From Far to Near by Jesus’ Blood
By Pastor Matt Black
03
December 2006
Lord's Day morning
Ephesians 2:11-13
Open your Bibles to Ephesians 2, and let’s read verses 11-22. The title of this morning’s message is “From Far to Near by Jesus’ Blood”.
[Read Ephesians 2:11-22].
Ephesians 2:11-13, “Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; 12 That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: 13 But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.”
Introduction: We come to this passage, and again we see the first imperative (command) of the letter so far. “Remember” is what we need to do. Ephesians 2:1-10 tells us that we were helpless to save ourselves. Our life was dead to God, and the only way we could come to Him was through His life-giving power. He had to raise us from the dead and sit us with Christ and use us according to His own plan. If verses 1-10 tell us we were helpless, our text today tells us how hopeless we were. In every conceivable way, we were far away from God. There was a time when as Gentiles we were:
· Without the coming Christ
· Outside of His Kingdom (the commonwealth of Israel)
· Outside of His Covenants (God made no obligation to us)
· Without Hope
· Without God in the World
We were bankrupt, but now we are brought near to God, so near in fact that we could not be any nearer.
There was a time in all of our lives when we were like the prodigal, wasteful, wayward son. We were living riotously, thinking we had it all. Indulging ourselves in this world, but we didn’t know that we had nothing.
There was a time in the past when we were living as “Gentiles in the flesh”. Remember when you thought that all that there was was what you see with your eyes? We were blind and far away from the Lord’s grace. We could do nothing.
I. First let’s look at how far we were away from God.
A. First, we were without Christ. Think about what it must have been like for our Gentile ancestors before Christ came. We were without Christ. Our Gentile ancestors looked for salvation in the sun, moon, and stars. They looked for salvation in gods that were simply exalted men who fought and sinned against one another. We were not waiting for Christ’s coming. We were in total darkness. We did not know the warning of Acts 4:12, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”
The Gentiles were totally separated the Saviour. The Jews were waiting for Christ to come. They were sacrificing bulls and goats as a picture of Christ’s covering of sins. Believing Jews were truly united to Jesus Christ. As they believed and followed the Lord, God would reveal Christ to them.
· Remember Noah built the ark, that picture of salvation in Christ?
· Remember God promised Abraham that he would give him the seed of Christ that would bless all nations?
· Remember Jacob at Bethel and he saw Christ as Jacob’s ladder?
· Remember all the Psalms that David wrote telling how Christ would suffer and die for our sins?
· Remember all the prophets—Samuel and Elijah and Isaiah and Daniel and all the others who were moved by the Holy Spirit of God. Peter tells us that all the prophets “prophesied of the grace that should come unto you”—he further says that the Spirit of God through them “testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow” (1 Peter 1:10-11).
Remember what it was like before you knew Christ? All our ancient ancestors were “without Christ.”
B. Second, we were outside of His Kingdom. Verse 12 says, “at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel.” Out of all the heathen people in the world, God chose Abraham and made of him and his children a commonwealth, or in other words, a Kingdom. The word commonwealth means “citizenship”. The Jews were citizens in God’s Kingdom with God Himself ruling over them. God later gave them laws of holiness to live by, which separated the children of Abraham (the Jews) from all other peoples of the world. So, the Gospel of faith in Christ that was given to Abraham was preached to and through the Jews and them only.
In order to follow the Lord in the Old Testament, the Gentile had to follow the Lord by uniting in some way to the Kingdom of Israel. So though Gentiles were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel”, it is also true that God saved many Gentiles in the Old Testament. Think of some of them:
· Caleb was not an Israelite but a Kenizzite. Caleb's descendants came from a wild, nomadic Bedouin tribe that ranged throughout the Sinai and southern Palestine. He was a Gentile, an outsider who had become a part of the people of God. Yet this Gentile along with Joshua to conquer the land of Canaan!
· Many of the Canaanites who the Jews had conquered in the time of Joshua through the time of David made covenants with the Jews and were converted to the Lord.
· Ruth was a Moabitess. She was the dauther-in-law of Naomi, and she said to Naomi in Ruth 1:16-17, “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: 17 Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.” She was giving up her identity as a Genile Moabitess and becoming a follower of the Lord. And what was Ruth’s reward? Ruth married Boaz the Jew, and in due course she gave birth to a son named Obed. Obed was the father of Jesse, who was the father of David, who was a descendent of Jesus Christ.
· As we think of Boaz that married this Gentile Moabitess Ruth, we have to ask ourselves a question? Who was the mother of Boaz? Boaz’ mother was anther famous Gentile: Rahab the harlot. When Rahab left Jericho, she married a man by the name of Salmon. Rahab gave birth to a son by the name of Boaz.
· Many other Gentiles that came to know Christ in the Old Testament could be named: Naaman was a General in the Syrian Army. He had captured a little Jewish slave girl who told him of the prophet Elisha. Remember Elisha cured his leprosy in the river, and Naaman became a believer in the LORD.
· Nebuchadnezzar who ruled the ancient land of Babylon came to know Christ through Daniel.
· Think about this—Jeremiah preached for 40 years in Israel without a convert, but Jonah, the reluctant prophet when to Ninevah, the capital of Assyria, and in one day saw over 500,000 Gentile Ninevites put their faith in the Lord!!
Yet these conversions were not the norm. For almost the entirety of the Gentiles, they were “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel.” They worshipped Zeus and Diana and gods of stone made with hands. They were busy building their own Kingdoms, but God had not intervened in their lives to make them part of His kingdom!
So, we as Gentiles were without Christ, aliens (foreigners) from the commonwealth of Israel, and…
C. Thirdly, we were outside of the covenants of promise. Just as verse 12 says, we were “strangers from the covenants of promise”. Beginning with Adam, God promised a Saviour would come and take away the sins of His people. The angel told Joseph in Matthew 1:21, “thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins”. The Gentiles were not God’s people, and were therefore “strangers from the covenants of promise”.
All the promises of the Old Testament, and really of the entire Bible, are based on a covenant made with blood. There were many covenants made in the Old Testament.
· There was a covenant made to Adam and Eve that a Saviour would come and “crush the serpent’s head” (Genesis 3:15).
· There was a covenant made with Noah not to preserve the earth until the Last Day.
· God made a covenant with Abraham to promise Him to bless all nations (Genesis 18:18; 26:4). This was a Gospel covenant—Christ as the seed of Abraham would save the world! Look at Galatians 3:8, “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.”
· God made a covenant with Moses—that God’s people should live according to the perfect Law of God. This too was fulfilled by Christ who is our righteousness!
All the promises of the Old Testament and all the covenants could be summed up into one: Leviticus 26:12 And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people.” God is for those in His covenant! Yet we were all outside the covenants of promise!
That leads us to our next point:
D. Ultimately, we were without hope and without God in the world. This is the truth of the Bible! Without God, we have no hope. We have no power to save ourselves. Salvation is all of grace.
1. Israel was once without God. Remember, Abraham was at first a heathen idol worshipper. He followed God because God first called him out of Ur. We are like Abraham. We love God because He first loved us. If you remove God from the equation, none of us would ever seek God.
2. Israel is no better than the Gentiles. Israel had God because God sought them. Paul asks an important question in Romans 3. Look there in verse 9, “What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin; 10 As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: 11 There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. 12 They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”
Both Jew and Gentile are by nature without hope and without God. It is the Lord who seeks us! As the Lord says in Romans 9:15, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”
3. Yet we must see that in the Old Testament, God had amazing favor and grace with the Jews. We cannot deny that in the Old Testament, God could have brought revival if wanted to unto the Gentiles, but He chose to work through the Jews. That is God’s sovereign choice and plan, and we must not object to it. What we should do is praise God that He has saved even one of us!
4. Perhaps you today are without hope because you are without God.
Being without hope and without God in the world is the most serious and painful condition. To think of it is unbearable. That is why people wrap their lives around other things. People refuse to think about ultimate reality. They try to escape. The escape can be very intellectual on one hand, or on the other hand, an eternal Nintendo game.
We are far away from God, and we cannot bring ourselves near. But God has bridged the gap with the death of His son! He has done it all. He has done everything to bring those who are far off to a right standing with Him! Those who are alienated can be reconciled!
Perhaps you are far from God even now. You can be brought near. Let’s find out how God does that!
II. Now let us see how God has brought us near to Himself. We were without Christ, outside his Kingdom, strangers to His covenant, without hope and without God! But Verse 13 gives us the Gospel! “But now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ.”
Spurgeon said,
“All that the Jew ever had we have. We have all his privileges, and more. He had but the shadow, we have the substance. He had but the type: we have the reality. But aforetime we had neither shadow nor substance; we were afar off, and had no participation in them.”
Christ has brought us near by the power of His blood! We sing that song!
Would you be free from your burden of sin?
There's power in the blood, power in the blood;
Would you o'er evil a victory win?
There's wonderful power in the blood.
There is power, power, wonder-working power,
In the blood of the Lamb;
There is power, power, wonder-working power,
In the precious blood of the
Lamb.
Would you be whiter, much whiter than snow?
There's power in the blood, power in the blood;
Sin-stains are lost in its life-giving flow,
There's wonderful power in the blood.
There is power in the blood of Christ. Do you understand that on the basis of Christ’s death, he has been praying for you since eternity? Jeremiah testifies in Jeremiah 31:3 The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.
Conclusion: Remember how Paul opens this chapter? We were “dead in trespasses and sins”, we “walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air”, and “we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others”
What does verse 4 say? “But God”! “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us”! Then he tells us you were “without Christ” and “without hope” and “without God in the world”. But just look at verse 13, “But now”! The Christian life is all about that conjunction! Things were going a certain way—I was lost, I was without Christ, BUT GOD! There is a divine interruption! Have you had that divine interruption in your life?
It took the blood of His Son to bring us near to Himself. We are in no way acceptable to Him in ourselves. We are proud sinners going our way. Let me ask you, have you come to know Christ? Have you repented of your sin and come near to Christ? You cannot come near to Christ without dealing with your sin. Isaiah was just fine until he came near to God. Then he said in Isaiah 6, “Woe is unto me for I am undone! I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for mine eyes have seen the King!” Have your eyes seen the King, the Lord of Hosts?
Let us who are believers here remember first and then rejoice that we have been brought near! Those who do not have that assurance that you are saved, I simply urge you—Look to Jesus! He has done it all! Be brought near by the blood of Christ. Look to nothing else but Jesus blood and righteousness!!
Closing Hymn: 262 Power in the Blood