Ephesians 2:12 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Ephesians 2:12

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‘You were without Christ’, you knew nothing about him, ‘being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel.’ They shouldn’t have been, of course. The commonwealth of Israel had always been designed to preach to Gentiles also. Yes, they were to be separate from Gentile idolatry and their heathen practices, but they were supposed to influence them and to bring them in. But Israel failed in this duty; they kept their opportunities and their privileges entirely to themselves, and the Gentiles didn’t know about the covenants of promise and the possibility of a Messiah. Those Gentiles at Ephesus and all the way round the world, they didn’t know, for example, the constantly repeated prophecies of Isaiah that the Gentiles were coming in, that they could have the blessing also. The Jewish people made it a thousand times worse, because they not only did not say these things to the Gentiles, but they held them in such contempt that the Gentiles for their part reacted against them and they hated the Jews. You cannot overstate the hostility of Jew to Gentile and Gentile to Jew in olden times. And yet, a tremendous miracle is going to take place, a miracle almost beyond all others, because it affected so many people. These hostile peoples were going to be brought together in the church of Jesus Christ.‘Being aliens from the commonwealth,’ the citizenship of Israel. The true Israel, that is, the household of God. You could not get into that house. The inside of that household was strange to you. You had never visited; you did not want to visit. You were an alien from the citizenship of the true Israel, the church of God. ‘Strangers from the covenants of promise.’ Those Old Testament covenants all pointed to Christ so they are called covenants of promise that a Saviour was coming. And the Gentiles did not know that and did not care about that. And in our past lives, we too did not know the significance of these things. ‘Having no hope’ – destined to eternal punishment and loss. ‘And without God in the world’ – no help, no knowledge of him at all.

Application

We think today of the possibility at a social level of amalgamating different nationalities and different religions and the thought is, that if people live together in the same country for generations, then these differences will be forgotten. But what we see here is a mighty miracle, whereby within days people could be so changed that the hostility and hatred just disappear, and they embrace each other as members almost of the same blood-bonded family. I remember once when a young man in his mid-twenties from another religious background entirely was converted to Jesus Christ and he was going to be baptised. His parents called in and asked for an interview, so I saw them but when they came, they brought at least a dozen other people with them. There was quite a crowd in the vestry – parents, uncles, and aunts – and the atmosphere was so hostile, it was a whole sequence of dire threats. Terrible things would happen to me, if ever this young man was baptised, and terrible things would happen to him. He would probably lose his life. What kind of people were these? Well, they were professional people. Two of the men were doctors and there were other professions there too. This wasn’t an uncultured, uneducated family but the hostility was astonishing. This is what we are talking about when we go back and we think of Jews and Gentiles. Why, Jews who were converted to Christ were often rendered homeless and very frequently jobless and if there should be any amalgamation with Gentiles, they were completely despised and cut off. The young man did get baptised, and he is still alive to this day as far as I know.

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Ephesians 2:12 Commentary and Bible Study

The meaning of Ephesians 2:12 explained