From Far to Near

 DEVOTION

THE LETTER TO THE EPHESIANS

FROM FAR TO NEAR

Eph 2:11-13

11 Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called "uncircumcised" by those who call themselves "the circumcision" (that done in the body by the hands of men)— 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. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.

NIV

Because we too, those of us who live in the United States of America were Gentiles by birth, unless of course, some who were born here, are of a Jewish bloodline. Nevertheless, we know that we were born as a Gentile, and we were separated from Christ, although that was by choice, as Christ died and shed his blood for us. Paul is going to say more about our relationship with Christ, but for now, we need to focus on the fact that we were once far away from God, and that was our choice. Speaking in the first person for a while, because this is my personal story, I was not only so far from God, but I also actually hated what I thought God stood for by how the church represented him. This organized religion appeared to me to be all about paying to pray. Of course, I did not care about the concept of sin, for that too came from the voices of the church. My own pleasures were paramount in my life, and yet, I lived with a great fear of death. Sure, I was egotistic, thinking only of myself, that when I died, death was the end, and that I would never know that I ever lived. This was life without hope in the truest sense. I was a foreigner to the covenants of the promise, without hope and God in this world. Alright, back to the third person. We do think that all of mankind was at one point as far from God as we were. At some point in each person’s life, whether that was as a young child, a teen, or some time during our adult life, we were awakened to the truth about God and about what Jesus did for us. As we have thought and said before, we lived in a city of darkness and death, and at some point, the Light shone into our lives and we were brought from living far away from God to being near Him through the blood of Jesus. We now live in this new city of Light and life and are so near to God that His Spirit dwells within us. It is almost as if Adam who had been cast out of the garden, out of the paradise of God, forced to live in the world, away from God because of his disobedience, was brought back into the garden, back into the place where God could walk and talk with him in the cool of the day. We were outside that paradise, living without hope, forced to live in exile because of our disobedience, or sin. Still, because of the blood of Jesus, we have been invited back into the paradise of God, living in a place where God walks and talks with us in the cool of the day, which in our case, is the long day. We cannot be any nearer to God than we are now and it is all due to the blood of Jesus. Our nearest has nothing to do with us, or how many good deeds we do. Nothing we can do will bring us nearer to God than what God did for us, even while we were sinners. Our nearness to God is all on God, the only thing we can do is accept on faith, that we are near to God and that God is near to us. Of course, our lives will always be changing as we walk and talk with God. We will gain more and more knowledge of our hope in Christ, and we will always be in a state of being transformed into being more and more like Jesus, but we will never be any closer or nearer to God than we are as we have been washed in the blood of Jesus.