Have you ever had the experience of missing out on something because you were too far away? Most of us in this room live in Scarborough. I'm guessing that you have therefore had this experience, because Scarborough is a town that is far away from just about everywhere. You can drive to York and hit kind of big roads that way—it takes about an hour. Or you can get bored of that road and think, "Well, I'll go to Goole instead," and discover that takes you an hour and 20 to hit a decent-sized road. Or you can head all the way up the coast to Newcastle, and finally you get there. But Scarborough is a place that is far away, and sometimes being far away means you miss things.
If you think back to the days of the pandemic, when travel was heavily restricted and you couldn't travel out of your area, perhaps there was a family thing in a less restricted part of the country that you would have loved to have gone to, but you were too far away and couldn't travel to go there—so you missed out.
It's lovely to have lots of people here who call home different countries from all over the world. So you've got family and friends in countries far away, and one of the prices that you're paying to live in this country is that you can't just pop around to your mum's house for tea—it's just too far to go.
Or maybe your favourite band is touring the UK. You'd love to go and hear them play, but the closest they're gonna get to you is four hours away, and you just can't make it happen for one evening.
What if we were talking instead about God? What if God were to throw the biggest party ever? What if God were to start handing out blessings—not just blessings on the scale of a meal with your mum or a good gig, but blessings that impact how your eternity plays out? What if God was to hand out blessings on the scale of wiping away every tear from people's faces, so that life going forward was good and only good? What if that was to happen, but you were too far away to take part? Wouldn't that be just awful?
Well, that's what we're thinking about together this morning. We're just actually going to look at the first three verses of that reading—11 to 13—and then we're going to spend the next two Sundays looking at the rest of the portion that was read. These verses tell you that you were further away from God than you ever realised, but wonderfully, God has bridged the gap.
Let me read again verse 13: But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
A hard sermon to prepare
I found this sermon quite hard to prepare. Let me share with you why. There were two things that I was getting stuck on preparing this sermon.
One is to do with the text—and it's why was the text so negative? So, like the previous portion of Ephesians 2 that we looked at over the past couple of Sundays, this is a kind of before-and-after passage: once you were like this, but now things are like this. But if you look at the paragraph, the "but now" comes at the start of verse 13. So you've got in our Bible—what—about 12 lines' worth of "once things were really bad", and then finally, "but now it's fixed". That's all. That's the good bit. The bad bit takes up most of the passage. And even when you get to verse 13, if you look at it, he's got one more bad bit he smuggles in there too: But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away—you thought I'd finished with the bad bit, didn't you? No, I've got one more line for you. So just two lines of good news, and 12 or 13 lines of bad news. It's so negative. Why?
That's one thing I was struggling with.
The other thing I was struggling with was: how do I preach this as a piece of good news that I am gripped by and desperate to share with you?
So when I'm preparing to preach, there are all kinds of convictions I hold that drive the way I'm preparing and planning what to say. But one of them is that the gospel of Jesus Christ is good news. Another one is: every passage in the Bible is about Jesus. So every passage in the Bible is good news. And another one is—I thought it was going to be a couple... sorry, three. I'm a preacher; I'm allowed to have more points than I tell you there are going to be! The third one is: it's no good for me just to kind of know what it says and then trot it out. I have got to somehow reach the point before I preach where I am gripped by what's here, so that what I'm sharing with you is just an outflow of: this is just wonderful. And I wasn't getting there with this passage. I was stuck. I just didn't have that kind of "this is the best thing ever, I've got to share this". I couldn't get there.
And then I realised the reason why both those things were making me stuck was the same thing. And that was this: I did not actually really believe that before I was a Christian, I was as far away from God as this is telling me that I am. I hadn't actually really got that on board.
So what I needed, it turned out, was a passage that would really rub my nose in how far away from God I was, if I was to properly appreciate what God had done for me. In other words, I needed this passage. And once I had let this passage do that work on me, suddenly I had no problem finding something to share with you. So actually, the two reasons why I was getting stuck were one and the same—and that's why this passage is amazing.
So verse 13 is the kind of summary of the whole paragraph. So I'm going to read that, and we're going to use that as the structure for what we're going to look at now. So here's what verse 13 says: But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
So, three points.
You were far away
Number one: you were far away.
He says you were separate from Christ. Let me read verse 12: Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. "Separate from Christ"—that's something that everybody who is not a Christian can say. You don't yet know Jesus; you're separate from him. This is the problem that you already know that you have. But he's being much more specific here, because he's talking specifically about Gentiles.
So, do you see in verse 11 he says, "Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth..." So, Ephesians 2:1–10, he's addressing the whole human race, whatever your ethnic background. In verse 11 to the end of the chapter, he is specifically addressing Gentiles—people, that is, who are not Jewish. This was a huge division in the ancient world. I think we today struggle to realise just how big the division between Jew and Gentile was. There's nothing quite like it today. You get small glimpses of it if you look maybe at some of the ugliest forms of racism that there have been over the past 50 to 100 years. Getting back to perhaps the eras in the United States where Black and white people had to travel on different seats in public transport—maybe you're getting close to some of the hideous division that there was between Jew and Gentile.
Certainly, if you went to the temple in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, there was the temple building itself, various courts outside that Jewish people could go to. But outside of that, there was another court that anyone could go to. But closer to the temple than that, you could only travel if you were yourself a Jew.
One book I was reading as I was preparing this said something I've not been able to have the time to kind of trace back to its sources—I always like to check these things before I share them, in case sometimes you find that people are perpetuating myths that, if you say them often enough and repeat them often enough and quote somebody, everyone assumes it's true. But actually, you trace it back, and there's nothing behind it. So, for example—by the way—there never has been in Jerusalem a gate called the "Needle Gate". Just throw that out there—it doesn't exist. But lots of people think that there is one or was one—there isn't.
Here's another one, though, that I think is true, but I've not checked it: apparently, in the time of Jesus, if a Jewish boy or girl married somebody who was a Gentile, the family would hold a funeral for the Jew who had just married outside of their faith. Now, if that's true, that shows you just how deep this division ran. And if it's not true, it's only because that exact detail isn't right—but the portrait it represents is right.
Which means that for Gentiles—which is most of us—there is an additional way that we are separate from Christ. So he says, "Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ." Sure, every person who is not a Christian can say that. But if you're not Jewish, there is another way that you are separate from Christ. And yes, this is what he is explaining in verse 12. He says you were foreigners to the covenants of promise.
A covenant—think of it a bit like a contract, an agreement between two parties. God made covenants with his people in Old Testament times. Covenants of promise. God promised to do things for his people—things like, "I will be your God and you will be my treasured possession, my special people." Things like, "I will bless you and you will be a blessing." But if you are not Jewish, you are not part of those promises. They were promises that were not made to you. They were made to the Jews—the descendants of Jacob—but not to you. So those promises are great, but they're not your promises.
Here's one more promise that God made: "I will send a king to rescue you." Now, don't look that up—search that on Google trying to find which Bible verse that is. There's no Bible verse that says exactly those words in that order. But that is a paraphrase of an awfully large number of verses in the Old Testament. In a lot of places, God says, "I will send a king to rescue you," which indeed he would do—and did do. But if you're not a Jew, that isn't actually for you.
Which is why it's so sad that he says that these Gentiles were excluded from citizenship in Israel. That's not just to say that it's going to take you longer to get through the queues at Ben Gurion Airport if you want to go and visit Tel Aviv because you haven't got an Israeli passport. No, it's a different kind of passport you haven't got. You don't have a passport that says that all these wonderful promises are yours. You're separate from Christ—not just don't know him, but don't belong to the people he was sent for.
And so he says you're cut off from God's promises. Those promises are not yours. It's a bit like—do you ever have a thing where there's someone going to come to your house in a few days' time, and meals are going to be cooked for your guests, and there's all kinds of gorgeous food in the fridge waiting for the people who are going to come and stay? And you're there, looking in the fridge and thinking, "That pudding looks really good..." but it turns out there's this little voice behind you that has just read your mind looking at that pudding. And that voice—that is an audible human voice—says: "That pudding's not for you. That's for tomorrow, when the guests come." What a spoilsport.
You see, the bad news we all talk about every day as Christians, if you talk about the gospel of Jesus Christ, is that we're sinners. And you say, "Okay, I've got that. I've got—I'm a sinner, I'm under God's judgment, I'm in trouble, I need rescuing. Do you have anything to offer me, Bible, any comfort?" And the Old Testament pipes up and goes, "Yeah, I've got something to say to you." And you go, "What is it? So, what—you want the good news or the bad news?"
I love good news.
"Okay, the good news."
God has a plan to deal with your sin.
"The bad news?"
You're not part of that plan.
That's what's going on here with those of us who are not Jewish by background. So he says, they are without hope—not to say that these people haven't got anything to look forward to. I mean, some people truly are without hope. They have nothing to look forward to. Most of us have things we look forward to, but you haven't got that ultimate hope—God's promise to deal with the biggest problems in this world, the day when he will wipe away every tear from the eyes of his people. That promise is not for you. You're without hope, and so you're without God.
Now, sure, you may well worship gods—not saying you're an atheist—but you have no knowledge of the one true God. And so he says you're far away. You who once were far away. Maybe we know that our sin creates a barrier between us and God. Maybe you didn't know that, and that's new. It's true—your sin, your rebellion against God, creates a barrier between you and him. When your prayers feel like they're bouncing off the ceiling, if you don't know Jesus, that's because they are bouncing off the ceiling. There's a barrier between you and God. But you're further away even than that.
God has a promise. God has a plan to deal with your sin, to remove that barrier. But those promises were made to a particular people. And those people—unless you're Jewish—are not us. And so we have a problem. And the solution is for other people.
We were far away.
You’ve been brought near
Point two: Now you've been brought near.
Verse 13: Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near.
The separation was both horizontal—Jews and Gentiles divided from each other—and vertical—we were enemies with God. And so we've been brought near in both ways. Human relationships have been healed, and our relationship with God has been healed. Next time's passage will explain more, but just to whet your appetite: instead of a divided human race—Jews and Gentiles, two halves—there's one new humanity. And we are in it.
Verse 15: His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two.
And God's brought people from that new humanity back to being rightly related to him. He's healed that vertical as well.
Verse 16: And in one body to reconcile both of them to God.
And it's not that God has made a Plan B—where Plan A was to bless the Jewish people, but then he kind of condescendingly comes up with a Plan B so that other people can have some throwaway extras. No, we're not second-class citizens. He had a Plan A. His plan was to send a king to rescue his people. And that plan has been gloriously and wonderfully enlarged and transformed to include people of every race, every tribe, every nation, and every language.
We are brought near to God, and brought near to his people. And that means we're brought near to hope, and we're brought into God's promises, and we're brought into him. We who once were far away have been brought near. God himself will be with us and will be our God. He will forgive our sins and remember them no more. Jesus will return and wipe away every tear from our eyes. He will swallow up death forever. And those promises are now ours.
You once were far away.
Brought near … by the death of Jesus
You've been brought near—third—by the death of Jesus.
And again, come back next week—it will explain exactly how that worked. But I wonder if you noticed that this was an ingredient that was missing in Ephesians 2:1–10. If you've been a Christian for a while, or been coming to church for a while, I hope your antennae were twitching a little as we looked at Ephesians 2:1–10. Ephesians 2:1–10 talked about Jesus rising from the dead and said that we were raised with him. Talked about Jesus ascending to heaven and said that we are seated with him. You should at that point have been thinking, "Hang on a minute, Paul. This is your presentation of the gospel. Haven't you forgotten the death of Jesus on the cross?" I was always taught that if I'm sharing the gospel with people, I need to tell them that Jesus died. And he didn't do it—it was missing.
Well, don't worry. Turns out that in Ephesians, the death of Jesus is just as central as it is everywhere else in the Bible. Here it is:
Verse 13: By the blood of Christ.
And next week's passage explains how Jesus's death deals in one stroke with our horizontal divisions and the division between us and God. It's a beautiful solution. It's an act of utter genius. It's the wisdom of God. But Jesus' death dealt with it—not only by the blood of Christ—but also at the beginning of verse 13: In Christ Jesus.
This is how you take hold of all of this—all the promises that are there—and have God as your God: it is to be in Christ Jesus.
Now, Shaheen's already mentioned it, but remember a few weeks ago, Lee used the illustration of the aeroplane—how we need to be... if you want to go where the plane is going, you need to be in the plane. Get in the plane, and you'll go where the plane is going. Take hold of all of this by taking hold of the Lord Jesus Christ. Attach yourself to him, and then you can be brought near.
This is all such good news.
We were so far away.
But we've been brought near by the blood of Christ.
But what is it that we need to go away and hear God speak to us? And it slightly depends where you're coming from as you come. I don't want to do this as explicitly as this, but I want to just consider different people in the room differently. Don't tune out when it's other people's bits, because it's all relevant to all of us. But I'm going to do a little bit of a triage.
So first of all, I want to think about those people here who—you're not yet a follower of Jesus. And maybe you think things are pretty much okay between God and you. And you're kind of living in hope that when it comes to it—when the last day comes—you'll be okay, because you've never done anything bad enough to get into the news.
This passage says you're far away.
You're not just basically fine with a few rough edges.
You have not one problem, but two:
Your sin is a barrier between you and God.
And then the one that I hadn't fully digested before preparing this:
You're not even one of those that God's rescue plan was initially for.
Now, the good news of today—if today is that Jesus came to rescue people who are far away—and Jesus's death is sufficient to rescue you. But before he can do that for you, you need to wake up to the fact that you are far, far away. And you need him to bring you near—and bring you nearer in more ways than one.
For us today
Other people here—maybe you're not a Christian yet, still looking into it. Great, keep coming.
Maybe, though, you know that you're far away.
Maybe your life is a mess and you know it.
Maybe you've done things that not even your friends know about.
Your problem is not that you need to be persuaded that you're so far away.
Your problem is believing that a God who reaches people who are far away can even reach as far as you.
This passage says he can.
But here's one more little thing that might help you: the word in verse 13 for being far away is the word makran. It occurs ten times in the New Testament. Two of them in Ephesians chapter two. The other eight are elsewhere. One of the other eight is Luke chapter 15, verse 20.
Luke chapter 15 tells the story of the prodigal son. You remember—a man had two boys. The younger one says, "Give me my inheritance now so I can go away and squander it." Well, he doesn't say that—he's a bit more polite to his dad than that—but he's basically saying to his dad, "I'd rather have your money than you, so give me the money, I'm going to go away and be independent."
So his dad gives him half of his money. And he goes away, has a great time—until he runs out of money. And he goes, "Oh my goodness, what an idiot. I've got nothing to feed myself. Even my dad's servants eat better than me. I'm gonna go home and beg to be one of his servants."
So he turns around and heads for home. What he doesn't know is that his dad has been on the doorstep every single day, the whole time he was gone, combing the horizon—just in case that speck on the horizon was his lost son coming back.
And then there is this beautiful phrase in Luke chapter 15 verse 20 that says: When he was still far off... And what did his dad do? He ran, and ran, and ran, and embraced his son, and welcomed him home.
When he was still makran—far off.
That's the God of this chapter.
He specialises in scooping people up while they are far away.
You don't need to come to him until you're close enough for him to be able to reach you.
All you have to do is turn back and return to him for forgiveness.
And he will spot you on the horizon.
And he will run.
And scoop you up.
And bring you near.
Or maybe you're here, as many of us are, as a Christian. And this was my problem.
You see, I knew about God's grace.
I knew I needed undeserved favour from God.
I knew that sin was a problem.
And I knew it all so well that it ceased to move me.
And we need to wake up to the fact that before we were Christians, we were further away from God than we realised.
We weren't just a little bit beyond his reach.
If you go to the Alps in the middle of the summer, it's beautiful—beautiful, huge valleys. Went there once in the summer. I've been twice in the summer actually—to parts of the Alps. And the thing about being in the Alps is you could be in the bottom of a valley, or you can be on the top of a mountain. Being on top of a mountain makes you no closer to the stars than being in the bottom of the valley—they're just as far away.
So you weren't going to just be on God's reach.
You were far away.
And you were a sinner.
And outside of every purpose that God had to fix that.
And wonderfully, in the death of Jesus, God has done what it takes to bring us near again.
And this tells us as well, that those that we love—our friends and our family who don't yet know Jesus—they are further away than we, or they, realise.
They're not kind of just outside the party, but they can just about hear the music going on and slightly enjoy it.
They are far, far away.
But that doesn't mean that God can't reach them.
It means they're in exactly the right place for God to bring them near.
All they need to do is attach themselves to Jesus.
To be in him.
To get on the plane.
And then God will have done for them what he's done for us.
He will have moved them from being people without hope, without God, to being people who are full of hope, and who have God as their loving heavenly Father.