Our present Position as Christians - our blessings

So this morning we're going to take a look at Ephesians 2 starting in verse 14 and reading on to verse 16. So if you've got your Bibles, go ahead and put them over there. step back into verse 13, although chapter 2 is almost as long a run-on sentence as chapter 1, so there is quite a bit of flow and trajectory here.

So starting in verse 13, he says, But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who made both groups into one, and broke down the barrier of the divining law, by abolishing in his flesh the enmity which is the law of commandments, contained in ordinances, so that in himself he might make the two into one new man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having been put to death.

I want to start off by talking about dispensationalism. Bob talked about this a little bit last week. But we want to reinforce why we're approaching this text this way and why this is so significant as we study through this passage here. Dispensationalism. What is dispensationalism?

Does anybody have a working definition or an idea on that? We don't use that word a lot. Because it's not a word in the text of scripture. Tom? It's an operating principle in regard to how God is working in the period of time that we are in. That's a pretty good definition there. Did everybody hear what Tom said and understand? It's the idea, and my dad used the word stewardship, and I think that's also a useful word to use. So what we look at is we see God has established a relationship with humanity as his agents.

Adam was created in God's image. So there was a time of period where Adam was, what, before he fell? He was innocent. He was innocent. And then, during that time, God gave him some specific directions. What was Adam's set of directions while he was in the garden? Don't eat from the tree. The center of the garden. That's it. You know how we were falsely worried about the Ten Commandments? Because really, there are 613 in the Old Testament, right? Adam just had one. He blew it with one, right?

And then we move forward, and then between Adam, when Adam fell, God makes provision for him. Death spiritually was a consequence, but death had never entered the garden. And so when Adam put on, and Eve put on the cloth made of animal, or the loin cloth, or the covering made of animal skin, the skin was a reminder of death. Prior to that, Adam had only seen living animals. It doesn't indicate whether or not it was in front of him, but the death was known and clear, and the consequence was obvious.

The shame of nakedness entered the knowledge of humanity. We have that period, and then we have the dispensation, as we call it, or the time period of conscience. Cain killed Abel during the dispensation of conscience. He violated his conscience when he did that. Then God sets forth, under Noah, a new covenant. And God's covenant with Noah specifically says that if a brother kills his brother, in response to Cain and Abel.

Then God sets forth a new covenant with Abraham. But does that inaugurate a new time period of stewardship? Not entirely. It makes some promises, right? But when we get to Moses, we see that there's a new stewardship that was given to Moses that he then, in the covenant with Deuteronomy 28-29, God makes a covenant with Israel. Okay, and so that covenant with Israel lasted all the way up until when?

The time of crucifixion. Until the church starts in Acts chapter 2, yeah, right? In Pentecost, in Acts chapter 2. Now I'm going to just briefly, this is a rabbit trail, but it's only like a two sentence rabbit trail, so I think it's safe. There is a kind of teaching called hyper-dispensationalism that teaches the church did not start until Acts chapter 9. It is an error. It is not what I think we can exposit, and we can take a look at that.

As you listen to the Acts series in the main service, the church was inaugurated in Acts chapter 2. Just because Paul was given a special commandment to reach out to the Gentiles doesn't change the nature of the church. And we're going to look at why that is this morning. So I'm calling these things out just because it's important for us to understand that God had a timeline.

When will this dispensation that we are in end? The rapture. So we have different time periods where God has given his people specific stewardship. Dispensation is a word actually that means stewardship. So stewardship is a good safe word to use in that case.

So we're going to keep moving on here. It's important that when we recognize the dispensation ended, like the church took over where Israel and their relationship with God ended, we have some key things. And we'll take a look at those further, why those matter, as we dig into this text. Okay, so who are the three people groups of the Bible? Gentiles. Jews. And the church, yeah, Christians. Okay, who are some Gentiles in the Bible?

Abraham, Noah, Adam. So before Jacob, who was God renamed Israel, there was no nation of Israel. And Israel didn't even get a new covenant from God for several hundred years. God told Abraham it was going to be several hundred years, and they would be in slavery for part of that time, and then God would send someone to free them. That was Moses. And then the New Covenant came.

So, people, groups, Jews, Gentiles, and the Church, sometimes people have kind of, we'll say out of naivety or ignorance, called everybody in the Old Testament a Jew. But that's not the case, right? Adam wasn't born and then on the eighth day circumcised. He wasn't complying with the law. He was the forefather, not the descendant of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.

So those are some examples of the different people groups. It's important to have those called out. Now the other thing that's important for us to recognize is that in the early days of the church, people went to church at the synagogue. They didn't go to church. The term Christ followers doesn't come up until later. For a long time, they were treated as a separate sect of Judaism, but they were treated as a sect of Judaism.

They just kept talking about the Messiah, and everybody was like, wow, you guys are obsessed. And then they started to say, this is how you get saved, and then that's when the Jews really ran out of patience quick. Paul started going on his imprisonment and killing spree, right? Or Saul did, not Paul. In the very early days of the Church, though, they met in homes, too.

They met in homes, Acts 2.42-47. But they were still going into the synagogue, because it was predominantly Jews.

What's interesting, when we see Pentecost, where were all the people from? We don't have a list. We don't have an exhaustive list, right? Everywhere outside of Israel, it sounded like. Yeah, they were Jews. They were following Judaism, but they were traitors and people from around the world, and they heard the gospel in their language. So it's kind of important to say, okay, they still fit into the Jewish people group at that point in time. And so Paul, as we go into this, is going to be focusing on the consequences of our relationship with Christ in the church. And as it turns out, most of the book of Ephesians is actually about that. If you think about it, what's chapter one about?

Our riches in Christ. That's a great summary. Chapter two is about God's creating, and we're summarizing here, right? It's about God's creating an eternal perspective, an eternal blessing, and a new relationship in Christ that people weren't used to. Chapter three is about being in one family and in the love of God. Chapter 4 is about unity in Christ and chapter 5 is in part about marriage in Christ and how the church represents the being in Christ and how that marriage analogy comes in. Chapter 6 is about us being a spiritual unit together as a family in Christ, working together with the spiritual armor. So in Christ, as has been emphasized, is a key detail here. But that relationship with Christ, Paul is calling the church and calling believers to recognize that that relationship doesn't fit into their social narratives. What did the Jews think about themselves? They were God's people, right? And what did the Gentiles think? They were all over the place, right?

The good news is that you didn't have Muslims yet, right? Muslims don't come for another 600 years. So when you're in the Middle East, you have people who had a lot of mystery religions. They were into the paganistic and hedonistic practices that were part of the Roman and Greek culture. The Jewish culture thought they were special. They thought they were separate. But who was reigning over Israel? Rome. Herod.

You know, the people that God said would be reigning over them when they disobeyed. You're not going to be in the land and under your own rulership. That was part of the covenant back in Deuteronomy 28. God said here during the stewardship, this is the consequence if you disobey. And so God had surrounded them with reminders that they had been disobedient and that they were walking outside of relationship with Him.

It didn't work. They just kind of put the blinders on, right? Every time they have a good leader and we're straightened out, they go right back into the mire. And so part of when we see the Holy Spirit being involved in the life of the believer, and that's how we actually fulfill God's desire through abiding and walking in the Spirit, that's substantial. Because the Old Testament saints didn't have that. They had faith, but they didn't have the Holy Spirit constantly indwelling them like we do. Alright, so let's keep moving.

We've got the three groups of the Bible. We have identified that the Jewish believers had been in the church up until Saul was confronted by Christ on the road to Damascus. And Peter, in chapter 10 of Acts, was given the Bacon Commandments. The sheep comes down and there's lobster and bacon, right? And all kinds of other critters that he's not supposed to eat.

Under the law, God says, don't call, and this is important because this is leading into reaching out to the Gentiles. God says to Peter, don't call unholy what I have called holy. And so Paul is picking up with these truths that he's been given a stewardship of as an apostle and he's talking to this church here in Ephesus and he says, for he himself is our the peace.

Now you don't have the peace in your translation there because that definite article is a little funky in English. But here's the thing, that definite article is there in the Greek, and it's because Paul wanted them to know that Jesus isn't just a piece or some piece. He is the piece that the church needs.

When we have division in the church, when we have disagreement, and I know that I've been in various church splits in the past, that everybody feels extra right about their position. Their position is almost never rooted in Jesus Christ. If the division is on anything else besides gospel-centric truth, where it's like Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of our lives, and instead it's what color the carpet is, or you played that instrument in my church, or I don't like it that this person gets to do this or that, or I want my name on this hall over here, or we need a bigger building program, or whatever the division is. It's not dividing on Christ, right?

So Paul says here that Jesus is our peace, our THE peace. What did God do on the cross that abolished... whoops, sorry, I jumped ahead of myself because I have a double-sided printing and I missed that. Alright, Paul's focus on who Christ is in relationship to the church is part of the theme of this letter. Christ is our identification and we're being conformed to his image. This is linked to the amazing blessings we have in chapter 1 and the earlier parts in chapter 2.

Now I want to briefly talk about race in Christianity because Paul is confronting racism in Christianity here. We look at racism in Christianity in modern lenses, right? We see issues that are part of the American history, right? When we talk about civil rights and we talk about different race opportunities. Oh, you have white privilege. Is there white privilege or racism in the church today according to the scriptures?

No. And when I say any of these terms, I know these are probably hot words that you see in the media and you see on social media, and I'm not using them that way. But let's take a look at how Paul deals with the issue of race here, because this is his foundation in this passage here. And so we need to take a look at that.

When we are saved, where does our citizenship move? It moves to heaven. What race is heaven? There is a race. No, it's God's people. We are being conformed to the image of Christ. Our created type, the race is the Jesus race. It has nothing to do with our earthly heritage.

Now, I happen to be a good Heinz 57 example. I'm Northern European plus a bunch of other stuff. So, I have pale skin, but I'm from all over the world, genetically. And guess how much pride I put in my last name. It's a Germanic last name. Guess how proud I am of my German heritage. It's not that I hate my German heritage. It is that I'm a citizen of heaven first. Which is why I loathe paying taxes. Because I'm not paying taxes in heaven. I'm just kidding. That's a joke. It's on the internet. I don't pay taxes in heaven.

The streets are paved in our currency's former backing. Paul knows that upon salvation we are made a new creation in Christ. If I'm a new creation in Christ, and Christ is my race type, and you're a believer, and your new race type is Christ, then we're the same race. Okay?

And number three, he's not willing to promote segregation based on race. If we look at Galatians 2, 11 through 12, and we taught through Galatians, actually I think we were up here even, at least when this was both rooms. In Galatians, Paul says, I had to give Peter the smackdown because he was hanging out with the Gentiles until some of the Jews showed up and then he segregated himself. And Paul said, we ain't doing that here. Probably didn't use the word ain't. He was pretty well educated.

But Paul said we are not going to promote segregation. In fact, the next one here is not based on that, but we can look at Colossians chapter 3, where Paul says there's no Jew, nor Greek, nor Scythian, nor slave, nor free. in Colossians 3. I'm sorry, did I say Galatians 3? Because I meant Colossians 3. I don't mean to misrepresent the text.

So when we look at race in the church, the dispensational distinctions of theological identification may be relevant at times. When we look at the Old Testament and we see that God is speaking to the Jews in Israel, when we look at the book of Judges, for example, What happens in the book of Judges? Israel keeps co-mingling with the secular nations and they don't fulfill the law. And then God sends a judge.

And some of those judge stories are awesome. They should be movies by themselves. They're like, wow, that's as good as any story I've ever heard. The spike driven through the guy's head, wow, that's amazing. But you look at that, and there are times when the race is relevant.

Paul in Romans tells us, I went to the Jew first and then the Greek. Why did he go to the Jew first? He was the apostle to the Gentiles. Why did he go to the Jew first? They were God's people, and they had the prophecies of the Messiah first hand. So they were a ready audience. But guess who the Jews knew? Everybody else in that community. And so he said, I'm going to go to the Jew first. I'm going to find some believers. I'm going to tell them about the Messiah. They're going to respond, hopefully. And then he's going to preach the gospel to everybody else that they know. Because they'll have a ready audience.

Oh, you've got to hear this guy Paul. He's really good. Well, I'm not Jewish. No, trust me. You're going to like this. So the issue of race, as Paul saw it, was done away with. And so, it's a key detail here. And in dealing with that, he says that God broke down the barrier of the dividing wall. Now, what was the barrier? You're not eligible for divine blessing if you are not a Jew. Okay, so the barrier was the covenant and the law and all of the things that separated Israel Now, one of the things that I've heard taught multiple ways over the years, but I think there's one solid answer that this passage answers, is what is the purpose of the law? Does it save anybody? No, it doesn't save anybody. Then what does it do? What's the purpose of the law? Deal with transgressions. Does it deal with transgressions?

That's a symptom of what the law does. It shows that they can't keep it. It shows that they can't keep it. That's a symptom of the law. They need a savior. So the law has one foundational purpose, which has a bunch of symptoms, and we're identifying the symptoms. The foundational purpose of the law is to separate God's people unto God.

When we look at Deuteronomy 28 and 29, when God is establishing that covenant, He says, it's going to separate you to Me. And if you disobey the law, then what's going to happen? I'm going to kick you out of the land, and you'll know that you've separated yourself from Me, and you're going to have to repent and come back. And they do that a few times, don't they?

So the primary focus of the law, and we're going to see this as we go on here, it was a divining wall. It separated Israel from the other nations so that they could be faithful to God. Just follow these simple 613 rules. Simple, right? And it's important. So the barrier was the law. The law was a barrier between Israel and the nations that were not following God.

It made practice of living so difficult to blend with the pagan rituals that it could have kept the nations separate. Now, what did the Jews do who were not obeying the law? What do we find in Judges? What do we find in the later books recorded in the Old Testament? God let them do that, but the Israelites were marrying outside of Israel. They were worshipping the false gods, right? And they had the high places and the Ashtaroth poles and things, and they were doing it, trying to do it in secret. just in case it would help. If our God is wrong, which is crazy if you think about it, but okay, if our God is wrong, then we can have these backup gods over here.

Head your bets. And if you go to the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Denver Museum right now, they say that the Bible... This is so wrong. So, so wrong. The Bible teaches the law, but it's clear that the people were disobeying the law. So we think that the religious leaders had this as an agenda, but the people of the day didn't live this way. Now, the reason why it's wrong is because the Bible tells us they were disobeying. This wasn't a secret, but they were disobeying.

So we have this dividing barrier that was supposed to set the people aside unto God, but it didn't work. The liberty we appreciate in Christ stands in stark contrast to the earthly thinking of liberalism and legalism. And so this barrier that's here was legalism. Right? But you know what's funny about the law? The law demanded a relationship with God as the focal point. And it did that in specific ways.

What happened if your child was born on a Friday? Sorry, I had to click because I was doing math in my head. What happens if your child is born on the day of no birth? It's on the Sabbath! And you can't circumcise on the Sabbath unless actually the law counts for it. And the law says you must circumcise on the Sabbath. So which law is holier? Well, that's not it at all. The circumcision represented relationship. It represented being consecrated and set aside as God's people. And so he said this one trumped.

What happened if your donkey fell in the well or the cistern on the Sabbath? You're going to take care of that donkey ahead of everything else because that's part of your well-being as God directs us. The Jews would pull out the donkey because otherwise you'll poison your well and kill your donkey. Because the donkey doesn't have hours and hours. Hey, can you tread water for 24 hours until we get to the sundown? No, you're going to pull the donkey out.

And David, what did David do? Oh man, he went into the temple and he ate the sacred food. Jesus and his disciples were on the Sabbath, and they milled grain with their hands, right? And the Pharisees were super upset about it. And Jesus said, you guys don't understand. You don't understand. God's law demands relationship. It demands we focus on Him. But they weren't doing that. So this separation, this barrier, this dividing wall, was so misunderstood by the Jews by the time we get to the New Testament, that Jesus is shocking. And frankly, a lot of what Paul and the apostles had to say was shocking to the Jews as well. Tom?

I've got to put it in simpler language. The Pharisees wanted you to connect the dots. Never mind what else happened. Just do this thing. We don't care what the picture is that we're painting. Just follow the rules. So the next thing Paul says there, God did this by abolishing in Christ's flesh the enmity. What's enmity? We don't use that word necessarily frequently in modern vernacular. We are strangers. We are aliens. We are not of this world.

Well, the law here represents God's righteous and wrathful attitude towards wickedness in Israel, and that which separated them from God's people. And I worded that a little weirdly. So let me restate that, because I want to make sure that we cover that well. God's righteous and wrathful attitude towards wickedness in Israel and that which separated them from God.

Let's get rid of apostrophe people there. When they disobeyed the law, God said, you're going to be out of the land. So that's one way we can define enmity. But what's the other way that we find enmity? What's Paul talking about here? One-on-one relationship. The Jews and the Gentiles had enmity.

The Pharisees were probably the most evangelistic of the Jews. And the Pharisees wanted to introduce you to Judaism, which was why they were in Ephesus and not in Israel. The Pharisees, when they went and spread out across Rome, there were some tax benefits and other reasons why you might be relocated out of Israel, but the Pharisees were somewhat evangelistic. But they still kept themselves separate as they were fulfilling the law. And they still looked down on the Gentiles.

So, what did God do on the cross that abolished this enmity? Abolish is a pretty key word here. So what did he do that abolished it, Tom? Well, the one crowning act, on top of what Jesus' ultimate sacrifice, which had to happen, that made it clear to all who were paying attention to what the law wasn't about, but what God was about, split like a karate chop that six inch or three inch whatever curtain separating the high priest areas from the rest of the temple and saying sacrifice is accepted.

You're okay now. So Christ was 100% God and 100% man. That's called the hypostatic union in theology circles. The hypostatic union to me is the longer I meditate on what that means is probably one of the key and core doctrines of the New Testament that we should understand in dealing with cults. Because the cults misdefine who Jesus was. He's either 100% God or 100% man, but he's not 100% God and 100% man in the cults. It's how we deal with salvation issues.

What was going on there? But Christ was able to represent Adam's line and God's line. Who was his seed from, according to Revelation? Who were his genetic progenitors? Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Mary. And who carried the genetic responsibility for sin? Who was the head over Eve? Adam. Adam was the genetic seed and responsible for sin within humanity. God very carefully orchestrated this.

In Genesis 3.15, when God says to the serpent that her seed will crush your head, The rabbis scratched their head about that for a long time. Wait a minute, why is her seed? Oh, it's going to be her seed. And then the Virgin Mary gets prophesied in Isaiah.

That's a big deal. So Christ comes as the hypostatic union, 100% God and 100% man, able to represent, but not carrying with him the sin ownership of male seed, that was through the Holy Spirit, but carrying humanity through the line of Eve. So it's a pretty substantial thing.

So he was able, as a representative, to take on the wrath of God, to take on and abolish in his flesh the wrath that separated God from mankind, and then because the new church creation came into existence, and we are of the type of Christ, we have a new type. So this abolishing of enmity is kind of complicated if you want to think of it that way, but it doesn't have to be complicated. It's a little theological and nerdy, but I think it's really neat when we start to understand the richness of what God did on the cross. the barrier of the two groups, just like that curtain, was torn in two. And so we could be united at the point of faith and be of one family, which we'll see more in chapters three and four. And so Paul answers the question we asked earlier, what was the thing that was the dividing barrier.

It was the law of commandments contained in ordinances. So, what is a commandment versus an ordinance? What's a commandment in the law? A general rule of life or practice. Well, it's an absolute rule, not a general. It's an absolute rule. The thou shalt or shalt not, right? You will do this or will not.

So what's an ordinance? And this for me was kind of an important thing, so this will be a good thing to have in your utility belt. What's an ordinance? Well, I would not have translated this as ordinance, but I didn't translate the New American Standard, so you'll have to forgive me.

I would call this the doctrines Doctrines are not the same as ordinances, but often reflect the derived teachings from the text. The ones that the human teachers put together. The Greek word for this, you may be familiar with it, is dogma. We get our word dogma, and it's used sometimes negatively, although I think that's not fair to always assume dogma is bad. Dogma means doctrine.

So it's not only the commandments, but it's also the dogmas or the doctrines that the rabbis taught. And I think it's important when we think about this that the division was not just the law, it was also the extrapolations that the Jewish leaders over time developed.

How many of you have heard of recently, within the last decade, the rabbis saying that Jews should not go on the internet? Anyone heard that? So the rabbis were saying, we should not go on the internet because there's all kinds of sins on there that you might stumble upon, and we do not want you to sin and violate the law, so we'll fix it by making a new law. Just don't go on the internet. Or how about this one? I love technology.

Recently a rabbi said, it is totally okay for you, and listen to this, because I'm going to say almost a potty word in the Jewish households, it's okay to have bacon if it's cloned pork meat from a lab and not harvested from an animal. Because it's not technically from a pig. It doesn't come from the animal God said you couldn't have. No more turkey bacon. Go ahead, have the clone pork bacon. So, technology being what it is, the law can't handle technology. It really can't.

If you ever visited my parents when they lived in the apartment complex back over a couple blocks away, they had a lot of Jews in that building, and so the elevator on the Sabbath would just visit every floor. You'd just get on the elevator and you'd wait until it got up to their floor and then you'd get off and go and do your thing. But because pushing the elevator is work, you just make it so you don't have to push the elevator button. And ta-da! Now you're not working, but you can go up and check your mail and down and do all the things, right?

So the law and the ordinances and the dogma, technology couldn't handle it. Or the law couldn't handle technology. How do we handle technology as believers in the New Testament? By faith. We walk by the Holy Spirit. Which is the same which we would have done a thousand years, or two thousand years ago, or five minutes ago, or five years ago, or fifty years ago. We walk by faith. And you know what? There's things that we do. I go on the internet. I work on the internet. I don't really think about it, but there's sites I don't go to because I know that I'm going to see stuff I probably don't want to see.

Holy Spirit made that real clear. Okay, cool. Got it. Continuing on, so that in himself he might make the two into one new man. If we're one man now with all who believe, how should we be treating each other? With love. We're brothers and sisters in Christ now. We're of the type of Christ now.

I don't care what race and background you have. I don't care if you speak English with an accent or not. I'm pretty sure if you talk to a British person, I speak English with an accent. It's funny. I moved to Texas. I got told by the Texans that I spoke English with an accent. They're like, you sound like the people on TV. And I did. Then I went home and they told me I sounded like a Texan.

So that he himself might make the two into one man. We're treating each other rooted in love, rooted in who we are in Christ. This unity is important because we change our citizenship and our perspective and we have our eternal blessings in Christ. It changes how we interact with one another. It allows Paul to write chapter 4, that we should be one and to be tolerating one another, not in a pandering way like the politicians and the media calls for, but rooted in love. The word tolerance only shows up once in the New Testament. And it's there in chapter 4. And it's tolerance rooted in love, not tolerance like today where we're like, you should tolerate this wicked sin. Nope. That's not how this works. You guys should tolerate one another in love, because you're one in Christ. The two disparate Jews and Gentiles are now able to become one in Christ.

And then Paul says, thus establishing peace. It is important to observe that this peace is dependent completely on faith. This isn't peace according to works. This isn't peace according to compliance with the law. This is peace because we believed. Dead simple. So why does it matter that God established this peace? Anything God does is good. I think that's a great thing to say.

Everybody saw probably this week that in North and South Korea Kim Jong-un walked south, placed the first order for a Kia. Just kidding, he didn't order a Kia. So he went down, he crossed, you guys are like, wait, what? No, he crossed the DMZ and he was like, look at the, look, imagine, South Korea is actually one of the most technologically advanced and extravagant countries. And if you look at a map at nighttime, North Korea is almost all dark except for its capital. There are almost no lights whatsoever because they have so much poverty. And so Kim Jong-un comes down and everybody goes, oh, they're going to have peace.

They've been at war for 70 years even though they've kind of got a truce, right? They're going to have peace. It's not God's peace. This is a peace not based on international boundaries. This is a peace that is good because God made it. This is a peace based on our position and our condition being unified in Christ and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross.

What does reconcile mean here in this context? Because reconcile sometimes has multiple definitions. I don't think we're talking about accounting. So we're not reconciling the books. What does reconcile mean? No longer two, but one. No longer two. In God's eyes, and in God's work, and in God's perspective, made one. If the reconciliation was just a compatibility, imagine if it was just compatibility, because that's one way reconcile can be defined, is that we just created a compatibility. If it was just merely a compatibility, then it would mean, Jews and Gentiles, be nice to one another. This rips those words out of the context. We're not reconciling so that we can have red and yellow, black and white. I'm going to briefly say it.

Six weeks ago or so, I went to the Civil Liberties Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. And you get halfway through the tour through the Civil Liberties Museum and there's the full end-to-end presentation from Dr. Martin Luther King at the Washington Monument at the federal capitol. And he says something that I've not heard often enough when people talk about race things.

Dr. Martin Luther King is very, very focused on the Christian ideas right here. He looks forward to a day when all of God's people will be united. And he uses Christian vocabulary and Christian ideas, which have been torn out, so that we can have fake unity and tolerance. But Dr. Martin Luther King was just copying Paul.

There's unity here. This is where unity is born. And it's precious. And we can treasure it. And we can go, We're brothers and sisters in Christ. So it's a rich, rich truth here. And He reconciles them into one body through the cross. The death of Christ that we joined in, we were identified in, reconciles us. And by that, having put to death the enmity.

Enmity can't be dealt with in any other way. God's wrath towards sin, there's no other way. God had to do away with the law system in Israel, and the death of Christ was the perfect and only way to do that. God had to do away with the law and get rid of all 613 laws.

He had to do it in a way that was so significant that it has been stated already this morning a few times, the curtain was torn. That curtain was God's box, if you will. It was the cage inside the temple that wasn't a cage to keep God in. It was to keep man's sinfulness out. And God said, I'm doing away with that. And He tore the curtain away. And where did God's presence go? Into us. Those who believed. Where's the Holy of Holies? Right here. So God's wrath and the enmity and the division that could keep Israel and the Gentiles apart is gone. It's demolished. It was nailed to the cross. Dead.

And so this is a short three verses talking about what sounds on the surface like a bit of race relations. And here we are in a room where it's our first time in this room. And it's our first time in this room and we get to talk about all the way into the beginning of the Bible and all the way into the future of the Bible because we understand the dispensations. We understand, in principle, that God has given us stewardship. And we get to talk about things that impact our relationship with one another. Let's go back to the hypostatic union briefly. We'll close with this idea because we're about two minutes out from the bell ringing.

Jesus represented Eve. He represented Noah. He represented Abraham. He represented David. And he represented God. There was not a people group. There was not a federal head. There was not anyone that Christ missed with a sacrifice on the cross. Adam and Eve believed God. He gave them the skin, and they put it on. They believed Him. Were they saved? They were saved by faith. And when we read Romans chapter 4, Paul says, You are all excited about being Abraham's descendants. Y'all love the law and Moses, but you're only saved by faith.

And the consequence of that is that all those barriers go away and we can be one. So this is a powerful, powerful three verses. I can't wait till next week because it just keeps being powerful. I think Ephesians is one of my favorite books on account of how much awesomeness there is in here.

Next week we get to talk about not only the relationship we have with one another, building on this, but the relationship we have with God. All of the dispensations covered that. All the dispensations were focused on relationship with God. So we get to see, while that might change, salvation was always by faith and the work of Christ on the cross.

Any other thoughts or questions? This is a lot of material we covered, covering a lot of ground, so thank you for your patience on that. Alright, let's close in prayer. Especially since I can probably predict Brian will ring the bell in the middle of me praying. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would just focus our hearts and minds the rest of this week on who we are in Christ and the power of what happened on the cross, that we have no more dividing wall between any of us, whether our race or age or whatever else it is, if we believe in Jesus Christ. Just pray for all of the things that are going on in the world that are focused around peace, that Christians would be a light there and talk about where true peace comes from. We thank you for the truth of your word and we look forward to your return.