God's deliverance or 'salvation' of mankind is a deliverance of individuals indeed, but of individuals in and through a society; not of isolated individuals, but of members of a body.
It is and has been a popular religious idea that the primary aim of the gospel is to produce saved individuals; and that it is a matter of secondary importance that the saved individuals should afterwards combine to form churches for their mutual spiritual profit, and for promoting the work of preaching the gospel. But this way of conceiving the matter is a reversal of the order of ideas in the Bible. 'The salvation' in the Bible is supposed usually 'to reach the individual through the community[[1]].' God's dealings with us in redemption thus follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural developement. For man stands out in history as a 'social animal.' His individual developement, by a divine law of his constitution, is only rendered possible because he is first of all a member of some society, tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society alone, and through the submissions and limitations on his personal liberty which such membership involves, does he become capable of any degree of free or high developement as an individual. This law, then, of man's nature appears equally in the method of his redemption. Under the old covenant it was to members of the 'commonwealth of Israel' that the blessings of the covenant belonged. Under the new covenant St. Paul still conceives of the same commonwealth as subsisting (as we shall see directly), and as fulfilling no less than formerly the same religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and enlarged to include the believers of all nations, and not merely one nation; but it is still the same commonwealth, or polity, or church; and it is still through the church that God's 'covenant' dealings reach the individual.
It is for this reason that St. Paul goes on to describe the state of the Asiatic Christians, before their conversion, as a state of alienation from the 'commonwealth of Israel.' They were 'Gentiles in the flesh,' that is by the physical fact that they were not Jews; and were contemptuously described as the uncircumcised by those who, as Jews, were circumcised by human hands. And he conceives this to be only another way of describing alienation from God and His manifold covenants of promise, and from the Messiah, the hope of Israel and of mankind. They were without the Church of God, and therefore presumably without God and without hope.
Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision, in the flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ.
This alienation of Gentiles from the divine covenant was represented in the structure of the temple at Jerusalem by a beautifully-worked marble balustrade, separating the outer from the inner court, upon which stood columns at regular intervals, bearing inscriptions, some in Greek and some in Latin characters, to warn aliens not to enter the holy place. One of the Greek inscriptions was discovered a few years ago, and is now to be read in the Museum of Constantinople. It runs thus: 'No alien to pass within the balustrade round the temple and the enclosure. Whosoever shall be caught so doing must blame himself for the penalty of death which he will incur.'
This 'middle wall of partition' was vividly in St. Paul's memory. He was in prison at Rome at the time of his writing this epistle, in part at least because he was believed to have brought Trophimus, an Ephesian, within the sacred enclosure at Jerusalem. 'He brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath defiled the holy place.'
It was this 'middle wall of partition,' representing the exclusiveness of Jewish ordinances, which St. Paul rejoiced to believe Christ had abolished. He had made Jew and Gentile one by bringing both alike to God in one body and on a new basis.
There were in fact two partitions in the Jewish temple of great symbolical importance. There was the veil which hid the holy of holies, and symbolized the alienation of man from God[[2]]; and there was 'the middle wall of partition' already described, representing the exclusion of the world from the privileges of the people of God. The Pharisaic Jews ignored the spiritual lessons of the first partition, and devoutly believed in the permanence of the second. But Saul, while yet a Pharisee, had felt the reality of the first, and had found in his own experience that the abolition of this first barrier by Christ involved also the annihilation of the second.
The breaking down of partitions
It is in the Epistle to the Colossians that he lays stress upon the abolition in Christ of the enmity between man and God. 'It was the good pleasure of the Father ... through him to reconcile all things unto himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross.' 'You, being dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh ... did he quicken together with Christ, having forgiven us all our trespasses; having blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us: and he hath taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross.' So with the help of various metaphors does St. Paul strive to express the mighty truth that, by the shedding of Christ's blood, that is to say by His sacrifice of perfected obedience, the way had been opened for the forgiveness of our sins and our reconciliation to God in one life, one Spirit. But the symbols and instruments of that former alienation from God which St. Paul had experienced so bitterly, were to his mind the 'ordinances' of the Jewish law. These, he had come to feel, had no other function than to awaken and deepen the sense of sin which they were powerless to overcome. They were nothing but 'a bond written against us'; a continual record of condemnation. To trust in the observance of ordinances was to remain an unreconciled sinner, alienated in mind and unpurified in heart. On the other hand, to have faith in Jesus and receive from Him the unmerited gift of the divine pardon and the Spirit of sonship was, for a Jew, to cast away all that trust in the observance of the ordinances of his nation which was so dear to his heart. It was at once to place himself among the sinners of the Gentiles. For in Jesus Christ all men were indeed brought near to God, but not as meritorious Jews; rather as common men and common sinners, needing and accepting all alike the undeserved mercy of a heavenly Father. Thus it was that Christ, in breaking down one partition, had broken down the other also. In opening the way to God by a simple human trust in a heavenly Father, and not by the complicated arrangements of a special law, He had put all men on the same level of need and of acceptance. He had not indeed abolished the covenant or the covenant people, but He had enlarged its area and altered its basis: there was still to be one visible body or people of the covenant, but membership in it was to be open to all, Jew and Gentile alike, who would feel their need of and put their trust in Jesus. This is what St. Paul proceeds to express, and little more need be added to explain his words. In the 'blood' or 'blood-shedding' of Jesus—that is, His self-sacrifice for men, His obedience carried to the point of the surrender of His life—a way had been opened to the Father that was purely human, that belonged to the Gentiles who had been 'far off' as well as to Jews who were already 'nigh' in the divine covenant. And in being brought near to God by faith, and not by Jewish ordinances, Jew and Gentile had been reconciled on a common basis—the two had been made one in 'the flesh,' that is, the manhood of Christ, for no other reason than because the 'law of commandments contained in (special Jewish) ordinances,' which had hitherto been the basis of separation, was now once for all 'abolished.' Henceforth there was one new man, or new manhood, in Christ, in which all men were, potentially at least, reconciled to God and to one another by His self-sacrifice upon the cross. And to the knowledge of this new manhood all men were being gradually brought by the 'preaching of peace' or of the gospel, which had its origin from Jesus crucified and risen, and which, even now that Jesus was invisibly acting through His apostolic and other ministers, St. Paul attributes directly to Him.