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This is the condition of those whose salvation and blessing this epistle chronicles. To
the praise of His glory such are urged to remember what they once were, that their high
privilege may be the better appreciated. Let us pass these items under review, so that we
may indeed look to the pit from which we were digged.
GENTILES.--There is nothing personally immoral or wicked in being a Gentile as
there is in being a sinner. While the Jew from his exclusiveness spoke of Gentiles,
publicans and sinners as all one and the same, there could be no personal responsibility
attaching to the question as to whether one was born a Roman, a Greek, a Scythian, or a
Jew. Why therefore should this national distinction be the first to be brought forward as
indicating the dispensational disability of these persons? When we stand upon Jewish
ground, we realize the distance that the Gentiles were from God. While He revealed
Himself to Israel, giving them holy and righteous laws, proverbs and prophecies, He
spoke not to the nations:--
"He sheweth His Word unto Jacob, His statutes and His judgments unto Israel, He
hath not dealt so with any nation: and as for His judgments, they have not known them"
(Deut. 4: 38; Psa. 147: 19, 20; Amos 3: 2; Rom. 3: 2).
Over against this statement of Gentile dispensational disability, let us place the
statement of Israel's dispensational privilege:--
A | According to the flesh.--Brethren.
B | Israelites.
C | Sonship.
D | Glory.
E | Covenants.
E | Law.
D | Service.
C | Promises.
B | Fathers.
A | According to the flesh.--The Messiah.
The one reminds us of our Gentile position, the other puts prominently forward the
favoured nation--Israel. The one speaks of alienation and strangership, the other of
sonship. In the one case neither covenants nor promises are attached; in the other they
are mentioned particularly. The Gentiles were without a Messiah: of Israel it is said that
Messiah came from them and that salvation is of the Jews. In both cases the paucity or
privilege is introduced by a reference to the flesh. The Gentile disability was "in the
flesh"; yet so also was the Jewish privilege. When the Jew and the Gentile stood together
on resurrection ground, the flesh with its disabilities and with its privileges also vanished.
"In Christ" is in the Spirit. Those who were far off and without hope in the flesh have
access unto the Father "by one Spirit". This teaching commends that reading of
Eph. 3: 5, 6 which makes the words "by" or "in the Spirit" to read with the peculiar
privileges of the Gentiles recorded in verse 6. In the flesh the Gentiles could never be
fellow-heirs, but in the Spirit they can. It is the flesh dispensationally considered that is
dealt with and removed in this section. "The enmity in the flesh" Christ has abolished, it