The Death the Wall Promised

In the temple complex at Jerusalem, a stone barrier marked a boundary Gentiles were forbidden to cross. Surviving inscriptions warned foreigners that anyone passing beyond it would bear responsibility for the death that followed. Put yourself there, standing on the wrong side of the stone, able to see farther in but forbidden to go farther in.

Paul knew how serious that boundary was. A mob seized him in the temple because of a rumor that he had brought Trophimus, an Ephesian Gentile, inside. They dragged Paul out and were trying to kill him when Roman soldiers intervened. The accusation was based on an assumption. They had seen Trophimus with Paul in the city and concluded Paul had taken him past the boundary. Paul later wrote to the believers in Ephesus as a prisoner, telling people from the same city as Trophimus what Christ had done about the wall that kept the outsider away.

Then Paul says, “But now.”

You were separated from Christ, strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world. There was a real distance between you and the holy presence of God. You could not climb over it, argue your way through it, or clean yourself up enough to cross it.

But now in Christ Jesus, those who were far away have been brought near.

The Blood

Paul tells you how.

By the blood of Christ.

The warning at the temple said the outsider who crossed the boundary faced death. The Gospel says Jesus took death upon Himself and brought the outsider through.

The blood is not religious decoration. Jesus gave His life. Sin had put humanity under judgment before a holy God, and no amount of moral improvement could settle the case. At the cross, Jesus took into His own body what stood against us and carried it into death.

God did not move the wall back a few feet or make a larger Gentile section. Jesus broke down the dividing wall and brought those who were outside into peace with God. What human effort could never cross, His blood crossed completely.

Religion has a strange ability to convince you that God is always somewhere else and that a little more effort might finally get you closer. You can spend years acting like a guest in a house where the Father has already given you a room.

Paul will not leave you standing there. He says Christ Himself is our peace. Your peace with God rests on what happened in the flesh of Jesus, not on whether you woke up feeling spiritual this morning. Feelings can change before breakfast. The cross does not.

The blood brought you near.

One New Man

Paul goes farther. Jesus did not simply bring Gentiles closer to Jewish privilege. In Himself He made the two into one new man.

God was not repairing Adam.

The old creation reached its end in Christ. Jesus took fallen humanity into His death, and in resurrection a new humanity appeared in union with Him. The new man is not Adam with better habits. The new man is humanity joined to the risen Christ.

That cuts straight through the small version of Christianity that treats salvation like behavior management. God is not standing over you with a clipboard trying to turn a bad version of Adam into a respectable version of Adam. The old man went to the cross. The life God gives you now is found in His Son.

Nobody walks into the family of God carrying a spiritual résumé that impressed heaven. The respectable sinner and the ruined sinner required the same Savior. The man who knew the Scriptures and the man who did not know Genesis from a grocery list both had to come through Christ.

So what are you going to brag about?

You cannot stand beneath a crucified Messiah and explain why you deserve the better chair. If God has created one new man in Christ, then the deepest truth about His people is no longer what separated them before Jesus. Jew and Gentile are reconciled to God in one body through the cross.

That reaches all the way into how you treat another believer.

It is easy to love the body of Christ in theory because the body of Christ in theory never parks in your spot.

Real people get close enough to inconvenience you. They talk too long. They misunderstand you. They have opinions you did not request and sometimes deliver them before you have had coffee. It is difficult to pretend you are walking in resurrection life while being willing to start a small war over a plastic chair.

The cross gives you a new center. Jesus is your life, and the people joined to Him belong to the same body. God did not negotiate a better arrangement between two hostile groups. He made something new in His Son.

And this new man has a home.

The Father’s House

Paul says that through Christ both Jew and Gentile have access in one Spirit to the Father.

The Gospel brings you home.

Jesus did not die to leave you as a forgiven servant standing at a safe distance. The purpose was sonship. The Son came to bring sons and daughters to His Father, and the Spirit brings into living experience what Christ purchased.

Think about a child walking into his father’s kitchen. He does not stand outside calculating whether he has accumulated enough good behavior to touch the refrigerator. He walks in because he belongs there. He knows whose house this is, and he knows whose child he is.

Some believers have lived with God for years and still knock on a door the Father has already opened. One bad Tuesday happens and suddenly they act like immigration has revoked their papers.

Paul says, “You are no longer strangers and aliens.”

No longer means something has ended.

You are a fellow citizen with the saints and a member of God’s household. Paul has moved you from the warning stone outside the temple all the way into the Father’s house. The man who once could not cross the barrier has been given a place in the family.

A son knows the Father. He learns the Father’s heart, carries the Father’s name, and lives from belonging rather than trying to earn it. When he speaks to his Father, he does not sound like a defendant begging a judge to reconsider the sentence.

There is reverence here because the Father is holy. But reverence does not require distance. Jesus did not tear down the wall so you could build another one inside your own head.

The warning said death waited for the man who crossed the wall. Jesus crossed the distance, took the death, and by His blood brought you into the Father’s house.

Take your place at the Father’s table and look Him in the face.

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