Week #2 - One New Man

Blog Series Intention Recap

This May series explores a truth Paul calls a mystery: something God planned before the ages, held back in earlier generations, and now made known. The Church was not an afterthought, nor a waiting room until God returns to His plan for Israel. It was formed in Messiah from believing Jews and Gentiles, and it has real purposes now, among them displaying God's wisdom even to the unseen world.

This series is not written to win an argument about Israel and the Church. It is written to help believers see what Scripture says God has done, understand why He has placed us here, and respond with gratitude and humility. We start with the mystery, move to what God formed, ask what that means for how we live, and end where Paul does: with humility before God's faithfulness to Israel.

This page is a post in the series “The Church: A Mystery Revealed.” Click here to see the rest of the posts.

Let’s jump into Week #2:

“One New Man”…

Paul says that in Messiah, God did something never done before: He took two groups standing on opposite sides of a wall and made them one new man. Not two peoples cooperating. Not one people absorbing the other. Something new. This post asks a specific question: what exactly changed, and what did not?

And a second question follows close behind it. If the wall is down, are Jewish believers and Gentile believers now simply the same, with no differences left at all? That question turns out to matter almost as much as the first.

Why it Matters:

• Before Messiah, Gentiles stood outside Israel's covenants entirely — “separated,” “strangers,” “having no hope” (Ephesians 2:12).

• The Mosaic Law marked the division between Israel and the nations. In Messiah, that dividing barrier came down.

• Messiah did not merely remove a barrier. He built something where the wall used to be: one new man, fellow citizens, a household, a dwelling place for God.

• Gentiles do not become Jews by faith, and Jewish believers do not stop being Jews. Together they are one new man — one in standing, not identical in practice.

Go Deeper:

What Wall Came Down?

Paul starts by making the Gentiles remember where they stood:

“Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called ‘the uncircumcision’ by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” (Ephesians 2:11–13, ESV)

That is four ways of saying the same hard truth: outside. Not partially outside. Outside the commonwealth, outside the covenants, without hope, without God.

Paul connects this dividing wall directly to “the law of commandments expressed in ordinances” (Ephesians 2:15). The Mosaic Law distinguished Israel, God's covenant nation, from the surrounding nations. That distinction created a real boundary between Jew and Gentile, a boundary Paul describes here in terms of hostility. The Jerusalem Temple later provided a vivid physical picture of the same reality: a barrier separated the Court of the Gentiles from the inner courts. Whether Paul had that particular wall in mind or not, his point is clear: the Law marked Israel off, and Gentiles stood on the other side of that mark.

And the wall was never the Abrahamic covenant. That promise came centuries before the Law, and Paul is explicit elsewhere that a later law cannot cancel an earlier promise (Galatians 3:15–18). Whatever came down at the cross, it was not God's word to Abraham.

What Exactly Ended at the Cross?

Paul explains how the wall came down:

“For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.” (Ephesians 2:14–16, ESV)

One way to describe this is that the Mosaic Law has been “rendered inoperative.” Paul says the Law of commandments was abolished, a strong word that shows up elsewhere too. Believers have been “released from the law” and are “married” to Messiah rather than to the Law (Romans 7:1–6); the glory that came with the Law's commandments, engraved on stone, has itself been brought to an end (2 Corinthians 3:7–11). Romans 10:4 calls Messiah the telos of the Law: its goal and culmination.

This matters because the Law is not a shelf of separate rules where you keep some and set others aside. Scripture treats it as one unit; James can say that stumbling in one point makes a person guilty of the whole (James 2:10). So when Paul says the Law of commandments has been abolished, he is describing the Mosaic Law as a covenantal unit no longer governing those who are in Messiah, Jew and Gentile alike.

Readers who know Matthew 5:17–19 (“I have not come to abolish the Law… but to fulfill it… not an iota, not a dot”) may wonder whether this contradicts what Yeshua (Jesus) Himself said. It doesn't. Yeshua is describing the Law of Moses in full, and almost no one who cites that verse keeps it that way themselves. Throughout Matthew, “fulfill” regularly describes Scripture reaching its intended accomplishment in Messiah. Yeshua did not fail or discard the Law; He fulfilled it. While He lived, He was fully under the Law and kept it Himself; His death brought the Mosaic Law's authority as a covenantal rule of life to its appointed end. Read this way, the passage is less a rule for today's believer than a promise that Scripture will not fail.

What Did Messiah Build?

The cross did more than destroy a barrier. It created a people.

Paul keeps going past “one new man,” and this is where the chapter's real weight lands:

“And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,” (Ephesians 2:17–19, ESV)

Not merely tolerated. Not merely permitted to stand nearby. Fellow citizens. Members of the household. Paul isn't finished:

“built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” (Ephesians 2:20–22, ESV)

Notice what just happened to the picture above. The old Temple had a wall keeping Gentiles out of the inner courts where God's presence dwelt. Now Paul says Jew and Gentile together are being built into a new temple, a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. The wall didn't just come down. Where separation once stood, God began building Jew and Gentile together into His dwelling place. This series will spend more time inside that picture in Week 3; for now, the point is simply this: Messiah did not leave a cleared lot where the wall used to stand. He built on it.

Messiah's answer to Jewish and Gentile division was not sameness. It was reconciliation.

Then What Rule Do We Live By?

If the Law is not the believer's rule of life, is there no rule at all? There is. Paul speaks explicitly of “the law of Christ”:

“Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” (Galatians 6:2, ESV)

Romans 8 similarly describes life in Messiah as life under “the law of the Spirit of life”:

“For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:2, ESV)

This new law is not the old one relabeled. It contains many commands that echo the Mosaic Law, because God's character has not changed. But those commands bind believers because Messiah and His apostles give them to the Church, not because the Church remains under the covenant made at Sinai. The Sabbath illustrates the distinction: the New Testament never transfers Israel's Sabbath obligation to the Church.

Messiah didn't hand believers a blank page. He handed them a new one, written under His own authority. Much of it echoes what came before. But it is a new page, not the old one revised.

Are Gentiles Now Spiritual Jews?

No. This is worth stating plainly, because “sons of Abraham” language can sound like it.

“And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.” (Galatians 3:29, ESV)

Being Abraham's offspring by faith is not the same as being a Jew. Physical descent from Abraham alone never made someone part of Israel's covenant line: Ishmael and Esau make that clear. Gentile believers share Abraham's standing by faith; they do not thereby inherit his ethnicity or every promise made to his physical descendants. The Land, for instance, was never promised to Gentile believers; it remains Israel's.

At the same time:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28, ESV)

One new man does not mean one uniform man. Galatians 3:28 is about standing, not erasure. Jew and Gentile share the same justification, the same membership in the Body, the same access to God, the same household and temple described above. They do not share an identical set of practices, any more than “neither slave nor free” abolished the real difference between those two conditions in the first century. Unity, not uniformity.

Freedom, Not License

None of this means Jewish believers must abandon Jewish practice. They remain free to keep parts of the Law they choose, so long as a practice doesn't become a basis for standing before God, a measure of someone else's spirituality, or something imposed on believers whom Scripture doesn't place under that obligation.

Paul's own life shows what that freedom looks like. He took a vow (Acts 18:18), planned his travel around Jerusalem's feasts (Acts 20:16), and at the urging of the Jerusalem church, joined in a purification rite at the Temple (Acts 21:17–26). Paul's vow in Acts 21 does not show he was under the Law; it shows the freedom the Messiah gives, freedom from the Law and freedom to keep parts of it. That freedom cuts both ways: no one keeps it to gain standing with God, and no one may require it of others. This series returns to that principle directly in Week 4.

How does this help me understand “The Church: A Mystery Revealed”?

One New Man, Not Two Peoples Sharing a Room

Torah-observant Messianic believers will read this post and disagree, and that disagreement deserves a gracious hearing, not a caricature. Our differences over practice make Paul's vision of one new man more important, not less. Whatever our practice, we should ask ourselves: Does this become a basis for our standing before God? Does it become a measure of someone else's spirituality? Is it imposed on believers whom Scripture does not place under that obligation? Held honestly, those questions are how believers who differ on practice still recognize each other as one new man rather than two peoples uneasily sharing a room.

Picture it concretely. A Jewish believer keeps Passover at her own table. A Gentile believer down the street does not. Neither practice is what marks either of them as belonging. Messiah is what marks them as belonging, and He has made them, together, into something neither of them was before.

This week, read Ephesians 2:11–22 in one sitting. Notice what came down: the wall. Then notice what was built in its place: one new man, one household, one temple.

Then ask yourself: Where do I expect other believers to look, sound, or practice like me before I treat them as fully one with me?

And if you are a Gentile believer, ask one more question: Does my picture of the Church leave room for Jewish believers to remain recognizably Jewish without treating their Jewishness as spiritually superior or as something that needs to disappear?

The wall has come down.

Not because Messiah failed the Law, but because He fulfilled it.

Jew and Gentile. One new man. One Messiah.