One New Man in Place of the Two

Scripture: Ephesians 2:11–22

Read Ephesians 2:11–22 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

For he is our peace, the one who made both groups into one and who destroyed the middle wall of partition, the hostility… He did this to create in himself one new man out of two, thus making peace.

(Ephesians 2:14–15, selected)

A Second Pivot in the Same Chapter

We have just walked through one of the most important passages in Paul’s writing: the great announcement of grace, faith, and the gift of God in 2:1–10. We might be tempted to think the chapter is finished. It is not. Paul has another twelve verses, and they form their own complete movement, with their own diagnosis, their own pivot, and their own gospel announcement.

The pattern of the second movement matches the pattern of the first.

In 2:1–3, Paul gave us a diagnosis: the saints were dead in offenses and sins, walking in three patterns of death.

In 2:4, Paul gave us a pivot: but God.

In 2:5–10, Paul gave us the gospel announcement: dead sinners made alive in Christ, raised with Him, seated where He reigns, saved by grace and not by works, and created for the good works He had prepared.

Now in 2:11–12, Paul gives us a second diagnosis. This time it is not the diagnosis of the saint as sinner. It is the diagnosis of the Gentile saint as outsider.

In 2:13, Paul gives us a second pivot: but now.

And in 2:14–22, Paul gives us the gospel announcement again, but in different terms. Where the first half of the chapter described the saint’s vertical reconciliation to God, the second half describes the saints’ horizontal reconciliation to one another. The two movements are not separate works of God. They are two faces of one work. And it is the same Christ, by the same blood, by the same grace, who accomplishes both.

This parallel structure is no accident. Paul wants us to see that the gospel does two things at once. It saves the individual sinner from death. It also gathers a people from out of all the divided peoples of the world. The Christ who reconciled us to the Father has also reconciled us to one another, and the body of Christ that results is a people who could never have been one apart from Him.

We turn now to the second diagnosis.

Remember Where You Were

Paul’s first move is striking. He commands the saints to remember.

This is not a sentimental remembering. It is a theological remembering. The Gentile believers in Ephesus had been brought into the family of God in Christ. They were saints, faithful in Christ Jesus, holding their full place in the body. Paul is not asking them to feel inferior or to be ashamed of their pre-Christian past. He is asking them to remember what they were not, so that the gift of what they now are will be felt as the gift it is.

What he asks them to remember is bleak.

He names them, first, by the name the Jews used for them: “uncircumcision” (Ephesians 2:11). That is, the Jewish people had been marked by God, in Abraham, with the sign of the covenant. The Gentiles had no such mark. They were outside the covenant, identified by the absence of the mark. Paul is honest about this. He does not soften it. The saints in Ephesus had been “Gentiles in the flesh,” and that meant they had been outside.

Then Paul names five things the Gentiles had been without. The list is one of the most desolate in the New Testament.

They were “without the Messiah” (Ephesians 2:12). The NET rightly draws out the title that stands behind the word Christ. Whatever Christ had been doing in His coming, His ministry, His cross, His resurrection, the Gentiles had no share in it. Christ had come from Israel, was promised to Israel, ministered in Israel. The Gentiles were not in the picture.

They were cut off from the people of God, “alienated from the citizenship of Israel.” The covenant community had been a community, a polity, a recognized people with a king and a law and a temple. The Gentiles stood outside that polity. They had no rights in it, no privileges from it, no place at its table.

They were “strangers to the covenants of promise.” The promises God had made to Abraham, to Moses, to David (promises of land, of blessing, of a Messiah, of an everlasting kingdom) were not made to them. The covenants were not theirs. The Gentile reading her Bible could not say, as the Jewish reader could, this was promised to me.

They had “no hope.” The future the Old Testament held out (resurrection, restoration, the day of the Lord, the gathering of all things) was not their future. They had no anchor pointing forward. They lived inside the present age, with no horizon beyond it.

And they were “without God in the world.” The Greek phrase is atheoi en tō kosmō: godless ones, atheists in the world. Paul does not mean they had no religion. The Gentile world was densely religious, full of temples and altars and gods of every description. He means they had no relationship with the true and living God. They were surrounded by gods who were not God, and the God who is God was not theirs.

This was the situation of the Ephesian believers before Christ. Paul wants them to remember it. Why? Because the gift of being in Christ cannot be felt as a gift unless we know what we were given out of. The Christian who has forgotten her former state will find herself indifferent to the gift of her present state. Memory is a guard against ingratitude.

This is true for every Christian. Most of us today are Gentiles by birth, but few of us feel the weight of that word as the Ephesians did. Many readers of this study come from generations of believers, and the Gentile question has been settled for two thousand years. But the structural truth still applies. Each of us, before the Spirit brought us to faith through the Word and Baptism, was outside. We were without Christ. We had no covenant standing of our own. We had no real hope. We lived in the world without God. The faces of our exclusion may have looked different from the Ephesians’, but the exclusion itself was the same.

Paul does not press us to live in this memory. He presses us to remember it long enough to receive the pivot.

But Now in Christ Jesus

But now.

The second pivot. Two words again. The same gospel rhythm. The same hinge between despair and life.

In verse 4, the pivot was but God. The subject changed. God moved into a sentence that had been about us. Here in verse 13, the pivot is but now. The time changes. The age that defined the diagnosis is no longer the age the saints are living in. Now is a new now. Now is the time of Christ.

What has happened? “But now in Christ Jesus you who used to be far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). Far away is not a casual phrase. It echoes Isaiah 57:19, which speaks of God’s peace given to those who are far and to those who are near. Paul will echo that very prophet a few verses later, when he says Christ “preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near” (Ephesians 2:17). Paul takes up the prophet’s language of far and near and hears in it the Gentiles, and what the Messiah has now done for them.

The means of being brought near is named simply: by the blood of Christ. Paul has named that blood once already in the letter: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our offenses” (Ephesians 1:7). There the blood brought forgiveness to sinners. Here the blood brings outsiders near. The same blood. The same cross. Two different fruits of the one death of Christ.

The blood of Christ is the cost of all reconciliation. Vertical reconciliation between sinner and God: the blood. Horizontal reconciliation between Jew and Gentile: the blood. The reconciling of all things in heaven and on earth, of which Paul speaks in Colossians 1:20: the blood. Paul does not pause to explain it again. He has named the cross, and the cross does what the cross does. The reader knows.

The far are now near. The foreigners are now no longer foreigners. The noncitizens are now citizens. The godless are now God’s. The hopeless now have a hope so substantial that it overflows into the age to come. In Christ Jesus, all of this is so. Not partly so. Not provisionally so. So.

Paul is now ready to tell us how.

He Himself Is Our Peace

Christ Himself is our peace. The Greek puts the weight on the Person: autos, “he himself.” The NET renders it simply, “he is our peace” (Ephesians 2:14). Paul will say in the next verse that Christ was “making peace,” and He did. But that is not all Paul says. Christ is our peace. The peace itself is a Person. The peace is not a feeling, not a treaty, not an absence of conflict. The peace is Jesus.

What Christ has done is named in three movements.

He “made both groups into one.” The two were Jew and Gentile. The categories that had defined humanity for Paul’s whole life (the people of God and the people not of God, the circumcised and the uncircumcised) have been collapsed into one. Not by erasing the distinction artificially, not by absorbing one into the other, but by creating something new in Christ that is neither. The phrase Paul uses is striking: one new man, “out of two.” The new humanity in Christ is not Jewish humanity expanded to include Gentiles, and it is not Gentile humanity reformed into something Jewish. It is a new thing. A new humanity, a new creation, the body of the second Adam.

He “destroyed the middle wall of partition, the hostility.” There was, in Paul’s day, a literal dividing wall in the temple in Jerusalem: a low stone barrier separating the Court of the Gentiles from the inner courts, with inscriptions warning Gentiles that they would be put to death if they passed it. Paul knew that wall well. The riot in Jerusalem that led to his arrest had begun with an accusation that he had brought a Gentile past it. Many readers hear that wall behind Paul’s words, the visible sign of an invisible wall. The Mosaic law, with its purity codes and dietary regulations and circumcision requirement, had functioned as a wall between Jew and Gentile. Christ, Paul says, “nullified in his flesh the law of commandments in decrees” (Ephesians 2:15). Not by ignoring the law. Not by abolishing its moral content. By fulfilling it in Christ, who absorbed its claim, paid its penalty, and ended its function as a barrier. The wall is rubble.

He came “to reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross” (Ephesians 2:16). The vertical and the horizontal reconciliations are accomplished together, in the same act, on the same cross. Paul cannot separate them. The death of Christ is a single death that does many things, but it does them as one work, not as separate works. The Christian who is reconciled to God is also, inseparably, reconciled to fellow Christians. The Church is the body in which both reconciliations are made visible.

And the result is announced in verse 17. After His resurrection, by the apostles He sends, in the gospel that goes out to the world, Christ continues to preach. He preaches peace to those who were near, and He preaches the same peace to those who were far off. Both groups hear the same message. Both groups are addressed by the same Lord. The same peace is given to those who were far off and to those who were near. There is one peace. There is one preaching. There is one Lord.

The trinitarian shape of what has happened is then named in verse 18: “through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” Through the Son, in the Spirit, to the Father: that is the saint’s access to God. The way is the Son’s work on the cross. The instrument is the Spirit who applies the Son’s work. The destination is the Father from whom all of it flows. This single sentence is one of the most compact trinitarian statements in Paul, and it gives us the order of all Christian prayer: through Christ, in the Spirit, to the Father.

The Lutheran tradition has always insisted that this access is not vague or general. It is concrete and means-of-grace shaped. The Word preached is the means. The waters of Baptism are the means. The bread and cup of the Supper are the means. These are not extras alongside Christ. These are the very ways Christ comes to His people, breaks down the walls that divide their hearts, applies His peace, and gives them access in the Spirit to the Father. The Augsburg Confession, Article V, on the office of the ministry, names this directly: that through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Spirit is given, who works faith, where and when it pleases God, in those who hear the gospel.

The Household of God

Paul has announced peace. He now describes the people who live in that peace.

“So then you are no longer foreigners and noncitizens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of God’s household” (Ephesians 2:19).

Paul stacks three images.

The Gentiles are no longer foreigners and noncitizens. The two words name people without standing: visitors who are tolerated but not at home, outsiders passing through. They have no rights, no claim, no place at the table. The Gentile believers were such people, by Paul’s diagnosis in verses 11–12. They are no longer.

They are now fellow citizens with the saints. The image is political. They have been naturalized into the people of God. The citizenship of Israel from which they were once alienated has now received them, not as resident aliens, but as full citizens with full rights. They share the citizenship of all the saints, ancient and modern, who belong to God in Christ. Whatever standing the saints have, the Gentile believer has: same standing, same rights, same claim on the promises.

And they are members of God’s household. The image is now familial. They are not just citizens; they are family. The household of God is not a polity but a home. It has a Father at its head, a Son who is its older brother and its Lord, and saints who are siblings to one another. The Christian’s standing is not just legal; it is filial. She is in the family.

This pastoral move is worth pausing on. Paul could have stopped at fellow citizens. That alone would have been a stunning announcement to a Gentile reader. But he goes further. He pushes the image past polity into family. The Christian is not just legally received by God; she is loved as a child by Him. The Lutheran tradition’s emphasis on the doctrine of adoption, already named in 1:5 (“adoption as his legal heirs”), finds its echo here. The saints are sons and daughters. Their place in God’s house is not earned; it is the Father’s gift in Christ, and He does not revoke His promise. Yet Scripture calls the saints to remain in Christ and warns against hardened unbelief, so this comfort must never be made a shelter for impenitence. It belongs to the troubled child who comes home, not to the secure one who has stopped listening.

A Holy Temple in the Lord

Paul could have stopped at the household. He does not.

The final movement of the chapter takes the Christian’s standing one step further, into the most sacred imagery of the Old Testament: the temple. The Gentile believer, who was once forbidden by a wall to enter the inner courts of God’s house, is now told that she herself, with her fellow saints, is God’s house.

Paul builds it brick by brick.

First, the foundation: “the apostles and prophets” (Ephesians 2:20). The Church is built on the apostolic preaching of the New Testament and the prophetic witness of the Old. Some readers have understood this to refer to the apostles and the New Testament prophets only; others have read it as the apostles and the Old Testament prophets. Either reading lands at the same place. The foundation of the Church is the Word of God given through those whom God appointed to deliver it. The Lutheran tradition has taught for centuries that the Church is the creature of the Word. Where the apostolic and prophetic Word is, there the Church stands; where it is not, there is no foundation, however impressive the building above. The Augsburg Confession, Article VII, defines the Church accordingly: the assembly of saints in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the Sacraments are rightly administered. The foundation is the Word.

Second, the cornerstone: “Christ Jesus himself.” The cornerstone in ancient masonry was the most important stone in the building. It was the stone from which all the other stones took their measure, their alignment, their relation to one another. Without the cornerstone, the building cannot be true. The apostolic preaching is not the cornerstone; Christ is. The apostles do not stand at the center of the Church; Christ does. The Church does not measure herself by her own institutional structure; she measures herself by Christ. Where Christ is the cornerstone, the building stands true. Where He is not, the structure may rise impressively, but it will fall.

Third, the building itself, the whole rising temple. “In him the whole building, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord” (Ephesians 2:21). The Church is not a static building. She is a growing temple. New stones are being added: saints from every nation, brought to faith by the Spirit, fitted into the structure. The image is dynamic. Paul’s eye is on a temple that is still being built. Whatever the saints in Ephesus saw of the Church on earth in their day was a partial structure, in the process of becoming the whole structure that the ascended Christ is building.

Fourth, the purpose: that the saints may be “a dwelling place of God in the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:22). This is what the temple was always for. The temple in Jerusalem had been the place where God placed His name, where His presence dwelt, where His people came to meet Him. The Church now is that temple. The Holy Spirit dwells in her. God’s presence is in her. The saints together are not just a society or a movement or a congregation in the modern sense. They are the dwelling place of God on earth.

This is a staggering claim. The Christian congregation that gathers on a Sunday morning, however small, however ordinary, however visibly unimpressive, is addressed by Paul as the temple of the living God. The presence of the Holy Spirit there is real, because the Word and Sacraments are there. The temple is built of living stones who believe; hypocrites may share the outward fellowship of a congregation, but they are not living stones in this temple. The believers there are stones in the building, joined together, growing into the temple that is still being built. What is happening in the means of grace at that congregation’s altar and font and pulpit is the activity of the ascended Christ, building His house.

The chapter ends here. It began with us dead in our sins. It ends with us as the temple of God. The journey from one to the other is the whole gospel: vertical and horizontal, by grace through faith, peace given to the far and near, made into one new humanity, the household and dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

The saints in Ephesus, hearing this read aloud, would have known themselves to be the people Paul was describing. So are we. So we read.

For Discussion

1. Paul commands the saints to remember what they were apart from Christ. Why is this kind of memory important for the Christian life? What gets lost when we forget? What gets exaggerated when we dwell on it?

2. Paul names five things the Gentiles were without before Christ: without the Messiah, alienated from the citizenship of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope, without God in the world. Which of these would have been the most painful to hear named? Which is the deepest?

3. Two pivots in one chapter: but God in verse 4 and but now in verse 13. The first is vertical (God to sinner), the second is horizontal (saint to saint). How do these two work together? Where is each most needed in your own life right now?

4. Paul says Christ Himself is our peace. Not only that He made peace, but that He is our peace. What changes when peace is a Person rather than a condition?

5. The cross destroyed the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile. Many Christians have heard in this a word for other walls the gospel addresses: between rich and poor, between cultures, between generations, between political enemies. What walls does your congregation, or your own life, need the cross to break down?

6. Paul calls the Church the household and the temple and the dwelling place of God. When you walk into your congregation on a Sunday morning, how does each of these images change what you see? Which is hardest for you to believe?

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, You who in mercy made us alive together with Christ, You have also brought us near by His blood. We were foreigners and noncitizens, without hope, without God in the world. Now we are citizens of Your kingdom, members of Your household, stones in the temple of Your Spirit. Christ Himself is our peace. He has made both into one. He has destroyed the walls that divided us, and He has given us, in one Spirit, access to You. Keep us in this peace. Keep us joined to one another in His body. Build us into the temple You are building. And let our congregations, however ordinary, be known to a watching world as the dwelling place of the living God in the Holy Spirit. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our peace, our cornerstone, and our entrance into Your presence. Amen.

Looking Ahead

Next session we read Ephesians 3:1–21. Paul has told us what God has done. He has given us election in chapter one, and he has given us salvation in chapter two. He now turns to himself: to his own ministry, his own imprisonment, his own commission. He opens chapter three by naming himself “the prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles,” and the chains come into view. The whole letter has been written from chains. Now Paul names them, and names them as a stewardship. He has been entrusted with what he calls the mystery: the mystery of God’s eternal purpose, hidden in former ages but now made known, that the Gentiles share the same body, the same inheritance, the same promise in Christ. The discussion of the mystery turns, by verse 14, into a second prayer: that the saints may be strengthened in the inner person, may comprehend the breadth and length and height and depth, may know the love of Christ, and may be “filled up to all the fullness of God.” The two halves of the chapter belong together. We will treat them together.

Before next session, read Ephesians 3:1–21 at least twice. Read it once for sense. Read it a second time noticing where Paul interrupts himself in verse 1, takes a long detour through verses 2–13, and finally returns to his prayer in verse 14. The detour is itself the point. Paul cannot speak about himself for long without speaking about the gospel. We will follow him into the detour.