Ephesians 2:11-13
Once far off, Now brought Near
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Welcome to God’s Word for You, a ministry of Sharon RP Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.Sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life.
Please turn over in your Bibles to the book of Ephesians. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians chapter 2. Ephesians chapter 2 and you can find that on page 1,038 of your Pew Bibles. Ephesians chapter 2:11-13. Hear now God's Word: “Therefore remember that you, once Gentiles in the flesh – who are called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made 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 without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” Thus ends this portion of the reading of God's Word. It is true, it is perfect, it is holy, and it is life-changing.
I was watching a show not too long ago with Olivia. And as we are watching, there was a story of a girl who is in foster care, and as this girl was in foster care it was her and another girl. And come to find out that the foster father that they had was an abusive foster father. He would beat them. He would neglect them. He would strip them of things and they found themselves in a tough spot. And the one girl talked back to him and stood up for the other girl as he came into the room to hurt her. And she said, “Why did you do that?” And the one girl who had been there much longer than her said, “At least at this home, he feeds me.” And I thought, “Man, how hard is that, that this person who's supposed to look like a father and in all reality is one who's beating and abusing. And yet this is where the Ephesians found themselves as they worshiped idols that they thought cared for them. And as they found out who the real Father was who would actually draw them near.
And so I want you to look at the text with me this morning and I want you to see that as we were those who were separated from Christ, your loving Father has brought you near to Him now. And the first thing that we see is that this is the first command that we have in the book of Ephesians. Ephesians chapter 2 verse 11, the very first command, and we won't see another command again until chapter 4. But this first command is remember. Remember. Look back. Bring back to mind. Remember what you were like before you became a Christian. And how does he say the Ephesians were beforehand? “You were once Gentiles in the flesh.” Who called them Gentiles in the flesh? Well, they were “called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made in the flesh by hands.” This is an odd way to think about this, but remember, Paul is a Jew of Jews. Right? Paul was raised in a Jewish home. Paul was raised under Gamaliel. Paul was raised up to follow the law. Paul was raised to have to think he was self-righteous. And when you set yourself apart like that, we are the special group, we are the righteous ones, we are the chosen ones, and everyone else out there: Gentiles. Uncircumcision. Others.
I'm going to take a I guess here, I won't have you literally raise your hand. How many of you are Jews by birth? If you're Jewish by ancestry, wow, it seems like this is talking about every single one of us. Every single one of us, the apostle Paul, and the Jews of that time, would have looked and said: Gentiles. Outsiders. Those who are uncircumcised. Those who are outside the promises of God. So this is the derogative way that they would talk about people, it was either Gentiles, those ethnic people. The word here for Gentiles in the Greek is ethnos. We get our word “ethnic” from it. And they would say, “You Gentiles. We’re to stay separate from you. The law even said that. We're not allowed to intermarry with you. We're not allowed to live with you. If you even come with us you have to follow our way.”
But even worse than that, they called them the Uncircumcision. This is a derogative word. I'm not going to say some of the words, but you know people who throw around words in our own culture about people of other ethnicities, don't you? You know what people call those people, that race. That's what, when they called them Uncircumcision, that's the distasteful feel of that word. That's who we were, the Uncircumcision. Saying the promises that God had given to Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, the promises that God would be with him and that God would give him more offspring than the stars of the sky. The promise that God would give him the land. All these promises? Not yours. You have no right to them. Why? You're not circumcised. You weren’t born of the right family. You don't have the sign of the covenant in your flesh.
But it's clear here, it's interesting. Paul can't just let it be about flesh, though. Look closely at verse 11. “You who are called Uncircumcision by what is called the Circumcision made in the flesh by hands.” So I'm going to clue you into something. Turn in your Bible to Deuteronomy chapter 10. Deuteronomy chapter 10. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The fifth book of the Bible. Deuteronomy 10:16, “Therefore circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and be stiffed necked no longer.” Just turn a few pages to Deuteronomy chapter 30. Deuteronomy chapter 30 verse 6. Verse 5 starts off, Deuteronomy 30:5, “Then the Lord your God will bring you to the land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it. He will prosper you and multiply you more than your fathers.” Right? So there's the promises of the gospel, the promises of that covenant with Abraham. But notice what comes next. “And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.” The outward sign was meant to point towards an inward reality, that it wasn't just because they were children of Abraham by birth, but that they were children of Abraham by faith. That God had circumcised their hearts, that they had the mark of God upon their souls.
This is what Paul is talking about in Ephesians 2:11 when he says, “by what is called the circumcision made in the flesh by hands.” Right? It’s man-made. Right? These people who are looking down at the Gentiles who are calling them, “You Uncircumcised,” these are people that Paul is saying, “They don't even get it.” They're boasting about their own circumcision, but their own circumcision is nothing but hand made. The words there, again, we sometimes lose some context when things are moved from their original languages, from Greek into English, and that's okay, but the idea of hand made here is, the word is one word that's used to describe how idols were made. Handmade idols or idols made by human hands. That circumcision is just a sign. The Jews are still trusting in that sign, but there's a heart reality here. See, you were really uncircumcised, not outwardly, but also inwardly.
This is what we just learned in Ephesians 2:1-2, “And he made you alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world,” right? We looked at that. We are those who were uncircumcised. We were dead in our transgressions and sins. You wallowed in your guilt, you walked according to the prince of the power of the air, you fulfilled the desires the lust of your flesh, and we deserved condemnation, just as the rest. That's what we looked at last week and here it's saying, “Yeah that's who you were.” Don't forget, that's who you were. That's who we are apart from Christ. We are apart from God. We were Gentiles in the flesh.
Then five things that flow from being Gentiles in the flesh. Who we are naturally. Verse 12, “You were without Christ.” You were without the Messiah. Gentiles in the flesh, uncircumcised in the heart, without the hope of David's son. Without the hope of a redeemer, without the hope of someone coming and ruling over you forever with righteousness, without the hope of Jesus Christ. You were without Christ. I don’t know about you, but it's hard for me to remember those days sometimes. I don't want to remember them. I don't want to remember sometimes what it was like, the things that I did with my buddies, and the things that I poisoned my mind with, and the things that I drunk deeply from the world and polluted my soul with. I don't want to remember, but Paul is saying, “You need to remember.”
You need to remember, because it's displaying His mighty power. Remember, that's what we had looked at in chapter one. This was the power of God that even though we were those who were once without Christ, thank God, we are not without Christ anymore. I don't know about you, but that's good enough for a sermon all of itself, right? That's the mini-gospel, you were without Christ and now you have Christ. You were without Jesus, now you have Jesus. You were without an anointed one and now you have The Anointed One. You were without a redeemer and now you have been redeemed. You have Christ, but remember you didn't always have Him. You were once strangers from Him. He was far from you.
So number one, we were once those who were without Christ, but also we were aliens. Verse 12, “being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel.” You guys have a really cool tradition here in Morning Sun. I love it. I love it. I didn't grow up with a whole town that swells, like to seven times its capacity during the 4th of July. I mean this past year, when we got to celebrate a Morning Sun 4th of July for the first time, I was just like, “How do all these people fit on this little street?! It's incredible?!” And you can remember when you think about your childhood and you think about bringing your kids and you can be like, “You know, I remember when I went to the Morning Sun and you know what? They had frog races, and then they had toilet bowl races, and then they had a huge massive fireworks display. And everybody got together. And when they did the parade, they threw sugar, crystallized sugar at us. It was amazing! Our parent hated it, and it was great!” Right? It is part of what it means to be a child of Morning Sun, to live in the commonwealth of Morning Sun is that you got to experience all that small town blessing.
Well, in a similar way, in Israel, they had a whole bunch of culture, a whole bunch of small town blessings, a whole bunch of covenant community blessings. Paul is saying, “Look, you were once alienated from the citizenship of Israel. You're outsiders. Even if you went in, you weren't allowed. You could come in as a visitor, but if you went to the temple, there was a specific place where you could watch as an outsider, but you couldn't fully participate.” And Paul could sit there from his background, Paul could sit from his memory and say, “You know, there was times in my life where I remember going to the Passover. Man, Mom made a mean lamb that day. And I remember we all tucked in our cloaks into our belts. And I remember what it was like to stand at the temple and to see the high priest walk in and the sun to shine off the emblem on his forehead that said, ‘Holiness unto the Lord.’ And I remember seeing the high priest with the onyx stones on his shoulder, and I remember the scarlet and the blue and the purple that was in his ephod. I remember his clothing. I remember the smell of the tabernacle. I remember the offerings. I remember my mother and my father every morning when we went to bed and when we rose up, they would say, “Shama Yisra’el Adonai Elohiym Adonai Echad.” “Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one.” And every day we would just get the Word. Man, that was what life was like in Israel. We would get to go to Jerusalem three times a year, and we would get to sing Psalms as we went up to Jerusalem and we would go on our pilgrimage and we would live in tents in Jerusalem. It was like a giant slumber party with all of our extended family and it was a great time.
But you Gentiles were none of that. You had no part in it. If you came, it meant nothing to you, because you were uncircumcised. You could not take part in the commonwealth of Israel. That's who you were. That’s who I was. That’s who you were. You were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers of the covenants of promise. This is an interesting phrase “the strangers of the covenants of promise”. We already talked about Genesis chapter 12 and Genesis chapter 17, where God comes into covenant with Abraham, right? He promised him that look up at the stars of the sky and count the stars if you can and your descendants are going to be more numerous than those. Look at the grains of the sand, your descendants are going to be more numerous than those. The land I'm going to give you, the land, it's going to be fertile. You're going to live in houses that you didn't make and you're going to pick fruit from vineyards that you didn't plant. It's all going to be yours. He renews that covenant with Jacob. He renews that covenant with Isaac. Those are the covenants of promise that He's going to be their God and they're going to be His people.
And then we keep finding that in Second Samuel chapter 27, where God makes a loving covenant. Second Samuel chapter 7, where God makes a covenant with David. He says, “I'm going to be your Father and you're going to be my son and I'm going to give you a son who's going to sit upon your throne and He's going to reign forever.” Right? The promise to Israel that God was going to be their God and they were going to be His people and He was going to rule over them, all of these were beautiful covenant promises. And yet you as Gentiles are strangers to those things. Gentiles, by birth, do not have a right to those promises. Why? Because they were made, in their eyes, to Abraham and to his children.
So they were, one, aliens without Christ. Number two, aliens from the commonwealth. Number three, strangers of the covenants of the promise. Number four, having no hope. These next two speak directly into the Ephesian lifestyle. The Bible is this unique story. The Bible is a unique truth that God gives you, that there is hope. That there is hope. That God is long suffering and kind and merciful and He redeems people. That is not the story of Greek and Roman mythology. See, every day when the Ephesians would go to Artemis's Temple, when the Ephesians would go and they would go and serve their pagan gods, they were not going because they had hope, but they went out of fear. I just need to go placate these gods. I'm telling you, if you ever go read Greek mythology or Roman mythology, it's like a giant soap opera where the gods are just upset at people or at each other and their wrath overflows all the time. But you know what you could do? You can bring them some gold and maybe they'll be happy. You can bring them a little bit of food, and maybe their tummies will be full and maybe they won't be upset with you that day.
See, they didn't have hope. How do you ever know that you have given enough? How do you ever know that you have sacrificed enough? How do the Ephesians know that they have ever satisfied the gods? How do they ever know that the gods aren't just going to wake up the next day and be hungry and angry again? How do they know that they're not just going to be hangry jerks and they're just going to be upset and ticked off? They don’t have hope. There’s no hope of redemption. There's no hope of peace. There is just fear. So, fourthly, they are strangers from the covenant of promise, having no hope.
And fifth, there's one last thing they were, we were before Christ and without God in the world. And without God in the world, I was kind of shocked when I was translating this passage, right? I've just told you what the Ephesians were like. They didn't just worship Artemis, right? They had a whole bunch of other gods that they would go to, a whole bunch of other temples. Artemis’s was the biggest and best in Ephesus. But God calls them here Atheists. That's what without God is. We get our word atheist from the from this word here. I'm not joking. In the Greek, I was surprised, atheos. Atheists. You were without God. See, because all these other gods were nothing but mere idols. They weren't gods at all. Their entire life had been devoted to a farce. They were without hope and without God. And Paul is telling us, “Remember those days. Remember. Remember that you were once without Christ. Remember that you were once strangers to the commonwealth of Israel. Remember that you were strangers to the covenant of promise. Remember that you didn't have hope. Remember that you were without God.” God is telling you, Christians, now, that this is who we are by birth. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty hopeless to me.
There's an amazing switch that happens in verse 13. Verse 13, “But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” Who are you now, though, Christian? If you are to remember that back then I was separated from Christ, back then I was way over here, away from God, without hope in the world, who are you now? In Christ, now, you are brought near to God. All the promises, all the hope, all the comforts, all the rights of citizenship are yours. God doesn't hold you with a stiff arm like a redheaded stepchild way over here. God doesn't say “uncircumcision”. He says, “No, come here. Come here son. Daughter, come here. Come here. I love you. All the promises are yours. I'm going to be your God. You're going to be one of my people. All of my blessings are now for you.”
See, no longer are you a stranger. No longer are you one without hope, but you have the hope of Jesus Christ. No longer are you one who is told you're not allowed to come into the holy place, but Jesus Christ has ripped the veil and He says, “Come. Come into my throne rooms. Come and sit at my feet. Come and eat from my table. Come and partake of the covenant meal. Come and drink and come and enjoy the wedding feast of the supper of the Lamb. Come, I'm drawing you near. My Holy Spirit is working in you and I want you to come near to Me.” God is drawing you near to Himself. Now, Christian, you are not someone far off. God is closer to you now than your very breath.
This is hard to realize sometimes though, isn't it? Maybe you're like me, maybe you're not like me, maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just given to depression sometimes, and that's okay. I'll take that. But I have a feeling that some of you doubt this at times. Some of you feel like, “But what if He doesn't?” Some of you might feel like, “Does He really love me? Does He know what's going on in my life?” And He's telling you, “yes”. He's telling you now, here, in definitive terms, with 100% certainty, “I am near to you. I've drawn you near to Myself.”
And it's not just something He's promised, but it's something He's proven. How? How did God draw you near to Himself? What's the last part of verse 13? How did God prove it? He brought us near by the blood of Christ. God in His infinite wisdom, from eternity past, looked upon you with love and redeemed you with the price of the blood that is His very own Son, He spared no cost that you might have hope in this world. That you might have citizenship in His kingdom. God paid the very blood of His own Son which is more valuable than anything in this world, more valuable than riches and gold and silver than rubies and all the IRAs and Roths in this world. Even more valuable than all the kingdoms. God gave His very only begotten Son that you might have life in Him, and dwell with Him forever.
Christian, God’s drawing you near to Himself. Christian, God has spared absolutely no expense. If you want to have hope, look to Christ. If you want to know that you are going to have a place in that throne room and that your seat in heaven is saved, now the ticket has been bought by the blood of Christ. Brothers and sisters, take hope in Christ, that in Christ you have been brought near to God, that He loves you. He is your Father and that you are no stranger to Him. Take hope, Christian. Take hope that you are no atheist, but He has circumcised your heart and has drawn you near to Himself.
Let's pray. “God, what a blessing it is, Lord, for we were not those who deserved your grace, and yet you poured it out upon us. Thank you, Lord, for the rich inheritance we have in Jesus Christ. Thank you, Father, that we do not go at life alone, but that You are in us and we are in You and that You love us and You care for us. Lord, we thank you that we have hope and that we belong to You. Thank you, Lord, for drawing us to Yourself. In Jesus's name, amen.”
Thanks for listening to this week's message from God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon RP Church in rural southeast Iowa. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith and your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website: Sharonrpc.org. We’d love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa 52640. May God richly bless you this week.