The Wall Is Down

Ordinary Means · An Ephesians Study · No. 5

There was a wall in the temple. A real one.

In Herod's temple in Jerusalem, a four-foot stone barrier called the soreg separated the outer Court of the Gentiles from the inner courts, where only Jews could go. Set into it were inscriptions — archaeologists have recovered fragments — warning any Gentile who passed beyond it to expect death. Not a metaphor. A wall, a warning, a penalty. Some of Paul's Ephesian readers had stood at that wall and known they could go no further.

That is the image Paul reaches for here. And what he announces is that Christ has torn it down.

But first he makes them remember. Remember, he says, that you Gentiles were once separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Five things you were not. Outside — all the way outside. This is not religious masochism; it is pastoral realism. The convert who forgets what he was delivered from becomes the believer most likely to treat the Gospel as a birthright instead of a rescue. Paul will not let them forget they were once foreigners, brought home.

Then, the pivot. We have seen Paul do this before — the But God of verse four. Here it comes again: But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Notice the verb: brought near. Passive. They did not climb toward God; God carried them in. And notice the cost. The wall did not fall because the world finally outgrew its tribalism, or because everyone agreed to be more tolerant. It fell because Christ bled. There is no cheaper version of this peace.

And here is the sentence at the center of it all: For he himself is our peace. Not Christ makes peace — though He does. Not Christ achieves peace — though He does. He himself is our peace. Where Christ is received, there is reconciliation, because the peace is not a thing He hands out; the peace is who He is. He broke the wall down in his flesh — in the body of a real man who died and rose. (The wall, Paul says, was the ceremonial law — the whole structure of regulations that marked Israel off from the nations. Not the moral law, which stands, but the ceremonial scaffolding that had done its work and was now set aside.)

What comes out the other side is one of the most startling phrases in Paul: Christ made one new man in place of the two. Not Jew becoming Gentile. Not Gentile becoming Jew. A third thing — a new humanity. The word for "new" is kainos: new in kind, not merely new in time. A different sort of creature, in whom the deepest religious and ethnic divide of the ancient world simply no longer organizes who a person most truly is.

Be careful here. Paul is not saying our particular identities evaporate — Jews stayed Jewish, Gentiles stayed Gentile. He is saying those identities no longer rank us before God or wall us off from one another. And that means Christian unity is not a project we achieve by goodwill and tolerance. It is a reality already purchased at the cross, waiting to be received and lived in. Wherever believers are divided today — by nation, by class, by politics, by language, even by worship style — the wall between them has, in principle, already been demolished. They have only to live as what they already are.

So Paul lands on belonging. You are no longer strangers and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Citizen and child, both. The believer who has felt homeless in the world is given a place at the deepest table there is — in the same household as Abraham and Moses and David.

And more than a household: a temple under construction. The Church, Paul says, is being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit — its foundation the apostles and prophets (that is, their inspired Word), its cornerstone Christ Himself, the stone to which every wall is aligned. The God who once dwelt behind the veil, past the soreg, in the Holy of Holies, now dwells by His Spirit in the gathered people of Christ. The wall that kept the Gentile out has become a temple the Gentile is built into.

Next time Paul pauses the argument to speak of his own place in this drama — a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles — and then does what only Paul would do: he turns it into prayer, perhaps the deepest in all his letters, that we would grasp the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ. Read Ephesians 3 before then.

Get the book here: [EPHESIANS]