James read our scripture for
us, but we're going to focus on verse 13, but now in Christ
Jesus, you who once were far away have been brought near through
the blood of Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ chose 12
men to be apostles, apostles of Christ, and of those 12 Only
Paul is specifically designated as the apostle to the Gentiles,
and for this he was uniquely qualified, because he was a Jew
by birth, which meant he was raised with a knowledge of the
Jewish scriptures. But he was raised in a Gentile
city, Tarsus, which is in modern-day Turkey. So he grew up around
Gentiles, probably speaking Greek as much his native language as
the Hebrew or Aramaic, maybe that his parents spoke. And he
was familiar with the Gentile way of thinking. He straddled
both worlds. But this book, more than any
other, shows how the gospel brought the Gentiles in as one with the
Jews. Look at chapter three, verse
six. Because this kind of gives us the theme of the book. This mystery, chapter 3, verse
6, this mystery is that through the gospel, the Gentiles are
heirs together with Israel, members together of one body, and sharers
together in the promise of Christ Jesus. Of course it would be
Paul that would write a book like this. None of the other
apostles, it seems that none of the other apostles were fully
reconciled, ever fully reconciled to the idea that the Gentiles
were on the same footing now as the Jews. They knew it to
be true. I mean, it's the same way with
you and me. There are things that we believe
and yet we find competing thoughts in our own mind, isn't that true?
In fact, we fight the fight of faith in our own minds throughout
our entire lives. We say, don't we, that we believe
that salvation is by grace without any works of our own, but let
our works fail and we begin to fear, which is a denial of what
we claim, that salvation is by grace without our works. Well,
it was difficult for the apostles to ever reconcile to the idea
that the Jews no longer had a privileged status. in the way God was doing things.
And this principle was included in the very first gospel message. Look here in verse 17 of chapter
two. Speaking of Christ, he came and
preached peace to you who were far away. Who is he talking about? The Gentiles. and peace to those
who are near. Who's that? That's the Jews.
Now turn back to Acts chapter 2, and you'll see that this aspect
of the gospel, the Holy Spirit inspired the Apostle Peter to
preach this very point, even though I'm not sure that he fully
understood just how serious God was about this, but nonetheless,
under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, he preached this
same truth Because when they said, brothers, what shall we
do? We'll pick up in verse 38 of Acts chapter two. Repent and
be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for
the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift
of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your
children and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord
our God shall call. And so maybe without realizing
the full significance of it, yet Peter already is mentioning
in the very first full-blown presentation of the gospel, he's
already mentioning this gospel is for those that are far off,
the Gentiles. Now these verses were addressed specifically to
the Gentiles, Paul says in verse 11, therefore remember that formerly
you who are Gentiles by birth and called uncircumcised by those
who call themselves the circumcision, now that's Ephesians chapter
two verse 11, these words were written with the Gentiles in
mind. And it was for the purpose of
reminding them of the gross spiritual darkness in which they as a people
had existed ever since there was such a thing as a Gentile.
And then to show them the great and wonderful grace of God that
had delivered them from that condition and brought them nigh
by the blood of Christ. Peter said that Jesus Christ
died the righteous one in place of the unrighteous ones to bring
us to God. the Gentiles had been to this
point utterly ignorant of that truth. Their lack of nearness
to God arose from the fact that they had no knowledge of Christ.
Let's start here by looking in verse 12. He said, remember at
that time you were separate from Christ. Now we say those words
and we scarcely understand the power of them. To be separate
from Christ is to be separate from everything good. We read
at the very beginning of this book, it said, God has blessed
us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenly places in Christ. So to be separate from Christ
is to be separate from every blessing that God has for the
sinner. Everything God has for the sinner
is in Christ. If you don't have Christ, you
don't have any of it. And so it said, you were without
Christ excluded from citizenship in Israel. Now, what do you mean
by that? Well, the Gentiles were not part
of the nation of Israel. Therefore, they had never heard
of Christ or as the Hebrews would call him, the Jews would call
him Messiah. That's why they were without Christ, without
Messiah. They never even heard of him. And so they were without Messiah,
having been excluded, not being part of the citizenship in Israel,
and they were foreigners to the covenants of promise. What do
you mean by that? They didn't have the Bible. Nobody
had told them what God was going to do. They didn't even know
about Adam and Eve and the very first promise of salvation through
the seed of the woman. They were ignorant of that. They
didn't know all that God had told Moses there on the Mount
and in other places and setting up that form of worship which
pictured Christ. They did not have access to the
prophets who over and over again spoke of one who would come and
be the Savior of God's people. They didn't know anything about
that. And that left them without hope. and without God in the world.
Now, that doesn't mean they didn't have a hope. They did have a
hope, it was just a faulty one. They hoped in their gods. What
Paul means is you didn't have any real hope. Everybody in this
world has a hope of going to heaven when they die. I remember
listening one time to Brother Henry Mahan preaching, and he
mentioned that he was at a funeral. I guess he was going to be preaching
the funeral, and he was talking to the funeral director. The
funeral director had been a funeral director for a long time, and
he told Henry, he said, you know, as near as I can tell from all
the sermons I've heard preached over these many years, nobody
in Ashland has ever gone to hell. Why? It doesn't matter what kind
of person a fellow was or what he believed or anything like
that, in a funeral they'll preach him right into heaven. Everybody's
got a hope. They hope in their works, they
hope in their church, they hope in their morality, they hope
in their sincerity, but they hope in something. without hope, and then without
God. Not that God was not present.
God was present, God's everywhere. I've sometimes heard hell described
as that place where God is not. I can tell you this, everyone
in hell wishes that's the way hell was. God is in hell, and
that's what makes it to be hell for them. God is there in his
justice and wrath. And they are experiencing what
it means to be a sinful person in the presence of a holy God. God is everywhere. So they weren't
without God in that sense, they were without God in terms they
had no knowledge of the true God, they worshiped idols. all
kinds of them. Paul went to Athens and he was
grieved at all the idols that he saw. On every street corner
there was an idol and they were so concerned that they would
miss one of the gods and therefore that particular God would be
upset and maybe bring about some kind of calamity. They had a
shrine, an altar, a likeness to the unknown God. The unknown
God. And I like what Paul did with
that. You know, Paul was a good preacher. He always met people
where they were and picked up something about their situation
and turned it into an opportunity of the gospel. And he said, I
saw this shrine of the unknown God. Let me make him known to
you. There is a God you don't know.
Let me tell you about him. And he began to preach to them
the God of scriptures, the God of creation, the God of judgment
and justice, and the God of mercy in the Lord Jesus Christ. They
were without God. Well, what's true of nations
and regions and families or whatever other group that may be formed
You can imagine it's also true of individuals as well. After
all, groups are simply made up of individuals. And while Paul
was just saying in general, you Gentiles were separate from Christ,
the fact is that everyone in this world who is born into this
world comes into this world separate from Christ. separate from Christ. Now we're not viewing this from
God's perspective in eternity where he sees all things as already
done. We're talking about in the flow
of time as we experience it and every person When they are born
into this world, we can go back farther, the moment they're conceived,
they are a person, and they are a person separate from Christ. And more than that, they were
a person separate from Christ, and there was nothing anyone
could do about it. He says, verse 13, now Ephesians
chapter two, now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far away, Now,
what were we far away from? Well, far away from God, or at
least any peaceable relationship with Him. And in our hearts and
minds, we willingly departed from God. Now, Adam and Eve,
they're in the garden. They were with God. God came to them in the cool
of the evening. and met with them face to face,
and spoke with them, and they fellowshiped with him. But when
they sinned, what did God do? He put them out of the garden,
and they no longer had access to him. And it says there was
a gate at the garden, and there was an angel that guarded it
with a sword, and that's as close as they could get. They were
without God in that respect. They were cut off from God. But
look over at Colossians chapter one, and we'll see how this applies
to us individually, spiritually. Colossians chapter
1 verse 21. Once you were alienated from
God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. Now in a religious community
such as you and I live in it's hard to convince people that
they were ever alienated from God. In fact While they might believe in some
abstract theological sense that we were all born that way, most
religious people believe that something was done that kind
of brought them near to God. But everyone is born separate
from God and there's nothing that anyone can do about that.
Not preachers, not priests, not elders, not churches, not ceremonies
can reunite us to God. Not even ceremonies God has commanded
can reunite us to God. Now, of course, we have a unique
position on baptism in our church that is unique in this town.
I don't think there's another church in this town that believes
it as we do, at least I'm not aware of it. And we practice
it because we believe that's what the scriptures say. And
I know that not everyone who sprinkles infants and calls it
baptism sees the same significance in that, but I do know that at
least some of them. Maybe many, maybe even most of
them believe that that ceremony somehow or another brings that
child within a more favorable relationship to God than he would
have been if his parents hadn't fulfilled that obligation. I
asked a preacher, well, he's dead now, but he was pastor of
one of the churches in town here. Now, this is 25 years ago or
so, but I went and visited him in his office. And as one raised
where, I mean, I've always been, shall we say, a Baptist, you
know, and never associated much with those who sprinkled infants.
And so I just asked him plainly about it. I said, why do you
do that? Well, I think actually my words were, where did you
all get that? Because I keep reading the Bible and I can't
find it. You will not find one instance of an infant being baptized
in the scriptures, not one. Not unless you first make some
assumptions. But if you just go to the Bible, actually I think
if anybody, if you handed them a New Testament, they would never
come up with the idea of infant sprinkling. But I asked him,
I said, where'd y'all get it? He kind of laughed and began to
explain it to me, and I tried to understand what he was saying.
Seemed terribly confusing to me, but I did the best I could,
and when he was done, I said, let me ask you a question, because
I wanted to make sure I understood what he was saying, because it
sounded to me like he was saying something absolutely awful. And
I said, imagine that some good, fine, reformed young couple has
a baby. And at the appropriate time,
they take this baby to their church and they sprinkle him
according to how you all do that. And then they begin to raise
him in the way that the church says they should be raised and
trained. And he reaches the age of about
one or one and a half and he dies. And at the same time down
there in the Amazon, in a very primitive area where the name
of Christ has never been mentioned, another young couple had a baby
also. And they initiated that baby
into whatever religion it was they practiced, and they began
to train him according to their religion, and he got to be about
a year old, and he died. And I looked at him, I said,
now tell me, is there a difference in the eternal destinies of those
children? And he said, yes. Now friends,
you know, the form of baptism, while there is a scriptural form
of it and everything, that's not the big issue. The big issue
is what do you make of your baptism? Sprinkling a child with some
water and Making promises about him and all that does not bring,
it doesn't make him, as we were reading here, it said that they
were foreigners to the covenants of promise. That won't make a
child to be one of the citizens under the covenants of promise.
It will not unite him to God. And quite frankly, neither will
dunking him under the water like we do. The only thing that baptism,
no matter how it's practiced, And I say this with all the boldness
that I can. The only thing that any form of baptism actually
accomplishes is making somebody wet. That's it. You cannot bring about a spiritual result
from a fleshly work. And baptism's a fleshly work.
I mean, it's done with fleshly hands on a fleshly body. Now,
I point that out simply because that does seem to be a prevailing
opinion in this area, and I also want to make sure that we don't
think that just because we changed the form of baptism, I say we
changed it, you all changed it from what many of you, from what
you were raised in, the form of baptism, the issue's more
important than that. What do you make of it? Now,
if someone tells us they believe the gospel and they've trusted
Christ and Christ has washed away their sins, we're gonna
take their word for it. And if they say, I wanna confess
him in baptism, we're gonna baptize him. But we're also gonna understand
he's no different when he comes out of the water than when he
went in. If he did not go in there reconciled to God, he didn't
come out reconciled to God. Nothing, absolutely nothing,
which can be seen with the eyes, nothing will reunite those who
are far from God. It will not reunite them to God. Do you realize how much of religion
would be dismantled on that very one point? When you see how much
of religion is devoted to things that people are supposed to do
to get back to God? ceremonies, the structure of
the church. You that are far off, we are
far away. The scriptures say your sins
have separated you from your God and the reason that all these
other things cannot fix that or cannot reunite us to God is
that none of these things can actually fix that problem of
sin. Now I can preach to you about
the forgiveness of sins, but I cannot forgive your sins. And those priests who dare to
tell people their sins are forgiven are simply inserting themselves
into a place that belongs to Christ alone. God has never put
the authority to forgive sins, in that sense, into the hands
of men. And if any man had such authority,
I'd say, then why aren't you just going around giving blanket
forgivenesses? No man, no church, no ceremony,
nothing, nothing that can be perceived with the eye of the
flesh has the power to put away sin. And until sin is put away,
we remain separated from our God. You that were afar off. We are far off by judgment because
like he sent them out of the Garden of Eden so we are driven
away from God in judgment but we are also far away from God
because until God does something to us that's just the way we
want things to be. Folks won't say it out loud but
actually it's good riddance. That's the attitude of man towards
God. Oh they want some kind of God
and they'll make up a God that suits them and they'll draw near to him
but he's no God at all. Men don't want the God of Scriptures. They don't want to have anything
with the God who says, I am God and beside me there is no other.
They want nothing to do with the God who says that he will
by no means clear the guilty. They want nothing to do with
the God who says that he is so holy and perfect and righteous
that he cannot bear to look upon sin or sinners with any favor. Anything to do with a God who
claims the right to determine their destiny and to control
the affairs of this world to bring them to that destiny. They
don't want that God. Moreover, they don't want the
Savior. that God has sent which can reunite us to God because
this Savior comes claiming he's the only way to God and while
they may be happy to say well he's one of the ways, people
don't, in our day anyway, don't like the idea of claiming there's
only one way. Why that's not broad-minded enough,
that's not sophisticated enough. Evidently our Lord Jesus was
not broad-minded enough or sophisticated enough because it was he who
said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to
the Father but by me. Nobody likes a Savior whose method
of salvation was not to say this person is worth saving, but rather
he came as a Savior for sinners. and did the kind of work necessary
to save them, which is to shed his own blood. We look at the cross, and if
we understand anything about what the cross says, it tells
us we have no reason to boast. Isn't that true? Look what it
took to save us. I mean, if we were good, If we
had any goodness at all, God might have been able to save
us with less of an effort than that. Our sins have separated us from
God. Our sins have made us rebels
against him and haters of his son. We were far away from God. But it says here, been brought
near through the blood of Christ. Now when we think how far away
we were from God, it should amaze us that it ever might be said
we were brought near. And what brought us near? The
blood of Christ. The blood of Christ shed for
sinners. And why did it have the capacity
to bring us near to God when all the pastors, preachers, priests,
churches, baptismal fonts and baptismal tanks and wine and
wafers, when all of them, they couldn't do it, how could one
man get that done? Because he alone gave to God
what was necessary to satisfy the justice of God against us
that had driven us away in the first place. His blood. You know, when God told Moses
about all the sacrifices, and of course there's blood and all
these sacrifices, God said this, it's the blood that makes atonement
for the soul. And the book of Hebrews picks
it up in a similar fashion. It says, without the shedding
of blood, there is no remission of sin. So long as sin is upon
me, I am far from God. So long as sin is in me, I want
to be far from God. So long as sin is on me, God
won't tolerate me coming into his presence. But the blood of
Jesus Christ is such that it takes away sin in the sight of
God. It takes it away so that God
no longer brings it to mind. He said regarding the new covenant.
Now, this is in the Old Testament when he's describing the new
covenant. And he said in this new covenant, there are sins
and iniquities. I will no longer remember. Not
meaning he would forget they happened, that's impossible for
God. What he means is he'll not bring
them up because they've been paid for.
And you know, once a debt's been paid, you don't bring it up anymore,
it's done. And so the blood of Jesus Christ
shed for God's people actually put away their sins in the sight
of God to such a degree that according to him they have no
sin. There shall be a search made
for the sins of Israel and the transgression of Judah says the
scriptures but it shall not be found. Why? The blood washed
it away. I referred to Psalm 51 in the
Sunday school lesson as I was reading that in preparation. There's those words by David,
wash me and I will be whiter than snow. Wash me from blood
guiltiness. The blood clears my account with
God. But you know something? The blood
does something else. This blood is powerful enough
to wash out all the sin stains. And when we are taught about
the blood by the Spirit of God, it puts away our enmity with
God and reconciles our hearts to God. You see, the blood of Jesus Christ
puts away our sin. It's gone. The legal issue is
taken care of. But the fact is, that still leaves
us as rebels against God. That didn't change us. If that's
all that the blood did was illegal work, that means we remain unchanged. But the blood of Jesus Christ
reconciles the heart to God. Why? Well, I don't know that
the scriptures ever give the actual reason for it, but this
seems plausible to me. It's certainly the reason that
my heart is reconciled to God. When the spirit of God took the
things of Christ and revealed them to my heart, I said, he
did that for me? For me who rebelled against him? For me who hated him? For me
who did nothing but break his law? He shed the blood of his
own son for me. And that work of grace and mercy
in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ broke the rebellion and made me love him. Is it not
true with you? People who hate God, and you
run into them on the internet, And they find fault with him.
And they say, some say, you know, he is a maniacal, genocidal,
megalomaniac. And what they're talking about
is how, well, he wiped out the whole world in a flood. They
didn't like that. He rained fire and brimstone
on Sodom and Gomorrah. He sent the Jews into the land
of Canaan to kill everybody. And they don't like it that he
is prepared to hell for everybody that doesn't submit to him. And
they think that that makes him a bad guy. You know what that
proves? They have no clue of his holiness
and no understanding of their own sin and no understanding
of the amazing grace of God in Christ Jesus, whereby he took
it upon himself to pay the debt that his people owed. You that were far away have been
brought nigh by the blood of Christ. Having been brought nigh to Christ,
we now, excuse me, having been brought nigh by the blood of
Christ, that means that we are no longer separate from Christ.
We are joined to him. Of God are you in Christ, Jesus
says the scriptures. God put us in Christ, and therefore,
by that act we're joined to him and all that comes from him. Because we've been united to
Christ we're no longer excluded from citizenship in Israel but
the Bible says we are members of God's Israel for all who believe
are the true children of Abraham the believer. That's what the
Bible tells us. Our genetics, our natural genetics
may not be Jewish but in our hearts we are of that people
chosen by God to be his holy nation. We are Israel. We're no longer foreigners to
the covenants of promise, but those covenants of promises have
been told to us and sealed to our hearts by the Holy Spirit
of God. We're no longer without hope, but we have a good hope
through faith in Christ Jesus, a sure and certain hope of the
resurrection of the dead, and a sure and certain hope that
in time to come we shall be with him, as the scriptures say, always
with him forever. and we're no longer without God. We're no longer living this world
either trusting a phony, faulty God who cannot save, nor are
we left in atheism. God has made himself known to
us and drawn us to himself with cords of kindness. I have loved
you with an everlasting love, says our God, therefore have
I drawn you with cords of kindness. And he has bound us to himself. We have become members, stones
as it were, within God's temple, a place where God lives by his
spirit. You who were far off, have you
ever been far off from God? I think I can say this with some
authority. If you've never been far from
God, you've never been brought near to God. Somebody told Brother Donny Bell
one time, you know, she was going out the door, she says, Preacher,
I've loved God all my life. He said, that's too long. That's
too long. We were born separate from God.
And if he is going to bring us near, he's gonna make us aware
how far off from God we are. And do you remember what that
was like? You know something, even we believers, once in a
while, once in a while, God lets us experience that again. Now,
he's not really far off, but he lets us get into such a psychological
or spiritual state that we feel we're far from God. Why? probably
because we've become very careless about the great blessing we have
of being brought near to God. You know, anybody that's married knows what it's like to be taken
for granted and then to take the other one for granted. I
mean, you know, we're married, we live together, we're in the
same house, You come and you go and you never think for a
minute what a wonderful blessing it is to have this other person
until it looks like you might not. I remember once when Bonnie had
surgery, I thought I was handling it pretty good. You know, okay,
surgery, take care of it. They do surgery all the time.
This won't be a problem. We went over to the hospital
and I sat out there in the waiting room and waited for news. And
like I said, I thought I was absolutely fine until they came
out and they said, everything's good. And I began to cry. You say,
why would you cry then? Well, that just unlocked all
that tension I'd been holding in. over the possibility that
what they would find would be something that would take my
wife away from me. Now, sometimes God allows us to go through a
season, a feeling cut off from him, probably because we're taking
him way too much for granted. And it gives us an appreciation
of this wonderful scripture. You, who were at one time far
away, have been brought near by the blood of Christ. Now,
if at the present time you recognize yourself as far from God, you
may be far, but he's still one step away. No matter how far
you are, he's only one step away. Jesus Christ said, come unto
me. that step toward Christ. Christ, the Lamb of God slain
from the foundation of the world, that brings us nigh to God, near
to God. Say how near does it bring us?
As near as Christ himself. I don't know how many times Henry
quoted the words from this particular hymn in the six years that I
was there. I guess it's because he understood
and rejoiced in it so much. There's a hymn that says, near,
so near to God, nearer I cannot be. For in the person of God's
son, I'm as near as he. Dear, so dear to God, dearer
I cannot be. For in the person of God's son,
I'm as dear as he. Brethren, those are bold words,
but they're true words. God's salvation is not a halfway
proposition. As wretched and awful and far
away from God as we are in nature and practice, through the blood
of Christ we are brought as near to God as Christ himself.