Ephesians 2:13-18 → Numbers 15:14

Name the donor honestly first, because this file has been filed under the wrong one. Paul's "far off"/"brought near" language is not drawn from Numbers 15. Verified at the NT Reference shelf, Ephesians 2:13 and 2:17 run on μακράν (G3112) and ἐγγύς (G1451) — and at verse 17 Paul quotes his source outright: "He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near," which is Isaiah 57:19. Numbers 15:14 shares no vocabulary with the passage at all. What Numbers 15:14 supplies is not Paul's wording but the Torah's own precedent, and it is a striking one. The verse legislates for the gēr (H1616), the foreigner residing among Israel, and it does not grant him a lesser rite or a side entrance: he may prepare "an offering made by fire as a pleasing aroma to the LORD" — the identical formula, rêaḥ nîḥôaḥ (H7381 + H5207), used for the native-born — and the instruction is to do it kēn ka-ʾăšer taʿăśû, "exactly as you do." The next verse pushes it further: "the assembly is to have the same statute both for you and for the foreign resident... you and the foreigner shall be the same before the LORD" (15:15). Israel's own law therefore already knew that God's altar could receive a Gentile's smoke, and that when it did, the smell was not marked as second-class. Paul's claim in Ephesians 2 is that Christ's blood has turned that concession into a citizenship. What the Torah permitted, the cross constitutes: the barrier is not lowered but "destroyed" (2:14), the two are not merely tolerated in one courtyard but made, as Paul puts it, "one new man out of the two" (2:15), and the outsider is no longer a gēr at all — "you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God's household" (2:19). The distance between Numbers 15 and Ephesians 2 is the distance between being allowed to bring an offering and being told the house is yours. And the point of access, in both texts, is the same and is the whole prize: "through Him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit" (2:18). Nearness to God was always the good on offer; Christ is what finally made it free.