Fellow-Citizens In The Commonwealth Of Israel Series

What is this dividing wall? St. Paul may have had in mind the low wall that in some Jewish synagogues separated men from women. He may have had that in mind when he wrote elsewhere that now in the Messiah Jesus there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus. If you belong to [the Messiah] then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:28-29); and that doesn’t mean there are no differences between us, it means we all share equally in the inheritance. I am still male. My wife is female!

More likely Paul has in mind the wall at the Temple in Jerusalem that kept out non-Jews from entering the inner courts of worship, for only Jews were allowed in; but thank God Jesus came to destroy the barrier that mean gentiles could not access the holiness of God.

That wall was a physical barrier, but more importantly Jesus breaks down and destroys the relational barrier of enmity that existed and still exists between Jew and Gentile; and as God’s workmanship (verse 10), created in [Jesus the Messiah] to do good works” (2:10) we have a part to play in Jesus in that work.

Just occasionally I don’t agree with the way the New International Version translates a Bible verse from Greek into English. I’m no Greek expert myself but when placing several Bible translations side by side, and listening to different Bible commentators I have difficulty with how verse 15 reads. The NIV says that

Jesus abolished “the law with its commandments and regulations”, thus strongly suggesting that the Jewish law was the barrier that needed to be broken.

Whereas Jesus himself said he did not come to abolish the law or the prophets. Matthew 5:17 says, “I have not come to abolish them but to fill them up” so what does Ephesians 2:15 mean?

Two major Bible translations – the Catholic Jerusalem Bible and the Messianic Jewish New Testament – use similar English. They say that Jesus has “destroyed the enmity occasioned [or caused] by the Torah with its commands set forth”. The difference is important.

It’s not the Jewish law with its commandments that needed to be broken. It was the spirit of discord and resentment that came about as a result of the commandments that needed to be broken.

By way of illustration it is not the laws of football that need to be changed or abolished, it is the response of angry Dads running along the touchline screaming at their kids and the referee that needs to be abolished!

The Messianic Bible Commentator David Stern puts it like this:

The Jewish law evoked Gentile envy at the special status of the Jews and it still does. It led to Jewish pride at being chosen and still does. It led to gentile resentment of that pride and still does; and it led to dislike of each other’s customs which led to anti-Semitism, and still leads to anti-Semitism.

In his body, on the cross, the purpose of Jesus was to make one new man out of the two – one new man out of Jew and gentile, thus making peace (2:15) and putting to death their hostility (2:16).