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First and foremost, I want to thank my wife, who has been very patient with me as I have struggled to learn the lessons of this passage over the last four and a half decades. She is my wife, my friend, and my partner. Together, we truly seek to be one. I also want to thank the many students I have had over the years for their input and challenges as they have helped me think through these issues. I want to thank Helen Wisniewski and Kevin & Larissa Munz whose editing and comments, made this a better book. Finally, I want to thank my friends at Energion, my editor Chris Eyre for his valuable suggestions and my publisher Henry Neufeld for his kind support and encouragement.
True, for some Christians this is not a troubling verse at all. In fact, for them, it is a proof text for how the world is corrupt and to be rejected for it is destroying the natural, God-given, order of things. I reject this view. Other Christians, however, view it as a prime example of how the Bible is not to be taken literally and without error. As an evangelical Christian believing in the inerrancy of scripture, while I reject the former view, I reject this view as well, and thus I cannot simply ignore this passage as an archaic relic of our patriarchal past.
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It would seem, as in many places, there were Gentile – Jewish tensions in the city of Ephesus, but unlike other locations, here the main problem was with the Gentile believers who saw themselves as superior and the Jews as inferior. This would account for the emphasis on God’s role in choosing us before the beginning of creation, and the warning about boasting, along with the calls for peace.
Chapter three starts with “For this reason,” a thought Paul will not finish until verse 14, as he goes instead into discussion of the secret of the Gentiles, a secret made known to Paul (3:2) and which we can understand (3:4); a secret that was hidden but was now being revealed (3:5). “This is that secret: The Gentiles are heirs-in-common, members-in-common of the body, and common participants in what was promised by the Messiah Jesus through the gospel” (3:6). Paul was called to proclaim the secret (3:7-9) the church is the union of God’s people, the Jews and the Gentiles, and it is through his people God works in the world.
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