Ephesians Devotionals
Bob Morris
Cosmic Alienation (Ephesians 2:11-12)
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (which is done in the body by human hands) – remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.
Alienated - Excluded from Hope and from God
An interesting intergenerational exercise for a church is to divide into groups by ages and arrange the following four words in the sequence that should take place in a person’s coming to faith and becoming part of the church: baptism, behaviour, belief, belonging.
Older Christians usually define the sequence as belief à behaviour à baptism à belonging. By that they mean you begin the Christian pilgrimage by putting your faith in Christ, which should transform your behaviour, which allows you to be baptized, which in turn means you can be part of the church.
Younger believers will often arrange them belonging à belief à behaviour, with baptism coming in a variety of places in that order. In other words, people need to feel they belong before they will change their values, and only then can we expect the corresponding Christian behaviour. A sense of belonging, whether it comes as a result of meeting the expectations of others, or is the means of people coming to faith, is a powerfully felt need of humans.
Paul here begins to set the stage for an exposition of the wonderful uniting work of Christ on the cross that is the theme of Ephesians. Historically in God’s purposes there were two groups of people: the Jews and the Gentiles, his chosen people, and the rest (whom God’s people were to reach). “Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19: 5-6). Israel was chosen to be the people under God’s rule who were given the mandate to mediate his grace to the rest of the world. When they failed rightly to understand that task, it did not reduce the division between Jew and Gentile, but rather exacerbated it. The distinction Jews had was their historical uniqueness as a people:
Theirs is the adoption; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them is traced the human ancestry of the Messiah… (Romans 9: 4-4)
The Gentiles had no part in those blessings. They did not belong. Their spiritual disabilities paralleled Israel’s blessings: they were “separate…excluded…and foreigners…without hope and without God.” The “in-crowd” referred to themselves as “the circumcision”, everyone else as “uncircumcised”, and there was no humanly possible way to cross that boundary. Humans historically have defined themselves as “Us versus the Rest”, whether in the “Middle Kingdom” in China or in ancient Greece where you were Greek or Barbarian. The added tragedy when God’s people do that is that those excluded miss out on the blessings God entrusted to them for sharing with others.
There is no more extreme cultural divide than that between Jew and Gentile. William Barclay gives us a measure of it:
The Jew had an immense contempt for the Gentile. The Gentiles, said the Jews, were created by God to be fuel for the fires of hell….The barrier between them was absolute. If a Jewish boy married a Gentile girl, or if a Jewish girl married a Gentile boy, the funeral of that Jewish boy or girl was carried out. Such contact with a Gentile was the equivalent of death.
(Daily Study Bible)
The Jewish historian Josephus describes the barriers in Herod’s temple that excluded foreigners (Gentile) from entering the sanctuary. The barriers had signs in Greek and Latin which forbade any foreigner to go in “under pain of death”.
That then is the backdrop of the reconciling work of Christ which is the good news to all who feel alienated and hopeless.
Father, give me a love for the outsiders of this world, especially those without hope and without you. Help me never to forget that I once sat where they sit, and help me always to hold out the hope of acceptance by you.
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