CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES
Ephesians 2:13. Ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh.—The Gentile may sing his hymn in Jewish words: “Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not: Thou, O Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer; from everlasting is Thy name.” “Lo-ammi” (“not My people”) is no longer their name (Hosea 2:23; Romans 9:24-25).
Ephesians 2:14. For He is our peace, who hath made both one.—“Not the Peacemaker merely, for indeed at His own great cost He procured peace, and is Himself the bond of union of both” (Jew and Gentile). The middle wall of partition.—M. Ganneau, the discoverer of the Moabite Stone, found built into the wall of a ruined Moslem convent a stone, believed to be from the Temple, with this inscription: “No stranger-born (non-Jew) may enter within the circuit of the barrier and enclosure that is around the sacred court; and whoever shall be caught [intruding] there, upon himself be the blame of the death that will consequently follow.” Josephus describes this fence and its warning inscription (Wars of the Jews, Bk. V., ch. v., § 2). It is rather the spirit of exclusiveness which Christ threw down. The stone wall Titus threw down and made all a common field, afterwards.
Ephesians 2:15. Having abolished in His flesh the enmity.—The enmity of Jew and Gentile; the abolition of their enmity to God is mentioned later. “First be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift,” for reconciliation to God. The law of commandments contained in ordinances.—The slave whose duty it was to take the child to his teacher might say, “Don’t do that.” St. Paul does not regard the function of the law as more than that (Galatians 3:23-25). One new man.—Trench, in an admirable section, distinguishes between the new in time (recens) and the new in quality (novum). The word here means new in quality, “as set over against that which has seen service, the outworn.” “It is not an amalgam of Jew and Gentile” (Meyer).
Ephesians 2:16. That He might reconcile both unto God.—The word “reconcile” implies “a restitution to a state from which they had fallen, or which was potentially theirs, or for which they were destined” (Lightfoot, Colossians 1:20). The cross having slain the enmity.—Gentile authority and Jewish malevolence met in the sentence to that painful death; and both Gentile and Jew, acknowledging the Son of God, shall cease their strife, and love as brethren.
Ephesians 2:17. Came and preached peace.—By means of His messengers, as St. Paul tells the Galatians that Christ was “evidently set forth crucified amongst them.” To you afar off, and to them that were nigh.—Isaiah’s phrase (Isaiah 57:19). The Christ uplifted “out of the earth” draws all men to Him.
Ephesians 2:18. For through Him we both have access.—St. Paul’s way of proclaiming His Master’s saying, “I am the door: by Me if any man enter in he shall be saved”; including the other equally precious, “I am the way: no man cometh unto the Father but by Me.” “Access” here means “introduction.”
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Ephesians 2:13-18
Christ the Great Peacemaker.
I. His mission on earth was one of peace.—“And came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh” (Ephesians 2:17). His advent was heralded by the angelic song, “Peace on earth, and goodwill toward men.” The world is racked with moral discord; He is constantly striving to introduce the music of a heavenly harmony. It is distracted with war; He is propagating principles that will by-and-by make war impossible. The work of the peacemaker is Christ-like. Shenkyn, one of whose anomalies was that with all his burning passions he was a notorious peacemaker, and had means of pouring oil upon troubled waters, once upon a time was deputed to try his well-known skill upon a Church whose strife of tongues had become quite notorious. He reluctantly complied, and attended a meeting which soon proved to his satisfaction that the people were possessed by a demon that could not easily be expelled. The peacemaker got up, staff in hand, paced the little chapel, and with his spirit deeply moved, cried out, “Lord, is this Thy spouse?” Faster and faster he walked, thumping his huge stick on the floor, and still crying out, “Lord, is this Thy spouse? Slay her!” Then there came, as it were from another, a response, “No, I will not.” “Sell her, then!” “No, I will not.” “Deny her, then!” Still the answer came, “I will not.” Then he lifted up his voice, saying, “I have bought her with My precious blood; how can I give her up? How can I forsake her?” The strife had now ceased, and the people looked on with amazement, crying out for pardon.
II. He made peace between man and man.—“For He is our peace, who hath made both one; … to make in Himself of twain one new man, so making peace” (Ephesians 2:14-15). The hostility of Jew and Gentile was conquered; the new spritual nature created in both formed a bond of brotherhood and harmony. The Jew no longer despised the Gentile; the Gentile no longer hated and persecuted the Jew. Where the Christian spirit predominates personal quarrels are speedily adjusted.
III. He made peace between man and God.—“That He might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross” (Ephesians 2:16). The enmity of man against God is disarmed and conquered by the voluntary suffering of Jesus in man’s stead, and by His thus opening up the way of reconciliation of man with God. God can now be just, and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. The violated law is now atoned for, and the violater may obtain forgiveness and regain the forfeited favour of the offended God. There is peace only through forgiveness.
IV. His death removed the great barrier to peace.—This paragraph is very rich and suggestive in the phrases used to explain this blessed result: “Ye are made nigh by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). “By the cross, having slain the enmity thereby” (Ephesians 2:16). “Hath broken down the middle wall of partition, having abolished in His flesh the enmity” (Ephesians 2:14-15). It is not the calm, silent, featureless, helpless, forceless peace of death, but a living, active, aggressive, ever-conquering peace. The death was the result of agonising struggle and intense suffering, and the peace purchased is a powerfully operating influence in the believing soul.
“A peace is of the nature of a conquest;
For there both parties nobly are subdued,
And neither party losers.”
Shakespeare.
V. True peace is realised only in Christ.—“But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). “For He is our peace” (Ephesians 2:14). “For through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father” (Ephesians 2:18). “Christ takes us by the hand, and eads us to the Father.” Men seek peace in the excitements of worldly pleasures, or in the pursuit of ambitious aims, but in vain. They only stimulate the malady they seek to cure. Christ is the restful centre of the universe, and the sin-tossed soul gains peace only as it converges towards Him. The efforts of men to find rest independent of Christ only reveal their need of Him, and it is a mercy when this revelation and consciousness of need does not come too late.
Lessons.—
1. Sin is the instigator of quarrels and strife.
2. Only as sin is conquered does peace become possible.
3. Christ introduces peace by abolishing sin.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Ephesians 2:13-18. Nearness to God.
I. They were brought into the Church of God, and admitted to equal privileges with His ancient people the Jews.
II. They were brought near to God as they were admitted to enjoy the gospel, which is a dispensation of grace and peace.
III. They were brought near to God by the renovation of their souls after His image.
IV. This nearness to God implies a state of peace with Him.
V. Another circumstance of the nearness is access to God in prayer.
VI. Another is the presence of His Holy Spirit.—Let us be afraid of everything that tends to draw us away from God, and love everything which brings us nearer to Him. Let us seek Him with our whole heart, preserve daily communion with Him, choose His favour as our happiness, His service as our employment, His word as our guide, His ordinances as our refreshment, His house as the gate of heaven, and heaven as our eternal home.—Lathrop.
Ephesians 2:13. Our State by Nature and by Grace.
I. Our state by nature.—The distance from God here spoken of is not a local distance, neither is it that which separates us from Him as an infinite Being.
1. It is legal. Banished by a righteous sentence and by a sense of guilt and unworthiness.
2. It is moral. Estrangement. Absence of sympathy. Want of harmony.
3. In both these respects it is ever-widening.
4. It is miserable and dangerous.
II. Our state by grace.—
1. The legal barriers are removed by the blood of Christ shed on the cross.
2. The moral alienation is removed by the blood of Christ as applied to the believer by the Holy Spirit.
3. The nearness to God thus effected is a valuable privilege. It includes reconciliation, friendship, communion. Sinner, apply now to be made nigh. Believer, remember thy obligations.—G. Brooks.
Ephesians 2:14-15. Death a Peacemaker.—The struggle between the Northern and Southern States of America closed for ever at the funeral of General Grant. The armies of rebellion surrendered twenty years before; but the solemn and memorable pageant at the tomb of the great Union soldier, where the leading generals of the living Union and of the dead Confederacy stood shoulder to shoulder and mingled their tears in a common grief—this historical event marked the absolute conclusion of sectional animosity in America.
Ephesians 2:16. The Power of the Gospel to dissolve the Enmity of the Human Heart against God.—
1. The goodness of God destroys the enmity of the human mind. When every other argument fails, this, if perceived by the eye of faith, finds its powerful and persuasive way through every barrier of resistance. Try to approach the heart of man by the instruments of terror and of authority, and it will disdainfully repel you. There is not one of you skilled in the management of human nature who does not perceive that, though this may be a way of working on the other principles of our constitution—of working on the fears of man, or on his sense of interest—this is not the way of gaining by a single hair-breadth on the attachments of his heart. Such a way may force, or it may terrify, but it never, never can endear; and after all the threatening array of such an influence as this is brought to bear upon man, there is not one particle of service it can extort from him but what is all rendered in the spirit of a painful and reluctant bondage. Now this is not the service which prepares for heaven. This is not the service which assimilates men to angels. This is not the obedience of those glorified spirits, whose every affection harmonises with their every performance, and the very essence of whose piety consists of delight in God and the love they bear to Him. To bring up man to such an obedience as this, his heart behoved to be approached in a peculiar way; and no such way is to be found but within the limits of the Christian revelation. There alone you see God, without injury to His other attributes, plying the heart of man with the irresistible argument of kindness. There alone do you see the great Lord of heaven and of earth, setting Himself forth to the most worthless and the most wandering of His children—putting forth His own hand to the work of healing the breach which sin had made between them—telling them that His word could not be mocked, and His justice could not be defied and trampled on, and that it was not possible for His perfections to receive the slightest taint in the eyes of the creation He had thrown around them; but that all this was provided for, and not a single creature within the compass of the universe He had formed could now say that forgiveness to man was degrading to the authority of God, and that by the very act of atonement, which poured a glory over all the high attributes of His character, His mercy might now burst forth without limit and without control upon a guilty world, and the broad flag of invitation be unfurled in the sight of all its families.
2. Let the sinner, then, look to God through the medium of such a revelation, and the sight which meets him there may well tame the obstinacy of that heart which had wrapped itself up in impenetrable hardness against the force of every other consideration. Now that the storm of the Almighty’s wrath has been discharged upon Him who bore the burden of the world’s atonement, He has turned His throne of glory into a throne of grace, and cleared away from the pavilion of His residence all the darkness which encompassed it. The God who dwelleth there is God in Christ; and the voice He sends from it to this dark and rebellious province of His mighty empire is a voice of the most beseeching tenderness. Goodwill to men is the announcement with which His messengers come fraught to a guilty world; and, since the moment in which it burst upon mortal ears from the peaceful canopy of heaven, may the ministers of salvation take it up, and go round with it among all the tribes and individuals of the species. Such is the real aspect of God towards you. He cannot bear that His alienated children should be finally and everlastingly away from Him. He feels for you all the longing of a parent bereaved of his offspring. To woo you back again unto Himself He scatters among you the largest and the most liberal assurances, and with a tone of imploring tenderness does He say to one and all of you, “Turn ye, turn ye; why will ye die?” He has no pleasure in your death. He does not wish to glorify Himself by the destruction of any one of you. “Look to Me, all ye ends of the earth, and be saved,” is the wide and generous announcement by which He would recall, from the outermost limits of His sinful creation, the most worthless and polluted of those who have wandered away from Him.
3. Now give us a man who perceives, with the eye of his mind, the reality of all this, and you give us a man in possession of the principle of faith. Give us a man in possession of this faith; and his heart, shielded as it were against the terrors of a menacing Deity, is softened and subdued, and resigns its every affection at the moving spectacle of a beseeching Deity; and thus it is that faith manifests the attribute which the Bible assigns to it, of working by love. Give us a man in possession of this love; and, animated as he is with the living principle of that obedience, where the willing and delighted consent of the inner man goes along with the performance of the outer man, his love manifests the attribute which the Bible assigns to it when it says, “This is the love of God, that ye keep His commandments.” And thus it is, amid the fruitfulness of every other expedient, when power threatened to crush the heart which it could not soften—when authority lifted its voice, and laid on man an enactment of love which it could not carry—when terror shot its arrows, and they dropped ineffectual from that citadel of the human affections, which stood proof against the impression of every one of them—when wrath mustered up its appalling severities, and filled that bosom with despair which it could not fill with the warmth of a confiding attachment—then the kindness of an inviting God was brought to bear on the heart of man, and got an opening through all its mysterious avenues. Goodness did what the nakedness of power could not do. It found its way through all intricacies of the human constitution, and there, depositing the right principle of repentance, did it establish the alone effectual security for the right purposes and the right fruits of repentance.—Dr. T. Chalmers.
Ephesians 2:18. The Privilege of Access to the Father.—In the Temple service of the Jews all did not enjoy equal privileges. The court of the Gentiles was outside that of the Jews and separated from it by “a marble screen or enclosure three cubits in height, beautifully ornamented with carving, but bearing inscriptions, in Greek and Roman characters, forbidding any Gentile to pass within its boundary.” Such restricted access to God the new dispensation was designed to abolish. The middle wall of partition is now broken down, and through Christ we, both Jews and Gentiles—all mankind—have equal access by one Spirit unto the Father. Observe:—
I. The privilege of access unto the Father.—That God is the proper object of worship is implied in our text, and more explicitly declared in other portions of the sacred writings. According to the nature of the blessings desired, prayer may be addressed to any one of the three Persons in the God-head; but the Bible teaches that prayer generally is to be presented to the Father through Christ and by the Holy Spirit. And so appropriate are the offices of the Persons in the Trinity that we cannot speak otherwise. We cannot say that through the Spirit and by the Father we have access to Christ, or through the Father and by Christ we have access to the Spirit. We must observe the apostle’s order—through Christ and by the Spirit we have access to the Father. Access unto the Father implies:—
1. His sympathy with us.—God is our Creator and Sovereign, but His authority is not harsh or arbitrary. He does not even deal with us according to the stern dictates of untempered justice. On the contrary, in love and sympathy He has for our benefit made His throne accessible. He will listen to our penitential confessions, our vows of obedience, our statements of want. He has sympathy with us.
2. His ability to help us.—That access is permitted to us, taken in connection with God’s perfections, prove this. He raises no hope to disappoint, does not encourage that He may repel, but permits access that He may help and bless.
3. His permission to speak freely.—There is nothing contracted in God’s method of blessing. We are introduced to His presence not to stand dumb before Him, nor to speak under the influence of slavish fear. We have such liberty as those enjoy who are introduced to the presence of a prince by a distinguished favourite, or such freedom as children have in addressing a father. We are brought into the presence of our King by His own Son; to our heavenly Father by Christ, our elder Brother. The results of this access to ourselves:
1. It teaches dependence;
2. Excites gratitude;
3. Produces comfort;
4. Promotes growth in grace.
II. The medium of access.—Under the law the high priest was the mediator through whom the people drew near to God. He went into the “holiest of all, once every year, not without blood, which he offered for himself, and for the errors of the people” (Hebrews 9:7). Under the new covenant “boldness to enter into the holiest” is “by the blood of Jesus” (Hebrews 10:19). But as the mediation of the Jewish high priest, though “done away in Christ,” was typical, it may serve to teach us how we are to come to God. He sprinkled the blood of the sin-offering on the mercy-seat, and burnt incense within the veil (Leviticus 16), thus symbolising the sacrifice and intercession of Christ.
1. We, then, have access to God through Christ as a sacrifice.—“Without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). But, “that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” we could never, as suppliants, have found acceptance with God.
2. Through Christ as an intercessor.—“But this man,” etc. (Hebrews 10:12). A disciple in temptation cries for deliverance from evil, and Christ prays, “Holy Father, keep through Thine own name those whom Thou hast given Me” (John 17:11). A dying saint asks for “an entrance into the heavenly kingdom,” and Christ pleads, “Father, I will that they also, whom Thou hast given Me, be with Me where I am” (John 17:24). None need deem himself too unworthy to call on God who comes to Him through Christ’s sacrifice and intercession.
III. The assistance afforded by the Holy Spirit.—As we have access unto the Father through Christ pleading for us, so we have access unto the Father by the Spirit pleading in us.
1. The Spirit kindles holy desire.—It is the work of the Spirit to draw off the hearts of men from the world and raise them to God in prayer. As in playing on a musical instrument no string sounds untouched, so without this influence of the Spirit man would never look heavenward, or his heart fill with desire toward God.
2. Prompts to immediate application.—Blessings are often desired but feebly. The Spirit rebukes this hesitancy, and urges on to immediate application.
3. Aids in that application.—“Without the Spirit we know not what we should pray for” (Romans 8:26). Our thoughts wander, our affections chill, the fervour of our importunity flags, unless the Spirit “helpeth our infirmities.”
Reflections.—
1. Those who do not enjoy this privilege are highly culpable.
2. Those who do enjoy this privilege are indeed happy.—The Lay Preacher.
Access to God, revealing the Trinity in Unity.
I. The end of human salvation is access to the Father.—That is the first truth of our religion—that the source of all is meant to be the end of all, that as we all came forth from a divine Creator, so it is into divinity that we are to return and to find our final rest and satisfaction, not in ourselves, not in one another, but in the omnipotence, the omniscience, the perfectness, and the love of God. Now we are very apt to take it for granted that, however we may differ in our definitions and our belief of the deity of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we are all at one, there can be and there is no hesitation, about the deity of the Father. God is divine. God is God. And no doubt we do all assent in words to such a belief; but when we think what we mean by that word “God”; when we remember what we mean by “Father,” namely, the first source and the final satisfaction of a dependent nature; and then when we look around and see such multitudes of people living as if there were no higher source for their being than accident and no higher satisfaction for their being than selfishness, do we not feel that there is need of a continual and most earnest preaching by word and act, from every pulpit of influence to which we can mount, of the divinity of the Father. The divinity of the Father needs assertion first of all. Let men once feel it, and then nature and their own hearts will come in with their sweet and solemn confirmations of it. But nature and the human heart do not teach it of themselves. The truest teaching of it must come from souls that are always going in and out before the divine Fatherhood themselves. By the sight of such souls others must come to seek the satisfaction that comes only from a divine end of life—must come to crave access to the Father. So we believe, and so we tempt other men to believe, in God the Father.
II. And now pass to the divinity of the method.—“Through Jesus Christ.” Man is separated from God. That fact, testified to by broken associations, by alienated affections, by conflicting wills, stands written in the whole history of our race. And equally clear is it to him who reads the gospels, and enters into sympathy with their wonderful Person, that in Him, in Jesus of Nazareth, appeared the Mediator by whom was to be the Atonement. His was the life and nature which, standing between the Godhood and the manhood, was to bridge the gulf and make the firm bright road over which blessing and prayer might pass and repass with confident golden feet for ever. And then the question is—and when we ask it thus it becomes so much more than a dry problem of theology; it is a question for live, anxious men to ask with faces full of eagerness—Out of which nature came that Mediator? Out of which side of the chasm sprang the bridge leaping forth toward the other? Evidently on both sides that bridge is bedded deep and clings with a tenacity which shows how it belongs there. He is both human and divine. But from which side did the bridge spring? It is the most precious part of our belief that it was with God that the activity began. It is the very soul of the gospel, as I read it, that the Father’s heart, sitting above us in His holiness, yearned for us as we lay down here in our sin. And when there was no man to make an intercession, He sent His Son to tell us of His love, to live with us, to die for us, to lay His life like a strong bridge out from the divine side of existence, over which we might walk fearfully but safely, but into the divinity where we belonged. Through Him we have access to the Father. As the end was divine, so the method is divine. As it is to God that we come, so it is God who brings us there. I can think nothing else without dishonouring the tireless, quenchless love of God.
III. The power of the act of man’s salvation is the Holy Spirit.—“Through Christ Jesus we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father.” What do we mean by the Holy Spirit being the power of salvation? I think we are often deluded and misled by carrying out too far some of the figurative forms in which the Bible and the religious experience of men express the saving of the soul. For instance, salvation is described as the lifting of the soul out of a pit and putting it upon a pinnacle, or on a safe high platform of grace. The figure is strong and clear. Nothing can overstate the utter dependence of the soul on God for its deliverance; but if we let the figure leave in our minds an impression of the human soul as a dead, passive thing, to be lifted from one place to the other like a torpid log that makes no effort of its own either for co-operation or resistance, then the figure has misled us. The soul is a live thing. Everything that is done with it must be done in and through its own essential life. If a soul is saved, it must be by the salvation, the sanctification, of its essential life; if a soul is lost, it must be by perdition of its life, by the degradation of its affections and desires and hopes. Let there be nothing merely mechanical in the conception of the way God treats these souls of ours. He works upon them in the vitality of thought, passion, and will that He put into them. And so when a soul comes to the Father through the Saviour, its whole essential vitality moves in the act. When this experience is reached, then see what Godhood the soul has come to recognise in the world. First, there is the creative Deity from which it sprang, and to which it is struggling to return—“the divine End, God the Father.” Then there is the incarnate Deity, which makes that return possible by the exhibition of God’s love—the divine Power of salvation, God the Holy Spirit. To the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. This appears to be the truth of the Deity as it relates to us. I say again, “as it relates to us.” What it may be in itself; how Father, Son, and Spirit meet in the perfect Godhood; what infinite truth more there may, there must, be in that Godhood, no man can dare to guess. But, to us, God is the end, the method, and the power of salvation; so He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is in the perfect harmony of these sacred personalities that the precious unity of the Deity consists. I look at the theologies, and so often it seems as if the harmony of Father, Son, and Spirit has been lost, both by those that own and by those that disown the Trinity. One theology makes the Father hard and cruel, longing as it were for man’s punishment, extorting from the Son the last drops of life-blood which man’s sin had incurred as penalty. Another theology makes the Son merely one of the multitude of sinning men, with somewhat bolder aspirations laying hold on a forgiveness which God might give but which no mortal might assume. Still another theology can find no God in the human heart at all; merely a fermentation of human naturo is this desire after goodness, this reaching out towards Divinity. The end is not worthy of the method. I do not want to come to such a Father as some of the theologians have painted. Or the method is not worthy of the end. No man could come to the perfect God through such a Jesus as some men have described. Or the power is too weak for both; and all that Christ has done lies useless, and all the Father’s welcome waits in vain for the soul that has in it no Holy Ghost. But let each be real and each be worthy of the others, and the salvation is complete. But each cannot be worthy of the others unless each is perfect. But each cannot be perfect unless each is divine; that is, our faith is in the Trinity—three Persons and one God.—Philips Brooks.
The Christian Law of Prayer—
I. To the Father.—
1. How honourable! Right of entry to an earthly sovereign.
2. How delightful! Our pleasures may be graduated according to the part of our nature in which they have their rise. The pleasures of devotion are the highest taste for devotion.
3. How profitable! God is able to bestow all temporal and spiritual blessings.
4. How solemn! The intercourse of our spirit with the Father of our spirits. Heart to heart.
II. Through the Son.—
1. Through His atonement. Legal barriers to our access must be removed. Have been removed by the death of Christ as a satisfaction to divine Justice. He has demolished the wall, He has constructed a bridge across the chasm, He has laid down His own body as the medium of approach. 2. Through His intercession. It perpetuates His sacrifice. The Jewish high priest entering the holy of holies on the Great Day of Atonement. Amyntas, mother of Coriolanus; Philippa after the siege of Calais.
III. By the Spirit.—
1. He teaches us what are our wants. For the most part we are likely to be aware of our temporal wants. In spiritual things the greater our need the less our sense of need.
2. He makes us willing to ask the supply of our wants. Aversion to beg. Aversion to lay bare the symptoms of humiliating disease.
3. He gives us power to spread our wants before God. One person employed to write a letter or a petition for another.
4. He inspires us with confidence to plead with importunity and faith. Confidence in the Father, in the Son, in the power of prayer.—G. Brooks.