Breaking Walls of Hostility
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Introduction
Introduction
When we came up with the different of stages of regathering as a church, I knew that in some way or form, we would have to rebuild our church with those who have remained in the city or nearby. Obviously, for us we don’t have a physical building to rebuild, although God willing if there is an opportunity to secure property in San Francisco, that window is probably going to open up in the near future. But before we work on the hardware, it’s far more important to work on the software, the blueprint and firmly understand what we are all trying to build here. From this week forward, I’ll be speaking about the New Testament church and why it is so important, why it is still the hope of the world, and why it is still worth expending so much of our time and effort to rebuild.
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
Last week, Pastor Sergio did a good job of introducing us to this passage and the relevance of the church in this current cultural climate. I think most of us were grateful or at least relieved for the guilty verdict in the murder of George Floyd but at the same time, we know that racial tensions are still growing, hate crimes against Asian Americans are at all time highs, and there is a general sense of hostility in the air. It’s interesting, isn’t it that as Paul begins to shift the conversation towards the church, he begins the discussion with how the gospel breaks down the walls of hostility between Jews and Gentiles. We know through his other letters, that Paul understood that these hostilities weren’t limited to just Jew versus Gentiles but that these divisions exist between all classes of people and that the church was meant to be an exception.
Here there is not Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free; but Christ is all, and in all.
The main reason why Paul highlights, Jews and Gentiles in the Ephesian passage is the fact that the hostilities that existed between these two classes of people were probably the most extreme in the ancient Middle East. It was almost as if Paul was saying, if the gospel can bring Jews and Gentiles together, there is no dividing wall of hostility that cannot be torn down under its power. This passage answers three important questions regarding the nature of the church.
How does the gospel break down the walls of hostility?
How is oneness achieved?
How does the church keeps those walls down?
When Paul talks about walls of hostility, he is referring to the wall found within the temple of Jerusalem that separated Gentiles from the Jews. When you look at the design of the temple it is a series of courts that rise up to the Holy of Holies. Beginning with the court of Gentiles, you have the court of women, men, priests, and finally the Holy Place. But when you look at this diagram, you’ll see that the court of Gentiles is actually found outside of the walls of the temple and on each of the pillars of the wall was an inscription declaring the law of purity that forbade any foreigner from going past that point under the punishment of death. I would say that is a pretty good definition of a wall of hostility. Even if you were a convert to Judaism, that wall represented the threshold of where you could go.
The Jews took this law seriously enough to want to kill the apostle Paul when they mistakenly assumed that he had brought a gentile into the temple.
Acts 21:29–31 (ESV)
For they had previously seen Trophimus the Ephesian with him in the city, and they supposed that Paul had brought him into the temple. Then all the city was stirred up, and the people ran together. They seized Paul and dragged him out of the temple, and at once the gates were shut. And as they were seeking to kill him, word came to the tribune of the cohort that all Jerusalem was in confusion.
Out of respect for Jewish customs, Paul never broke this law but he did not hesitate to teach that in Christ, the wall of hostility no longer existed to separate Jews and Gentiles by his death on the cross, Jesus abolished the law of commandments expressed in these ordinances. Now this is where many non-believers would say “Aha, this is what’s wrong with religion. It’s always creating these walls of division in our society?” But that would be the wrong conclusion from this example because without God, people would find a way to divide themselves with an even greater degree of hostility. A casual observance of our world clearly bears out this fact. God only knows what is happening to the Uigars in Eastern China in their reorientation camps. When I visited Cambodia, I saw the devastation caused by secular humanism where under the guise of justice for the poor, the educated and those considered to be privileged were killed by the millions in the killing fields. The greatest human atrocities have occurred not in the name of God but in the pursuit of human progress.
This week I read an interesting article in Newsweek magaizine from an ex- Muslim who expressed his opinion that the new rules of woke liberalism feel very much like the heavy handed religion that he had been trying to leave behind. Omer Obaid writes:
Like with religious blasphemy codes, you can only talk about certain topics in specific ways. I couldn't help but notice there was an almost fundamentalist, faith-like aspect to these claims. When I heard people asked to check their privilege or introspect the ways they have been racist, it sounded like the inner jihad that Muslims are supposed to perform to make sure they are on the correct path.
Even apart from religion, we will somehow translate our zeal into new codes of behavior that seem just as restrictive as any religous law. Religion doesn’t divide people and create walls of hostility, people divide people becasue of our sinful nature and ironically when mankind tries to pursue unity apart from God, it often leads to unimaginable suffering and chaos. This is why God stopped mankind from building the tower of Babel, why He separated us into nations and languages, and why He provided the law of commandments becasue He knew that apart from Him, our own pursuit of equality and unity would prove to be not only fruitless but disastrous.
After all, if there was ever a set of policies or civil laws that could bring about the unity of natives and immigrants, there is no code of ethics better suited to bring about that oneness than the law given to the people of Israel. Consider what it says in Leviticus:
You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.
If you consider what this law implies, this goes further than any immigration policy or laws protecting minorities in any country. Whether you are Republican or a Democrat, we all fall woefully short of fulfilling this law. But who could deny the moral goodness of this gold standard of hospitiality? The Law of God is perfect in every way and it’s only weakness is the fact that it is impossible for unredeeemd mankind to follow. How many of us love the stranger in our city like we love ourselves? The answer to that question reveals the main purpose of the Law of God.
Why then the law? It was added because of transgressions, until the offspring should come to whom the promise had been made, and it was put in place through angels by an intermediary.
Of our own accord, it is impossble for us to follow the precepts of God but in the fullness of time, at the right moment in history, God sent his Son to abolish the law of commandments so that the walls of hostility could finally come down and people as diametrically opposed as Jews and Gentiles could become one. But how is this oneness practically achieved?
Creation of a new kind of people through the work of the Holy Spirit
Our common reconciliation to God the Father through the cross of Jesus Christ
In the Old Testament, there are prophecies of a new kind of people that would have one heart and a new spirit that would enable them to live out the demands of the law not out of legalistic compusion but out of love for God and one another.
And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.
Rules and regulations, policy changes may possibly bring tolerance but it can never bring the unity of races, the loving of strangers as oneself that the Scriptures demand. Only the Spirit of the Lord can change the human heart and cause us to walk according to God’s ways. We know that the entire law of God can be neatly summarized into one commandment with two parts: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself. This is not rocket science, it’s not like we don’t know that these commandments exist, it’s more a matter of not being able to live it out. And we can either respond by giving up or we can press in and desperately ask God to give us His Spirit so that can follow Him with an undivided heart. (When you look at the Azuza Street Revivals, it represented the first time that blacks and whites worshipped together freely in the United States as they broke free from the rules of segregation.) It was the Spirit of the Lord that made that possible then and it is still the Spirit of the Lord that will make that possible today. Our churches needs revival in a desperate way if we are to have any chance of overcoming the hatred that surrounds us and start living in love.
But in order to start fulfilling the greatest commandment, we have to be reconciled to God through Christ and be reconciled to one another. Martyn Lloyd-Jones describes reconciliation as having five basic steps:
A change from a hostile to a friendly relationship.
Going beyond casual frienship to being reconnected and reunited.
It is more than compromise or patching up a problem for a moment. In the place of hostility, there is in now love and trust.
From the Greek word, reconcilation begins with one party, the one in the higher position must take the first step of action. It is not about two sides coming together voluntarily, it’s one side restoring the other into a position of friendship.
Finally, the word carries the meaning that it is a restoration of something that was there before. Before the sin of Adam, we all were meant to have a relationship with God and as people who have a common origin in Adam and Eve, we were meant to be one people.
Through the gospel, all of these different aspects of reconciliation are fulfilled in Christ. Only our reconciliation with God, makes reconciliation with others possible. These are the first steps in brining down the wall of hostility but what keeps these walls of hostility down?
Our understanding of church and our commitment to building the church according to the Scriptures.
We are citizens of the kingdom of God
2. We are members of the family of God
3. We are living stones of the temple of God
Every nationality has it own customs and culture. When we become Christian, we don’t lose the distinctives of our race and culture. Paul didn’t force Gentiles to become like Jews and have them follow the strict dietary restrictions nor observe all the ceremonies of Judaism like circumcision. In the same way, he also didn’t force the Jews to become like Gentiles and make them eat pork and shrimp and learn Greek. We know that racial even national distinctions will be kept for all eternity. The new kind of humanity that is created through Christ isn’t achieved by blotting out these characteristics, it’s acheived by making people of all tribes and nations into Christians. Our identity as Christians was meant to create a greater bond with one another than our race, our common interests, our socio-economic class, even our families. Before we are Asian or Black or Hispanic, we are Christian first and all our other identities are subordinate to that. In that way we are a qualitivately different from the world that eventually finds ways to divide itself.
Second, we are brothers and sisters in the family of God. Our allegiance and commitment to the church has to be at least equal to the love and loyalty that we show to our own families. Our identity as children of God is not just a label or a description of our relationship with God, it also describes our relationship with one another.
Finally, we are living stones that make up the temple of God. Out of all the institutions in this world, only we can house the presence of God. We need to come back together to rebuild this temple not only for our own sake but for the sake of the world. I believe the best blueprint for the rebuilding process is found in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, where a remnant of God’s people are called back from the Babylonian exile and begin the task of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and the new temple.When we hear the word, church, everyone seems to have their own ideas based on their spiritual background and from there we all have varying degrees of commitment to the church. (Some peope come out once or twice a month, others just enjoy the relationships, for some it’s a force of habit or cultural.) The Scriptures, on the other hand, tell us that we are the temple of God bound together as a covenant people. That understanding brings a certain level of commitment to the rebuilding process that is essential for the future health of the church. In Nehemiah 10:39, we can see the heart posture that’s necessary for those who are called to this great work.
For the people of Israel and the sons of Levi shall bring the contribution of grain, wine, and oil to the chambers, where the vessels of the sanctuary are, as well as the priests who minister, and the gatekeepers and the singers. We will not neglect the house of our God.”
During this pandemic, it’s been easy to be neglectful of God’s house, to build our homes before His. It’s time for us to prepare to change those priorities because differences in commitment levels cannot exist in the rebuilding process, for the simple reason that every piece is dependent on the other. If you build a wall around a city and there are some breaches in certain parts of the wall, it negates the work of everyone. In the same way, when you begin to build the foundation of a structure, you better hope that everyone is committed to building in the same way because the stability of the entire structure is dependent on it. This is why the Scriptures repeatedly mentions that Christ is the cornerstone on which God’s temple is built.
Through modern progress and technology, the world has become a neighborhood, but we have been given the task of making it a brotherhood. In these days that are filled with hostility across race, class, and creed, we must proclaim the gospel of Christ in whom there is neither Jew nor Gentile, free nor slave, male nor female, but all are one in Him.