Ephesians 2:14

Ephesians 2:14. For. This introduces a confirmatory explanation of the preceding verse.

He is our peace. The subject is emphatic: ‘He and none other'; the personal Christ, whose blood was shed, is Himself our peace, not simply our peacemaker; for in His person, as God man, the reconciliation took place. ‘Peace' is here to be taken in its widest sense, as the complex idea of peace between God and man, and between Jews and Gentiles. The latter is based upon the former, and the Apostle gives prominence now to the one, and again to the other, but here necessarily includes both in the phrase, ‘our peace.' How He is our peace is specified in what follows (down to the close of Ephesians 2:17).

Who made both one. Both Jews and Gentiles, as the context shows.

And broke down the middle wall of the partition. This explains how he ‘made both one,' namely, in that He broke down, etc. The figure is a natural one. Between the Jews and the Gentiles there had existed a ‘middle wall,' which belonged to ‘the partition,' the well-known hedge or fence between the two classes. Others explain: the middle wall which was the partition; but the former view is preferable, since it gives a wider meaning to the latter term, better suited to the complex idea of peace running through the passage. The ‘hedge' was the whole Mosaic economy which separated between Jews and Gentiles, but which, as Ephesians 2:15-16 indicate, also separated both from God, by convincing of guilt and sin. How the ‘middle wall,' which resulted from and belonged to this economy, was broken down once for all, is explained in what follows. The figures may have been suggested by the Jewish temple. ‘There was there a court of the Gentiles (Acts 21:28), though only in later times, in the last temple; a vail which separated like a wall, rent first at the death of the Redeemer' (Braune).