R.C. Sproul

And so he came and preached peace to you who were afar off and to those who were near.

He preached the same message both to the Jews and to the Gentiles of the presence of the kingdom of God.

For through him,

We both have access by one Spirit to the Father.

If there's ever a Trinitarian passage that you're gonna run into, here it is, because it says that this work of reconciliation, this making peace between Jew and Gentiles is a Trinitarian work.

It was through Christ, by the Holy Spirit,

unto the Father, so that all three persons in the Trinity are working for the same purpose and to the same end here.

He says, now therefore, you're no longer strangers and foreigners.

The Old Testament saw the Gentiles

foreigners and strangers to God's covenant community.

That old system is gone.

It no longer stands.

But instead of being strangers and foreigners, Paul says that this unity manifests itself fundamentally in three ways.

And let's see if we can discover them.

Now, therefore, you're no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens

with the saints.

What's a citizen?

A citizen belongs to some political group, a city, really comes from the word city, or a nation.

I told the story at some point on Sunday morning about what happened to Vesta and me and two of our friends when I was doing a three-week series of lectures in Eastern Europe right after the wall came down.

and the communists had departed.