Ephesians 2 verse 11. It says, Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, you are called uncircumcision by the so-called circumcision which is performed in the flesh by human hands. Remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 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 into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall 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 put to death the enmity. And He came and preached peace to you who were far away, and peace to those who were near. For through Him we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father. So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and are of God's household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone in whom the whole building being fitted together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together into a dwelling of God in the Spirit. Let's pray briefly before we begin. Lord, we come before You this morning, and we are acutely aware, Lord, how we need Christ in this life. And these things that we've read are wonderful. And surely every believer here wants to know them more. Surely none of us would say that we already understand these verses we just read and we don't have any need to squint harder and see more, to be moved up closer to get a better seat. So Lord, we pray for that purpose to ask You to help us. We do pray, Lord, for that song, that lyric that we just sang, that we would be able to forgive each other, to see each other this way through Christ, who is the only hope of humanity, Lord. We pray that You would draw us nearer and nearer and nearer to Him through Your Word, Lord. One more day, one more sermon, we would see Jesus. in the sacred page. We would have Your Spirit guide us along and turn our chin and cheek to Him. We don't pray this prayer in frivolity, Lord. We know the sufferings of the present time are great. We are trusting You to help us through Your Word by Your Spirit to see Your Son and to see you in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. So after a brief pause, we are returning to the study of what's becoming to me my favorite letter in the New Testament. I never thought I would say that about Romans. But as we're returning to it, this great and incredible letter As such, it's good to remind ourselves what we've seen thus far, exactly, so that we can more fully appreciate what we're about to see in this new unit we've come to, which we just read in its fullness to begin with. So we began this series by setting before our minds, trying to, what has been said to be the dominant thought of this letter. What is the main idea of Paul's letter to the Ephesians? And the goal there is really to get that tethering pole put down so that we don't get lost in the parts. Often we fail to do this. It's easy to do it in the day in which we live. I think easier because we are texting throughout the week and we have various social media platforms and so By nature of the case, we tend to look at scripture through a keyhole, one verse at a time, one phrase that is shared, and we don't typically see the whole. And so when you get to study a book like this, you get to see the whole and see how the parts relate to the whole, to see it in context, to see it rightly. Without that, You go through a series, and you begin to get lost somewhere in all the sermons, and they just appear to you. It's like walking up to a construction site, and here comes the mason, and here comes the carpenter, and here comes somebody with a clipboard, and they're bringing this material and that material, and it all appears a light confusion to you because you don't have access to the blueprint, and you can't see the rhyme and reason what's going on, but if you had the architect's blueprint, you would see the coherence in everything that is happening. It's all related to this one dominant idea, and there's a way to read Ephesians that way, that every verse you read, you can see it carrying out this dominant idea. So we wanted to get it before us, and we said, Virtually all the commentaries agree. There's no debate on it. So that's good. That the theme of this book is really found in one verse that just, pun intended, sums it up so well. Chapter 1, verse 10. And therefore, this verse is the theme verse of the book. It says, with a view to an administration, this is the New American Standards version, suitable to the fullness of the times, that means Creation is providentially, history is moving. When it says fullness, it's like a grape or a fruit that is budding and it starts out green and then it gets the right color. And you want to just pick it at just the right time when it's just full and juicy. but no bad spots on it. It's this idea that there's a perfect time, that it's moving toward this point at which you pick it, and it's this word for fullness. It means that history is moving along toward a goal, toward a telos, and it is defined as the summing up of all things in Christ, things in the heavens, things on the earth. So I said before, John Lennox, the mathematician, the Oxford mathematician, still alive, tongue-in-cheek, teases his colleagues who are atheists that they can know some of what the universe is, but they can't know why the universe is. Because in order to know why, somebody created something, you have to ask the creator of that something. He uses this illustration of Aunt Betty makes a apple pie and chemists can test it and he can tell you the chemicals that are in it, but he can't tell you why it is. You have to see Aunt Betty for that answer. And similarly with creation. Why is there a tree out there? Why is that water flowing over there? The only person who knows is the person who created it, or should we say the persons. And Paul is an apostle of Jesus, sent by the risen Christ, revealing to us, God through him, the purpose for which all things exist. And he says they're moving along to the summing up of all things in Christ. Some other translations are the ESV puts it, unite all things in Him. If you have an NIV, it is to bring unity to all things under Christ. King James puts it to gather into one. things in Christ. It's a fascinating Greek term behind the first part of that verse, the gathering and the one. It's the term anakaphaleo. It's got a prefix and a root. Ana is the prefix and kapha is the root. And this root, kaphaleo, means to unify under a head, to unify under a head, to take some disparate disorganized parts and unify them under a head the way you would do in an outline. If you're taking notes at school, some of the kids may can identify with this. You may put Roman numeral one, and you put whatever goes there, and you know everything you write under Roman numeral one has some kind of coherent unity with this subject, such and such, whatever it is. Under that you put capital letter A and you write some other heading and everything under that has to do with that. That's this word. It's used in one other place, Romans 13.9. Perhaps we should look at it there. He turned A few books over to the left, Romans 13, verse 9, is the only other place that's used. It's the only other place we have to go to to kind of get an analogy of the meaning to get some help. He says in verse 8 of Romans 13, O, nothing to anyone except to love one another, for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law." And then he quotes several of the law from the Ten Commandments. For this, here's a specific one, you shall not commit adultery. Another, you shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not covet. And if there is any other commandment, and we know there is, there's plenty of them, it is summed up in this saying, you shall love your neighbor yourself. But what does that mean? As Charles Leiter, one preacher who's devoted a lot of his mind and heart to understanding the relation of the two testaments to each other, really does a good job at this point. He says, why is adultery so bad? Because it breaks the law of love so much. Why is stealing so bad? Because it breaks the law of love. Why is it such a heinous thing to murder someone because it's so unloving to murder someone. So that's the idea that these are all just different ways to love. Different in this situation, this is how you love. In this situation, this is how you love. But you could put them all under the heading of Roman numeral one, love, and you could write all 613 Old Testament commandments under that heading. So that gives us a feel for this term, the summing up. So the meaning of the root is this, in the context of Ephesians, the way Paul is using it, that he is claiming that God is unifying all of the broken pieces of creation in and under and by Christ. God is using Christ as his heading, as it were, and you think of this notepaper with just this confusion of notes everywhere, no harmony, and you think if you get the right heading, you can organize it, and now it is all in place, and Paul is saying Christ is the head under which God is going to bring into harmony again all of the brokenness and creation. Now, it said it had a prefix, too, ana-kafileo. That's the kafileo part, the head part. You may hear that as Peter's name, right? Cape up the head. So the ana part is a prefix. It means up or back or again, so it's got some ambiguity. there to it. The NAS is the only one that actually translates the prefix, and I was beginning to think I was seeing things when I was studying it because I'm not high up on the Greek scholar list, but I'm looking at it and I'm like, well, there's the prefix there. It's not showing up in the translations, And then I eventually came to Martin Lloyd-Jones, and he was saying the same thing I was saying. So I thought, well, now I can say it. I have some good work cited documentation. But the NAS is the only one that really translates it at all, and that's behind the word up, the summing up. So they take it as up, which goes well with the the note-taking heading analogy. But what Martyn Lloyd-Jones points out in his sermon on it is this little prefix also has the meaning of back or again in it. And that needs to come out in our understanding there. If it's there, we need to apply it and get the meaning from it. So when you do, what it means is, is it doesn't just mean to sum up as though this were the first time you were putting all these notes under a heading. But it really means to sum up again, not just to unite, but to reunite all of this brokenness. So you see how fascinating this single term is, because in this one word is found the four great pillars of the Christian worldview. say, what is the Christian worldview? Or really, it's four main ideas. Creation, fall, redemption, consummation. Creation, everything was created and ordered and harmonious, there was a fall that brought discord throughout the whole entire thing, discord between man and God, discord between the man and the woman, discord between the first two children, discord between nations, discord literally between the soul and the body. Our very beings break up because of the fall. But then there was redemption, and it's moving toward consummation, a summing up together again of what was fractured and ruptured and divided. So that is the amazing thing this verse is talking about. And that means the theme of this book is really the reunification of all things in, by, and under Christ. And that means this book presents to us a unique view of the person and work of Christ. And we mentioned that at the beginning of the introductory sermon, that If you were to try to maybe just pick up Ephesians just at your house and read it and you go with the most zoomed out view you can and sort of zoom in and get what the book is about, you may look at it first and say, well, it's a book of the Bible. Ephesians is the book of the Bible. And that means it's about Christ because every book of the Bible is about Him. And then you may zoom in a little further and say, well, it's a New Testament book of scripture. And that means not only is it a book about Christ, but it's a book that focuses on him by looking back at his person and work. Whereas if it were Old Testament, they'd be looking forward. So it's a book about Christ looking back at his work. And then you may go further and say, well, among all the books of the New Testament, it's a letter, not a gospel. So the gospels are narrative and the letters are didactic. The gospel is just giving us mainly the facts. He was born, he lived, he was crucified, he rose. But the letters are not just concerned with the facts. Notice there's nothing Nowhere in the Gospels where you read about dying with Christ, rising with Him, you got to go to the epistles for that. So the epistles are concerned with communicating to the people of God in the world the meaning of the facts. He died, but what was unique about his death in comparison to the two criminals' disciples? They died on the cross. What do you mean? That's where you get phrases, well, he died for our sins. That's an interpretation of the death. Or we died in him. That's an interpretation of what happened, et cetera. So the epistles, this is why passion plays could never be a replacement for the gospel. Because all a passion play can do is set before you the facts. Well, he carried a cross. Well, he was crucified by Roman soldiers. Well, he rose again. Well, do you believe he carried a cross and died? Yes, I believe. Do you believe he rose after that? Yes, I believe. Okay, you're saved. Well, you can't be saved like that. That's not denying the scripture that says if you believe those things, but you don't believe them as bare, empty, historical facts. When you believe he died, the idea is you're believing he died for you. He died as a substitute for you, which involves all the idea of God's wrath and judgment and a sacrifice. for you, all kinds of meaning to that. So a play by itself, and that's why often people get sidetracked in a play. They end up thinking the whole point is to feel really bad for Jesus, that he was so beaten, banged, and bruised up by the Romans. And so really the sign that the play worked is you just leave really upset about what happened to him. which is amazing because in the Gospels, there were some women who were weeping when he was carrying the cross and he corrected them. Don't weep for me, weep for yourselves. For if they do this thing when the tree is green, what will they do when it's dry? Basically prophesying the coming judgment of Jerusalem. He's the green tree. being burned up. What will become of you who are less holy and righteous than me? So that they're concerned with the same thing. So what does it mean that he was born? What does it mean that he lived? What does it mean that he died? What does it mean that he rose? What does it mean that he sits at the right hand of the Father? What does it mean that he's going to return? What does it mean that he's gonna judge the world? What does it mean that he's gonna raise us up? Those are all the questions in the epistles. So you may say, what do we have? Well, we have Ephesians as a book, looking back at the person and work of Christ to see what it means. But there's one more click, zoom in, you can do. You could say, well, among all the letters that are concerned with that, Ephesians is, well, Ephesians. It's not Romans. It's not Philippians, which means the letters are not just concerned with the meaning of the person and work of Christ generally. They all have a peculiar angle at which they're looking at this diamond. So you may say Romans is looking at just the basic gospel and getting it out to the world. And you may say Galatians is really zooming in on works and adding to the gospel. And you may say Philippians is really looking at the humility of it and the suffering involved in it and how to emulate that in your life. So what is Ephesians looking at? Ephesians is looking at the same diamond, the cross, but as a work of unity, as a work of unity. My mind went to John Calvin at this point, who gave the church this historic way of looking, mostly he did in his Institute's book on thinking about the work of Christ in terms of prophet, priest, and king. he was the one that developed this the most. And you can kind of group everything. Like you may say, he died for your sins. Well, you put that under priest. Or you may say, well, he spoke to us. We put that under prophet. He reigns. You put that under king. So there are these categories to think and organize the personal work of Christ. And you may say you could put the summing up of all things under King, Him ruling and reigning and controlling everything, and you could make a good argument for that, but I think you could argue that it deserves its own category, that we're on the same level, that we're being taught by this book to think of the person and work of Christ, to think of the cross, to think of Christ not only as prophet, not only as priest, not only as king, but Christ as unifier, Christ as unifier. For in this book, Paul focuses on the cross, and he thinks of the cross as an instrument of unity, as an instrument of unity, as a magnet, as something that pulls indeed everything together, which means he thinks in this book of the work of Adam as a work of division. He thinks of Adam as a divider and Christ as a uniter. Or to put it one way, when we studied Romans, We got this idea down, didn't we, that God deals with humanity in terms of two men, that the actions of these two men determine the destinies of all men. If you're in Adam, what he does is imputed to you and you're penalized based on your unity, your corporate unity, he's your representative in him. Or if you're in Christ, his works are counted to you and you're rewarded based on his words, if you're in him. Well, that could be thought of as the general idea. The Ephesians has taken us a step further in this doctrine in teaching us to think of these effects from a peculiar angle, to think of Adam's representation as the representation of a divider, as one that fractured creation. and tore it apart, and to think of Christ, the effects of his representation as reunification, as bringing it back together again. So these two men, Adam, the divider, Christ, the unifier. Maybe an analogy to help a few of them. I don't know how many people have seen The Marvel Studios films, I know just some of us have, but even if you haven't, I think you could profit from the setup of this analogy. It's just a wonderful, wonderful, it helps to see it. So, these two films I have in mind are Infinity War and Endgame. Infinity War was a film about these stones that control the universe, and the whole plot was Thanos, this Titan giant, wanted to get all the stones and put them in his glove, and when he had all the stones and he had all the power, he could snap his fingers and basically eliminate millions and millions of people. And so, he does that in Infinity War. He gets them, and he does that. And when he does it, people sort of disintegrate. They sort of turn into this soot, almost, and decompose right in front of you, and they just go away. They seem to dissolve in the air, and they're gone, which is a pretty good analogy of turning to dust. Well, in Endgame, The plot ends with Iron Man getting the glove from Thanos, putting it on his hand, and he's got all five stones, and he snaps his finger, and all that was divided and disintegrated, and Thanos comes back together again in Iron Man through the very same mechanism, you see. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, by a man came death, so also by a man comes the resurrection of the dead. In other words, if God has set salvation and judgment up in such a way that the actions of one man can count to all men, then it works both ways, whether it's a positive effect or a negative effect. And so Christ, what the gospel shows is really what God was up to all the whole time, which also I could expand the analogy if you go back to Infinity War, because Dr. Strange, it was like Iron Man asked him, he looked at all the possibilities that they would win this war. And he looked at, I don't know how many millions or whatever, and there was only one. And he knew what it was that was coming, and he set all of this in motion. And Paul in Romans 5 calls Adam a type of him who was to come. And Paul Washer in his book, The Truth About Man, says in one way, you could say there had to be a cross because there was a garden. In another way, you could say there had to be a garden because there was a cross. There's a book in Revelation called the Book of Life of the Lamb that was slain, written before the foundation of the world. So there had to be the first Adam so that there could be the second Adam, and God would glorify his son what this is incredible incredible idea that it was just a replica of what happens to the world in Christ that because he is righteous and his acts are counted to us our bodies will literally be put back together again as a result and it's unbelievably incredible to see people who are even lost fall in love with the Marvel movie. It is literally the gospel, just in a different form. It reminds me of the old Christmas hymn, Come, Desire of Nations, come. Or Paul on Mars Hill, what you already worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. Or you think of Belle in Beauty and the Beast, The irony is she loved this story about this girl not discovering he was the prince until chapter three, right? That ended up being her story. So in a sense, she loved the story before she heard it. And in a sense, you could say that because we're made in God's image. And this story has been passed down from the garden. Paganism is deviations of the gospel. That's all it is. And therefore it always has some splinters of truth in it. That's why you can always fish in their stories and have a bite and catch something, because there's some truth in it. Well, this is what Paul was praising God for in the first half of chapter one. He starts this letter off praising God, and he says why in verse 10, that he's summing up all things that are broken in Christ. And he mentions the things in the heavens and things on earth, so it includes everything. It's like the beginning of the Bible. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. What is the point of saying that? It's like when your mom says, We're gonna clean this house from one end to the other. It's a way of referring to the whole thing. So for Paul to say he's summing up all things in Christ, things in the heavens and things on the earth is a way to refer to everything. And then the second half of chapter one, we saw that this is what he was not only praising God about, but praying to God about that. the Ephesians would know the gospel. It's good news about what? It's good news, the power of it, the value of it, the hope of it. He says, basically, it's good news about the reunification of all things. When I pulled in, I was thinking about it. And I hadn't watched these movies in a while, There's a scene in the film, Lord of the Rings, where Sam is talking in a monologue, kind of a Frodo, at the end of, I believe, the two towers. And he says this one statement, how could everything go back to the way it was before after so much bad has happened? What a thought. Well, you think that. How can it come back together again? How can bodies come back together again? And yet, over and over, I see men longing unconsciously for this. If you've ever even liked Frosty the Snowman, he's put back together again. The same thing happens to Olaf in Frozen 2. Anna, do you want to build a snowman? That's the resurrection. Everybody's just rejoicing in the resurrection, not knowing they're rejoicing in the resurrection. So Paul is praying that we know this about the gospel. It's not just good news of having a clean conscience. Great as that is. It's not just good news of being forgiven of all your wretched sins. Good as that is, it's good news about the whole entire universe. So in the second half, well, I'll say second half. In chapter 2, what we saw is he began preaching to us about this. He began trying to show us how it is. You say, well, Paul, how is he doing it? Well, he started in the first half of chapter two with showing us how Christ reunites man to God. The power of God in your salvation through Christ reunited you to God. Isaiah says our sins of made a separation, the flaming sword or the chair of them were put down, but through regeneration, through conversion, something happened to you where you began to be reunited to your creator again. That is the reunification of things in heaven. The vertical is being put right, but now What we're about to see in the second half of chapter two, he shows us here, he's about to start teaching us how Christ reunites man's relationship to man. How Christ reunites sinners to one another, not just sinners to God. These are the things on earth. He is summing up reuniting things in the heavens and things on the earth. So you could say the first half of chapter 2, which we finished studying from verses 1 to 10 already, that this deals with how Christ unites the vertical relationship between man to God, and the second half deals with how He reunites the horizontal relationships between each other. This is what we're going to see coming up. So a brief outline of it just to prepare you. If you look at verses 11 to 22, this unit that focuses on this, it really falls into three obvious sections, almost like it comes perforated to tear apart. Verses 11 to 12, He's basically gonna show us how divided we were before Christ came and did his cross work, that we were separate, that the Jews and Gentiles were divorced, separate, not together. Then, verses 13 to 18, it starts mentioning Christ, but now in Christ, but now through the cross, but now through his blood. changing factor. He's the changing variable. And then after mentioning Christ, verses 19 to 22 is going to say, now the division is no longer there. Now there's unity. So you have division, Christ, now unity. This is the outline of this section. So basically you would say because of the cross work of Christ. the division in our souls between each other due to sin is dealt with sufficiently enough to initiate unity. So let that stand as an intro to you to this section we're coming to. And maybe you should think about it a little bit. Think about your life. Think about growing up. You don't have to live very long in this world to find out a couple of things about it. It's a very divided place. But then you think it's also a very beautiful place, right? I can remember being a kid. I'm sure you can. There were times of family Christmases ate at my grandmother's, it just seemed like we were in the Garden of Eden. That everything was right and everyone was happy and everything was safe and good. And then as my life went on, there were sins. Not the same anymore. This fell apart and this fell apart and this, and I can remember wondering why people are dying. My grandmother had like 11 siblings. So as a little boy, it was like every other year we would go into Aunt so-and-so's funeral. And I remember my grandmother dying. I remember sitting in the back of the car right where we were at this cemetery and my dad turned to back the car up and I saw the tears coming down his cheek. And it makes you think, as a little boy, I thought, why? Why did she die? Why is this tear in the universe? And I remember having kids of my own My dog Fresca died, and it was the first thing Annabelle was hit with, with death, is that virgin knocking the wind out of the gut, like when she saw Fresca dead in the back of my truck to try to bury her, and she wept and wept. And then our neighbor lives right to the left of us, Got home one day and walked outside, and the ambulance was over there. And she had passed away. And then I looked around. There was no Annabelle. I go into the room. We still had the bunk bed in there then. She was in her bed crying. We are used to death. We're used to it. And that's why Ecclesiastes tells us to remember your creator in the days of your youth. You get old and you harden up and you just see death all the time. It doesn't do anything to us. But then it takes a new child with a new heart like that to show us how hard our hearts have become living in this world. that death is not natural and something's wrong. So you think, what caused it? And then as you think about your life, think about the division you've seen in the world like that, in your story, in your memories. And as we're studying this text, be asking at least two questions. Let me offer you as a suggestion. Number one, be asking where do you see relationships between man and man divided? Husband, wife, father, child, worker, friend, or if something's been ruptured, where do you see it at? Where do you see alienation and estrangement? And when you fix it in your mind, ask the second question as we're studying this. How does Paul say the crosswork of Christ brings unity to this? How does he say, what is he teaching us here? And we'll take that up next time. I'm looking forward to it. A beautiful, beautiful passage. Someone said, if Ephesians is the crown of Paul's theology, then chapter two, verses 11 and 22 is the jewel in the crown. That's an incredible statement. It's an amazing piece of the New Testament that we're about to study with amazing relevance to our day, both nationally, personally, throughout the church and in the world. So let us pray. as we study it together, and let's pray now to close. So Lord, as we move to close the service today, we are grateful to be able to ponder your word and to have it and to think about our lives and to think over our lives and to see the goodness in the world and to see the evil and to think about it and what it means and to be able to know that there is this word of redemption. And even so, Lord, our hearts are heavy and sometimes we can't bring them to hope in your word and we need your help. So we pray for it and we ask it that you would help our unbelief, that you would cause us to see in these days something of the reunification of all things in Christ. And we pray for those who feel the division of this world more than others. those who are hopeless, those who are overwhelmed with excessive sorrows. And we pray that you may, according to your tender mercies and your good heart, have compassion, as it is said in Lamentations, Lord, that you do not afflict from your heart, the sons of men, you are our only hope. So we pray to you, we look to you, we look forward to what you may show us and how you may help us, how you may strengthen our hearts and cheer our souls in this life. We pray that you might even bring a unity somewhere where there's been a the vision that we may really apply the cross of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to our relationships that we might be thinking when we're in an argument, and how does the cross apply here? How do I put it to work here? May you give us the humility and the desire to do these things In Jesus' name we pray, amen.