Ephesians 2

It is too easy for us to imagine that we bring something to God that makes Him like us. The truth is that God has great resources of mercy and pity for us, and it is His prior commitment of love that makes everything happen in our lives concerning our movement toward Him. The reality of our prior spiritual condition is so far from recommending us to God that Paul can say that we had no life at all with which we could have moved toward the Lord. We were dead in our trespasses and sins.

This is not just about some particularly nasty people. All of us in churches throughout the world were once following the course of this world, following the devil, by nature deserving the wrath of God, just like all the rest of mankind. If we see others who are still living the spiritually dead lifestyle, we can honestly say that we were once exactly like them. We cannot imagine that we were any better than them.

But someone has changed that situation, and that someone is God. God had a great love for us, not because we were of a lovable nature, but because of the richness of His own mercy, and His amazing resources of faithful commitment. He was like the Good Samaritan who had compassion on the wounded Jewish man on the side of the road and was determined to do something about us. He saw us in our spiritual death, He recognized us as His beloved, and He decided to come to us and to breathe new life into us. This is His great gift of love, of Christ, of heaven, of blessing to us, and it is by this grace that we have been saved. He saw us and made us alive together with Christ.

We were deserving of hell, but Christ was deserving of heaven and of the fullness of heavenly riches. Jesus took our hell in His death, and we have been granted the gift of Him and His heaven. Not only are we counted as being in Jesus’ family, we are raised up with Him, and we are seated with Him on His throne in heavenly places. This all seems so foreign to us because of the miseries and uncertainties of this present life. There is another age ahead of us. That age is reserved for us, in a way, in a current place, heaven, as if God is storing up an entire time period of eternity in a spatial entity that is beyond the reach of our technology. The way to that place now, the way to the age to come of eternal life, is only in Christ. One day that place will become an eternal age in a renewed world, and it is the intention of God to show the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus when that age is finally here.

Until then we have faith. That faith is the way that the people of God have access to this eternal gift of God’s grace, rather than by our own works. Faith is what connects us to the works of another, the only Man of merit, Jesus. We trust Him. We believe in Him. He is the substance of things hoped for, and the evidence of things not seen. When we believe in Him, we have Him, and we have the future He won for us. This is faith, and even that is a gift from God, so that all the credit for our excellent future goes solely to God, who has provided. He has works for us to do, but even that is due to His kindness and mercy, for He has left us a new life full of meaning.

It is amazing that a person can be saved for a great life of service through this kind of arrangement of substitution. To think that those who were far from God among the uncircumcised nations of the world have now been granted faith and life in the Jewish Messiah is wonderfully good news. This has all happened through the blood of Christ. The death of Jesus has accomplished what the Law could never have done for us. We have been brought near to Israel’s God.

In former days the Law was a dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles that kept all but the chosen people far from God. Now that division between circumcised and uncircumcised has been torn down in the death of Jesus. The old ceremonies are abolished. The time of shadows has been superseded by the glory of the brightness of the face of God in the love of Christ for us.

We have peace with God through Christ, and through Christ Jews and Gentiles have peace with one another, and can share complete fellowship in the New Testament church. Gentiles have the Savior of the chosen people. They have the Holy Spirit of God promised to the chosen people. They have the God of the chosen people as their Father. They have the citizenship of the chosen people. Together we are being built up into a new temple of chosen Jews and Gentiles on the cornerstone of Christ, and on the apostolic and prophetic foundation granted to us in the Scriptures. Together we are growing in what is destined to be the promised resurrection temple of God. God Himself died for us in Christ, and God Himself lives in us together by the Holy Spirit. Together we are the chosen people of God by His grace, through the faith He has granted to us in the Son of God who died for us. All this has sprung up from the inexhaustible wellspring of the electing love of God for the unworthy and not from anything that we could have offered to God. This is grace, and it is worthy of celebration. Blessed be the Name of the Lord who saves unworthy and desperate sinners!