Brought Near, Built Together

Paul had just told his friends in Ephesus that God made them alive as a free gift, and he was not done writing. The chain on his wrist clinked as he wrote.

Paul knew exactly why he was in chains. It had all started at a wall.

In Jerusalem, God's temple stood on a hill, and around its inner courts ran a stone fence about as high as a grown-up's chest. Stone signs stood along it with a warning: any outsider who went past this point would be put to death. (One of those warning stones has been dug up, letters and all, and you can see it in a museum today.) Jewish people could walk on in. Everyone else, the people called Gentiles, had to stop at the fence and look.

A few years before, Paul had gone up to worship in that temple. Some men had seen him in the city with Trophimus, a Gentile from Ephesus, and they guessed wrong. "He has brought Greeks into the temple!" they shouted. A crowd dragged Paul out and beat him, and the soldiers who rescued him had to carry him up the steps. He had been a prisoner ever since.

Now he was writing to Ephesus, where many of the believers were Gentiles, just like Trophimus.

"Remember who you used to be," Paul wrote. "You were outsiders. You were strangers to God's promises, with no hope and without God in the world."

Then the pen pressed harder. "But now, you who were once far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ."

Jesus had died on a cross outside Jerusalem, for Jews and Gentiles both. "He himself is our peace," Paul wrote. "He has made the two groups one, and he has broken down the wall of hatred that stood between them." The stone fence in Jerusalem was still standing while Paul wrote. The wall Jesus knocked down was the old anger between Jews and Gentiles, which had kept them apart much longer than any stones could. On the cross he brought both groups to God together. "Through him we can both come to the Father," Paul wrote, "by the one Spirit."

"So you are not strangers or visitors anymore," Paul went on. "You belong to God's family. You are being built into a house, with Jesus himself as the cornerstone."

(A cornerstone is the first stone a builder sets. Every other stone is measured from it, so if the cornerstone is straight, the whole building comes out straight.)

"In him the whole building is joined together," Paul wrote, "and it is growing into a holy temple, a place where God lives by his Spirit."

That temple on the hill was a good gift, but it had a fence in it, and outsiders could only watch from behind it. Centuries earlier God had said through the prophet Isaiah, "My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations." The fence stayed up, and the promise waited.

Now God was building a different house, with no fence anywhere in it. Its stones were people: Jewish fishermen, Greek shopkeepers, a former Pharisee in chains, and Trophimus from Ephesus, who had never been allowed past the fence. It is still going up in every country on earth, one stone at a time, and it is not finished yet. Every stone in it is measured from the same first one: Jesus, the cornerstone who died to turn enemies into brothers and sisters.