Jews and Gentiles are united into one church
The barriers and hedges God set around Israel in the form of rules and regulations, which were intended to keep them a separate nation, have now served their purpose. The division between Jews and Gentiles has become an anachronism, an outdated and unnecessary complication. As one organic unit, the Christian church now enfolds and unites all believers in Christ. Paul invites the Ephesians to see and to appreciate the change by comparing their former state with what they have now become.
Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (that done in the body by the hands of men)— 12 remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.
Accepting circumcision was the sign and seal by which a Jewish male indicated his willingness to live under God’s covenant. Circumcision denoted him as a “son of the covenant,” one of God’s chosen people. Claiming this favored status for themselves made it very easy for Jews to look down on the less-favored Gentiles. Referring to a Gentile as “uncircumcised” was a term of reproach, the equivalent of calling him an outcast and a reprobate sinner.
Paul certainly is not approving of the animosity and bias that underlay many of the derisive terms the Jews heaped on the Gentiles. But he does acknowledge a basis for the standard Jewish opinions regarding Gentiles and the Jews’ low esteem of the Gentiles’ spiritual status. They were right in thinking that the Gentiles in general were lost.
To see how true this was, Paul’s gentile readers in Ephesus needed merely to think back on their miserable condition prior to the days when Paul came to them with the gospel. “Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ,” Paul says. That was a terrible problem, an insurmountable obstacle. And Paul reinforces how desperate their situation was by adding four more negative descriptors. The Gentiles were (1) excluded from citizenship in Israel, (2) foreigners to the covenants of the promise, (3) without hope, and (4) without God in the world.
Recall that at Jacob’s well Jesus told the Samaritan woman, “Salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22). For Gentiles to be “excluded from citizenship in Israel” and “foreigners to the covenants” that promised the Messiah was a dreadful plight. It made their situation hopeless. Paul can rightly say they were “without hope” because they were “without God in the world.” It is not that they were atheists, who denied the existence of a god. They had many gods, but they were false gods. They did not have the triune God, so they had no god at all to help them.
Paul doesn’t dredge up these old memories to hurt the Ephesians but to help them, not to pull them down but to build them up. He wants them to make a comparison. Formerly they were without hope and without God in the world, but all that has changed.