Fr. Stephen De Young: Chapter two, verse one: "And you he made alive who were dead in trespasses and sins." Okay, and now you're going to get your wish: I'm going to pick on the Calvinists directly, because our Calvinist friends, this is one of their favorite verses. [Laughter] St. Paul's going to repeat this in a few verses, too.

"You're dead in trespasses and sins!" And they'll say, "Well, see? You're dead. What can a dead person do? A dead person can't do nothin'. You're dead." And they'll often, when they're explaining this, they'll go to Lazarus, Christ's friend Lazarus who was dead, was dead in the tomb, four days, just a dead body there, couldn't do anything. And Jesus comes and he raises him from the dead. So they're going to say, "This is what salvation is like. You're just dead; you can't do nothin'. You're evil and wicked, and then Christ comes, because he picked you, and says, 'Come forth,' and, boom, you're alive."

So maybe you've already figured out some of the problems here. Let's start with St. Lazarus, Christ's friend. Was he just a dead body? Is that what happens to people when they die? They just become dead bodies that [lie] there and can't do anything? Not last I checked! At least for Christians. When St. Lazarus was physically dead, that means his soul was separated from his body. And his soul was still alive. So when Christ says, "Lazarus, come forth," Christ is telling Lazarus's soul to return to his body, and St. Lazarus's soul obeys Christ's commandment and does it, and he comes back to life. So his soul kind of did something. I kind of heard it did something.

But you say, "Okay, that's just a bad example." [Laughter] Maybe that's a bad example, but this verse still says you're dead. Dead as a doornail. Can't do nothin'.

Verse two: "—you're dead and trespasses in sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world." Well, wait a minute, now you're a dead man walking. [Laughter] Now you're the walking dead. "Walking" sounds like doing something.

Q1: You're a zombie, I guess.

Fr. Stephen: Right? And zombies just kind of wander around and don't know what they're doing, but this doesn't say you don't know what you're doing. You're going around sinning and trespassing! So that's not doing nothing.

What does "dead" mean? The Fathers tell us—and this goes back beyond them; this goes back into Jewish tradition—there's two kinds of death. There's spiritual death and there's physical death. This goes all the way back, really, to— It's the only way to make sense of Genesis 3. God says to Adam, "The day you eat of it, you will surely die." Well, Adam eats of it and he becomes mortal, but he doesn't just drop dead when he eats. So something happens, and then, hundreds of years later in Adam's case, he drops dead; he physically dies.

As we just said, when he physically dies, his soul is separated from his body: his soul goes into Hades and waits there for Christ to come and pull him out, as we see in the icon of the resurrection; his body goes into a tomb. But what happened on that day that made him mortal? That's that he died spiritually, and what does that mean? Well, a physical death is your soul being separated from your body; spiritual death is your soul being separated from God, because what your soul is, in the Jewish understanding, is the life of your body. It's basically synonymous with "life." It's talked about synonymously with "spirit," with "breath." It's what makes your body alive. Well, God is the source of all life, so if your life gets separated from the source of life, there's a meter running. It's just a matter of time before your life runs out.

So when it says, "You were dead in your sins and your trespasses, you're dead and you're doing stuff," you're like Adam and Cain and all those descendants. You're spiritually dead: your soul's cut off from God. And because your soul is cut off from God, we're out there sinning and trespassing, actively doing these things. But now St. Paul's going to go one step further.

We're "walking in sins and trespasses, according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience." So it's not just that our souls are cut off from God and we're dead in that sense, but our souls are united to somebody else.

Q1: Satan?

Fr. Stephen: This is— I mean, "the prince and the power of the air" is literally the devil, who is the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience. The way St. Paul is describing our state before Christ is not inert, dead and inert and a corpse [lying] in a grave; it's that we were cut off from God, and so we were in this alliance with the enemies of God, with the devil, and we were going out and doing his works: we were cooperating with him. This is synergy. We were bringing his works into the world. We had this alliance with him, and that's why we were sinning and committing trespasses. So it's an active thing. We were actively moving in one very negative direction.

So he goes on: "—among whom also—"among the sons of disobedience"—among whom also we conducted ourselves in the lusts of the flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath just as the others." "Just as the others," meaning just like everybody else. So he's saying to the people who are now in the Church, "You weren't any better than any of the folks who are out there, lost, right now, and sinning it up. We were the same way as [they], actively out there in alliance with these evil spiritual powers, doing these evil things. And through that alliance and working together with them, it was transforming us in a negative way."

The language that St. Paul uses here about "fulfilling the lusts of the flesh," this is language, if you're familiar with classical philosophy, that's used to describe how animals work. The lusts and desires here, the epithemia in Greek, that's how the describe and explain animal behavior. An animal doesn't have a nous that makes it make moral judgments. My dog does not make moral judgments. You put food in front of him, it's only a matter of time before he eats it, because he has desires within him that are innate within him because of the type of animal he is—to climb or to dig or to eat or to reproduce or whatever—has those desires. When it finds an object to fulfill one of those desires, it does it.

St. Paul is saying here that, through this devil's bargain that we had in our actions and our activities, it transformed us and made us subhuman, less than what God created us to be. This is the negative side of what he was just talking about in chapter one, what God did create us to be: sons of God, holy ones like the angels. That's who he created us to be, but rather than, in faithfulness to God, working towards the fulfillment of that inheritance, we were going in the opposite direction, reducing ourselves to this subhuman state of just seeking to gratify whatever desires we had in the moment, and then move on to the next one. It's sort of this self-destruction. That's why it talks about becoming children of wrath, that we're just going to our own destruction, by our own choices and our own actions. That's how he's describing our state. Again, that is the opposite of inert; that's the opposite of not doing anything.

Verse four: "But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses…" So God didn't start loving us after we repented, after we got saved, after any of these things happened; he loved us beforehand. He loved us beforehand, while we were still doing that. Why is that important? Because St. Paul just said we were children of wrath. So that means God's wrath and his love are not opposed to each other. I can't emphasize this enough, because, again, over against our Calvinist friends, he doesn't say, "You were under wrath, but now God loves you," or "God loves you, but he has wrath toward those people." God loved us when we were like that; he loves those people who are still like that. It's out of his love for us that he's acting. He has that love for us while we're still out there, actively rebelling against him, actively hating him. He still loves us.

Q1: I have a small question. Back at the beginning of the chapter, "he made alive," and that's in italics which means it's not there. How did that make sense, if it wasn't there?

Fr. Stephen: Well, this is another one of those super-duper long sentences, because the next clause I'm about to read has the "made us alive."

Q1: Yes, that's what—

Fr. Stephen: So if you take it out up here: "And you, who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of the world," those are all just nested clauses. The verb is "he made alive," and it's all the way down here. [Laughter]

Q1: So it had to be there to make—

Fr. Stephen: In English. They're trying to clarify it in English, so they moved the verb back to the beginning, basically, to make it more sense. This is something you can do in Greek or Latin and not in English.

Q1: Oh, yeah, you can— forever.

Fr. Stephen: Caesar's conquest of Gaul, there's a sentence that goes 17 pages in the Loeb edition, and the last word is the subject. [Laughter] Fun with ancient languages! But so, yeah, that's just for clarification purposes. So: "even though we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved." So he made us alive, together with Christ. So what kind of death and what kind of life are we talking about?

Q1: Christ's death and resurrection?

Fr. Stephen: Right, in the case of Christ, but in terms of us?

Q1: We're being reunited—?

Fr. Stephen: Because you weren't physically dead yet. You weren't spiritually alive yet! [Laughter]

Q1: But spiritually…

Fr. Stephen: He made us alive—spiritual death, spiritual life, right?—united our souls to God again, in the resurrection of Christ.

"And by grace you have been saved." Remember, what's grace? Grace is God's activity. It's not stuff that he gives you. It's not just liking you. It's God doing something. So he's saying God did this; God took action—not while you were [lying] there, inert, but while you were out there hating him and rebelling against him. That's when God took action and had Christ die for your sins, as he already talked about it in chapter one, to purify us from sin by his blood, and raised Christ again, did all the things he described just a few verses ago, for us, back then.

"And raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." So not only were we made alive in the resurrection of Christ, it's that same movement—Christ's resurrection, his exaltation in the heavenly places. So what's St. Paul saying here? That movement of Christ that he described is a movement that we took with him. Well, how did we do that? because last I checked I was seated in Lafayette, Louisiana, not the heavenly places.

Q1: It's heaven on earth. What are you talking about?

Fr. Stephen: Well, you know, I came from West Virginia, which is almost heaven—not quite, but almost.

How is this? Because Christ is man, our human nature that we share [with him]. So it's in Christ and his resurrection that we're all made alive. It's in his exaltation that we're glorified and find exaltation. That's the basis of it.

Q1: This is why we have to believe that Christ really was a man like us.

Fr. Stephen: Yes.

Q1: Or else this wouldn't work.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And is God, or it doesn't work. Yeah. And so it's in the same sense that— Remember, St. Paul was saying: You're already sons of God. You're already holy ones. In Christ, that's already true of you. In Christ, you've already been raised from death, because your soul's been united to God again, even though you haven't physically died, in the same way that Adam spiritually died before he physically died. And it was the fact that he spiritually died that caused him, down the road to physically die, in the same way, we've been spiritually resurrected, spiritually restored to life, by having our souls united to God in Christ, and because of that, down the road, we'll be physically resurrected at Christ's glorious appearing. And that's part of the inheritance we receive: down payment, inheritance.

Verse seven: "So that, in the age to come, he might show the exceeding riches of his grace and his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." Remember the exceeding riches of the inheritance? Same wording here. So that this is already true, God already did this in Christ, so that we could receive this inheritance in the age to come. This is what St. Paul's talking about when he's talking about predestination. God did these things in advance and set them in place in advance so that we could be saved. It's not talking about picking certain people over against others.

Verse eight: "For by grace you have been saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God; not of works, lest anyone should boast." Okay! Here we go! [Laughter] It's on! So that starts with "for." The fact that it starts with the word "for" is connecting it to what came before, meaning we can't just pull this out and read it by itself. St. Paul is making a point about what he just described. So, first of all, context. He already said, "by grace you have been saved"; he already said the first part back in verse five, remember? That it's the action of God. So he's saying it's by grace, by the action of God, you have been saved—from what?

Q2: From the spiritual death?

Fr. Stephen: From spiritual death, from the sins and trespasses that we were committing, from destruction, from wrath, from the dehumanization of what we were doing: that's what we're saved from. So by God's action, by what God did in Christ, we were saved. Now, notice, he doesn't just leave it there: through faithfulness, through our faithfulness. So there's that "through." That means if we remain faithful. He isn't saying, "God did this to you and now you're set." He isn't saying, "God gave you the whole inheritance already." He doesn't say it's already yours; he said the deposit and seal.

Q1: So you have to read "faith" as "faithfulness," and not as "belief, as you did once."

Fr. Stephen: Right, and what would that even be in context? What would that even be in context? Thought experiment. You believed what, based on the context here?

Q2: I think: God did this for you?

Fr. Stephen: Right, but does he say that?

Q2: No, he doesn't.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so you're just kind of guessing at something in the context that he could be referring to, because if God did it for you, if he did it, why would it matter if you recognized it or not?

Q1: True.

Fr. Stephen: So that reading doesn't make sense in context, that it means "believing that something is true at one point in time." You can't read that in there. He's already been talking about faithfulness, very clearly, because he's been talking about walking according to the Spirit, and "walking" implies time and progress. But "faithfulness" makes perfect sense, because again he's been talking about this faithfulness, the seal: provided you don't break it, provided you remain faithful, these are all the things Christ has done for us if we are faithful. What's the difference between us and the people who are still in their sins?

Q1: They're serving the...

Fr. Stephen: They're still children of wrath. Now, our Calvinist friends will say the difference is God chose to give us to his grace; God chose to save us and not them. But is that what St. Paul has said over the course of the last two chapters is the difference? He said the difference is that we're faithful and they're not. And so if we cease being faithful, we'll be right back with them. And if they hear the Gospel and become faithful to it, then they'll receive the inheritance. It's pretty clear in context that's what St. Paul is saying.

Q1: Because he just said we used to be that way, too.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And so then when he says, "This is not of yourselves, it's the gift of God"— God does it, so it's a gift. Gifts aren't generally forced on people; gifts are generally offered to people. "Not of works, lest anyone should boast." What is he saying, "not of works," here? Now, he doesn't say "works of the law" here. We talked a lot in Galatians about how St. Paul says "works of the law," not just works in general. So he's saying this is not of yourself, and then parallels that with "not of works, so that nobody can boast."

Q3: It's not anything that you can do.

Fr. Stephen: Right. God didn't come to you and say, "Okay, you're dead in your trespasses and sins, you're rebelling against me, and you've reduced yourself to this subhuman level. Here's 12 steps. And once you complete these 12 steps, I will share my eternal divine life with you." Right? So what is—? This is another element of context that's important when we're reading the Scriptures. Who is it that St. Paul is arguing against? Who would be the person whom St. Paul would be correcting here?

Q3: Well, the Pharisees?

Fr. Stephen: No.

Q1: The people who were causing trouble in Galatians.

Fr. Stephen: No, this is Ephesians. Who's he writing to? He's writing to Gentiles. He's writing to former pagans. Well, how does paganism work?

Q1: You make your sacrifices and—

Q2: You become like a god.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It's by your actions. How do people get deified in Greco-Roman paganism?

Q1: They don't.

Fr. Stephen: Well, the few who do. By doing these great deeds.

Q1: Ah, Hercules.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, you go and you do these great deeds that sort of impress the gods, and so they accept you into their number. That's how you become a son of god in Greco-Roman paganism. Or you go to one of the mystery cults, and you learn the secret rituals and the secret rites and the secret knowledge. Or in Egyptian religion, you learn the names, talked about above every name; you learn the names and invocations, to sort of work your way up to the heavenly places after you die. All of these ideas where it's about you learning something and figuring something out and doing something and achieving this sort of divine status, which only a few people do: that's why you can boast, "because 99% of humanity is ignorant fools and sheeple, but I have discovered how to turn lead into gold!"

Q1: Which is exactly why I tell them to do! [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Right. You read Plato, it's pretty clear. There's the philosopher-kings who are supposed to be up here at the top, and then we tell everybody else the noble lie that they're just fit for their grunt work and go be happy doing it. That's what St. Paul is countering for these Gentiles, that that's not how salvation in Christ works. He used language of wisdom and knowledge and understanding. We saw a little bit of this at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, all this talk of knowledge and being the enlightened ones and the ones who know. Same kind of thing here, again, with a formerly pagan audience. This isn't something where you mount your way up to heaven through secrets and wisdom and this kind of thing. Yes, God gives you the spirit of wisdom and allows you to see these things—they might have been tracking really well with that, like: "Oh, the vision of God, ah, yes, and the divine places" and da-da-da da-da-da-dah, but you don't get there that way. You get there because Christ did that. And we receive that by receiving the Gospel and then being faithful to Christ.

So now I'm going to prove to you—I'm going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt—that our friend, old Mister Luther, was wrong in thinking that St. Paul is here saying that works have nothing to do with salvation. Are you ready? I'm going to do that by reading the next verse. [Laughter]

Q1: Whoa, whoa, whoa!

Fr. Stephen: I know!

Q1: Whoa, man!

Fr. Stephen: "For"—again, connecting it—"because we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." See how I did that?

Q1: That was clever, yeah.

Fr. Stephen: By reading?

Q1: Wow. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: St. Paul is saying you don't do these great deeds, but our salvation, just like being dead, meant participating in certain works, works of the devil, works of the evil one. When we read 1 John, St. John really hammers this. Was participating in the works of the devil and doing evil and being transformed and becoming subhuman. Our salvation, this part between receiving the deposit and receiving the inheritance, where he talked about our calling, our trying to grow—God created us and saved us for this purpose, and there's a whole bunch of good works. And why are they good works? Because they're his works. Remember, grace is him doing things. So God, in his grace, has been doing these things since he created the world, to bring about our salvation. He's at work in the world now. Preeminently St. Paul said he was at work in the world in Christ, in his death and resurrection and exaltation.

And so what does our faithfulness consist of? Participating in those works. Just as we used to do the works of the devil, now we do the works of God. And so God can look at those works and call them good, like on the days of creation, because they're his works; they're not ours. I'm not Hercules, and I go and clean out a bunch of stables real fast and God's impressed; but God creates St. Paul to be the apostle to the nations and sends him out, and God does it—or St. Paul does it, and God does it. But then God can look at what St. Paul does and say, "That is good," and say to St. Paul, "Well done, my good and faithful servant," not because St. Paul did this of himself and it's so impressive, because it's God's own works that he did through St. Paul and that St. Paul participated in.

And St. Paul is transformed in the same way that we were transformed in our sins and iniquities, and we were transformed, became subhuman, became children of wrath; now we're transformed into sons of God, holy ones, by participation. And this is synergy again.

So this passage we just went through is the one that our Calvinist and traditional Lutheran friends use to teach what they call monergism, that we're just dead and inert like a corpse, and God comes and saves us against our will. I think we just saw its teaching the exact opposite—synergy, synergism—that we're working and God's working. We're either working together with the devil in rebellion against God, or we're working together with God. And Christ, through his death and resurrection and exaltation, has allowed us now to come out of working with the devil toward our own destruction to come alive again and work with God to work out our salvation.

Q1: Would the— In this reading, it seems that the actions of Christ, the healing and miracles and all the things that he did, are given to us at least in part as examples of the kinds of works that we're supposed to do. Is that a correct reading?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and the things St. Paul and the apostles did. Yeah, but it's different for every person.

Q1: Yeah, sure.

Fr. Stephen: I had a thought, and then it left, but maybe it'll come back. [Laughter] Oh! I was going to comment, since you brought up Christ's healing and miracles, chronic misunderstanding: Christ says all the time, "Your faith has made you well." Well, what does that mean? Wasn't it Christ who made him well? Like, could they have just sat at home and had faith, and they would have been healed, and they didn't need to go see Christ? Is that what he's saying? No, that's not what he's saying. He's saying that you believed really hard. [Laughter] When he says to someone, "Oh ye of little faith," "You just believe, like, vaguely, whereas this other person—" [Intense groaning] "—really believes!"

Q2: Super Saiyan. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, goes super Saiyan on the faith! Obviously not. It's your faithfulness. Everything Christ does is a work of God, because Christ is God. How do we receive the benefits of the works of God, of the work of God, of the grace of God? By faithfulness! It's what Christ's saying; it's what St. Paul's saying here. Christ and St. Paul don't say different things. It's the faithfulness of coming to Christ. And sometimes Christ gave them assignments: "Go wash in the pool of Siloam. Go do this." With the lepers, "Go present yourself to the priest." It says they were healed on the way. They were healed on the way, when they were doing it, when they were walking. It's still Christ who healed them; they didn't heal themselves, by walking. The pool of Siloam wasn't magic water. Christ healed them, but they received it through their faithfulness. They couldn't brag about it. "Hey, guess what? I figured out the trick for restoring blindness." [Laughter] "You go and spit on the ground and put mud on your eye and go wash it off in the pool of Siloam." It's not a technique. It's Christ who did it, but they received it through faithfulness.

Going all the way back to Abraham, that we talked about in Romans and Galatians: Abraham didn't go and impress God and God said, "You know what? In reward for how awesome you are, I'm going to give you a strip of land in the Levant. And I'm going to give you all these other promises about your children being like the stars." It's not that he was impressed. He comes and he tells Abraham, "This is what I'm doing." But then how does Abraham actually receive it? He has to get up and leave Ur, travel to the other side of the known world, a journey that took years, with his whole family. He had to do something. He had to be faithful to the promise God gave him, and, by being faithful, he received the think God promised him, which he promised as a gift, gratis. Very clear dynamic in what St. Paul is doing, unfortunately missed by our Protestant Reformer friends in the 16th century.

Q3: See, I always wondered— It confused me a little bit that Paul said I could work my way to hell but believe my way to heaven. [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and, well, "believe," like: Believe! [Straining noises] But, on the practical side, that has stricken a lot of Protestant people I know with all kinds of conflictedness and self-doubt, because if what gets you to heaven is "I believe real hard!" then every time a doubt enters your mind, you're in danger of hell. "Do I believe enough? Do I really?"

I have so many people I've known in my life who were from a "once saved, always saved" kind of thing. I had a friend who was a former Assemblies of God pastor, whom I've probably mentioned before in these Bible studies, but I asked him once; I said, "Hey, did you write in the front of your Bible the date you got saved?" He said, "Oh, yeah, I wrote all of them." [Laughter] Because stuff would be going sideways in his life. He'd be doing stuff he knew he wasn't supposed to be doing, he'd have doubts, he'd have things: "Well, maybe I'm not saved…" So he'd go forward again the next meeting and pray again and accept Christ again. And then some time would pass and he'd wonder again, and would just get into this cycle.

The whole idea of "once saved, always saved" and "you're saved by faith alone" was supposed to do the exact opposite of that! That was their whole intention. That's what the Reformers were trying to do. As I think we've seen, they're wrong in how they read this stuff, but what they were trying to do was give people assurance and confidence in their faith and peace with God; that's what they really wanted and were looking for. They're not like these evil heretics trying to lead people to hell. As much as I've picked on Luther and Calvin, that's not who they were. They were seeking something; they were seeking a sense of peace with God that they weren't getting from the Church of Rome—and I still don't think you get from the Church of Rome—and they were looking for that kind of assurance and confidence in their faith, which they weren't getting.

But in trying to do that, in sort of re-engineering how they read these passages, to try to give themselves that, their solution doesn't practically work, at least for a whole lot of people. There might be some people whom it really does give a sense of peace believing these things, but I've known a whole lot of people for whom it did just the opposite.

Q4: Yeah, it didn't help me. I fell into the same conflicts, on a much minor scale.

Fr. Stephen: And so for the perspective of, on the positive side, having read this now and what it says, what St. Paul says, if someone comes and they're having doubts— If someone comes to me as a priest and says, "I'm having doubts about this or that," or "Man, I've fallen into this or that sin," I have an answer: "How do you receive the promises of God? Faithfulness. So you need to do the things God commanded you to do." That's the answer to the problem, if you're worried. What are the things God told you to do? Well, if you've fallen into sin, repent! If you're faithful in what he said to do and you come and confess your sins, they're forgiven; it's done. He's promised to forgive your sins. And so if you come and you confess them, you'll receive that promise, if you're faithful to what he's told you to do.

If you have doubts, if you feel far from God, come to the sacraments, come to the Eucharist, come and pray, come and worship, do the things that you know God has created you to do and commanded you to do and you will receive the things that he's promised you—not because you're earning them—there's no earning, there's no merit, you're not impressing him. If I come to you and I said, "If you come over to my house tomorrow, I will give you my old Xbox," and you come to my house tomorrow, you driving to my house did not earn you an Xbox. I gave you a gift; you had to follow through and be faithful to what I said in order to receive the gift.

Q4: I don't believe you.

Fr. Stephen: So if you were sitting at home going: "Man, I wish I had an Xbox," what's the answer to the problem? "Well, Fr. Stephen told you if you drove over to his house, he'd give you one!" So if you're having doubts, you're feeling far from God, you're struggling with sin—God told you to drive over to his house and he'd give you those things!

Q4: So you're doing that because you believe in what he told you.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah!

Q1: It reminds me of a Jewish joke that was told to me by Jewish people. I won't go into the whole thing, but this guy keeps arguing with God. "Why don't— My cousin won the lottery; my uncle won the lottery. Why don't I win the lottery if God is divine justice?" Finally, he hears a voice from heaven which says, "Ernie! Buy a ticket!" [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. So God has these things he created for us to do; it's different for each of us, but if you want to find your salvation, you want to have that peace, that confidence in it, [then] you find those things that God created you to do and you do them. Doing those things does not earn you anything, but that's how you receive what it is that God wants to give to you.

Q1: So Rome was having this hard a time trying to debate that with Protestants?

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Well, but they weren't debating from the point of what I just said. They had their own skewing of it, where they had— "Well, no, you go and you good deeds, and that gets you God's grace." They had this transactional system of merit. I won't go into all that now, but, yeah. So they weren't arguing from the Orthodox position with Protestant people. The Protestant Reformers were pretty good at identifying a lot of the problems with Rome in the 16th century. A lot of these things, from the Orthodox perspective, they were late to the party, like it took them 500 extra years to figure out the papacy was all wet? [Laughter] We kind of already knew that, that there was a problem with the idea of one bishop with universal jurisdiction. A lot of these— There were a lot of these things that were like: yeah, okay, they're good at identifying the problems; it's just the solutions weren't really solutions. In a lot of cases, they tended to go to the opposite extremes, or they'd have one— With the Reformers, sometimes they'll have one really good insight, spiritual insight, but then, like, you've got a hammer so everything looks like a nail. [Laughter] So that becomes the whole thing, and you end up losing other aspects of the truth because you're just focused on this one thing, and so you don't have the full context. There's a whole bunch of issues in their stuff of that fight. And that's part of the reason, too, why I'm not spending a ton of time going into: "Well, this group teaches this and that group teaches that." I'm trying to say: Look, here, let's look at what it says, and if we understand what it says, then anybody who comes to us saying something else, we can say, "Well, wait, no, that's not what it says." Regardless of what it is they've gotten mixed up; we can give them the truth.

Verse eleven: "Therefore"—we've got another "therefore," so we just got some theology; here's going to be the application: here's what that means—"that you, once Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision made in flesh by hands—" Notice a couple things. "You who were once Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision." Does St. Paul, when he says, "once you were Gentiles in the flesh," mean that they've all been circumcised?

Q2: No.

Fr. Stephen: No. What does that mean? They're not Gentiles any more.

Q2: They were once chosen—

Fr. Stephen: Well, no. They're not Gentiles any more.

Q2: Oh.

Fr. Stephen: They're not pagans any more. They've been grafted in. They're Israel now. So he's saying even though those who were circumcised in the flesh want to call you the uncircumcision, the uncircumcised in the flesh—he's referring to that group from back in Galatians. They want to say you're still in this other category; you're still Gentiles in some sense; you're still outside in some sense. You were. He's saying you were at one point outside, and there are people who still want to say that you're outside, to some extent.

Verse twelve: "—that at that time you were without Christ—" So that's the key. That's what made them Gentiles at the time, was that they were without Christ, not that they weren't circumcised, not that they weren't keeping Torah, not that they weren't Jews—it's that they didn't have Christ. So now that they have Christ, that's not true any more.

"—being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world." Back when you were doing all that stuff, when you were Gentiles, the difference is that now you're circumcised; the difference is that now you're Jewish.

Notice that he says the commonwealth of Israel. There was no nation of Israel at this time. There hadn't been for 780 years or so. And before that it was just the northern tribes for 200 years—less than 200 years. And before that, the commonwealth of Israel existed for less than a century. But he doesn't say Judea, Judah, Judeans. That's where we get the word "Jew." He doesn't say you were Gentiles and not Jews; you were uncircumcised, now you're circumcised. It's not about becoming Jewish. He says you're aliens to the commonwealth of Israel, meaning what? Now they're part of Israel. We talked, when we talked about Romans 11, the ten tribes that were dispersed to the Gentiles, dispersed out into the nations, and then the prophets all promised that those ten tribes are going to be restored. Well, how's that going to happen? From the Gentiles coming back in. So the commonwealth of Israel, for St. Paul, is reestablished by the Gentiles coming in to replace the ten tribes that are gone.

Q1: That's a totally new idea to me. I hadn't heard that.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, Judah was never Israel. Judah was part of Israel. There were two tribes; there's some Benjamites, Judahites, a few Levites, but the ten tribes are gone. So when the prophets—Jeremiah, Ezekiel—keep saying God's going to take the stick of Ephraim, the stick of the northern kingdom, and bind it back together with the stick of Judah, and Israel will stand again, how can that happen? The only way that can happen is— They were dispersed out into the Gentiles, so the Gentiles have to come in. But— It's been a while since we talked about this, so I'll give a little more detail. But this was prophesied in the book of Genesis, in a passage that almost no one reads, because it's when you get to the boring last few chapters of Genesis. When you get to the end of the book of Genesis, after Joseph has revealed that he's still alive and all his brothers come and his father, Israel, his father, Jacob, comes and they're all in Egypt, there are these chapters where Israel's blessing all the kids and all this stuff is happening, and people kind of skim over that, because they're like: "Okay, I'm done with Genesis; now I want some Exodus! Give me some Ten Commandments, Charlton Heston!" [Laughter]

But in one of those blessing scenes, there's a separate scene where Israel, Jacob, blesses Joseph's sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Manasseh was the older son of Joseph, so technically he would have been considered Joseph's heir, but Joseph does this weird thing where he crosses his hands, and he puts his right hand on Ephraim, even though he's younger, and he blesses them. Ephraim, as I just mentioned, is what the northern kingdom is called; it's called all the time in the psalms, all the time, because Ephraim was the largest tribe, and the capital city, Samaria, of the northern kingdom was in the middle of Ephraim. So it's the Ephraimites is another name. Syro-Ephraimite War: the Ephraimites are the northern kingdom of Israel. When he blesses Ephraim, from whom they're going to be descended, he says, and I quote, "Your descendants will become the fullness of the Gentiles."

In Romans 11, when St. Paul is talking about all Israel being saved, he says that will happen when the fullness of the Gentiles comes in and is joined to the remnant of Judah. He picks up that language from Genesis. So St. Paul sees the Gentiles, whom he's bringing the Gospel to and who are turning to Christ, as the Ephraimites. They're the Israelites of the northern kingdom whom he's bringing back in, along with the Judahites, who are the remnant, who are faithful, the remnant from which Christ came, and now they're brought together into Israel, all twelve tribes. So that's what he's alluding to here. That's why he talks about the commonwealth of Israel, and he says, "Strangers from the covenants of promise." Notice he doesn't say "from the Torah." It's not about being circumcised; it's not about keeping the Torah, for them. But the promises, the inheritance—that wasn't their inheritance; now it is. They weren't part of Israel; now they are.

Verse 13: "But now in Christ Jesus, you who were once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ." We talked already about the blood of Christ. Sacrificial blood is used, like in the day of atonement, [as] purification from sin, from uncleanness, from curse. Why did they have to be purified?

Q2: So God can dwell among them.

Fr. Stephen: Because they were dead in their trespasses and sins and all that. Now they've been washed by the blood of Christ, purified by the blood of Christ, from all of that, and so now they can become part of Israel; now they're clean instead of unclean. And as you said, now God can come and dwell among them.

Verse 14: "For he himself is our peace, who has made both one and has broken down the middle wall of separation—" Middle wall of separation: where?

Q2: In the Temple.

Fr. Stephen: In the Temple. You are unclean; you can't come to where God is. Where did he say, earlier this evening, is the place God is, like the Temple?

Q1: The Church.

Fr. Stephen: The Church. So because they've been cleaned and purified, they can come into the Church, the place where God is. They're not on the outside, meaning what? Meaning they have access to him. They can come to him. They can come to Christ.

"—having abolished in his flesh the enmity, that is, the law of commandments contained in ordinances, so as to create in himself one new man from the two, thus making peace." So "the law of commandments contained in ordinances": he's talking about, remember, works of the law, those things that separated, made the Judean people, the Judahite people, made them different, because they had this other purpose: to preserve this purity. We talked about the bubble in Galatians. To preserve this purity, this sacred and pure and holy space. Part of that, part of preserving that, meant what? Keeping out whoever was unclean and impure.

Christ doesn't do that by saying, "Ah, toss all the rules. That's fine. Just let all the unclean people walk in." He does it by purifying them, with his flesh that's broken and his blood that's spilled. With his sacrifice, he purifies them so that they can now come in. That's why they don't have to be kept out any more. That's the peace that it's talking about and the enmity. There's this border that had to be policed between the sacred and the profane, between the clean and the unclean, the blessed and the cursed. Christ means we don't have to defend that border any more, because these people out here now have been made clean and pure and holy, so we don't need the wall on the border any more. We're talking about the Church.

And so he creates one new man from the two, a new—not just a new person, like "here's a new man," but a new humanity. So humanity is no longer divided into Jew and Gentile, clean and unclean, circumcised and uncircumcised, all these divisions. There's now Christ's humanity that we come to share in through baptism and purification. It doesn't matter if you were a Gentile sinner before or a Jewish sinner before. It doesn't matter who you were who was dead in your trespasses and sins; now you're in Christ: you're a new creation; you're a new person.

"—that he might reconcile them both to God in one body—" What's that body?

Q1: The Church!

Fr. Stephen: The Church, right. Not only are they reconciled to each other in the Church, but they were all together reconciled to God:

"—through the cross, thereby putting to death the enmity." Through the cross, the sacrifice is an atoning sacrifice that purifies, that purifies them and allows them to enter. Notice here, though—this is important when we're talking to our Protestant friends—the enmity here is not between God and them.

Q1: It's between two groups of people.

Fr. Stephen: It's between two groups of people. That's the enmity. We're not talking about enmity with God; we're talking about enmity with two groups of people, that Christ has put an end to by removing— The wall is removed because the need for the wall is removed. And now they're all together in one body, that whole body he reconciles to God.

"And he came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near. For through him we both have access through one Spirit to the Father." Trinitarian again: we've got the Spirit and the Father. That access, that's just what we were talking about in terms of the body, in terms of the Church. All who come into the Church now can all come in to God, all have access to the Father in the Spirit, through the purification of Christ's sacrifice that has made us all clean.

Verse 19: "Now therefore you are no longer strangers and foreigners"— That was a category; it's the Hebrew word gur. When you read the— We talked about this a little when we talked about Acts 15. There are laws in the Torah about how you treat strangers and foreigners and sojourners, resident aliens, we would call them. They're not Israelites; they don't have to convert to live in Israel. They don't have to be circumcised and eat the Passover. They can. They can become Israelites if they want to become Israelites, but they could also just live in Israel and work for hire or whatever they were going to do. But there were specific laws, remember, that applied to them. They weren't allowed to engage in idolatry or sexual immorality. Obviously, you couldn't murder people. So there were commandments that applied to them, but the food laws, what they ate, that didn't apply to them. There was this huge backlash— We talked about this in terms of— There's commandments that were just for Israel. You weren't supposed to go and enforce those on the whole world, like stop everyone from eating pork. That was never a commandment. It was just they were not to, as something that sets them apart.

So St. Paul is here wanting to make clear what? It's not that: "Oh, we're letting you come and live with us in Israel, but you're still Gentiles." That's not what I'm saying. What he's saying is: "You're not like guests in our house; you're now fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God." He draws those two things together: holy ones, household of God: household, family. You're sons of God; you're holy ones—just like they are. And, as we talked about in Galatians, they didn't become that through the Torah. Christ made— Christ reconciles the whole Church, as he just said, to God, as one. So if you're a Jewish person, you receive those promises, become a son of God, become a holy one, the glorification, resurrection—all those things—you receive all those things in Christ. And if you're a Gentile pagan, guess what? You receive all those things in Christ. And so he's saying you're not a guest, you're not a visitor; you're just as much— You are an heir to those promises and have received the down payment on those promises just as much as any Jewish person who has kept the Torah their whole life like St. Paul.

There's the household of God, which, verse 20:

—has been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling-place of God in the Spirit.

We talked about: they're the body of Christ. Where was the body of God in the Old Testament? In the Temple. So he's saying: You—the assembly, the Church, the gathering-together of the people—you are now the Temple. The prophets and apostles—we have their writings in the Scriptures—they laid the foundation for this, that now the Church is built upon. Christ is the chief cornerstone. I know that doesn't mean as much to us. We have some cornerstone rituals still, I think, in some places, but not the way they did. In the Ancient Near East, you blessed the cornerstone to bless the whole building; you sanctified the cornerstone to sanctify the whole building. So that's what St. Paul is appealing to here, the idea that, because Christ is the chief cornerstone, because Christ is holy, the whole building is holy; because Christ is righteous, the whole building is righteous. That's what he's aiming at with that.

And so— Now notice the "being fitted together" is ongoing, and it's "growing into a holy temple in the Lord." We have this idea of progress again. We see this in pretty much all of St. Paul's epistles. He said it to the Corinthians, too. There's this idea in St. Paul of maturity. It's not like: "Boom, I get saved, now I'm good. I wait to die, and I go to heaven." [Laughter] There's this initial deposit, and then there's this growing into the inheritance. Same idea here. You already have this— You're already a brick in the wall, right? [Laughter] Oh, don't shake your head at me! I know. [Laughter] But we're growing into this temple, because Christ, who's God himself, dwells in us, as one body, one place of access to God himself.

So that's the end of chapter two. We'll stop here for now, and we'll come back to chapter three, Lord willing, next time. Thank you, everybody!