So in the first ten verses of chapter 2, Paul taught us about God's gracious salvation of sinners through the gift of faith. Faith, the instrument by which God saves a sinner. In our faith, Paul showed us, it's not a work of our own. It's not of ourselves. It's a gift of God by which we can see and know and believe the divine truth that saves a sinner. Hebrews 11.1, it's the evidence, the assurance implanted in our hearts by God of those things for which we hope. Things we can't see yet. It's eyes to see God's truth given to us by God Himself. Paul has shown us that all men come into the world spiritually dead. Children of wrath. That every person, though, who's been born again of the Spirit is a new creation in Christ. Not a work of one's own doing. A work of God. And God's transformation of a sinner to a new creation in Christ means a man can now do works that are pleasing to God. And this is the only way our works are pleasing to God, is if they're done in faith. Without faith, Hebrews 11, 6, it is impossible to please God. And now in verses 11 through 22, really the second paragraph of chapter 2, Paul's addressing Gentile converts And he turns to what the matter of salvation by grace through faith in Christ means for the relationship between Jewish believers and Gentile believers. So beginning in verse 11, Paul turns from teaching of God's gracious salvation of individuals to the joining of believing Jews and believing Gentiles into one body in Christ. That's the theme. That's the great message of verses 11 through 22. And in verses 11 and 12, Paul describes the previous state of the Gentiles, all the Gentiles. before the coming of Christ. Their state in relation to God and their state in relation to the sons of Jacob. Now, you recall in the beginning of chapter 2, the first three verses, he showed each sinner's condition before God made him alive in Christ. Now he shows the state of the Gentiles as a body before Christ. So he says in verse 11, Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called uncircumcision by the so-called circumcision, which is performed in the flesh by human hands, remember that you were at that time before Christ, separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise. having no hope and without God in the world. Five parts here, a little quintuplet describing the condition of the Gentiles during the 1500 years between the establishment of the nation of Israel and the cross. For 1500 years, God had ordained the separation of the sons of Jacob, whose name God changed to Israel, sons of Israel, God had ordained the separation of Jacob's sons from all the rest of the world, from the Gentiles. Gave the Jews their own system of worship, their own daily animal sacrifices, their own diet, their own holidays. All of which the Gentiles were excluded from. For 1,500 years, and we saw last week, the Jews alone were the people of God. They weren't the people of God in the sense that they were saved unto eternal life, but they were the people of God on earth. To them alone was given the Word of God, the promises of God, the sign of the promise, circumcision, and the privileges which God had not granted to non-Jews. This is what we read in the psalm earlier. And the Jews, the sons of Jacob, were forbidden to intermarry with or even associate with Gentiles. So last week we looked at God's exclusive relationship with Israel from roughly 1450 B.C. until the time of Christ. And tonight I want to look at the state of the Gentiles now during those same 1500 years prior to Christ. In verse 12, in these five parts, these five descriptions, Paul shows their desperate state before Christ came. He writes that for those 1500 years, roughly, all who were not sons of Jacob... And look at these words. ...were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world. We're going to look at each of these five parts tonight. And I remind us, I won't read all of the passages that we read last week. But I want to read, again, just these four verses in Deuteronomy chapter 7. Because as the sons of Jacob were about to enter the promised land of Canaan, here's what Moses said to them. When the LORD your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it and clears away many nations before you, Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you, and when the LORD your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them. You shall show no favor to them. You shall not intermarry with them. You shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons. For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods. And then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and He will quickly destroy you. Now this is what God said to the sons of Jacob. And from 1445 B.C. until the coming of Christ, these sons of Jacob were alone the people of God. It was them to whom He gave His law. It was with them that He entered into a covenant. And this command that I just read in Deuteronomy 7, God repeated several times to the sons of Jacob throughout Old Testament history. So for those 1,500 years, there were two separate peoples of the earth, sons of Jacob and the Gentiles. The Gentiles, we read, were separate from the Christ, separate from Messiah. separate from the promise of Christ. That promise had come for the benefit of all men who would believe, but it came to Israel, came to the Jews. So this was the dire state of all who were not of Israel during those 1,500 years. Before Christ came, here's how Paul puts it, they were not among the people of God. They had no benefit of the privileges of being the people of God. They were not the people who God chose to receive the promises of the covenants God had made with Abraham and David and Jeremiah. They were outsiders. Outsiders. And Paul wants his Gentile readers to remember what they once were in distinction from the Jews. So there's much to unpack here. First, Paul says that they were separate from Christ. Now let's ask this question. Were the Jews not also separate from Christ? What do you think? In what sense were they separate from Christ? They were not believers. Certainly Jews who were not trusting in the promise of Messiah were not spiritually joined to Christ by the Holy Spirit. And in that sense, they were separate from Christ. But that's not what Paul's talking about here. Though many of the Jews, and maybe most, had not been joined to Him spiritually, He was with the sons of Jacob in several senses during the Old Testament period. Anybody have any thoughts on in what sense Christ was with the Jews during the Old Testament period? Let's look at a Scripture. First Corinthians 10.1. Paul writes, For I don't want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under a cloud and all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them, and the rock was Christ. The rock was Christ. So, Scripture explicitly tells us Christ was with them in the Old Testament, in the wilderness. But second, the promise of Christ, the Messiah, was given first to whom? Where do we first see the promise of Christ in the Old Testament? In Genesis, what chapter? Chapter 3, verse 15. He's the one who will crush the head of Satan. Now it's not given as a promise there, I would say. But it is a statement to the serpent that the Messiah is going to crush your head. And it's certainly an announcement of the coming of Christ. That's the first one. Then when did we see the promise of Christ? Abraham. In your seed, all the nations of the earth will be blessed. in you, all the nations and families of the earth will be blessed." Genesis 12, 3. And that's the first time we see the promise explicitly made. And the promise was fulfilled through Abraham's son, Isaac, and through his son, Jacob. Those who were of faith are called the children of the promise. So for those 1,500 years, The promise of Messiah was peculiar to Israel. They were going through this whole time with this promise of Messiah in your seed. And remember, the word Messiah means Christ. The word Christ means Messiah. One is a translation of the other. There's something else though. The Christ was going to be born whose son? David's son and who else's son? Abraham's son. And Christ was going to be born a Jew. He's going to be born a Jew. And it was going to be through the Messiah that all these promises of God were going to be filled. That's what makes the Jewish people, the nation, the sons of Jacob special. That was their role, to bring forth, to receive the Word of God for all humanity, and to bring forth physically the Messiah. So we may say that unbelieving Jews were separated from Christ in that one sense, but they weren't separated from the messianic hope. Because here they are, alone and trusted with what Paul calls in Romans 3, the oracles of God, which spoke of Messiah. Now Abraham wasn't a Jew, but Jacob becomes really the father of the 12 tribes of Israel. Gentiles, on the other hand, were not waiting for the Messiah. Think about never hearing of Christ, never hearing of the promise of Christ, never hearing the gospel, knowing nothing about any hope beyond this life. Well, that's where the Gentiles were. They were living apart from the hope of Christ. The Jews had the hope of Christ, those who believed. And not only that, the Gentiles, did they have gods of their own? They did. They were worshiping gods, but they weren't the true God. They were worshiping gods of their own imaginations. They did not even have the expectation of a Messiah or a Savior. These are our ancestors, by the way. Third, the promise of Christ was foreshadowed in the Old Covenant and in the Old Testament. How was the promise of Christ foreshadowed? Christ was foreshadowed, I should probably say. How? Where was He foreshadowed? In Israel. Well, certainly in those animal sacrifices. God had commanded them to offer those sacrifices as acts of worship and as a means of seeking atonement for their sins. Now, those animal sacrifices foreshadowed what? The cross. Christ became the true sacrifice. And fourth, Christ is the very Word of God. Remember how John put it, the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory. Christ is the Word of God. And so this Word given to Israel from Moses through Malachi, Christ is that Word. So during that entire period, you know, we read the Old Testament here, and it's a good two-thirds of our Bible, It's only speaking in the immediate sense to the Jews. They're the only ones who had this. Gentiles didn't have this, even though all the promises contained in these 39 books certainly pertain to every elect Gentile. They didn't know about it. They were apart from it. The light of Christ during that whole time had not even become a hope for them. So their former condition was one without hope. Now contrast that state with the joy that all true Christians have now in Christ, this certain assurance we have that nothing can ever separate us from Him or from His love. Think about that. Nothing can separate us from His love. So while all the unregenerate, Jew, Gentile, then and now, are indeed separate from Christ, spiritually dead, as Paul wrote in chapter 2, verse 1 and 5, Paul's point here is that the Gentiles had not even received the promise of Christ, and they weren't hoping for Christ, though it did ultimately in order to the benefit of all the Gentile believers. They didn't have, though, the foreshadowings of Christ. They didn't have these animal sacrifices that were intended by the unblemished animals to foreshadow Christ, to speak of the promise of Christ. They didn't have those. They hadn't received the Word. It's just amazing to me. While the Jews had all of this, they didn't have any of it. They had only the fictions they wrote, the myths they wrote and held to. And there's some suggestion here, I think, that what Paul means here by the words separate from Christ is further defined in the remaining four clauses of this verse. The next one is this, the Gentiles were excluded from the commonwealth of Israel. That's why I read the passage from Deuteronomy 7 again, just to kind of remind us the Jews were to have nothing to do with them. And this was of great significance in part because of what we just saw in terms of the presence of Christ and the promise of Christ by which faithful Jews lived and the foreshadowings of Christ, the reminders of their sin and their need for a savior, their need for an atonement for sin. Gentiles didn't even have that. So it was to Israel that God had revealed Himself in this special manner, and to Israel alone. It was to them that He said, If you obey Me, I will be your God, and you shall be My people. God did not say that to the Assyrians, or the Egyptians, or the Babylonians, or the Romans. He said it to the sons of Jacob. If you obey Me, I will be your God. I will dwell among you. It wasn't to the Gentiles that God had promised His blessing, His protection, and fruitful crops if they obeyed Him. It was only to the sons of Jacob. In sum, it was to them He had given His law, His prophecies, and His promises. Here they were, they had it all. When He came, we know what happened. Turn to Leviticus chapter 26. I want to read 10 verses here. Here's the summary of the Mosaic covenant. It's a conditional covenant. The covenant with David was unconditional. The new covenant in Jeremiah is unconditional. They're both unilateral. They're going to be works of God. They're not dependent on any works of any man. But the covenant with Israel, the Mosaic covenant, this was conditional. This was dependent on their obedience to Him. If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments so as to carry them out, Then I shall give you rains in their season, so that the land will yield its produce, and the trees of the field will bear their fruit. You see any heavenly blessings there? Understand these are earthly blessings that are promised. Indeed, your threshing will last for you until grape-gathering, and the grape-gathering will last until sowing time. You will thus eat your food to the full and live securely in your land. I shall also grant peace in the land, so that you may lie down with no one making you tremble." To have safety from their enemies. "...I shall also eliminate harmful beasts from the land, and no sword will pass through your land." But you will chase your enemies, and they'll fall before you by the sword. Five of you will chase a hundred, and a hundred of you will chase ten thousand, and your enemies will fall before you by the sword. So I'll turn toward you and make you fruitful and multiply you, and I will confirm My covenant with you. You will eat the old supply and clear out the old because of the new. And moreover, I will make My dwelling among you, and My soul will not reject you. I will also walk among you and be your God, and you shall be My people. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you would not be their slaves. I broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. Now as Leviticus 26 follows, he tells them, but if you don't obey, famine, no crops. Your enemies will come with a sword. The wild beasts will attack you. So this was a conditional covenant. This was the promise to them. And he repeated it, of course, throughout. And you don't have to turn here. These are very short. But hear what the Lord said, Deuteronomy 33, 29, Blessed are you, O Israel, who is like you, a people saved by the Lord. Who is the shield of your help and the sword of your majesty, so your enemies will cringe before you, and you will tread upon their high places? We read earlier, Psalm 147. Here's verse 19, He declares His words to Jacob, His statutes and His ordinances to Israel. And He has not dealt thus with any nation. As for His ordinances, they've not known them. Isaiah 63, 9, in all their affliction He was afflicted. And the angel of His presence saved them. In His love and His mercy He redeemed them, and He lifted them and carried them all the days of old. And finally, Amos 3, 2, one verse. You only have I chosen among all the families of the earth. Therefore, I will punish you for all your iniquities. Amos 3, 2. Gentiles had none of this. They were separate from all of it. Excluded from the commonwealth of Israel. And third, they were strangers to the covenants of promise. God delivered His covenants, His promise for all the families of the earth through one family of the earth. Delivered His promises, His covenant to the sons of Israel. Remember, a nation God had created out of Abram and Sarai, a barren couple. He had delivered His words, His covenants of promise of a Savior through the descendants of Jacob. And He promised that the deliverer would be born a physical descendant of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But what does Paul mean here by the words, strangers, to the covenants of promise? What are the covenants of promise? Well, you can bring up a pretty spirited debate among theologians with this question. God made several covenants in the Old Testament. Some would say He made a covenant with Adam, a covenant of works, very much like the one He later made with the sons of Jacob. Obey me and you will live. If you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will surely die. That was the covenant, a conditional covenant. And then God made a similar covenant with the sons of Jacob at Mount Sinai. This is the so-called Mosaic covenant, or it is referred to in the New Testament as the Old Covenant. Same term, Old Covenant mosaic covenant, and refers to this covenant God made with Israel, the terms of which we read in Leviticus 26. Neither of these is what Paul's referring to here. These are covenants of promise. Those were conditional covenants. Blessings for obedience, curses for disobedience. So, when we think of covenants of promise, in this context especially, it's best to think of them as the unconditional covenants, these unilateral promises of God to the objects of His grace. Now, God's declaration to the serpent in the presence of Adam in the garden was unconditional. The seed of the woman is going to crush your head. That was a promise, unconditional. That was decreed and going to happen. His covenant with Noah was unconditional. Never again am I going to destroy the world by flood. And then, some do not see God's words to Abraham in Genesis 12, 3 as a covenant, but I believe they are. Genesis 12, 3, He says, In you, in your seed, all the nations of the world will be blessed. All the families of the earth will be blessed. Certainly His covenant with David. that He would have a descendant who would reign on His throne forever. And ultimately, the new covenant, ultimately promised by God through the prophet Jeremiah and ratified by Christ when He shed His blood on the cross. The promise to Abraham, the promise to David, and the promise to Jeremiah, these are the covenants of promise that Paul is speaking of here, I believe. And I'm going to read you now and think about what we just read in Leviticus 26 and the necessity of obedience. And listen and see if you can find any place here where there's a condition placed on man to receive these blessings of Jeremiah 31, 31. Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. So the covenant is going to be made with them, but for the benefit of all who would be joined to Christ. Here's the covenant I will make, God said. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. Now, what covenant is he referring to there when he says it won't be like that? What's the covenant he's talking about? The Mosaic Covenant. And what's the difference between this covenant He makes in Jeremiah and the Mosaic Covenant? One was conditional. The Mosaic Covenant was always conditional, if you obey Me. There aren't any conditions here. And that makes the New Covenant a covenant entirely of grace, unlike the Mosaic Covenant. Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them. They broke that covenant. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put My law within them, and on their heart I will write it. No conditions. And I will be their God, and they shall be My people. You see the absence of conditions here. "...they will not teach again each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, Know the LORD, for they will all know Me." From the least of them to the greatest of them, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more. This is a covenant of grace. Some people use a title, covenant of grace, and apply it here. It's a term that doesn't really appear in Scripture. But this covenant announced through Jeremiah is entirely one of grace. Unconditional, unilateral. And in Hebrews chapters 8, 9, and 10, the writer applies all these blessings of the new covenant to all believers in Christ, Jew and Gentile. But though elect Gentiles were going to one day become beneficiaries of this covenant, Paul is saying here that prior to the coming of Christ, they were strangers to these covenants. They didn't know about them. They didn't believe in them. They weren't hoping for them because these covenants were made with Israel. And so, if the Gentiles lacked the covenants of promise, what also were they without at that time? If you have this covenant, you have this promise of God, what do you have? Hope. Very good. You have hope. This promise, look at this promise in Jeremiah 31. This is a promise that gives one hope. This wasn't heard by the Gentiles. gave it to Israel. Gentiles were going to be blessed by it, but they didn't have this, so they had no hope. They were without hope. It's so hard for us to imagine being where they were, being of the mind they must have been of. They lived without hope, just like unbelievers do today. Our only hope is in Christ. And if the Gentiles lack these covenants of promise, They lacked the one thing, Christ, that could set forth an objective hope that is based on one thing. What's our hope based on? His grace is right. What are we basing our hope on? His Word. And in His Word we have what? We have the promise of God. Our hope is based on His promise. Without His promises, what have you got? They didn't have these promises. They lived for thousands of years without hope. They didn't even know of these covenants of promise. Without the promises, what did they have to look forward to? Nothing. Nothing. So they didn't share the hope of Israel in the promised messianic salvation. And Israel didn't understand what it was. The question was, do you believe in this promise? God will send a Messiah who's going to atone for your sins. This is how life was for all of our ancestors in those days. And we must have them or else we wouldn't be here. This is how life is today for every person who is apart from Christ. If you haven't been joined to Christ, you haven't been made spiritually alive, you're not even aware of the hope that we have in Christ. Only the presence of Christ among the Gentiles and belief in Him could produce that hope. The reason for this is pretty simple when we think about it. It's because the hope of the assurance of every Christian is based on what Jim just told us. It's based on that divine promise. Now, we're also, of course, trusting in all what Christ did to fulfill the promise. And now, as Paul's writing in about 60 AD, he's telling them, all of this was for you too. There you were though. Do you understand where you have come from? And all of this culminates in the words that Paul finishes with in the fifth item. You were without God in the world. The Greek word for without God is atheos. A-T-H-E-O-S. From which we get the word atheist. They were without the knowledge of the true God. They didn't know about the God who was holy and righteous and just and loving and compassionate and merciful and gracious. They didn't know about the joy that was to be had in Him. Why? Because they're out there worshiping some planet up there or some statue they made out of wood or clay. And they're saying, make things go okay for us, will you? We need some rain. They didn't know the true God. They made up their own. It's what people do today. One writer says this, they had resembled mariners who without a compass and a guide were adrift in a rudderless ship during a starless night on the sea far away from the harbor. That's the state of the one who's lost in his sin. And it was the state of all the Gentiles. That's the world of fallen mankind. Romans 121, for even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their speculations. Their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Galatians 4.8, Here's what he says to the Galatians. He'd said this ten years earlier than this letter. However, at that time when you did not know God, you were slaves to those which by nature are no gods. So the point that I believe the Spirit wants us to draw from this passage, without the God of the Bible, the God of Israel, none of us could have any real hope beyond this life, beyond the grave. There's just no basis for it. We can't reason our way to it. Apart from belief in the God who's given us His Word, and in what He has said and revealed to us in His Word, no man would have any hope. And every man who's without God, and you can only know God through Christ, is without hope. These guys who fly planes into buildings and engage in these suicide missions, they're doing it without any real for the coming of Christ. All Gentiles were without God in the world and without hope. With the good news, the Gentiles were always intended by God to be beneficiaries of those covenants of promise. It was always God's plan. They just didn't know it. Hadn't been revealed to them. The promise of Genesis 12, 3. In your seed, all the nations, all the families of the earth will be blessed. Was always intended to bless all the families of the earth. And so in verse 13, Paul wrote, But now, in Christ Jesus, you who were formerly far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. What a fabulous verse. But now in Christ Jesus. This harkens right back, doesn't it, to chapter 2, verse 4. But God, because of His great love. Nation of Israel, brethren, was never the ultimate plan of God. It was never the ultimate destiny of the people of God. It foreshadowed the reality. The reality, the substance, is Christ in whom all things are summed up. I believe there's no greater piece of literature ever written than these first two chapters. Maybe the first three chapters. Maybe I'll say all six by the time we're done. But these first two chapters tell us everything we would ever need to know. So, Galatians 6.16, Paul says, those who are in Christ, the Christian church, both Jewish and non-Jewish peoples, are called the Israel of God. Believing Gentiles are no longer separate from Christ, no longer excluded from the Israel of God, the church, no longer strangers to the covenants of promise, but are now, in Christ, recipients of all the blessings of those covenants of promise. And so, believing Gentiles are no longer without hope and no longer without God. but now have in its place a blessed assurance of eternal glory with God. Well, let's take a moment and reflect on the things the Word of God has spoken to our minds and hearts this night, and then we will close in prayer. Lord, we are thankful that you have rescued us from the domain of darkness, that you have lifted the cover from our eyes, removed our blindness, and opened our eyes to see these marvelous truths. Lord, we thank you that you have decreed for us to live in this time when all these blessings have already been revealed to us and have already been accomplished for us. We thank you that you have, by your Spirit, given us new life, joined us to the risen Christ, and given us this great assurance. And so, Lord, we pray that you will keep us ever mindful of your goodness to us, and that you will make us effective witnesses of your grace and your glory. In Christ's name, amen.