The Advent of Peace

Amen.

Amen.

Well, good morning, Sacred Mission.

Hey, my name is Justin.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm one of the pastors here, and it's my joy to bring God's word to us this morning.

We are in the second Sunday of Advent, and this is the Advent of Peace.

And so I I don't know about you, but I love Christmas movies.

Do you guys join me in that?

Like affection.

I just I know there's something about gathering the whole family together on our couch in the living room, right?

Under some blankets, drinking something warm, watching a Christmas movie in the ambient glow of the decorated and lit up tree in the corner, right?

There's just nothing like it.

I love sitting down with my family and watching these movies.

Something I've observed over the years, though, is that the best Christmas movies all have the same general storyline that they tell.

And if you have a wife who unfortunately subscribes to the Hallmark channel, you have actually seen this in an obnoxiously abused way where they just over and over again, it's like we get it.

You've cracked the code on what makes a great movie, or at least what tells a good story.

The best storyline for a Christmas movie goes something like this Hostility and relational tension are established very early on in the movie.

After some challenges, the main character experiences this renewal of faith and hope.

Then peace and reconciliation come to mend the hostility and tension that was present before, and everyone then lives happily ever after in this restored state of bliss.

Think about it, right?

A Christmas carol.

Ebenezer Scrooge begins as a cold, miserable man, alienated from others.

After supernatural visits from the ghosts of Christmas, past, present, and future, his heart is transformed, leading to acts of kindness and reconciliation with those in his life.

It's a wonderful life.

George Bailey, he feels frustrated and undervalued, reaching a breaking point.

After an angel shows him what the world would be like without him, George then regains his faith in life and community, reuniting joyfully with his family and friends.

How the Grinch stole Christmas.

Hands down, the best movie ever made.

Ever.

Which one?

The 2000 Jim Carrey one.

Duh! The Grinch lives in bitterness, harboring this grudge against Christmas and the people of Hooville.

After witnessing the relentless joy and love of Cindy Lou Hu, he has a change of heart that grows three sizes that day.

And he's reconciled to a people he was alienated from.

What about Elf, right?

Buddy, raised by Elves, struggles to connect with his human father who's distant and cynical.

Through this childlike innocence and belief in the magic of Christmas, Buddy transforms his father's heart, bringing the family all together.

And then this classic, Home Alone.

Right?

Kevin McAllister, what's he do?

He initially feels disconnected and frustrated with his family.

Left behind during Christmas, he learns self-reliance and the importance of family from the South Bend shovel slayer.

And it culminates in this heartfelt reunion at the end.

There's a reason why these storylines make the best Christmas movies.

It's because they're all borrowing from the greatest story that mankind has ever known.

It's the story of the gospel.

You see, in his letter to the church in Ephesus, Paul's writing to a people who have been living in hostility and alienated from both God and his people.

They were a people distant from God because of their sin and rebellion toward him, and they were distant from his covenant people because of their ethnicity and rejection of his holy law.

And this alienation was fueled by a deep, rooted hostility against them.

Let's first look at this hostility that they had between God's covenant people and themselves, the Gentiles, that Paul's writing to.

I think it's really hard for us to understand such hostility in the time we live today.

Right?

We've worked fiercely over the last 70 years to dismantle any relational and social separation that we have seen in our culture.

The thought of holding hostility against someone just because of the way that they are born, it seems so primitive and regressive to us as a culture today.

But for the people who Paul was writing to, this hostility was a present, everyday reality that they experienced.

You see, the Jewish people, they had an immense disdain for Gentiles.

They had this saying that they would quote very often that the Gentiles, they were created by God to fuel the fires of hell.

Rabbis taught that a Jewish woman may not act as a midwife for a Gentile simply because it would bring another child of idolatry into the world.

It was unlawful for a Jewish woman to help a Gentile woman in her time of greatest need.

If a Jewish person married a Gentile, their funeral would be carried out by their family.

Such contact with the Gentile was the equivalent of death.

We can't fathom that kind of hostility and alienation, but for them it was an ever-present reality.

You see, not only did these heart postures and practices communicate the hostility of Jews and the alienation of Gentile people, but there was a permanent structure actually constructed to remind them of that reality every moment.

Around the entire temple in Jerusalem, there was about a five-foot-tall wall that was a standing symbol of their separation from God and his covenant people.

It was literally a dividing wall of hostility.

If you were a Gentile, you had to remain in the court of the Gentiles, and this wall lets you know that you were not able to come near to God or His people, for you were unclean.

Upon this five-foot wall that surrounded the temple at different intervals, there were these warning signs written in both Greek and Latin.

And this is what they said.

Anyone who is caught doing so will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.

You see, every aspect of Gentile life was marked by hostility and alienation from God and his covenant people.

This relational suffering was felt in every moment of their life.

And they didn't just experience it from Jewish people, they really truly experienced it from God Himself.

This is what Paul admonishes them to remember earlier in this part of chapter two of Ephesians.

He writes in Ephesians 2, 1 through 3, and you, you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the Prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

He reminds them that they were disobedient, children of wrath, and because of that, they must remember further on in verse 12 remember that you were at one time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.

What a despairing state that they were in.

Suffering alienation from God and his covenant people due to their rebellion, lawlessness, and identity as a people distant and removed, their double alienation was a result of the hostility both held and exercised against them.

So truly, when Paul says they were a people without hope or God in the world, this was their felt experience.

But the work that Paul's putting forward is not to condemn them, it's not to condemn them and amplify their hopelessness.

He's actually laboring to remind them that this was their state.

But now they live in a different reality because of the reconciling work of Jesus.

You see, what he wants to help them see and understand is that an alienated people have been reconciled by establishing peace where there was hostility.

An alienated people have been reconciled by establishing peace where there was hostility.

I think what Paul does here in the letter to Ephesians is absolutely essential to a gospel-centered life.

We use this language of gospel-centeredness here at Sacred Mission constantly, but to put some skin on it, right?

To make it more functional in our lives, what he does is he actually helps them to have truth and their reality of the gospel shape and form the reality and experience of their everyday life.

You see, a gospel-centered life is one that submits all of their experiences, all of their feelings, all of their thoughts to the truth of God's word and the finished work of his son and lives every day from that foundation.

This is what he's working to help them understand.

This might be your experience, this might be the way that you feel, but let me tell you a better truth, a greater reality than what your everyday reminds you of.

And it's from that that we live and we uh function with inside of this life of which God has given us.

Let's see how Paul works to conform their identity around the gospel rather than around their experience.

Verse 13, he says, But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ, for he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace.

You see, they were an alienated people who were far off from both God and his covenant people, but the blood of Jesus has brought them near and reconciled them.

The deep-rooted hostility that was held against them has been uprooted and destroyed, and there no longer remains anything to separate them from one another.

You see, this was literally accomplished by Jesus being the peace that we so desperately needed.

And I think this is important for us to consider when we think about Jesus and his relationship with this notion of peace.

I think we can have a false understanding and we kind of view him in this Mahatma Gandhi image, right?

A person of peace who taught peace and practiced peace.

And what we ought to do is in response to that person that we should teach such peace, we should live in such peace as well, is trying to model our lives after him.

But Jesus wasn't just a peaceful person.

He wasn't just someone who came and taught peace and modeled it through his life, and we should try and be like him as much as we possibly can.

No, what the scriptures tell us is that Jesus actually is our peace.

Not that he taught it, not that he exampled it, but that he becomes our literal peace that we so desperately needed.

He is our literal peace in that he took in himself the fullness of the hostility that was kindled against us for our lawlessness and rebellion toward God and his holiness.

Jesus wasn't just a teacher of peace, Jesus is peace.

Because it took the spilling of his blood to reconcile an alienated people, and it took the destruction of his flesh to tear down the hostility that divided us.

You see, peace doesn't come without confrontation.

Jesus didn't come and just say, do better, try harder, follow the way that I live my life.

We were gonna continue in hostility.

We were gonna remain alienated from God and his covenant people if Jesus didn't go to war to make peace.

And he doesn't do it by coming and crushing us under the heel of his boot.

He comes and accomplishes it by being crushed himself in our place.

What was the cost of peace?

It was the spilled blood and torn flesh of Christ.

Paul uses the language of dividing wall of hostility.

I think Paul's pointing to the wall that encompassed the temple, separating them from the worship of God and the fellowship of his people.

You see, here's what I want us to understand about this gospel-centered life.

That wall still stood physically, it was still standing around the temple, dividing the Gentiles into this outer court and reminding them and letting them know you don't belong there.

You don't belong with us, you don't belong in his presence, and if you try to, in your own work, get over that hostility, we'll kill you.

But Paul says something different because the gospel says something different.

That even though the physical wall remained and it was a part of their everyday experience, there was a greater truth in Christ, that the dividing wall of hostility was torn down in his own flesh.

This is the very essence of a gospel-centered life, that there is a truth that is more real than your experience.

It's more real than what you face every single day, no matter what your life circumstance wants to tell you, there's a greater truth that should dictate how we live and function and respond in this world with a greater hope and a greater joy and a peace that has no end.

Because the gospel is more real than even a brick wall that stands in front of you.

In Christ, that wall has been destroyed.

Jesus is the embodiment of our peace, and he has accomplished in himself peace for us.

Paul continues by saying that the death of Jesus abolished the law of commandments expressed in ordinances.

What does Paul mean here?

I think it's important for us to kind of pause and dive into this for just a moment.

Because in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus actually said something that seems contradictive to this statement.

He had this to say actually about his life and law relationship when questioned by the religious leaders.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 17 through 18, he says this do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.

I've not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

To help us understand potentially what Paul's putting forward, I think we need to understand that there are really three ways that we can categorize the law of God for his people.

The first way that we can categorize this law is the moral law.

There's an aspect of the law that God gave to his people that is moral in nature.

You see, these are permanent laws established for all of mankind, and they work to reflect God's unchanging character to his image bearers.

We see a concentrated expression of this in the Ten Commandments.

You see, Christ did not abolish the Ten Commandments.

Christ did not abolish the moral law of God because it still governs his image-bearers.

Yet Jesus did perfectly fulfill the moral law of God in his perfect obedience to the will of the Father, where you and I have perpetually failed to keep it.

And because Jesus perfectly fulfilled it, we are now reconciled to God through Jesus' perfect obedience.

And salvation is not achieved by any works of our own, but by grace through faith in his satisfying, finished work.

You see, our obedience to the moral law of God is then a necessary response to the saving grace that we have received in Him.

It sees itself come into the life of the Christian, as Paul says in Ephesians 2.10, because we were created in Christ Jesus for good works.

We must know, therefore, what a good work is.

The moral law provides us with our inspired and infallible definition of what good works for a Christian life is to look like.

The other two categories of the law are this: there is the civil category and the ceremonial category of the law.

You see, the civil law consists of those laws given to Israel as a unique political state that governed their day-to-day lives.

And the ceremonial law governed Israel's relationship with God and their worship of him.

So I would submit to you what Paul is primarily referring to here in this passage is the civil and ceremonial categories of the law when he says in verse 15, by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances.

This is what Christ put to death that we might be made one new man in him.

And why I would submit this to you is because of the outcome Jesus was striving for in his work.

Paul says that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace.

So what's the aim and endeavor of Christ?

It was to have one new man, a reconciled man in place of the two that were formerly separated.

The moral law did not separate mankind into two people groups, since most of the moral law is universally held by all of mankind.

This is what Paul says in Romans that we have this law written on our hearts, that we understand what goodness inherently is, and yet we fail to keep it.

Therefore we are condemned.

We are held culpable and guilty because it is inscribed within our very being.

No, it wasn't the moral law that divided mankind into two, it was the civil and ceremonial law that.

Drew the thick dividing line.

And so the fruit of Christ's work to have one new man where there was once two is accomplished by destroying in his own flesh the very thing that divided them.

So in Christ, both the lawless, the lawless, and the legalist become loved.

They become one in Christ Jesus.

The self-righteous and the unrighteous becomes the righteousness of Christ.

You see, the civil law is abolished because the true Israel would not be known through a man's bloodline or through a political state, but through a reconciled nation of people who have been made so by the blood of Jesus alone.

And the ceremonial law is abolished because our relationship with and worship of God comes only through the spirit and truth of Jesus, his son.

You see, the ceremonial law was always a shadow of Christ that was meant to lead us to the beauty of his person and work.

And so in Jesus putting to death the civil and ceremonial categories of the law, he has made peace where hostility once prevailed.

These two who were divided have now been created into one man, reconciled and united in Christ Jesus alone.

In the beautiful mystery of the gospel, the slain one has slayed the hostility that divided us from God and divided us from his people.

Jesus is our peace.

As I said earlier, true peace must come through conflict.

And God engaged the conflict of our hostility with the shedding of blood and the tearing of flesh from his own son.

You see, the cross is the eternal portrait that you and I get of peace.

It's not the manger scene.

It's not the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes.

Because surely he was born to die.

That's the image of peace.

Because to have peace with us, to have peace with one another, it would be costly.

This then was the crown achievement of Christ's cross.

First, he abolished the law as a divisive instrument separating men from God and from one another.

Second, he created a single new humanity out of his two former divided ones, establishing peace between them.

And finally, he reconciled this new united humanity to God, having killed through the cross all the hostility between us.

Christ crucified has brought us into being a new, united human race, united in itself and united to its God.

This is what a costly bloodbought peace accomplishes.

And Paul goes on to say that after Jesus accomplished this, he then announced it.

After Christ accomplished it, he then announced it.

Verse 17, and he came and preached peace to you who were far off, and peace to those who were near.

You see, both needed the message and hope of peace.

Since the accomplishment was at the cross, the announcement of victory, the establishment of everlasting peace by the very Prince of Peace Himself must follow the accomplishment.

Think about the first word Jesus speaks to his disciples after his resurrection.

Peace be with you.

He was the true everlasting peace standing before them.

And he declares this message to a trembling and fear-filled group of men.

Peace.

You don't have to be afraid anymore.

You don't have to worry about the hostility that was present.

You don't have to hide under the covering of your own fabricated safety.

There's peace.

You see, the message of the gospel is that peace has come.

But not just peace has come, peace has been made.

For the enemies of God have been reconciled to him and to one another in Christ Jesus.

You who are far off.

You, because of your unrighteousness and your lawlessness, there is peace in Jesus.

And you who were near.

You who were near, but your self-righteousness and uncircumcised hearts were unable to deliver you.

There is peace in Jesus.

You see, church, there are glad tidings of great joy, for to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and his name shall be called Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of his government and of peace, there will be no end.

You see, the hostility that alienated us from God and his people was abolished at the cross.

And now in Christ we are reconciled to him and to one another through peace that will have no end, because he adorns an eternal crown to rule and reign over his people.

The best Christmas movie is only able to miserably borrow from the greatest story ever known to man.

You see, these movies, though they try, they'll never be able to truly communicate the depth of our hostility and relational despair.

Their heroes will pale to the perseverance, faith, and triumph of Christ the King.

Their biggest celebration of familial reconciliation, it will be pathetic when held against the way all of heaven stops and rejoices when one sinner repents.

And their state of bliss is going to fade like everything else in this world.

But there will be no end to the peace that we have in Jesus.

Amen.

Amen.

Let's pray.