Ephesians 2:15 Commentary and Bible Study

The Old Testament ceremonial law was the wall that separated Jew from Gentile. It was given by God, yes; it was given to teach, yes; and Jews should have taught it to Gentiles if they would receive it, but it was a separating factor. What is the difference between Jews and Gentiles? Well, the way Jews worshipped, when they went to the temple and the synagogues and they kept the ceremonial law, and the Gentiles did not. So the Jews were identified as different and special. So it served to separate Jew and Gentile. But when Christ came and fulfilled the ceremonial law, fulfilled all their prophecies, became the perfect sacrifice, then the Old Testament law was done away with. The wall was collapsed. And now Jews and Gentiles are together. Both are treated the same way now. So it is about a new body, a new church. ‘To make in himself of twain one new man.’ The word ‘new’ casts influence over the combining of the two. It is not that the Jew and the Gentile who are saved have been amalgamated or merged. What has happened is a new man has been created from them and the word translated ‘new’ is the Greek word for new which means entirely different, different in kind. A car may simply be unused and therefore new to its owner; or it may be a new model, new in kind. The latter is the meaning here. Well, Chrysostom in the 4th century had a beautiful illustration for this – the amalgamation of Jew and Gentile in the church – and he put it like this. He used a fantasy illustration, a fantasy miracle, but he put it beautifully. Suppose we have a statue and it is made of silver – that represents the Jews, unconverted, formalists. And we have another statue and it is made of lead – that represents the Gentiles – further away in a sense, ignorant of God entirely, polytheists. You take the two statues and you melt them down and the miracle takes place. What you get from the molten metal from which you cast a new statue is a gold statue – it is a fantasy, of course! Not lead and silver mixed together but something entirely different; something much more valuable, much more wonderful, and that is the amalgamation of Jew and Gentile. Unsaved Jew, unsaved Gentile, saved by Christ, brought together in the church, a new creation. Not a Jew, not a Gentile, not even a Jew/Gentile, but a Christian, something entirely new. We need to grasp that. This is the miracle of grace: we are so changed by conversion and we leave our old ways behind entirely.