PREACHING OF THE WORD OF GOD
Edwin Mutton
I have read the whole chapter because it is such a wonderful chapter and it shows how fundamentally the gospel is part and parcel of what we often speak of as Ephesian truth. The very greatest thoughts of God for men are contained in the gospel.
There are two expressions which I particularly want to draw upon – one is verse 5, “we too being dead in offences” and the other is in verse 18, “ye who once were afar off are become nigh by the blood of the Christ”. These are two states, “being dead”, and “become nigh”. It is a contrast between what is so awful and what is so wonderful and is that something that we need to face.
I think most of us have been rather appalled and shocked by recent events in the Middle East. A man there is held ransom, and quoted as saying that he did not deserve to die. He wanted to be saved because he did not deserve to die. I am sure we all feel very much for that poor man and his family, but the truth is we all deserve to die. We cannot say we do not deserve to die. “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God”, Rom 3: 23. Paul tells us in Romans “the wages of sin is death” (6: 23). He adds, “but the act of favour of God, eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”. But you and I, dear friends, all deserve to die, we have no ground at all for asking God to preserve us from death because we are sinners; we have sinned and come short of His glory.
Men have an attitude (and maybe it finds an echo in our own hearts) – they do not deserve what they get – Why does God allow this? Why does He not do something about it? Disasters, wars, circumstances that come upon them – they do not deserve them, they say, do not deserve to die; do not deserve to have that kind of end. Maybe we would have said that about Job if we had been around at the time, ‘he does not deserve this’. We need to come to it, all of us, “and you, being dead in your offences”. As far as our eternal salvation is concerned, as far as our future is concerned it is absolutely black without any ray of hope unless God intervenes. Thank God He has intervened. The Lord Jesus, “being rich, became poor” (2 Cor 8: 9) for our sakes. It was a divine intervention that we “by his poverty might be enriched”. Not by His riches. We might have thought that the riches that are God’s, the place in glory that the Lord Jesus had, that by His richness, and His riches, He would have been able to effect a salvation; but it is by His poverty that we have been enriched. It is the way that God has taken to meet the condition in which we were, and are if we are still in our sins, dead. People speak of that, they have an expression that certain things are dead in the water, absolutely no life, going nowhere. That is man away from God, not exactly going nowhere, because he is going on to judgment. The inevitability of death and judgment is something that people are not prepared to face.
It says here, “God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love wherewith he loved us”. God has forgiveness in His heart for every man, woman and child on this earth. That they cannot experience that forgiveness unless they repent is true, but God comes first. God always comes first in every circumstance, in every age, in every situation. God and His heart and His love and His forgiveness came long before there was any peep of response or appreciation of need in my heart or yours; it has all come from God’s side. God said to Adam as to the serpent that it is he who will be crushed (see Gen 3: 15). That did not come from Adam, that came from God, that was God’s. God saw right down through time that this great work of atonement and redemption would have to be undertaken because of the condition that man was in. That is the gospel. You and I can do nothing, God has done everything. “God being rich in mercy, because of his great love wherewith he loved us, we too being dead in offences, has quickened us”. Who apart from God could quicken what is dead? No one naturally can do that, you cannot quicken what is dead. That is what is so final about death, that you can do absolutely nothing. While there is a flicker of life there is hope. Once death comes in things are fixed and cannot be reversed. But God has come in and He has quickened us with the Christ, “ye are saved by grace, and has raised us up together, and has made us sit down together in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus”. We need to face the fact that we are shut up to God. Those of us who are Gentiles, doubly so. The Jews were God’s people, they had a claim on God because He had chosen them as His people. We cannot even say that. Not that it would save the Jew, he still comes under this universal condemnation that “all have sinned and come short of the glory God” (Rom 3: 23), and even with the favour that God showed to His earthly people and the guidance He gave them on how to live, they died and their carcasses were strewn in the wilderness. But how much more it is so of those of us of the nations? What a terrible plight to be in, no hope and without God in the world.
That is the position of every one of us, dear friends, but thank God He has come in from His own side and He has provided the sacrifice, provided the way of redemption, provided the great scope of redemption. What it says is that we who are in this dire situation having no hope and without God, “in Christ Jesus … are become nigh”. I want to stress that, we have become nigh. God has not bridged the distance, He has removed it, taken it away, we are “become nigh”. It does not say here, (it would be true in another setting) that God has brought us nigh, but it says, “are become nigh”. It is as much a position as was the position that we were “dead in offences”. That is the truth of the gospel. God takes us from one situation and puts us in another, “are become nigh”. The work of Christ does that through the blood, “ye are become nigh by the blood of the Christ”. God puts the saved sinner, who He reaches in His mercy and saves in His grace by Him, “become nigh” and nothing can alter that. What a wonderful thing that in the gospel we change position absolutely through the grace of God. We often speak about changing our man, that is our side, but as far as God is concerned, He takes you from the dung hill and He sets you among nobility; “become nigh”. So, there is no danger of you slipping away as to your place before God, you are become nigh and nothing can alter that. In your experience distance comes in, a cloud may fill your sight, but as far as God is concerned the work of Christ has taken you from being dead in your offences and your sins and you have become nigh. That is why I think this chapter is such a wonderful chapter, such a wonderful expression of the gospel because it shows that God does not leave us in the condition of being dead in offences, He quickens us and we are become nigh.
Our standing before God is absolute, nothing can touch that. You can say to any believer that He has become nigh. The younger son might have wandered off into the far country, but he was still a son, he still had that position. He did not look like it, he did not act like it, and he certainly did not go to places that showed that that was what he wanted, but that was the situation. A believer is become nigh and he can always return to the joy of that position. If it were not so, that young man would never have been able to count on the father’s grace, mercy, compassion and forgiveness. He was a son and he had become nigh and his father took him and gave him the experience of what that really meant. That is the gospel. We have become nigh and everything that stood out against us, everything that separated us from God and maybe separated us from one another is gone. The great subject of this chapter turns into that, that God has taken these two disparate people and set them together. That is a consequence of the gospel. The real essence of the gospel firstly is that you and I have become nigh. Then we find that God has slain the enmity so that we are before God in nearness. It would be unthinkable that God had made you nigh and had made me nigh that you and I are at enmity. The gospel, therefore, in its scope, solves every personal problem that there is.
Indeed, the gospel is the answer to every problem in our lives. Individual, family or collective, the answer is in the gospel. The seed of everything is in the gospel. Mr Stoney said, in the gospel, as you put your faith in Christ you receive everything, there is nothing more to have. You say, I understand and enjoy a lot more now than I did the day I was converted. That may be, but you had it all, you had it all in Christ; God has made you nigh, “are become nigh”, there is nothing that you will enjoy eternally that you do not receive in the gospel as you open you heart to God’s overtures of divine grace.
It is a wonderful effect of the gospel that God has dealt not only with sin, he has dealt with all these things that are the result of sin; enmity is one of them. There are various degrees of it, you may not like someone, or you may actually hate them, but it is all enmity anyway. God has slain it, it is gone, there is no reason why I should be at enmity with any other believer. Now, that is not practically so, there are many things that keep us at a distance, even those of us who claim to be in fellowship together. As far as God is concerned He has slain the enmity and both are become nigh, He has made them one, “through him we have both access by one Spirit to the Father”. It struck me this morning as we went into the Father’s presence, that every believer has that right to go into His presence, God is saying that we have access. What a sad thing to think that access is for me, but is it not for someone else? God has slain that enmity and what comes in here is that we have “both access by one Spirit to the Father”. If I can go in and you can go in, God has raised us up together and made us sit down together. It will not be different places in heaven for those I get on with and those I do not; no, God has slain the enmity.
I think that is the great scope of the gospel that we need to have in our hearts. We need to work towards that. We know it is not fully true in practice, there are many believers with whom sadly we cannot share full and happy fellowship with, but as far as the gospel is concerned that is what has been secured, that we have been made nigh and the enmity and the distance and the wall of partition have gone. That is the glory of the gospel. You and I should strive to have that as our objective and to work towards that. If we do not work towards it then we fall short of God’s thought as to what He would have achieved in the gospel. The gospel is all about reconciliation, the reconciliation of God and men, and if God and men are reconciled then surely men can be reconciled. It is a very sad thing if despite that I am still out at elbows with my brother. But sadly these things are there and the gospel is the answer, “are become nigh”.
We apply that in an initial sense, we have been afar off and we have been dead in offences and now we have become nigh. As you go down this chapter you find all these words that speak about togetherness. For example: “fellow-citizens”. Think of that, “fellow-citizens of the saints, and of the household of God, being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the corner-stone”. Everything takes character from Him. There can be no discrepancies. There cannot be some odd stone that stands out with my name written on it. Jesus Christ is the corner-stone, “in whom all the building fitted together increases to” – different things? No, “to a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are built together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”. This is Ephesian language, God is going on with what is whole, God is building us in to one blessed work and that is going on at the present time. If we really have the gospel in our hearts we will not rest in anything less, be it for ourselves, be it for our brethren, be it for believers generally.
Paul saw this all fall away practically. John saw what Ephesus became. They left their first love, they left the truth of it, the truth of this ministry that Paul gave them and alas what weakness and failure has come into church history. But let us cleave to what scripture says, let us cleave to what is true, and it begins with us having a real sense in the gospel that we have “become nigh”. Let us not leave that, let us not move away from God. God does not move away from us, we move away from God. If you feel your relationship with God, your communion with divine Persons is not what it should be, it is not God’s fault, it is your fault. God does not move away, we have “become nigh”. God wants us nigh, He wants us to keep there, He wants us to be there and He wants us to come out and act in that spirit of mercy and grace and reconciliation which is the fruit of the gospel. We have been taken from one situation, we have been placed in another environment, and God intends us to stay there practically. We cannot alter our standing, our state may get better or worse as we go through life, but we should strive to be in accord of what is true of us that it may be true in us and about us because of the effect of the gospel in our lives.
That was my exercise, these two different situations, “dead in offences” and “become nigh by the blood of the Christ”. I noticed it the other day and I had not really noticed it in the same way. It does not say, ‘ye who once were afar off are brought nigh by the blood of the Christ’, but the language is “are become nigh” which is more than a directional thing, it is a positional thing and that is what God has done in the gospel and He wants us to stay there to enjoy what it is to be built together “to a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are built together for a habitation of God in the Spirit”. Once something is built into a building it stays there, you cannot exactly take odd bricks out and put them somewhere else, the building is built together and every part is integral to what is going on. That is what God has done with us, we have been brought into a place where this is going on and where things are fixed for God’s pleasure and every believer, every soul coming into the gain of these things is built into this building, one glorious work that is soon going to be taken and translated to glory to be there forever. May the Lord just strengthen our hearts, affect our souls and stimulate us to work towards this great end which is the purpose of God for all men that they should come into this nearness to Him, for time and present experience and certainly for eternity. May He bless the word.
COLCHESTER