The Ecclesiology of Ephesians, Part 2: Eph 2:1–22

Ephesians 1, which we looked at last week, deals with the relation of the church to Christ. Ephesians 2 deals with the relation of the church to Israel. In chapter one, Paul defines the church in relation to Christ as the body of Christ, created by union with him. In chapter two, Paul locates the church historically and shows that the church is integrally related to Israel, the old covenant people of God, even though the church cannot be equated with Israel.

Traditional Reformed theology defines the church in terms of covenant theology. According to the classic formulation of covenant theology, the church is created by the covenant of grace that God established immediately after the fall in Genesis 3:15. God established the covenant of grace with Adam and Eve when he revealed the promise of the coming Seed who would destroy the serpent. This revelation of grace established the church as a covenant community of believers and their seed. This covenant of grace then continues uninterrupted from Adam and Eve to Abraham and Israel, right on into Christ and his church. The old covenant and the new covenant are merely different administrations of the same covenant of grace. As the Westminster Confession puts its: “There are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various administrations” (WCF VII:6). The New Testament church is essentially a continuation of the old covenant community. Certain outward changes in administration have occurred, especially in the external forms of worship, but essentially it is the same people of God, the same covenant community. The church, therefore, began immediately after the fall and continues on thereafter.

This definition of the church as the covenant community from the fall onward is logical and coherent. But it’s not how the New Testament speaks. The church in the New Testament is described as a new thing that was established by Christ through his death and resurrection. Our text makes that point explicitly:

Read Ephesians 2:13-16.

The inclusion of the Gentiles did not simply mean that they were added to Israel. According to Paul, the two groups have been fashioned into a new entity, which Paul calls “one new man.”

The notion that there is only one redeemed community established by the one covenant of grace captures a significant truth. It is based on the sound principle that there is only one way of salvation. As Paul clearly teaches, Abraham was justified by faith in the coming Messiah, just as much as you and I are justified by faith in the Messiah who has already come. Since there is only one way of salvation, logically there can only be one covenant of grace. And since there is only one covenant of grace, there can only be one covenant community. There are not two peoples of God with different promises and different destinies, as dispensationalism has traditionally taught. There is only one people of God which has existed from the very beginning when God first established his covenant of grace with Adam and Eve after the fall in Genesis 3:15.

However, after Geerhardus Vos, we can no longer approach Scripture in an abstract manner flattens out the progressive nature of revelation. A redemptive historical approach to Scripture is concerned not only with the organic unity of revelation, but with the key epochal developments in God’s unfolding economy of grace. And there is no more radical and significant epochal development than the appearing of the Messiah on the stage of world history. The incarnation, death, burial and resurrection of Christ intrudes into the midst of history like a bolt of lightning straight out of heaven.

Even though the coming of Christ was foretold in prophecy and hinted at in the types and shadows of temple worship, the Christ-event is not merely a progressive unfolding or development of what came before. It is a radically new thing. It is an event of unparalleled significance. After Christ, everything has changed. Indeed, as Paul says, it is nothing less than a new creation. Upon the cross, the old things have passed away. In the resurrection of Jesus, behold, all things have become new.

One of the primary changes that occurs after the incarnation is that the form of the covenant community undergoes a radical shift. Before Christ, the covenant community was defined and shaped by the Torah. The Torah or the Mosaic Law was God’s marriage covenant with Israel. It defined her existence in the world. It stood at the very heart of her relationship with God. By means of the Torah Israel was set apart from the nations as God’s special people, called to be holy even as God is holy, called to be separate from the unclean Gentiles, living in the holy land at the center of which stood the Temple where God himself dwelled in the midst of his holy people. The Torah therefore not only created Israel, but also, by antithesis, a new class of men called Gentiles. The Gentiles are those who do not have the light of the Torah, who live in darkness and impurity, away from God. God does not dwell among them. They are rejected and unclean. The Torah thus established and defined the Jew-Gentile contrast. It was not fundamentally an ethnic or racial difference, although that played a subordinate role. Gentiles could always become proselytes by submitting to circumcision and taking upon themselves the yoke of the Law.

The same Law which separated Israel from the Gentiles also separated Israel from God.

Read vv. 15-16.

Back of the horizontal enmity between Jew and Gentile stood the vertical enmity between God and man. And thus, even though the Jews had the tremendous advantage of the Jews of being God’s elect people, the Law was a constant threat to the stability of Israel’s covenant relationship. It hung over Israel’s head with its conditionality and its curses. Eventually, because of the inability of Israel to keep the Law, it led to Israel’s exile away from the presence of God. As long as the people of God were founded, defined, and shaped by the Law, they not only stood in judgment over the Gentiles but they themselves were also judged by God in his Law. It seemed that the Law, by means of sin, was going to result in the annihilation of the covenant community, thus threatening not only the people but even calling into question God’s own faithfulness to his promises of grace.

It was into this dire situation that Christ entered when he became man, being born of a woman, born under the Law. At his baptism, the heavens were opened and the Father declared Jesus to his beloved Son, in whom he was well-pleased. This language, which was originally applied to the old covenant people of God, is now applied to Jesus. It is as if Jesus is the only faithful Israelite left. The remnant has been whittled down to a single individual. All the promises concerning God’s glorious grace and his future plans for his people are all wrapped up in Jesus.

Jesus then takes upon himself the fullness of the Law’s curse. He undergoes the ultimate exile from the presence of God when he is abandoned by his Father on the cross. A decisive judgment had to occur. God had to judge sin in the flesh, thus accomplishing a radical and definitive break with the past.

Verse 13 - through the blood of Christ.

Verse 15 - in his flesh.

Verse 16 - through the cross.

We must never allow our legitimate concern for the continuity of redemptive history to become so rigid that our continuity swallows up the cross. The cross rips right into the middle of redemptive history. It breaks the continuum with the jagged knife-edge of judgment followed by a new creation.

And so, on the cross, the Law is now spent. It has breathed its last word of enmity and judgment. It is no longer operative. The people of God, having been reduced to a single individual, are now raised again from the dead. A new Israel of God emerges from the ashes.

This is the point of Paul’s reference to the resurrection of Christ in the first part of chapter 2 as a corporate event (vv. 5-6). We were raised up with him. This language echoes Ezekiel 37 which is a prophetic vision of the future restoration of Israel, described in terms of the resurrection of Israel’s dry bones in the valley of death. And Ezekiel 37 in turn echoes Genesis 2 where God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground and breathed into him the breath of life and he became a living being. Paul picks up on the Genesis reference in 2:15 when he speaks of this corporate resurrection of the new Israel in creation terms and calls the church “the new man.”

And so there is both continuity and discontinuity between Israel and the church. There is continuity, because God fulfills his promises and purposes for Israel in the person of Jesus, who entered into Israel’s history and brought Israel through the exile of the cross and over into the resurrection of the valley of dry bones. All who are united to his Lord Jesus by faith are now the sons of Abraham, and heirs according to the promise.

But there is discontinuity, because the new humanity that has emerged in Christ is not simply an expansion of the boundaries of Israel to include Gentiles, not simply a matter of adding those who are non-Jews by birth to the covenant community. It is an eschatological new covenant community, grounded in Christ, which both transcends and fulfills the old covenant community, grounded in the Law.

Application

Christ made the two groups, the Jews and the Gentiles, “into one new man.” He “reconciled them both in one body to God through the cross.” This phrase “in one body” here has a dual reference to both the flesh of Christ, crucified and now risen, and the body of Christ in the sense of the church. For by incorporation into Christ, both Jews and Gentiles have been crucified and raised with Christ, and have thus become one body, the church. The vertical reconciliation between God and man accomplished by the cross resulted in a new horizontal reconciliation between Jew and Gentile. This ties back with what we saw last week in chapter 1. Thus, the covenant community has now taken on a new form, created by union with Christ in his death and resurrection. It is no longer formed and defined by the Law, which as been rendered inoperative. It is defined by Christ. Christ is the eschatological new reality that stands in the place of the Torah to give shape to the corporate existence of the new community of the new age.

Unfortunately, this insight has not always been clearly grasped and applied to practical issues of ecclesiology. Many Reformed practices in the areas of worship, church government, and the Christian life, have historically been rooted in appeals to the Old Testament, specifically to the Mosaic Law. Three examples:

The regulative principle is rooted in the stern OT prohibitions against idolatry. The regulative principle is also taught in the NT, which condemns the Pharisees for their reliance on the traditions of men. It teaches the necessity of worship that is reverent and God-centered, the necessity of making sure that our worship is Scriptural and thus pleasing to God. My point is not to discredit the regulative principle but to point out that if we are not careful to recognize the legitimate discontinuities between the testaments, the OT zeal to cast down idolatry can get infused into our contemporary application of the regulative principle. This can lead us to mistakenly identify certain contemporary worship forms as idolatry. Such a condemning attitude toward those who do not follow the regulative principle of worship, or who are seeking a different cultural application of it, can have negative spiritual effects in our own hearts. Certainly, it hinders the proper expression of biblical unity and brotherly love that ought to characterize our relationships with non-Reformed Christians.

The strict Puritan understanding of the Sabbath, as a holy resting from all worldly employments and recreations, is clearly derived from the Mosaic regulations concerning the Sabbath, since the NT teaching on the Lord’s Day focuses our attention primarily on the importance of corporate worship. Again, appealing to the Mosaic Sabbath for guidance in how to observe the Lord’s Day can easily lead to a harsh condemnation of non-Sabbatarians or of those like ourselves who practice a more moderate observance of the Lord’s Day.

Prior to the American Revolution, most Reformed theologians argued that the church ought to be countenanced and maintained by the civil magistrate, thus creating a close working relationship between church and state, with both operating under the authority of God’s covenantal revelation in Scripture, in order to create as much as possible a “Christian society.” Even after the American Revolution, this view continues to be held by theonomists, covenanters, and others. This then leads to a natural analogy between Israel and the United States, wherein God is thought to deal with nations covenantally, meting out judgment upon the nation for our national sins. Hence the recent flurry of pronouncements from the religious right and other Reformed fundamentalists to the effect that the terrorist attacks were God’s judgment upon us for our national sins of abortion, toleration of homosexuality, banning of school prayer, and so on. Motivated by misguided zeal for America’s mythical and imaginary national covenant with God, the church’s proper message of reconciliation and peace with God through Jesus Christ is submerged under the shrill calls to national repentance taken from the OT prophetic lawsuit genre instead of the kindness and love of Jesus recorded in the gospels.

The Mosaic economy was a ministry of condemnation. And so it is not surprising that when we appeal to the Mosaic economy for ethical principles, that we also end up reviving its ministry of condemnation among the NT people of God.

In light of what Paul has taught us here about the newness of the church, created by Christ’s atoning death by which he rendered the Law inoperative, so that its detailed commandments and ordinances have ceased to function as that which gives shape to the identity of the people of God - in light of this teaching of Paul’s, we must question the way in which the Reformed community today has allowed itself to become increasingly defined by distinctives which are rooted in the now defunct Mosaic code.

Rather than being built on the foundation of the Old Testament Law, we ought to regard ourselves the way Paul instructs us to regard ourselves - as a holy temple being built on the foundation of the New Testament:

Read 2:20 (cp. 3:5)

This does not mean that the Old Testament plays no role in shaping our community. In the 2nd century the church rejected Marcion’s reductionistic canon in which he wanted to eliminate the writings of the Old Testament and even most of the New Testament, except for Paul’s epistles. The church wisely followed in the footsteps of the apostle Paul himself, who said that the Scriptures were written for our instruction.

2 Timothy 3:15-17.

But notice the way in which the Scriptures instruct us. It is because they bear witness to Jesus Christ. They “are able to make you wise unto salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.” The Scriptures of the Old Testament must be read, studied, and preached. They are profitable for instruction in righteousness. But to go directly to the Mosaic code as a legally binding manual of ethical conduct is to miss the fact that the Law was given to direct us to Christ, who alone keeps it and fulfills it on our behalf.

The more we look to the Law as that which shapes our community, the more we become like Israel under the Law. Like Israel, we exclude those who are not Law-observant as outsiders. Like Israel, we develop a judgmental attitude toward those who do not observe the Law. Judgmentalism evolves into self-righteousness, and self-righteousness gives birth to spiritual bondage, and bondage to fear, and fear to exile and death. Our lack of interest in the vertical reconciliation between God and man achieved via the cross, leads inevitably to a lack of interest in the horizontal reconciliation that we are to express within the body of Christ and which we are to extend to others outside that body by means of the preaching of the gospel.

Let us rather be built upon the foundation of the apostles and NT prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief cornerstone. Let us be the reconciled community - reconciled with God and thereby with one another - and as such, let us then become the reconciling community as ambassadors for Christ, beseeching the world to be reconciled to God through faith in Christ, telling them that with arms wide open God was in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them. In this way, God will build us into a new covenant community, a new spiritual temple, to be the dwelling place of God by his Spirit.