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The building is organic, but it grows into a holy temple. You had the foundation and then you had the cornerstone. But what makes up the rest of the building? Who are the stones, the bricks that are knit together to make this magnificent building? We are, as the Apostle Peter said, we are the living stones that Christ uses to to knit together. And he's taking Gentile stones and Jewish stones and knitting them together to build together a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
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One of the beautiful truths of the Gospel is the reality that not only are believers united to Christ, but but as a result, we also have union with each other. Christians have unity in Christ. It might not always appear that way, as we are all in different stages of our growth in Christlikeness. And that's precisely why we need to be reminded of it, recognizing each other as brothers and sisters, living stones being knit together. Welcome to the Sunday edition of Renewing youg Mind, where each week we feature the preaching and teaching ministry of RC Sproul. Last week we started a short series in Ephesians on how there can be peace between sinners and our Holy God and peace between Jew and Gentile. Although we'll only be considering a short portion of Ephesians. You can study all of Paul's letter when you request Dr. Sproul's commentary on Ephesians. All of Dr. Sproul's teaching on this book was brought together to form this final commentary in his Expositional Commentary series. You can own a copy when you give a donation in support of renewing your mind@renewingyourmind.org before midnight tonight. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the unity we have in Christ.
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Last time we looked at that section of the text where Paul had contrasted the former situation, the relationship of hostility between Jews and Gentiles, saying that now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. And then he says in verse 14, for He Himself is our peace. In this case, Jesus is not merely the peacemaker. It's not as though Jesus himself brings the Jew and the Gentile to the bargaining table and effects a successful negotiation for the cessation of hostilities. It's not simply that he brings peace or that teaches peace, but he himself, Paul is saying now in a remarkable way, is our peace now. What does Paul mean by that? He speaks elsewhere of Christ being our righteousness. That is, his righteousness is imputed to us. But Jesus himself brings peace between these warring parties, not only because he is peaceful, but because he is the Very incarnation of peace. You remember his last will and testimony, his legacy pronounced to his disciples in the upper room on the night before he was crucified, when he said to his disciples, peace, I leave with you, my peace. I give unto you. Not as the world gives, give I unto you. Let not your hearts be troubled. Now, how does this work? I think Paul here is alluding at least to a very core doctrine that he teaches throughout his Epistles, and that is the doctrine of the mystical union of believers with Christ. When we recite the Apostles Creed, one of the affirmations that we make in that Creed is that we believe in the communio sanctorum, the communion of saints. Have you given much thought to that? What does it mean again, if I can break down the word, it's a simple word, another compound word. There is the prefix com, which means what with, and then the root unio. So a communion is a uniting of people together with each other. There's a certain witness, a unified witness that we all share as Christians. Now, the foundation for the communion of saints is our mystical union as individuals with Christ. As I've said before, when looking at this epistle, when you become a Christian, you believe in into Christ. And when you believe into Christ, Christ comes in you. He is now in you, and you are in Him. But this mystical union goes far beyond the individual. If I am in Christ and Christ is in me, and you are in Christ, and Christ is in you, then our peace, our reconciliation, our union is found in Him. So that he is our unity, he is our peace, He Himself. That's the emphatic reference here to Christ is our peace, who has made both, both one that is Jew and Gentile, and has broken down the middle wall of separation. We remember that the day of our Lord's death, that when he satisfied the demands of God's holiness and justice, that the veil of the temple was rent vertically, opening up access to from the holy place to the holy of Holies. But that wasn't the only separation. There was the porch of the Gentiles, the area that separated the Gentiles from the Jews. And that was a place of separation. And now that wall of separation, not only the curtain between the holy place and the holy of holies has been torn asunder, but the separation between the Jew and the Gentile has also been broken down, having abolished in his flesh the enmity. Now we know, I think, what the word abolish means. We went through a war in this country to abolish slavery and to abolish means to get rid of, to terminate, to end, particularly with respect to legal requirements. And so the enmity that exists between the Jew and the Gentile is not only overcome by the peace of Christ, but by his authority has been abolished. It's over. There is no justification to continue any enmity between Jew and Gentile once Christ has abolished that enmity. And how did he do it? He did it in his flesh. That is, he did it on the cross. He did it by suffering both for the sins of the Jewish elect as well as the sins of the Gentile elect. And so in the sacrifice of his physical death, he set aside not only the enmity between God and us, but also the enmity between Jew and Gentile. He abolished in his flesh the enmity that is the law of commandments contained in ordinances. Again, the big stumbling block between the Jews and the Gentiles were those particularly ceremonial laws that dealt with the liturgical, cultic life of Israel, that distinguished them from all the nations of the world. And so one of the things that the Gentiles hated about the Jews were all these Jewish rituals and rites and ceremonies and regulations that they did not participate in. So as to that is for the purpose here to create in himself. Again, you see that this is an act of creation by Christ. That is an act of creation that is not only by Christ, but it is in Christ. And you might say it is for Christ. Just as the world itself was created by Christ for Christ, and he is the one who holds all things together, so now he's creating in himself one new man. Now, that singular use of man there may mislead us for a moment and we may miss the point, but what Paul is speaking about here is that Christ has introduced a new humanity, a new humanity that abolishes this wall of separation between Jew and Gentiles, so that now in him there is no Jew nor Greek, only one common humanity, so in himself he created one new man from the two, thus making peace, and that he might reconcile them both to God in one body through the cross, therefore putting to death the enmity. These images are simply repeating by way of emphasis what he's already said here. And so he came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. He preached the same message both to the Jews and to the Gentiles, of the presence of the Kingdom of God. For through him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father. If there's ever a trinitarian passage that you're going to run into here, it is because it says that this work of reconciliation, this making peace between Jew and Gentiles, is a Trinitarian work. It was through Christ, by the Holy Spirit unto the Father, so that all three persons in the Trinity are working for the same purpose and to the same end. Here he said, now therefore, you're no longer strangers and foreigners. The Old Testament saw the Gentiles, foreigners and strangers to God's covenant community. That old system is gone, it no longer stands. But instead of being strangers and foreigners, Paul says that this unity manifests itself fundamentally in three ways. And let's see if we can discover them. Now, therefore, you're no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints. What's a citizen? A citizen belongs to some political group. A city really comes from the ward city or a nation. I told the story at some point on Sunday morning about what happened to Vesta and me and two of our friends when I was doing a three week series of lectures in Eastern Europe right after the wall came down and the Communists had departed. And I had lectured for a week, first of all in Czechoslovakia, which is now the Czech Republic, and then a week at the seminary in, in Budapest, in Hungary. And from there we were traveling to Romania to do another week of lectures there. This is shortly after Ceausesco had been overthrown. But we were warned in our journey that things at the border between Hungary and Romania were difficult and that we might encounter trouble by the authorities at the border. And so when our train, which was an antiquated train, I believe World War II vintage, crossed the border from Hungary into Romania and came into the first stop, we were met by the border patrol. And two somewhat rough and crude soldiers got on the train and demanded that we open up our luggage, which we did. And they were being very aggressive and unfriendly towards us. And then a moment later, the head officer got on, a great big burly guy and he walked over to see what was going on here and looked down. And one of our persons that were with us had a Bible in a brown paper bag. And this chief of the border patrol saw this Bible and said, what's that? And she pulled it out and she said, it's a Bible. He looked at the Bible and he said, you Christians? We said, yes. And then he said, looking at our passports, you know Americans, we said, oh, we're in trouble now. You're not American. I'm not Romanian. Then he opened the text of Scripture and said, what does this say? We are fellow citizens of the Kingdom of God. Here he was a Christian, and he told to these other guys, he says, leave these people alone. They're fine. They're fellow citizens with us of the kingdom of God. That was a wonderful taste of the mercy and grace of God. But what he's saying is that the Gentiles now, through the ministry of Christ, have been brought into the city of God. Now, in this metaphor, he speaks about, first of all, that this house has been built on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets. If you ask the average Christian on the street, what is the church's foundation, they will say, the church's foundation is Jesus Christ. Now, that's usually because they've heard the hymn, the Church's one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord. Well, the Bible teaches us that the only foundation that can be laid is the one that is laid in Christ, Jesus Christ. But again, the main metaphor for the foundation of the church is not that Jesus is the foundation, but the foundation is built upon the prophets and the apostles. Now, what does that mean, and why is that important? We have seen in the last 200 years a wholesale assault against the authority of the Bible. And that assault has not come simply from unbelieving secularists, but in a main, it's come from within the church, from critics of the Scripture who claim to be Christians. Speaking of the higher critics of the academic world who have leveled this assault, the founder of the university where I did my doctoral studies was also the prime minister of the Netherlands, Abraham Kuyper, said at the turn of the century that biblical criticism can no longer legitimately be called biblical criticism. It must be called, to be accurate, biblical vandalism. That the attacks upon biblical authority have been so severe, it betrays the work of vandals. Now, to say that the church is built on the foundation of the prophets and the apostles is to say that the foundation of the church is based upon the truth that is revealed by God through his agents of revelation. Those agents of revelation in the Old Testament were the prophets. In the New Testament, they are the apostles. We see that same imagery found in the Book of Revelation, for example. And again, when the psalmist wrote, he raised the question, if the foundation of the house be shaken, how can the building stand? And the foundation of the church is the teaching, the words of the prophets and the apostles. To put it another way, the church is built on the word of God. And when that foundation is shaken, the building cannot possibly stand. But again, the prophets and the apostles do not serve merely on their own power and even on their delegated authority. As the whole of the foundation of the church. But that foundation, in order to be able to support the building, has to be neatly fit together and built upon a sound basis. And that which knits it together is the cornerstone, without which the building will not be unified. And so that foundational imagery of the prophets and the apostles is seen to be knit together and unified by the Lord Christ Himself, being the chief cornerstone. And a chief cornerstone to a builder in the first century was that stone without which the building could not stand, in whom the whole building being fitted together. Again, it's in Christ that the whole building is knit together through and by the cornerstone. So this image, now we've gone beyond citizen, to family, to the building which is knit together by Christ himself. And it grows here. The building is organic, but it grows into a holy temple. This foundation really makes the old temple of brick and mortar to be obsolete, because we now have a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you are also being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. Again, you had the foundation and then you had the cornerstone. But what makes up the rest of the building? Who are the stones, the bricks that are knit together to make this magnificent building? We are, as the Apostle Peter said, we are the living stones that Christ uses to knit together. And he's taking Gentile stones and Jewish stones and knitting them together to build together a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. If we just would believe those last words, that last phrase of this last verse of chapter two, I believe the life of this church would be transformed. I believe we would have revival like we've never seen. I believe that our worship experience on Sunday morning would undergo a metamorphosis. Why? Because we have been built together as a people to be a dwelling place, a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. Say, if we really believed that, we would know that when we come together on Sunday morning for worship that we're coming into the manifest and manifold presence of God. And if we really believe that, if we really believe that God was here in the power and presence of the Holy Ghost, our worship experience would go through the roof and we would experience a renewal of our souls, a refreshment of our spirits, a fullness of reverence and adoration, because we know that we have spent time with the Lord.
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Isn't that what you long for on Sunday mornings? What a beautiful picture and a glorious reality that we as Christians have unity in Christ. I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and this is the Sunday edition of Renewing youg Mind. I do hope that What RC Sproul just described at the end of today's message is what you experienced as you gathered for worship in a local congregation this morning. We're in the middle of a short series in Ephesians, but Paul addresses many topics in this letter, expounding on the gospel and detailing how we are to live as those in the light, the armour of God and more. Spend time this year walking through Ephesians line by line when you request Dr. Sproul's hardcover commentary. If you're looking for reading to help focus your thoughts on the truths of God's word, this resource could be a great help to you. Request your copy when you give a donation@renewingyourmind.org or when you use the link in the podcast Show Notes. We'll send you this commentary to add to your library as our way of saying thank you. And if you live outside of the US And Canada, the ebook edition is waiting for you@renewingyourmind.org make plans to join us next time as RC Sproul teaches on the unsearchable riches of Christ. That'll be next Sunday here on Renewing youg Mind.
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