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ARE THE RULES GONE NOW?

It sounds startling to hear a Bible-thumping, Sabbath-keeping Adventist Christian to say that the law has been abolished, but unless I want to use scissors and cut Ephesians 2:15 out of my Bible, I have to explore just exactly what the law-LOVING apostle Paul was talking about.

For 22 years he was prisoner #31450. Pastor Humberto Noble Alexander was a Seventh-day Adventist minister living in Cuba when Castro’s henchmen pulled up to his house in one of their infamous ‘57 Oldsmobiles and dragged him off to their G-2 interrogation headquarters. Using an imaginary trumped-up charge of trying to bomb Castro’s private plane, they sentenced him to nearly a quarter of a century in the Isle of Pines prison and other institutions of Communist horror. His marvelous autobiography, I Will Die Free, co-written with our Voice of Prophecy friend, Kay Rizzo, is one of the best books you’ll ever read.

Isle of Pines was set up by the Cuban authorities to try out something called the Camilo Cienfuego Plan — “a plan to break the [6000] prisoners’ morale and exploit the island’s productivity through the use of slave labor,” writes Alexander. And the story is mind-boggling: the torture, the brainwashing, the random shootings. But Noble and fellow Christians there in that hellhole decided that Castro simply wasn’t going to beat them. They wouldn’t give in. They wouldn’t sign “confession statements.” They wouldn’t break under pressure. “We will die free,” they assured each other.

They also began worship services. Alexander was an ordained minister, and soon men of all religious persuasions dubbed him “The Preacher.”

“We banded together for strength,” he writes. “Seventh-day Adventist, Catholic, Presbyterian, [Baptists, Pentecostals] — labels didn’t matter in prison. There, in the most disgusting of Communist prison conditions, Christ’s church was unified; we were one.”

The more harassment they got, the more the little “church” grew. In four years, despite the beatings and killings, the ad hoc congregation of men in striped prison garb swelled to more than 200. Noble describes a chilling scene where, on a nightly basis, guards would come to the prisoners’ “gallery,” their sleeping place, and randomly pick out a few. They would take them outside to the firing wall, and simply shoot them dead. Every night.

“We who remained heard the centuries-old cries of ‘Viva, Cristo el Rey!’ (‘Long live Christ the King!’),” Noble writes, “before the rifle shots. Then — silence.”

And an old Christian inmate named Gerardo would quietly move among the men. “Let not your heart be troubled,” he would whisper. “Our beloved brother is asleep in Jesus.” Somehow, this brave little Noble Alexander, “The Preacher,” survived 22 years. Finally, in 1983, presidential candidate Jesse Jackson negotiated the release of the inmates, and Noble joined other emaciated prisoners — Catholic, Protestant, every conceivable religious persuasion — in getting on board a plane at José Marti Airport and flying to freedom: Washington, D.C.

Well, friend, it’s a whale of a story: I Will Die Free, by Noble Alexander and Kay Rizzo. Ask at your Christian bookstore for this bestseller by Pacific Press. But here in Ephesians chapter two, where the apostle Paul served some time in dark dungeons as well, he writes, in a sense, about religious barriers coming down. Writing about Jesus, our Savior, here’s verse 14:

“For He Himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.” And then these fascinating, but troubling, 12 more words: “By abolishing in His flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.”

And we say, What? What is the Bible saying here? “Abolishing the law”? Is this the message of the New Testament?

Going back to the first part of Ephesians 2, which we studied last week, we have a clear picture of division: Jews and Gentiles. Lawkeepers and lawbreakers. People on the inside, and rebels out in the yard. And Paul has said here: “No, that’s not it any more. We’re all in the same boat. All of us have been ‘dead in our trespasses and sins.’” But then in verse 13, those who were “far away” have been brought near by the shed blood of Jesus. He is the great unifier; He brings all people together at the foot of the cross. In the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, Dr. Francis Foulkes writes:

“Not only can it be said that Christ BRINGS peace. He IS our peace. As men are brought to be with Him, and continue to live in Him, they find peace with God, and so also a meetingplace and concord with one another, whatever may have been their divisions of race, color, class or creed before. He came for this purpose, to be the Prince of peace.”

It certainly worked out that way in the Cuban prison. Jesus Christ WAS the peace of those men; they found their unity in serving Him. So far so good. But now, here in verse 15, is Paul telling us that Christian unity comes by doing away with the law? There would be a certain Wild-Wild-West kind of cohesiveness if all the rules were gone, I suppose. Although most of us would be robbed, ruined, and rigor-mortis-ing in very short order because the entire planet would be one giant Mafia. And what kind of unity would that be? What is the Word of God telling us here in Ephesians chapter two?

Well, we just read from the New International Version, so let’s see what the NIV’s own scholars have to say about verse 15 and this expression: “abolishing in His flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.”

First of all, they point us to two other verses — that’s one of the beautiful things about these study Bibles: they help build a network of verses that go together. First of all, Matthew 5:17:

“Do not think” — and this is Jesus talking during His famous Sermon on the Mount — “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.”

Sometimes Christians suggest that “fulfill” means “to do away with,” but that really makes no sense if we then read it like this: “I have not come to abolish them but to do away with them.” No.

“Jesus fulfilled the Law,” suggest the NIV scholars here, “in the sense that He gave it its FULL meaning. He emphasized its deep, underlying principles and total commitment to it rather than mere external acknowledgment and obedience.”

We especially find support for a continued validity of the Law when we go on to Romans 3:31, where Paul, who also wrote Ephesians, asserts this:

“Do we, then, nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.”

“Paul anticipated being charged with antinomianism,” write the NIV text note scholars. “Antinomianism” meaning a hostility to the law of God. Now, then, to the rest of this NIV text note. Here it is:

“Since Matthew 5:17 and Romans 3:31 teach that God’s moral standard expressed in the Old Testament law is NOT changed by the coming of Christ, what is abolished here is probably the effect of the specific ‘commandments and regulations’ in separating Jews from Gentiles, whose nonobservance of the Jewish law renders them ritually unclean.”

Recall that we already studied, just four verses earlier, a mini-debate about circumcision. Should all Christians have to undergo this Jewish ritual? Should all the Old Testament regulations about feasts and diets and how far you could walk on the Sabbath still be enforced on these Gentile Christians coming into the church? That was the question, and you can read the minutes of the Jerusalem Meeting back in Acts chapter 15, where the answer was an emphatic no. With that in mind, I appreciate how The Message paraphrase gives us this interesting verse 15 of Ephesians 2:

“He [Jesus] tore down the wall we used to keep each other at a distance. He repealed the law code that had become so clogged with fine print and footnotes that it hindered more than it helped.”

So the ceremonial law, which had been such a source of division, came to an end. The exclusivity the Jews had placed on it, the hostilities that came from living in a “have” and “have-not” world, the mountain of legal requirements a would-be convert faced at the baptismal pool — Jesus Christ came to abolish “in His flesh” those regulations.

And in a way, we see that in the grime and blood of this Cuban prison. The men had doctrinal differences that could have kept them separate and apart and bickering, but that didn’t happen. Instead they came together “in Christ.” One weekend it would be Noble’s turn to preach, the following Sunday or Sabbath — they wisely and humbly worked their way around that dilemma — a Baptist or Presbyterian would stand behind the makeshift pulpit and share Jesus Christ. Setting to the side their debate points about the Eucharist and “transubstantiation,” they would celebrate communion together: Catholics and Protestants alike. The dividing wall of hostility was gone.

Friend, this is not to say that doctrines are unimportant. Some Old Testament law codes came to an end at Calvary, but Bible truth is alive and vital and worth studying always. But if the book of Ephesians tells us one thing, it is that every son or daughter of God must dialogue and study in a spirit of unity at the foot of the Cross. If you have been “far away” from some fellow Christian who believes differently than you about the timing of the millennium or what happens when a person dies, Ephesians 2 is telling you right now that God wants to “bring you near” to that person . . . through the blood of Christ.