THE EXPOSITOR’S BIBLE.
EDITED BY THE REV.
W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, M.A., LL.D.
Editor of "The Expositor," etc.
THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS
BY THE REV. PROFESSOR
G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.
Headingley College, Leeds
London
HODDER AND STOUGHTON,
27, PATERNOSTER ROW
MDCCCXCVIII
THE
EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS
BY THE REV. PROFESSOR
G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.
Headingley College, Leeds
THIRD EDITION
London
HODDER AND STOUGHTON,
27, PATERNOSTER ROW
MDCCCXCVIII
INTRODUCTION. | |
Chapter i. 1, 2. | |
CHAPTER I. | |
THE WRITER AND READERS. | |
PAGE | |
---|---|
Contrast of Galatians and Ephesians—Pauline qualities of Ephesians: intellectual, historical, theological, spiritual, ethical—The Idea of the Church—The Person of Christ—Ephesians and Colossians—Style of Ephesians—Circular Hypothesis—Epistle from Laodicea—Designation of the Readers—Faithful Brethren | 3 |
PRAISE AND PRAYER. | |
Chapter i. 3–19. | |
CHAPTER II. | |
THE ETERNAL PURPOSE. | |
The Apostle’s Hymn of Praise—Blessed be God!—Blessing spiritual, heavenly, Christian—In the Beginning the Election of Grace—The World and its Founder—Redemption embedded in Creation—God’s prescient Choice—Our Holiness His Purpose—Divine Adoption—Who are the Elect? | 21 |
CHAPTER III. | |
THE BESTOWMENT OF GRACE. | |
34 | |
CHAPTER IV. | |
THE FINAL REDEMPTION. | |
Mutual Inheritance—Jewish and Gentile Heirs—Uses of the Seal—The Stamp of Sanctity—Promise fulfilled and to be fulfilled—Hearing and Believing—Salvation by the Truth—Salvation for the Gentiles—Faith and the Holy Spirit—The two Redemptions—The encumbered Property—The Earnest of our consummate Life | 50 |
CHAPTER V. | |
FOR THE EYES OF THE HEART. | |
Thanksgiving for the Readers—The God of Christ, the Father of Glory—Christian Enlightenment—Seeing with the Heart—What is our Hope?—God’s Wealth in Men—The true Standard of Value—The Power of Christ’s Resurrection | 65 |
THE DOCTRINE. | |
Chapter i. 20—iii. 13. | |
CHAPTER VI. | |
WHAT GOD WROUGHT IN THE CHRIST. | |
Prayer and Teaching—Historical Effect of Christ’s Resurrection—The
Stages of His Exaltation—Christianity without
Miracles—The efficient Cause of Christianity—The
perfect Resurrection—The First-begotten out of the
Dead—The Risen One, the Holy One—Resurrection
and Ascension—Ascension to Rule—Christ and the
Angels—Christ glorified God’s Gift to the Church—Christ
|
81 |
CHAPTER VII. | |
FROM DEATH TO LIFE. | |
Raised with Christ—Sin is Death—Jesus Christ in a dead World—Alive in Body, dead in Spirit—Religious Difficulties—Antipathy to God—The Power of the Air—God’s Anger against Sinners—The Soul’s Awaking—Consciousness of God—Fellowship in Salvation | 95 |
CHAPTER VIII. | |
SAVED FOR AN END. | |
Beginning and End of God’s Plan—Mercy, Love, Kindness, Grace and Gift—Not of Works—Boasting excluded—Evangelical Assurance—In the heavenly Places—Grace a Task-master—Creation and Redemption—The apostolic Church and the coming Times | 109 |
CHAPTER IX. | |
THE FAR AND NEAR. | |
Wherefore remember!—Sudden and gradual Conversion—The Gentile World: Godless, hopeless, Christless—Away with the Atheists!—The double Pessimism—The Uncircumcision—Nigh in the Blood of Christ—Reunion in Guilt and in Pardon | 120 |
CHAPTER X. | |
THE DOUBLE RECONCILIATION. | |
The Jewish War—The two Parties in the Church—The Jewish Enmity typical—The new Christian Humanity—The Church in the first Century and the nineteenth—Hindrances to Unity: external, internal—The Ground of Reconciliation—Enemies of God—The Atonement of the Cross—Moral Communism—Personal Faith—The Fraternization of Mankind | 131 |
CHAPTER XI. | |
GOD’S TEMPLE IN HUMANITY. | |
143 | |
CHAPTER XII. | |
THE SECRET OF THE AGES. | |
St Paul’s Style of Composition—Christ the Mystery of God—Christ in the Old Testament—The Exploration of Christ—The Portion of the Gentiles in Israel—The Organs of the new Revelation—The unique Office and Influence of the Apostle Paul | 155 |
CHAPTER XIII. | |
EARTH TEACHING HEAVEN. | |
Christ the Bond of Angels and Men—Our Lord and theirs—Jesus of Nazareth the Lord of the Ages—The Reality of the Angels—Their Interest in the Church—The Peculiarity of the human Problem—The Docility of the heavenly Potentates—The angelic Standpoint—The Grandeur of Christianity inspires Courage | 167 |
PRAYER AND PRAISE. | |
Chapter iii. 14–21. | |
CHAPTER XIV. | |
THE COMPREHENSION OF CHRIST. | |
Contents of St Paul’s Prayer—The Father of Angels and of Men—Strength of Spirit and of the Spirit—Christ abiding in the Heart—Christ and the Christ—Christ’s Claim on the Intellect—Neglect of Theology—Dimensions of God’s Building—Strength to grasp the Magnitude of Christianity—The true Broad Churchman | 183 |
CHAPTER XV. | |
KNOWING THE UNKNOWABLE. | |
197 | |
THE EXHORTATION. | |
ON CHURCH LIFE. | |
Chapter iv. 1–16. | |
CHAPTER XVI. | |
THE FUNDAMENTAL UNITIES. | |
The Prisoner in the Lord—The Foes of Church Peace: Low-mindedness, Ambition, Resentfulness—The Basis of Unity: sevenfold, threefold—One Body despite Divisions—One Spirit makes one Body—Unity of Life and Hope—One Lord in all Churches—Baptism a Sign of Christ’s Rule, the Seal of a corporate Life—The one God, and the many | 213 |
CHAPTER XVII. | |
THE MEASURE OF THE GIFT OF CHRIST. | |
Unity in Diversities—Christ the Administrator—The Ascension of David and of David’s Son—Height and Breadth—The Giving of Jesus—Christ’s Descent and Ascent—The Warfare of Christ—The Spoils of His Victory—The Enlistment of His Prisoners—Apostles and Prophets, Evangelists and Pastors—Paul, Augustine, Luther, Knox, Wesley—The Demands of the Future—Individual Responsibility | 227 |
CHAPTER XVIII. | |
THE GROWTH OF THE CHURCH. | |
The Aim of the Christian Ministry—A perfect Manhood—Sleight
or Sport?—Junctures of Supply—Reunion in the
|
244 |
ON CHRISTIAN MORALS. | |
Chapter iv. 17–v. 21. | |
CHAPTER XIX. | |
THE WALK OF THE GENTILES. | |
The old World and the old Man—Impotence of Gentile Reason—Science and Pessimism—Loss of the Life of God—Ignorance the Mother of Indevotion—Induration of Heart—Impudicity of Paganism | 261 |
CHAPTER XX. | |
THE TWO HUMAN TYPES. | |
Defective Views of Christ amongst Paul’s Readers—The historical Jesus the true Christ—Paul and the Tradition of Jesus—Jesus the human Model—Nero a Type of the Pagan Order—The Fraud of Sin—The Growth and the Birth of the new Man—Righteousness and Holiness | 275 |
CHAPTER XXI. | |
DISCARDED VICES. | |
The seven Gentile Sins—Truthfulness and the Truth—The Perils of Anger—The Antidote to Theft—Sinfulness of vain Speech—Malice and its Brood—Imitation of the Divine Love—Filthiness and Jesting—The golden Leprosy | 290 |
CHAPTER XXII. | |
DOCTRINE AND ETHICS. | |
The Intrinsic and Experimental in Morals—Originality of
Christian Ethics—Ethical Art and Science—Four Principles
|
305 |
CHAPTER XXIII. | |
THE CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT. | |
Right the Fruit of Light—All Virtue from one Source—Unbelief and Immorality—Christian Goodness—The Way of Righteousness—Truth the Hall-mark of Sanctity—Verity and Veracity—Specialists in Virtue—Reproof of open and of hidden Sins—Manifestation and Transformation | 321 |
CHAPTER XXIV. | |
THE NEW WINE OF THE SPIRIT. | |
Soberness and Excitement—The heedful Look—Evil Days for the Asian Christians—Wisdom to know God’s Will—Wine and social Pleasure—The Craving for Excitement—Fulness of the Spirit—The Rise of Christian Psalmody—The Music of the Heart—Enthusiasm and Order | 336 |
ON FAMILY LIFE. | |
Chapter v. 22–vi. 9. | |
CHAPTER XXV. | |
CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE. | |
The Divine Character of Marriage—Religious Equality of the Sexes—The Glory of the Man—Women’s Rights—Christ’s undivided Headship—Masculine Selfishness—Greek Terms for Love—The Husband and the Priest—The double Self—Indelibility of Wedlock | 353 |
CHAPTER XXVI. | |
CHRIST AND HIS BRIDE. | |
366 | |
CHAPTER XXVII. | |
THE CHRISTIAN HOUSEHOLD. | |
Children in the Church—The initial Form of Duty—Commandment and Promise—Gentleness of fatherly Rule—Spoilt Children—The Lord’s Nurture—Greek and Roman Slaves—The Church and the Slaves—Christ a Pattern for Slaves—Servants of Society—Care, Honesty, Heartiness in Work—The heavenly Master’s Reward—Responsibility of the earthly Master | 380 |
ON THE APPROACHING CONFLICT. | |
Chapter vi. 10–18. | |
CHAPTER XXVIII. | |
THE FOES OF THE CHURCH. | |
Henceforth be strong!—The two Panoplies—The Personality of Satan—The Devil and his Angels—Paul’s Demonology—The spiritual Combat—Interior Temptations—Persecution and Heresy—The Region of the Struggle—The Siege of the heavenly City | 397 |
CHAPTER XXIX. | |
THE DIVINE PANOPLY. | |
The coming evil Day—Comparison with |
410 |
THE CONCLUSION. | |
Chapter vi. 19–24. | |
CHAPTER XXX. | |
REQUEST: COMMENDATION: BENEDICTION. | |
Paul’s Need of the Church’s Prayers—Christ’s Ambassador before the Emperor—Speaking the Word given—Good News for the Asian Churches—Character and Services of Tychicus—Peace to the Brethren—Love with Faith—Love toward Christ and Grace from God—The Love incorruptible | 427 |
Acts xix. 26.
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God, to the
saints, who are indeed faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus
Christ.” The translation given in this volume is based upon the Revised
Version, but deviates from it in some particulars. These deviations
will be explained in the exposition.
Yet there is a fundamental resemblance and identity
of character. The two letters are not the expression
of different minds, but of different phases of the same
The case against authenticity is ably stated in Dr. S. Davidson’s
Introduction to the N. T.; see also Baur’s Paul, Pfleiderer’s Paulinism,
Hilgenfeld’s Einleitung, Hatch’s article on “Paul” in the Encyclopædia
Britannica. The case for the defence may be found in Weiss’, Salmon’s,
Bleek’s, or Dods’ N. T. Introduction—the last brief, but to the point;
in Reuss’ History of the N. T.; Milligan’s article on “Ephesians” in
Encycl. Brit.; Gloag’s Introduction to the Pauline Epp.; Meyer’s, or
Beet’s, or Eadie’s Commentary; Sabatier’s The Apostle Paul.
Let us observe some of the Pauline qualities that are
stamped upon the face of this document. There is, in
the first place, the apostle’s intellectual note, what has
been well called his passion for the absolute. St Paul’s
was one of those minds, so discomposing to superficial
and merely practical thinkers, which cannot be content
with half-way conclusions. For every principle he
seeks its ultimate basis; every line of thought he
Hence, in contesting the Jewish claim to religious superiority on the ground of circumcision and the Abrahamic covenant, St Paul developed in the epistle to the Galatians a religious philosophy of history; he arrived at a view of the function of the law in the education of mankind which disposed not only of the question at issue, but of all such questions. He established for ever the principle of salvation by faith and of spiritual sonship to God. What that former argument effects for the history of revelation, is done here for the gospel in its relations to society and universal life. The principle of Christ’s headship is carried to its largest results. The centre of the Church becomes the centre of the universe. God’s plan of the ages is disclosed, ranging through eternity and embracing every form of being, and “gathering into one all things in the Christ.” In Galatians and Romans the thought of salvation by Christ breaks through Jewish limits and spreads itself over the field of history; in Colossians and Ephesians the idea of life in Christ overleaps the barriers of time and human existence, and brings “things in heaven and things in earth and things beneath the earth” under its sway.
The second, historical note of original Paulinism we
recognize in the writer’s attitude towards Judaism. We
should be prepared to stake the genuineness of the
epistle on this consideration alone. The position and
point of view of the Jewish apostle to the Gentiles are
unique in history. It is difficult to conceive how any
one but Paul himself, at any other juncture, could have
represented the relation of Jew and Gentile to each
For our author this revelation has lost none of its novelty and surprise. He is in the midst of the excitement it has produced, and is himself its chief agent and mouthpiece (iii. 1–9). This disclosure of God’s secret plans for the world overwhelms him by its magnitude, by the splendour with which it invests the Divine character, and the sense of his personal unworthiness to be entrusted with it. We utterly disbelieve that any later Christian writer could or would have personated the apostle and mimicked his tone and sentiments in regard to his vocation, in the way that the “critical” hypothesis assumes. The criterion of Erasmus is decisive: Nemo potest Paulinum pectus effingere.
St Paul’s doctrine of the cross is admittedly his
Another mark of the apostle’s hand, his specific
spiritual note, we find in the mysticism that pervades
the epistle and forms, in fact, its substance. “I live
no longer: Christ lives in me.” “He that is joined to the Lord is one
spirit.”
The ethical note of the true Paulinism is the conception
of the new man in Christ Jesus, whose sins were
slain by His death, and who shares His risen life unto
God (
The characteristics of St Paul’s teaching which we
have described—his logical thoroughness and finality,
his peculiar historical, theological, spiritual, and ethical
standpoint and manner of thought—are combined in the
conception which is the specific note of this epistle, viz.,
its idea of the Church as the body of Christ,—or in
other words, of the new humanity created in Him. This
forms the centre of the circle of thought in which the
writer’s mind moves; See ch. i. 9–13, ii. 11–22, iii. 5–11, iv. 1–16, v. 23–32.
The apostle Paul necessarily conceived the reconstruction of humanity under the form of a reconciliation of Israel and the Gentiles. The Catholicism we have here is Paul’s Catholicism of Gentile engrafting—not Clement’s, of churchly order and uniformity; nor Ignatius’, of monepiscopal rule. It is profoundly characteristic of this apostle, that in “the law” which had been to his own experience the barrier and ground of quarrel between the soul and God, “the strength of sin,” he should come to see likewise the barrier between men and men, and the strength of the sinful enmity which distracted the Churches of his foundation (ii. 14–16).
The representation of the Church contained in this
epistle is, therefore, by no means new in its elements.
Such texts as
The idea of the Church is not, however, independently
developed. Ephesians and Colossians are companion
letters,—the complement and explanation of
each other. Both “speak with regard to Christ and the
Church”; both reveal the Divine “glory in the Church and in Christ
Jesus.”
Criticism has attempted to derive first one and
then the other of the two from its fellow,—thus, in
effect, stultifying itself. Finally Dr. Holtzmann, in his Kritik der Epheser-und
Kolosserbriefe, Kritik d. Epheser-u. Kolosserbriefe auf Grund einer Analyse ihres
Verwandtschaftsverhältnisses (Leipzig, 1872). A work more subtle and
scientific, more replete with learning, and yet more unconvincing than
this of Holtzmann, we do not know.
Von Soden, the latest interpreter of this school and Holtzmann’s
collaborateur in the new Hand-Commentar, accepts Colossians in its
integrity as the work of Paul, retracting previous doubts on the subject.
Ephesians he believes to have been written by a Jewish disciple of
Paul in his name, about the end of the first century.
At the same time, there is a considerable difference
between the two writings in point of style. M. Renan,
who accepts Colossians from Paul’s hand, and who
See his Saint Paul, Introduction, pp. xii.–xxiii.
In this instance, Renan’s literary sense has deserted
him. While Colossians is quick in movement, terse
and pointed, in some places so sparing of words as to be almost hopelessly
obscure, See E.g., in See the Winer-Moulton N. T. Grammar, p. 709: “It is in writers
of great mental vivacity—more taken up with the thought than with the
mode of its expression—that we may expect to find anacolutha most
frequently. Hence they are especially numerous in the epistolary style
of the apostle Paul.”
In general, the writings of this group, belonging to
the time of the apostle’s imprisonment and advancing
age,
But that it was addressed to “the saints which are
in Ephesus” is more difficult to believe. The apostle
has “heard of the faith which prevails amongst” his
readers; he presumes that they “have heard of the
Christ, and were taught in Him according as truth is
in Jesus.” Ch. i. 15, iv. 20, 21. “My brethren” in ch. vi. 10 is an insertion of the copyists. Even
the closing benediction, ch. vi. 23, 24, is in the third person—a thing
unexampled in St Paul’s epistles.
It agrees with these internal indications that the
local designation is wanting in the oldest Greek copies
of the letter that are extant. The two great manuscripts
of the fourth century, the Vatican and Sinaitic
codices, omit the words “in Ephesus.” Basil in the
fourth century did not accept them, and says that “the
old copies” were without them. Origen, in the beginning
of the third century, seems to have known
nothing of them. And Tertullian, at the end of the
second century, while he condemns the heretic Marcion
Here the circular hypothesis of Beza and Ussher
comes to our aid. It is supposed that the letter was
destined for a number of Churches in Asia Minor,
which Tychicus was directed to visit in the course of
the journey which took him to
Colossæ. Ch. vi. 21, 22;
To which or how many of the Asian Churches
Tychicus would be able to communicate the letter
was, presumably, uncertain when it was written at
Rome; and the designation was left open. Its conveyance
At the close of his epistle to the Colossians St Paul
directs this Church to procure “from Laodicea,” in
exchange for their own, a letter which he is sending
there (iv. 16). Is it possible that we have the lost
Laodicean document in the epistle before us? So
Ussher suggested; and though the assumption is not
essential to his theory, it falls in with it very aptly.
Marcion may, after all, have preserved a reminiscence
of the fact that Laodicea, as well as Ephesus, shared in
this letter. The conjecture is endorsed by Lightfoot,
who says, writing on Compare Maclaren on Colossians and Philemon, p. 406, in this
series.
But how are we to read the address, with the local
definition wanting? There are two constructions open
to us:—(1) We might suppose that a space was left
blank in the original to be filled in afterwards by
Tychicus with the names of the particular Churches to
which he distributed copies, or to be supplied by the
voice of the reader. But if that were so, we should
have expected to find some trace of this variety of
designation in the ancient witnesses. As it is, the
documents either give Ephesus in the address, or
supply no local name at all. Nor is there, so far as
we are aware, any analogy in ancient usage for the
proceeding suggested. Moreover, the order of the
Greek words
Τοῖς ἁγίοις τοῖς οὖσιν ... καὶ πιστοῖς ἐν Χριστῳ Ἰησοῦ. The interposition
of the heterogeneous attributive between
ἁγίοις and
πιστοῖς is
harsh and improbable—not to say, with Hofmann, “quite incredible.”
The two latest German commentaries to hand, that of Beck and of
von Soden (in the Hand-Commentar), interpreters of opposite schools,
agree with Hofmann in rejecting the local adjunct and regarding
πιστοῖς as the complement of
τοῖς οὖσιν. Origen, in his fanciful way, makes of
τοῖς οὖσιν a predicate by
itself: “the saints who are,” who possess real being like God Himself
(
“The saints” is the apostle’s designation for Christian
believers generally, See, e.g., ver. 18, ii. 19, iii. 18, iv. 12, v. 3.
The Salutation is according to St Paul’s established form of greeting.
The apostle surveys in this thanksgiving the entire
course of the revelation of grace. Standing with the
men of his day, the new-born community of the sons
of God in Christ, midway between the ages past and
to come, Ch. ii. 7, iii. 5, 21;
Despite the grammatical involution of the style here
carried to an extreme, and underneath the apparatus of
Greek pronouns and participles, there is a fine Hebraistic
lilt pervading the doxology. The refrain is in the
manner of
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ: who hath blessed us,
In every blessing of the spirit, in the heavenly places, in Christ.”
Blessed be God!—It is the song of the universe, in
which heaven and earth take responsive parts.
Blessed be God!—It is the perpetual strain of the
Old Testament, from Melchizedek down to Daniel,—of
David in his triumph, and Job in his misery. But not
hitherto could men say, Blessed be the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ! He was “the Most High God,
the God of heaven,”—“Jehovah, God of Israel, who
only doeth wondrous things,”—“the Shepherd” and
“the Rock” of His people,—“the true God, the living
God, and an everlasting King”; and these are glorious
titles, which have raised men’s thoughts to moods of
highest reverence and trust. But the name of Father,
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, surpasses and
outshines them all. With wondering love and joy unspeakable
St Paul pronounced this Benedictus. God
was not less to him the Almighty, the High and
Holy One dwelling in eternity, than in the days of
The apostle’s psalm is a psalm of thanksgiving to God blessing and blessed. The second clause rhythmically answers to the first. True, our blessing of Him is far different from His blessing of us: ours in thought and words; His in mighty deeds of salvation. Yet in the fruit of lips giving thanks to His name there is a revenue of blessing paid to God which He delights in, and requires. “O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel,” grant us to bless Thee while we live and to lift up our hands in Thy name!
By three qualifying adjuncts the blessing which the Father of Christ bestowed upon us is defined: in respect of its nature, its sphere, and its personal ground.
The blessings that prompt the apostle’s praise are
not such as those conspicuous in the Old Covenant:
“Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and in the field;
in the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground,
and the increase of thy kine; blessed shall be thy
basket, and thy kneading-trough” (
Blessing spiritual in its nature is, in St Paul’s conception
of things, blessing in and of the Holy
Spirit. Vv. 13, 14;
Here is St Paul’s first chapter of Genesis. In
the
“The world” is a work of time, the slow structure of innumerable yet finite ages. Science affirms on its own grounds that the visible universe had a beginning, as it has its changes and its certain end. Its structural plan, its unity of aim and movement, show it to be the creation of a vast Intelligence. Harmony and law, all that makes science possible is the product of thought. Reason extracts from nature what Reason has first put there. The longer, the more intricate and grand the process, the farther science pushes back the beginning in our thoughts, the more sublime and certain the primitive truth becomes: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
The world is a system; it has a method and a plan,
therefore a foundation. But before the foundation,
there was the Founder. And man was in His thoughts,
and the redeemed Church of Christ. While yet the
world was not and the immensity of space stretched
lampless and unpeopled, we were in the mind of God;
His thought rested with complacency upon His human
sons, whose
When he says that God “chose us in Christ before
the foundation of the world”—or before founding the
world—this is not a mere mark of time. It intimates
that in laying His plans for the world the Creator had
the purpose of redeeming grace in view. The kingdom
which the “blessed children” of the Father of Christ
“inherit,” is the kingdom “prepared for them from the
foundation of the world” (
Evil existed before man appeared on the earth to be tempted and to fall. Through the geological record we hear the voice of creation groaning for long æons in its pain.
grim prophets of man’s brutal and murderous passions,
The Divine election of men in Christ is further
defined in the words of verse 5: “Having in love predestined
us,” and “according to the good pleasure of
His will.” Election is selection; it is the antecedent
in the mind of God in Christ of the preference which
Christ showed when He said to His disciples, “I have
chosen you out of the world.” It is, moreover, a fore-ordination
in love: an expression which indicates on
the one hand the disposition in God that prompted and
sustains His choice, and on the other the determination
of the almighty Will whereby the all-wise Choice is put
into operation and takes effect. In this pre-ordaining
control of human history God “determined the fore-appointed
seasons and the bounds of human habitation”
(
The consistence of foreknowledge with free-will is
an enigma which the apostle did not attempt to
solve. His reply to all questions touching the justice
of God’s administration in the elections of grace—questions
painfully felt and keenly agitated then as
they are now, and that pressed upon himself in the
case of his Jewish kindred with a cruel force (
The purpose of this loving fore-ordination of believing
men in Christ is twofold; it concerns at once their
character and their state: “He chose us out—that we
should be holy and without blemish in His sight,” and
“unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ for
Himself.” These two purposes are one. God’s sons
must be holy; and holy men are His sons. For this
end “we” were elected of God in the beginning. Nay,
εἰς αὐτόν, for Him;
not αὐτῳ, to Him.
“That we should be holy”—should be saints. This
the readers are already: “To the saints” the apostle
writes (ver. 1). They are men devoted to God by
their own choice and will, meeting God’s choice and
will for them. Imperfect saints they may be, by no
means as yet “without blemish”; but they are already,
and abidingly, “sanctified in Christ Jesus” (
Thus the Church is at last to be presented, and
every man in his own order, “faultless before the
presence of His glory, with exceeding
joy.” Ch. v. 25–27;
Sonship to Himself is the Christian status, the rank
and standing which God confers on those who believe
in His Son; it accrues to them by the fact that they
are in Christ. On sonship, see Chapters XV.–XVII. and XIX. in The Epistle to
the Galatians (Expositor’s Bible). From a valuable and suggestive paper by W. E. Ball, LL.D., on
“St Paul and the Roman Law,” in the Contemporary Review, August
1891.
This exalted status belonged to men in the purpose of God from eternity; but as a matter of fact it was instituted “through Jesus Christ,” the historical Redeemer. Whether previously (Jewish) servants in God’s house or (Gentile) aliens excluded from it (ii. 12), those who believed in Jesus as the Christ received a spirit of adoption and dared to call God Father! This unspeakable privilege had been preparing for them through the ages past in God’s hidden wisdom. Throughout the wild course of human apostasy the Father looked forward to the time when He might again through Jesus Christ make men His sons; and His promises and preparations were directed to this one end. The predestination having such an end, how fitly it is said: “in love having foreordained us.”
Four times, in these three verses, with exulting
emphasis, the apostle claims this distinction for “us.”
Who, then, are the objects of the primordial election
of grace? Does St Paul use the pronoun distributively,
thinking of individuals—you and me and so
many others, the personal recipients of saving grace?
See vv. 12, 13, where Jews and Gentiles, collectively, are distinguished;
and ch. ii. 11, 12, iii. 2–6, 21, iv. 4, 5, v. 25–27.
On the other hand, we may not widen the pronoun further; we cannot allow that the sonship here signified is man’s natural relation to God, that to which he was born by creation. This robs the word “adoption” of its distinctive force. The sonship in question, while grounded “in Christ” from eternity, is conferred “through” the incarnate and crucified “Jesus Christ”; it redounds “to the praise of the glory of His grace.” Now, grace is God’s redeeming love toward sinners. God’s purpose of grace toward mankind, embedded, as one may say, in creation, is realized in the body of redeemed men. But this community, we rejoice to believe, is vastly larger than the visible aggregate of Churches; for how many who knew not His name, have yet walked in the true light which lighteth every man.
There lies in the words “in Christ” a principle of exclusion, as well as of wide inclusion. Men cannot be in Christ against their will, who persistently put Him, His gospel and His laws, away from them. When we close with Christ by faith, we begin to enter into the purpose of our being. We find the place prepared for us before the foundation of the world in the kingdom of Divine love. We live henceforth “to the praise of the glory of His grace!”
The arrangement above made of the lines of this intricate passage is designed to guide the eye to its elucidation. Our disposition of the verses has not been determined by any preconceived interpretation, but by the parallelism of expression and cadences of phrase. The rhythmical structure of the piece, it seems to us, supplies the key to its explanation, and reduces to order its long-drawn and heaped-up relative and prepositional clauses, which are grammatically so unmanageable.
Eph. i. 6b–12a.
The leading word of this clause we can only paraphrase;
it has no English equivalent. St Paul perforce
turns grace into a verb; this verb occurs in the New
Testament but once besides,—in Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη. It is impossible to reproduce in English the
beautiful assonance—the play of sound and sense—in Gabriel’s greeting,
as St Luke renders it.
God “showed us grace in the Beloved”—or, to render the phrase with full emphasis, “in that Beloved One”—even as He “chose us in Him before the world’s foundation” and “in love predestined us for adoption.” The grace is conveyed upon the basis of our relationship to Christ: on that ground it was conceived in the counsels of eternity. The Voice from heaven which said at the baptism of Jesus and again at the transfiguration, “This is my Son, the Beloved,” uttered God’s eternal thought regarding Christ. And that regard of God toward the Son of His love is the fountain of His love and grace to men.
Christ is the Beloved not of the Father alone, but of
the created universe. All that know the Lord Jesus
1. Of grace bestowed, the first manifestation, in the
experience of Paul and his readers, was the forgiveness
of their trespasses (comp. ii. 13–18). This is “the
redemption” that “we have.” And it comes “through
His blood.” The epistles to the Galatians and
Romans See
In It is an error to suppose, as one sometimes hears it said, that trespasses
or transgressions are a light and comparatively trivial form of sin.
Both words denote, in the language of Scripture, definite offences
against known law, departures from known duty. Adam’s sin was the
typical “transgression” and “trespass” (
On rising from the dead our Saviour commissioned
the apostles to “proclaim in His name repentance and
remission of sins to all nations” (
Does it occupy the like position in modern Christian
teaching? Do we realize the criminality of sin, the fearfulness
of God’s displeasure, the infinite worth of His
forgiveness and the obligations under which it places
us, as St Paul and his converts did? or even as our
fathers did a few generations ago? “It is my impression,” writes
Dr. R. W. Dale, See The Evangelical Revival, and other Sermons, pp. 149–170, on
“The Forgiveness of Sins.”
These are solemn words, to be deeply pondered. They come from one of the most sagacious observers and justly revered teachers of our time. We have made a real advance in breadth and human sympathy; and there has been throughout our Churches a genuine and much needed awakening of philanthropic activity. But if we are departing from the living God, what will this avail us? If “the redemption through Christ’s blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses,” is no longer to us the momentous and glorious fact that it was to the apostles, then it is time to ask whether our God is in truth the same as theirs, whether He is still the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—whether we are not, haply, fabricating for ourselves another gospel. Without a piercing sense of the shame and ruin involved in human sin, we shall not put its remission where St Paul does, at the foundation of God’s benefits to men. Without this sentiment, we can only wonder at the passionate gratitude with which he receives the atonement and measures by its completeness the riches of God’s grace.
II. Along with this chief blessing of forgiveness, there came another to the apostolic Church. With the heart the mind, with the conscience the intellect was quickened and endowed: “which [grace] He shed abundantly upon us in all wisdom and intelligence.”
This sequel to verse 7 is somewhat of a surprise.
The reader is apt to slur over verse 8, half sensible of
some jar and incongruity between it and the context.
It scarcely occurs to us to associate wisdom and good
sense with the pardon of sin, as kindred bestowments
But there is another side to all this. “Christ
was made of God unto us wisdom.” This attribute
the apostle even sets first when he writes to the
wisdom-seeking Greeks, mocked by their worn-out and
confused philosophies (
Of such wisdom our epistle is full, and God “has
made it to abound” to the readers in these inspired
This intellectual gift is twofold: phronēsis as well as sophia,—the bestowment not only of deep spiritual thought, but of moral sagacity, good sense and thoughtfulness. This is a choice charism—a mercy of the Lord. For want of it how sadly is the fruit of other graces spoilt and wasted. How brightly it shines in St Paul himself! What luminous and wholesome views of life, what a fund of practical sense there is in the teaching of this letter.
St Paul rejoices in these gifts of the understanding
and claims them for the Church, having in his
view the false knowledge, the “philosophy and vain
deceit” that was making its appearance in the Asian
Churches (
But let us observe here that our wisdom and prudence lie in the knowledge of God’s will. Truth is not to be found in any system of logical notions, in schemes and syntheses of the laws of nature or of thought. The human mind can never rest for long in abstractions. It will not accept for its basis of thought that which is less real and positive than itself. By its rational instincts it is compelled to seek a Reason and a Conscience at the centre of things,—a living God. It craves to know the mystery of His will.
III. Verse 11 fills up the measure of the bestowment of grace on sinful men. The present anticipates the future; faith and love are lifted to a glorious hope. “In whom also—i.e., in Christ—we received our heritage, predestinated [to it], according to His purpose who works all things according to the counsel of His will.”
Following Meyer and other great interpreters, we
prefer in this passage the rendering of the English
Authorized Version (we obtained an inheritance) to that
of the Revised (we were made a
heritage). Bishop Ellicott, who advocates the latter rendering, objects to
Meyer’s interpretation that it is “doubtful in point of usage.” Pace
tanti viri, we must retort this objection upon the new translation. To
obtain by lot, to have (a thing) allotted to one, is the meaning regularly
given to
κληροῦσθαι in the classical dictionaries; and in O.T. usage the
lot (κλῆρος)
becomes the inheritance (the thing allotted). The verb is
repeatedly used by Philo with the meaning to obtain, or receive an
inheritance; whereas there seems to be no real parallel to the other
rendering. It is true that
κληροῦσθαι in the sense of the A.V. requires
an object; but that is virtually supplied by
ἐν ᾧ: “we had our inheritance
allotted in Christ.” Comp. See Compare
The heritage of the saints in Christ is theirs already,
by actual investiture. The liberty of sons of God,
access to the Father, the treasures of Christ’s wisdom
and knowledge, the sanctifying Spirit and the moral
strength and joy that He imparts, these form a rich
estate of which ancient saints had but foretastes and
promises. In the all-controlling
From the same point his gaze sweeps onward to the
end. God’s purpose embraces the ages to come with
those that are past. His working will not cease till
the whole counsel is fulfilled. What we have of our
inheritance, though rich and real, holds in it the promise
of infinitely more; and the Holy Spirit is the “earnest
of our inheritance” (ver. 14). God intends “that we
should be to the praise of His glory.” As things are,
His glory is but obscurely visible in His saints. “It
doth not yet appear what we shall be,”—and it will
not appear until the unveiling of the sons of God (
Verses 9 and 10 (which He purposed ... upon the earth) are, as we have said, a parenthesis or episode in the passage just reviewed. Neither in structure nor in sense would the paragraph be defective, had this clause been wanting. With the “in Him” repeated at the end of verse 10, St Paul resumes the main current of his thanksgiving, arrested for a moment while he dwells on “the mystery of God’s will.”
This last expression (ver. 9), notwithstanding what he
has said in verses 4 and 5, still needs elucidation. He
will pause for an instant to set forth once more the
God formed in Christ the purpose, by the dispensation
of His grace, in due time to re-unite the universe
under the headship of Christ. This mysterious design,
hitherto kept secret, He has “made known unto us.”
Its manifestation imparts a wisdom that surpasses all
the wisdom of former ages. Vv. 8, 9, ch. iii. 4, 5; comp.
The first clause of verse 10 supplies a datum for
its interpretation. The fulness of the times, in St Paul’s
dialect, can only be the time of
Christ. “The fulness of the time,” Ch. iii. 8, 9;
What, then, signifies this gathering-into-one or summing-up
of all things in the Christ? Our recapitulate
is the nearest equivalent of the Greek verb, in its etymological
sense. In
Similarly, St Paul finds in Christ the fundamental
principle of the creation. For those who think with him,
God has by the Christian revelation already brought all
things to their unity. This summing up—the Christian
inventory and recapitulation of the universe—the
apostle has formally stated in
The “gathering into one” of this text includes the
“reconciliation” of Comp. ch. v. 5;
Observe that the apostle says “in the
Christ.” One wonders that our Revisers, so attentive to all points of Greek
idiom, did not think it worth while to discriminate between Christ and
the Christ in such passages as this. In Ephesians this distinction is
especially conspicuous and significant. See vv. 12, 20 iii. 17, iv. 20,
v. 23; similarly in
Christ’s work is essentially a work of restoration. We must insist, with Meyer, upon the significance of the Greek preposition in Paul’s compound verb (ana-, equal to re-in restore or resume). The Christ is not simply the climax of the past—the Son of man and the recapitulation of humanity, as man is of the creatures below him, summing up human development and lifting it to a higher stage—though He is all that. Christ rehabilitates man and the world. He re-asserts the original ground of our being, as that exists in God. He carries us and the world forward out of sin and death, by carrying us back to God’s ideal. The new world is the old world repaired, and in its reparation infinitely enhanced—rich in the memories of redemption, in the fruit of penitence and the discipline of suffering, in the lessons of the cross.
All things in heaven and earth it was God’s good pleasure in the Christ to gather again into one. Is this a general assertion concerning the universe as a whole, or may we apply it with distributive exactness to each particular thing? Is there to be, as we fain would hope, no single exception to the “all things”—no wanderer lost, no exile finally shut out from the Holy City and the tree of life? Are all evil men and demons, willing or against their will, to be embraced somehow and at last—at last—in the universal peace of God?
It is impossible that the first readers should have
so construed Paul’s words (comp. v. 5). He has not
forgotten the “unquenchable fire,” the
St Paul assures us that God and the world will be reunited, and that peace will reign through all realms and orders of existence. He does not, and he could not say that none will exclude themselves from the eternal kingdom. Making men free, God has made it possible for them to contradict Him, so long as they have any being. The apostle’s words have their note of warning, along with their boundless promise. There is no place in the future order of things for aught that is out of Christ. There is no standing-ground anywhere for the unclean and the unjust, for the irreconcilable rebel against God. “The Son of man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend and them that do iniquity.”
Eph. i. 12–14.
This hope of Israel pointed Israelite and Gentile
believer alike to the completion of the Messianic era,
when the mystery of God should be finished and His
universe redeemed from the bondage of corruption
(vv. 10, 14). By the “one hope” of the Christian
calling the Church is now made one. From this point
of view the apostle in chapter ii. 12 describes the
condition in which the gospel found his Gentile readers
as that of men cut off from Christ, strangers to the
covenants of promise,—in a word, “having no hope”;
while he and his Jewish fellow-believers held the
priority that belonged to those whose are the promises.
To these Christless heathen Christ and His hope
came, when they “heard the word of truth, the gospel
of their salvation.” A great light had sprung up for
them that sat in darkness; the good tidings of salvation
came to the lost and despairing. “To the Gentiles,”
St Paul declared, addressing the obstinate Jews of
Rome, “this salvation of God was sent: they indeed
will hear it” (
Salvation, as St Paul understands it, includes our
uttermost deliverance, the end of death itself (
There are three things to be considered in this statement: the seal itself, the conditions upon which, and the purpose for which it is affixed.
I. A seal is a token of proprietorship put by the owner
upon his property; Ch. iv. 30. The “seal” of
This seal is constituted by the Holy Spirit of the promise,—in
contrast with the material seal, “in the flesh,
wrought by hand,” Ch. ii. 11; comp.
The apostle writes “the Spirit of the promise, the
Holy [Spirit],” with emphasis on the word of quality;
for the testifying power of the seal lies in its character.
“Beloved, believe not every spirit; but try the spirits,
whether they are of God” ( Comp.
When the sealing Spirit is called the Spirit of
Now, if God has done so much—for this is the implied argument of verses 13, 14—He will surely accomplish the rest. The attainment of past hope is the warrant of present hope. He who gives us His own Spirit, will give us the fulness of eternal life. The earnest implies the sum. In the witness of the Holy Spirit there is for the Christian man the power of an endless life, a spring of courage and patience that can never fail.
II. But there are very definite conditions, upon which this assurance depends. “When you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation”—there is the outward condition: “when you believed”—there is the inward and subjective qualification for the affixing of the seal of God to the heart.
See
If they are to believe unto salvation, men must be
made to hear the word of truth. Unless the good news
reaches their ears and their heart, it is no good news
to them. “How shall they believe in Him of whom
they have not heard? how shall they hear without
a preacher?” (
The nature of the message constitutes our duty to proclaim it. It is “the word of truth.” If there be any doubt upon this, if our certainty of the Christian truth is shaken and we can no longer announce it with full conviction, our zeal for its propagation naturally declines. Scepticism chills and kills missionary fervour, as the breath of the frost the young growth of spring. At home and amongst our own people evangelistic agencies are supported by many who have no very decided personal faith, from secondary motives,—with a view to their social and reformatory benefits, out of philanthropic feeling and love to “the brother whom we have seen.” The foreign missions of the Church, like the work of the Gentile apostle, gauge her real estimate of the gospel she believes and the Master she serves.
But if we have no sure word of prophecy to speak,
we had better be silent. Men are not saved by illusion
or speculation. Christianity did not begin by
offering to mankind a legend for a gospel, or win
the ear of the world for a beautiful romance. When
the apostles preached Jesus and the resurrection, they
declared what they knew. To have spoken otherwise,
to have uttered cunningly devised fables or pious
phantasies or conjectures of their own, would have
been, in their view, to bear false witness against God.
Before the hostile scrutiny of their fellow-men, and in
prospect of the awful judgement of God, they testified
the facts about Jesus Christ, the things that they had
“heard, and seen with their eyes, and which their
hands had handled concerning the word of life.” They
were as sure of these things as of their own being.
And they could always speak of this word of truth,
addressing whatsoever circle of hearers or of readers,
as “the good news of your salvation.” The pronoun,
as we have seen, is emphatic. The glory of Paul’s apostolic
mission was its universalism. His message was
to every man he met. His latest writings glow with
delight in the world-wide destination of his
gospel.
For it is upon this question of faith that the whole
issue turns. Hearing is much, when one hears the
word of truth and news of salvation. But faith is
the point at which salvation becomes ours—no longer
a possibility, an opportunity, but a fact: “in whom
indeed, when you believed, you were sealed with the
Holy Spirit.” So characteristic is this act of the new
life to which it admits, that St Paul is in the habit of
calling Christians, without further qualification, simply
believers (“those who believe,” or “who believed”).
Faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit are associated
in his thoughts, as closely as Faith and Justification.
In the chamber of our spirit, while we abide in faith, the Spirit of the Father and the Son dwells with us, witnessing to us of the love of God and leading us into all truth and duty and divine joy, instilling a deep and restful peace, breathing an energy that is a fire and fountain of life within the breast, which pours out itself in prayer and labour for the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit is no mere gift to receive, or comfort to enjoy; He is an almighty Force in the believing soul and the faithful Church.
III. The end for which the seal of God was affixed
to Paul’s Gentile readers, along with their Jewish
The last of these words is the equivalent of the Old
Testament phrase rendered in
God has “redeemed unto Himself a people”; He
has “bought us with a price.” His rights in us are
both natural and acquired; they are redemptional
rights, the recovered rights of the infinite love which in
Jesus Christ saved mankind by extreme sacrifice from
the doom of death eternal. This redemption
Comp. Chapter VIII.
Our salvation is come; but, after all, it is still to
come. We find the apostle using the words “save” and
“redeem” in this twofold sense, applying them both to
the commencement and the consummation of the new
life. For the former usage see, along with ver. 7 and ch. ii. 5, 8;
Rom. iii, 24, x. 9;
But this last redemption—or rather this last act of
the one redemption—like the first, is through the blood
So long as mortality afflicts us, God cannot be satisfied on our account. His children are suffering and tortured; His people mourn under the oppression of the enemy. They sigh, and creation with them, under the burdensome and infirm tabernacle of the flesh, this body of our humiliation for which the hungry grave clamours. God’s new estate in us is still encumbered with the liabilities in which the sin of the race involved us, with the “ills that flesh is heir to.” But this mortgage—that we call, with a touching euphemism, the debt of nature—will at last be discharged. Soon shall we be free for ever from the law of sin and death. “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come with singing to Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads: they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
To God, as He looks down upon men, the seal
The same incoherence occurs in
Arrhabon, the earnest (fastening penny), is a Phœnician word of the market, which passed into Greek and Latin,—a monument of the daring pioneers of Mediterranean commerce. It denotes the part of the price given by a purchaser in making a bargain, or of the wages given by the hirer concluding a contract of service, by way of assurance that the stipulated sum will be forthcoming. Such pledge of future payment is at the same time a bond between those concerned, engaging each to his part in the transaction.
The earnest is the seal, and something more. It
is an instalment, a token in kind, a foretaste of the
feast to come. In the parallel passage,
Of the “earnest of the Spirit” St Paul has spoken
twice already, in
For this we wait till the time appointed of the Father,—the time when He will reclaim His heritage in us, and give us full possession of our heritage in Christ. We do not wait, as did the saints of former ages, ignorant of the Father’s purpose for our future lot. “Life and immortality are brought to light through the gospel.” We see beyond the chasm of death. We enjoy in the testimony of the Holy Spirit the foretaste of an eternal and glorious life for all the children of God—nay, the pledge that the reign of evil and death shall end throughout the universe.
With this hope swelling their hearts, the apostle’s readers once more triumphantly join in the refrain: To the praise of His glory.
“For this cause I also, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you, and which ye shew toward all the saints, cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers:
“That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him; having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to that working of the might of His strength, which He wrought in the Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places.”—Eph. i. 15–20.
The intermediate clause of verse 15, describing the
readers’ faith, is obscure. This form of expression
occurs nowhere else in St Paul; but the construction
is used by St Luke,—e.g., in See Westcott and Hort’s New Testament in Greek, vol. ii., pp.
124, 125. Dr. Beet abides by the critical text. He solves the difficulty by
giving
πίστις a double sense: “the faith among you in the Lord Jesus,
and the faithfulness towards all the saints.” See his Commentary on
Ephesians, etc., pp. 284–6.
We are reminded of the thanksgiving for the Roman
Church, In
In verse 16 we pass from praise to prayer. God is invoked by a double title peculiar to this passage, as “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory.” The former expression is in no way difficult. The apostle often speaks, as in verse 3, of “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”: intending to qualify the Divine Fatherhood by another epithet, he writes for once simply of “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This reminds us of the dependence of the Lord Jesus upon the eternal Father, and accentuates the Divine sovereignty so conspicuous in the foregoing Act of Praise. Christ’s constant attitude towards the Father was that of His cry of anguish on the cross, “My God, my God!” Yet He never speaks to men of our God. To us God is “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,” as He was to the men of old time “the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.”
The key to the designation Father of glory is in
This is the emphatic
ἐπιγνῶσις, so frequent in the later epistles. See
Lightfoot’s note on
The spirit of wisdom and revelation desired will proceed
from the Holy Spirit dwelling in these Gentile
believers (ver. 13). But it must belong to their own
spirit and direct their personal mental activity, the
spirit of revelation becoming “the spirit of their mind”
(iv. 23). When St Paul asks for “a spirit of wisdom
and revelation,” he desires that his readers may have
amongst themselves a fountain of inspiration and share
in the prophetic gifts diffused through the
Church. See ch. iii. 3–5, iv. 11; and comp. Adolphe Monod: Explication de l’épître de S. Paul aux Éphésiens.
A deeply spiritual and suggestive Commentary.
The connexion of the first clause of verse 18 with the
last of verse 17 is not very clear in St Paul’s Greek;
there is a characteristic incoherence of structure. The
Yonder is an ox grazing in the meadow on a bright summer’s day. Round him is spread the fairest landscape,—a broad stretch of herbage embroidered with flowers, the river gleaming in and out amongst the distant trees, the hills on both sides bounding the quiet valley, sunshine and shadows chasing each other as they leap from height to height. But of all this what sees the grazing ox? So much lush pasture and cool shade and clear water where his feet may plash when he has done feeding. In the same meadow there stands a poet musing, or a painter busy at his easel; and on the soul of that gifted man there descends, through eyes outwardly discerning no more than those of the beast at his side, a vision of wonder and beauty which will make all time richer. The eyes of the man’s heart are opened, and the spirit of wisdom and revelation is given him in the knowledge of God’s work in nature.
Like differences exist amongst men in regard to the
things of religion. “So foolish was I and ignorant,”
says the Psalmist, speaking of his former dejection
and unbelief, “I was as a beast before Thee!” There
shall be two men sitting side by side in the same house
of prayer, at the same gate of heaven. The one sees
heaven opened; he hears the eternal song; his spirit
is a temple filled with the glory of God. The other
It is not the strangeness and distance of Divine things alone that cause insensibility; their familiarity has the same effect. We know all this gospel so well. We have read it, listened to it, gone over its points of doctrine a hundred times. It is trite and easy to us as a worn glove. We discuss without a tremor of emotion truths the first whisper and dim promise of which once lifted men’s souls into ecstasy, or cast them down into depths of shame and bewilderment so that they forgot to eat their bread. The awe of things eternal, the mystery of our faith, the Spirit of glory and of God rest on us no longer. So there come to be, as one hears it said, gospel-hardened hearers—and gospel-hardened preachers! The eyes see—and see not; the ears hear—and hear not; the lips speak without feeling; the heart is waxen fat. This is the nemesis of grace abused. It is the result that follows by an inevitable psychological law, where outward contact with spiritual truth is not attended with an inward apprehension and response. How do we need to pray, in handling these dread themes, for a true sense and savour of Divine things,—that there may be given, and ever given afresh to us “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God.”
Three things the apostle desires that his readers
may see with the heart’s enlightened eyes: the hope to
I. What, then, is our hope in God? What is the ideal of our faith? For what purpose has God called us into the fellowship of His Son? What is our religion going to do for us and to make of us?
It will bring us safe home to heaven. It will deliver us from the present evil world, and preserve us unto Christ’s heavenly kingdom. God forbid that we should make light of “the hope laid up for us in the heavens,” or cast it aside. It is an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast. But is it the hope of our calling? Is this what St Paul here chiefly signifies? We are very sure that it is not. But it is the one thing which stands for the hope of the gospel in many minds. “We trust that our sins are forgiven: we hope that we shall get to heaven!” The experience of how many Christian believers begins and ends there. We make of our religion a harbour of refuge, a soothing anodyne, an escape from the anguish of guilt and the fear of death; not a life-vocation, a grand pursuit. The definition we have quoted may suffice for the beginning and the end; but we need something to fill out that formula, to give body and substance, meaning and movement to the life of faith.
Let the apostle tell us what he regarded, for himself,
as the end of religion, what was the object of his
ambition and pursuit. “One thing I do,” he writes
to the Philippians, opening to them all his heart,—“One
thing I do. I press towards the mark for the
prize of my high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” And
what, pray, was that mark?
Behold, then, brethren, the hope of our calling. God could not call us to any destiny less or lower than this. It would have been unworthy of Him,—and may we not say, unworthy of ourselves, if we are in truth His sons? From eternity the Father of spirits has predestined you and me to be holy and without blemish before Him,—in a word, to be conformed to the image of His Son. Every other hope is dross compared to this.
II. Another vision for the heart’s eyes, still more amazing than that we have seen: “what is,” St Paul writes, “the riches of the glory of God’s inheritance in the saints.”
We saw, in considering the eleventh and fourteenth
verses, how the apostle, in characteristic fashion, plays
upon the double aspect of the inheritance, regarding it
now as the heritage of the saints in God and again as
His heritage in them. The former side of this relationship
What presumption is all this, some one says. How preposterous to imagine that the Maker of the worlds interests Himself in atoms like ourselves,—in the ephemera of this insignificant planet! But moral magnitudes are not to be measured by a foot-rule. The mind which can traverse the immensities of space and hold them in its grasp, transcends the things it counts and weighs. As it is amongst earthly powers, so the law may hold betwixt sphere and sphere in the system of worlds, in the relations of bodies terrestrial and celestial to each other, that “God has chosen the weak things to put to shame the mighty, and the things that are not to bring to nought the things that are.” Through the Church He is “making known to the potentates in the heavenly places His manifold wisdom” (iii, 10). The lowly can sing evermore with Mary in the Magnificat: “He that is mighty hath magnified me.” If it be true that God spared not His Son for our salvation and has sealed us with the seal of His Spirit, if He chose us before the world’s foundation to be His saints, He must set upon those saints an infinite value. We may despise ourselves; but He thinks great things of us.
So far as we can judge of His ways, the great God
who made us cares comparatively little about the upholstery
and machinery of the universe; but He cares
immensely about men, about the character and destiny
of men. There is nothing in all that physical science
discloses for God to love, nothing kindred to Himself.
“Hast thou considered my servant Job?” the Hebrew
poet pictures Him saying before heaven and hell!—“Hast
thou considered my servant Job?—a perfect
man and upright: there is none like him in the earth.”
How proud God is of a man like that, in a world like
this. Who can tell the value that the Father of glory
sets upon the tried fidelity of His humblest servant here
on earth; the intensity with which He reciprocates the
confidence of one timid, trembling human heart, or the
Let us learn, then, to respect ourselves. Let us not take the world’s tinsel for wealth, and spend our time, like the man in Bunyan’s dream, scraping with “the muck-rake” while the crown of life shines above our head. The riches of a Church—nay, of any human community—lies not in its moneyed resources, but in the men and women that compose it, in their godlike attributes of mind and heart, in their knowledge, their zeal, their love to God and man, in the purity, the gentleness, the truthfulness and courage and fidelity that are found amongst them. These are the qualities which give distinction to human life, and are beautiful in the eyes of God and holy angels. “Man that is in honour and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish.”
III. One thing more we need to understand, or what
we have seen already will be of little practical avail.
We may see glorious visions, we may cherish high
The answer lies in the apostle’s words: “That ye
may know what is the exceeding greatness of His
power toward us that believe,”—a power measured by
“the energy of the might of His
strength In this amplitude of expression there is no idle heaping up of
words. The four synonyms for power have each a distinct force in the
sentence.
Δύναμις is power in general, as that which is able to effect some
purpose;
ἐνέργεια is energy, power in effective action and operation;
κράτος is might, mastery, sovereign power,—in the New Testament
used chiefly of the power of God;
ἰσχύς is force, strength, power resident
in some person and belonging to him. This is the order in which the
words follow each other. Compare vi. 10 in the Greek.
We preachers hear it said sometimes:
What would our objectors have said at the grave-side of Jesus? “The beautiful dreamer, the sublime idealist! He was too good for a world such as ours. It was sure to end like this. His ideas of life were utterly impracticable.” So they would have moralized. “And the good prophet talked—strangest fanaticism of all—of rising again on the third day! One thing at least we know, that the dead are dead and gone from us. No, we shall never see Jesus or His like again. Purity cannot live in this infected air. The grave ends all hope for men.” But, despite human nature and human experience, He has risen again, He lives for ever! That is the apostle’s message and testimony to the world. For those “who believe” it, all things are possible. A life is within our reach that seemed far off as earth from heaven. You may become a perfect saint.
From His open grave Christ breathed on His disciples, and through them on all mankind, the Holy Spirit. This is the efficient cause of Christianity,—the Spirit that raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. The limit to its efficacy lies in the defects of our faith, in our failure to comprehend what God gave us in His Son. Is anything now too hard for the Lord? Shall anything be called impossible, in the line of God’s promise and man’s spiritual need? Can we put an arrest upon the working of this mysterious force, upon the Spirit of the new life, and say to it: Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther?
Look at Jesus where He was—the poor, tortured,
wounded body, slain by our sins, lying cold and still
in Joseph’s grave: then lift up your eyes and see Him
John Chrysostom: In epistolam ad Ephesios.
“He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and He put all things in subjection under His feet, and Him He gave—the head over all things—to the Church which is His body,—the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.”—Eph. i. 20–23.
The resurrection of Christ made men sensible that a
new force of life had come into the world, of incalculable
potency. This power was in existence before. In
With what a rebound did the “energy of the might of God’s strength” put forth itself in Him, when once this sacrifice was accomplished! Even His disciples who had seen Jesus still the tempest and feed the multitude from a handful of bread and call back the spirit to its mortal frame, had not dreamed of the might of Godhead latent in Him, until they beheld Him risen from the dead. He had promised this in words; but they understood His words only when they saw the fact, when He actually stood before them “alive after His passion.” The scene of Calvary—the cruel sufferings of their Master, His helpless ignominy and abandonment by God, the malignant triumph of his enemies—gave to this revelation an effect beyond measure astonishing and profound in its impression. From the stupor of grief and despair they were raised to a boundless hope, as Jesus rose from the death of the cross to glorious life and Godhead.
Of the same nature was the effect produced by His
manifestation to Paul himself. The Nazarene prophet
known to Saul by report as an attractive teacher and
worker of miracles, had made enormous pretensions,
blasphemous if they were not true. He put Himself forward
as the Messiah and the very Son of God! But
when brought to the test, His power utterly failed. God
disowned and forsook Him; and He
It is “the Christ,” let us observe, in whom God
“wrought raising Him from the dead”: the Christ of
Jewish hope (ver. 12), the centre and sum of the Divine
counsel for the world (ver. 10), See the note upon this definite article on p. 47.
The demonstration of the power of Christianity Paul
had found in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The
power which raised Him from the dead is the working
energy of our faith. Let us see what this mysterious
power wrought in the Redeemer Himself; and then we
will consider how it bears upon us. There are two
steps indicated in Christ’s exaltation: He was raised
from the death of the cross to new life amongst men; and
again from the world of men He was raised to the throne
of God in heaven. In the enthronement of Jesus Christ
I. God raised the Christ from the dead.
This assertion is the corner-stone of St Paul’s life and doctrine, and of the existence of Christendom. Did the event really take place? There were Christians at Corinth who affirmed, “There is no resurrection of the dead.” And there are followers of Jesus now who with deep sadness confess, like the author of Obermann once more:
If we are driven to this surrender, compelled to think that it was an apparition, a creation of their own passionate longing and heated fancy that the disciples saw and conversed with during those forty days, an apparition sprung from his fevered remorse that arrested Saul on the Damascus road—if we no longer believe in Jesus and the resurrection, it is in vain that we still call ourselves Christians. The foundation of the Christian creed is struck away from under our feet. Its spell is broken; its energy is gone.
Individual men may and do continue to believe in
Christ, with no faith in the supernatural, men who are
sceptics in regard to His resurrection and miracles.
They believe in Himself, they say, not in His legendary
wonders; in His character and teaching, in His
The fact of Christ’s resurrection is one upon which
modern science has nothing new to say. The law of
death is not a recent discovery. Men were as well
aware of its universality in the first century as they are
in the nineteenth, and as little disposed as we are ourselves
to believe in the return of the dead to bodily life.
The stark reality of death makes us all sceptics.
Nothing is clearer from the narratives than the utter
surprise of the friends of Jesus at His reappearance,
and their complete unpreparedness for the event.
They were not eager, but “slow of heart to believe.”
Their very love to the Master, as in the case of
Christ’s was not the only resurrection; but it is the
only final resurrection. Lazarus of Bethany left his tomb
at the word of Jesus, a living man; but he was still a
mortal man, doomed to see corruption. He returned from
the grave on this side, as he had entered it, “bound hand
and foot with grave-clothes.” Not so with the Christ.
He passed through the region of death and issued on the
immortal side, escaped from the bondage of corruption.
Therefore He is called the “firstfruits” and “the firstborn
out of the dead.”
Πρωτότοκος ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν,
The resurrection of the Christ inaugurated a new
order of things. It was like the appearance of the first
living organism amidst dead matter, or of the first
rational consciousness in the unconscious world. He
“is,” says the apostle, the “beginning, first-begotten
out of the dead” (
That resurrection, nevertheless, did homage to the
fundamental law of science and of reason, that
every occurrence, ordinary or extraordinary, shall
have an adequate cause. The event was not more
singular and unique than the nature of Him to whom
it befell. Looking back over the Divine life and deeds
of Jesus, St Peter said: “It was not possible that He
should be holden of death.” How unfitting and repugnant
to thought, that the common death of all men
should come upon Jesus Christ! There was that in
II. The power which raised Jesus our Lord from the dead could not leave Him in the world of sin and death. Lifting Him from hades to earth, by another step it exalted the risen Saviour above the clouds, and seated Him at God’s right hand in the heavens.
The forty days were a halt by the way, a condescending
pause in the operation of the almighty power that
raised Him. “I ascend,” He said to the first that saw
Him,—“I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my
God and your God.” He must see His own in the
world again; He must “show Himself alive after His
passion by infallible proofs,” that their hearts may be
comforted and knit together in the assurance of faith,
that they may be prepared to receive His Spirit and to
bear their witness to the world. Then He will ascend
up where He was before, returning to the Father’s
bosom. It was impossible that a spiritual body should
tarry in a mortal dwelling; impossible that the familiar
relations of discipleship should be resumed. No
new follower can now ask of Him, “Rabbi, where
dwellest Thou,” under what roof amid the homes of
men? For He dwells with those that love Him always
“In the heavenlies” now abides the Risen One.
This expression, so frequent in the epistle as to be
characteristic of it, Ver. 3, ch. ii. 6, iii. 10, vi. 12; nowhere else in the New Testament.
Comp., however,
But rest and felicity are not enough for Him. Christ sits at the right hand of power, that He may rule. In those heavenly places, it seems, there are thrones higher and lower, names more or less eminent, but His stands clear above them all. In the realms of space, in the epochs of eternity there is none to rival our Lord Jesus, no power that does not owe Him tribute. God “hath put all things under His feet.” The Christ, who died on the cross, who rose in human form from the grave, is exalted to share the Father’s glory and dominion, is filled with God’s own fulness, and made without limitation or exception “Head over all things.”
Note on
The apostle appropriates here two sentences of
Messianic prophecy, from
III. The second clause of verse 22 begins with an emphasis upon the object which the English Version fails to recognize: “and Him He gave”—the Christ exalted to universal authority—“Him God gave, Head over all things [as He is], to the Church which is His body,—the fulness of Him who fills all things in all.”
At the topmost height of His glory, with thrones
and princedoms beneath His feet, Christ is given to the
Church! The Head over all things, the Lord of the
created universe, He—and none less or lower—is the
Head of redeemed humanity. For the Church “is His
body” (this clause is interjected by way of explanation):
she is the vessel of His Spirit, the organic instrument
of His Divine-human life. As the spirit belongs to its
How rich is this gift of the Father to the Church
in the Son of His love, the concluding words of the
paragraph declare: “Him He gave ... to the Church ... [gave]
the fulness of Him that fills all in all.” In
the risen and enthroned Christ God bestowed on men
a gift in which the Divine plenitude that fills creation is
embraced. For this last clause, it is clear to us, does
not qualify “the Church which is His body,” and
expositors have needlessly taxed their ingenuity with
the incongruous apposition of “body” and “fulness”;
it belongs to the grand Object of the foregoing description,
to “the Christ” whom God raised from the dead
and invested with His own prerogatives. The two
separate designations, “Head over all things” and
“Fulness of the All-filler,” are parallel, and alike point
back to Him who stands with a weight of gathered
emphasis—heaped up from verse 19 onwards—at the
front of this last sentence (ver. 22b). There has been
nothing to prepare the reader to ascribe the august
title of the pleroma, the Divine fulness, to the Church—enough
for her, surely, if she is His body and He God’s
gift to her—but there has been everything to prepare
us to crown the Lord Jesus with this glory. To that
which God had wrought in Him and bestowed on Him,
as previously related, verse 23 adds something more
The reader of the Old Testament, unless otherwise advertized, must
inevitably have referred the words who filleth all things in all to the
Supreme God. See
Our text is in strict agreement with the sayings
about “the fulness” in
Again there was poured into the empty, humbled
and impoverished form of the Son of God the brightness
of the Father’s glory and the infinitude of the Father’s
authority and power. The majesty that He had foregone
was restored to Him in undiminished measure.
“And you did He quicken, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins, wherein aforetime ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom we also all once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest:—but God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, quickened us together with the Christ (by grace have ye been saved), and raised us up together and made us to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”—Eph. ii. 1–6.
The apostle, in verse 3, pointedly includes amongst
the “dead in trespasses and sins” himself and his
Jewish fellow-believers as they “once lived,” when
they obeyed the motions and “volitions of the flesh,”
and so were “by birth” not children of favour, as Jews
presumed, but “children of anger, even as the
rest.” For the antithesis of “you” and “we,” comp. vv. 11–18, ch. i,
12, 13; also
This passage gives us a sublime view of the event of our conversion. It associates that change in us with the stupendous miracle which took place in our Redeemer. The one act is a continuation of the other. There is an acting over again in us of Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection and ascension, when we realize through faith that which was done for mankind in Him. At the same time, the redemption which is in Christ Jesus is no mere legacy, to be received or declined; it is not something done once for all, and left to be appropriated passively by our individual will. It is a “power of God unto salvation,” unceasingly operative and effective, that works “of faith and unto faith” that summons men to faith, challenging human confidence wherever its message travels and awakening the spiritual possibilities dormant in our nature.
It is a supernatural force, then, which is at work
upon us in the word of Christ. It is a resurrection-power,
that turns death into life. And it is a power
instinct with love. The love which went out towards
the slain and buried Jesus when the Father stooped
to raise Him from the dead, bends over us as we
lie in the grave of our sins, and exerts itself with a
Let us look at the two sides of the change effected in men by the gospel—at the death they leave, and the life into which they enter. Let us contemplate the task to which this unmatched power has set itself.
I. You that were dead, the apostle says.
Jesus Christ came into a dead world—He the one living man, alive in body, soul, and spirit—alive to God in the world. He was, like none besides, aware of God and of God’s love, breathing in His Spirit, “living not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded from His mouth.” “This,” He said, “is life eternal.” If His definition was correct, if it be life to know God, then the world into which Christ entered by His human birth, the world of heathendom and Judaism, was veritably dying or dead—“dead indeed unto God.”
Its condition was visible to discerning eyes. It was
a world rotting in its corruption, mouldering in its
decay, and which to His pure sense had the moral
aspect and odour of the charnel-house. We realize
very imperfectly the distress, the inward nausea, the
conflict of disgust and pity which the fact of being in
such a world as this and belonging to it caused in the
nature of Jesus Christ, in a soul that was in perfect
sympathy with God. Never was there loneliness such
as His, the solitude of life in a region peopled with the
dead. The joy which Christ had in His little flock,
in those whom the Father had given Him out of the
world, was proportionately great. In them He found
companionship, teachableness, signs of a heart awakening
towards God—men to whom life was in some
degree what it was to Him. He had come, as the
When St Paul speaks of his readers in their heathen
condition as “dead,” it is not a figure of speech. He
does not mean that they were like dead men, that their
state resembled death; “nor only that they were in
peril of death; but he signifies a real and present
death” (Calvin). They were, in the inmost sense and
truth of things, dead men. We are twofold creatures,
two-lived,—spirits cased in flesh. Our human nature
is capable, therefore, of strange duplicities. It is
possible for us to be alive and flourishing upon one
side of our being, while we are paralyzed or lifeless
upon the other. As our bodies live in commerce with
the light and air, in the environment of house and food
and daily exercise of the limbs and senses under the
economy of material nature, so our spirits live by the
breath of prayer, by faith and love towards God, by
reverence and filial submission, by communion with
things unseen and eternal. “With Thee,” says the
Psalmist to his God, “is the fountain of life: in Thy
light we see light.” We must daily resort to that
fountain and drink of its pure stream, we must faithfully
walk in that light, or there is no such life for us. The
soul that wants a true faith in God, wants the proper
The man who walks the earth a sinner against God, becomes by the act and fact of his transgression a dead man. He has imbibed the fatal poison; it runs in his veins. The doom of sin lies on his unforgiven spirit. He carries death and judgement about with him. They lie down with him at night and wake with him in the morning; they take part in his transactions; they sit by his side in the feast of life. His works are “dead works”; his joys and hopes are all shadowed and tainted. Within his living frame he bears a coffined soul. With the machinery of life, with the faculties and possibilities of a spiritual being, the man lies crushed under the activity of the senses, wasted and decaying for want of the breath of the Spirit of God. In its coldness and powerlessness—too often in its visible corruption—his nature shows the symptoms of advancing death. It is dead as the tree is dead, cut off from its root; as the fire is dead, when the spark is gone out; dead as a man is dead, when the heart stops.
As it is with the departed saints sleeping in Christ,—“put
to death, indeed, in the flesh, but living in the
spirit,”—so by a terrible inversion with the wicked in
this life. They are put to death, indeed, in the spirit,
while they live in the flesh. They may be and often
are powerfully alive and active in their relations to the
world of sense, while on the unseen and Godward side
utterly paralyzed. Ask such a man about his business
or family concerns; touch on affairs of politics or trade,—and
you deal with a living mind, its powers and susceptibilities
awake and alert. But let the conversation
pass to other themes; sound him on questions of the
And yet that hardened man of the world—starve and ignore his own spirit and shut up its mystic chambers as he will—cannot easily destroy himself. He has not extirpated his religious nature, nor crushed out, though he has suppressed, the craving for God in his breast. And when the callous surface of his life is broken through, under some unusual stress, some heavy loss or the shock of a great bereavement, one may catch a glimpse of the deeper world within of which the man himself was so little conscious. And what is to be seen there? Haunting memories of past sin, fears of a conscience fretted already by the undying worm, forms of weird and ghostly dread flitting amid the gloom and dust of death through that closed house of the spirit,—
In this condition of death the word of life comes to
men. It is the state not of heathendom alone; but of
those also, favoured with the light of revelation, who
have not opened to it the eyes of the heart, of all who
Ποιοῦντες τὰ θελήματα τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ τῶν διανοιῶν (ver. 3).
It is true, there are other hindrances to faith, intellectual difficulties of great weight and seriousness, that press upon many minds. For such men Christ has all possible sympathy and patience. There is a real, though hidden faith that “lives in honest doubt.” Some men have more faith than they suppose, while others certainly have much less. One has a name to live, and yet is dead; another, perchance, has a name to die, and yet is alive to God through Jesus Christ. There are endless complications, self-contradictions, and misunderstandings in human nature. “Many are first” in the ranks of religious profession and notoriety, “which shall be last, and the last first.” We make the largest allowance for this element of uncertainty in the line that bounds faith from unfaith; “The Lord knoweth them that are His.” No intellectual difficulty, no mere misunderstanding, will ultimately or for long separate between God and the soul that He has made.
It is antipathy that separates. “They did not like
to retain God in their knowledge”; that is Paul’s
explanation of the ungodliness and vice of the ancient
world. And it holds good still in countless instances.
When the apostle says of his Gentile readers that
they “once walked in the way of the age, according to
the course of this world, Perhaps this double rendering may bring out the force of
κατὰ τὸν αἰῶνα τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.
As Beck profoundly remarks upon this
text: In the posthumous Erklärung des Briefes Pauli an die Epheser—a
valuable exposition, marked by Beck’s theological acumen and lucidity. The
φύσει of verse 3 thus corresponds to the
ἐξουσία τοῦ ἀέρος of
verse 2. “Sin entered into the world” (
κόσμος),
Above this feverous, sin-laden atmosphere the apostle
sees God’s anger brooding in threatening clouds. For
our trespasses and sins are, after all, not forced on us
by our environment. Those offences by which we
provoke God, lie in our nature; they are no mere
casual acts, they belong to our bias and disposition.
Sin is a constitutional malady. There exists a bad
element in our human nature, which corresponds but
too truly to the course and current of the world around
us. This the apostle acknowledges for himself and his
law-honouring Jewish kindred: “We were by nature
children of wrath, even as the rest.” So he wrote in
the sad confession of
It is upon this “other law,” the contradiction of His
own, upon the sinfulness beneath the sin, that God’s
displeasure rests. Human law notes the overt act:
“the Lord looketh upon the heart.” There is nothing
“The sons of disobedience” must needs be “children of wrath.” All sin, whether in nature or practice, is the object of God’s fixed displeasure. It cannot be matter of indifference to our Father in heaven that His human children are disobedient toward Himself. Children of His favour or anger we are each one of us, and at every moment. We “keep His commandments, and abide in His love”; or we do not keep them, and are excluded. It is His smile or frown that makes the sunshine or the gloom of our inner life. How strange that men should argue that God’s love forbids His wrath! It is, in truth, the cause of it. I could neither love nor fear a God who did not care enough about me to be angry with me when I sin. If my child does wilful wrong, if by some act of greed or passion he imperils his moral future and destroys the peace and well-being of the house, shall I not be grieved with him, with an anger proportioned to the love I bear him? How much more shall your heavenly Father—how much more justly and wisely and mercifully!
St Paul feels no contradiction between the words of
verse 3 and those that follow. The same God whose
wrath burns against the sons of disobedience while
they so continue, is “rich in mercy” and “loved us
even when we were dead in our trespasses!” He
pities evil men, and to save them spared not His Son
from death; but Almighty God, the Father of glory,
hates and loathes the evil that is in them, and has
II. Such was the death in which Paul and his readers once had lain. But God in His “great love” has “made them to live along with the Christ.”
How wonderful to have witnessed a resurrection: to see the pale cheek of the little maid, Jairus’ daughter, flush again with the tints of life, and the still frame begin to stir, and the eyes softly open—and she looks upon the face of Jesus! or to watch Lazarus, four days dead, coming out of his tomb, slowly, and as one dreaming, with hands and feet bound in the grave-clothes. Still more marvellous to have beheld the Prince of Life at the dawn of the third day issue from Joseph’s grave, bursting His prison-gates and stepping forth in new-risen glory as one refreshed from slumber.
But there are things no less divine, had we eyes for
their marvel, that take place upon this earth day by
day. When a human soul awakes from its trespasses
and sins, when the love of God is poured into a heart
that was cold and empty, when the Spirit of God
breathes into a spirit lying powerless and buried in the
flesh, there is as true a rising from the dead as when
Jesus our Lord came out from His sepulchre. It was
of this spiritual resurrection that He said: “The hour
cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice
of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.”
Having said that, He added, concerning the bodily
resurrection of mankind: “Marvel not at this; for the
hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall
hear His voice, and shall come forth!” The second
wonder only matches and consummates the first (
The words the apostle uses—gave us life—raised us up—seated us in the heavenly places—embrace the whole range of salvation. “Those united with Christ are through grace delivered from their state of death, not only in the sense that the resurrection and exaltation of Christ redound to their benefit as Divinely imputed to them; but by the life-giving energy of God they are brought out of their condition of death into a new and actual state of life. The act of grace is an act of the Divine power and might, not a mere judicial declaration” (Beck). This comprehensive action of the Divine grace upon believing men takes place by a constant and constantly deepening union of the soul with Christ. This is well expressed by A. Monod: “The entire history of the Son of man is reproduced in the man who believes in Him, not by a simple moral analogy, but by a spiritual communication which is the true secret of our justification as well as of our sanctification, and indeed of our whole salvation.”
There is no repetition in the three verbs employed,
which are alike extended by the Greek preposition with
“That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God: not of works, that no man should glory. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.”—Eph. ii. 7–10.
Thus large and limitless is the range of “the purpose
and grace given us in Christ Jesus before times
eternal” (
These words place us on familiar ground. We recognize the Paul of Galatians and Romans, the dialect and accent of the apostle of salvation by faith. But scarcely anywhere do we find this wonder-working grace so affluently described. “God being rich in mercy, for the great love wherewith He loved us—the exceeding riches of His grace, shown in kindness toward us—the gift of God.” Mercy, love, kindness, grace, gift: what a constellation is here! These terms present the character of God in the gospel under the most delightful aspects, and in vivid contrast to the picture of our human state outlined in the beginning of the chapter.
Mercy denotes the Divine pitifulness towards feeble,
suffering men, akin to those “compassions of God” to
which the apostle repeatedly
appeals. Comp.
God’s mercy regards us as we are weak and miserable:
His love regards us as we are, in spite of trespass
and offence, His offspring,—objects of “much love”
amid much displeasure, “even when we were dead
through our trespasses.” What does the story of the
prodigal son mean but this? and what Christ’s great
word to Nicodemus ( On grace, comp. The Epistle to the Galatians (Expositor’s Bible),
Chapter X.
The opposition of gift and debt, of gratuitous salvation through faith to salvation earned by works of law, belongs to the marrow of St Paul’s divinity. The teaching of the great evangelical epistles is condensed into the brief words of verses 8 and 9. The reason here assigned for God’s dealing with men by way of gift and making them absolutely debtors—“lest any one should boast”—was forced upon the apostle’s mind by the stubborn pride of legalism; it is stated in terms identical with those of the earlier letters. Men will glory in their virtues before God; they flaunt the rags of their own righteousness, if any such pretext, even the slightest, remains to them. We sinners are a proud race, and our pride is oftentimes the worst of our sins. Therefore God humbles us by His compassion. He makes to us a free gift of His righteousness, and excludes every contribution from our store of merit; for if we could supply anything, we should inevitably boast as though all were our own. We must be content to receive mercy, love, grace, kindness—everything, without deserving the least fraction of the immense sum. How it strips our vanity; how it crushes us to the dust—“the weight of pardoning love!”
Concerning the office of faith in salvation we have
Compare also, on Faith, The Epistle to the Galatians (Expositor’s
Bible), Chapters X.–XII. and XV.
Ἐστὲ σεσωσμένοι: for the peculiar emphasis of this form of the
verb, implying a settled fact, an assured state, compare ver. 12,
ἢτε ... ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι;
Here is St Paul’s doctrine of Assurance. It was
laid down by Christ Himself when He said: “He that
believeth on the Son of God hath eternal life.” This
sublime confidence is the ruling note of St John’s
great epistle: “We know that we are in Him.... We
know that we have passed out of death into life....
This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our
faith.” It was this confidence of present salvation
that made the Church irresistible. With its foundation
secure, the house of life can be steadily and calmly
Greatly do we need, like the Asian disciples of Paul and John, to “assure our hearts” before God. With death confronting us, with the hideous evil of the world oppressing us; when the air is laden with the contagion of sin; when the faith of the strongest wears the cast of doubt; when the word of promise shines dimly through the haze of an all-encompassing scepticism and a hundred voices say, in mockery or grief, Where is now thy God? when the world proclaims us lost, our faith refuted, our gospel obsolete and useless,—then is the time for the Christian assurance to recover its first energy and to rise again in radiant strength from the heart of the Church, from the depths of its mystic life where it is hid with Christ in God.
You are saved! cries the apostle; not forgetting that
his readers have their battle to fight, and many hazards
yet to run (vi. 10–13). But they hold the earnest of
victory, the foretaste of life eternal. In spirit they sit
with Christ in the heavenly places. Pain and death,
temptation, persecution, the vicissitudes of earthly
history, by these God means to perfect that which He
has begun in His
This is the epistle of the Church and of humanity.
It dwells on the grand, objective aspects of the truth,
rather than upon its subjective experiences. It does
not invite us to rest in the comforts and delights of
grace, but to lift up our eyes and see whither Christ has
translated us and what is the kingdom that we possess
in Him. God “quickened us together with the Christ”:
He “raised us up, He made us to sit in the heavenly
places in Christ Jesus.” Henceforth “our citizenship
is in heaven” (
This is the inspiring thought of the third group of
St Paul’s epistles; we heard it in the first note of his
song of praise (i. 3). It supplies the principle from
which St Paul unfolds the beautiful conception of the
Christian life contained in the third chapter of the
companion letter to the Colossians: “Your life is hid
with the Christ in God”; therefore “seek the things
that are above, where He is.” We live in two worlds
at once. Heaven lies about us in this new mystic
childhood of our spirit. There our names are written;
thither our thoughts and hopes resort. Our treasure is
there; our heart we have lodged there, with Christ in
God. He is there, the Lord of the Spirit, from whom
In his lofty flights of thought the apostle always has some practical and homely end in view. The earthly and heavenly, the mystical and the matter-of-fact were not distant and repugnant, but interfused in his mind. From the celestial heights of the life hidden with Christ in God (ver. 6), he brings us down in a moment and without any sense of discrepancy to the prosaic level of “good works” (ver. 10). The love which viewed us from eternity, the counsels of Him who works all things in all, enter into the humblest daily duties.
Grace, moreover, sets us great tasks. There should be something to show in deed and life for the wealth of kindness spent upon us, some visible and commensurate result of the vast preparations of the gospel plan. Of this result the apostle saw the earnest in the work of faith wrought by his Gentile Churches.
St Paul was the last man in the world to undervalue
human effort, or disparage good work of any sort. It
is, in his view, the end aimed at in all that God bestows
on His people, in all that He Himself works in them.
Only let this end be sought in God’s way and order.
Man’s doings must be the fruit and not the root of his
The “workmanship” of our Version suggests an idea
foreign to the passage. The apostle is not thinking of
the Divine art or skill displayed in man’s creation; but
of the simple fact that “God made man” (
Far backward in the past, amid the secrets of
creation, lay the beginnings of God’s grace to mankind.
Far onward in the future shines its lustre revealed in
In those approaching æons he foresees that the
apostolic dispensation will play a conspicuous part.
Unborn ages will be blessed in the blessing now
descending upon Jews and Gentiles through Christ
Jesus. So marvellous is the display of God’s kindness
toward them, that all the future will pay homage to it.
The overflowing wealth of blessing poured upon St
Paul and the first Churches had an end in view that
reached beyond themselves, an end worthy of the Giver,
worthy of the magnitude of His plans and of His
measureless love. If all this was theirs—this fulness of
God exceeding the utmost they had asked or thought—it
is because God means to convey it through them to
multitudes besides! There is no limit to the grace that
God will impart to men and to Churches who thus
reason, who receive His gifts in this generous and
communicative spirit. The apostolic Church chants
with Mary at the Annunciation:
Never was any prediction better fulfilled. This spot of history shines with a light before which every other shows pale and commonplace. The companions of Jesus, the humble fraternities of the first Christian century have been the object of reverent interest and intent research on the part of all centuries since. Their history is scrutinized from all sides with a zeal and industry which the most pressing subjects of the day hardly command. For we feel that these men hold the secret of the world’s life. The key to the treasures we all long for is in their hands. As time goes on and the stress of life deepens, men will turn with yet fonder hope to the age of Jesus Christ. “And many nations will say: Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. And He will teach us of His ways; and we will walk in His paths.”
The stream will remember its fountain; the children of God will gather to their childhood’s home. The world will hear the gospel in the recovered accents of its prophets and apostles.
“Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision in the flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometime were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ.”—Eph. ii. 11–13.
To such recollections we do well to summon ourselves.
The children of grace love to recall, and on fit occasions
recount for God’s glory and the help of their fellows,
the way in which God led them to the knowledge of
Himself. In some the great change came suddenly.
He “made speed” to save us. It was a veritable
This instant conversion, such as Paul experienced, this sharp and abrupt transition from darkness to light, was common in the first generation of Christians, as it is wherever religious awakening takes place in a society that has been largely dead to God. The advent of Christianity in the Gentile world was much after this fashion,—like a tropical sunrise, in which day leaps on the earth full-born. This experience gives a stamp of peculiar decision to the convictions and character of its subjects. The change is patent and palpable; no observer can fail to mark it. And it burns itself into the memory with an ineffaceable impression. The violent throes of such a spiritual birth cannot be forgotten.
But if our entrance into the life of God was gradual,
like the dawn of our own milder clime, where the light
steals by imperceptible advances upon the darkness—if
the glory of the Lord has thus risen upon us, our certainty
of its presence may be no less complete, and our
such remembrances are a priceless treasure, that grows richer as we grow wiser. It awakens a joy not so thrilling nor so prompt in utterance as that of the soul snatched like a brand from the burning, but which passes understanding. Blessed are the children of the kingdom, those who have never roamed far from the fold of Christ and the commonwealth of Israel, whom the cross has beckoned onwards from their childhood. But however it was—by whatever means, at whatever time it pleased God to call you from darkness to His marvellous light, remember.
But we must return to Paul and his Gentile readers.
The old death in life was to them a sombre reality,
keenly and painfully remembered. In that condition
of moral night out of which Christ had rescued them,
Gentile society around them still remained. Let us
observe its features as they are delineated in contrast
Israel had a God. Besides, there were only “those who are called gods.” This was the first and cardinal distinction. Not their race, not their secular calling, their political or intellectual gifts, but their faith formed the Jews into a nation. They were “the people of God,” as no other people has been—of the God, for theirs was “the true and living God”—Jehovah, the I AM, the One, the Alone. The monotheistic belief was, no doubt, wavering and imperfect in the mass of the nation in early times; but it was held by the ruling minds amongst them, by the men who have shaped the destiny of Israel and created its Bible, with increasing clearness and intensity of passion. “All the gods of the nations are idols—vapours, phantoms, nothings!—but Jehovah made the heavens.” It was the ancestral faith that glowed in the breast of Paul at Athens, amidst the fairest shrines of Greece, when he “saw the city wholly given to idolatry”—man’s highest art and the toil and piety of ages lavished on things that were no gods; and in the midst of the splendour of a hollow and decaying Paganism he read the confession that God was “unknown.”
Ephesus had her famous goddess, worshipped in the
most sumptuous pile of architecture that the ancient
world contained. Behold the proud city, “temple-keeper
of the great goddess Artemis,” filled with
wrath! Infuriate Demos flashes fire from his thousand
eyes, and his brazen throat roars hoarse vengeance
against the insulters of “her magnificence, whom all
The Pagans retorted this reproach. “Away with the atheists!” they cried, when Christians were led to execution. Ninety years after this time the martyr Polycarp was brought into the arena before the magistrates of Asia and the populace gathered in Smyrna at the great Ionic festival. The Proconsul, wishing to spare the venerable man, said to him: “Swear by the Fortune of Cæsar; and say, Away with the atheists!” But Polycarp, as the story continues, “with a grave look gazing on the crowd of lawless Gentiles in the stadium and shaking his hand against them, then groaning and looking up to heaven, said, Away with the atheists!” Pagan and Christian were each godless in the eyes of the other. If visible temples and images, and the local worship of each tribe or city made a god, then Jews and Christians had none: if God was a Spirit—One, Holy, Almighty, Omnipresent—then polytheists were in truth atheists; their many gods, being many, were no gods; they were idols,—eidola, illusive shows of the Godhead.
The more thoughtful and pious among the heathen
felt this already. When the apostle denounced the
idols and their pompous worship as “these vanities,”
his words found an echo in the Gentile conscience.
The classical Paganism held the multitude by the force
of habit and local pride, and by its sensuous and artistic
charms; but such religious power as it once had was
gone. In all directions it was undermined by mystic
In this despair of their ancestral religions many piously disposed Gentiles turned to Judaism for spiritual help; and the synagogue was surrounded in the Greek cities by a circle of earnest proselytes. From their ranks St Paul drew a large proportion of his hearers and converts. When he writes, “Remember that you were at that time without God,” he is within the recollection of his readers; and they will bear him out in testifying that their heathen creed was dead and empty to the soul. Nor did philosophy construct a creed more satisfying. Its gods were the Epicurean deities who dwell aloof and careless of men; or the supreme Reason and Necessity of the Stoics, the anima mundi, of which human souls are fleeting and fragmentary images. “Deism finds God only in heaven; Pantheism, only on earth; Christianity alone finds Him both in heaven and on earth” (Harless). The Word made flesh reveals God in the world.
When the apostle says “without God in the world,”
this qualification is both reproachful and sorrowful. To
be without God in the world that He has made, where
His “eternal power and Godhead” have been visible
from creation, argues a darkened and perverted
heart.
In these words we have an echo of Paul’s preaching to the Gentiles, and an indication of the line of his appeals to the conscience of the enlightened pagans of his time. The despair of the age was darker than the human mind has known before or since. Matthew Arnold has painted it all in one verse of those lines, entitled Obermann once more, in which he so perfectly expresses the better spirit of modern scepticism.
The saying by which St Paul reproved the Corinthians,
“Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we
die,” is the common sentiment of pagan epitaphs of
the time. Here is an extant specimen of the kind:
“Let us drink and be merry; for we shall have no
more kissing and dancing in the kingdom of Proserpine.
Soon shall we fall asleep, to wake no more.” Such
were the thoughts with which men came back from
the grave-side. It is needless to say how depraving
was the effect of this hopelessness. At Athens, in
the more religious times of Socrates, it was even considered
a decent and kindly thing to allow a criminal
condemned to death to spend his last hours in gross
sensual indulgence. There is no reason to suppose that
Our modern speech and literature and our habits of feeling have been for so many generations steeped in the influence of Christ’s teaching, and it has thrown so many tender and hallowed thoughts around the state of our beloved dead, that it is impossible even for those who are personally without hope in Christ to realize what its general decay and disappearance would mean. To have possessed such a treasure, and then to lose it! to have cherished anticipations so exalted and so dear,—and to find them turn out a mockery! The age upon which this calamity fell would be of all ages the most miserable.
The hope of Israel which Paul preached to the
Gentiles was a hope for the world and for the nations,
as well as for the individual soul. “The commonwealth
[or polity] of Israel” and “the covenants of
promise” guaranteed the establishment of the Messianic
kingdom upon earth. This expectation took
amongst the mass of the Jews a materialistic and even
a revengeful shape; but in one form or other it
belonged, and still belongs to every man of Israel.
Those noble lines of Virgil in his fourth
Eclogue
The Gentiles were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,”—that is to say, treated as aliens and made such by their exclusion. By the very fact of Israel’s election, the rest of mankind were shut out of the visible kingdom of God. They became mere Gentiles, or nations,—a herd of men bound together only by natural affinity, with no “covenant of promise,” no religious constitution or destiny, no definite relationship to God, Israel being alone the acknowledged and organized “people of Jehovah.”
These distinctions were summed up in one word,
expressing all the pride of the Jewish nature, when
the Israelites styled themselves “the Circumcision.”
The rest of the world—Philistines or Egyptians, Greeks,
Romans, or Barbarians, it mattered not—were “the
Uncircumcision.” How superficial this distinction was
in point of fact, and how false the assumption of moral
superiority it implied in the existing condition of
Judaism, St Paul indicates by saying, “those who are
called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision,
in flesh, wrought by human hands.” In the
second and third chapters of his epistle to the Romans
he exposed the hollowness of Jewish sanctity, and
The destitution of the Gentile world is put into a
single word, when the apostle says: “You were at
that time separate from Christ”—without a Christ,
either come or coming. They were deprived of the
world’s one treasure,—shut out, as it appeared, for
ever Observe the perfect participle
ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι, which signifies an
abiding fact or fixed condition. Similar is the turn of expression in
ch. iii. 9, and in
“But now in Christ Jesus ye were made nigh.”
What is it that has bridged the distance, that has
transported these Gentiles from the wilderness of
heathenism into the midst of the city of God? It is
“the blood of Christ.” The sacrificial death of Jesus
Christ transformed the relations of God to mankind,
and of Israel to the Gentiles. In Him God reconciled
not a nation, but “a world” to Himself (
When the Greeks in Passion week desired to see
Him, He exclaimed: “I, if I be lifted up from the
earth, will draw all unto me.” The cross of Jesus
was to draw humanity around it, by its infinite love
The union of Caiaphas and Pilate in the condemnation of Jesus and the mingling of the Jewish crowd with the Roman soldiers at His execution were a tragic symbol of the new age that was coming. Israel and the Gentiles were accomplices in the death of the Messiah—the former of the two the more guilty partner in the counsel and deed. If this Jesus whom they slew and hanged on a tree was indeed the Christ, God’s chosen, then what availed their Abrahamic sonship, their covenants and law-keeping, their proud religious eminence? They had killed their Christ; they had forfeited their calling. His blood was on them and on their children.
Those who seemed nigh to God, at the cross of Christ were found far off,—that both together, the far and the near, might be reconciled and brought back to God. “He shut up all unto disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all.”
“For He is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of partition, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances, that He might create in Himself of the twain one new man, so making peace; and might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: and He came and preached good tidings of peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father.”—Eph. ii. 14–18.
There were two distinct, but kindred enmities to
be overcome by Christ, in preaching to the world
His good tidings of peace (ver. 17). There was the
hostility of Jew and Gentile, which was removed in its
cause and principle when Christ “in His flesh” (by His
incarnate life and death) “abolished the law of commandments
in decrees”—i.e., the law of Moses as it
constituted a body of external precepts determining the
The Jewish and Gentile peoples formed two distinct
types of humanity. Politically, the Jews were insignificant
and had scarcely counted amongst the great
powers of the world. Their religion alone gave them
influence and importance. Bearing his inspired
Scriptures and his Messianic hope, the wandering
Israelite confronted the vast masses of heathenism and
the splendid and fascinating classical civilization with
the proudest sense of his superiority. To his God
he knew well that one day every knee would bow and
every tongue confess. The circumstances of the time
deepened his isolation and aggravated to internecine
hate his spite against his fellow-men, the adversus
omnes alios hostile odium stigmatized by the incisive
pen of Tacitus. Within three years of the writing of
this letter the Jewish war against Rome broke out,
when the enmity culminated in the most appalling and
fateful overthrow recorded in the pages of history.
Now, it is this enmity at its height—the most inveterate
and desperate one can conceive—that the apostle proposes
to reconcile; nay, that he sees already slain by
the sacrifice of the cross, and within the brotherhood
of the Christian Church. It was slain in the heart
In his earlier writings the apostle has been concerned
chiefly to guard the position and rights of the two parties
within the Church. He has abundantly maintained,
especially in the epistle to the Galatians, the claims of
Gentile believers in Christ against Judaic assumptions
and impositions. He has defended the just prerogative
of the Jew and his hereditary sentiments from the
contempt to which they were sometimes exposed on the part of the Gentile
majority. See to this effect such passages as
It was his confidence in the victory of the cross
over all strife and sin that sustained St Paul through
The enmity of Jew and Gentile was representative of all that divides mankind. In it were concentrated most of the causes by which society is rent asunder. Along with religion, race, habits, tastes and culture, moral tendencies, political aspirations, interests of trade, all helped to widen the breach. The cleavage ran deep into the foundations of life; the enmity was the growth of two thousand years. It was not a case of local friction, nor a quarrel arising from temporary causes. The Jew was ubiquitous, and everywhere was an alien and an irritant to Gentile society. No antipathy was so hard to subdue. The grace that conquers it, can and will conquer all enmities.
St Paul’s view embraced, in fact, a world-wide
reconcilement. He contemplates, as the Hebrew prophets
themselves did, the fraternization of mankind
under the rule of the Christ. After this scale he laid
down the foundation of the Church, “wise master-builder”
that he was. It was destined to bear the weight
of an edifice in which all the races of men should dwell
together, and every order of human faculty should find
its place. His thoughts were not confined within the
Judaic antithesis. “There is no Jew and Greek,” he
says in another place; yes, and “no barbarian, Scythian,
At the present time we are better able to enter into
these views of the apostle than at any intervening
period of history. In his day almost the whole visible
world, lying round the Mediterranean shores, was
brought under the government and laws of Rome. This
fact made the establishment of one religious polity a
thing quite conceivable. The Roman empire did not,
as it proved, allow Christianity to conquer it soon
enough and to leaven it sufficiently to save it. That
huge construction, the mightiest fabric of human polity,
fell and covered the earth with its ruins. In its fall
it reacted disastrously upon the Church, and has bequeathed
to it the corrupt and despotic unity of Papal
Rome. Now, in these last days, the whole world is
opened to the Church, a world stretching far beyond
the horizon of the first century. Science and Commerce,
those two strong-winged angels and giant
ministers of God, are swiftly binding the continents
together in material ties. The peoples are beginning to
realize their brotherhood, and are feeling their way in
many directions towards international union; while
in the Churches a new, federal catholicity is taking
shape, that must displace the false catholicism of
external uniformity and the disastrous absolutism inherited
If Christendom were worthy of her Master and her name, this question would be answered with no doubtful affirmative. The Church is well able, if she were prepared, to go up and possess the whole earth for her Lord. The way is open; the means are in her hand. Nor is she ignorant, nor wholly negligent of her opportunity and of the claims that the times impose upon her. She is putting forth new strength and striving to overtake her work, notwithstanding the weight of ignorance and sloth that burdens her. Soon the reconciling cross will be planted on every shore, and the praises of the Crucified sung in every human language.
But there are dark as well as bright auguries for
the future. The advance of commerce and emigration
has been a curse and not a blessing to many heathen
peoples. Who can read without shame and horror the
story of European conquest in America? And it is a
chapter not yet closed. Greed and injustice still mark
the dealings of the powerful and civilized with the
weaker races. England set a noble example in the
abolition of negro slavery; but she has since inflicted,
for purposes of gain, the opium curse on China, putting
poison to the lips of its vast population. Under our
Christian flags fire-arms are imported, and alcohol,
amongst tribes of men less able than children to resist
their evils. Is this “preaching peace to those far off”?
And what shall we say of ourselves at home, in our relation to this great principle of the apostle? The old “middle wall of partition,” the temple-barrier that sundered Jew and Gentile, is “broken down,”—visibly levelled by the hand of God when Jerusalem fell, as it had been virtually and in its principle destroyed by the work of Christ. But are there no other middle walls, no barriers raised within the fold of Christ? The rich man’s purse, and the poor man’s penury; aristocratic pride, democratic bitterness and jealousy; knowledge and refinement on the one hand, ignorance and rudeness on the other—how thick the veil of estrangement which these influences weave, how high the party walls which they build in our various Church communions!
It is the duty of the Church, as she values her existence,
with gentle but firm hands to pull down and to
keep down all such partitions. She cannot abolish the
natural distinctions of life. She cannot turn the Jew
into a Gentile, nor the Gentile into a Jew. She will
never make the poor man rich in this world, nor the
rich man altogether poor. Like her Master, she
declines to be “judge or divider” of our secular inheritance.
But she can see to it that these outward
distinctions make no difference in her treatment of the
men as men. She can combine in her fellowship all
grades and orders, and teach them to understand and
respect each other. She can soften the asperities and
relieve many of the hardships which social differences
Let us labour unweariedly for this, and let our meeting at the Lord’s table be a symbol of the unreserved communion of men of all classes and conditions in the brotherhood of the redeemed sons of God. “He is our peace”; and if He is in our hearts, we must needs be sons of peace. “Behold the secret of all true union! It is not by others coming to us, nor by our going over to them; but it is by both them and ourselves coming to Christ” that peace is made (Monod).
Thus within and without the Church the work of atonement will advance, with Christ ever for its preacher (ver. 17). He speaks through the words and the lives of His ten thousand messengers,—men of every order, in every age and country of the earth. The leaven of Christ’s peace will spread till the lump is leavened. God will accomplish His purpose of the ages, whether in our time, or in another worthier of His calling. His Church is destined to be the home of the human family, the universal liberator and instructor and reconciler of the nations. And Christ shall sit enthroned in the loyal worship of the federated peoples of the earth.
But the question remains: What is the foundation,
what the warrant of this grand idealism of the apostle
Paul? Many a great thinker, many an ardent reformer
before and since has dreamed of some such millennium
as this. And their enthusiastic plans have ended too
often in conflict and destruction. What surer ground
of confidence have we in Paul’s undertaking than in
those of so many gifted visionaries and philosophers?
The difference lies here: his expectation rests on the
God is the centre of His own universe. Any reconciliation that is to stand, must include Him first of all. Christ reconciled Jew and Gentile “both in one body to God.” There is the meeting point, the true focus of the orbit of human life, that can alone control its movements and correct its wild aberrations. Under the shadow of His throne of justice, in the arms of His fatherly love, the kindreds of the earth will at last find reconciliation and peace. Humanitarian and secularist systems make the simple mistake of ignoring the supreme Factor in the scheme of things; they leave out the All in all.
“Be ye reconciled to God,” cries the apostle. For Almighty God has had a great quarrel with this world of ours. The hatred of men towards each other is rooted in the “carnal mind which is enmity against God.” The “law of commandments contained in ordinances,” in whose possession the Jew boasted over the lawless and profane Gentile, in reality branded both as culprits.
The secret disquiet and dread lurking in man’s conscience,
the pangs endured in his body of humiliation,
the groaning frame of nature declare the world unhinged
and out of course. Things have gone amiss,
somehow, between man and his Creator. The face of
the earth and the field of human history are scarred
with the thunderbolts of His displeasure. God, the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the King of the
ages, is not the amiable, almighty Sentimentalist that
some pious people would make Him out to be. The
men of the Bible felt and realized, if we do not,
the grave and tremendous import of the Lord’s controversy
with all flesh. He is unceasingly at war
Look at it from what side you will (and it has many
sides), propound it in what terms you may (and it
translates itself anew into the dialect of every age), you
must not explain the cross of Christ away nor cause
its offence to cease. “The atonement has always been
a scandal and a folly to those who did not receive it; it
has always contained something which to formal logic
is false and to individualistic ethics immoral; yet in
that very element which has been branded as immoral
and false, has always lain the seal of its power and
the secret of its truth.” The Holy One of God, the
Lamb without spot and blemish, He died by His own
consent a sinner’s death. That sacrifice, undergone by
the Son of God and Son of man dying as man for men,
in love to His race and in obedience to the Divine will
and law, gave an infinite satisfaction to God in His
relation to the world, and there went up to the Divine
throne from the anguish of Calvary a “savour of sweet
smell.” The moral glory of the act of Jesus Christ in
dying for His guilty brethren outshone its horror and
disgrace; and it redeemed man’s lost condition, and
clothed human nature with a new character and aspect
Perhaps you say: This is immoral, surely, that the just should suffer for the unjust; that one commits the offence, and another bears the penalty.—Stay a moment: that is only half the truth. We are more than individuals; we are members of a race; and vicarious suffering runs through life. Our sufferings and wrong-doings bind the human family together in an inextricable web. We are communists in sin and death. It is the law and lot of our existence. And Christ, the Lord and centre of the race, has come within its scope. He bound Himself to our sinking fortunes. He became co-partner in our lost estate, and has redeemed it to God by His blood. If He was true and perfect man, if He was the creative Head and Mediator of the race, the eternal Firstborn of many brethren, He could do no other. He who alone had the right and the power,—“One died for all.” He took upon His Divine heart the sin and curse of the world, He fastened it to His shoulders with the cross; and He bore it away from Caiaphas’ hall and Pilate’s judgement-seat, away from guilty Jerusalem; He took away the sin of the world, and expiated it once for all. He quenched in His blood the fires of wrath and hate it kindled. He slew the enmity thereby.
Still, we are individuals, as you said, not lost after
Coming “in one Spirit to the Father,” the reconciled children join hands again with each other. Social barriers, caste feelings, family feuds, personal quarrels, national antipathies, alike go down before the virtue of the blood of Jesus.
“Beloved,” you will say to the man that hates or has wronged you most,—“Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” In these simple words of the apostle John lies the secret of universal peace, the hope of the fraternization of mankind. Nations will have to say this one day, as well as men.
“So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God, being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the chief corner stone; in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.”—Eph. ii. 19–22.
I. The Church is a house built for an Occupant. Its
quality and size, and the mode of its construction are
determined by its destination. It is built to suit the
great Inhabitant, who says concerning the new Zion as
He said of the old in figure: “This is my rest for ever!
Here will I dwell, for I have desired it.” God, who is
spirit, cannot be satisfied with the fabric of material
nature for His temple, nor does “the Most High dwell
In the collective life and spirit of humanity God claims to reside, that He may fill it with His glory and His love. “Know you not,” cries the apostle to the once debased Corinthians, “that you are God’s temple, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”
Nothing that is bestowed upon man terminates in himself. The deliverance of Jewish and Gentile believers from their personal sins, their re-instatement into the broken unity of mankind and the destruction in them of their old enmities, of the antipathies generated by their common rebellion against God—these great results of Christ’s sacrifice were means to a further end. “Hallowed be Thy name” is our first petition to the Father in heaven; “Glory to God in the highest” is the key-note of the angels’ song, that runs through all the harmonies of “peace on earth,” through every strain of the melody of life. Religion is the mistress, not the handmaid in human affairs. She will never consent to become a mere ethical discipline, an instrument and subordinate stage in social evolution, a ladder held for men to climb up into their self-sufficiency.
The old temptation of the Garden, “Ye shall be as
gods,” has come upon our age in a new and fascinating
form, “You shall be as gods,” it is whispered: “nay,
you are God, and there is no other. The supernatural
is a dream. The Christian story is a fable. There is
none to fear or adore above yourselves!” Man is to
worship his collective self, his own humanity. “I am
the Lord thy God,” the great idol says, “that brought
Yes, we willingly admit, such human service is “religion pure and undefiled, before our God and Father.” If service is rendered to our kind as worship to the Father of men; if we reverence in each man the image of God and the shrine of His Spirit; if we are seeking to cleanse and adorn in men the temple where the Most High shall dwell, the humblest work done for our fellows’ good is done for Him. The best human charity is rendered for the love of God. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul, and strength. This,” said Jesus, “is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” On these two hangs the welfare of men and nations.
But the first commandment must come first. The
second law of Jesus never has been or will be kept to
purpose without the first. Humanitarian sentiments,
dreams of universal brotherhood, projects of social
reform, may seem for the moment to gain by their independence
of religion a certain zest and emphasis; but
they are without root and vitality. Their energy fails,
or spends itself in revolt; their glow declines, their
purity is stained. The leaders and first enthusiasts
trained in the school of Christ, whose spirit, in vain
repudiated, lives on in them, find themselves betrayed
and alone. The coarse selfishness and materialism of
In the light of God’s glory man learns to reverence his nature and understand the vocation of his race. The love of God touches the deep and enduring springs of human action. The kingdom of Christ and of God commands an absolute devotion; its service inspires unfaltering courage and invincible patience. There is a grandeur and a certainty, of which the noblest secular aims fall short, in the hopes of those who are striving together for the faith of the gospel, and who work to build human life into a dwelling-place for God.
II. God’s temple in the Church of Jesus Christ, while
it is one, is also manifold. “In whom each several
building [or every part of the
building Πᾶσα οἰκοδομή,
according to the well-established critical reading.
For πᾶς without the article, implying a various whole, compare
πάσης κτίσεως in
The image is that of an extensive pile of buildings, such as the ancient temples commonly were, in process of construction at different points over a wide area. The builders work in concert, upon a common plan. The several parts of the work are adjusted to each other; and the various operations in process are so harmonized, that the entire construction preserves the unity of the architect’s design. Such an edifice was the apostolic Church—one, but of many parts—in its diverse gifts and multiplied activities animated by one Spirit and directed towards one Divine purpose.
Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome—what
a various scene of activity these centres of Christian
Such was the catholicism of the apostolic age. The
true reading of verse 21, as it is restored by the Revisers,
is an incidental witness to the date of the epistle.
A churchman of the second century, writing under
Paul’s name in the interests of catholic unity as it was
then understood, would scarcely have penned such a
sentence without attaching to the subject the definite
article: he must have written “all the building,” as
the copyists from whom the received text proceeds
very naturally have done. From that time onwards,
as the system of the ecclesiastical hierarchy was
developed, external unity was more and more strictly
imposed. The original “diversity of operations”
Had not Jerusalem been overthrown and its Church destroyed, the hierarchical movement would probably have made that city, rather than Rome, its centre. This was in fact the tendency, if not the express purpose of the Judaistic party in the Church. St Paul had vindicated in his earlier epistles the freedom of the Gentile Christian communities, and their right of non-conformity to Jewish usage. In the words “each several building, fitly framed together,” there is an echo of this controversy. The Churches of his mission claim a standing side by side with those founded by other apostles. For himself and his Gentile brethren he seems to say, in the presence of the primitive Church and its leaders: “As they are Christ’s, so also are we.”
The co-operation of the different parts of the body
of Christ is essential to their collective growth. Let
all Churches beware of crushing dissent. Blows aimed
at our Christian neighbours recoil upon ourselves.
Undermining their foundation, we shake our own.
Next to positive corruption of doctrine and life, nothing
hinders so greatly the progress of the kingdom of God
as the claim to exclusive legitimacy made on behalf of
ancient Church organizations. Their representatives
would have every part of God’s temple framed upon
one pattern. They refuse a place on the apostolic
foundation to all Churches, however numerous, however
This policy on the part of any Christian Church, or Church party, is contrary to the mind of Christ and to the example of His apostles. Those who hold aloof from the comity of the Churches and prevent the many buildings of God’s temple being fitly framed together, must bear their judgement, whosoever they be. They prefer conquest to peace, but that conquest they will never win; it would be fatal to themselves. Let the elder sister frankly allow the birthright of the younger sisters of Christ’s house in these lands, and be our example in justice and in charity. Great will be her honour; great the glory won for our common Lord.
“Every building fitly framed together groweth into
a holy temple in the Lord.” The subject is distributive;
the predicate collective. The parts give place to the
whole in the writer’s mind. As each several piece of
the structure, each cell or chapel in the temple, spreads
out to join its companion buildings and adjusts itself
to the parts around it, the edifice grows into a richer
completeness and becomes more fit for its sacred purpose.
The separate buildings, distant in place or
historical character, approximate by extension, as they
spread over the unoccupied ground between them and as
the connecting links are multiplied. At last a point is
When each organ of the body in its own degree is perfect and holds its place in keeping with the rest, we think no longer of their individual perfection, of the charm of this feature or of that; they are forgotten in the beauty of the perfect frame. So it will be in the body of Christ, when its several communions, cleansed and filled with His Spirit, each honouring the vocation of the others, shall in freedom and in love by a spontaneous movement be gathered into one. Their strength will then be no longer weakened and their spirit chafed by internal conflict. With united forces and irresistible energy, they will assail the kingdom of darkness and subjugate the world to Christ.
For this consummation our Saviour prayed in the
last hours before His death: “that they all may be
one, as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that
they also may be in us, that the world may believe
that Thou didst send me” (
III. To appearance, we are many rather than one who bear the name of Christ. But we are one notwithstanding, if below the variety of superstructure our faith rests upon the witness of the apostles, and the several buildings have Christ Jesus Himself for chief corner-stone. The one foundation and the one Spirit constitute the unity of God’s temple in the Church.
“The apostles and prophets” are named as a single
body, the prophets being doubtless, in this passage and
in chapters iii. 5 and iv. 11, the existing prophets of
the apostolic Church, whose inspired teaching supplemented
that of the apostles and helped to lay down
the foundation of revealed truth. That foundation has
been, through the providence of God, preserved for later
ages in the Scriptures of the New Testament, on which
the faith of Christians has rested ever since. Such a
prophet Barnabas was in the first days (
It is thought surprising that St Paul should write
thus, in so general and distant a fashion, of the order to
which he belonged (comp. iii. 5). This, it is said, is
the language of a later generation, which looks back
with reverence to the inspired Founders. But this
These men have laid the foundation—Peter and Paul, John and James, Barnabas and Silas, and the rest. They are our spiritual progenitors, the fathers of our faith. We see Jesus Christ through their eyes; we read His teaching, and catch His Spirit in their words. Their testimony, in its essential facts, stands secure in the confidence of mankind. Nor was it their word alone, but the men themselves—their character, their life and work—laid for the Church its historical foundation. This “glorious company of the apostles” formed the first course in the new building, on whose firmness and strength the stability of the entire structure depends. Their virtues and their sufferings, as well as the revelations made through them, have guided the thoughts and shaped the life of countless multitudes of men, of the best and wisest men in all ages since. They have fixed the standard of Christian doctrine and the type of Christian character. At our best, we are but imitators of them as they were of Christ.
In regard to the chief part of their teaching, both as
to its meaning and authority, the great bulk of Christians
in all communions are agreed. The keen disputes
So “the firm foundation of God standeth”; though men, shaken themselves, seem to see it tremble. On that basis we may labour confidently and loyally, with those amongst whom the Master has placed us. Some of our fellow-workmen disown and would hinder us: that shall not prevent us from rejoicing in their good work, and admiring the gold and precious stones that they contribute to the fabric. The Lord of the temple will know how to use the labour of His many servants. He will forgive and compose their strife, who are jealous for His name. He will shape their narrow aims to His larger purposes. Out of their discords He will draw a finer harmony. As the great house grows to its dimensions, as the workmen by the extension of their labours come nearer to each other and their sectional plans merge in Christ’s great purpose, reproaches will cease and misunderstandings vanish. Over many who followed not with us and whom we counted but as “strangers and sojourners,” as men whose place within the walls of Zion was doubtful and unauthorized, we shall hereafter rejoice with a joy not unmixed with self-upbraiding, to find them in the fullest right our fellow-citizens amongst the saints and of the household of God.
The Holy Spirit is the supreme Builder of the
Church, as He is the supreme witness to Jesus Christ
(
In the hands of these faithful and wise stewards of God’s dispensation, “the stone which the builders rejected was made the head of the corner.” Their work has been tried by fire and by flood; and it abides. The rock of Zion stands unworn by time, unshaken by the conflict of ages,—amidst the movements of history and the shifting currents of thought the one foundation for the peace and true welfare of mankind.
“For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you Gentiles,—if so be that ye have heard of the dispensation of that grace of God which was given me toward you; how that by revelation was made known unto me the mystery (as I wrote afore in few words, whereby, when ye read, ye can perceive my understanding in the mystery of Christ), which in other generations was not made known unto the sons of men, as it hath now been revealed unto His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit; to wit, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs, and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel, whereof I was made a minister, according to the gift of that grace of God which was given me according to the working of His power. Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; and to bring to light what is the dispensation of the mystery which from all ages hath been hid in God who created all things.”—Eph. iii. 1–9.
Like chapter i. 3–14, this passage is an extreme instance of St Paul’s amorphous style. His sentences are not composed; they are spun in a continuous thread, an endless chain of prepositional, participial, and relative adjuncts. They grow under our eyes like living things, putting forth new processes every moment, now in this and now in that direction. Within the main parenthesis we soon come upon another parenthesis including verses 3b and 4 (“as I wrote afore,” etc.); and at several points the grammatical connexion is uncertain. In its general scope, this intricate sentence resolves itself into a statement of what God has wrought in the apostle toward the accomplishment of His great plan. It thus completes the exposition given already of that which God wrought in Christ for the Church, and that which He has wrought through Christ in Gentile believers in fulfilment of the same end.
Verses 1–9 speak (1) of the mystery itself—God’s gracious intention toward the human race, unknown in earlier times; and (2) of the man to whom, above others, it was given to make known the secret.
I. The mystery is defined twice over. First, it consists
in the fact that “in Christ Jesus through the
gospel the Gentiles are co-heirs and co-incorporate and
co-partners in the promise” (ver. 6); and secondly, it
Christ is, to St Paul, the centre and the sum of
the mysteries of Divine truth, of the whole enigma of
existence. In the parallel epistle he calls Him “the
mystery of God—in whom are all the treasures of
wisdom and knowledge hidden” (
In close connexion with these statements, St Paul speaks there, as he does here, of his own heavy sufferings endured on this account and the joy they gave him. He is the instrument of a glorious purpose worthy of God; he is the mouthpiece of a revelation waiting to be spoken since the world began, that is addressed to all mankind and interests heaven along with earth. The greatness of his office is commensurate with the greatness of the truth given him to announce.
The mystery, as we have said, consists in Christ.
This we learned from chapter i. 4, 5, and 9, 10. In
Christ the Eternal lodged His purpose and laid His
plans for the world. It is His fulness that the fulness
of the times dispenses. The Old Testament, the
reservoir of previous revelation, had Him for its close-kept
secret, “held in silence through eternal times”
(
But while Christ gathers into Himself the accumulated
wealth of former revelation, His fulness is not
measured thereby or exhausted. He solves the problems
of the past; He unseals the ancient mysteries. But
He creates new and deeper problems, some explained
in the continued teaching of His Spirit and His providence,
others that remain, or emerge from time to time
to tax the faith and understanding of His Church.
There are the mysteries surrounding His own Person,
with which the Greek Church struggled long—His
eternal Sonship, His pre-incarnate relation to mankind
and the creatures, the final outcome of the mediatorial
reign and its subordination to the absolute sovereignty
For such inquiries the Spirit of wisdom and revelation is given to those who humbly seek His light. He is given afresh in every age. Out of Christ’s unsearchable riches ever-new resources are forthcoming at His Church’s need, new treasures lying hidden in the old for him who can extract them. But His riches, however far they are investigated, remain unsearchable, and inexhaustible however largely drawn upon. God’s ways may be tracked further and further in each generation; they will remain to the end, as they were to the mind of Paul at the limit of his bold researches, “past finding out.” The inspired apostle confesses himself a child in Divine learning: “We know in part,” he says, “we prophesy in part.” Oh the depths of “hidden wisdom” unimagined now, that are in store for us in Christ, “foreordained before the worlds unto our glory!”
See
In virtue of the dispensation committed to him, St
Paul formally proclaims the incorporation of the Gentiles
into the body of Christ, their investiture with the franchise
of faith. The forgiveness of sins is theirs, the
light of God’s smile, the breath of His Spirit, the
worship and fellowship of His Church, the tasks and
honours of His service. The incarnation of Christ is
theirs; His life, teaching, and miracles; His cross is
theirs, His resurrection and ascension, and His second
coming, and the glories of His heavenly kingdom—all
made their own on the bare condition of a penitent
and obedient faith. The past is theirs—is ours, along
with the present and the future. The God of Israel
is our God. Abraham is our father, though his sons
after the flesh acknowledge us not. Their prophets
What a boundless wealth we Gentiles, taught by Jesus Christ, have discovered in the Jewish Bible! When will the Jewish people understand that their greatness is in Him, that the light which lightens the Gentiles is their true glory? When will they accept their part in the riches of which they have made all the world partakers? The mystery of our participation in their Christ has now been “revealed to the sons of men” long enough. Is it not time that they themselves should see it, that the veil should be lifted from the heart of Israel? The disclosure was in the first instance so astounding, so contrary to their cherished expectations, that one can scarcely wonder if it was at first rejected. But God the King of the ages has been asserting and re-asserting the fact in the course of history ever since. How vain to fight against Him! how useless to deny the victory of the Nazarene!
II. But there was in Israel an election of grace,—men of unveiled heart to whom the mystery of ages was disclosed. “The secret of Jehovah is with them that fear Him, and He will show them His covenant.” Such is the rule of revelation. To the like effect Christ said: “The pure in heart shall see God. He that willeth to do His will shall know of the doctrine.”
The light of God’s universal love had come into the
The secret was further disclosed to Peter, when he
was taught at the house of Cornelius “not to call any
man common or unclean.” He saw, and the Church
of Jerusalem saw and confessed that God “gave the
like gift” to uncircumcised Gentiles as to themselves
and had “purified their hearts by faith.” Many prophetic
voices, unrecorded, confirmed this revelation. Of
all this Paul is thinking here. It is to his predecessors
in the knowledge of the truth rather than to himself
that he refers when he speaks of “holy apostles and
prophets” in verse 5. His readers would naturally
turn to them in coming to this plural expression. The
original apostles of Jesus and witnesses of His truth
first attested the doctrine of universal grace; and that
they did so was a fact of vital importance to Paul and
the Gentile Church. The significance of this fact is
shown by the stress which is laid upon it and the
The apostle frequently alludes to revelations made to himself; he never claims that this chief matter was revealed personally to himself. It was an open secret when Saul entered the Church. “Whereof,” he says, in verse 7, “I became minister”; again, “to me was this grace given, to preach to the Gentiles Christ’s unsearchable riches.” The leaders of the Jewish Christian Church knew well that their message was meant for all the world. But the abstract knowledge of a truth is one thing; the practical power to realize it is another. Until the new apostle came upon the field, there was no man ready for this great task and equal to it. It was at this crisis that Paul was raised up. Then “it pleased God to reveal His Son” in him, that he might “preach Him among the Gentiles.”
The effect of this summons upon Paul himself was
overwhelming, and continued to be so till the end of
life. The immense favour humbles him to the dust.
He strains language, heaping comparative upon superlative,
to describe his astonishment as the import of his
mission unfolds itself: “To me, less than the least of
all the saints, was this grace given.” That Saul the
Pharisee and the persecutor, the most unworthy and
most unlikely of men, should be the chosen vessel to
bear Christ’s riches to the Gentile world, how shall
he sufficiently give thanks for this! how express his
wonder at the unfathomable wisdom and goodness that
the choice displays in the mind of God! But we can
see well that this choice was precisely the fittest. A
Hebrew of the Hebrews, steeped in Jewish traditions
and glorying in his sacred ancestry, none knew better
To himself the office was an unceasing delight. The universalism of the gospel—a commonplace of our modern rhetoric—had burst upon his mind in its unspoilt freshness and undimmed splendour. He is sailing out into an undiscovered ocean, with a boundless horizon. A new heaven and earth are opened to him in the revelation that the Gentiles are partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus. He is entranced, as he writes, with the largeness of the Divine purpose, with the magnificent sweep and scope of the designs of grace. These verses give us the warm and genuine impression made upon the hearts of its first recipients by the disclosure of the universal destination of the gospel of Christ.
St Paul’s work, in carrying out the dispensation of
this mystery, was twofold. It was both external and
internal. He was a “herald and apostle”; he was
also “teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth”
(
The apostle was not unaware of the vast influence he now possessed, and that must accrue to him in the future from the transcendent interest of the doctrines committed to his charge. There is no false modesty about this splendidly gifted man. It is his not only to “preach to the Gentiles the good news of Christ’s unsearchable riches”; but more than that, “to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery that has been hidden away from the ages in God who created all things.” The great secret was out while Saul of Tarsus was still a persecutor and blasphemer. But as to the management and dispensation of the mystery, the practical handling of it, as to the mode and way in which God would convey and apply it to the world at large, and as to the bearings and consequences of this momentous truth,—the apostle Paul, and no one but he, had all this to expound and set in order. He was, in fact, the architect of Christian doctrine.
Theologically, Peter and John himself were Paul’s
debtors; and are included amongst the “all men” of
verse 9 (if this reading of the text is correct). St John
Well persuaded is our apostle that all readers of this letter in the Asian towns, if they have not known it before, will now “perceive” his “understanding in the mystery of Christ.” All ages have discerned it since. And the ages to come will measure its value better than we can do now.
“To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the Church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the purpose of the ages which He formed in the Christ, even Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through our faith in Him. Wherefore I ask that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which are your glory.”—Eph. iii. 10–13.
“There is nothing covered,” said Jesus, “which shall
To some this will appear to be mere extravagance.
They see in such expressions the marks of an unrestrained
enthusiasm, of theological speculation pushed
beyond its limits and unchecked by any just knowledge
of the physical universe. This censure would be
plausible and it might seem that the apostle had
extended the mission of the gospel beyond its province,
were it not for what he says in verse 11: This “purpose
of the ages” God “made in the Christ, even Jesus
our Lord.” Jesus Christ links together angels and
men. He draws after Him to earth the eyes of heaven.
Christ’s coming to this world and identification with it
unite to it enduringly the great worlds above us. The
scenes enacted upon this planet and the events of its
religious history have sent their shock through the
universe. The incarnation of the Son of God gives to
human life a boundless interest and significance. It is
idle to oppose to this conviction the fact of the littleness
of the terrestrial globe. Spiritual and physical
magnitudes are incommensurable. You cannot measure
a man’s soul by the size of his dwelling-house. Science
Here, then, lies the centre of the apostle’s thoughts in this paragraph: God’s all-comprehending purpose in Christ. The magnitude and completeness of this plan are indicated by the fact that it embraces in its purview the angelic powers and their enlightenment. So understanding it, our human faith gains confidence and courage (vv. 12, 13).
I. The textual critics restore the definite article
which later copyists had dropped before the word
Christ in verse 11. We have already remarked the
frequency of “the Christ” in this epistle. See note on p. 47; also pp. 83, 189.
Not without meaning is He called “Jesus our Lord.” The “principalities and powers” of the heavenly places are in our view (ver. 10). These potentates some of the Asian Christians were fain to worship. “See ye do it not,” Paul seems to say. “Jesus, the Christ of God, is alone our Lord; not these. He is our Lord and theirs (i. 21, 22). As our Lord He commands their homage, and gives them lessons through His Church in God’s deep counsels.” Everything that the apostle says tends to exalt our Redeemer and to enhance our confidence in Him. His position is central and supreme, in regard alike to the ages of time and the powers of the universe. In His hand is the key to all mysteries. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning, middle, and end of God’s ways. He is the centre of Israel, Israel of the world and the human ages; while the world of men is bound through Him to the higher spheres of being, over which He too presides.
There is a splendid intellectual courage, an incredible
boldness and reach of thought in St Paul’s conception
of the sovereignty of Christ. Remember that He of
whom these things are said, but thirty years before died
a felon’s death in the sight of the Jewish people. It is
not our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name is hallowed by
the lips of millions and glorified by the triumphs of
centuries upon centuries past, but the Nazarene with
the obscurity of His life and the cruel shame of Calvary
The supremacy here assigned to Christ is a consequence of the exaltation described at the close of the first chapter. There we see the height, here the breadth and length of His dominion. If He is raised from the grave so high that all created powers and names are beneath His feet, we cannot wonder that the past ages were employed in preparing His way, that the basis of His throne lies in the foundation of the world.
II. The universe is one. There is a solidarity of
rational and moral interests amongst all intelligences.
Granting the existence of such beings as the angels
of Scripture, we should expect them to be profoundly
concerned in the redeeming work of Christ. They are
the “watchers” and “holy ones” spoken of by the
The apostle Paul, who denounces “worship of the
angels” in the fellow epistle to this, earnestly believed
in their existence and their interest in human affairs.
If he did not write the words of
Christ’s service is the high school of wisdom for the
universe. These princes of heaven win by their
ministry to Christ and His Church a great reward.
Their intelligence, however lofty its range, is finite.
Their keen and burning intuition could not penetrate
the mystery of God’s intentions toward this world.
The revelations of the latter days—the incarnation, the
cross, the publication of the gospel, the outpouring of
“Through the Church,” we are told, the angels of
God are “now” having His “manifold wisdom made
known” to them. It is not from the abstract scheme
of salvation, from the theory or theology of the Church
that they get this education, but through the living
Church herself. The Saviour’s mission to earth created
a problem for them, the development of which they
follow with the most intense and sympathetic interest.
With what solicitude they watch the conflict between
good and evil and the varying progress of Christ’s
kingdom amongst men! Many things, doubtless, that
engage our attention and fill a large space in our Church
records, are of little account with them; and much that
passes in obscurity, names and deeds unchronicled by
fame, are written in heaven and pondered in other
spheres. No brave and true blow is struck in Christ’s
battle, but it has the admiration of these high spectators.
One would suppose from what the apostle hints,
that our world presents a problem unique in the
kingdom of God, one which raises questions more complicated
and crucial than have elsewhere arisen. The
heavenly princedoms are learning through the Church
“the manifold wisdom of God.” His love, in its pure
essence, those happy and godlike beings know. They
have lived for ages in its unclouded light. His power
and skill they may see displayed in proportions immensely
grander than this puny globe of ours presents.
God’s justice, it may be, and the thunders of His law
have issued forth in other regions clothed with a
splendour of which the scenes of Sinai were but a faint
emblem. It is in the combination of the manifold
principles of the Divine government that the peculiarity
of the human problem appears to lie. The delicate
and continuous balancing of forces in God’s plan of
dealing with this world, the reconciliation of seeming
incompatibilities, the issue found from positions of
hopeless contradiction, the accord of goodness with
severity, of inflexible rectitude and truth with fatherly
compassion, afford to the greatest minds of heaven
And “the principalities and the powers in the
heavenly places” are, it seems, willing to learn from
those below them. As they traced the course of human
history in those “eternal times” during which the
mystery lay wrapped in silence, the angel watchers
were too wise to play the sceptic, too cautious to
criticize an unfinished plan and arraign a justice they
could not yet understand. With a dignified patience
they waited the uplifting of the curtain and the unravelling
of the entangled plot. They looked for the
coming of the Promised One. So in due time they
witnessed and, for their reward, assisted in His manifestation.
With the same docility these high sharers
of our theological inquiries still wait to see the end of
the Lord and to take their part in the dénouement of
the time-drama, in the revelation of the sons of God.
Let us copy their long patience. God has not made us
to mock us. “What thou knowest not now,” said the
These wise elder brothers of ours, rich in the lore of eternity, foresee the things to come as we cannot do. They are far above the smoke and dust of the earthly conflict. The doubts that shake the strongest souls amongst us, the cries of the hour which confuse and deceive us, do not trouble them. They behold us in our weakness, our fears and our divisions; but they also look on Him who “sits expecting till His enemies are made His footstool.” They see how calmly He sits, how patiently expectant, while the sound of clashing arms and the rage and tumult of the peoples go up from the earth. They mark the steadiness with which through century after century, in spite of refluent waves, the tide of mercy rises, and still rises on the shores of earth. Thrones, systems, civilizations have gone down; one after another of the powers that strove to crush or to corrupt Christ’s Church has disappeared; and still the name of Jesus lives and spreads. It has traversed every continent and sea; it stands at the head of the living and moving forces of the world. Those who come nearest to the angelic point of view, and judge of the progress of things not by the froth upon the surface but by the trend of the deeper currents, are the most confident for the future of our race. The kingdom of Satan will not fall without a struggle—a last struggle, perhaps more furious than any in the past—but it is doomed, and waning to its end. So far has the kingdom of Christ advanced, so mightily does the word of God grow and prevail in the earth, that faith may well assure itself of the promised triumph. Soon we shall shout: “Alleluia! The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!”
If it be “Jesus our Lord” to whom these attributes belong, and He is not ashamed of us, well may we draw near with confidence to the Father, unashamed in the presence of His holy angels. We have no need to be abashed, if we approach the Divine Majesty with a true faith in Christ. His name gives the sinner access to the holiest place. The cherubim sheathe their swords of flame. The heavenly warders at this passport open the golden gates. We “come unto Mount Sion, the city of the living God, and to an innumerable company of angels.” Not one of these mightinesses and ancient peers of heaven, not Gabriel or Michael himself, would wish or dare to bar our entrance.
“We have boldness and access,” says the apostle, as in chapter i. 7: “We have redemption in His blood.” He insists upon the conscious fact. This freedom of approach to God, this sonship of faith, is no hope or dream of what may be; it is a present reality, a filial cry heard in a multitude both of Gentile and Jewish hearts (comp. ii. 18).
This sentence exhibits the richness of synonyms
characteristic of the epistle. There is boldness and
“Wherefore,” concludes the imprisoned apostle, “I beg you not to lose heart at my afflictions for you.” Assuredly Paul did not pray that he should not lose heart, as some interpret his meaning. But he knew how his friends were fretting and wearying over his long captivity. Hence he writes to the Philippians: “I would have you know that the things which have happened to me have turned out rather to the furtherance of the gospel.” Hence, too, he assures the Colossians earnestly of his joy in suffering for their sake (ch. i. 24).
The Church was fearful for Paul’s life and distressed
Those that love him should boast rather than grieve over his afflictions. “We make our boast in you amongst the Churches of God,” he wrote to the distressed Thessalonians (2 Ep. i. 4), “for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and afflictions”; so he would have the Churches think of him. When good men suffer in a good cause, it is not matter for pity and dread, but rather for a holy pride.
Τὸ ὑπερέχον τῆς γνώσεως Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ τοῦ Κυρίου μου.—Phil. iii. 8.
“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family in heaven and upon earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, that ye may be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inward man; that the Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth.”—Eph. iii. 14–18.
The prayer which he offers here is no less remarkable and unique in his epistles than the act of praise in chapter i. Addressing himself to God as the Father of angels and of men, the apostle asks that He will endow the readers in a manner corresponding to the wealth of His glory—in other words, that the gifts He bestows may be worthy of the universal Father, worthy of the august character in which God has now revealed Himself to mankind. According to this measure, St Paul beseeches for the Church, in the first instance, two gifts, which after all are one,—viz., the inward strength of the Holy Spirit (ver. 16), and the permanent indwelling of Christ (ver. 17). These gifts he asks on his readers’ behalf with a view to their gaining two further blessings, which are also one,—viz., the power to understand the Divine plan (ver. 18) as it has been expounded in this letter, and so to know the love of Christ (ver. 19). Still, beyond these there rises in the distance a further end for man and the Church: the reception of the entire fulness of God. Human desire and thought thus reach their limit; they grasp at the infinite.
In this Chapter we will strive to follow the apostle’s prayer to the end of the eighteenth verse, where it arrives at its chief aim and touches the main thought of the epistle, expressing the desire that all believers may have power to realize the full scope of the salvation of Christ in which they participate.
Let us pause for a moment to join in St Paul’s
invocation: “I bow my knees to the Father, of whom
Of these are “the sons of God” whom the Book
of Job pictures appearing in the Divine court and
forming a “family in heaven.” When Christ promises
(
This passage gives to God’s Fatherhood the same extension that chapter i. 21 has given to Christ’s Lordship. Every order of creaturely intelligence acknowledges God for the Author of its being, and bows to Christ as its sovereign Lord. In God’s name of Father the entire wealth of love that streams forth from Him through endless ages and unmeasured worlds is hidden; and in the name of sons of God there is contained the blessedness of all creatures that can bear His image.
I. What, therefore, shall the universal Father be asked to give to His needy children upon earth? They have newly learnt His name; they are barely recovered from the malady of their sin, fearful of trial, weak to meet temptation. Strength is their first necessity: “I bow my knees to the Father of heaven and earth, praying that He may grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened by the entering of the Spirit into your inward man.” The apostle asked them in verse 13, in view of the greatness of his own calling, to be of good courage on his account; now he entreats God so to reveal to them His glory and to pour into their hearts His Spirit, that no weakness and fear may remain in them. The strengthening of which he speaks is the opposite of the faintness of heart, the failure of courage deprecated in verse 13. Using the same word, the apostle bids the Corinthians “Quit themselves like men, be strong” (1 Ep. xvi. 13). He desires for the Asian believers a manful heart, the strength that meets battle and danger without quailing.
The apostle points to “the inner man” as the seat of this invigoration, thinking perhaps of its secrecy. While the world buffets and dismays the Christian, new vigour and joy are infused into his soul. The surface waters and summer brooks of comfort fail; but there opens in the heart a spring fed by the river of life proceeding from the throne of God. Beneath the toil-worn frame, the mean attire and friendless condition of the prisoner Paul—a mark for the world’s scorn—there lives a strength of thought and will mightier than the empire of the Cæsars, a power of the Spirit that is to dominate the centuries to come. Of this omnipotent power dwelling in the Church of God, the apostle prays that every one of his readers may partake.
II. Parallel to the first petition, and in substance identical with it, is the second: “that the Christ may make His dwelling through faith in your hearts.” Such, it seems to us, is the relation of verses 16 and 17. Christ’s residence in the heart is to be viewed neither as the result, nor the antecedent of the strength given by the Spirit to the inward man: the two are simultaneous; they are the same things seen in a varying light.
We observe in this prayer the same vein of Trinitarian
thought which marks the doxology of chapter i.,
See ch. i. 17, ii. 18, 22, and especially ch. iv. 4–6.
As in the previous clause, the verb of verse 17 bears
emphasis and conveys the point of St Paul’s entreaty;
he asks that “the Christ may take up His abode,—may
settle in your hearts.” The word signifies to set up one’s
house or make one’s home in a place, by way of contrast
with a temporary and uncertain sojourn (comp. ii. 19).
The same verb in
And “the Christ,” not Christ alone. Why does the
apostle say this? There is a reason for the definite article, as we have found
elsewhere. See pp. 47, 83, 169.
The heart, in the language of the Bible, never denotes the emotional nature by itself. The antithesis of “heart and head,” the divorce of feeling and understanding in our modern speech is foreign to Scripture. The heart is our interior, conscious self—thought, feeling, will in their personal unity. It needs the whole Christ to fill and rule the whole heart,—a Christ who is the Lord of the intellect, the Light of the reason, no less than the Master of the feelings and desires.
The difference in significance between “Christ” or
“Christ Jesus” and “the Christ” in such a sentence
as this, is not unlike the difference between “Queen
Victoria” and “the Queen.” The latter phrase brings
Her Majesty before us in the grandeur and splendour
of her Queenship. We think of her vast dominion, of
her line of royal and famous ancestry, of her beneficent
and memorable reign. So, to know the Christ is to
apprehend Him in the height of His Godhead, in the
breadth of His humanity, in the plenitude of His nature
and His powers. And this is the object to which the
teaching and the prayers of St Paul for the Churches
at the present time are directed. Understanding in
this larger sense the indwelling of the Christ for which
But however large the mental conception of Christ that St Paul desires to impart to us, it is to be grasped “through faith.” All real understanding and appropriation of Christ, the simplest and the most advanced, come by this channel,—through the faith of the heart in which knowledge, will and feeling blend in that one act of trustful apprehension of the truth concerning Jesus Christ by which the soul commits itself to Him.
How much is contained in this petition of the apostle
that we need to ask for ourselves, Christ Jesus
dwells now as then in the hearts of all who love Him.
But how little do we know our heavenly Guest! how
poor a Christ is ours, compared to the Christ of Paul’s
experience! how slight and empty a word is His name
to multitudes of those who bear it! If men have once
attained a sense of His salvation, and are satisfied of
their interest in His atonement and their right to hope
for eternal life through Him, their minds are at rest.
They have accepted Christ and received what He has
to give them; they turn their attention to other things.
They do not love Christ enough to study Him. They
have other mental interests,—scientific, literary, political
or industrial; but the knowledge of Christ has no
intellectual attraction for them. With St Paul’s
passionate ardour, the ceaseless craving of his mind
to “know Him,” these complacent believers have no
sympathy whatever. This, they think, belongs only
to a few, to men of metaphysical bias or of religious
genius like the great apostle. Theology is regarded as
a subject for specialists. The laity, with a lamentable
Lectures on Ephesians, pp. 235–8. No one who has read Dr.
R. W. Dale’s noble Lectures on this epistle, can write upon the same
subject without being deeply in his debt.
It is a knowledge that when pursued grows upon the
mind without limit. St Paul, who knew so much, for
that reason felt that all he had attained was but in the
bud and beginning. “The Christ” is a subject infinite
as nature, large and wide as history. With our enlarged
apprehension of Him, the heart enlarges in capacity
and moral power. Not unfrequently, the study of
Christ in Scripture and experience gives to unlettered
men, to men whose mind before their conversion was
dull and uninformed, an intellectual quality, a power of
discernment and apprehension that trained scholars
might envy. By such thoughtful, constant fellowship
with Him the vigour of spirit and courage in affliction
III. The prayers now offered might suffice, if St Paul were concerned only for the individual needs of those to whom he writes and their personal advancement in the new life. But it is otherwise. The Church fills his mind. Its lofty claims at every turn he has pressed on our attention. This is God’s holy temple and the habitation of His Spirit; it is the body in which Christ dwells, the bride that He has chosen. The Church is the object that draws the eyes of heaven; through it the angelic powers are learning undreamed-of lessons of God’s wisdom. Round this centre the apostle’s intercession must needs revolve. When he asks for his readers added strength of heart and a richer fellowship with Christ, it is in order that they may be the better able to enter into the Church’s life and to apprehend God’s great designs for mankind.
This object so much absorbs the writer’s thoughts and has been so constantly in view from the outset, that it does not occur to him, in verse 18, to say precisely what that is whose “breadth and length and height and depth” the readers are to measure. The vast building stands before us and needs not to be named; we have only not to look away from it, not to forget what we have been reading all this time. It is God’s plan for the world in Christ; it is the purpose of the ages realized in the building of His Church. This conception was so impressive to the original readers and has held their attention so closely since the apostle unfolded it in the course of the second chapter, that they would have no difficulty in supplying the ellipsis which has given so much trouble to the commentators since.
Der Brief Pauli an die Epheser, p. 138. Hofmann is one of those
writers from whom one constantly learns, although one must as often
differ from him as agree with him.
Do we not need to be strong—to “gain full strength,”
as the apostle prays, in order to grasp in its substance
and import this immense revelation and to handle it
with practical effect? Narrowness is feebleness. The
greatness of the Church, as God designed it, matches
the greatness of the Christ Himself. It needs a firm
spiritual faith, a far-seeing intelligence, and a charity
broad as the love of Christ to comprehend this mystery.
From many believing eyes it is still hidden. Alas
for our cold hearts, our weak and partial judgements!
alas for the materialism that infects our Church theories,
and that limits God’s free grace and the sovereign
action of His Spirit to visible channels and ministrations
We draw close about us the walls of Christ’s wide house, as if to confine Him in our single chamber. We call our particular communion “the Church,” and the rest “the sects”; and disfranchise, so far as our word and judgement go, a multitude of Christ’s freemen and God’s elect, our fellow-citizens in the New Jerusalem—saints, some of them, whose feet we well might deem ourselves unworthy to wash. A Church theory that leads to such results as these, that condemns Nonconformists to be strangers in the House of God, is self-condemned. It will perish of its own chillness and formalism. Happily, many of those who hold the doctrine of exclusive Roman or Anglican, or Baptist or Presbyterian legitimacy, are in feeling and practice more catholic than in their creed.
“With all the saints” the Asian Christians are called
to enter into St Paul’s wider view of God’s work in
the world. For this is a collective idea, to be shared
by many minds and that should sway all Christian
hearts at once. It is the collective aim of Christianity
that St Paul wants his readers to understand, its mission
But the first condition for this largeness of sympathy and aim is that stated at the beginning of the verse, thrown forward there with an emphasis that almost does violence to grammar: “in love being fast rooted and grounded.” Where Christ dwells abidingly in the heart, love enters with Him and becomes the ground of our nature, the basis on which our thought and action rest, the soil in which our purposes grow. Love is the mark of the true Broad Churchman in all Churches, the man to whom Christ is all things and in all, and who, wherever he sees a Christlike man, loves him and counts him a brother.
When such love to Christ fills all our hearts and penetrates to their depths, we shall have strength to shake off our prejudices, strength to master our intellectual difficulties and limitations. We shall have the courage to adopt Christ’s simple rule of fellowship: “Whosoever shall do the will of my Father who is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother.”
“[I pray] that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God.”—Eph. iii. 17–19.
I. St Paul prays that we may “know [not comprehend]
the love of Christ”; for it “passes knowledge.”
In all the mystery of Christ, there is nothing more wonderful and past finding out than His love. For nigh thirty years Paul has been living in daily fellowship with the love of Christ, his heart full of it and all the powers of his mind bent upon its comprehension: he cannot understand it yet! At this moment it amazes him more than ever.
Great as the Christian community is, and large as
the place and part assigned to it by this epistle, that
is still finite and a creation of time. The apostle’s
doctrine of the Church is not beyond the comprehension
of a mind sufficiently loving and enlightened.
But though we had followed him so far and had well
and truly apprehended the mystery he has revealed
to us, the love of Christ is still beyond us. Our
When, turning from Christ Himself in His own
person and presence, before whom praise is speechless,
we contemplate the manifestations of His love to
mankind; when we consider that its fountain lies in
the bosom of the Eternal; when we trace its footsteps
prepared from the world’s foundation, and perceive it
choosing a people for its own and making its promises
and raising up its heralds and forerunners; when at
last it can hide and refrain itself no longer, but comes
This is a revelation that searches every man’s soul who looks into it. What is there so confounding to our reason and our human self-complacency as the discovery: “He loved me; He gave Himself up for me”—that He should do it, and should need to do it! It was this that went to Saul’s heart, that gave the mortal blow to the Jewish pride in him, strong as it was with the growth of centuries. The bearer of this grace and the ambassador of Christ’s love to the Gentiles, he feels himself to be “less than the least of all the saints.” We carry in our hands to show to men a heavenly light, which throws our own unloveliness into dark relief.
II. The love of Christ connects together, in the
apostle’s thoughts, the greatness of the Church and the
fulness of God. The two former conceptions—Christ’s
love and the Church’s greatness—go together in our
The “fulness [pleroma] of God,” and the “filling” (or “completing”) of believers in Christ are ideas characteristic of this group of epistles. The first of these expressions we have discussed already in its connexion with Christ, in chapter i. 23; we shall meet with it again as “the fulness of Christ” in chapter iv. 13. The phrase before us is, in substance, identical with that of the latter text. Christ contains the Divine plenitude; He embodies it in His person, and conveys it to the world by His redemption. St Paul desires for the Asian Christians that they may receive it; it is the ultimate mark of his prayer. He wishes them to gain the total sum of all that God communicates to men. He would have them “filled”—their nature made complete both in its individual and social relations, their powers of mind and heart brought into full exercise, their spiritual capacities developed and replenished—“filled unto all the plenitude of God.”
This is no humanistic or humanitarian ideal. The
mark of Christian completeness is on a different and
higher plane than any that is set up by culture. The
ideal Christian is a greater man than the ideal citizen
or artist or philosopher: he may include within himself
any or all of these characters, but he transcends them.
He may conform to none of these types, and yet be a
perfect man in Christ Jesus. Our race cannot rest in
any perfection that stops short of “the fulness of God.”
When we have received all that God has to give in
Christ, when the community of men is once more a
family of God and the Father’s will is done on earth
as in heaven, then and not before will our life be
complete. That is the goal of humanity; and the
The apostle prays that his readers may know the love of Christ. This is a part of the Divine plenitude; nor is there anything in it deeper. But there is more to know. When he asks for “all the fulness,” he thinks of other elements of revelation in which we are to participate. God’s wisdom, His truth, His righteousness, along with His love in its manifold forms,—all the qualities that, in one word, go to make up His holiness, are communicable and belong to the image stamped by the Holy Spirit on the nature of God’s children. “Ye shall be holy, for I am holy” is God’s standing command to His sons. So Jesus bids His disciples, “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” St Paul’s prayer “is but another way of expressing the continuous aspiration and effort after holiness which is enjoined in our Lord’s precept” (Lightfoot).
While the holiness of God gathers up into one
stream of white radiance the revelation of His character,
“the fulness of God” spreads it abroad in its many-coloured
richness and variety. The term accords with
the affluence of thought that marks this supplication.
The might of the Spirit that strengthens weak human
hearts, the greatness of the Christ who is the guest of
our faith, His wide-spreading kingdom and the vast
interests it embraces and His own love surpassing all,—these
objects of the soul’s desire issue from the
fulness of God; and they lead us in pursuing them,
like streams pouring into the ocean, back to the eternal
Godhead. The mediatorial kingdom has its end;
St Paul is conscious of the extreme boldness of the prayer he has just uttered. But he protests that, instead of going beyond God’s purposes, it falls short of them. This assurance rises, in verses 20 and 21, into a rapture of praise. It is a cry of exultation, a true song of triumph, that breaks from the apostle’s lips:—
Praise soars higher than prayer. When St Paul
has reached in supplication the summit of his desires,
he sees the plenitude of God’s gifts still by a whole
heaven outreaching him. But it is only from these
mountain-tops hardly won in the exercise of prayer,
in their still air and tranquil light, that the boundless
realms of promise are visible. God’s giving surpasses
immeasurably our thought and asking; but there must
be the asking and the thinking for it to surpass. He
puts always more into our hand and better things than
Man’s desires will never overtake God’s bounty. Hearing the prayer just offered, unbelief will say: “You have asked too much. It is preposterous to expect that raw Gentile converts, scarcely raised above their heathen debasement, should enter into these exalted notions of yours about Christ and the Church and should be filled with the fulness of God! Prayer must be rational and within the bounds of possibility, offered ‘with the understanding’ as well as ‘with the spirit,’ or it becomes mere extravagance.”—The apostle gives a twofold answer to this kind of scepticism. He appeals to the Divine omnipotence. “With men,” you say, “this is impossible.” Humanly speaking, St Paul’s Gentile disciples were incapable of any high spiritual culture; they were unpromising material, with “not many wise or many noble” amongst them, some of them before their conversion stained with infamous vices. Who is to make saints and godlike men out of such human refuse as this! But “with God,” as Jesus said, “all things are possible.” Fæx urbis, lux orbis: “the scum of the city is made the light of the world!” The force at work upon the minds of these degraded pagans—slaves, thieves, prostitutes, as some of them had been—is the love of Christ; it is the power of the Holy Ghost, the might of the strength which raises the dead to life eternal.
Let us therefore praise Him “who is able to do
beyond all things”—beyond the best that His best
servants have wished and striven for. Had men ever
asked or thought of such a gift to the world as Jesus
Christ? Had the prophets foreseen one tenth part
of His greatness? In their boldest dreams did the
St Paul’s reliance is not upon the “ability” alone,
upon the abstract omnipotence of God. The force
upon which he counts is lodged in the Church, and is
in visible and constant operation. “According to the
power that worketh in us” he expects these vast results
to be achieved. This power is the same as that he
invoked in verse 16,—the might of the Spirit of God in
the inward man. It is the spring of courage and joy,
the source of religious intelligence (i. 17, 18) and
personal holiness, the very power that raised the dead
body of Jesus to life, as it will raise hereafter all the
holy dead to share His immortality (
The presence of this mysterious power of the Spirit
St Paul constantly felt when engaged in prayer,—“The
Spirit helpeth our infirmities”; He “makes intercession
for us with groanings that cannot be uttered”
(
In such measure, then, shall glory be to God “in
the Church and in Christ Jesus.” We see how the
Church takes up the foreground of Paul’s horizon.
This epistle has taught us that God desires far more
than our individual salvation, however complete that
might be. Christ came not to save men only, but
mankind. It is “in the Church” that God’s consummate
glory will be seen. No man in his fragmentary
self-hood, no number of men in their separate capacity
can conceivably attain “unto the fulness of God.”
It will need all humanity for that,—to reflect the
full-orbed splendour of Divine revelation. Isolated
and divided from each other, we render to God a
dimmed and partial glory. “With one accord, with
one mouth” we are called to “glorify the God and
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Wherefore the
apostle bids us “receive one another, as Christ also
received us, to the glory of God” (
The Church, being the creation of God’s love in
Christ and the receptacle of His communicative fulness,
Nor does the Church by herself alone render this praise and honour unto God. The display of God’s manifold wisdom in His dealings with mankind is drawing admiration, as St Paul believed, from the celestial spheres (ver. 10). The story of earth’s redemption is the theme of endless songs in heaven. All creation joins in concert with the redeemed from the earth, and swells the chorus of their triumph. “I heard,” says John in another place, “a voice of many angels round about the throne, and the living creatures, and the elders, saying with a great voice, Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain! And every created thing which is in the heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and on the sea, and all things that are in them, heard I saying:
The Church and Christ Jesus are wedded in this
doxology, even as they were in the foregoing supplication
(vv. 18, 19). In the Bride and the Bridegroom,
in the Redeemed and the Redeemer, in the many
brethren and in the Firstborn is this perfect glory to
be paid to God. “In the midst of the congregation”
Christ the Son of man sings evermore the Father’s
praise (
The duration of the glory to be paid to God by Christ
and His Church is expressed by a cumulative phrase
in keeping with the tenor of the passage to which it
belongs: “unto all generations of the age of the ages.”
It reminds us of “the ages to come” through which
the apostle in chapter ii. 7 foresaw that God’s mercy
to his own age would be celebrated. It carries our
thoughts along the vista of the future, till time melts
into eternity. When the apostle desires that God’s
praise may resound in the Church “unto all generations,”
he no longer supposes that the mystery of
God may be finished speedily as men count years.
The history of mankind stretches before his gaze
into its dim futurity. The successive “generations”
gather themselves into that one consummate “age”
The end comes: God is all in all. At this furthest horizon of thought, Christ and His own are seen together rendering to God unceasing glory.
“It is good we return unto the ancient bond of unity in the Church of God, which was one faith, one baptism, and not one hierarchy, one discipline; and that we observe the league of Christians, as it was penned by our Saviour Christ, which is in substance of doctrine this: He that is not with us is against us; and in things indifferent and but of circumstance this: He that is not against us is with us.”—Lord Bacon: Certain Considerations touching the better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England, addressed to King James I.
“I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beseech you to walk worthily of the calling wherewith ye were called, with all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; giving diligence to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
The apostle resumes the words of self-description
dropped in chapter iii. 1. He appeals to his readers
with pathetic dignity: “I the prisoner in the Lord”;
and the expression gathers new solemnity from that
which he has told us in the last chapter of the mystery
and grandeur of his office. He is “the prisoner”—the
one whose bonds were known through all the Churches
and manifest even in the imperial palace (
His first and main appeal to the Asian brethren, as
we should expect from the previous tenor of the letter,
is an exhortation to unity. It is an obvious conclusion
from the doctrine of the Church that he has taught
them. The “oneness of the Spirit” which they must
“earnestly endeavour to preserve,” is the unity which
their possession of the Holy Spirit of itself implies.
“Having access in one Spirit to the Father,” the antipathetic
Jewish and Gentile factors of the Church are
reconciled; “in the Spirit” they “are builded together
for a habitation of God” (ii. 18–22). This unity
when St Paul wrote was an actual and visible fact,
despite the violent efforts of the Judaizers to destroy it.
The conditions for such pursuing and preserving of peace in the fold of Christ are briefly indicated in verses 1 and 2. There must be—
(1) A due sense of the dignity of our Christian calling: “Walk worthily,” he says, “of the calling where with you were called.” This exhortation, of course, includes much besides in its scope; it is the preface to all the exhortations of the three following chapters, the basis, in fact, of every worthy appeal to Christian men; but it bears in the first instance, and pointedly, upon Church unity. Levity of temper, low and poor conceptions of religion militate against the catholic spirit; they create an atmosphere rife with causes of contention. “Whereas there is among you jealousy and strife, are ye not carnal and walk as men?”
(2) Next to low-mindedness amongst the foes of
unity comes ambition: “Walk with all lowliness of
mind and meekness,” he continues. Between the low-minded
and the lowly-minded there is a total difference.
The man of lowly mind habitually feels his
dependence as a creature and his unworthiness as a
sinner before God. This spirit nourishes in him a
wholesome self-distrust, and watchfulness over his
temper and motives.—The meek man thinks as little of
his personal claims, as the humble man of his personal
merits. He is willing to give place to others where
higher interests will not suffer, content to take the lowest
(3) When St Paul adds “with longsuffering, forbearing
one another in love,” he is opposing a cause
of division quite different from the last,—to wit, impatience
and resentfulness. A high Christian ideal and
a strict self-judgement will render us more sensitive to
wrong-doing in the world around us. Unless tempered
with abundant charity, they may lead to harsh and
one-sided censure. Gentle natures, reluctant to condemn,
are sometimes slow and difficult in forgiveness.
Humbleness and meekness are choice graces of the
Spirit. But they are self-regarding virtues at the best,
and may be found in a cold nature that has little of
the patience which bears with men’s infirmities, of the
sympathetic insight that discovers the good often lying
close to their faults. “Above all things”—above
kindness, meekness, longsuffering, forgivingness—“put
on love, which is the bond of perfectness”
(
Closely considered, we find that the seven unities resolve themselves into three, centring in the names of the Divine Trinity—the Spirit, the Lord, and the Father. The Spirit and the Lord are each accompanied by two kindred uniting elements; while the one God and Father, placed alone, in Himself forms a threefold bond to His creatures—by His sovereign power, pervasive action, and immanent presence: “Who is over all, and through all, and in all” (comp. i. 23).
The rhythm of expression in these verses suggests
that they belonged to some apostolic Christian song.
Other passages in Paul’s later epistles betray the same
character; See ch. v. 14;
I. One body there is, and one Spirit.
The former was a patent fact. Believers in Jesus Christ formed a single body, the same in all essentials of religion, sharply distinguished from their Jewish and their Pagan neighbours. Although the distinctions now existing amongst Christians are vastly greater and more numerous, and the boundaries between the Church and the world at many points are much less visible, yet there is a true unity that binds together those “who profess and call themselves Christians” throughout the world. As against the multitudes of heathen and idolaters; as against Jewish and Mohammedan rejecters of our Christ; as against atheists and agnostics and all deniers of the Lord, we are “one body,” and should feel and act as one.
In missionary fields, confronting the overwhelming
forces and horrible evils of Paganism, the servants of
Christ intensely realize their unity; they see how
trifling in comparison are the things that separate the
Churches, and how precious and deep are the things
that Christians hold in common. It may need the
pressure of some threatening outward force, the sense
of a great peril hanging over Christendom to silence
our contentions and compel the soldiers of Christ to
fall into line and present to the enemy a united
front. If the unity of believers in Christ—their oneness
of worship and creed, of moral ideal and discipline—is
hard to discern through the variety of human
There is “one body and one Spirit”: one body
because, and so far as there is one Spirit. What is it
constitutes the unity of our physical frame? Outward
attachment, mechanical juxtaposition go for nothing.
What I grasp in my hand or put between my lips is
no part of me, any more than if it were in another
planet. The clothes I wear take the body’s shape;
they partake of its warmth and movement; they give
its outward presentment. They are not of the body for
all this. But the fingers that clasp, the lips that touch,
the limbs that move and glow beneath the raiment,—these
are the body itself; and everything belongs to it,
however slight in substance, or uncomely or unserviceable,
nay, however diseased and burdensome, that is
vitally connected with it. The life that thrills through
nerve and artery, the spirit that animates with one
will and being the whole framework and governs its
ten thousand delicate springs and interlacing cords,—it
is this that makes one body of an otherwise inert and
decaying heap of matter. Let the spirit depart, it is
He who has the Spirit of Christ, will find a place within His body. The Spirit of Jesus Christ is a communicative, sociable spirit. The child of God seeks out his brethren; like is drawn to like, bone to bone and sinew to its sinew in the building up of the risen body. By an instinct of its life, the new-born soul forms bonds of attachment for itself to the Christian souls nearest to it, to those amongst whom it is placed in God’s dispensation of grace. The ministry, the community through which it received spiritual life and that travailed for its birth claim it by a parental right that may not be disowned, nor at any time renounced without loss and peril.
Where the Spirit of Christ dwells as a vitalizing, formative principle, it finds or makes for itself a body. Let no man say: I have the spirit of religion; I can dispense with forms. I need no fellowship with men; I prefer to walk with God.—God will not walk with men who do not care to walk with His people. He “loved the world”; and we must love it, or we displease Him. “This commandment have we from Him, that he who loves God love his brother also.”
The oneness of communion amongst the people of
Christ is governed by a unity of aim: “Even as also
you were called in one hope of your calling.” Our
fellowship has an object to realize, our calling a prize
to win. All Christian organization is directed to a
practical end. The old Pagan world fell to pieces
For ourselves, in our personal quality, Christianity holds out a splendid crown of life. It promises our complete restoration to the image of God, the redemption of the body with the spirit from death, and our entrance upon an eternal fellowship with Christ in heaven. This hope, shared by us in common and affecting all the interests and relationships of daily life, is the ground of our communion. The Christian hope supplies to men, more truly and constantly than Nature in her most exalted forms,
Happy are the wife and husband, happy the master
and servants, happy the circle of friends who live and
work together as “joint-heirs of the grace of life.”
Well says Calvin here:
But the hope of our calling is a hope for mankind,—nay, for the entire universe. We labour for the regeneration of humanity. “We look for a new heavens and earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness;” for the actual gathering into one in Christ of all things in all worlds, as they are already gathered in God’s eternal plan. Now if it were merely a personal salvation that we had to seek, Christian communion might appear to be an optional thing, and the Church no more than a society for mutual spiritual benefit. But seen in this larger light, Church membership is of the essence of our calling. As children of the household of faith, we are heirs to its duties with its possessions. We cannot escape the obligations of our spiritual any more than of our natural birth. One Spirit dwelling in each, one sublime ideal inspiring us and guiding all our efforts, how shall we not be one body in the fellowship of Christ? This hope of our calling it is our calling to breathe into the dead world. Its virtue alone can dispel the gloom and discord of the age. From the fountain of God’s love in Christ springing up in the heart of the Church, there shall pour forth
II. The first group of unities leads us to the second.
If one Spirit dwells within us, it is one Lord who reigns
over us. We have one hope to work for; it is because
Thus Christ Jesus the Lord takes His place fourth in this list of unities, between hope and faith, between the Spirit and the Father. He is the centre of centres, the Lamb in the midst of the throne, the Christ in the midst of the ages. United with Christ, we are at unity with God and with our fellow-men. We find in Him the fulcrum of the forces that are raising the world, the corner-stone of the temple of humanity.
But let us mark that it is the one Lord in whom we find our unity. To think of Him as Saviour only is to treat Him as a means to an end. It is to make ourselves the centre, not Christ. This is the secret of much of the isolation and sectarianism of modern Churches. Individualism is the negation of Church life. Men value Christ for what they can get from Him for themselves. They do not follow Him and yield themselves up to Him, for the sake of what He is. “Come unto me, all ye that are burdened, and I will give you rest”: they listen willingly so far. But when He goes on to say “Take my yoke upon you,” their ears are deaf. There is a subtle self-seeking and self-pleasing even in the way of salvation.
From this springs the disloyalty, the want of affection for the Church, the indifference to all Christian interests beyond the personal and local, which is worse than strife; for it is death to the body of Christ. The name of the “one Lord” silences party clamours and rebukes the voices that cry, “I am of Apollos, I of Cephas.” It recalls loiterers and stragglers to the ranks. It bids each of us, in his own station of life and his own place in the Church, serve the common cause without sloth and without ambition.
But it is the seal of a corporate life in Him. Christian
baptism is no private transaction; it attests no
mere secret vow passing between the soul and its
Saviour. “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into
one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether bond or
free; and were all made to drink of one Spirit” (
One baptism there has been through all the ages
since the ascending Lord said to His disciples: “Go,
make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit.” The ordinance has been administered
in different ways and under varying regulations; but
with few exceptions, it has been observed from the
beginning by every Christian community in fulfilment
of the word of Christ, and in acknowledgement of His
In this rule lies the ultimate ground of union for men, and for all creatures. Our fellowship in the faith of Christ is deep as the nature of God; its blessedness rich as His love; its bonds strong and eternal as His power.
III. The last and greatest of the unities still remains. Add to our fellowship in the one Spirit and confession of the one Lord, our adoption by the one God and Father of all.
To the Gentile converts of the Asian cities this was a new and marvellous thought. “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians,” they had been used to shout; or haply, “Great is Aphrodité of the Pergamenes,” or “Bacchus of the Philadelphians.” Great they knew was “Jupiter Best and Greatest” of conquering Rome; and great the numen of the Cæsar, to which everywhere in this rich and servile province shrines were rising. Each city and tribe, each grove or fountain or sheltering hill had its local genius or daimon, requiring worship and sacrificial honours. Every office and occupation, every function in life—navigation, midwifery, even thieving—was under the patronage of its special deity. These petty godships by their number and rivalries distracted the pious heathen with continual fear lest one or other of them might not have received due observance.
With what a grand simplicity the Christian conception
Here is no jealous Monarch regarding men as tribute-payers, and needing to be served by human hands. He is the Father of men, pitying us as His children and giving us all things richly to enjoy. Our God is no local divinity, to be honoured here but not there, tied to His temple and images and priestly mediators; but the “one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in all.” This was the very God whom the logic of Greek thought and the practical instincts of Roman law and empire blindly sought. Through ages He had revealed Himself to the people of Israel, who were now dispersed amongst the nations to bear His light. At last He declared His full name and purpose to the world in Jesus Christ. So the gods many and lords many have had their day. By His manifestation the idols are utterly abolished. The proclamation of one God and Father signifies the gathering of men into one family of God. The one religion supplies the basis for one life in all the world.
God is over all, gathering all worlds and beings under the shadow of His beneficent dominion. He is through all, and in all: an Omnipresence of love, righteousness and wisdom, actuating the powers of nature and of grace, inhabiting the Church and the heart of men. You need not go far to seek Him; if you believe in Him, you are yourself His temple.
“But unto each one of us was the grace given according to the measure of the gift of Christ. Wherefore He saith: ‘When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts unto men.’ Now this, ‘He ascended,’ what is it but that He also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all the heavens, that He might fill all things. And He gave some to be apostles; and some, prophets; and some evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints for work of ministration, for the building up of the body of Christ.”—Eph. iv. 7–12.
All this the apostle keeps in view and allows for in
his doctrine of the Church. He does not merge man in
humanity, nor sacrifice the individual to the community.
He claims for each believer direct fellowship with Christ
Like a wise master in his household and sovereign
in his kingdom, the Lord of the Church distributes
His manifold gifts. His bestowments and appointments
are made with an eye to the furtherance of
the state and house that He has in charge. As God
dispenses His wisdom, so Christ His gifts “according
to plan” (iii. 11). The purpose of the ages, God’s
great plan for mankind, determines “the measure of
the gift of Christ.” Now, it is to illustrate this measure,
to set forth the style and scale of Christ’s bestowments
within His Church, that the apostle brings in
evidence the words of
Let us go back for a moment to the occasion of
the old Hebrew song. Psalm lxviii, is, as Ewald
says, “the greatest, most splendid and artistic of the
temple-songs of Restored Jerusalem.” It celebrates
Jehovah’s entry into Zion. This culminating verse
records, as the crowning event of Israel’s history, the
capture of Zion from the rebel Jebusites and the
Lord’s ascension in the person of His chosen to take
His seat upon this holy hill. The previous verses, in
which fragments of earlier songs are embedded, describe
the course of the Divine Leader of Israel through
former ages. In the beat and rhythm of the Hebrew
lines one hears the footfall of the Conqueror’s march,
as He “arises and His enemies are scattered” and
“kings of armies flee apace,” while nature trembles
at His step and bends her wild powers to serve His
congregation. The sojourn in the wilderness, the
scenes of Sinai, the occupancy of Canaan, the wars of
the Judges were so many stages in the progress of
Jehovah, which had Zion always for its goal. To
Zion, the new and more glorious sanctuary, Sinai must
now give place. Bashan and all mountains towering
in their pride in vain “look askance at the hill which
God has desired for His abode,” where “Jehovah will
dwell for ever.” So the day of the Lord’s desire has
come! From the Kidron valley David leads Jehovah’s
triumph up the steep slopes of Mount Zion. A train
of captives defiles before the Lord’s anointed, who
In this conquest David “gave to men” rather than “received”—gave even to his stubborn enemies (witness his subsequent transaction with Araunah the Jebusite for the site of the temple); for that which he took from them served to build amongst them God’s habitation: “that,” as the Psalmist sings, “the Lord God might dwell with them.” St Paul’s adaptation of the verse is both bold and true. If he departs from the letter, he unfolds the spirit of the prophetic words. That David’s giving signified a higher receiving, Jewish interpreters themselves seem to have felt, for this paraphrase was current also amongst them.
The author of this Hebrew song has in no way
exaggerated the importance of David’s victory. The
summits of the elect nation’s history shine with a
supernatural and prophetic light. The spirit of the
Christ in the unknown singer “testified beforehand
of the glory that should follow” His warfare and
sufferings. From this victorious height, so hardly
won, the Psalmist’s verse flashes the light of promise
across the space of a thousand years; and St. Paul
has caught the light, and sends it on to us shining
with a new and more spiritual brightness. David’s
“going up on high” was, to the apostle’s mind, a
picture of the ascent of Christ, his Son and Lord.
David rose from deep humiliation to a high dominion;
his exaltation brought blessing and enrichment to his
people; and the spoil that he won with it went to
The three short clauses of the citation supply, in effect, a threefold measure of the gifts of Christ to His Church. They are gifts of the ascended Saviour. They are gifts bestowed from the fruit of His victory. And they are gifts to men. Measure them, first, by the height to which He has risen—from what a depth! Measure them, again, by the spoils He has already won. Measure them, once more, by the wants of mankind, by the need He has undertaken to supply.—As He is, so He gives; as He has, so He gives; as He has given, so He will give till we are filled unto all the fulness of God.
I. Think first, then, of Him. Think of what, and where He is! Consider “what is the height” of His exaltation; and then say, if you can, “what is the breadth” of His munificence.
We know well how He gave as a poor and suffering
man upon earth—gave, with what affluence, pity and
delight, bread to the hungry thousands, wine to the
wedding-feast, health to the sick, sight to the blind,
pardon to the sinful, sometimes life to the dead! Has
His elevation altered Him? Too often it is so with
vain and weak men like ourselves. Their wealth increases,
but their hearts contract. The more they
have to give, the less they love to give. They go up
Mere authority, even Omnipotence, could not suffice
to save and bless moral beings like ourselves; nor
even the best will joined to Omnipotence. Christ
gained by His humiliation, in some sense, a new fulness
added to the fulness of the Godhead. This gain of
His sufferings is implied in what the apostle writes
in
Think of the regions He has traversed, the range of being through which the Lord Jesus passed in descending and ascending, “that He might fill all things.” Heaven, earth, hades—hades, earth, heaven again are His; not in mere sovereignty of power, but in experience and communion of life. Each He has annexed to His dominion by inhabitation and the right of self-devoting love, as from sphere to sphere He “travelled in the greatness of His power, mighty to save.” He is Lord of angels; but still more of men,—Lord of the living, and of the dead. To them that sleep in the dust He has proclaimed His accomplished sacrifice and the right of universal judgement given Him by the Father.
Nor did Abraham alone and Moses and Elijah have
the joy of “seeing His day,” but all the holy men of
old, who had embraced its promise and “died in faith,”
who looked forward through their imperfect sacrifices
“which could never quite take away sins” to the better
thing which God provided for us, and for their perfection
along with us. Comp.
The words of David in Browning’s Saul, turned from the future tense into the present.
So “Christ is all things, and in all.” And we are nothing; but we have everything in Him.
How, pray, will He give who has thus given Himself,—who has thus endured and achieved on our behalf? Let our hearts consider; let our faith and our need be bold to ask. One promise from His lips is enough: “If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it.”
II. A second estimate of the gifts to be looked for from Christ, we derive from His conquests already won. David as he entered Zion’s gates “led captivity captive,”—led, that is in Hebrew phrase, a great, a notable captivity. Out of the gifts thus received he enriched his people. The resources that victory placed at his disposal, furnished the store from which to build God’s house. In like fashion Christ builds His Church, and blesses the human race. With the spoils of His battle He adorns His bride. The prey taken from the mighty becomes the strength and beauty of His sanctuary. The prisoners of His love He makes the servants of mankind.
This “captivity” implies a warfare, even as the
ascent of Christ a previous descending. The Son of
God came not into His earthly kingdom as kings are
said to have come sometimes disguised amongst their
For Him pain and conflict are gone by. It remains
to gather in the spoil of His victory of love, the
harvest sown in His tears and His blood. And what
are the trophies of the Captain of our salvation? what
the fruit of His dread passion? For one, there was
the dying thief, whom with His nailed hands the
Lord Jesus snatched from a felon’s doom and bore
from Calvary to Paradise. There was Mary the
Magdalene, out of whom He had cast seven demons,
the first to greet Him risen. There were the three
thousand whom on one day, in the might of His
Spirit, the ascended Lord and Christ took captive in
rebel Jerusalem, “lifted from the earth” that He might
draw all men unto Him. And there was the writer of
this letter, once His blasphemer and persecutor. By
St Paul’s own case suggested, surely, the application
he makes of this ancient text of the Psalter and
lighted up its Messianic import. In the glory of His
triumph Jesus Christ had appeared to make him
captive, and put him at once to service. From that
hour Paul was led along enthralled, the willing bond-slave
of the Lord Jesus and celebrant of His victory.
“Thanks be unto God,” he cries, “who ever triumphs
over us in the Christ, and makes manifest through us
the savour of His knowledge in every
place.”
Such, and of such sort are the prisoners of the war of Jesus; such the gifts that through sinners pardoned and subdued He bestows upon mankind,—“patterns to those who should hereafter believe.” Time would fail to follow the train of the captives of the love of Christ, which stretches unbroken and ever multiplying through the centuries to this day. We, too, in our turn have laid our rebel selves at His feet; and all that we surrender to Him, by right of conquest He gives over to the service of mankind.
He gives out of the spoil of His war with evil,—gives
what He receives. Yet He gives not as He receives.
Everything laid in His hands is changed by their
What may we not expect from Him who has led captive such a captivity! What surprises of blessing and miracles of grace there are awaiting us, that shall fill our mouth with laughter and our tongue with singing—gifts and succours coming to the Church from unlooked-for quarters and reinforcements from the ranks of the enemy. And what discomfitures and captivities are preparing for the haters of the Lord,—if, at least, the future is to be as the past; and if we may judge from the apostle’s word, and from his example, of the measure of the gift of Christ.
III. A third line of measurement is supplied in the
last word of verse 8, and is drawn out in verses
11 and 12. “He gave gifts to men—He gave some
apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some
pastors and teachers, with a view to the full equipment
of the saints for work of ministration, for
building up of the body of Christ.” Yes, and some
martyrs, some missionaries, some Church rulers and
Christian statesmen, some poets, some deep thinkers
and theologians, some leaders of philanthropy and
helpers of the poor; all given for the same end—to
minister to the life of His Church, to furnish it with
the means for carrying on its mission, and to enable
every saint to contribute his part to the commonwealth
Comparison with verse 16 that follows and with verse 7 that precedes, seems to us to make it clear that we should read, without a comma, the second and third clauses of verse 12 as continuations of the first. The “work of ministering” and the “building up of the body of Christ” are not assigned to special orders of ministry as their exclusive calling. Such honour have all His saints. It is the office of the clergy to see that the laity do their duty, of “the ministry” to make each saint a minister of Christ, to guide, instruct and animate the entire membership of Christ’s body in the work He has laid upon it. Upon this plan the Christian fellowship was organized and officered in the apostolic times. Church government is a means to an end. Its primitive form was that best suited to the age; and even then varied under different circumstances. It was not precisely the same at Jerusalem and at Corinth; at Corinth in 58, and at Ephesus in 66 A.D. That is the best Church system, under any given conditions, which serves best to conserve and develope the spiritual energy of the body of Christ.
The distribution of Church office indicated in verse
11 corresponds closely to what we find in the Pastoral
epistles. The apostle does not profess to enumerate
all grades of ministry. The “deacons” are wanting;
although we know from
In
The office of teaching, as in In
The prophets, Comp. ch. ii. 20, iii. 5 for the association of prophets with apostles.
The first three orders (apostles, prophets, evangelists) linked Church to Church and served the entire body; the last two (pastors and teachers) had charge of local and congregational affairs. The apostles (the Twelve and Paul), with the prophets, were the founders of the Church. Their distinctive functions ceased when the foundation was laid and the deposit of revealed truth was complete. The evangelistic and pastoral callings remain; and out of them have sprung all the variety of Christian ministries since exercised. Evangelists, with apostles or missionaries, bring new souls to Christ and carry His message into new lands. Pastors and teachers follow in their train, tending the ingathered sheep, and labouring to make each flock that they shepherd and every single man perfect in Christ Jesus.
Marvellous were Christ’s “gifts for men” bestowed in the apostolic ministry. What a gift to the Christian community, for example, was Paul himself! In his natural endowments, so rich and finely blended, in his training and early experience, in the supernatural mode of his conversion, everything wrought together to give to men in the apostle Paul a man supremely fitted to be Christ’s ambassador to the Pagan world, and for all ages the “teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.” “A chosen vessel unto me,” said the Lord Jesus, “to bear my name.”
Such a gift to the world was St Augustine: a man
of the most powerful intellect and will, master of the
thought and life of his time. Long an alien from the
household of faith, he was saved at last as by miracle,
Such another gift to men was Martin Luther, the captive of justifying grace, won from the monastery and the bondage of Rome to set Germany and Europe free. What a soul of fire, what a voice of power was his! to whose lips our Lord Christ set the great trumpet of the Reformation; and he blew a blast that waked the sleeping peoples of the North, and made the walls of Babylon rock again to their foundation. Such a gift to Scotland was John Knox, who from his own soul breathed the spirit of religion into the life of a nation, and gave it a body and organic form in which to dwell and work for centuries.
Such a gift to England was John Wesley. Can we conceive a richer boon conferred by the Head of the Church upon the English race than the raising up of this great evangelist and pastor and teacher, at such a time as that of his appearance? Standing at the distance of a hundred years, we are able to measure in some degree the magnitude of this bestowment. In none of the leaders and commanders whom Christ has given to His people was there more signally manifest that combination of faculties, that concurrence of providences and adjustment to circumstances, and that transforming and attempering influence of grace in all—the “effectual working in the measure of each single part” of the man and his history, which marks those special gifts that Christ is wont to bestow upon His people in seasons of special emergency and need.
There is nothing new or surprising to the Lord Jesus in the progress of our times and the developments of modern thought, nothing for which He is not perfectly prepared. He has taken their measure long ere this, and holds them within His grasp. The government is upon His shoulders—“the weight of all this unintelligible world”—and He can bear it well. He has gifts in store for the twentieth century, when it arrives, as adequate as those He bestowed upon the first or fifth, upon the sixteenth or the eighteenth of our era. There are Augustines and Wesleys yet to come. Hidden in the Almighty’s quiver are shafts as polished and as keen as any He has used, which He will launch forth in the war of the ages at the appointed hour. The need, the peril, the greatness of the time will be the measure of the gift of Christ.
Those who are most ready to appraise their fellows are constantly at fault. Our last may prove Christ’s first; our first His last! “Each of us shall give account of himself to God”: each must answer for his own stewardship, and the grace that was given to each. “Let us not therefore judge one another any more.” But let every man see to it that his part in the building of God’s temple is well and faithfully done. Soon the fire will try every man’s work, of what sort it is.
“Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the full knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: that we may be no more children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine in the sport of men, in craftiness, unto the scheme of error; but dealing truly, in love may grow up in all things into Him, which is the head, even Christ; from whom all the body fitly framed and knit together, through that which every juncture supplieth, according to the working in due measure of each several part, maketh the increase of the body unto the building up of itself in love.”—Eph. iv. 13–16.
The gifts pertaining to special office in the Church were bestowed to promote its corporate efficiency and to further its general growth (vv. 11, 12). Now, the purpose of these endowments sets a limit to their use. “Christ gave apostles, prophets,” and the rest—“till we all arrive at our perfect manhood and reach the stature of His fulness.” Such is the connexion of verse 13 with the foregoing context. The aim of the Christian ministry is to make itself superfluous, to raise men beyond its need. Knowledge and prophesyings, apostolates and pastorates, the missions of the evangelist and the schools of the teacher will one day cease; their work will be done, their end gained, when all believers are brought “to the unity of faith, to the full knowledge of the Son of God.” The work of Christ’s servants can have no grander aim, no further goal lying beyond this. Verse 14, therefore, does not disclose an ulterior purpose arising out of that affirmed in the previous sentence; it restates the same purpose. To make men of us (ver. 13) and to prevent our being children (ver. 14) is the identical object for which apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers are called to office. The goal marked out for all believers in the knowledge and the moral likeness of Christ (ver. 13), is set up that it may direct the Church’s course through dangers shunned and enemies vanquished (ver. 14) to the attainment of her corporate perfection (vv. 15, 16). The whole thought of this section turns upon the idea of “the perfecting of the saints” in verse 12. Verse 16 looks backward to this; verse 7 looked forward to it.
(1) The “perfect [full-grown] man” of verse 13 is
the individual, not the generic man, not “the one
[collective] new man” of chapter ii. 15. The Greek
words for man in these two places
differ. Εἰς ἕνα καινὸν ἄνθρωπον
(homo), ch. ii. 15; similarly in iv. 22,
24;
(2) “Sleight of men” (A.V. and R.V.) does not
seem to us to express the precise meaning of the
word so translated in verse 14. Kubeia (from kubos,
a cube, or die) occurs only here in the New Testament;
in classical Greek it appears in its literal sense
of dice-play, gambling. The interpreters have drawn
from this the idea of trickery, cheating—the common
accompaniment of gambling. But the kindred verb
(to play dice, to gamble) has another well-established
use in Greek, namely, to hazard: this supplies for St
Paul’s noun the signification of sport or hazarding,
preferred by Beza among the older expositors and by
von Soden amongst the newest. In the sport of men,
says von Soden: “conduct wanting in every kind of
earnestness and clear purpose. These men play with
religion, and with the welfare of Christian souls.”
This metaphor accords admirably with that of the
For this association of metaphor, comp. Shakespeare: Julius
Cæsar, Act V., Scene 1:—
(3) Another rare word is found in this verse, not
very precisely rendered as “wiles”—a translation suiting
it better in chapter vi. 11. Here the noun is
singular in number: methodeia. It signifies methodizing,
reducing to a plan; and then, in a bad sense,
scheming, plotting. “Error” is thus personified: it
“schemes,” just as in
(4) As the contrast between manhood and childhood
links verses 13 and 14, so it is by the contrast of error
and craftiness with truth that we pass from verse 14 to
verse 15. “Speaking truth” insufficiently renders the
opening word of the latter verse. The “dealing truly”
(5) The last difficulty of this kind we have to deal
with, lies in the connexion of the clauses of verse 16.
“Through every joint of supply” is an incongruous
adjunct to the previous clause, “fitly framed and knit
together,” although the rendering “joint” gives this
connexion a superficial aptness. The apostle’s word
means juncture rather than
joint. Vulgate: per omnem juncturam ministrationis. St Paul’s word
here is διὰ πάσης ἁφῆς,
through every touching. See Lightfoot’s valuable
note on the medical and philosophical use of the word by Greek authors,
in his Commentary on Colossians (ii. 19).
These difficult verses unfold to us three main conceptions: The goal of the Church’s life (ver. 13), the malady which arrests its development (ver. 14), and the means and conditions of its growth (vv. 15, 16).
I. The mark at which the Church has to arrive is set forth, in harmony with the tenor of the epistle, in a twofold way,—in its collective and its individual aspects. We must all “unitedly attain the oneness of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God”; and we must attain, each of us, “a perfect manhood, the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.”
The “one faith” of the Church’s foundation (ver. 5)
is, at the same time, its end and goal. The final unity
will be the unfolding of the primal unity; the implicit
will become explicit; the germ will be reproduced in
the developed organism. “The faith” is still, in St
Paul, the fides qua credimus, not quam credimus; it is
the living faith of all hearts in the same Christ and
gospel. Comp. ch. i. 13: “in whom you also [Gentiles, along with us
Jews] found hope”; also
While faith is the central organ of the Church’s life,
the Son of God is its central object. The dangers
assailing the Church and the divisions threatening its
See the connexion of thought in
“Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of
God, God abideth in him and he in God” (
The second and third unto of verse 13 are parallel
with the first, and with each other. A truer faith
and better knowledge of Christ uniting believers to
each other, at the same time develope in each of
them a riper character. Jesus Christ was the “perfect
man.” In Him our nature attained, without
the least flaw or failure, its true end,—which is to
glorify God. In His fulness the plenitude of God
is embodied; it is made human, and attainable to
faith. In Jesus Christ humanity rose to its ideal
stature; and we see what is the proper level of our
nature, the dignity and worth to which we have to rise.
We are “predestinated to be conformed to the image
of God’s Son.” All the many brethren of Jesus
measure themselves against the stature of the Firstborn;
“Till we arrive—till we all arrive” at this, the work of the Christian ministry is incomplete. Teachers must still school us, pastors shepherd us, evangelists mission us. There is work enough and to spare for them all—and will be, to all appearance, for many a generation to come. The goal of the regenerate life is never absolutely won; it is hid with Christ in God. But there is to be a constant approximation to it, both in the individual believer and in the body of Christ’s people. And a time is coming when that goal will be practically attained, so far as earthly conditions allow. The Church after long strife will be reunited, after long trial will be perfected; and Christ will “present her to Himself” a bride worthy of her Lord, “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.” Then this world will have had its use, and will give place to the new heavens and earth.
II. The goal that the apostle marked out, did not
appear to him to be in immediate prospect. The
childishness of so many Christian believers stood in
the way of its attainment. In this condition they were
exposed to the seductions of error, and ready to be
driven this way and that by the evil influences active
in the world of thought around them. So long as the
Church contains a number of unstable souls, so long
she will remain subject to strife and corruption.
When he says in verse 14, “that we may be no longer
children tossed to and fro,” etc., this implies that many
Christian believers at that time were of this childish
Compare
It is a grievous thing to a minister of Christ to see those who for the time ought to be teachers, fit for the Church’s strong meat and the harder tasks of her service, remaining still infantile in their condition, needing to be nursed and humoured, narrow in their views of truth, petty and personal in their aims, wanting in all generous feeling and exalted thought. Some men, like St Paul himself, advance from the beginning to a settled faith, to a large intelligence and a full and manly consecration to God. Others remain “babes in Christ” to the end. Their souls live, but never thrive. They suffer from every change in the moral atmosphere, from every new wind of doctrine. These invalids are objects full of interest to the moral pathologist; they are marked not unfrequently by fine and delicate qualities. But they are a constant anxiety to the Church. Till they grow into something more robust they must remain to crowd the Church’s nursery, instead of taking part in her battle like brave and strenuous men.
The appearance of false doctrine in the Asian
Churches made their undeveloped condition a matter for
peculiar apprehension to the apostle. The Colossian
heresy, for example, with which he is dealing at this
present moment, would have no attraction for ripe and
settled Christians. But such a “scheme of error” was
exactly suited to catch men with a certain tincture of
philosophy and in general sympathy with current
St Paul speaks of “every wind of the doctrine,”
having in his mind a more or less definite form of
erroneous teaching, a certain “plan of error.” Reading
this verse in the light of the companion letter to
Colossæ and the letters addressed to Timothy when
at Ephesus a few years later, we can understand its
significance. We can watch the storm that was rising
in the Græco-Asiatic Churches. The characteristics
of early Gnosticism are well defined in the miniature
picture of verse 14. We note, in the first place, its
protean and capricious form, half Judaistic, half philosophical—ascetic
in one direction, libertine in another:
“tossed by the waves, and carried about with every
wind.” In the next place, its intellectual spirit,—that
of a loose and reckless speculation: “in the
hazarding of men,”—not in the abiding truth of God.
Morally, it was vitiated by “craftiness.” And in its
issue and result, this new teaching was leading “to
the scheme of error” which the apostle four years
ago had sorrowfully predicted, in bidding farewell
to the Ephesian elders at Miletus (
The struggle with legalism was now over and past,
at least in its critical phase. The apostle of the
Gentiles had won the battle with Judaism and saved
the Church in its first great conflict. But another
strife is impending (comp. vi. 10); a most pernicious
error has made its appearance within the Church
At every crisis in human thought there emerges some prevailing method of truth, or of error, the resultant of current tendencies, which unites the suffrages of a large body of thinkers and claims to embody the spirit of the age. Such a method of error our own age has produced as the outcome of the anti-Christian speculation of modern times, in the doctrines current under the names of Positivism, Secularism, or Agnosticism. While the Gnosticism of the early ages asserted the infinite distance of God from the world and the intrinsic evil of matter, modern Agnosticism removes God still further from us, beyond the reach of thought, and leaves us with material nature as the one positive and accessible reality, as the basis of life and law. Faith and knowledge of the Son of God it banishes as dreams of our childhood. The supernatural, it tells us, is an illusion; and we must resign ourselves to be once more without God in the world and without hope beyond death.
This materialistic philosophy gathers to a head the unbelief of the century. It is the living antagonist of Divine revelation. It supplies the appointed trial of faith for educated men of our generation, and the test of the intellectual vigour and manhood of the Church.
III. In the midst of the changing perils and long
delays of her history, the Church is called evermore
to press towards the mark of her calling. The conditions
To the craft of false teachers St Paul would have his
Churches oppose the weapons only of truth and love.
“Holding the truth in love,” they will “grow up in all
things into Christ.” Sincere believers, heartily devoted
to Christ, will not fall into fatal error. A healthy life
instinctively repels disease. They “have an anointing
from the Holy One” which is their protection (
Next to the moral condition lies the spiritual condition of advancement,—viz., the full recognition of the supremacy and sufficiency of Christ. Christ assumes here two opposite relations to the members of His body. He is the Head into (or unto) which we grow in all things; but at the same time, from whom all the body derives its increase (ver. 16). He is the perfect ideal for us each; He is the common source of life and progress for us all. In our individual efforts after holiness and knowledge, in our personal aspirations and struggles, Jesus Christ is our model, our constant aim: we “grow into Him” (ver. 15). But as we learn to live for others, as we merge our own aims in the life of the Church and of humanity we feel, even more deeply than our personal needs had made us do, our dependence upon Him. We see that the forces which are at work to raise mankind, to stay the strifes and heal the wounds of humanity, emanate from the living Christ (ver. 16). He is the head of the Church and the heart of the world.
A building or a machine is fitted together by the
adjustment of its parts. A body needs, besides this
mechanical construction, a pervasive life, a sympathetic
force knitting it together: “knit together in love,” the
apostle says in
The rest of the sentence, following the comma that
we place at “knit together,” has its parallel in
“Wherever two or three are met together in my name,” said Jesus, “there am I in the midst.” In the multitude of these obscure and humble meetings of brethren who love each other for Christ’s sake, is the grace supplied, the love diffused abroad, by which the Church lives and thrives. The vitality of the Church of Christ does not depend so much upon the large and visible features of its construction—upon Synods and Conferences, upon Bishops and Presbyteries and the like, influential and venerable as these authorities may be; but upon the spiritual intercourse that goes on amongst the body of its people. “Each several part” of Christ’s great body, “according to the measure” of its capacity, is required to receive and to transmit the common grace.
However defective in other points of organization, the society in which this takes place fulfils the office of an ecclesiastical body. It will grow into the fulness of Christ; it “builds up itself in love.” The primary condition of Church health and progress is that there shall be an unobstructed flow of the life of grace from point to point through the tissues and substance of the entire frame.
“This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye no longer walk as the Gentiles also walk, in the vanity of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart; who being past feeling gave themselves up to lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.”—Eph. iv. 17–19.
When he “testifies,” with a pointed emphasis, “that
you no longer walk as do indeed the Gentiles,” and
when in verse 20 he exclaims, “But you did not thus
“The persons here denounced,” says Lightfoot on
The connexion between the foregoing part of this
chapter and that on which we now enter, lies in the
relation of the new life of the Christian believer to the
new community which he has entered. The old world
of Gentile society had formed the “old man” as he then
existed, the product of centuries of debasing idolatry.
But in Christ that world is abolished, and a “new man”
is born. The world in which the Asian Christians once
lived as “Gentiles in the flesh,” is dead to
them. Comp.
The representation given of Gentile life in the three
verses before us is highly condensed and pungent. It
is from the same hand as the lurid picture of
I. “The Gentiles walk,” the apostle says, “in vanity
of their mind”—with reason frustrate and impotent;
“being darkened in their understanding”—with no clear
or settled principles, no sound theory of life. Similarly,
he wrote in
The men of intellect, who held themselves aloof from
popular beliefs, for the most part confessed that their
philosophies were speculative and futile, that certainty
in the greatest and most serious matters was unattainable.
Pilate’s question, “What is truth?”—no jesting
Our own age, it may be said, possesses a philosophic method unknown to the ancient world. The old metaphysical systems failed; but we have relaid the foundations of life and thought upon the solid ground of nature. Modern culture rests upon a basis of positive and demonstrated knowledge, whose value is independent of religious belief. Scientific discovery has put us in command of material forces that secure the race against any such relapse as that which took place in the overthrow of the Græco-Roman civilization. Pessimism answers these pretensions made for physical science by her idolaters. Pessimism is the nemesis of irreligious thought. It creeps like a slow palsy over the highest and ablest minds that reject the Christian hope. What avails it to yoke steam to our chariot, if black care still sits behind the rider? to wing our thoughts with the lightning, if those thoughts are no happier or worthier than before?
“Civilization contains within itself the elements of a fresh servitude. Man conquers the powers of nature, and becomes in turn their slave” (F. W. Robertson). Poverty grows gaunt and desperate by the side of lavish wealth. A new barbarism is bred in what science grimly calls the proletariate, a barbarism more vicious and dangerous than the old, that is generated by the inhuman conditions of life under the existing regime of industrial science.
Education gives man quickness of wit and new capacity
for evil or good; culture makes him more sensitive;
refinement more delicate in his virtues or his vices.
In vanity of mind and darkness of reasoning men
stumble onwards to the end of life, to the end of time.
The world’s wisdom and the lessons of its history give
no hope of any real advance from darkness to light
until, as Plato said, “We are able more safely and
securely to make our journey, borne on some firmer vehicle, on some Divine
word.” Phæao: § xxxv.
II. The delusion of mind in which the nations walked, resulted in a settled state of estrangement from God. They were “alienated from the life of God.”
“Alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,” St
Paul said in chapter ii. 12, See p. 129.
Everywhere the apostle moved amongst men who
seemed to him dead—joyless, empty-hearted, weary of
an idle learning or lost in sullen ignorance, caring only
to eat and drink till they should die like the beasts.
Their so-called gods were phantasms of the Divine, in
which the wiser of them scarcely even pretended to
believe. The ancient natural pieties—not wholly untouched
by the Spirit of God, despite their idolatry—that
peopled with fair fancies the Grecian shores and
skies, and taught the sturdy Roman his manfulness and
hallowed his love of home and city, were all but extinguished.
Death was at the heart of Pagan religion;
“When human life to view lay foully prostrate upon earth, crushed down under the weight of religion, who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect lowering upon mortals, a man of Greece ventured first to lift up his mortal eyes to her face and first to withstand her to her face” (Munro).
How alienated from the life of God were those who conceived such sentiments, and those whose creed excited this repugnance. And when amongst ourselves, as it occurs in some unhappy instances, a similar bitterness is cherished, it is matter of double sorrow,—of grief at once for the alienation prompting thoughts so dark and unjust towards our God and Father, and for the misshapen guise in which our holy religion has been presented to make this aversion possible.
The phrase “alienated from the life of God” denotes
an objective position rather than a subjective disposition,
And this banishment was due to the cause already described,—to the radical perversion of the Gentile mind, which is re-affirmed in the double prepositional clause of verse 18: “because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their heart.” The repeated preposition (because of) attaches the two parallel clauses to the same predicate. Together they serve to explain this sad estrangement from the Divine life; the second because supplements the first. It is the ingrained “ignorance” of men that excludes them from the life of God; and this ignorance is no misfortune or unavoidable fate, it is due to a positive “hardening of the heart.”
Ignorance is not the mother of devotion, but of
indevotion. If men knew God, they would certainly
love and serve Him. St Paul agreed with Socrates
and Plato in holding that virtue is knowledge. The
debasement of the heathen world, he declares again and
again, was due to the fact that it “knew not
God.”
Since the world’s creation, the apostle says, God’s
unseen presence has been clearly visible (
The Gentile ignorance of God was attended, as St
Paul saw it, with an induration of heart, of which it
was at once the cause and the effect. There is a wilful
stupidity, a studied misconstruction of God’s will, which
has played a large part in the history of unbelief. The
Israelitish people presented at this time a terrible
example of such guilty callousness (
In the case of the heathen, hardness of heart and
religious ignorance plainly went together. The knowledge
of God was not altogether wanting amongst them;
He “left Himself not without witness,” as the apostle
told them (
But the Jewish nation as a whole, and the mass of
the pagans, remained at present obstinately disbelieving.
They had no perception of the life of God, and felt no
need of it; and when offered, they thrust it from them.
Theirs was another god, “the god of this world,” who
“blinds the minds of the unbelieving” (
III. By two conspicuous features the decaying
Paganism of the Christian era was distinguished,—its
unbelief and its licentiousness. In his letter to the
Romans St Paul declares that the second of these
Upon that brilliant classic civilization there lies a shocking stain of impurity. St Paul stamps upon it the burning word Aselgeia (lasciviousness), like a brand on the harlot’s brow. The habits of daily life, the literature and art of the Greek world, the atmosphere of society in the great cities was laden with corruption. Sexual vice was no longer counted vice. It was provided for by public law; it was incorporated into the worship of the gods. It was cultivated in every luxurious and monstrous excess. It was eating out the manhood of the Greek and Latin races. From the imperial Cæsar down to the horde of slaves, it seemed as though every class of society had abandoned itself to the horrid practices of lust.
The “greediness” with which debauchery was then
pursued, is at the bottom self-idolatry, self-deification;
it is the absorption of the God-given passion and will
of man’s nature in the gratification of his appetites.
Here lies the reservoir and spring of sin, the burning
deep within the soul of him who knows no God but
his own will, no law above his own desire. He plunges
into sensual indulgence, or he grasps covetously at
wealth or office; he wrecks the purity, or tramples on
the rights of others; he robs the weak, he corrupts the
innocent, he deceives and mocks the simple—to feed
the gluttonous idol of self that sits upon God’s seat
within him. The military hero wading to a throne
For the light-hearted Greeks, lovers of beauty and of laughter, self was deified as Aphrodité, goddess of fleshly desire, who was turned by their worship into Aselgeia,—she of whom of old it was said, “Her house is the way to Sheol.” Not such as the chaste wife and house-keeping mother of Hebrew praise, but Laïs with her venal charms was the subject of Greek song and art. Pure ideals of womanhood the classic nations had once known—or never would those nations have become great and famous—a Greek Alcestis and Antigoné, Roman Cornelias and Lucretias, noble maids and matrons. But these, in the dissolution of manners, had given place to other models. The wives and daughters of the Greek citizens were shut up to contempt and ignorance, while the priestesses of vice—hetæræ they were called, or companions of men—queened it in their voluptuous beauty, until their bloom faded and poison or madness ended their fatal days.
Amongst the Jews whom our Lord addressed, the
choice lay between “God and Mammon”; in Corinth
and Ephesus, it was “Christ or Belial.” These ancient
gods of the world—“mud-gods,” as Thomas Carlyle
called them—are set up in the high places of our populous
cities. To the slavery of business and the pride of
Hard by the temple of Mammon stands that of Belial. Their votaries mingle in the crowded amusements of the day and rub shoulders with each other. Aselgeia flaunts herself, wise observers tell us, with increasing boldness in the European capitals. Theatre and picture-gallery and novel pander to the desire of the eye and the lust of the flesh. The daily newspapers retail cases of divorce and hideous criminal trials with greater exactness than the debates of Parliament; and the appetite for this garbage grows by what it feeds upon. It is plain to see whereunto the decay of public decency and the revival of the animalism of pagan art and manners will grow, if it be not checked by a deepened Christian faith and feeling.
Past feeling says the apostle of the brazen impudicity of his time. The loss of the religious sense blunted all moral sensibility. The Greeks, by an early instinct of their language, had one word for modesty and reverence, for self-respect and awe before the Divine. There is nothing more terrible than the loss of shame. When immodesty is no longer felt as an affront, when there fails to rise in the blood and burn upon the cheek the hot resentment of a wholesome nature against things that are foul, when we grow tolerant and familiar with their presence, we are far down the slopes of hell. It needs only the kindling of passion, or the removal of the checks of circumstance, to complete the descent. The pain that the sight of evil gives is a divine shield against it. Wearing this shield, the sinless Christ fought our battle, and bore the anguish of our sin.
“But ye did not so learn the Christ; if so be that ye heard Him, and were taught in Him, even as truth is in Jesus: that ye put away, as concerning your former manner of life, the old man, which waxeth corrupt after the lusts of deceit; and that ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which after God hath been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.”—Eph. iv. 20–24.
The phrase is highly condensed. The apostle, in
this letter so exuberant in expression, yet on occasion
is as concise as in Galatians. One is tempted, as Beza
suggested Quid si post οὕτως
distinctionem ascribas? Vos autem non ita (subaudi
facere convenit), qui didicistis, etc. Comp. Comp.
Strictly speaking, it is not Christ, but the Christ
whom St Paul presumes his readers to have duly
learnt. See pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.
The apostle’s confidence in the Christian knowledge
of his readers is, however, qualified in verse 21 in a
somewhat remarkable way: “If verily it is He whom
you heard, and in Him that you were taught, as truth
is in Jesus.” We noted at the outset the bearing of
this sentence on the destination of the letter. It would
never occur to St Paul to question whether the Ephesian
There are several considerations which help to
account for it. When St Paul first arrived at Ephesus,
eight years before this time, he “found certain disciples”
there who had been “baptized into John’s
baptism,” but had not “received the Holy Spirit” nor
even heard of such a thing (
Judaistic Christians, such as those who at Rome “preached Christ of envy and strife,” were also disseminating an imperfect Christian doctrine. They limited the rights of uncircumcised believers; they misrepresented the Gentile apostle and undermined his influence. A third and still more lamentable cause of uncertainty in regard to the Christian belief of Asian Churches, was introduced by the rise of Gnosticizing error in this quarter. Some who read the epistle had, it might be, received their first knowledge of Christ through channels tainted with error similar to that which was propagated at Colossæ. With the seed of the kingdom the enemy was mingling vicious tares. The apostle has reason to fear that there were those within the wide circle to which his letter is addressed, who had in one form or other heard a different gospel and a Christ other than the true Christ of apostolic teaching.
Where does he find the test and touchstone of the
true Christian doctrine?—In the historical Jesus: “as
there is truth in Jesus.” Not often, nor without distinct
meaning, does St Paul use the birth-name of the
Saviour by itself. Where he does, it is most significant.
He has in mind the facts of the gospel history; he
speaks of “the Jesus” Ἐστὶν ἀληθεία ἐν τῷ Ἰησοῦ.
The article with the proper name is
most significant. It points to the definite image of Jesus, in His actual
person, that was made familiar by the preaching of Paul and the other
apostles.
Amongst the Gnostics of the second century there
was held a distinction between the human (fleshly and
imperfect) Jesus and the Divine Christ, who were
regarded as distinct beings, united to each other
from the time of the baptism of Jesus to His death.
The critics who assert the late and non-Pauline authorship
of the epistle, assert that this peculiar doctrine
is aimed at in the words before us, and that the
identification of Christ with Jesus has a polemical
reference to this advanced Gnostic error. The verses
that follow show that the writer has a different and
entirely practical aim. The apostle points us to our
true ideal, to “the Christ” of all revelation manifest in
“the Jesus” of the gospel. Here we see “the new man
created after God,” whose nature we must embody in
ourselves. The counteractive of a false spiritualism
is found in the incarnate life of the Son of God. The
dualism which separated God from the world and
man’s spirit from his flesh, had its refutation in “the
Jesus” of Paul’s preaching, whom we see in the Four
Gospels. Those who persisted in the attempt to graft
the dualistic theosophy upon the Christian faith, were
in the end compelled to divide and destroy the Christ
It is an entire mistake to suppose that the apostle Paul was indifferent to the historical tradition of Jesus; that the Christ he taught was a product of his personal inspiration, of his inward experience and theological reflection. This preaching of an abstract Christ, distinct from the actual Jesus, is the very thing that he condemns. Although his explicit references in the epistles to the teaching of Jesus and the events of His earthly life are not numerous, they are such as to prove that the Churches St Paul taught were well instructed in that history. From the beginning the apostle made himself well acquainted with the facts concerning Jesus, and had become possessor of all that the earlier witnesses could relate. His conception of the Lord Jesus Christ is living and realistic in the highest degree. Its germ was in the visible appearance of the glorified Jesus to himself on the Damascus road; but that expanding germ struck down its roots into the rich soil of the Church’s recollections of the incarnate Redeemer as He lived and taught and laboured, as He died and rose again amongst men. Paul’s Christ was the Jesus of Peter and of John and of our own Evangelists; there was no other. He warns the Church against all unhistorical, subjective Christs, the product of human speculation.
The Asian Christians who held a true faith, had
received Jesus as the Christ. So accepting Him,
they accepted a fixed standard and ideal of life for
themselves. With Jesus Christ evidently set forth
before their eyes, let them look back upon their past
life; let them contrast what they had been with what
Strangely did the image of Jesus confront the pagan world; keenly its light smote on that gross darkness. There stood the Word made flesh—purity immaculate, love in its very self—shaped forth in no dream of fancy or philosophy, but in the veritable man Christ Jesus, born of Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate,—truth expressed
And this life of Jesus, living in those who loved Him
(
To see the new and the old man side by side was enough to assure one that the future lay with Jesus. Corruption and decrepitude marked every feature of Gentile life. It was gangrened with vice,—“wasting away in its deceitful lusts.”
St Paul had before his eyes, as he wrote, a conspicuous
type of the decaying Pagan order. He had
appealed as a citizen of the empire to Cæsar as his
judge. He was in durance as Nero’s prisoner, and was
acquainted with the life of the palace (
At this epoch, writes M.
Renan, L’Antéchrist, pp. i. ii. 1, 2. This is a powerful and impressive
work, of whose value those who know only the Vie de Jésus can have
little conception. Renan’s faults are many and deplorable; but he is a
writer of genius and of candour. His rationalism teems with precious
inconsistencies. One hears in him always the Church bells ringing under
the sea, the witness of a faith buried in the heart and never silenced,
to which he confesses touchingly in the Preface to his Souvenirs.
Such was the man who occupied at this time the summit of human power and glory,—the man who lighted the torch of Christian martyrdom and at whose sentence St Paul’s head was destined to fall, the Wild Beast of John’s awful vision. Nero of Rome, the son of Agrippina, embodied the triumph of Satan as the god of this world. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, reigned only in a few loving and pure hearts. Future history, as the scroll of the Apocalypse unfolded it, was to be the battle-field of these confronting powers, the war of Christ with Antichrist.
Could it be doubtful, to any one who had measured
the rival forces, on which side victory must fall? St
Paul pronounces the fate of the whole kingdom of evil
in this world, when he declares that “the old man” is
“perishing, according to the lusts of deceit.” It is an
application of the maxim he gave us in
The passions which carry men and nations to their
By its baits of sensuous pleasure, and still more by its show of freedom and power to stir our pride, sin cheats us of our manhood; it sows life with misery, and makes us self-despising slaves. It knows how to use God’s law as an incitement to transgression, turning the very prohibition into a challenge to our bold desires. “Sin taking occasion by the commandment deceived me, and by it slew me.” Over the pit of destruction play the same dancing lights that have lured countless generations,—the glitter of gold; the purple robe and jewelled coronet; the wine moving in the cup; fair, soft faces lit with laughter. The straying foot and hot desires give chase, till the inevitable moment comes when the treacherous soil yields, and the pursuer plunges beyond escape into sin’s reeking gulfs. Then the illusion is over. The gay faces grow foul; the glittering prize proves dust; the sweet fruit turns to ashes; the cup of pleasure burns with the fire of hell. And the sinner knows at last that his greed has cheated him, that he is as foolish as he is wicked.
Let us remember that there is but one way of escape
from the all-encompassing deceit of sin. It is in
“learning Christ.” Not in learning about Christ, but
From the perishing old man the apostle turns, in
verses 23, 24, to the new. These two clauses differ
in their form of expression more than the English
rendering indicates.
ἀνανεοῦσθαι δὲ τῷ πνεύματι τοῦ νοὸς ὑμῶν,
καὶ ἐνδυσασθαι τὸν καίνον ἄνθρωπον,
τὸν κατὰ Θεὸν κτισθέντα.
Borne on the stream of his evil passions, we saw “the old man” in his “former manner of life,” hastening to the gulf of ruin. For the man renewed in Christ the stream of life flows steadily in the opposite direction, and with a swelling tide moves upward to God. His knowledge and love are always growing in depth, in refinement, in energy and joy. Thus it was with the apostle in his advancing age. The fresh impulses of the Holy Spirit, the unfolding to his spirit of the mystery of God, the fellowship of Christian brethren and the interests of the work of the Church renewed Paul’s youth like the eagle’s. If in years and toil he is old, his soul is full of ardour, his intellect keen and eager; the “outward man decays, but the inward man is renewed day by day.”
This new nature had a new birth. The soul reanimating
itself perpetually from the fresh springs that are in
God, had in God the beginning of its renovated life.
We have not to create or fashion for ourselves the
perfect life, but to adopt it,—to realize the Christian
ideal (ver. 24). We are called to put on the new type
of manhood as completely as we renounce the old
(ver. 22). The new man is there before our eyes,
manifest in the person of Jesus Christ, in whom we
Now, the character of Jesus is human nature as
God first formed it. It existed in His thoughts from
eternity. If it be asked whether St Paul refers, in
verse 24, to the creation of Adam in God’s likeness, or
to the image of God appearing in Jesus Christ, or to the
Christian nature formed in the regenerate, we should
say that, to the apostle’s mind, the first and last of
these creations are merged in the second. The Son of
God’s love is His primeval image. The race of Adam
was created in Christ (
The qualities which the apostle insists upon in the
new man are two: “righteousness and holiness [or piety]
of the truth.” This is the Old Testament conception
of a perfect life, whose realization the devout Zacharias
anticipates when he sings how God has “shown mercy
Comp. pp. 29, 30. It is important to distinguish the Greek adjectives ἅγιος
and ὅσιος,
with their derivatives. See Cremer’s N. T. Lexicon on these words, and
Trench’s N. T. Synonyms, § lxxxviii. Of the latter word,
A religious temper, a reverent mind marks the true child of grace. His soul is full of the loving fear of God. In the new humanity, in the type of man that will prevail in the latter days when the truth as in Jesus has been learnt by mankind, justice and piety will hold a balanced sway. The man of the coming times will not be atheistic or agnostic: he will be devout. He will not be narrow and self-seeking; he will not be pharisaic and pretentious, practising the world’s ethics with the Christian’s creed: he will be upright and generous, manly and godlike.
“Wherefore, having put away falsehood, ‘speak ye truth each one with his neighbour’: for we are members one of another.
“‘Be ye angry, and sin not’: let not the sun go down upon your provocation: neither give place to the devil.
“Let him that stole steal no more; but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have whereof to give to him that hath need.
“Let no worthless speech proceed out of your mouth, but such as is good for edifying as the need may be, that it may give grace to them that hear. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption.
“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you. Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, even as the Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour of a sweet smell.
“But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as becometh saints; nor filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not befitting: but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know of a surety, that no fornicator, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, which is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no man deceive you with empty words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the sons of disobedience.”—Eph. iv. 25—v. 6.
The peculiarity of the instructions given by the apostle for this purpose does not lie in the virtues enjoined, but in the light in which they are set and the motives by which they are inculcated. The common conscience condemns lying and theft, malice and uncleanness; they were denounced with eloquence by heathen moralists. But the ethics of the New Testament differed in many respects from the best moral philosophy: in its direct appeal to the conscience, in its vigour and decision, in the clearness with which it traced our maladies to the heart’s alienation from God; but most of all, in the remedy which it applied, the new principle of faith in Christ. The surgeon’s knife lays bare the root of the disease; and the physician’s hand pours in the healing balm.
Let us observe at the outset that St Paul deals with the actual and pressing temptations of his readers. He recalls what they had been, and forbids them to be such again. The associations and habits of former life, the hereditary force of evil, the atmosphere of Gentile society, and added to all this, as we discover from chapter v. 6, the persuasions of the sophistical teachers now beginning to infest the Church, tended to draw the Asian Christians back to Gentile ways and to break down the moral distinctions that separated them from the pagan world.
Amongst the discarded vices of the forsaken Gentile life, the following are here distinguished: lying, theft, anger, idle speech, malice, impurity, greed. These may be reduced to sins of temper, of word, and of act. Let us discuss them in the order in which they are brought before us.
Διὸ ἀποθέμενοι τὸ ψεῦδος. Despite the commentators, we must
hold to it that the lie, the falsehood is objective and concrete; not lying,
or falsehood as a subjective act, habit, or quality,—which would have
been rather ψευδολογία
(comp. μωρολογία, v. 4; and
St Paul applies here the words of
Believers in Christ represent a communion which in principle embraces all men. The human race is one family in Christ. For any man to lie to his fellow is, virtually, to lie to himself. It is as if the eye should conspire to cheat the hand, or the one hand play false to the other. Truth is the right which each man claims instinctively from his neighbour; it is the tacit compact that binds together all intelligences. Without neighbourly and brotherly love perfect truthfulness is scarcely possible. “Self-respect will never destroy self-seeking, which will always find in self-interest a side accessible to the temptations of falsehood” (Harless).
2. Like the first precept, the second is borrowed
There is no surer way of tempting the devil to tempt
us than to brood over our wrongs. Every cherished
grudge is a “place given” to the tempter, a new
entrenchment for the Evil One in his war against the
soul, from which he may shoot his “fire-tipped darts”
(vi. 16). Let us dismiss with each day the day’s vexations,
commending as evening falls our cares and griefs
to the Divine compassion and seeking, as for ourselves,
Still the apostle says: “Be angry, and sin not.” He does not condemn anger in itself, nor wholly forbid it a place within the breast of the saint. Wrath is a glorious attribute of God,—perilous, indeed, for the best of men; but he who cannot be angry has no strength for good. The apostle knew this holy passion, the flame of Jehovah that burns unceasingly against the false and foul and cruel. But he knew its dangers—how easily an ardent soul kindled to exasperation forgets the bounds of wisdom and love; how strong and jealous a curb the temper needs, lest just indignation turn to sin, and Satan gain over us a double advantage, first by the wicked provocation and then by the uncontrolled resentment it excites.
3. From anger we pass to theft.
The eighth commandment is put here in a form
indicating that some of the apostle’s readers had been
habitual sinners against it. Literally his words read:
“Let him that steals play the thief no more.” The
Greek present participle does not, however, necessarily
imply a pursuit now going on, but an habitual or
characteristic pursuit, that by which the agent was
known and designated: “Let the thief no longer steal!”
From the lowest dregs of the Greek cities—from its
profligate and criminal classes—the gospel had drawn
its converts (comp.
4. We have passed from speech to temper, and from temper to act; in the warning of verses 29, 30 we come back to speech again.
We doubt whether corrupt talk is here intended. That
comes in for condemnation in verses 2 and 3 of the next
chapter. The Greek adjective is the same that is used
of the “worthless fruit” of the “worthless [good-for-nothing]
tree” in
Jesus Christ laid great stress upon the exercise of the gift of speech. “By thy words,” He said to His disciples, “thou shalt be justified, and by thy words condemned.” The possession of a human tongue is an immense responsibility. Infinite good or mischief lies in its power. (With the tongue we should include the pen, as being the tongue’s deputy.) Who shall say how great is the sum of injury, the waste of time, the irritation, the enfeeblement of mind and dissipation of spirit, the destruction of Christian fellowship that is due to thoughtless speech and writing? The apostle does not simply forbid injurious words, he puts an embargo on all that is not positively useful. It is not enough to say: “My chatter does nobody harm; if there is no good in it, there is no evil.” He replies: “If you cannot speak to profit, be silent till you can.”
Not that St Paul requires all Christian speech to be grave and serious. Many a true word is spoken in jest; and “grace” may be “given to the hearers” by words clothed in the grace of a genial fancy and playful wit, as well as in the direct enforcement of solemn themes. It is the mere talk, whether frivolous or pompous—spoken from the pulpit or the easy chair—the incontinence of tongue, the flux of senseless, graceless, unprofitable utterance that St Paul desires to arrest: “let it not proceed out of your mouth.” Such speech must not “escape the fence of the teeth.” It is an oppression to every serious listener; it is an injury to the utterer himself. Above all, it “grieves the Holy Spirit.”
The witness of the Holy Spirit is the seal of God’s
possession in us; See ch. i. 13, 14, and 18 (last clause).
5. In his previous reproofs the apostle has glanced
in various ways at love as the remedy of our moral disorders
and defects. Falsehood, anger, theft, misuse of
the tongue involve disregard of the welfare of others; if
they do not spring from positive ill-will, they foster and
aggravate it. It is now time to deal directly with this
evil that assumes so many forms, the most various of
our sins and companion to every other: “Let all bitterness,
The last of these terms is the most typical. Malice is badness of disposition, the aptness to envy and hatred, which apart from any special occasion is always ready to break out in bitterness and wrath. Bitterness is malice sharpened to a point and directed against the exasperating object. Wrath and anger are synonymous, the former being the passionate outburst of resentment in rage, the latter the settled indignation of the aggrieved soul: this passion was put under restraint already in verses 26, 27. Clamour and railing give audible expression to these and their kindred tempers. Clamour is the loud self-assertion of the angry man, who will make every one hear his grievance; while the railer carries the war of the tongue into his enemy’s camp, and vents his displeasure in abuse and insult.
These sins of speech were rife in heathen society; and there were some amongst Paul’s readers, doubtless, who found it hard to forgo their indulgence. Especially difficult was this when Christians suffered all manner of evil from their heathen neighbours and former friends; it cost a severe struggle to be silent and “keep the mouth as with a bridle” under fierce and malicious taunts. Never to return evil for evil and railing for railing, but contrariwise blessing,—this was one of the lessons most difficult to flesh and blood.
Kindness in act, tenderheartedness of feeling are to
take the place of malice with its brood of bitter
passions. Where injury used to be met with reviling
and insult retorted in worse insult, the men of the
new life will be found “forgiving one another, even
as God in Christ forgave” them. Here we touch the
spring of Christian virtue, the master motive in the
The commencement of the new chapter at this point
makes an unfortunate division; for its first two verses
are in close consecution with the last verse of chapter iv.
By kindness and pitifulness of heart, by readiness to
forgive, God’s “beloved children” will “show themselves
imitators” of their Father. The apostle echoes
the saying of his Master, in which the law of His
kingdom was laid down: “Love your enemies, and
do good, and lend never despairing; and your reward
shall be great, and you shall be called children of the
Highest: for He is kind to the thankless and evil.
Be ye therefore pitiful, as your Father is pitiful”
(
In chapter iv. 32–v. 2 the Father’s love and the
Son’s self-sacrifice are spoken of in terms precisely
parallel. They are altogether one in quality. Christ
does not by His sacrifice persuade an angry Father
to love His children; it is the Divine compassion in
Hence the love which follows Christ’s example, is love wedded with duty. It finds in an ordered devotion to the good of men the means to fulfil the all-holy Will and to present in turn its “offering to God.” Such love will be above the mere pleasing of men, above sentimentalism and indulgence; it will aim higher than secular ideals and temporal contentment. It regards men in their kinship to God and obligation to His law, and seeks to make them worthy of their calling. All human duties, for those who love God, are subordinate to this; all commands are summed up in one: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” The apostle pronounced the first and last word of his teaching when he said: Walk in love, as the Christ also loved us.
6. Above all others, one sin stamped the Gentile world of that time with infamy,—its uncleanness.
St Paul has stigmatized this already in the burning
words of verse 19. There we saw this vice in its
The “good-for-nothing speech” of chapter iv. 29 comes up once more for condemnation in the foolish speech and jesting of this passage. The former is the idle talk of a stupid, the latter of a clever man. Both, under the conditions of heathen society, were tainted with foulness. Loose speech easily becomes low speech. Wit, unchastened by reverence, finds a tempting field for its exercise in the delicate relations of life, and displays its skill in veiled indecencies and jests that desecrate the purer feelings, while they avoid open grossness.
St Paul’s word for “jesting” is one of the singular
terms of this epistle. By etymology it denotes
a well-turned style of expression, the versatile speech
of one who can touch lightly on many themes and
aptly blend the grave and gay. This social gift was
prized amongst the polished Greeks. But it was a
faculty so commonly abused, that the word describing
Trench: N. T. Synonyms, § xxxiv.
In place of senseless prating and wanton jests—things unbefitting to a rational creature, much more to a saint—the Asian Greeks are to find in thanksgiving employment for their ready tongue. St Paul’s rule is not one of mere prohibition. The versatile tongue that disported itself in unhallowed and frivolous utterance, may be turned into a precious instrument for God’s service. Let the fire of Divine love touch the jester’s lips, and that mouth will show forth His praise which once poured out dishonour to its Maker and shame to His image in man.
7. At the end of the Ephesian catalogue of vices, as at the beginning (iv. 19), uncleanness is joined with covetousness, or greed.
This, too, is “not even to be named amongst you,
as becometh saints.” Money! property! these are the
words dearest and most familiar in the mouths of a
large class of men of the world, the only themes on
The apostle classes the covetous man with the fornicator and the unclean, amongst those who by their worship of the shameful idols of the god of this world exclude themselves from their “inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.”
A serious warning this for all who handle the world’s wealth. They have a perilous war to wage, and an enemy who lurks for them at every step in their path. Will they prove themselves masters of their business, or its slaves? Will they escape the golden leprosy,—the passion for accumulation, the lust of property? None are found more dead to the claims of humanity and kindred, none further from the kingdom of Christ and God, none more “closely wrapped” within their “sensual fleece” than rich men who have prospered by the idolatry of gain. Dives has chosen and won his kingdom. He “receives in his lifetime his good things”; afterwards he must look for “torments.”
“We are members one of another....
“Let the thief labour ... that he may have whereof to give to him that hath need....
“Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption....
“Forgive each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you. Be ye imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, even as the Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God....
“No fornicator, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, which is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.”—Eph. iv. 25–v. 6.
The apostle does not condemn these sins as being
contrary to God’s law: that is taken for granted. But
the legal condemnation was ineffectual (
Nor does the apostle make use of the principles of philosophical ethics, which in their general form were familiar to him as to all educated men of the day. He says nothing of the rule of nature and right reason, of the intrinsic fitness, the harmony and beauty of virtue; nothing of expediency as the guide of life, of the inward contentment that comes from well-doing, of the wise calculation by which happiness is determined and the lower is subordinated to the higher good. St Paul nowhere discountenances motives and sanctions of this sort; he contravenes none of the lines of argument by which reason is brought to the aid of duty, and conscience vindicates itself against passion and false self-interest. Indeed, there are maxims in his teaching which remind us of each of the two great schools of ethics, and that make room in the Christian theory of life both for the philosophy of experience and that of intuition. The true theory recognizes, indeed, the experimental and evolutional as well as the fixed and intrinsic in morality, and supplies their synthesis.
But it is not the apostle’s business to adjust his
position to that of Stoics and Epicureans, or to unfold
a new philosophy; but to teach the way of the new
life. His Gentile disciples had been untruthful, passionate
in temper, covetous, licentious: the gospel
which he preached had turned them from these sins
to God; from the same gospel he draws the motives
and convictions which are to shape their future life and
The originality of Christian ethics, we repeat, does not lie in its detailed precepts. There is not one, it may be, even of the noblest maxims of Jesus that had not been uttered by some previous moralist. With the New Testament in our hands, it may be possible to collect from non-Christian sources—from Greek philosophers, from the Jewish Talmud, from Egyptian sages and Hindoo poets, from Buddha and Confucius—a moral anthology which thus sifted out of the refuse of antiquity, like particles of iron drawn by the magnet, may bear comparison with the ethics of Christianity. If Christ is indeed the Son of man, we should expect Him to gather into one all that is highest in the thoughts and aspirations of mankind. Addressing the Athenians on Mars’ Hill, the apostle could appeal to “certain of your own poets” in support of his doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. The noblest minds in all ages witness to Jesus Christ and prove themselves to be, in some sort, of His kindred.
It is Christ in us, it is the personal fellowship of the
soul with Him and with the living God through Him,
that forms the vital and constitutive factor of Christianity.
Here is the secret of its moral efficacy. The
Christ is the centre root and of the race; He is the
There is, therefore, an evangelical ethics, a Christian
science of life. “The law of the Spirit of life in
Christ Jesus” has a system and method of its own.
It has a rational solution and explanation to render
for our moral problems. But its solution is given,
as St Paul and as his Master loved to give it, in
practice, not in theory. It teaches the art of living to
multitudes to whom the names of ethics and moral
science are unknown. Those who understand the
method of Christ best are commonly too busy in its
practice to theorize about it. They are physicians
tending the sick and the dying, not professors in some
school of medicine. Yet professors have their use, as
well as practitioners. The task of developing a Christian
science of life, of exhibiting the truth of revelation in
its theoretical bearings and its relations to the thought
of the age, forms a part of the practical duties of the
Church and touches deeply the welfare of souls. For
other times this work has been nobly accomplished
by Christian thinkers. Shall we not pray the Lord of
There emerge in this exhortation four distinct principles, which lay at the basis of St Paul’s views of life and conduct.
I. In the first place, the fundamental truth of the Fatherhood of God, “Be imitators of God,” he writes, “as beloved children.” And in chapter iv. 24: “Put on the new man, which was created after God.”
Man’s life has its law, for it has its source, in the nature of the Eternal. Behind our race-instincts and the laws imposed on us in the long struggle for existence, behind those imperatives of practical reason involved in the structure of our intelligence, is the presence and the active will of Almighty God our heavenly Father. His image we see in the Son of man.
Here is the fountainhead of truth, from which the
two great streams of philosophical thought upon morals
have diverged. If man is the child of a Being
absolutely good, then moral goodness belongs to the
essence of his nature; it is discoverable in the instincts
of his reason and will. Were not our nature warped
by sin, such reasoning must have commanded immediate
assent and led to consistent and self-evident
results. Again, if man is the child of God, the finite
of the Infinite, his moral character must, presumably,
have been in the beginning germinal rather than complete,
needing—even apart from sin and its
The command to “be imitators of God” makes
personality the sovereign element in life. If consciousness
is a finite and passing phenomenon, if God be
but a name for the sum of the impersonal laws that
regulate the universe, for the “stream of tendency”
in the worlds, Father and love are meaningless terms
applied to the Supreme and religion dissolves into
an impalpable mist. Is the universe governed by
personal will, or by impersonal force? Is reason, or
is gravitation the index to the nature of the Absolute?
This is the vital question of modern thought. The
latter is the answer given by a large, if not a preponderant
body of philosophical opinion in our own
day,—as it was given, virtually, by the natural philosophers
of Greece in the dawn of science. Man’s
triumphs over nature and the splendour of his discoveries
in the physical realm bewilder his reason.
The scientists, like other conquerors, have been
intoxicated with victory. The universe, it seemed,
was about to yield to them its last secrets; they were
prepared to analyze the human soul and resolve the
conception of God into its material elements. Religion
and conscience, however, prove to be intractable
subjects in the physical laboratory; they are coming
out of the crucible unchanged and refined. We are
able by this time to take a more sober measure of the
possibilities of the scientific method, and to see what
The great tide of joy, the victorious energy which the sense of God’s love brings into the life of a Christian, is evidence of its reality. The believer is a child walking in the light of his Father’s smile—dependent, ignorant, but the object of an Almighty love. A thousand tokens speak to him of the Divine care; his tasks and trials are sweetened by the confidence that they are appointed for wise ends beyond his present knowledge. To another in that same house there is no heavenly Father, no unseen hand that guides, no gleam of a brighter and purer day lighting up its dull chambers. There are human companions, weak, erring and wearying like oneself. There is work to do, with the night coming swiftly; and the brave heart girds itself to duty, finding in the service of man its motive and employment—but, alas, with how poor success and how faint a hope!
It is not the loss of strength for human service,
nor the dying out of joy which unbelief entails, that is
II. The solidarity of mankind in Christ furnishes the
apostle with a powerful lever for raising the ethical
standard of his readers. The thought that “we are
members one of another” forbids deceit. That he
may “have whereof to give to the needy” is the
purpose that provokes the thief to industry. The
desire to “give grace” to the hearers and to “build
them up” in truth and goodness imparts seriousness
and elevation to social intercourse. The irritations
and injuries we inflict on each other, with or without
purpose, furnish occasion for us to “be kind one to
another, good-hearted, forgiving yourselves”—for this
is the expression the apostle uses in chapter iv. 32,
and in
Showing-grace is what the apostle literally says here,
speaking both of human and Divine
forgiveness. Χαριζόμενοι ἐαυτοῖς,
καθὼς καὶ ὁ Θεὸς ἐν Χριστῷ ἐχαρίσατο ὑμῖν.
So in
“Even as God in Christ forgave you.” And how
did God forgive? Not by a grand imperial decree, as
of some monarch too exalted to resent the injuries of
men or to inquire into their futile proceedings. Had
such forgiveness been possible to Divine justice, it
could have wrought in us no real salvation. Our
forgiveness is that of God in Christ. The Forgiver
has sat down by the prisoner’s side, has felt his misery
and the force of his temptations, and in everything but
the actual sin has made Himself one with the sinner,
even to bearing the extreme penalty of his guilt. In
the act of making sacrifice, Jesus prayed for those
that slew Him: “Father, forgive them; they know
not what they do!” This intercession breathed the
spirit of the new forgiveness. There is a real remission
of sins, a release granted justly and upon
due satisfaction; but it is the act of justice charged
with love, of a justice as tender and considerate as it
is strong, and which eagerly takes account of all that
To proclaim by word and deed this forgiveness of God to the sinful world is the vocation of the Church. And where she does thus declare it, by whatever means or ministry, Christ’s promise to her is verified: “Whose-soever sins ye remit, they are remitted to them.” We may so reconcile men to ourselves, as to bring them back to God. Has some one done you a wrong? there is your opportunity of saving a soul from death and hiding a multitude of sins. Thus Christ used the great wrong we all did Him. It is your privilege to show the wrong-doer that you and he are made one by the blood of Christ.
“Walk in love,” St Paul says, “as the Christ also
loved us and gave up Himself for us a sacrifice.”
When the apostle writes the Christ, he points us along
the whole line of the revelation of the
cross. Comp. pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.
In studying this epistle, we have felt increasingly that the Church is the centre of humanity. The love born and nourished in the household of faith goes out into the world with a universal mission. The solidarity of moral interests that is realized there, embraces all the kindreds of the earth. The incarnation of Christ knits all flesh into one redeemed family. The continents and races of mankind are members one of another, with Jesus Christ for head. We are brothers and sisters of humanity: He our elder brother, and God our common Father in heaven,—His Father and ours.
Auguste Comte writes in his System of Positive
Polity: “The promises of supernatural religion appealed
exclusively to man’s selfish instincts.... The sympathetic
instincts found no place in the theological
synthesis.” Vol. iv., pp. 22, 41 (Eng. Trans.). Comte, vol. iv., p. 30.
In the darkest hour of Israel’s oppression and of
international hate, one of her great prophets thus
described the triumph of supernatural religion: “In
that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and
Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth; for that
the Lord of hosts hath blessed them, saying, Blessed
be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my
hands, and Israel my inheritance” (
III. Another of St Paul’s ruling ideas lying at the basis of Christian ethics, is his conception of man’s future destiny. The apostle warns his readers that they “grieve not the Holy Spirit, in whom they were sealed till the day of redemption.” He tells them that “the impure and the covetous have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.”
There is thus disclosed a world beyond the world,
a life growing out of life, an eternal and invisible
kingdom of whose possession the Spirit that lives in
Christian men is the earnest and firstfruits. This
kingdom is the joint inheritance of the sons of God,
brethren with Christ and in Christ, who are conformed
to His image and found worthy to “stand before the
Son of man.” Those are excluded from the inheritance,
It is true that the wicked flourish and spread themselves like green trees in the sunshine; and the covetous boast of their hearts’ desire. To see this was the trial of ancient faith; and the good man had to charge himself constantly that he should not fret because of evil-doers. It required an heroic faith to believe in God’s kingdom and righteousness, when the visible course of things made all against them, and there was no clear light beyond. God’s saints had to learn first that God is Himself the sufficient good, and must be trusted to do right. But this was the faith of defence rather than of victory,—of endurance, not enthusiasm. In the knowledge of Christ’s victory over death and entrance on our behalf into the heavenly world, “in hope of life eternal which God who cannot lie hath promised,” men have fought against their own sins, have struggled for the right and spent themselves to save their fellows with a vigour and success never witnessed before, and in numbers far exceeding those that all other creeds and systems have enlisted in the holy cause of humanity.
Human reason had guessed and hope had dreamed
Our bodily dress, we now learn, is one with the spirit that it infolds. We shall lay it aside only to resume it,—transfigured, but with a form and impress continuous with its present being. This identical self, the same both in its outward and inward personality, will appear before the tribunal of Christ, that it may “receive the things done in the body.” This announcement gives reasonableness and distinctness to the expectation of future judgement. The judgement assumes, with its solemn grandeur, a matter-of-fact reality, an immediate bearing on the daily conduct of life, which lends a powerful reinforcement to the conscience, while it supplies a fitting and glorious conclusion to our course as moral beings.
IV. Finally, the atonement of the cross stamps its
own character and spirit on the entire ethics of
Christianity. The Fatherhood of God, the unity and
solidarity of mankind, the issues of eternal life or death
The fact that Christ “gave Himself up for us an offering and sacrifice to God”—gave Himself, as it is put elsewhere, “for our sins”—throws an awful light upon the nature of human transgression. The blood spilt in the strife with our sin and shed to wash out its stain, reveals its foulness and malignity. All that inspired men had taught, that good men had believed and felt and penitent men confessed in regard to the evil of human sin, is more than verified by the sacrifice which the Holy One of God has undergone in order to put it away. It was felt that “the blood of bulls and goats could never take away sins,” that the sacrifices man could offer for himself, or the creatures on his behalf, were ineffectual; the guilt was too real to be expiated in this fashion, the wound too deep to be healed by those poor appliances. But who had suspected that such a remedy as this was needed, and forthcoming? How deep the resentment of eternal Justice against the transgressions of men, if the blood of God’s own Son alone could make propitiation! How rank the offence against the Divine holiness, if to purge its abomination the vessel containing the most sweet fragrance of His sinless nature must be broken! What tears of contrition, what cleansing fires of hate against our own sins, what scorn of their baseness, what stern resolves against them are awakened by the sight of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ!
This negative side of the ethical bearing of Christ’s
sacrifice is implied in the words of the apostle in the
second verse, and in the contrast indicated between
Let the gospel of Christ’s kingdom be preached in word and deed to all nations, let the love of Christ be brought to bear upon the great masses of mankind, and the time of the world’s salvation will be come. Its sin will be hated, forsaken, forgiven. Its social evils will be banished; its weapons of war turned to ploughshares and pruning hooks. Its scattered races and nations will be reunited in the obedience of faith, and formed into one Christian confederacy and commonwealth of the peoples, a peaceful kingdom of the Son of God’s love.
“Be not ye therefore partakers with them; for ye were once darkness, but are now light in the Lord; walk as children of light (for the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth), proving what is well-pleasing unto the Lord; and have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather even reprove them. For the things which are done by them in secret it is a shame even to speak of; but all things when they are reproved are made manifest by the light: for everything that is made manifest is light. Wherefore He saith:—
In wrath or promise, in hope of life eternal or in
the fearful looking for of judgement they, and we, must
partake. This future participation depends upon present
Verses 9 and 10 delineate the character of the children of the light: verses 11–14 set forth their influence upon the surrounding darkness. Into these two divisions the exposition of this paragraph naturally falls.
I. “The fruit of the light” (not of the Spirit) is the
true text of verse 9, as it stands in the older Greek
copies, Versions, and Fathers. Calvin showed his
judgement and independence in preferring this reading
to that of the received Greek text. Similarly
Bengel, Mr. Wesley adopted this and other emendations from Bengel,
“that great light of the Christian world,” in the translation accompanying
his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament. He there
supplied the Methodist preachers with many of the most valuable
improvements made in the Revised Version, a hundred years before
the time.
“You are light in the Lord,” the apostle said; “walk as children of the light.” But his readers might ask: “What does this mean? It is poetry: let us have it translated into plain prose. How shall we walk as children of the light? Show us the path.”—“I will tell you,” the apostle answers: “the fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth. Walk in these ways; let your life bear this fruit; and you will be true children of the light of God. So living, you will find out what it is that pleases God, and how joyful a thing it is to please Him (ver. 10). Your life will then be free from all complicity with the works of darkness. It will shine with a brightness clear and penetrating, that will put to shame the works of darkness and transform the darkness itself. It will speak with a voice that all must hear, bidding them awake from the sleep of sin to see in Christ their light of life.” Such is the setting in which this delightful definition stands.
But it is more than a definition. While this sentence
The principle that religion is the basis of moral virtue, is one that many moralists disputed in St Paul’s time; and it has fallen into some discredit in our own. In philosophical theory, and to a large extent in popular maxim and belief, it is assumed that faith and morals, character and creed, are not only distinct but independent things and that there is no necessary connexion between the two. Christians are themselves to blame for this fallacy, through the discrepancy not seldom visible between their creed and life. Our narrowness of view and the harshness of our ethical judgements have helped to foster this grave error.
Great Christian teachers have spoken of the virtues
of the heathen as “splendid sins.” But Christ and
His apostles never said so. He said: “Other sheep
I have, which are not of this fold.” And they said:
“In every nation he that feareth God and worketh
righteousness, is accepted of Him.” The Christian
creed has no jealousy in regard to human excellence.
“Whatsoever things are true and honourable and just
and pure,” wherever and in whomsoever they are
found, our faith honours and delights in them, and
accepts them to the utmost of their worth. But then
it claims them all for its own,—as the fruit of the one
“true light which lighteth every man.” Wherever
this fruit appears, we know that that light has been,
though its ways are past finding out. Through secret
All goodness has one source; for, said Jesus, “there is none good but one, that is God.” The channels may be tortuous, obstructed and obscure: the stream is always one. There is nothing more touching, and nothing more encouraging to our faith in God’s universal love and His will that all men should be saved, than to see, as we do sometimes under conditions most adverse and in spots the most unlikely, features of moral beauty and Christlike goodness appearing like springs in the desert or flowers blooming in Alpine snows,—signs of the universal light,
The action of God’s grace in Christ is by no means
limited to the sphere of its recognized working. All
the more earnestly on this account do we vindicate
this grace against those who deny its necessity or
the permanence of its moral influence. The fruit,
in the main, they approve. But they would cut down
the plant from which it came; they seek to quench
the light under which it grew. They are like men
who should take you to some lofty tree that has
flourished for ages rooted in the rock, and who should
say: “See how wide its branches and how stout its
Moral effects do not follow upon their causes as rapidly as physical effects: they follow as certainly. We live largely upon the accumulated ethical capital of our forefathers. When that is spent, we are left to our intrinsic poverty of soul, to our faithlessness and feebleness. The scepticism of one generation bears fruit in the immorality of the next, or the next after that; the unbelief and cynicism of the teacher in the vice of his disciple. Such fruit of blasting and mildew the decay of faith has never failed to bear.
The corresponding truth will be at once acknowledged.
There is no real religion without virtue. If the godly
man is not a good man, if he is not a sincere and pure-hearted
man, “that man’s religion is vain”: no matter
In Christ’s garden there forms in clustered beauty and perfectness the ripe growth of virtue, which in the sunshine of His love and under the freshening breath of His Spirit sends forth its spices and “yieldeth its fruit every month.” In it there abide goodness, righteousness, truth—these three; and who shall say which of them is greatest?
I. Goodness stands first, as the most visible and obvious form of Christian excellence,—that which every one looks for in a religious man, and which every one admires when it is to be seen. Righteousness, regarded by itself, is not so readily appreciated. There is something austere and forbidding in it. “For a righteous man scarcely would one die”—you respect, even revere him; but you do not love him: “but for the good man peradventure, one would even dare to die.”
Christian goodness is the sanctification of the heart
and its affections, renewed and governed by the love
of God in Christ. It is, notwithstanding, but seldom
inculcated in the New
Testament; The word belongs to Paul’s vocabulary; it is found besides in
2. And righteousness.
This second and central definition applies a searching test to all spurious forms of goodness, superficial or sentimental,—to the goodness of mere good manners, or good nature. The principle of righteousness, fully understood, includes everything in moral worth, and is often used to denote in one word the entire fruit of God’s grace in man. For righteousness is the sanctification of the conscience. It is loyalty to God’s holy and perfect law. It is no mere outward keeping of formal rules, such as the legal righteousness of Judaism, no submission to necessity or calculation of advantages: it is a love of the law in a man’s inmost spirit; it is the quality of a heart one with that law, reconciled to it as it is reconciled to God Himself in Jesus Christ.
At the bottom, therefore, righteousness and goodness
are one. Each is the counterface and complement of
the other. Righteousness is to goodness as the strong
backbone of principle, the firm hand and the vigorous
grasp of duty, the steadfast foot that plants itself on the
eternal ground of the right and true and stands against
a world’s assault. Goodness without righteousness is
a weak and fitful sentiment: righteousness without
This also, this above all is “the fruit of the light.” Two watchwords we have from the lips of Jesus, two mottoes of His own life and mission,—the one given at the end, the other at the beginning of His course: “Greater love hath none than this, that one lay down his life for his friends”; and, “Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” By a double flame was He consumed a sacrifice upon the cross,—by the passion of His zeal for God’s righteousness, and by the passion of His pity for mankind. In that twofold light we see light, and become “light in the Lord.” Therefore the fruit of the light, the moral product of a true faith in the gospel, is in all goodness and righteousness.
There is a danger of merging the latter in the former of these attributes. Evangelical piety is credited with an excess of the sentimental and emotional disposition, cultivated at the expense of the more sterling elements of character. High principle, scrupulous honour, stern fidelity to duty are no less essential to the image of Christ in the soul than are warm feeling and zealous devotion to His service. Jesus Christ the righteous, as His apostles loved to call Him, is the pattern of a manly faith, up to which we must grow in all things. “He is the propitiation for our sins.” Never was there an act of such unswerving integrity and absolute loyalty to the law of right as the sacrifice of Calvary. God forbid that we should magnify love at the expense of law, or make good feeling a substitute for duty.
3. Truth comes last in this enumeration, for it signifies the inward reality and depth of the other two.
Now, it is only children of the light, only men thoroughly good and upright who can, in this strict sense, be men of truth. So long as any malice or iniquity is left in our nature, we have something to conceal. We cannot afford to be sincere. We are compelled to pay, by very shame, the degrading tribute which vice renders to virtue, the homage of hypocrisy. But find a man whose intellect, whose heart and will, tried at whatever point, ring sound and true, in whom there is no affectation, no make-believe, no pretence or exaggeration, no discrepancy, no discord in the music of his life and thought, “an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile”—there is a saint for you, and a man of God; there is one whom you may “grapple to your soul with hoops of steel.”
Truth is the hall-mark of entire sanctification; it is
the highest and rarest attainment of the Christian life.
It is equally the charm of an innocent, unspoilt childhood,
and of a ripe and purified old age. The apostle
John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” is the most
perfect embodiment, after his Master, of this consummating
We must beware of giving a subjective and merely
personal aspect to this divine quality. While truth is
the unity of the outward and inward, of heart and act
and word in the man, it is at the same time the agreement
of the man with the reality of things as they exist
in God. The former kind of truth rests upon the
latter; the subjective upon the objective order. The
truth of God makes us true. We magnify our own
sincerity, until it becomes vitiated and pretentious. In
our eagerness to realize and express our own convictions,
we give too little pains to form them upon a
sound basis; we make a great virtue of speaking out
what is in our hearts, but take small heed of what
comes in to the heart, and speak out of a loose self-confidence
and idolatry of our own opinions. So the
Pharisees were true, who called Christ an impostor.
So every careless slanderer, and scandalmonger credulous
of evil, who believes the lies he propagates.
F. W. Robertson: Sermons (First Series), xix., on “The Kingdom
of the Truth.”
“In all goodness and righteousness and truth,” says the apostle. Let us seek them all. We are apt to become specialists in virtue, as in other departments of life. Men will endeavour even to compensate by extreme efforts in one direction for deficiencies in some other direction, which they scarcely desire to make good. So they grow out of shape, into oddities and moral malformations. There is a want of balance and of finish about a multitude of Christian lives, even of those who have long and steadily pursued the way of faith. We have sweetness without strength, and strength without gentleness, and truth spoken without love, and words of passionate zeal without accuracy and heedfulness.
All this is infinitely sad, and infinitely damaging to the cause of our religion.
Let us judge ourselves, that we be not judged by the
Lord. Let us count no wrong a trifle. Let us never
imagine that our defects in one kind will be atoned for
by excellencies in another. Our friends may say this,
II. The effect upon surrounding darkness of the light of God in Christian lives is described in verses 11–14, in words which it remains for us briefly to examine.
Verse 12 distinguishes “the things secretly done” by the Gentiles, “of which it is a shame even to speak,” from the open and manifest forms of evil in which they invite their Christian neighbours to join (ver. 11). Instead of doing this and “having fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness,” they must “rather reprove them.” Silent absence, or abstinence is not enough. Where sin is open to rebuke, it should at all hazards be rebuked. On the other hand, St Paul does not warrant Christians in prying into the hidden sins of the world around them and playing the moral detective. Publicity is not a remedy for all evils, but a great aggravation of some, and the surest means of disseminating them. “It is a shame”—a disgrace to our common nature, and a grievous peril to the young and innocent—to fill the public prints with the nauseous details of crime and to taint the air with its putridities.
“But all things,” the apostle says—whether it be
those open works of darkness, profitless of good, which
expose themselves to direct conviction, or the depths of
Satan that hide their infamy from the light of day—“all
things being reproved by the light, are made
manifest” (ver. 13). The fruit of the light convicts
the unfruitful works of darkness. The daily life of a
Christian man amongst men of the world is a perpetual
reproof, that tells against secret sins of which no word
“This is the condemnation,” said Jesus, “that light is come into the world.” And this condemnation every one who walks in Christ’s steps, and breathes His Spirit amid the corruptions of the world, is carrying on, more frequently in silence than by spoken argument. Our unconscious and spontaneous influence is the most real and effective part of it. Life is the light of men—words only as the index of the life from which they spring. Just so far as our lives touch the conscience of others and reveal the difference between darkness and light, so far do we hold forth the word of life and carry on the Holy Spirit’s work in convincing the world of sin. “Let your light so shine.”
This manifestation leads to a transformation: “For everything that is made manifest is light” (ver. 13). “You are light in the Lord,” St Paul says to his converted Gentile readers,—you who were “once darkness,” once wandering in the lusts and pleasures of the heathen around you, without hope and without God. The light of the gospel disclosed, and then dispelled the darkness of that former time; and so it may be with your still heathen kindred, through the light you bring to them. So it will be with the night of sin that is spread over the world. The light which shines upon sin-laden and sorrowful hearts, shines on them to change them into its own nature. The manifested is light: in other words, if men can be made to see the true nature of their sin, they will forsake it. If the light can but penetrate their conscience, it will save them. “Wherefore He saith:—
With this song on her lips the Church went forth, clad in the armour of light, strong in the joy of salvation; and darkness and the works of darkness fled before her.
“Look therefore carefully how ye walk, not as unwise, but as wise; redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
“And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit; speaking one to another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father; subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ.”—Eph. v. 15–21.
So far St Paul’s renewed exhortation, in verses
15–17, inculcates care and wary discretion,—the skill
A striking contrast thus arises between the sobriety and the excitement that mark the life of grace. We see with what strictness we must watch over ourselves, and guard the character and interests of the Church; and with what joyousness and holy freedom we may take our part in its communion. Temperament and constitution modify these injunctions in their personal application. The Holy Spirit does not enable us all to speak with equal fervour and freedom, nor to sing with the same tunefulness. His power operates in the limbs of Christ’s body “according to the measure of each single part.” But the self-same Spirit works in both these contrasted ways,—in the sanguine and the melancholic disposition, in the demonstrative and in the reserved, in the quick play of fancy and the brightness and impulsiveness of youth no less than in the sober gait and solid sense of riper age. Let us see how the two opposite aspects of Christian experience are set out in the apostle’s words.
I. First of all, upon the one side, heedfulness is
enjoined. The children of light must use the light to
According to the preferable (Revised) order of the words, the qualifying adverb “carefully” belongs to the “look,” not to the “walk.” The circumspect look precedes the wise step. The spot is marked on which the foot is to be planted; the eye ranges right and left and takes in the bearings of the new position, forecasting its possibilities. “Look before you leap,” our sage proverb says. According to the carefulness of the look, the success of the leap is likely to be.
There is no word in the epistle more apposite than this to
We are too restless to think, too impatient to learn.
Everything is sacrificed to speed. The telegraph and
the daily newspaper symbolize the age. The public
ear loves to be caught quickly and with new sensations:
a premium is set on carelessness and hurry. Earnest
men, eager for the triumph of a good cause, push
forward with unsifted statements and unweighed denunciations,
that discredit Christian advocacy and
wound the cause of truth and charity. Time, thus
wronged and driven beyond her pace, has her revenge;
she deals hardly with these light judgements of the
hour. They are as the chaff which the wind carrieth
away. After all, it is still truth that lives; thorough
work that lasts; accuracy that hits the mark. And
the time-servers are “unwise,” both intellectually and
morally. They are most unwise who think to succeed
in life’s high calling without self-distrust, and without
In the evil of his own times St Paul sees a special
reason for heedfulness: “Walk not as unwise, but as
wise, buying up the opportunity, because the days are
evil.” In
As wise men, reading thoughtfully the signs of the
times, the Asian Christians will “redeem the [present]
season.” They will use to the utmost the light given
them. They will employ every means to increase their
knowledge of Christ, to confirm their faith and the
habits of their spiritual life. They are like men expecting
a siege, who strengthen their fortifications and
furbish their weapons and practise their drill and lay
up store of supplies, that they may “stand in the
Within a year after this epistle was penned, Rome
was burnt and the crime of its burning washed out,
at Nero’s caprice, in Christian blood. In four years
more St Paul and St Peter had died a martyr’s death
at Rome; and Nero had fallen by the assassin’s hand.
At once the Empire was convulsed with civil war;
and the year 68–69 was known as that of the Four
Emperors. Amid the storms threatening the ruin of
the Roman State, the Jewish war against Rome was
carried on, ending in the year 70 with the capture of
Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish temple
and nationality. These were the days of tribulation
of which our Lord spoke, “such as had not been since
the beginning of the world” (
When men amid evil days and portents of danger
must be told not to be “foolish” nor “drunken with
wine,” one is disposed to tax them with levity. It was
difficult for these Asian Greeks to take life seriously,
and to realize the gravity of their situation. St Paul
appeals to them by their duty, still more than by their
danger: “Be not foolish, but understand what the will
of the Lord is.” As he bade the Thessalonians consider
that chastity was not matter of choice and of their own
advantage only, it was “God’s will” (1 Ep. iv. 3), so
Nowhere does the apostle say so much of “the will
of God” in regard to the dispensation of grace as he
does in this epistle. See ch. i. 5–11, ii. 21, iii. 11, v. 10, vi. 6; comp.
II. There were converted thieves in the Ephesian
Church, who still needed to be warned against their
old propensities (iv. 28); there were men who had
been sorcerers and fortune-tellers (
In view of the following context (vv. 19–21), and
remembering how the Lord’s table was defiled by excess
at Corinth (
The eastern coast of the Ægean is an ancient home of the vine. And the Greeks of the Asian towns, on those bright shores and under their genial sky, were a light-hearted, sociable race. They sought the wine-cup not for animal indulgence, but as a zest to good-fellowship and to give a freer flow to social joys. This was the influence that ruled their feasts, that loosened their tongues and inspired their gaiety. Hence their wit was prone to become ribaldry (ver. 4); and their songs were the opposite of the “spiritual songs” that gladden the feasts of the Church (ver. 19). The quick imagination and the social instincts of the Ionian Greeks, the aptness for speech and song native to the land of Homer and Sappho, were gifts not to be repressed but sanctified. The lyre is to be tuned to other strains; and poetry must draw its inspiration from a higher source. Dionysus and his reeling Fauns give place to the pure Spirit of Jesus and the Father. “The Aonian mount” must now pay tribute to “Sion hill”; and the fountain of Castalia yields its honours to
Our nature craves excitement,—some stimulus that
shall set the pulses dancing and thrill the jaded frame,
and lift the spirit above the taskwork of life and the
dreary and hard conditions which make up the daily lot
of multitudes. It is this craving that gives to strong
drink its cruel fascination. Alcohol is a mighty
magician. The tired labouring man, the household
drudge shut up in city courts refreshed by no pleasant
sight or cheering voice, by its aid can leave fretted
For the drunkards of Ephesus the apostle finds a cure in the joys of the Holy Ghost. The mightiest and most moving spring of feeling is in the spirit of man kindred to God. There is a deep excitement and refreshment, a “joy that human thought transcends,” in the love of God shed abroad in the heart and the communion of true saints, which makes sensuous delights cheap and poor. Toil and care are forgotten, sickness and trouble seem as nothing; we can glory in tribulation and laugh in the face of death, when the strong wine of God’s consolations is poured into the soul.
“Be filled with the Spirit,” says the apostle—or
more strictly, “filled in the Spirit”; since the Holy
Spirit of God is the element of the believer’s life, surrounding
while it penetrates his nature: it is the
atmosphere that he breathes, the ocean in which he
is immersed. As a flood fills up the river-banks, as
the drunkard is filled with the wine that he drains
The words of verses 19, 20 show that St Paul is thinking of that presence of the Spirit in the Christian community, which is the spring of its affections and activities. The Spirit of Jesus, the Son of man, is a kindly and gracious Spirit, the guardian of brotherhood and friendship, the inspirer of pure social joys and genial converse. The joy in the Holy Ghost that in its warmth and freshness filled the hearts of the first Christians, soared upward on the wings of song. Their very talk was music: they “spoke to each other in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with their heart to the Lord.” Love loves to sing. Its joys
Upon this congenial soil, we trace the beginnings of
As in their heathen days they were used to “speak
to each other,” in festive or solemn hours, with hymns
to Artemis of the Ephesians, or Dionysus giver of the
vine, or to Persephoné sad queen of the dead—in
songs merry and gay, too often loose and wanton;
in songs of the dark underworld and the grim Furies
and inexorable Fate, that told how life fleets fast and
we must pluck its pleasures while we may;—so now
the Christians of Ephesus and Colossæ, of Pergamum
and of Smyrna would sing of the universal Father
whose presence fills earth and sky, of the Son of His
love, His image amongst men, who died in sacrifice
for their sins and asked grace for His murderers, of
the joys of forgiveness and the cleansed heart, of life
eternal and the treasure laid up for the just in the
heavenly places, of Christ’s return in glory and the
judgement of the nations and the world quickly to
dissolve and perish, of a brotherhood dearer than
earthly kindred, of the saints who sleep in Jesus and
in peace await His coming, of the Good Shepherd who
feeds His sheep and leads them to fountains of living
water calling each by his name, of creation redeemed
“Singing and playing,” says the apostle. For music aided song; voice and instrument blended in His praise whose glory claims the tribute of all creatures. But it was “with the heart,” even more than with voice or tuneful strings, that melody was made. For this inward music the Lord listens. Where other skill is wanting and neither voice nor hand can take its part in the concert of praise, He hears the silent gratitude, the humble joy that wells upward when the lips are still or the full heart cannot find expression.
But the Spirit who dwelt in the praises of the new
Israel, was not confined to its public assemblings. The
people of Christ should be “always giving thanks, for
all things, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” It
is one of St Paul’s commonest injunctions. “In everything
give thanks,” he wrote to the Thessalonians in
his earliest extant letter (1 Ep. v. 18). “For all
things,” he says to the Ephesians,—“though fallen on
evil days.” Do we not “know that to them that love
Always, the apostle says,—for all things! No room
for a moment’s discontent. In this perfecting of praise
he had himself undergone a long schooling in his four
years’ imprisonment. Now, he tells us, he “has learnt
the secret of contentment, in whatsoever state” (
The twenty-first verse, which seems to belong to a
different line of thought, in reality completes the foregoing
paragraph. In the Corinthian Church, as we
remember, with its affluence of spiritual gifts, there
were so many ready to prophesy, so many to sing and
recite, that confusion arose and the Church meetings
fell into disedifying uproar (
In our common work and worship, in all the offices of life this is the Christian law. No man within Christ’s Church, however commanding his powers, may set himself above the duty of submitting his judgement and will to that of his fellows. In mutual subjection lies our freedom, with our strength and peace.
Θέλω δὲ ὑμᾶς εἰδέναι ὅτι παντὸς ἀνδρὸς ἡ κεφαλὴ ὁ Χριστός ἐστιν, κεφαλὴ δὲ γυναικὸς ὁ ἀνήρ, κεφαλὴ δὲ τοῦ Χριστοῦ ὁ Θεός.—1 Cor. xi. 3.
“And pure Religion breathing household laws.”
W. Wordsworth.
“Wives, be in subjection to your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as the Christ also is the head of the Church, being Himself the saviour of the body. But as the Church is subject to the Christ, so let the wives also be to their husbands in everything.
“Husbands, love your wives, even as the Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself up for her; that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present the Church to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and without blemish.
“Even so ought husbands also to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself: for no man ever hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Christ also the Church; because we are members of His body. ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the twain shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the Church. Nevertheless do ye also severally love each one his own wife even as himself; and let the wife see that she fear her husband.”—Eph. v. 22–33.
Of this subjection to Christ the relationship of
marriage furnishes an example and a mirror. St Paul
passes on to the new topic without any grammatical
pause, verse 22 being simply an extension of the
participial clause that forms verse 21: “Being in subjection
to one another in fear of Christ—ye wives to
your own husbands, as to the Lord.” The relation
of the two verses is not that of the particular to
the general, so much as that of image and object, of
type and antitype. Submission to Christ in the Church
suggests by analogy that of the wife to her husband in
the house. Both have their origin in Christ, in whom
all things were created, the Lord of life in its natural
as well as in its spiritual and regenerate sphere
(
The race springs not from a unit, but from a united
pair. The history of mankind began in wedlock. The
family is the first institution of society, and the mother
St Paul rightly gives to this subject a conspicuous place in this epistle of Christ and the Church. The corner-stone of the new social order which the gospel was to establish in the world lies here. The entire influence of the Church upon society depends upon right views on the relationship of man and woman and on the ethics of marriage.
In wedlock there are blended most completely the two principles of association amongst moral beings,—viz., authority and love, submission and self-surrender.
I. On the one side, submission to authority.
“Wives, be in subjection, as to the Lord,”—as is fitting
in the Lord ( See Dr. Maclaren’s admirable words on this subject in Colossians
and Philemon (Expositor’s Bible), pp. 336–40; and Dr. Dale’s Lectures
on Ephesians, Lect. xix., “Wives and Husbands.”
Such subordination implies no inferiority, rather the
opposite. A free and sympathetic obedience—which is
the true submission—can only subsist between equals.
The apostle writes: “Children, obey; ... Servants,
obey” (vi. 1, 5); but “Wives, submit yourselves to
your own husbands, as to the Lord.” The same word
denotes submission within the Church, and within the
house. It is here that Christianity, in contrast with
Paganism, and notably with Mohammedanism, raises
the weaker sex to honour. In soul and destiny it
Christian courtesy treats the woman as “the glory
of the man”; it surrounds her from girlhood to old
age with protection and deference. This homage, duly
rendered, is a full equivalent for the honour of visible
command. When, as it happens not seldom in the
partnership of life, the superior wisdom dwells with
the weaker vessel, the golden gift of persuasion is not
wanting, by which the official ruler is guided, to his own
advantage, and his adviser accomplishes more than she
could do by any overt leadership. The chivalry of the
Middle Ages, from which the refinement of European
society takes its rise, was a product of Christianity
grafted on the Teutonic nature. Notwithstanding the
folly and excess that was mixed with it, there was a
beautiful reverence in the old knightly service and
Shall we say that this law of St Paul is that laid
down specifically for Christian women? is it not rather
a law of nature—the intrinsic propriety of sex, whose
dictates are reinforced by the Christian revelation?
The apostle takes us back to the creation of mankind
for the basis of his principles in dealing with this subject
(ver. 31). The new commandments are the old
which were in the world from the beginning, though
concealed and overgrown with corruption. Notwithstanding
the debasement of marriage under the non-Christian
systems, the instincts of natural religion
taught the wife her place in the house and gave rise
to many a graceful and appropriate custom expressive
of the honour due from one sex to the other. So the
apostle regarded the man’s bared and cropped head and
the woman’s flowing tresses as symbols of their relative
place in the Divine order (
Some earnest promoters of women’s rights have
fallen into the error that Christianity, to which they
owe all that is best in their present status, is the
obstacle in the way of their further progress. It is an
“As unto the Lord” gives the pattern and the
principle of the Christian wife’s submission. Not
that, as Meyer seems to put it, the husband in virtue
of marriage “represents Christ to the wife.” Her relation
to the Lord is as full, direct, and personal as his.
Indeed, the clause inserted at the end of verse 23 seems
expressly designed to guard against this exaggeration.
The qualification that Christ is “Himself Saviour of the
body,” thrown in between the two sentences comparing
the marital headship to that which Christ holds towards
the Church, has the effect of limiting the
former. In verse 24 St Paul resumes with ἀλλά,
the but of opposition and not mere contrast, indicating a case where the claims of husband and
Saviour may, conceivably, be in competition.
“Nevertheless, as the Church is subject to the Christ, so also wives [should be] to their husbands in everything” (ver. 24). Again, in verse 33: “Let the wife see that she fear her husband”—with the reverent and confiding fear which love makes sweet. As the Christian wife obeys the Lord Christ in the spiritual sphere, in the sphere of marriage she is subject to her husband. The ties that bind her to Christ, bind her more closely to the duties of home. These duties illustrate for her the submissive love that Christ’s people, and herself as one of them, owe to their Divine Head. Her service in the Church, in turn, will send her home with a quickened sense of the sacredness of her domestic calling. It will lighten the yoke of obedience; it will check the discontent that masculine exactions provoke; and will teach her to win by patience and gentleness the power within the house that is her queenly crown.
II. The apostle alludes to submission as the wife’s
duty; for she might, possibly, be tempted to think this
superseded by the liberty of the children of God. Love
he need not enjoin upon her; but he writes: “Husbands,
love your wives, even as the Christ also loved
the Church and gave up Himself for her” (comp.
The danger of selfishness lies on the masculine side.
The man’s nature is more exacting; and the self-forgetfulness
and solicitous affection of the woman may
blind him to his own want of the truest love. Full
of business and with a hundred cares and attractions
lying outside the domestic circle, he too readily forms
habits of self-absorption and learns to make his wife
“Love your wives, even as the Christ loved the Church.”
What a glory this confers upon the husband’s part in
marriage! His devotion pictures, as no other love can,
the devotion of Christ to His redeemed people. His love
must therefore be a spiritual passion, the love of soul
to soul, that partakes of God and of eternity. Of the
three Greek words for love,—eros, familiar in Greek
poetry and mythology, denoting the flame of sexual
passion, is not named in the New Testament; philia,
the love of friendship, is tolerably frequent, in its verb
at least; but agapé absorbs the former and transcends
both. This exquisite word denotes love in its spiritual
purity and depth, the love of God and of Christ, and of
souls to each other in God. This is the specific Christian
affection. It is the attribute of God who “loved
the world and gave His Son the Only-begotten,” of
“the Christ” who “loved the Church and gave up
From verse 26 we gather that Christ is the husband’s
model, not only in the rule of self-devotion, but in the
end toward which that devotion is directed: “that He
might sanctify the Church,—that He might present her
to Himself a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle,—that
she might be holy and without blemish.” The
perfection of the wife’s character will be to the religious
husband one of the dearest objects in life. He will
desire for her that which is highest and best, as for
himself. He is put in charge of a soul more precious
to him than any other, over which he has an influence
incomparably great. This care he cannot delegate to
any priest or father-confessor. The peril of such
delegation and the grievous mischiefs that arise when
there is no spiritual confidence between husband and
wife, when through unbelief or superstition the head of
the house hands over his priesthood to another man, are
painfully shown by the experience of Roman Catholic
countries. The irreligion of laymen, the carelessness and
unworthiness of fathers and husbands are responsible for
the baneful influences of the confessional. The apostle
bade the Corinthian wives, who were eager for religious
knowledge, to “ask their husbands at home” (
The selfishness of the stronger sex, supported by the force of habit and social usage, was hard to subdue in the Greek Christian Churches. Through some eight verses St Paul labours this one point. In verse 28 he adduces another reason, added to the example of Christ, for the love enjoined. “So ought men indeed to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.” The “So” gathers its force from the previous example. In loving us Christ does not love something foreign and, as it were, outside of Himself. “We are members of His body” (ver. 30). It is the love of the Head to the members, of the Son of man to the sons of men, whose race-life is founded in Him. Jesus Christ laid it down as the highest law, under that of love to God: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” His love to us followed this rule. His life was wrapped up in ours. By such community of life self-love is transfigured, and exalted into the purest self-forgetting.
Thus it is with true marriage. The wedding of a
human pair makes each the other’s property. They
The saying the apostle quotes in verse 31 dates from
the origin of the human family; it is taken from the
lips of the first husband and father of the race, while
as yet unstained by sin (
Amidst this seething mass of corruption the Spirit
of life in Christ Jesus created new hearts and new
homes. It kindled a pure fire on the desecrated
hearth. It taught man and woman a chaste love; and
their alliances were formed “in sanctification and
honour, not in the passion of lust as it is with the
Gentiles who know not God” (
“The Christ is the head of the Church, being Himself the Saviour of the body.... The Church is subject to the Christ in everything....
“The Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself up for her; that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present the Church to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and without blemish....
“The Christ [nourisheth and cherisheth] the Church; because we are members of His body. ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the twain shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the Church.”—Eph. v. 23–32.
I. “Husbands, love your wives, even as the Christ
also loved the Church, and gave up Himself for her.”
This is parallel to the declaration of
On the one hand, we must value infinitely and joyfully assert our individual part in the redeeming love of the Son of God; but we must equally admit the sovereign rights of the Church in the Redeemer’s passion. Our souls bow down before the glory of the love with which He has from eternity sought her for His own. There is in some Christians an absorption in the work of grace within their own hearts, an individualistic salvation-seeking that, like all selfishness, defeats its end; for it narrows and impoverishes the inner life thus sedulously cherished. The Church does not exist simply for the benefit of individual souls; it is an eternal institution, with an affiance to Christ, a calling and destiny of its own; within that universal sphere our personal destiny holds its particular place.
It is “the Christ” who stands, throughout this context
(vv. 23–29), over against “the Church” as her
Lover and Husband; whereas in the context of
Compare pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.
This Christ “gave Himself up for the Church,”—yielded
Himself to the death which the sins of His
people merited and brought upon Him. Under the
same verb, the apostle says in
The sayings of verses 25–27 set the glory of the
vicarious death in a vivid light. Of such worth was
the person of the Christ, of such significance and
moral value His sacrificial death, that it weighed against
the trespass, not of a man—Paul or any other—but of
a world of men. He “purchased through His own
blood,” said Paul to the Ephesian elders, “the Church
of God” (
He is worthy; and she must be made worthy. “He
gave up Himself, that He might sanctify her,—that He
might Himself present to Himself a glorious Church,
not having spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind,—that
she may be holy and without blemish.” The
sanctification of the Church is the grand purpose of
redeeming grace. This was the design of God for His
sons in Christ before the world’s foundation, “that we
should be holy and unblemished before Him” (i. 4).
This, therefore, was the end of Christ’s mission upon
earth; this was the intention of His sacrificial death.
“For their sakes,” said Jesus concerning His disciples,
“I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in
truth” (
Only in this passage, where the apostle is thinking
of the preparation of the Church for its perfect union
with its Head, does he name Christ as our Sanctifier;
in
“That He might sanctify her, having cleansed her in
the laver of water by the word.” The Church’s purification
is antecedent in thought to her sanctification
through the sacrifice of Christ; and it is a means thereto.
“Ye were washed, ye were sanctified,” writes the
apostle in
“Having cleansed” is a phrase congruous with the
figure of the laver, or bath (comp. again See
Along with this older teaching, a further and kindred
significance is now given to the baptismal rite. It
denotes the soul’s affiance to its Lord. As the maiden’s
bath on the morning of her marriage betokened the
purity in which she united herself to her betrothed, so
the baptismal laver summons the Church to present
herself “a chaste virgin unto Christ” (
At the end of verse 27 the sentence doubles back upon itself, in Paul’s characteristic fashion. The twofold aim of Christ’s sacrifice of love on the Church’s behalf—viz., her consecration to God, and her spotless purity fitting her for perfect union with her Lord—is restated in the final clause, by way of contrast with the “spots and wrinkles and such-like things” that are washed out: “but that she may be holy and without blemish.”
We passed by, for the moment, the concluding
phrase of verse 26, with which the apostle qualifies his
reference to the baptismal cleansing; we are by no
means forgetting it. “Having cleansed her,” he writes,
“by the laver of water in [the] word.” This adjunct is
deeply significant. It impresses on baptism a spiritual
character, and excludes every theurgic conception of
the rite, every doctrine that gives to it in the least
degree a mechanical efficacy. “Without the word
the sacrament could only influence man by magic, outward
or inward” (Dorner). The “word” of which
the apostle speaks, Ἐν ῥήματι.
Λόγος is word as expressive of thought.
Ῥῆμα, the
utterance of a living voice,—a sentence, pronouncement, message; it is
the Greek term employed in all the passages here cited.
The “word” in question is defined in
This interpretation gives a key to the obscure text
of St Peter upon the same subject (1 Ep. iii. 21):
“Baptism saves you—not the putting away of the filth
of the flesh, but the questioning with regard to God of
a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus
Christ.” The vital constituent of the rite is not the
application of water to the body, but the challenge
which the word makes therein to the conscience
respecting the things of God,—the inquiry thus conveyed,
to which a sincere believer in the resurrection
of Christ makes joyful and ready answer. It is, in
The “word” that makes Christian ordinances valid, is not the past utterance of God alone, which may remain a dead letter, preserved in the oracles of Scripture or the official forms of the Church, but that word alive and active, re-spoken and transmitted from soul to soul by the breath of the Holy Spirit. Without this animating word of faith, baptism is but the pouring or sprinkling of so much water on the body; the Lord’s Supper is only the consumption of so much bread and wine.
All the nations will at last, in obedience to Christ’s
command, be baptized into the thrice-holy Name; and
the work of baptism will be complete. Then the
Church will issue from her bath, cleansed more effectually
than the old world that emerged with Noah from
the deluge. Every “spot and wrinkle” will pass from
her face: the worldly passions that stained her features,
the fears and anxieties that knit her brow or furrowed
her cheek, will vanish away. In her radiant beauty,
in her chaste and spotless love, Christ will lead forth
His Church before His Father and the holy angels,
“as a bride adorned for her husband.” From eternity
He set His love upon her; on the cross He won
her back from her infidelity at the price of His blood.
Through the ages He has been wooing her to Himself,
and schooling her in wise and manifold ways that she
might be fit for her heavenly calling. Now the end
of this long task of redemption has arrived. The
message goes forth to Christ’s friends in all the worlds:
II. Concerning Christ’s lordly authority over His Church we have had occasion to speak already in other places. A word or two may be added here.
We acknowledge the Church to be “subject to Christ in everything.” We proclaim ourselves, like the apostle, “slaves of Christ Jesus.” But this subjection is too often a form rather than a fact. In protesting our independence of Popish and priestly lords of God’s heritage, we are sometimes in danger of ignoring our dependence upon Him, and of dethroning, in effect, the one Lord Jesus Christ. Christian communities act and speak too much in the style of political republics. They assume the attitude of self-directing and self-responsible bodies.
The Church is no democracy, any more than it is
an aristocracy or a sacerdotal absolutism: it is a
Christocracy. The people are not rulers in the house
of God; they are the ruled, laity and ministers alike.
“One is your Master, even the Christ; and all ye are
brethren.” We acknowledge this in theory; but our
language and spirit would oftentimes be other than
they are, if we were penetrated by the sense of the
continual presence and majesty of the Lord Christ in
our assemblies. Royalties and nobilities, and the
holders of popular power—all whose “names are
named in this world,” along with the principalities in
heavenly places, when they come into the precincts of
III. We come now to the profound mystery disclosed, or half-disclosed at the end of this section, that of the origination of the Church from Christ, which accounts for His love to the Church and His authority over her. He nourishes and cherishes the Church, we are told in verses 29, 30, “because we are members of His body.”
Now, this membership is, in its origin, as old as
creation. God “chose us in Christ before the world’s
foundation” (i. 4). We were created in the Son of
God’s love, antecedently to our redemption by Him.
Such is the teaching of this and the companion epistle
( The words “of His flesh and of His bones,” following “members
of His body” in the A.V., appear to be an ancient gloss adopted by
the Greek copyists, which was suggested by St Paul changes the Ἕνεκεν τούτου
of the original to Ἀντὶ τούτου,
which conveys the idea that marriage has its counterpart in the fact
that we are members of Christ.
The train of thought that the apostle resumes here
he followed in
“The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof: and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man, made He a woman, and brought her to the man. And the man said,
But our apostle sees within this declaration a deeper truth, kept secret from the foundation of the world. When he speaks of “this great mystery,” he means thereby not marriage itself, but the saying of Adam about it. This text was a standing problem to the Jewish interpreters. “But for my part,” says the apostle, “I refer it to Christ and to the Church.” St Paul, who has so often before drawn the parallel between Adam and Christ, by the light of this analogy perceives a new and rich meaning in the old dark sentence. It helps him to see how believers in Christ, forming collectively His body, are not only grafted into Him (as he puts it in the epistle to the Romans), but were derived from Him and formed in the very mould of His nature.
What is affirmed in
In our union through grace and faith with Christ
crucified, we realize again the original design of our
being. Christ has purchased by His blood no new or
foreign bride, but her who was His from eternity,—the
child who had wandered from the Father’s house, the
betrothed who had left her Lord and Spouse. In
regard to this “mystery of our coherence in Christ,”
Richard Hooker says, in words that suggest many
aspects of this doctrine: “The Church is in Christ, as
Eve was in Adam. Yea, by grace we are every one of
us in Christ and in His Church, as by nature we are
in our first parents. God made Eve of the rib of Adam.
And His Church He frameth out of the very flesh, the
very wounded and bleeding side of the Son of man.
His body crucified and His blood shed for the life of
the world are the true elements of that heavenly being
which maketh us such as Himself is of whom we come.
For which cause the words of Adam may be fitly the
words of Christ concerning His Church, ‘flesh of my
flesh and bone of my bones—a true native extract out
of mine own body,’ So that in Him, even according
to His manhood, we according to our heavenly being
are as branches in that root out of which they
grow.” Ecclesiastical Polity; v. 56 7.
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. ‘Honour thy father and mother,’ which is a first commandment, given in promise,—‘that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.’ And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord.
“Servants, be obedient to them that according to the flesh are your lords, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto the Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the soul; with good will doing service, as unto the Lord, and not unto men: knowing that whatsoever good thing each one doeth, the same shall he receive again from the Lord, whether he be bond or free. And, ye lords, do the same things unto them, and forbear threatening: knowing that both their Lord and yours is in heaven, and there is no respect of persons with Him.”—Eph. vi. 1–9.
I. Thus the apostle turns, in the opening words of
chapter vi., from the husband and wife to the children
We cannot absolutely prove infant baptism from the New Testament
texts adduced on its behalf; but they afford a strong presumption
in its favour, which is confirmed on the one hand by the analogy
of circumcision, and on the other by the immemorial usage of the
early Church.
Obedience is the law of childhood. It is, in great part, the child’s religion, to be practised “in the Lord.” The reverence and love, full of a sweet mystery, which the Christian child feels towards its Saviour and heavenly King, add new sacredness to the claims of father and mother. Jesus Christ, the Head over all things, is the orderer of the life of boys and girls. His love and His might guard the little one in the tendance of its parents. The wonderful love of parents to their offspring, and the awful authority with which they are invested, come from the source of human life in God.
The Latin pietas impressed a religious character
upon filial duty. This word signified at once dutifulness
towards the gods, and towards parents and
kindred. In the strength of its family ties and its deep
filial reverence lay the secret of the moral vigour and
the unmatched discipline of the Roman
commonwealth.
For this is right, says the apostle, appealing to the instincts of natural religion. The child’s conscience begins here. Filial obedience is the primary form of duty. The loyalties of after life take their colour from the lessons learnt at home, in the time of dawning reason and incipient will. Hard indeed is the evil to remove, where in the plastic years of childhood obedience has been associated with base fear, with distrust or deceit, where it has grown sullen or obsequious in habit. From this root of bitterness there spring rank growths of hatred toward authority, jealousies, treacheries, and stubbornness. Obedience rendered “in the Lord” will be frank and willing, careful and constant, such as that which Jesus rendered to the Father.
St Paul reminds the children of the law of the Ten Words, taught to them in their earliest lessons from Scripture. He calls the command in question “a first [or chief] commandment”—just as the great rule, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” is the first commandment; for this is no secondary rule or minor precept, but one on which the continuance of the Church and the welfare of society depend. It is a law fundamental as birth itself, written not on the statute-book alone but on the tables of the heart.
Moreover, it is a “command in promise”—that takes
the form of promise, and holds out to obedience a bright
future. The two predicates—“first” and “in promise”—as
we take it, are distinct. To merge them into one
blunts their meaning. This commandment is primary
in its importance, and promissory in its import. The
promise is quoted from
Children are exhorted to submission: fathers to gentleness. “Do not,” the apostle says, “anger your children”; in the corresponding place in Colossians, “Do not irritate your children, lest they be disheartened” (ch. iii. 21). In these parallel texts two distinct verbs are rendered by the one English word “provoke.” The Colossian passage warns against the chafing effect of parental exactions and fretfulness, that tend to break the child’s spirit and spoil its temper. Our text warns the father against angering his child by unfair or oppressive treatment. From this verb comes the noun “wrath” (or “provocation”) used in chapter iv. 26, denoting that stirring of anger which gives peculiar occasion to the devil.
Not that the father is forbidden to cross his child’s
wishes, or to do anything or refuse anything that may
excite its anger. Nothing is worse for a child than to
find that parents fear its displeasure, and that it will
gain its ends by passion. But the father must not be
Household rule should be equally firm and kind, neither provoking nor avoiding the displeasure of its subjects, inflicting no severity for severity’s sake, but shrinking from none that fidelity demands. With much parental fondness, there is sometimes in family government a want of seriousness and steady principle, an absence in father or mother of the sense that they are dealing with moral and responsible beings in their little ones, and not with toys, which is reflected in the caprice and self-indulgence of the children’s maturer life. Such parents will give account hereafter of their stewardship with an inconsolable grief.
It is almost superfluous to insist on the apostle’s
exhortation to treat children kindly. For them these
are days of Paradise, compared with times not far
distant. Never were the wants and the fancies of these
small mortals catered for as they are now. In some
households the danger lies at the opposite extreme
from that of over-strictness. The children are idolized.
Not their comfort and welfare only, but their humours
and caprices become the law of the house. They are
“nourished” indeed, but not “in the discipline and
admonition of the Lord.” It is a great unkindness to
treat our children so that they shall be strangers to
hardship and restriction, so that they shall not know
what real obedience means, and have no reverence
for age, no habits of deference and self-denial. It is
the way to breed monsters of selfishness, pampered
“Discipline and admonition” are distinguished as
positive and negative terms. The first is the “training
up of the child in the way that he should go”; the
second checks and holds him back from the ways in
which he should not go. The former word (paideia)—denoting
primarily treating-as-a-boy—signifies very often
“chastisement”;
“Foolishness,” says the Hebrew proverb, “is bound
up in the heart of a child.” In the Old Testament
discipline there was something over-stern. The “hardness
of heart” censured by the Lord Jesus, which
allowed of two mothers in the house, put barriers
between the father and his offspring that rendered “the
rod of correction” more needful than it is under the
rule of Christ. But correction, in gentler or severer
sort, there must be, so long as children spring from
sinful parents. The child’s conscience responds to the
kindly and searching word of reproof, to the admonition
of love. This faithful dealing with his children wins
for the father in the end a deep gratitude, and makes
The child’s “obedience in the Lord” is its response to “the discipline and admonition of the Lord” exercised by its parents. The discipline which wise Christian fathers give their children, is the Lord’s discipline applied through them. “Correction and instruction should proceed from the Lord and be directed by the Spirit of the Lord, in such a way that it is not so much the father who corrects his children and teaches them, as the Lord through him” (Monod). Thus the Father of whom every family on earth is named, within each Christian house works all in all. Thus the chief Shepherd, through His under-shepherds, guides and feeds the lambs of His flock. By the gate of His fold fathers and mothers themselves have entered; and the little ones follow with them. In the pastures of His word they nourish them, and rule them with His rod and staff. To their offspring they become an image of the Good Shepherd and the Father in heaven. Their office teaches them more of God’s fatherly ways with themselves. From their children’s humbleness and confidence, from their simple wisdom, their hopes and fears and ignorances, the elders learn deep and affecting lessons concerning their own relations to the heavenly Father.
St Paul’s instruction to fathers applies to all who have
the charge of children: to schoolmasters of every degree,
whose work, secular as it may be called, touches the
springs of moral life and character; to teachers in the
Sunday school, successors to the work that Christ
assigned to Peter, of shepherding His lambs. These
instructors supply the Lord’s nurture to multitudes of
children, in whose homes Christian faith and example
II. From the children of the house the apostle proceeds
to address the servants—slaves as they were,
until the gospel unbound their chains. The juxtaposition
of children and slaves is full of significance; it is
a tacit prophecy of emancipation. It brings the slave
within the household, and gives a new dignity to
domestic service. The word family (Latin familia) denoted originally the servants of
the establishment, the domestic slaves. Its modern usage is an index
to the elevating influence of Christianity upon social relations.
The Greek philosophers regarded slavery as a fundamental
institution, indispensable to the existence of
civilized society. That the few might enjoy freedom
and culture, the many were doomed to bondage.
Aristotle defines the slave as an “animated tool,” and
the tool as an “inanimate slave.” Two or three facts
will suffice to show how utterly slaves were deprived
of human rights in the brilliant times of the classic
humanism. In Athens it was the legal rule to admit
the evidence of a slave only upon torture, as that of a
freeman was received upon oath. Amongst the Romans,
if a master had been murdered in his house, the whole
of his domestic servants, amounting sometimes to
hundreds, were put to death without inquiry. It was
a common mark of hospitality to assign to a guest a
female slave for the night, like any other convenience.
No wonder that the new religion was welcome to the slaves of the Pagan cities, and that they flocked into the Church. Welcome to them was the voice that said: “Come unto me, all ye that are burdened and heavy laden”; welcome the proclamation that made them Christ’s freedmen, “brethren beloved” where they had been “animated tools” (Philem. 16). In the light of such teaching, slavery was doomed. Its re-adoption by Christian nations, and the imposition of its yoke on the negro race, is amongst the great crimes of history,—a crime for which the white man has had to pay rivers of his blood.
The social fabric, as it then existed, was so entirely
based upon slavery, that for Christ and the apostles to
have proclaimed its abolition would have meant universal
anarchy. In writing to Philemon about his
converted slave Onesimus, the apostle does not say,
“Release him,” though the word seems to be trembling
on his lips. In
“Ye slaves, obey your lords according to the flesh.”
The apostle does not disguise the slave’s subservience;
nor does he speak in the language of pity or of condescension.
He appeals as a man to men and equals,
on the ground of a common faith and service to Christ.
He awakens in these degraded tools of society the
sense of spiritual manhood, of conscience and loyalty,
of love and faith and hope. As in
How much there was, then, to console the Christian
bondman for his lot. In self-abnegation, in the
willing forfeiture of personal rights, in his menial and
unrequited tasks, in submission to insult and injustice,
he found a holy joy. His was a path in which he
might closely follow the steps of the great Servant
of mankind. His position enabled him to “adorn the
Saviour’s doctrine” above other men (
The relations of servant and master will endure, in one shape or other, while the world stands. And the apostle’s injunctions bear upon servants of every order. We are all, in our various capacities, servants of the community. The moral worth of our service and its blessing to ourselves depend on the conditions that are here laid down.
1. There must be a genuine care for our work.
“Obey,” he says, “with fear and trembling, in
singleness of your heart, as unto the Christ.” The
fear enjoined is no dread of human displeasure, of the
master’s whip or tongue. It is the same “fear and
trembling” with which we are bidden to “work out
our own salvation” (
“As ever in the great Task-master’s eye.”
2. The sense of Christ’s Lordship ensures honesty in work.
In His book of accounts there is a stern reckoning in store for deceitful dealers and the makers-up of unsound goods, in whatever handicraft or headcraft they are engaged.
Let us all adopt St Paul’s maxim; it will be an immense economy. What armies of overlookers and inspectors we shall be able to dismiss, when every servant works as well behind his master’s back as to his face, when every manufacturer and shopkeeper puts himself in the purchaser’s place and deals as he would have others deal with him. It was for the Christian slaves of the Greek trading cities to rebuke the Greek spirit of fraud and trickery, by which the common dealings of life in all directions were vitiated.
3. To the carefulness and honesty of the slave’s
daily labour he must even add heartiness: “as slaves
They must do the will of God in the service of men, as Jesus Christ Himself did it,—and with His meekness and fortitude and unwearied love. Their work will thus be rendered from inner principle, with thought and affection and resolution spent upon it. That alone is the work of a man, whether he preaches or ploughs, which comes from the soul behind the hands and the tongue, into which the workman puts as much of his soul, of himself, as the work is capable of holding.
4. Add to all this, the servant’s anticipation of the final reward. In each case, “whatsoever one may do that is good, this he will receive from the Lord, whether he be a bondman or a freeman.” The complementary truth is given in the Colossian letter: “He who does wrong, will receive back the wrong that he did.”
The doctrine of equal retribution at the judgement-seat
of Christ matches that of equal salvation at the
cross of Christ. How trifling and evanescent the differences
of earthly rank appear, in view of these sublime
realities. There is a “Lord in heaven,” alike for
servant and for master, “with whom is no respect of
persons” (ver. 9). This grand conviction beats down
all caste-pride. It teaches justice to the mighty and
the proud; it exalts the humble, and assures the
down-trodden of redress. No bribery or privilege, no
sophistry or legal cunning will avail, no concealment
or distortion of the facts will be possible in that Court
of final appeal. The servant and the master, the
monarch and his meanest subject will stand before
the bar of Jesus Christ upon the same footing. And
the poor slave, wonderful to think, who was faithful
“And, ye lords, do the same things towards them”—be as good to your slaves as they are required to be towards you. A bold application this of Christ’s great rule: “What you would that men should do to you, do even so to them.” In many instances this rule suggested liberation, where the slave was prepared for freedom. In any case, the master is to put himself in his dependant’s place, and to act by him as he would desire himself to be treated if their positions were reversed.
Slaves were held to be scarcely human. Deceit and sensuality were regarded as their chief characteristics. They must be ruled, the moralists said, by the fear of punishment. This was the only way to keep them in their place. The Christian master adopts a different policy. He “desists from threatening”; he treats his servants with even-handed justice, with fit courtesy and consideration. The recollection is ever present to his mind, that he must give account of his charge over each one of them to his Lord and theirs. So he will make, as far as in him lies, his own domain an image of the kingdom of Christ.
“From henceforth be strong in the Lord, and in the might of His strength. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness, in the heavenly places.”—Eph. vi. 10–12.
The epistle to the Colossians is altogether a letter of
conflict (see ch. ii. 1 ff.). In writing that letter St Paul
was wrestling with spiritual powers, mighty for evil,
which had commenced their attack upon this outlying
post of the Ephesian province. He sees in the sky
the cloud portending a desolating storm. The clash of
It is the apostle’s call to arms!—“Be strengthened
in the Lord,” he says (to render the imperative literally:
so in Ἐνδυναμοῦσθε
[from δύναμις]
ἐν Κυρίῳ καὶ ἐν τῷ κράτει τῆς ἰσχύος αὐτοῦ.
See the note on these synonyms, on p. 76. Comp., for this verb,
“The panoply of God” (ver. II) reminds us of the
saying of Jesus in reference to His casting out of
demons, recorded in
Let us review the forces marshalled against us,—their nature, their mode of assault, and the arena of the contest.
1. The Asian Christians had to “stand against the
wiles [schemes, or
methods Comp. remark on μεθοδεία
(iv. 14), p. 247.
Unquestionably, the New Testament assumes the
personality of Satan. This belief runs counter to
modern thought, governed as it is by the tendency to
depersonalize existence. The conception of evil spirits
given us in the Bible is treated as an obsolete superstition;
and the name of the Evil One with multitudes
serves only to point a profane or careless jest. To
Jesus Christ, it is very certain, Satan was no figure
of speech; but a thinking and active being, of whose
presence and influence He saw tokens everywhere in
this evil world (comp. ii. 2). If the Lord Jesus “speaks
what He knows, and testifies what He has seen” concerning
the mysteries of the other world, there can be
no question of the existence of a personal devil. If in
any matter He was bound, as a teacher of spiritual
truth, to disavow Jewish superstition, surely Christ was
so bound in this matter. Yet instead of repudiating
the current belief in Satan and the demons, He earnestly
Satan is the consummate form of depraved and
untruthful intellect. We read of his “thoughts,” his
“schemes,” his subtlety and deceit and
impostures; Rev. xii, 7–10;
Ch. iv. 27;
Such is the gigantic opponent with whom Christ and
the Church have been in conflict through all ages. But
Satan does not stand alone. In verse 12 there is called
up before us an imposing array of spiritual powers.
They are “the angels of the devil,” whom Jesus set
in contrast with the angels of God that surround and
serve the Son of man (
In contrast with the “angels of light” (
The darkness surrounding the apostle in Rome and the Churches in Asia—“this darkness,” he says—was dense and foul. With Nero and his satellites the masters of empire, the world seemed to be ruled by demons rather than by men. The frightful wish of one of the Psalmists was fulfilled for the heathen world: “Set a wicked man over him, and let Satan stand at his right hand.”
The last of St Paul’s synonyms for the satanic forces,
“the spiritual [powers] of wickedness,” may have
served to warn the Church against reading a political
sense into the passage and regarding the civil constitution
of society and the visible world-rulers as objects
for their hatred. Pilate was a specimen, by no means
amongst the worst, of the men in power. Jesus
regarded him with pity. His real antagonist lurked
behind these human instruments. The above phrase,
“spirituals of wickedness,” is Hebraistic, like “judge” and “steward of
unrighteousness,” Τὰ πνευματικὰ tῆs πονηρίας.
St Paul’s demonology Mr. Moule aptly observes, in his excellent and most useful Commentary
on Ephesians in the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges:
St Paul’s “testimony to the real and objective existence” of evil spirits
“gains in strength when it is remembered that the epistle was addressed
(at least, among other designations) to Ephesus, and that Ephesus (see
II. The conflict against these spiritual enemies is essentially a spiritual conflict. “Our struggle is not against blood and flesh.”
They are not human antagonists whom the Church
has to fear,—mortal men whom we can look in the face
and meet with equal courage, in the contest where hot
blood and straining muscle do their part. The fight
needs mettle of another kind. The foes of our faith are
untouched by carnal weapons. They come upon us
without sound or footfall. They assail the will and
conscience; they follow us into the regions of spiritual
thought, of prayer and meditation. Hence the weapons
of our warfare, like those which the apostle wielded
(
It is true that the Asian Churches had visible enemies
arrayed against them. There were the “wild beasts”
with whom St Paul “fought at Ephesus,” the heathen
mob of the city, sworn foes of every despiser of their
great goddess Artemis. There was Alexander the
coppersmith, ready to do the apostle evil, and “the
Jews from Asia,” a party of whom all but murdered
him in Jerusalem (
Even in outward struggles against worldly power, our wrestling is not simply against blood and flesh. Calvin makes a bold application of the passage when he says: “This sentence we should remember so often as we are tempted to revengefulness, under the smart of injuries from men. For when nature prompts us to fling ourselves upon them with all our might, this unreasonable passion will be checked and reined in suddenly, when we consider that these men who trouble us are nothing more than darts cast by the hand of Satan; and that while we stoop to pick up these, we shall expose ourselves to the full force of his blows.” Vasa sunt, says Augustine of human troublers, alius utitur; organa sunt, alius tangit.
The crucial assaults of evil, in many instances, come
in no outward and palpable guise. There are sinister
influences that affect the spirit more directly, fires that
search its inmost fibres, a darkness that sweeps down
upon the very light that is in us threatening its extinction.
“Doubts, the spectres of the mind,” haunt it;
clouds brood over the interior sky and fierce storms
sweep down on the soul, that rise from beyond the
seen horizon. “Jesus was led of the Spirit into the
wilderness, to be tempted of the devil.” Away from
Some men are constitutionally more exposed than others to these interior assaults. There are conditions of the brain and nerves, tendencies lying deep in the organism, that give points of vantage to the enemy of souls. These are the opportunities of the tempter; they do not constitute the temptation itself, which comes from a hidden and objective source. Similarly in the trials of the Church, in the great assaults made upon her vital truths, historical conditions and the external movements of the age furnish the material for the conflicts through which it has to pass; but the spring and moving agent, the master will that dominates these hostile forces is that of Satan.
The Church was engaged in a double conflict—of the flesh and of the spirit. On the one hand, it was assailed by the material seductions of heathenism and the terrors of ruthless persecution. On the other hand, it underwent a severe intellectual conflict with the systems of error that were rooted in the mind of the age. These forces opposed the Christian truth from without; but they became much more dangerous when they found their way within the Church, vitiating her teaching and practice, and growing like tares among the wheat. It is of heresy more than persecution that the apostle is thinking, when he writes these ominous words. Not blood and flesh, but the mind and spirit of the Asian believers will bear the brunt of the attack that the craft of the devil is preparing for the apostolic Church.
See p. 103.
No; Satan and his hosts do not dwell with Christ
and the holy angels “in the heavenly places.” But
the Church dwells there already, by her faith; and it
is in the heavenly places of her faith and hope that
she is assailed by the powers of hell. This final prepositional
clause should be separated by a comma from
the words immediately foregoing; it forms a distinct
predicate to the sentence contained in verse 12. It
specifies the locality of the struggle; it marks out the
battle-field. “Our wrestling is ... in the heavenly
places.” The objection against the common rendering taken from the
absence of the Greek article (τά)
before the phrase
ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις,
required to link it to
τὰ πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας,
is not decisive.
The questions of religious controversy characteristic
of our own times, though not identical with those of
Colossæ or Ephesus, concern matters equally high
and vital. It is not this or that doctrine that is now
at stake—the nature or extent of the atonement, the
procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son with the
Father, the verbal or plenary inspiration of Scripture;
but the personal being of God, the historical truth of
Christianity, the reality of the supernatural,—these and
the like questions, which formed the accepted basis and
the common assumptions of former theological discussions,
are now brought into dispute. Religion has to
justify its very existence. Christianity must answer
for its life, as at the beginning. God is denied. Worship
is openly renounced. Our treasures in heaven
“The apostle incites the readers,” says Chrysostom, “by the thought of the prize at stake. When he has said that our enemies are powerful, he adds thereto that these are great possessions which they seek to wrest from us. When he says in the heavenly places, this implies for the heavenly things. How it must rouse and sober us to know that the hazard is for great things, and great will be the prize of victory. Our foe strives to take heaven from us.” Let the Church be stripped of all her temporalities, and driven naked as at first into the wilderness. She carries with her the crown jewels; and her treasure is unimpaired, so long as faith in Christ and the hope of heaven remain firm in her heart. But let these be lost; let heaven and the Father in heaven fade with our childhood’s dreams; let Christ go back to His grave—then we are utterly undone. We have lost our all in all!
“Wherefore take up the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and, having conquered all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the readiness of the gospel of peace; withal taking up the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: with all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in the Spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and supplication for all the saints.”—Eph. vi. 13–18.
Comp.
This defence is needed, for an “evil day” is at
hand! This emphatic reference points to something
more definite than the general day of temptation that
is co-extensive with our earthly life. St Paul foresaw
a crisis of extreme danger impending over the young
Church of Christ. The prophecies of Jesus taught
His disciples, from the first, that His kingdom could
only prevail by means of a severe conflict, and that
some desperate struggle would precede the final
Messianic triumph. This prospect looms before the
minds of the New Testament writers, as “the day of
Jehovah” dominated the imagination of the Hebrew
prophets. Paul’s apocalypse in 1 and 2 Thessalonians
is full of reminiscences of Christ’s visions of judgement.
It culminates in the prediction of the evil day of Antichrist,
which is to usher in the second, glorious coming
of the Lord Jesus. The consummation, as the apostle
was then inclined to think, might arrive within that
generation (
Two chief characteristics marked this crisis, as it
affected the people of Christ: persecution from without,
and apostasy within the Church (
When we turn to the epistle to the Seven Churches
(
But it is time to look at the armour in which St Paul bids his readers equip themselves against the evil day. It consists of seven weapons, offensive or defensive—if we count prayer amongst them: the girdle of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of readiness to bear the message of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the word, and the continual cry of prayer.
1. In girding himself for the field, the first thing the
soldier does is to fasten round his waist the military
belt. With this he binds in his under-garments, that
there may be nothing loose or trailing about him, and
The epistle is pervaded by the sense of the Church’s
need of intellectual conviction. Many of the Asian
believers were children, half-enlightened and irresolute,
ready to be “tossed to and fro and carried about with
every wind of doctrine” (iv. 14). They had “heard
the truth as it is in Jesus,” but had an imperfect comprehension
of its meaning. Ch. 1. 17–23, iii. 16–19, iv. 13–15, 20–24.
Such is the faith needed by the Church, now as then,
the faith of an intelligent, firm and manly assurance.
There is in such faith a security and a vigour of action
that the faith of mere sentiment and emotional impression,
with its nerveless grasp, its hectic and impulsive
fervours, cannot impart. The luxury of agnosticism,
the languors of doubt, the vague sympathies and
hesitant eclecticism in which delicate and cultured
minds are apt to indulge; the lofty critical attitude,
as of some intellectual god sitting above the strife of
creeds, which others find congenial—these are conditions
2. Having girt his loins, the soldier next fastens on his breastplate, or cuirass.
This is the chief piece of his defensive armour; it
protects the vital organs. In the picture drawn in
This attribute must be understood in its full Pauline meaning. It is the state of one who is right with God and with God’s law. It is the righteousness both of standing and of character, of imputation and of impartation, which begins with justification and continues in the new, obedient life of the believer. These are never separate, in the true doctrine of grace. “The righteousness that is of God by faith,” is the soul’s main defence against the shafts of Satan. It wards off deadly blows, both from this side and from that. Does the enemy bring up against me my old sins? I can say: “It is God that justifieth; who is he that condemneth?”—Am I tempted to presume on my forgiveness, and to fall into transgression once more? From this breastplate the arrow of temptation falls pointless, as it resounds: “He that doeth righteousness is righteous. He that is born of God doth not commit sin.” The completeness of pardon for past offence and the integrity of character that belong to the justified life, are woven together into an impenetrable mail.
3. Now the soldier, having girt his loins and guarded
What is the quality most needed in the soldier’s
shoes? Some say, it is firmness; and they so translate
the Greek word employed by the apostle, occurring only
here in the New Testament, which in certain passages
of the Septuagint seems to acquire this sense, under
the influence of Hebrew
idiom. Ἑτοιμασία
is adopted by the Greek translators as the equivalent of
the Hebrew word for foundation, or base, in
Thus shod with speed and willingness were “the
beautiful feet” of those that brought over desert and
mountain “the good tidings of peace,” the news of
Israel’s return to Zion (
The girdle and breastplate look to one’s own safety.
They must be supplemented by the evangelic zeal
inseparable from the spirit of Christ. This is, moreover,
4. With his body girt and fenced and his feet clad with the gospel shoes, the soldier reaches out his left hand to “take up withal the shield,” while his right hand grasps first the helmet which he places on his head, and then the sword that is offered to him in the word of God.
The shield signified is not the small round buckler,
or target, of the light-armed man; but the door-like
shield, Θυρεός:
Latin scutum; only here in N.T.
St Paul can scarcely mean by his “fiery darts” incitements to passion in ourselves, inflammatory temptations that seek to rouse the inward fires of anger or lust. For these missiles are “fire-pointed darts of the Evil One.” The fire belongs to the enemy who shoots the dart. It signifies the malignant hate with which Satan hurls slanders and threats against the people of God through his human instruments. A bold faith wards off and quenches this fire even at a distance, so that the soul never feels its heat. The heart’s confidence is unmoved and the Church’s songs of praise are undisturbed, while persecution rages and the enemies of Christ gnash their teeth against her. Such a shield to him was the faith of Stephen the proto-martyr.
To “take up the shield of faith,” is it not, like the
5. At this point (ver. 17), when the sentence beginning at verse 14 has drawn itself out to such length, and the relative clause of verse 16b makes a break and eddy in the current of thought, the writer pauses for a moment. He resumes the exhortation in a form slightly changed and with rising emphasis, passing from the participle to the finite verb: “And take the helmet of salvation.”
The word take, in the original, differs from the taking
up of verses 13 and 16. It signifies the accepting of
something offered by the hand of another. So the
Thessalonians “accepted the word” brought them by
St Paul (
The “helmet of salvation” is worn by the Lord
Himself, as He is depicted by the prophet coming to
the succour of His people (
The warrior’s head rising above his shield was frequently open to attack. The arrow might shoot over the shield’s edge, and inflict a mortal blow. Our faith, at the best, has its deficiencies and its limits; but God’s salvation reaches beyond our highest confidence in Him. His overshadowing presence is the crown of our salvation, His love its shining crest.
Thus the equipment of Christ’s soldier is complete; and he is arrayed in the full armour of light. His loins girt with truth, his breast clad with righteousness, his feet shod with zeal, his head crowned with safety, while faith’s all-encompassing shield is cast about him, he steps forth to do battle with the powers of darkness, “strong in the Lord, and in the might of His strength.”
6. It only remains that “the sword of the Spirit” be put into his right hand, while his lips are open in continual prayer to the God of his strength.
The “cleansing word” of chapter v. 26, by whose
virtue we passed through the gate of baptism into the
flock of Christ, now becomes the guarding and smiting
word, to be used in conflict with our spiritual foes. Of
the Messiah it was said, in language quoted by the
apostle against Antichrist (
This sword of the inspired word Paul himself wielded with supernatural effect, as when he rebuked Elymas the sorcerer, or when he defended his gospel against the Judaizers of Galatia and Corinth. In his hand it was even as
With what piercing reproofs, what keen thrusts of argument, what double-edged irony and dexterous sword-play did this mighty combatant smite the enemies of the cross of Christ! In times of conflict never may such leaders be wanting to the Church, men using weapons of warfare not carnal, but mighty to “cast down strongholds,” to “bring down every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and make captive every thought to Christ’s obedience.”
In her struggle with the world’s gigantic lusts and
tyrannies, the Israel of God must be armed with this
7. We have surveyed the Christian soldier with his harness on. From head to foot he is clothed in arms supernatural. No weapon of defence or offence is lacking, that the spiritual combat needs. Nothing seems to be wanting: yet everything is wanting, if this be all. Our text began: “Be strong in the Lord.” It is prayer that links the believer with the strength of God.
What avails Michael’s sword, if the hand that holds it is slack and listless? what the panoply of God, if behind it beats a craven heart? He is but a soldier in semblance who wears arms without the courage and the strength to use them. The life that is to animate that armed figure, to beat with high resolve beneath the corslet, to nerve the arm as it lifts the strong shield and plies the sharp sword, to set the swift feet moving on their gospel errands, to weld the Church together into one army of the living God, comes from the inspiration of God’s Spirit received in answer to believing prayer. So the apostle adds: “With all prayer and supplication praying at every time in the Spirit.”
There is here no needless repetition. “Prayer” is
the universal word for reverent address to God; and
Ἐν πάσῃ προσκαρτερήσει:
in every kind of persistence,—a perseverance
that tries all arts and holds its ground at every point. The verb
προσκαρτερέω
appears in the parallel passages:
The word “supplication” is resumed at the end of verse 18, in order to enlist the prayers of the readers for the service of the Church at large: “with wakeful heed thereto, in all persistence and supplication for all the saints.” Prayer for ourselves must broaden out into a catholic intercession for all the servants of our Master, for all the children of the household of faith. By the bands of prayer we are knit together,—a vast multitude of saints throughout the earth, unknown by face or name to our fellows, but one in the love of Christ and in our heavenly calling, and all engaged in the same perilous conflict.
“All the saints,” St Paul said (i. 15), were interested
in the faith of the Asian believers; they were called
“with all the saints” to share in the comprehension
Πέπεισμαι γὰρ ὅτι οὔτε θάνατος οὔτε ζωὴ οὔτε ἄγγελοι οὔτε ἀρχαὶ οὔτε ἐνεστῶτα οὔτε μέλλοντα οὔτε δυνάμεις οὔτε ὕψωμα οὔτε βάθος οὔτε τις κτίσις ἑτέρα δυνήσεται ἡμᾶς χωρίσαι ἀπὸ τῆς ἀγάπης τοῦ Θεοῦ τῆς ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ τῷ Κυρίῳ ἡμῶν—Rom. viii. 38, 39.
“Love for Christ is immortal.”—R. W. Dale.
“And [pray] on my behalf, that the word may be given unto me in opening my mouth, to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that in it I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.
“But that ye also may know my affairs, how I do, Tychicus, the beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord, shall make known to you all things: whom I have sent unto you for this very purpose, that ye may know our state, and that he may comfort your hearts.”—Eph. vi. 19–22.
The apostle Paul himself stood in the forefront of
this battle. He was suffering for the cause of common
Christendom; he was a mark for the attack of the
enemies of the gospel. Ch. ii. 7, iii. 10;
Strong and confident as the apostle Paul was, he
felt himself to be nothing without prayer. It is his
habit to expect the support of the intercessions of all
who love him in Christ. Out of the instances in which the English Version renders
λόγος
in St Paul by utterance, the Revisers have substituted word for utterance
only in
The Church must entreat on Paul’s behalf that the word he utters may be God’s, and not his own. It is in vain to “open the mouth,” unless there is this higher prompting and through the gates of speech there issues a Divine message, unless the speaker is the mouthpiece of the Holy Spirit rather than of his individual thought and will. “The words that I speak unto you,” Jesus said, “I speak not of myself.” The bold apostle intends to open his mouth; but he must have the true “word given” him to say. We should pray for Christ’s ambassadors, and especially for the more public and eloquent pleaders of the Christian cause, that it may be thus with them. Rash and vain words, that bear the stamp of the mere man who utters them and not of the Spirit of his Master, do a hurt to the cause of the gospel proportioned to the blessing that comes from such lips when they speak the word given to them.
Such inspiration would enable the apostle to “make
known the mystery of the gospel with freedom and
confidence of speech”: the expression rendered
Ἐν παρρησίᾳ:
comp. iii. 12;
St Paul’s trial, we suppose, passed off successfully, as he at this time
anticipated.
St Paul’s bonds in Christ have now become widely
The paragraph relating to Tychicus is almost identical
with that of
St Paul knew the great anxiety of the Christians of
Asia on his account. Epaphras of Colossæ had
Comp.
In the parallel epistle he writes, “that you may
know” (
The apostle commends Tychicus in language identical
in the two letters, except that in Colossians “fellow-servant”
is added to the honourable designations of
“beloved brother and faithful minister,” under which
he is here introduced. We find him first associated
with St Paul in
Tychicus was well known in the Asian Churches,
and suitable therefore to be sent upon this errand.
And the commendation given to him would be very
welcome to the circle to which he belonged. The
We observe that in writing to the Colossians the
apostle applies to Onesimus, the converted slave, the
honourable epithets applied here to this long-tried
friend: “the faithful and beloved brother” (
The Benediction.
Grace and Peace were the first words of the epistle,—the apostle’s salutation to all his Churches. In Peace and Grace he breathes out his final blessing. The benediction is fuller than in most of the epistles, and exhibits several peculiar features.
To the Thessalonians (2 Ep. iii. 16) St Paul wished:
“Peace continually, in all ways, from the Lord of peace
Himself”; and he commends the Romans twice to
“the God of peace” (ch. xv. 33, xvi. 20): the Corinthians
he bids to “live in peace,” so that “the God of
love and peace” may be with them ( See pp. 13–17.
“With faith,” that “love” is desired whereby,
The peace that the apostle looks for amongst Christian brethren is the fruit of peace with God through Christ. Such “peace guarding the thoughts and heart” of each Christian man, nothing contrary thereto will arise amongst them. Calm and quiet hearts make a peaceful Church. There are no clashing interests, no selfish competitions, no strife as to who shall be greatest. Differences of opinion and taste are kept within the bounds of mutual submission. The awe of God’s presence with His people, the remembrance of the dear price at which His Church was purchased, the sense of Christ’s Lordship in the Spirit and of the sacredness of our brotherhood in Him, check all turbulence and rivalry and teach us to seek the things that make for peace.
“Peace and love,” the apostle desires. Love includes
peace, and more; for it labours not to prevent contention
only, but to help and enrich in all ways the body
of Christ. By such “toil of love” faith is made
complete. We are bidden indeed, in certain matters,
to “have faith to ourselves before God” (
As faith grows and deepens, it makes new channels
in which love may flow. “We are bound to thank
God always for you,” writes St Paul to the Thessalonians
(2 Ep. i. 3), “for that your faith groweth exceedingly,
and the love of each one of you all toward
one another multiplieth.” This is the sound and true
growth of faith. Where an intenser faith makes men
disputatious and exclusive; where it fails to breed
meekness and courtesy, we cannot but suspect its
quality. Such faith may be sincere; but it is mixed
with a lamentable ignorance, and a resistance to the
Holy Spirit that is likely to end in grave offence.
“Contending earnestly for the faith” does not mean
contending angrily, with the weapons of satire and censoriousness.
It is well to remember that we are not
the judges of our brethren. There are many questions
raised and discussed amongst us, which we may safely
leave to the judgement of the last day. It is too easy
to fill the air with matters of contention, and to excite
a sore and suspicious temper destructive of peace,
and in which nothing but fault-finding will flourish.
If we must contend, we may surely debate quietly on
secondary matters, while we are one in Christ. If we
have not love with faith, our faith is worthless (
Deep beneath the peace that dwells in the Church
“With all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ,” Paul says; for it is to lovers of Christ that God gives the continuance of His grace. If our love to Christ fails, grace leaves us. God cannot look with favour upon the man who has no love to His Son Jesus Christ. In giving his blessing to the Corinthians, St Paul was compelled to write with his own hand: “If any man love not the Lord, let him be anathema.” The blessing involves the anathema. God’s love is not a love of indifference, an indiscriminate, immoral affection. It is a love of choice and predilection—“If any man love me,” said Jesus, “my Father will love him.” Is not the condition reasonable,—and the inference inevitable? The Father cannot grant His grace to those who have seen and hated Him in His Son and image. By that hatred they refuse His grace, and cast it from them.
On the other hand, a sincere love to the Lord Jesus
Christ opens the heart to all the rich and purifying
influences of Divine grace. The sinful woman, stained
with false and foul love, who washed the Saviour’s feet
with her tears, attained in that act to a height of purity
undreamed of by the virtuous Pharisee. This new and
Ch. i. 14, iv. 30. See Chapter IV., above.
In incorruption is the last and sealing word of this
letter, which we have been so long studying together.
It “stands as the crown and climax of this glorious
epistle” (Alford). Like so many other words of the
epistle, at first sight its interpretation is not clear. The
apostle has used the term in several other passages, as synonymous with
immortality
The rendering of our ordinary version, “in sincerity”
(in the Revised rendering, “uncorruptness”), gives an
ethical sense to the word that is scarcely borne out by
usage. It is a different, though kindred expression that
St Paul employs to express “uncorruptness” in Ἀφθορία:
ἀφθαρσία
is deleted in the critical texts.
It appears to us that the term “incorruption,” in its ordinary significance, applies fitly to the believer’s love for the Lord, when the word is read in accordance with the symbolism of the epistle. This love is the life of the body of Christ. In it lies the Church’s immortality. The gates of death prevail not against her, rooted and grounded as she is in love to the risen and immortal Christ. “May that love be maintained,” the apostle says, “in its deathless power. Let it be an unspoilt and unwasting love.”
Of earthly love we often say with sadness:—
Not so with the love of Christ. Neither death nor life parts the soul from Him. Our love to the Lord Jesus Christ seats us with Him in the heavenly places,—above the realm of decay, above this wasting flesh and perishing world.
i iii v vi vii viii ix x xi xii xiii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440