Ephesians 2: The Half of the Chapter After Verse 10

Tuesday evening the family in the next cabin down the gravel road was eating dinner at their picnic table, hot dogs and a bag of chips, people I'd nodded at twice and never spoken to. Ben walked over in one sandal, climbed onto the bench between a teenage boy and a grandmother, and held out his hand. She gave him a bun. Nobody asked whose he was. Melissa went over to apologize and came back twenty minutes later with a paper cup of lemonade and a tip about which place in Garden City has the shortest raspberry shake line.

I'll leave that there. Ephesians 2 was the next chapter in the rotation, and I've always filed it as the grace chapter, which it is for about ten verses. The other twelve are about something else.

What does "saved by grace through faith" actually say?

Most of us can quote verses 8 and 9 from memory, and they're worth having there.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.

Ephesians 2:8-9

What I'd never paid attention to is the way Paul gets there. Verse 1 says God made you alive ("And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins") and then he wanders off for two verses describing the dead, how they walked "according to the course of this world" and "according to the prince of the power of the air." By verse 3 the "you" has turned into "we all." He puts himself in the same ground as his readers. When he finally comes back to the verb in verse 5, "hath quickened us together with Christ," he can't wait for the end of the sentence and drops in a parenthesis: "(by grace ye are saved;)". Three verses before the famous line he's already said it, tucked in brackets, like a man who couldn't hold it.

Verse 4 turns on two words, "But God," and goes on, "who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us." Through verse 3 we're the ones doing things, walking along and fulfilling the desires of the flesh. For the next few verses the verbs are his. He quickens, he raises, he shows.

That last one is verse 7, and it's the verse I'd have cut if you'd asked me to cut one. The reason given for all of it is "that in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us." So the purpose reaches forward, to ages that haven't happened yet, and grace is something kept on view. Scholars argue over what "that" points to in verse 8, grace or faith or the whole arrangement, and every candidate lands in the same place anyway.

Then comes verse 10, which people tend to skip because it makes the neat summary untidy.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

I'm told the Greek word behind "workmanship" is the one we get "poem" from, something made on purpose by someone who cared how it came out. And "before ordained" means the good works were prepared ahead, laid out before we showed up.

Where does "after all we can do" fit?

Latter-day Saints reach for Nephi whenever this chapter comes up, and I've done it in Sunday School myself. "We know that it is by grace that we are saved, after all we can do" (2 Nephi 25:23). For a long time I heard "after" as a deadline, as in do everything you can and then grace covers the remainder. Verse 10 doesn't allow that order. The works were prepared first and we walk into them already inside the gift. Whether Nephi would put it that way I can't say.

What was the middle wall of partition?

The second half starts with an instruction to remember what you were called. Gentiles were "called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands" (verse 11), and you can hear Paul raise an eyebrow at "made by hands." The label came from one side and he's quoting it back.

Verse 12 lists what those Gentile readers lacked, five things in a row. They were without Christ, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world. Then verse 13 opens "But now." Verse 4 turned on "But God" and this is the same hinge used a second time.

The wall in verse 14 was a real one, as far as the evidence goes. The temple in Jerusalem had a court where Gentiles could stand and a barrier past which they couldn't go, and at least one of the stone signs warning them off was dug up in the 1800s and now sits in a museum in Istanbul. Paul knew that barrier better than most of his readers did. In Acts 21 a crowd drags him out of the temple because they supposed he'd brought "Trophimus an Ephesian" past it (verse 29), and the doors are shut behind him. When he writes in Ephesians 3:1 that he is "the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles," the road to that prison runs straight back to the wall he's describing here.

For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.

Watch the word "both." Verse 15 says he made "of twain one new man," and verse 16 says he reconciled "both unto God in one body." Nobody gets pulled across to the other side. There's a third thing that neither group had before, and it's a long way from what Peter was doing in Galatians 2:12, when he withdrew from the Gentile table in Antioch. I wrote about Paul and Peter at Antioch a couple of weeks ago. Verse 17 has Christ preaching peace "to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh." The near ones needed it as well.

Verse 18 puts the Son, the Spirit and the Father in one sentence: "through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father." Both groups walk through the same door with the same Spirit on the way in, and "access" is the word that decides what the wall was for.

Built on the foundation of apostles and prophets

Across three verses Paul changes the picture three times. In verse 19 the Gentiles are "fellowcitizens" and then "of the household of God," which is a city and then a family. By verse 20 it's a building with a foundation, and by verse 21 the building is "an holy temple in the Lord." Nothing he reached for was quite big enough on its own.

The foundation is "the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone" (verse 20). Anyone who has framed anything knows what a corner does. Every other measurement gets taken from it. Latter-day Saints read the foundation as something still being laid, and I do too, for the plain reason that Paul's verbs for the building are in the present tense. It "groweth" (verse 21) and you "are builded together" (verse 22). A building that was finished in the first century wouldn't be described that way.

If you've read my post on the pronoun that shifts in Ephesians 1, you'll see why verse 19 hits the same nerve. Paul starts that letter saying "us" and "we" and moves to "ye also," and here he arrives at "no more strangers."

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Ephesians 2:8 mean works don't matter?

No, and Paul says so himself two verses later. The works just can't pay for anything, which is all "lest any man should boast" is guarding against.

Who is "we" and who is "ye" in this chapter?

It moves around a lot. "You" in verses 1 and 11 through 13 is the Gentile reader, while "we all" in verse 3 and "we both" in verse 18 take in Paul and the Jewish believers too. When the pronoun changes, so does the room.

Was the middle wall of partition a real wall?

Yes, there was a barrier in the temple court. But verse 15 puts "the law of commandments contained in ordinances" in the same sentence, so he means more than the stone.

Does "the foundation of the apostles and prophets" put Christ second?

I don't think so. Verse 20 makes him the corner stone, and the apostles and prophets are laid against him, which is a statement about what the building rests on. The ranking question seems to me a different one.

Before Sunday

Read the whole chapter in one sitting and notice where you'd normally have stopped. For most of us it's verse 10. Then go back over verses 11 through 22 with a pencil and circle every "both," "together" and "one," and when you've got them all, read Acts 21:27 through 36 beside them. It takes ten minutes, and the chapter reads differently with the crowd in the temple court in your head.

— D.