Ephesians 2:11-22

Your Connect Devotional scribes hope our readers are reading the whole of the week’s Scripture passage before diving into our brief attempts to comment on one or two aspects of it each morning.  Please get a sense for the forest before reading our observations on one or two trees!

We’re currently exploring a wonderful, beautiful, un-boundaried “forest” called “The Cross.”  So much to see, so many different things to marvel at, so many times and places where we are stopped in our tracks, “lost in wonder, love and praise,” as an old hymn has it.  

This week’s passage has so much going on in it!  It might help to see it as a drama in three acts.

But before we get to each act, let’s cheat a bit and see how the drama ends: verse 22.  “And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”  In this passage, Paul says that "the purpose of the cross” was for God to build for himself a new kind of “house,” a dwelling where God can be at home with us and we with God.  Here and now; not perfectly, not fully, but nevertheless: here and now.

Act One (verses 11-13)

Interesting: there already was a Temple in Jerusalem.  But God, Paul writes, is building a temple, an entirely new kind of temple.

There is only one God—and therefore, ultimately, only one people, one family of God.  Yet Gentiles must remain outside the Temple in Jerusalem. They can get close, but they cannot come all the way in.

So the drama begins with God gathering building materials.  Not lumber and masonry; people. Many of whom are “far” away.  They are Gentiles, not Jews, which means they are unqualified not qualified, outsiders instead of insiders, the wrong sort rather than the right sort, especially if we’re building a temple. Their situation is as bleak as it gets: separated, excluded, foreigners/aliens, without hope and without God.  As bad as it gets.

And then, the best word in the Bible: but.  “But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far away have been brought near through the blood of Jesus.”  The cross is the way God pays for and gathers his building materials.

Act Two (verses 14-18)

Building requires demolition.  The site needs to be prepared, obstacles removed.  Those who had usurped ownership (the “principalities) must be silenced and sent packing.  The theme words of this act are “peace” (used four times) and “one” (also four times).

Jesus himself is our peace.  His cross is his means of making peace—our King does not kill his enemies, he dies for them!  The King who is the source and author of the Law dies according to that Law in order to put that Law to silence.  The King who has not created enmity, strife, war, racism, and all our human divisivenesses picks up, upon the cross, the tab for all the wreckage and ruin we have created.  Our King who owed none of us anything reconciles all of us to himself through the cross. And he pours his Spirit upon us and into us, granting to people like us the most precious of gifts and privileges: access to the Father.

Act Three (verses 19-22)

The pace quickens.  God “naturalizes” a whole new citizenship—and then turns them into building materials!  A foundation is laid, the cornerstone (Jesus) installed, the parts of the building are joined together and the whole structure rises: a temple!  But not physical structure, not “a religious building”—a people who, united to their King by his cross, are becoming, here and now, a dwelling where God lives.

The cross is not only the way in which our King pays for the project; the cross is the way our King goes about building.

Hmmm … Chatham Church is about to start construction on Andrews Store Road.  How could that building project help us (the people of Chatham Church) become a dwelling where God lives by his Spirit?