And here's a list of synonyms to describe this word enmity because it's not really a word that we use today.

Some of these you may connect with. Some of them are words that stretch my vocabulary or surpass it. Alienation. So aliens are weird people from outer space. It's like, "Ew, what's that? And get them out of here." Right?

Animosity. So that's bad feelings, bad attitudes between people. Antagonism. It's where the one party is pestering and attacking the other one. Antipathy, antipathy, the opposite of feeling. Bad blood. The hat fields and the McCoys. Bitterness, dislike, hatred, hostility, ill will, loathing, like malice. That's plans to do evil.

Rancor, aversion. Like, "I'd rather not. Just keep it away from me." Daggers. I think that's like somebody was staring daggers at somebody. Detestation. It's another strong term for dislike. Hate. Malevolence. Again, that's malignity. Malignancy. Those are all mal words, which means bad. The prefix mal does. Spite. So I don't want to get back at them. Spleen. That one doesn't connect with me. Unfriendliness. This is very tame. Venom. Uncordiality. So just an unfriendliness. It's just rude, just the opposite of being pleasant.

That's all packed into this word enmity. That's what the law did between the Israelites and everybody else. And it was a good thing. It was a necessary thing to keep them separate so that they didn't digress into what the other nations were like.

Here's just a little picture of this from the New Testament. So when Peter went into Cornelius, who was a Gentile, when he got back, the guys all came around and said, they said to him, they contended with him and said, "You went into uncircumcised men and ate with them."

Like, "Peter, what are you doing? You're going back to the, you're doing the same kind of thing that they did in Baal Peor. Don't you remember how Phineas had to go out there and kill that guy?" And that's what this meant with. It was an act of betrayal, it felt like.

You're breaking the seal. You're opening Pandora's box here. Gives you just a little bit of picture of this thing of the enmity that was created because of the law to keep the Israelites safe. John Chrysostom says this, "The law was a hedge, but this it was made for the sake of security. And for this reason was called a hedge to the intent that it might form an enclosure." I like that term. It's not an enclosure. It's an enclosure. So it's not so much to keep people in, but it's to keep them included. It's to protect and to enfold, to embrace a group of people. For listen again to the prophet where he says, "I made a trench about it."

These are different pictures God uses to describe His making the law and the covenant. And again, now it's broken down her fences so that they which pass by the way do pluck her. So the people broke the law, and that made them open to borrow John Branyon's words from the triune tale of dominion of swine, tremulous and vulnerable, with nary a strategy for eschewing the canine devourer looming in deadly proximity.

Sorry, I like that picture there. Tremulous and vulnerable. That's what happened when they broke God's commandments. Then they opened themselves up to the powers and the people who served the powers, the other nations. And they were devastated because of that. And there's many stories in the Bible that depict that.

"Here therefore it means security." And so he says again, "I will take away the hedge thereof, and it shall be trodden down." And again, he gave them the law for a defense. And again, the Lord executeth righteous acts and made known His ways unto Israel.

It became, however, a middle wall, no longer establishing them in security, but cutting them off from God. Such then is the middle wall of partition formed out of the hedge. And to explain what this is, he subjoins or adds below so we know what this enmity was, having abolished in His flesh the enmity which was the law of commandments.

So this thing that was supposed to be a protection to them was a double-edged sword and became a judgment and a destruction to them when they didn't keep it. The problem with the law.

The pictures there are worshiping the golden calf symbolizing their straying into sin, and then the destruction of Jerusalem below, the city being burned and being led captive, symbolizing the destruction that came with that. The law of Moses did not take care of humanity's selfish, stubborn heart, and they continually transgressed it. The law became a condemnation to the Israelites who did not keep it. So the law that was a fence to keep God's people safe became a fence that kept them out. It separated them then from God when they transgressed it. The law of Moses did not deal with the roots in the heart and so could not raise Israel up to the kind of people God desires.

Hopefully that will make sense more as we finish up here.

So the law ended up creating a barrier for both. It was enmity between the Jews and the Gentiles for the Jews who were trying to honor God, and it became a barrier. I'm going to stay with my notes here. The law of Moses and the covenant barred the other nations from the influence of God. The law separated the Jew who did not keep it from God. I should have said a word of that differently. The law separated the Jew from God who did not keep His law.

That's still not right. We'll leave that for right now.

Both are under bondage to the powers. So this whole thing of the enmity that Christ destroyed in His flesh applies to two things. He's talking mainly to the Gentiles, but it also applied to the Jew who didn't keep the law.

So going back to Ephesians chapter 2, I want to walk through what Paul says here and pull some of these concepts together into what Paul is talking about. So he begins with, "Wherefore remember." Well, whenever you see those words like wherefore and therefore or and so, it's important to go back and find out what it is because you can't really get the next part unless you know what it's connecting to. So if we back up to chapter 2, verse 10, we read, "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." So because we have been created, we have become God's artwork and been created as a new creature for good works, we need to remember where we started.

Well, why do we need to remember? Well, one is because it's so easy to forget. We have the phrase we use, "Familiarity breeds contempt." And this happens in so many ways, whether it's health or whether it's relationships or whether it's finances or whether it's a new vehicle or whether it's

the older people forgetting what it was like to be younger. We just, it wears off. And what is new, what once was prized and privileged and wow, tends to wear off on us. And we devalue it. It doesn't mean as much to us anymore unless we keep remembering.

We have a lot of things we do that communion service is a time to do that, to remember where we were and what Jesus did to rescue us. That's part of why we have anniversaries and birthdays and things like that. Times to remember the privilege of relationships that we have. Devaluing.

So the newness and the blessing of something wears off. We value it less. And then we often relate to it in a way that makes us lose it. So he's telling him, "Remember that where you came from so that you don't lose this standing of being a new creature of God, God's artwork, created and living the way that God always meant for you to."

And so he reminds him of some things that will help them to treasure and to value that. And this directly applies to us because we are all Gentiles. And if it hasn't been for God's love for all mankind and His desire to bring all mankind to Himself and to make them His treasure in His temple, we would all probably not exist.

"Remember who you were." So he has all these things. Some of these are looking back at the beginning of chapter 2. Some of them are from verse 11 on. He says, "We were dead. We were living under the control of our fleshly desires. We were children of wrath. We were without Christ." Which sounds not very nice, but when you think about that, the term Christ means a deliverer. It's a term that means a revolutionary king who's going to come and throw off bondage and start a new era of deliverance and of peace and freedom.

And so without Christ, we are under bondage to the powers that have brought all the devastation in the world. "Strangers from the covenants of promise. Aliens from the commonwealth of Israel." That phrase intrigues me. We talked a little bit about aliens already. An alien is somebody who just has nothing to do with what's here. They're from a completely different realm. They can't associate with it. They don't belong here. It's kind of like, "Get out and go stay in your own thing," right?

If aliens would show up here and people dream about what aliens are and if they exist, then that's the sentiment of planet Earth is like, "Go back home and leave us alone. We're kind of afraid of them." An alien is someone who doesn't belong, has no right, doesn't belong at all to it.

"Aliens from the commonwealth of Israel." So I want to talk a little bit about what the commonwealth of Israel was. The commonwealth just means common wealth. Common meaning shared by all and wealth meaning something of value. And as I was thinking about, well, what was the commonwealth of Israel? I thought of two passages that talk about that. One is Romans 3, verses 1 and 2. Paul says, "What advantage then has the Jews? Or what is the benefit of circumcision, this covenant that God made with them?" Well, much in every way. Mainly because to them were committed the oracles of God. Oracles meaning mouthpiece or the message of God referring to the law. And we've already talked about that, how that was the big benefit of being a Jew is you had the law to keep you from going the way of the nations and being under the rule of the powers.

And then Romans 9, he lists off some more things, talking about the Israelites to whom pertained the adoption, so being chosen by God and brought to be part of His family, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, the promises, the fathers, so all the examples, the heroes of faith, all those things. We're going to connect that one later on. Those all belonged to somebody else.

And we had no part of those. Those examples didn't apply to us. They were actually the anti-type or the opposite picture of the kind of people that the Gentiles were. That's a little bit like saying you think if we were Germans without meaning any racism or anything like that here, but if you think about America lifts up different of its heroes, you know, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln and Daniel Boone and whoever else, these brave, courageous men. And those are the American heroes, supposedly. And as a German, we just got done with World War II and our hero was Hitler and look what he did. That's kind of this picture of being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel.

The benefits and the glory and all of the heritage that went with being an Israelite, the other people had nothing of it. They had the opposite. They had a bunch of scandal to their name. So aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, no hope. So their condition wasn't going to get any better. Without God in the world, this is actually the word atheos, which means where we get our word atheist, ungoded. So they were uncared for, unprotected, unguided.

The New Testament uses the term bastards, which means a child who was begotten by parents but has no one to care for him, no one to guide him, and he's just an unruly piece of street scum. Far off. So again, separated. You have to stand outside and look over and watch it happen, but you can't be part of it. Enmity with God and within His people. It's not just that you're not included, but we actually want you to stay out. We want you to just get out of here and just stay away. We don't even want to see you around.

Foreigners from the family and nation of God. So that's who the Gentiles were as a people, and that's who each of us are without Christ.

So flipping the tables, though, he says, "But now in Christ," and I want to talk a little bit about that term in the first message. I think it was the first message or the second message we talked a little bit about that concept, this concept of in Christ. First of all, the title Christ isn't Jesus' last name. It's not a name. It's a title. It says something about who He is and His authority and His position. And it's a title of kingship. So in Christ Jesus, Jesus our King, when we are in Christ, we are in Christ's way of being human. We're following the life that He lived, the way that He submitted to God and partnered with God and always honored His Father rather than choosing His own way like Adam did.

We are in the liberty from bondage and self and sin and judgment that He brought us. We are in the adoption as children of our heavenly Father. And a few points on that is we're protected under His authority. We're changed into His likeness by obeying His commandments. And we are heirs. We are going to receive the kingdom that He is building for us. That's a kingdom of peace and righteousness. So those are some things that I think of when I think about this concept of in Christ. It's really important to stop and think about this. It's not something automatic. It's something we choose to begin in. We choose to respond to His love that raises us up from the dead.

And it's our choice to remain in that liberty of being obedient, loving children by following Jesus' way of being human. So in Christ, as we follow Him and take advantage of the gift of redemption and

being trained that He gives us, we are alive. We're brought near at the cost of the blood of Christ. He Himself is what makes peace. An interesting story about that is the book Peace Child. That's the whole point of the book is this child that could bring peace and stop this retribution that was going on between the New Guinea tribes.

Very good imagery of this concept of Him being our peace. We are reconciled to God. Conciled means pleasant, good relationships. And so to be reconciled means brought back again into the place, relationship with God we were created for.

We have access to the Father by one spirit. Probably a lot of you have a difficult time grasping how important this thing is of having access to the Father because most of us had fathers and most of us had good fathers.

But there are things that I'm thinking if I should pick on anybody or not. Justin is a good guy, but there are things that his sons can come to him and expect help with that if somebody else comes to him, he's going to say, "Well, go talk to your dad."

And if you don't have a dad, then too bad for you. I'm not saying Justin would say that to you, but that's just the way this whole thing of belonging in a family works. And so that picture here is now we have a dad. We have someone to go to and find help and be loved and find security and have direction for our lives.

Fellow citizens with the saints. This word citizen is something that has been used in revolutions very often. In the French Revolution, they instead of having the not anarchy, the aristocracy, the high-ups, and then the low scum people who slaved for their bread and paid huge taxes, where everybody was equal. So we greet each other with, "Good day, citizen." And we're all up on this good level, right? We all have rights and privileges and responsibilities. So now we are on that level with the saints. And this is referring to the Old Testament heroes we read about in Hebrews chapter 11.

We belong with them. We're in the same caliber of people. That's not automatic, but it's something that we choose to begin. And we are members of God's family. We belong somewhere. That is probably a very meaningful one to me because that has been a big struggle in my life is this thing of belonging somewhere.

And so He makes both one by breaking down the middle wall of partition. And reading John Chrysostom really helped me with this picture and added a dimension I probably knew but never thought about before. So we have the Jews and we have the Gentiles. And the Gentiles are far off. They're way down, way back. They're as far down in the slide as I could get them. And there's this middle wall of partition, the law that protects the Jews from their influence and keeps them on the good side.

And they're a little higher up. They're a little closer to the center, but they're still not quite there.

And we could think about this that God wanted to do is get rid of the barrier and make the Gentiles become Jews then and have one big happy family of good Jews, right? But that's not the picture. That's not what God wanted because the Jews weren't there themselves. What God wants to do is break down this barrier that separates them from each other and from God and instead of both make one new humanity, one new man, which is just the general term for human that follow King Jesus' way of life and become a place where God is experienced. So that's why there's no longer Jew or Gentile because being a Christian isn't about either one.

It's about following Jesus. Neither was where God wanted them to be. And so Jesus came to deliver both from both the bondage of sin and the curse of having broken the commandments of God. And I'm not sure if I have this point blank in my notes here, so I'm going to say it right now. It's not that we no longer have a law. And there's lots of quotes I could have put up here, but I can't say everything this morning. So it's not that we don't have a law, but God gives us a law that helps us actually take care of the problem. And so He doesn't just say, "Don't commit adultery." He says, "Don't lust."

He doesn't say, "Just don't kill your neighbor." He says, "Don't think evil of your neighbor." And so we have a new law that helps us get to where God really wants us and restores us to the way God meant for us to live. So it's not that we no longer have any law. The law that brought a curse was the Mosaic law. It wasn't a bad law. It simply didn't fix the problem. I was trying to think on the way over here this morning of an example of that. So in the plumbing world, if you have a pipe that's cracked, you can have a perfectly good fitting to put in there to try to fix the joint.

But if the pipe is cracked, it's not going to fix the problem because the problem isn't the fitting. The problem is the pipe is cracked. So you can glue a new fitting on there to try to fix it, and it's not going to work. And that's a little bit the way the law was. Jesus uses the picture of a new patch of cloth on an old garment. The problem isn't the new patch. The problem is the old garment. That probably is hijacking a metaphor there. But it wasn't that the law was bad. It's that it could not fix the problem of the human heart that wanted to serve self.

Jesus does as we surrender to Him, and He gives us a new law to live by. So how did He make it? How did He bring people to get back both sides together? He broke down the dividing barrier. He got rid of the enmity between the two sides by absorbing that in His flesh, and that could be a whole message in itself. And He created in Himself one new humanity and reconciled both back to God.

He did it in His body on the cross. Jesus fulfilled the law of Moses in His body.

Jesus bought back the nations from the powers. That's a big part of what's talked about on the cross. I'm not going to get into that a lot. I'm just going to point you to two scriptures that depict this: Colossians 2:13-15. "And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, has He quickened together, having forgiven all your trespasses, blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us." That's talking about the law of Moses, nailing it to His cross and having spoiled principalities and powers. So He defeated them and plundered them. He took everything that they had that was of value. They had nothing left. He spoiled principalities and powers, and He made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.

So it wasn't just like He pulled them back or just like He just did a burnout the whole way. It just totally smoked them.

In Ephesians 4:8, He says, "When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive and gave gifts unto men." That's just two examples of that where it refers to a big part of this was that He defeated the captor, the powers who held the nations in dominion.

He gave us the new law that would make us truly accomplish God's will from the heart. And He brought both Jew and Gentile together in a new way of being human defined by His life. And so the Mosaic law was fulfilled by the life of Christ and ended.

And we should not go back to it for directions for our lives, or we are taking on something again that brings division and enmity. This is a big mistake that Christians have made. I don't know why we do it, but we go back to the Mosaic law for lots of different things. The Sabbath day is a big thing. We go back and we grab those laws. Now, God did create us to have a day of rest, but the laws in the law of Moses don't apply today. And that's a subject for another message. But we should not do that. And when we do that, we make a problem for ourselves. When we go back to the law of Moses and we try to use that to tell us how we should live our life, the law of Jesus is the law that guides us in the way of life.