<p>2:14 <i>For he himself is our peace, who has made us one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility</i>- &quot;Peace&quot; continues the allusion to Is. 57:19 (see on :13). The Lord Jesus was our peace in the sense He is the source of our peace, our peace offering. The enmity &quot;hostility&quot; is the 'alienation' from the community of Israel spoken of in :12, physically manifest in the stone dividing wall between the court of the Gentiles and the temple proper. The first century unity between Jew and Gentile must have been especially impressive. Philo records of Jamnia: &ldquo;There lived a mixed population, the majority of them Jews but the rest a number of foreigners who had nested there as vermin from neighbouring territories&rdquo;. And there are many other such references to the bitter hatred between them. This &ldquo;enmity&rdquo; (AV) between them was taken away for those who were in Christ (Eph. 2:14; Col. 3:11; Gal. 3:28). It must have made a startling and arresting witness. And yet sadly, it didn&rsquo;t continue; the old tensions and feelings rent apart that unity. The issues facing the body of Christ today are not simply Jew : Gentile tensions; there are enmities and oppositions between groups and persons which are only resoluble by common membership in the body of Christ. &nbsp;</p><p>The offerer put his hand on the head of the animal, thereby associating himself with it. In a sense, the animal therefore represented the offerer. But it had to be &quot;without blemish&quot; (Lev. 3:1), and to produce a &quot;sweet savour&quot; when burnt (Lev. 3:16). But how are we to offer ourselves as an unblemished sacrifice? We are surely each aware of our desperate sinfulness. The answer is in the fact that the language of the peace offering sacrifice is applied to Jesus. &quot;He is our peace&quot; (Eph. 2:14), our peace offering by metonymy (in the same way as Christ was made &ldquo;sin&quot; for us, i.e. a sin offering). He is the unblemished animal (1 Pet. 1:19), and if we are in Christ, we too will be counted as being without spot and blemish (Eph. 5:27). We ought to know whether we are in Christ. If we are, we will be seen by God as just as pure as He is. See on Eph. 5:2. We thereby become mediators of peace to all manner of divided groups and persons.</p>