He is our peace, who hath made both one

Israel in the Old Testament was ordered by God to be a people separated from the moral and spiritual pollutions of the heathen world. He hedged them about, and many of the precepts of the law (e. g., food laws) were designed to make social intercourse with Gentiles difficult. The ‘middle wall of partition’, 2. 14, separated Jew from Gentile, just as there was a literal wall in the Jerusalem temple barring the Gentile under pain of death.

The Gentiles were ‘separate from Christ’, v. 12a NASB, having no part or lot in the Messianic people, Rom. 9. 5. Like Ruth the Moabitess, they were all strangers to the covenants of promise. ‘Having no hope and without God’ in the world accurately describes the prevailing moral conditions of the ancient pagan world.

But now what a glorious transformation has been brought about by the death of Christ, and realized in union with Christ, v. 13a! The vast redemption price is expressed by references to His blood, and His cross. A new entity - the church - has thus been brought into being, by including the Gentiles on an equal footing with the Jews: a body (with a common life), a city (with equal citizen privileges), a family (with no poor relations), and a magnificent spiritual temple (integrated together with diverse living stones), vv. 16, 19, 21. Old barriers and enmities have been swept away, for Christ has made peace, preached peace, and indeed He is our peace. The church is thus uniquely the vehicle and display of God’s reconciling power, the effects of which will one day be seen to be universal.

The world is broken at every level; alienation and conflict make life misery for millions. How tragic, too, is the injury to the cause of Christ caused by the endless rifts between Christians! Nevertheless, throughout the earth God’s reconciling grace through the gospel is seen, and, unheralded, the church still grows unto that holy temple in the Lord. The outcome is not in doubt, for the blessed Trinity is ever active to that same end, ‘In [Christ] ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit, v. 22. Even now ‘through[Christ]we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father, v. 18.