Ephesians 2:14

For he is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of partition.

Our peace ... The mind of the great apostle still lingered upon the glorious prophecies of Isaiah (see under Ephesians 2:13); and in such a frame of mind Paul would most certainly have included in his thoughts the prophecy of the Son of God who had assured his apostles that the Jewish temple itself would be utterly devastated and destroyed within the time-span of a single generation after Jesus spoke (Mark 13:30), and that the destruction would be so complete that not one stone would be left on top of another (Mark 13:2). Furthermore, as Paul wrote, he could not have failed to recall that he himself had barely escaped with his life when the Jews wrongly accused him of taking a Gentile beyond the "middle wall of partition" in the temple (Acts 21:28f). And yet ... here he was dictating a letter to a congregation containing many Gentiles, all of whom, together with himself and many other Jews, were now, all of them, members of that greater temple in Christ! As one of the most prominent and successful Pharisees of his generation, Paul would also have had first-hand information about the rending of the temple veil that hung between the Holy of Holies and the Holy Place, a sensational event that took place at the moment of Christ's death (Matthew 27:51), the significance of this being in the fact that the sacred veil was the largest, highest, most important and most symbolical of all the "middle walls of partition" (of which there were several) in the ancient Jewish temple. Thus, when God rent it in twain, all of the middle walls of separation were broken down and destroyed. A little fuller comment on this situation is purposefully included here with the intention of showing the absurdity of a critical remark such as:

It is improbable, however, that the figure (of the broken down middle wall of partition) would have occurred to any Christian writer while the wall itself was still standing: the expression therefore points to a post-Apostolic dating of this epistle![42]

Only if Paul had been a spiritual ignoramus could he have failed to know at this time of his first imprisonment when this letter was written that God had broken down the middle wall of partition between the Jews and Gentiles. Paul's whole apostolic mission had been carried forward in the stern and certain conviction that God had broken it down; and for anyone to imagine that Paul would have needed the actual destruction of the temple itself (which occurred after Paul's death) to suggest the figure which he employed in this passage it would first have to be supposed that Paul was a spiritual dunce. The whole Christian world knew that the temple was doomed to destruction by Christ's prophecy; and not even all of the cunning and power of the Jews and Gentiles alike who tried to save it could prevent the prophecy's fulfillment. Not only by Paul, but by every Christian, the Jewish temple was looked upon as already destroyed! Inherent in such a criticism as that just quoted is not only the bias which prompted it but an amazing lack of spiritual discernment. All such criticisms of the word of God have a quality of solving "problems" by creating greater and more numerous problems. For example, if it is assumed, for the moment only, and for the purpose of argument, that some post-Apostolic writer wrote Ephesians, attributed it to Paul the apostle, sent it forth, and achieved universal acceptance of it as a genuine Pauline letter by the churches of all nations for nineteen centuries - if such a monstrous and improbable supposition should be allowed, then it would be true that the book of Ephesians was produced by a true genius who gave humanity some of the noblest teaching in all of the sacred Scriptures, but that this genius (!) did not even know that Paul died before the Jewish temple was destroyed, and that he betrayed the fraudulent nature of his deception by the reference in Ephesians 2:14!