Let's turn to Ephesians chapter
two. Ephesians chapter two. Verse 14. Christ is our peace. Christ is our peace. who hath made both one, and hath
broken down the middle wall of partition between us. Christ is our peace. The natural Jew had the law of
God, and the natural Gentile did not have the law of God. And the natural Jew, because
he had the law of God, hated the natural Gentile. And the
natural Gentile, because the Jew had the law, he hated the
natural Jew. They hated one another. And the
enmity between them was the law. Because Those with the law thought
they were righteous by the deeds of the law, and so they looked
down on the Gentile as just filthy, vile dogs. And yet, that enmity, that law,
was what separated every sinner from God. There was not only
a division between the Jew and Gentile, there was separation
between God and men. And the law was the enmity in
the hearts of men. Men hated God and the law just
gendered to more hatred of God. And this verse says, is our peace. Speaking to believers born of
God, he says, Christ is our peace who hath made both one. He made God and his people one,
and he made his elect Jew and his elect Gentile one. How? Christ is our peace. He made
both one, hath broken down the middle wall of partition between
us. having abolished in his flesh
the enmity, here's what he means, even the law of commandments
contained in ordinances. For to make in himself of two
one new man, so making peace. And that he might reconcile both
unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby. He came and preached peace to
you, you Gentiles who were far off, and to the elect Jews that
were near. For through Him, through Christ,
we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. The Lord Jesus
Christ is our peace. The Lord Jesus Christ not only
made peace between God and His people, between God's elect,
He is our peace. Just like He not only made us
everlastingly righteous, He is our righteousness. And so He
not only made peace between you who believe in God and all these
people in God, and between brethren, He is that peace. He is our peace. He's peace with God, Christ made
peace between God and His people. He's the peace in our heart.
Christ came and preached peace to us and by the Spirit of God,
He's the peace in our heart. And by this same One who is our
peace with God and the peace in our heart, that's the One
who is peace between brethren. Look at those three things, our
peace with God, Peace in our heart and peace with brethren.
Christ is our peace. Christ is our peace who made
peace between God and his people. Now think about this. Go back
to the very beginning. Before sin entered in. Who made
Adam originally have peace with God? Who was responsible for
that? Who worked that so that Adam
in the beginning had peace with God? God did it. God did it all. He created Adam upright, and
God and man had peace. They were in peace with one another.
They had sweet fellowship and communion, walking the garden
in the cool of the day together. Well, likewise, brethren, it's
Christ who creates his people brand new in his righteousness
and in his holiness, and so making us have peace with God and peace
with one another. Now what happened between God
and Adam that created division? What happened? What created division?
God gave one law. One law. And the temptation that
Satan used to beguile Eve was this. If you take that fruit,
what's going to happen is you're going to be like God. You're
going to know good and evil. You're going to know right and
wrong. And this is what our flesh did and does is we go to the
law and says well this is right and wrong. But the problem is
the flesh thinks I'm right and that one's wrong. And that was
the division between the Jew and the Gentile. The unregenerate
Jew was saying I'm right, you're wrong. Sin entered though when he took
that fruit, when Adam took it, sin entered. and death by sin. He didn't learn right from wrong. He had a corrupt understanding
of right from wrong, but what he first learned is, I've sinned. I'm naked. I gotta have something
to make peace with God. I gotta have a covering. But
his corruption was he didn't know right from wrong, because
he tried to make that peace himself. He tried to make a covering that
would make him accepted of God. And that's what sinners have
been doing all along. God gave the law to Israel. And the reason the unregenerate
Jew and the unregenerate Gentile hated each other is because man
tried to use the law to make a fig leaf covering and say,
Ha! I'm better than you. And tried to bring ourselves
to God by it. That's the corruption of our
heart. Because Adam, by his disobedience, made his people sin, God imputed
sin to all his posterity, to all his people. And born of Adam's
corruption, our mind, we come into this world and our mind
is enmity against God. It's enmity, it's hatred against
God. That's what our nature is. It's
hatred against God. We hate God. That's what we do.
We only hate God by nature. alienated from God, enemies in
our mind by wicked works. We didn't think our minds were
enmity against God. Man will say, religious folks
say, I never hated God. Never hated the idol of our imagination. That God that would look at us
and accept us for what we did, we never hated that God. But
you let men hear about the God who chooses whom he will and
passes by whom he will. You let men hear about the God
who does all the saving and man's going to bow and give him all
the glory and you'll find out there's enmity in the heart against
that God. The Lord taught us to pray, forgive
us our debts as we forgive our debtors. We became indebted to
God. We need our debts forgiven. We
have a debt we can't pay by nature. That debt we can't pay is we
have got to die eternally. Because the law says the soul
that sinneth must die. We've got to give God a perfect
righteousness. We can't pay the debt we owe.
We sinned against the Most High God. We committed treason against
the Most High God. That's all that's in our flesh. But God did nothing unrighteous
to us. He didn't do anything unrighteous
to us. We didn't have any reason to be angry against God. Thus
said the Lord, what iniquity have your fathers found in me
that they've gone far from me and have walked after vanity
and become vain? Our Lord stood on this earth
and He said, I've done many, many good works among you. For
which of these works are you stoning me? We did nothing. God did nothing against us. For
us to be angry at God, it was all us being angry at Him because
of our sin. But remember this too, brethren.
We became children of wrath, hating God, but because God chose
a people in Christ, His love for His people never changed. He everlastingly loved His people
in Christ, even when we fell in at Him. Thank God for His
grace. Thank God for His sovereign love
in Christ Jesus. If it wouldn't have been for
God's love and God's grace and God's mercy from eternity, we'd
have been like Amalek. God said, the Lord has sworn
the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.
That would have been all of us falling in Adam if it wasn't
for God's grace. Men think, you know, when a man
in this world, when he's at variance with another man and he dies,
that ends it. But that don't end it with God.
That don't end it with God. Physical death puts the sinner
into an eternal living state of misery while he curses God
and blasphemes God and goes on in the same hatred of God as
he suffers for eternity and God just pours out wrath upon him
for all eternity, the worm that never dies. Physical death doesn't end this
separation and this variance that sinners have with God, this
separation. It doesn't end in death. But
what amazing, amazing grace of our God, brethren. You think
about this. What amazing grace in the midst of this division,
between God and His people. The Lord Jesus Christ came and
willingly from eternity agreed and then came willingly to be
the mediator to interpose Himself between God and His sinful people. There's one God and there's one
mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus. I'm thankful
God didn't send Christ to be a judge. He didn't come to be
a judge. Because a judge does one thing.
A judge takes the law. And a judge says, this is right
and this is wrong. And that's all he says, he upholds
the law. He says, this is right, this
is wrong. That's what a judge does. And
if Christ had come as a judge, this is what he would have said.
And if he came and judged us now, just in ourselves, if we
want to be judged by the law, this is what he says. God is
right, we're wrong. No, he came. as the daysman betwixt
us that he might lay his hand on both of us. He came as a daysman
to do a work for God and to do a work for his people to take
away the division and take away the separation and the variance
and reconcile his people to God. That's what he came to do. That's
what he accomplished. Christ is our peace. The only
way peace is accomplished between those at variance is by Christ
our peace. That's the only way. And it's
through the gospel of Christ our peace. There was a middle
wall, a partition. In the temple, there was a wall
that divided the Jew from the Gentile. Paul was in prison. He's in prison while he's writing
this. You know why he's in prison? because they accused Paul of
taking a Gentile and defiling the Jews part of that temple
by taking a Gentile into that temple. That's how much they
hated the Gentile. Paul's in prison while he's writing
this because that's what he did. Paul was trying to declare to
them that little wall of the law is gone. But they didn't want that wall
taken down. We have this terrible tendency to keep trying to build
that wall back up. But the Lord Jesus Christ came,
and for God and His elect, that enmity that was between us, between
elect Jew and elect Gentile, Christ came to take it down.
And He came to take down that law that was separating His people
from God, to fulfill it, to honor it, to magnify it, for God and
for His people. That's what he came to do. Ephesians
2.14, he says, he's our peace who has made both one and has
broken down the middle wall of partition between us. Having
abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments
contained in ordinances for to make in himself of two one new
man and so make in peace. Christ first had to deal with
God on behalf of his people. If he's gonna make peace, he's
gonna have to satisfy God toward His people. Because we're the
offender. God's justice had to be satisfied
and God's elect had to die. We had to die. What did God demand
as satisfaction? What's going to satisfy the law?
What's going to satisfy Holy God? Blood. Blood. It's got to be blood. You see
there in Ephesians 2.13, Now in Christ Jesus you who are sometimes
far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. Blood. Almost all things are by the
law purged with blood and without shedding of blood. No remission.
What does that mean? Why blood? Life's in the blood.
The wages of sin is death. What would any blood do? What
would any death do? That was the question asked in
Micah 6.6. Wherewith shall I come before
the Lord and bow myself before the Most High God? How am I going
to have acceptance with God? Shall I come before him with
burnt offerings and with calves of a year old and bring my best,
prettiest calf without blemish? Can I give that to God? Will the Lord be pleased with
thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? How
about this? Shall I give my firstborn for
my transgression? What if I give my own child,
my firstborn child, the fruit of my body for the sin of my
soul? What if I give my firstborn? Nope. Our own blood couldn't
even make satisfaction. Our own blood couldn't make satisfaction.
The nature of the sinner who died, who sinned, it's got to
be that nature that lays down his life before God and dies. but it's got to be the nature
of God if it's going to make eternal satisfaction. You get
what I'm saying? So Christ, who is God, comes
down and becomes a man so that he has a man with the nature
of his brethren who sin, he's laying down his life, it's his
blood, and that one who did it is the son of God eternal so
that it's an eternal work. Lord Jesus said, lo, I come. Instead of letting separation
and variance continue, instead of letting divine justice fall
on his people, the Lord Jesus Christ wittingly said, I'll be
made the man of sorrows. I will come and I will come between
the fierce fury of God's wrath in my people and I'll lay down
my life. And I'll take the justice. I'll
take the blows of God's fury. I'll take it in place of my people. I delight to do Thy will, O my
God. Yea, Thy law, that perfect love,
that perfect righteousness it's going to take to fulfill God's holy law. Your law's in
my heart, He said. That's the perfect love we're
with. His people have loved God and loved our neighbor as ourselves.
It was in His heart. It was in His heart. I've preached righteousness in
the great congregation. He declared God's righteousness
on the cross. He said, I've declared thy faithfulness
and thy salvation. I've not concealed thy loving
kindness and thy truth from the great congregation. We look at
Christ crucified and there we see God's faithfulness toward
His chosen people. He promised He would send a substitute. He promised it in the garden.
And we look at Christ crucified and we see God's faithfulness
to His people. He said, I've declared God's
salvation. You look at Christ on the cross.
There's salvation. Neither is there salvation in
any other. There's no other name under heaven
whereby we must be saved. There He is. He said, I've declared
your loving kindness, God. Look to Christ on the cross.
That's where you see the loving kindness of God toward his people,
that love that'll never change toward his people. Nothing shall
separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. That love
is so, so perfect and so sure and so everlasting that when
he made his son sin, he would not spare his son. That's the
love of God for his people. He was doing that for his people. He said, I've manifest your truth,
Lord, your righteousness. There's where we see how God
is just, His law is satisfied, His law is honored, and He's
the justifier. He's righteousness. We're not.
He is. That's why He came. He's the righteousness. He said,
I've declared it. I've declared your truth. And
when we behold His Son and see Him, God looking at His Son and
beholding His Son and being satisfied with His Son, He said, of all
His elect, deliver Him from going down into the pit. I found the
ransom. Here He is. This is the one who ransomed
my people from their sin. And he spoke from heaven and
he said, behold, this is my beloved son. This is the one I'm well
pleased with. This is my peace for my people. This is peace, the one who's
making peace. And he's the peace and all this
is of God. Paul said, all things are of
God who has reconciled us to himself by Christ Jesus. You think about this. We offended
God. We trespassed against God. We
hated God. And he sent his only son to be
the mediator to reconcile us to him. That's amazing. And he fulfilled it. He took
down that middle wall of partition between God and his people, established
it in perfect righteousness. God looks now at his people in
Christ. And when Christ said it's finished
and he died, we really died before God's law. It's not pretend. It's not as if you did. You did. Adam, by his disobedience, when
God imputed sin to us, he wasn't treating us as if we were sin.
We were made sin. We were in Adam. And brethren,
God's people were in Christ, and when Christ died, we died. And God says now, I don't see
sin. My law looks my people up and
down. And because of Christ, because
in Christ we're righteous, he says there is no sin to impute. He won't charge you with what
don't exist. He won't impute to you what's
not there anymore. He put away our sin before the
law of God and he says it exists no more. Now you impute it to
be the same. That's what he said. You reckon
yourself dead indeed to God and alive to God in Christ Jesus. Dead to the law and alive to
God. That middle wall's abolished. But now there's a second way
he's peace. We had a sin nature that's gotta be dealt with. If
he left it right there, there's many people today in religion
that claim to believe that work of Christ and they're still using
the law and still using the New Testament scriptures just like
the Jews was using the letter of the law against the Gentiles. to kill them, to whip them, to
just put the knife in the wound and twist it and turn it and
just keep on beating them black and blue with it. What's gonna
make peace? What's gonna make peace? Man's
gotta be made to know what he really is. Verse 17, Christ came and he
preached peace to you which were afar off and to them that were
nigh. To the Gentile afar off and to
the Jew that was near for through him we both have access by one
spirit to the Father. Christ sent the gospel and by
it he made us alive. He birthed us with the incorruptible
seed and made us alive and made us hear what Christ had done,
that he had accomplished our peace with God. And Paul said,
we come, he's given us the ministry of reconciliation. That's our
whole gospel. Why on earth we would try to
use anything else to affect peace when that's the only thing that
affected peace between us and God was the gospel of reconciliation? Why would we use the law? If a man don't see the law fulfilled
in Christ, he sure ain't gonna see it. He ain't gonna see his
guilt with it. He's got to see Christ bearing
the sin of His people and the justice of God to see that's
why He did that because of our sin. That law said we were guilty. That's why He did it. And this
gospel is a ministry of reconciliation. And when He sends this gospel,
Paul said, we're beseeching you on the behalf of Christ. Now
be ye reconciled to God. God was in Christ. He reconciled
his people unto God. It's accomplished wherever they
are in the world. He's done it. He's accomplished
it. The warfare is accomplished. And then he says now, through
this gospel, this is what he said. Be ye reconciled to God. Stop fighting God. Stop warring
against God. Be reconciled to God. Lay down
your weapons. The warfare is accomplished.
He's not imputing sins to His people because Christ put them
away. Because He made Him sin for us who knew no sin that we
might be made the righteousness of God in Him. It's accomplished! That's the message. And through
that message the Spirit of God enters in. And Christ preaches
peace in our heart and makes us know He's my peace. He's my
peace with God. And He makes you willing to surrender. He says fury's not in me. He says, who's going to set the
briars and the thorns against me in battle? Sinner, you've
taken all your best righteous deeds that you've ever done,
all the knowledge you've gotten, all the best religious works,
and you're setting them up. And he says, and all that is
is briars that have come out of the thorn bush that is our
sinful flesh. And God said, and I'll just go
right through it. I'll just burn that up. And He makes you know that. He
makes you know that you have no righteousness by the works
of your hands at all. It's just thorns. And then He says, or let Him
take hold of my strength. Let Him lay hold of Christ my
Son who is my strength that He may make peace with me and He'll
make peace with me. and He makes you willing to lay
hold of Christ, and He makes you know in your heart, purges
your conscience, and He makes you know you've got peace with
God. Christ is that peace with God. Through Christ, we have access
by one Spirit to the Father. He opens the access and says,
now, you're holy, you're righteous, you can come into God's presence
and God will receive you because Christ is your peace. You know,
that word there, access, it's from a word, I'm trying to think
of the word, but anyway, the Greek word means this. It means,
it's from the tradition of where when they would come into a court
where kings were, you had to have somebody bring you and present
you to the king. And he's saying, by Christ, our
great high priest, our righteousness, He can take us in by the Spirit
and give us access and present us to the Father, to the Holy
Father, and He accepts us. That's peace, brethren. When
you have that, you know you have peace with God. We don't make
our peace with God. Christ is our peace with God.
He made our peace with God, and He makes that peace in our heart,
and He is that peace. And when that happens, in every
heart where that has happened, Christ is our peace between brethren. That unregenerate Jew, that unregenerate
Gentile, they hated each other. They were just one self-righteous
sinner and another self-righteous sinner hating each other, thinking
they were both righteous before God, and the other was unrighteous. No peace. No peace with each
other, and neither had peace with God. None of them. The natural Jew, He exalted himself
with the Gentile. He had outward circumcision in
the flesh made with hands. And he said, ah, we're the circumcision. You're the uncircumcision. So
we're better. And that's what he boasted in. But then God came and he circumcised
the heart of his elect Jew and he circumcised the heart of his
elect Gentile. And you may both see, we're not
one wit better than the other. We both vow puddles of puke before
God and don't deserve a thing. The only acceptance we have with
God is Christ, our peace, who made peace for us, and he becomes
the peace between the brethren. That's when you have peace. God made natural Israel to show
that God alone makes His spiritual Israel by His electing sovereign
grace and passes by who He will. That's why He made natural Israel.
And the natural Jew looked at himself and he looked at those
Gentiles out there that God passed by and he went, Ah! We're the
Hebrews! Y'all are just filthy Gentile
dogs out there. That's what we're saying every
time we go to this book. and try to shoot the arrow and
make the arrow hit somebody in the heart with it. That ain't
how the gospel works. There's too much flesh in that.
The gospel is just shooting a bow at a venture. And God directs
it right into the, you realize when Ahab was in that battle,
Ahab wore disguise. He told the king of Judah, Jehoshaphat,
you wear your kingly garments. And he wore disguise. They didn't
know who the king was. And that fellow that drew that
bow and just shot at a venture, he wasn't aiming at nobody. He
just drew back and shot. He didn't even know which one
was the king of Israel. And the arrow went right, not
only to the king of Israel, it went between the crease of his
armor and hit him and killed him. And just like God's word
said, the dogs licked up his blood. But they were sitting there,
they were trying to shoot the arrow and kill one another and
saying, where are the Hebrews? Because look at us, we're Israel. And God comes and he makes that
arrow find its mark in the heart and he makes you see you just
a filthy Gentile dog like the rest of them. And he makes us all see that.
and makes us see Christ alone as our peace and that he's our
peace because God in his sovereign electing grace chose you simply
because he would and he puts you in Christ and Christ did
it all and you didn't do a thing about it. He did it all and he
did it in mercy when all we deserve with the wrath of God and he
bore it and brought us to God and he makes you see that and
we stop using God's word and ourselves whatever we think makes
us to differ, and saying, I've never done what that Gentile
dog's done. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. And worse. Christ alone's your
peace. Then you'll have peace with brethren.
At wall, still a wall of separation of self-made religious men who
judged by appearance and by the letter This country's been making
laws since we founded it. We're amending laws and fixing
laws that we already made and adding to laws and making new
laws. And there's still not peace in
the heart. It's never going to end racism. That's what was going
on between Jew and Gentile. Never going to end it. Never
going to end pride of... No law is going to end pride
of face Pride of race, pride of grace, or pride of place. It ain't gonna do it. What's
gonna end it? What's gonna make us see that
the only one who makes you to differ is God only? Is Christ
coming in the heart and saying, you don't even deserve your next
breath. right now. If I want to go to
the law and judge somebody according to the law and say, well, this
is what it says, and I won't forgive the one that God's broken
their heart, what I'm saying is, I haven't sinned like that.
And the only way I'll have peace is if God comes and makes me
say, yes, you've sinned just like that and way worse. And
God, by His grace, has saved you. and he's your peace, now
be reconciled. When he does this in our hearts,
brethren, when he did this in your heart in the first hour,
you could not not be reconciled to God. You could not resist
it. You could not say, nope, I don't
believe I will be reconciled to it. When he did this in your
heart, you said, I surrender. And when he does this between
brethren, you surrender. If you've been defrauded, it
makes you say, I'll just be defrauded. If there's been a fault committed
against you, it makes you say, I'll just take the fault. If somebody compels you to go
a mile, it's the only thing that makes you say, I'll go too. What is it? It's knowing I don't
have any peace with God except Christ. That means I have no
wall of separation in anything in me whatsoever that can separate
me from anybody else. You take the worst, vilest sinner
you can think of, in the worst situation you can think of, doing
the worst possible things you can think of, that's me, and
that's you. In ourselves, right now where
we sit in this fine building right here, that's us. The only
difference, Christ came and took down the wall between us and
God, and between us and our brethren, and by His grace, He is the difference. It's Him. It's only Him. It's nothing else. It's nothing
else. We're the chief of sinners in
ourselves. You know, Paul told the Corinthians,
I just realized the time, I'm about to stop. Let me make this
point real quick. Paul told the Corinthians. The
Corinthians had all kinds of trouble. And Paul could have
went to the law, he could have went, he told them that. He said,
the law says, don't muzzle the mouth of the ox, it treads out
the corn, meaning they should have supported Paul. He could
have used that law. He said, but I haven't. That
was my right, according to the law, that's right! He's saying,
If I was going to use the law, that's right, and what you did
was wrong. And Paul said, I've never used that. Never used it. I would just as soon not take
you to law and just do whatever I have to do to take that burden
off you so you could hear the gospel. That's what Paul said
to him. Why? Because the only way to make
peace between a sinner and God and between sinners and sinners
is through the gospel of Christ who is our peace. That's the
only way. Law won't do it. Law was given to tell us, you
can't make peace with God, you're guilty. That's what the law was
given for. He's the righteousness of the law. He is, and he's our
peace. He's our peace. So Paul preached
three chapters here, declaring this gospel. And then he got
over there and he said, now, This right here, this gospel
I've been preaching to you, Christ our peace, because of him endeavored
to keep this unity, this unity of this peace and the bond of
the Spirit, the bond that he's made by Christ. Keep this, because
you're one. You're one. You're one body.
You're born of one spirit. You each have the same spirit.
You got one faith. You got one baptism. You got
one hope. You got one calling. You got
one God and Father who is in you all, and everything's through
Him, and everything's by Him, and everything's to Him. You're
one! And every other exhortation he
made in avoiding sin and then in forgiving your brethren when
they do sin, every one of them was on this basis right here.
You got one who's your peace, that's Christ. He's your only
peace. And if peace is gonna be made,
it's gonna be made through preaching the message of these first three
chapters of this book, Christ your peace. Because that's how
he's gonna make peace. And he said this, I think I'm
going to preach on this Sunday. Thou will keep him in perfect
peace whose mind is stayed on thee. Because he trusts you. Instead of thinking of all the
wrongs that they did to me and all the wrongs they've done and
all the what ifs and what abouts and what's going to be and what
might be and all that. You just go down and down and
down and down in the waves and down in the waves and your mind
will just be so bound up and full of turmoil. He said, stay
your mind on me. He's got it. He's your peace. He's working it all out. And
that'll be peace in your heart. And it's through that message
of Him that He's going to make peace with brethren. It's Him. Amen.