Ephesians 2:14 Commentary and Bible Study

This is about the one body. When I was a young Christian, I read verse 14 and it seemed obvious to me what it meant, but I drew entirely the wrong conclusion. ‘He is our peace,’ I read, ‘who hath made both one’, that is to say, has made God and man one. Christ and his people one. ‘And hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.’ But I was reading the passage carelessly. It is not actually about the reconciliation of God with man, though ultimately it speaks of that. It is about the reconciliation of Jew with Gentile.‘For he is our peace,’ – our ‘reconciliation’ that means – ‘who hath made both [parties] one’ in the new church. This is a word of comfort and assurance to Gentiles. Gentiles were constantly being told by the Judaising heretics of those days that, as Gentiles, they could not become Christians without becoming Jewish proselytes as well, and they had to be circumcised and to obey the Jewish ceremonial law. Christ was not enough. That is quite wrong, Paul is saying: they do not understand that Gentiles and Jews are all one in the church of Christ.‘And hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us’ – the separating wall. What is that? What was the separating wall between Jews and Gentiles? Now some may have seen a plaque in the British Museum – and there are several such that have been discovered – coming from roughly the time of the apostle Paul, which used to be positioned on the wall dividing the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple from the rest of the Temple. Beyond this point Gentiles would not dare to go and there was a plaque on the wall which reminded them of this, and indicated that any Gentile, who passed this point, would be responsible for his own death. That is the ‘middle wall of partition,’ and probably that’s what the apostle has in mind as he writes this; and it represents a much greater wall of partition, this mutual hostility between Jew and Gentile. The Gentiles hated the notion of one God; they were polytheists. They hated the Jewish attitude; they hated the Ten Commandments. The Jews, for their part, with their pride and self-righteousness despised the Gentiles, but for converts to Jesus Christ all that is gone. ‘Having abolished in his flesh [by his suffering and death on Calvary] the enmity.’ The apostle gives the theological explanation. How did this come about? Well, because the law of commandments, contained in ordinances, was abolished by the death of Christ on Calvary. Some say what is meant is the ceremonial law, rather than the moral law, because Christ, on Calvary, brought to an end the ceremonial law. The ceremonial law and all the observances of the Jews taught symbolically about the great atonement of Jesus Christ. When he carried out that atonement, the pictures of Old Testament worship were fulfilled and obsolete and finished. No, say others, it is the moral law that he destroyed, because he destroyed the condemnation which is over every one of us, because we have broken the Ten Commandments and we are offensive in God’s sight. So which is it? The answer very simply is it is both. Paul does not distinguish; it is everything. On Calvary’s Cross Christ took the punishment due to believers, those who are his people, because of their disobedience to God’s moral law and the guilt that they incur.