Ephesians2chapter 2

Ephesians 2:1-3

The diagnosis is death, not weakness, and the dead walk: according to the course of this world, and according to the prince of the power of the air, a real ruler of a real domain whom the letter will name again at 6:12. The spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience is present tense, an active energizing. Verse 3 closes every exit by adding we all, Jew as well as Gentile, by nature children of wrath.

Ephesians 2:4-5

rich in mercy: But God is the hinge of the whole chapter: the sentence that began with death is interrupted by mercy. The riches are his own, for his great love wherewith he loved us, and the quickening happens even when we were dead in sins, so the dead contribute nothing to their own raising. The parenthesis by grace ye are saved breaks in early, as if Paul cannot wait for verse 8 to say it.

Ephesians 2:6-7

The verbs walk with Christ's own history: quickened together, raised together, seated together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, the third beat of the letter's epouranios thread after 1:3 and 1:20. What was done to the Head at 1:20 is here counted true of the members, a standing already granted, not yet experienced in full. The purpose clause runs into the ages to come: the church itself is the exhibit of the exceeding riches of his grace.

Ephesians 2:8-9

The Greek behind and that not of yourselves is a neuter touto, which does not agree with the feminine faith alone; the fathers and the Reformers alike read it of the whole affair of salvation by grace through faith, the entire arrangement given, none of it earned. Chrysostom presses that even believing was not our own achievement but came by the call. Verse 9 gives the design: not of works, lest any man should boast, and boasting is the thing the gospel is built to kill.

Ephesians 2:10

Workmanship is poiema, a thing made, the word the Greek Old Testament uses for God's works in creation; believers are his making twice over, created in Christ Jesus. Good works return in their right place: excluded from the ground of salvation in verse 9, ordained beforehand as its path in verse 10. The walk language picks up the thread of 2:2; the same word that described the old course now describes the prepared road.

Ephesians 2:11-12

Gentiles in the flesh: The remembering is commanded: the Gentile reader is to know what he was. Verse 12 counts five privations, without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. The measure of Gentile distance is distance from Israel, her polity and her covenants, which is the letter's own frame for what follows: the nations are brought near to promises that were and remain Israel's.

Ephesians 2:13

Far off and made nigh is the synagogue's own language for the Gentile brought in; the rabbis spoke of making a proselyte nigh under the wings of the Shekinah, and Isaiah 57:19, peace to him that is far off and to him that is near, stands behind the verse and will be quoted at verse 17. What brings near is neither circumcision nor the proselyte's bath but the blood of Christ. The verse is the letter's atonement in one line.

Ephesians 2:14-15

The figure had stone under it: the soreg, the low barrier ringing the temple's inner courts, carried inscriptions warning any foreigner that passing meant death, and two of those very stones have been recovered. Edersheim describes the barrier as the visible statute of separation, and Paul, once accused of taking Trophimus the Ephesian past it (Acts 21:29), writes to Ephesians that Christ has broken it down. What is abolished is read two ways, the ceremonial ordinances that fenced Israel from the nations, or the law as a covenant of works; the readings are old and both have their holders. The purpose is one new man made of the two, so making peace.

Ephesians 2:16

The reconciliation is double: both to God, and both to each other, in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby. The one new man is Jew and Gentile together in Messiah, not Israel dissolved into the church; the commonwealth of verse 12 is the body the nations are joined to, and Romans 11 guards the same truth from the other side. The cross kills the enmity itself, which is why the peace holds.

Ephesians 2:17-18

Paul quotes Isaiah 57:19 as Christ's own preaching: peace to the far off, peace to the near, one message to both distances. Verse 18 gives the standing result in a trinitarian line, through him, by one Spirit, unto the Father, the whole Godhead engaged in the believer's access. Prosagoge is the word for being led into a royal presence; both peoples come in by the same introduction.

Ephesians 2:19-20

The five privations of verse 12 are answered: fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God. The house rests on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, the readings dividing over whether the prophets are the Old Testament's or the church's own named at 3:5 and 4:11, and the near mention favors the latter with many. Jesus Christ himself is the chief corner stone, the stone of Isaiah 28:16 and Psalm 118:22, the one piece that sets every line of the building.

Ephesians 2:21-22

The building is alive: fitly framed together, it groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord, masonry described with a plant's verb. The temple thread the Old Testament program traced from tabernacle to Solomon's house arrives at a sanctuary built of persons, and ye also are builded together names the Ephesian Gentiles as stones in it. The end of the sentence is the end of the story: an habitation of God through the Spirit.