St. Paul’s dealings with the Ephesians cannot be traced from the Epistle itself as clearly as those with the Corinthians and Galatians. But no other Church is so well documented from outside sources. The 19th and 20th chapters of Acts give invaluable hints. From the previous chapter we know that Apollos had visited Ephesus in the heat of his first convictions, before Aquila and Priscilla instructed him about Christ. The opening of chapter 19 shows the character of his preaching. Paul finds certain disciples and asks, “Have ye received the Holy Spirit since ye believed?” They answer, “We have not so much as heard if there is a Holy Spirit.” He asks into what they were baptized; they say, “To John’s Baptism.” These men were not of any Apollos-school such as later appeared in Corinth—that later school was Christian in the ordinary sense, though, like every school, it might divide Christ. Nor should we suppose that Apollos’s Alexandrian character was swallowed up in his reverence for John the Baptist. He would probably have spoken of John as one who came to draw his countrymen away from visible things and fix their minds on the divine and Eternal Teacher, Light, Word. In this sense he spoke of a divine Lord, and his hearers could rightly be called “disciples” by Luke. His acknowledgment of John’s mission lifted him above the mere theosophists of his city; it brought him into contact with the people and made him something of a leveller. It may have combined with his Philonic training to break down his Jewish prejudices. What he and his followers lacked, as Paul’s words show, was the belief that the King John spoke of had appeared, and was baptizing, as John foretold, with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
This is the first great help toward knowing the state of the Ephesian Church. It would be rash to say these twelve Johannine disciples were the nucleus of the Christian society there, but Luke would hardly have mentioned them just as he records the start of Paul’s two years’ preaching unless the facts were closely connected. Next comes a more formal break with the synagogue than we read of elsewhere. For three months Paul argued there with the freedom Jews rarely refused to teachers who reasoned from Scripture. But seeing his debates were doing harm rather than good—hardening the Jews’ conscience and letting them misrepresent him to the crowd—he withdrew and taught daily in the school of one Tyrannus. There Jews and Gentiles were admitted alike; in the most important city of Asia Minor a Jew declared God’s message to both equally for two years.
Next we hear of unusual healings by the Apostle. The common view would say these were more frequent and remarkable in Ephesus because it drew more strangers than any city Paul had yet visited. I do not dismiss that; but Luke himself suggests another explanation deserving equal attention. He has already shown that the Christians in Ephesus needed to feel spiritual power. Their moral preparation, since they began with the preacher of repentance, was excellent; but they had not yet entered into that victory over the powers of evil which our Lord’s and the Apostles’ miracles displayed. Perhaps they instinctively shrank from believing in powers they saw abused for shameful and demoralizing ends—for it is plain from Luke that sorcery and magic, all the arts that betoken belief in a spirit, but not a holy Spirit, flourished there. Everything in Scripture suggests that displays of divine power took a more startling form where superstitions grounded on reverence for diabolical power prevailed—that they were the proclamation of a good and orderly government sent to overcome one that was disorderly and malevolent. So a deadly blow was struck at idolatry, which relied for its defence on men’s curiosity and fears. And to show that the Christian testimonies against these enchantments were not of the same kind—that they did not depend on charms or magical words—the story of the Jewish youths who tried to imitate Paul’s abjuration is told alongside the planting of the Church. Paul was waging no sham battle with evil. He had no new scheme for working on weak women’s nerves or evil men’s consciences, but the power to make the one reasonable and the other pure.
Next, in Ephesus, idolatry first clearly realizes what a new foe it faces. Nowhere else do we hear of a tumult like that raised by Demetrius and his craftsmen. The historian dwells on it at unusual length, marking both its singularity then and its importance as a type of later events. There was a powerful Jewish colony in Ephesus who had of course stood aloof from the worship of Diana, yet had caused no alarm to those upholding it. Alexander probably appeared in the theatre to assert his countrymen’s innocence and to disclaim any sympathy with the new sect. Paul, as the town-clerk testified, had not offended the country’s religion or spoken disrespectfully of the goddess or the temple; and in mixing with heathens he was far less exclusive than the older Jews. Yet precisely in this freedom from exclusiveness lay the danger to the craft. If a society of Jews and Gentiles recognizing no barriers were possible, idolatry was hastening to its end. Demetrius saw this: it was catholicism, not Judaism, that would make the silver shrines unmarketable.
Here are hints that give a clue to the aim and connection of this memorable epistle. Here, if anywhere, we may expect to find the ground of a spiritual society with a deeper foundation than the Jewish calling—one founded in the nature of God Himself, explaining and supporting all human relationships, having all spiritual enemies to fight, set out less controversially than in Galatians, with less reference to Jewish opponents and more direct reference to mankind and the universe. All that Paul had taught and endured in this city, its position as one of the world’s great markets, and those fears about future disturbers of that Church which he could not shake off when he blessed its elders at Miletus—all these must have been with him as he wrote, deepened by his prison reflections on how the little band in Ephesus stood in relation to the whole family in earth and heaven, and to the powers of darkness striving against it but unable to prevail.
Though the opening of this Epistle speaks much of adoption, redemption, and forgiveness of sins, its main subject is not to be found there. Nor can we say that man’s sin or fall is Paul’s starting-point, from which he proceeds to a remedy. The teaching of the opening sentence—which is not merely a preface but a statement of the letter’s design—is, in the strictest sense, supralapsarian. Paul thanks “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because he has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ, even as He chose us out in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.” Here, as the Predestinarian school rightly tells us, is a divine purpose to be carried out in time but not formed in time, not to be judged by time’s conditions. They are right that the rest of the Epistle is unintelligible if this Eternal Order is forgotten or merged into the acts by which it was realized; or if the knowledge of that Divine Mind—before all worlds, changeless, untouched by accident—is not held up as the great reward and fruition Paul offers his converts and the whole Church. I heartily agree with all these positions, and wish to show how free they are from the moral dangers Arminian divines have charged them with—how little they need restraint or qualification, and how much they need expanding beyond the limits the Calvinist writers have set.
The satisfactory answer to the charge of immorality lies, as the truest Predestinarians have often said, in the effect the divine Election is said to produce: “That we may be holy and without blame before Him in love.” They have not done full justice to their own argument, for many of them merely say Paul never contemplates happiness except through holiness. But I see nothing here of holiness being a means to an end. There is indeed a higher object than any state of mind in the members or the whole Church: all is to the praise of the glory of His grace, all tending toward gathering together all things in Christ as Head, whether in heaven or earth. But for those Paul includes in “us,” being holy and blameless is treated as the highest blessing they can inherit. If Election in Christ has this one end, how can believing oneself its object harm anyone’s inner life or outward acts? The danger lies rather in not thinking oneself its object—in supposing God has not meant us to be holy or given us the means. Terrible danger lies in that belief, as experience shows; and anything that strengthens it in a man makes us accessories to his becoming evil. But there is more. If I credit myself with belonging to a class from which I exclude him, I have put my own Election on a new footing. It is no longer that God, being holy, wishes His creature to be like Him. It is that God, being Almighty, has decreed that certain persons, myself among them, shall have certain blessings. I call them spiritual and divine—but do I mean it? A spiritual blessing is to share the character I count most divine. If God, as I picture Him, is not one whose Will is toward all good, but simply a Great Power who does as He likes, then I may resemble such a Being within my own sphere—but that cannot be my real object. My real object must be to get something from Him: His Will must be a will to grant me tangible benefits, defined by my own taste, from which others are shut out, or to exempt me from penalties others must bear. On this view both the spiritual blessing and the spiritual curse vanish; the old phrases remain but carry a new sense. The good man, who has found sin his misery and the knowledge of God his blessing, does not notice the change; he uses the language of his godly forefathers in its plain, natural sense. But how he groans to discover that words of life to him have become words of death to those who most passionately adopt them, and death also to some—more honest men—who fling them indignantly aside. This is what I mean by saying the Calvinist theory needs not diluting but unfolding; its poison lies not in the breadth but in the narrowness of its assertions; it becomes harmful when it becomes self-contradictory.
How great this contradiction is will appear as we examine Paul’s statement, especially the words the Calvinists have borrowed from him. “He hath chosen out” (ἐξελέξατο) and “having predestinated” (προορίσας) are vital words in his introduction and deserve careful study. The modern Calvinist takes for granted that “chosen out” means chosen out of a ruined mass or majority. Yet there is no mention of ruin or majority. The Election is “before the foundation of the world”—not merely before the world fell, but before it existed. “But surely there was a foresight of the fall.” You assume this, first, because you confuse ἐξελέξατο with προώρισε, though Paul carefully distinguishes them; and second, because “chosen us out in Him” suggests to you the time when Christ came in the flesh. But if you did not mix in the notion of His appearance, would you have to see this election as a foresight? Would you not rather be led to think of an Eternal Son, one with the Father before all worlds—and would not the election then be, as the Calvinists say, not in time but strictly in Eternity? Accept or reject that reading as you like; but it will not surprise you that, having traced the Eternal Son through all the Gospels and Epistles, I recognize this announcement as most Pauline and most consistent with all the New Testament. “But why ‘elected’? Why not ‘constituted’ or the like?” We may find such phrases occurring often and significantly in this and other Epistles. But “He hath chosen out” cannot be dispensed with; no other phrase exactly fills its place. “Constituted,” unless interpreted by this, might make us think of an involuntary earth that cannot depart from its law, though it needs a renewing power to make it bring forth according to that law. Paul carries us into the “heavenlies”—not “heavenly places,” as our translators render it, wrongly importing place into a sentence from which place and time are excluded—into a region of voluntary beings, spirits standing by a spiritual law and capable of a spiritual blessing. That law must be one of allegiance to God; the heavenly blessing must be to be subject to His Will and choice. The character of that Will—its certainty and security, because it is a Righteous One’s—does not change the nature of the tenure. A subject will must be chosen and upheld by the higher Will; it stands by His knowing of it. This principle is asserted in Romans and assumed everywhere, but nowhere brought out so fully as here.
If election, for Paul, has just as much and just as little to do with foresight as creation has, how does “having predestinated” come in? Join it to the words that follow and you see at once: having predestinated us to the adoption of sons (υἱοθεσία). We learned the force of this word from Galatians. Paul follows the Roman custom closely: adoption happens when one who is already a son is acknowledged by his father and freed from the pupillage of infancy. God, having chosen us in His Son before the foundation of the world, purposed to declare this election by manifesting Him. Only then, in connection with adoption, do we hear of redemption and remission of transgressions. The sons, being claimed, are freed from bondage to masters—whether masters the Father appointed or ones they chose for themselves, rightful teachers or illegitimate usurpers. Having broken their Father’s laws—whether laws openly made known or revealed in conscience—they must have forgiveness. To leave out these acts of redemption and amnesty would fail to explain how the Father’s eternal purpose is brought to bear on human creatures. But Paul does not linger over them; he does not investigate their working, but crowds them rapidly together, fearing lest the main subject of his thanksgiving be lost in its precious details.
It would repay long study to examine the order of these details—how they relate to one another, how all are referred to one ground, the good pleasure of His Will, and one end, the gathering up of all things in Christ; the divine Wisdom and Prudence devising them, revealing the mystery of His Will not suddenly but gradually. But desirable as such minute study is once the road is familiar, the reader must let the Apostle carry him at his own speed, on his own wings, if he would grasp the height from which he is descending and to which he returns.
Some will think the whole question turns on determining who are meant by “us,” which Paul uses in the third verse and often after. I confess I feel no anxiety here. Even if the pronoun were singular, I should be content. If Paul had been the only man in the world brought to believe in the true God—to see that God is not what the heathen or Jewish priests took Him to be, and that His only-begotten Son is the Centre in whom all things in heaven and earth are gathered—he would still have to thank God for that knowledge, for choosing him in Christ to be holy and blameless. He could not deny that calling, whether or not he walked worthy of it; God would rebuke him in his conscience if he said, “Thou hast not called me to be holy.” So even if he and “those who first hoped in Christ” were the tiniest fraction of the world, he could not help feeling they represented the true condition of humanity, God’s purpose concerning it. For God had called them to be sons—how? By causing “His Son to be made of a woman, made under the law.” Christ, in becoming man and taking on the conditions of suffering and dying man, so claims us as sons. He took not the nature of Paul or James, but of men; He claimed not Paul or James but men to be sons. And since, by this chapter’s teaching, the adoption on earth corresponds to the election in the heavenlies and can be no wider than it, what Paul asserts for himself and his little band is a share in the privileges of humanity as it is created, elected, and known by God in Christ. For the original purpose before the world is that which Adam’s sin, and every descendant’s sin, contradicts: every man trying to stand by himself, and not on God’s election, stands on false, fallen ground; every man claiming that election, now shown to all in Christ, affirms that neither Adam’s sin nor all the world’s sin has defeated the Creator’s design.
So the Apostle can pass without hesitation from “us” who first hoped in Christ to “you” who heard the word of truth and believed the Gospel of your salvation. The word of truth was that God sent His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that they might receive adoption. The Gospel of their salvation was that Christ had redeemed them from curse and bondage and brought them into His body, of which He is Head. This word had been preached to them before they believed; their belief did not create it or confine it to themselves. But having believed, they were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise—the pledge that they shared that adoption proclaimed to man in Christ, and that Redemption He won by facing men’s tyrants—Death, the grave, hell, the evil spirit. This same Spirit was the earnest of an inheritance they would enter when He who purchased them came to claim them.
Paul is sure they have believed what they had a right to believe, what was true for them and for those who did not believe it. And he has no doubt that the Spirit of Truth—the Spirit mocked and parodied by the spirits the enchanters boasted of, spoken of in the magic books they had burnt—was with them, binding them into one and prompting them to love and good works. So he has ground for continual thanksgiving; but also for continual prayer, that they may have ever-fresh wisdom and revelation, the eyes of their hearts enlightened, so they may know what their calling means, what its hope is, what the wealth of God’s inheritance in the saints is, and the surpassing greatness of His power toward believers—that very belief being itself the working of this power. At first we sink under this language; the reader may be tempted to cry with Festus, “Thou art beside thyself, Paul!” But if this is the madness the ancients linked with the highest inspiration, it is compatible with perfect practical soberness. The only hope of the Ephesians being kept from the fanaticism and intoxication the magicians spread was that they should confess themselves guided by a Spirit truly familiar yet awful—one leading them to grasp objects as real as any their senses knew, but not fluctuating: the knowledge of the Eternal Being who had first known them. Paul cannot think he is preaching Christ if he hides from them that they have received this Spirit, or the truth of the calling this Spirit seals, or the inheritance it guarantees. For he can only measure the power working in each Ephesian convert, in each wretched creature of that city where the earth’s refuse was poured, by the power that worked in Christ when God raised Him and exalted Him. The mysterious working of the Spirit who in death still united the Son of Man to the Father, enabling Him to triumph over space and time, is not merely the image of the working that begets faith in the most sense-bound man and raises him into union with the risen Lord; it is the very same. Paul cannot separate them; if he did, the believer might fancy his holiness a private possession, the Spirit given to him alone. He would not see that he is faithful and holy only when lifted out of himself, acknowledging himself a member of a living body joined to a living Head—that body being the fulness of Him who fills all in all, to whom every lordship, principality, and power, now and to come, is subjected.
Christ being proclaimed as Head and reconciler of the two worlds, and fulfiller of God’s original purpose for those who had fallen from it, Paul can tell the Ephesians that, being dead in trespasses, God had quickened them with Christ. The words wedged between the object and its verb wonderfully illustrate his meaning. The Ephesians had walked according to the course (αἰῶνα) of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit working in the children of disobedience—among whom, Paul says, he himself and all his brethren, Jews or Gentiles, had once lived, doing the inclinations of the flesh and of the thoughts (διανοιῶν), and were by nature children of impulse (ὀργῆς) like the rest. This shows what he believes Christ had freed them from: a bondage of the will. The will was enslaved to nature, regarding itself as part of the outside world, chained to fate. It was indeed so chained, because a spirit of unbelief and disobedience had mastered it, because it had used its awful power of choice by submitting to a tyrant. The careless reader thinks Paul heaps up clauses needlessly, that any one phrase would have done, that there is tautology if not contradiction. But the more we know the philosophers’ attempts to formalize the facts of man’s freedom and servitude—the proof that he has a will while yoked to fate—and the more we know the contradictions in ourselves, the more we shall value this inspired language, which states the case with all its anomalies, shows where they come from, how frightful they must be when a spirit sinks under the sensual and hugs its fetters, and how impossible it is to escape them unless we recognize a disobedient Spirit at war with God as well as man, and believe that God, by claiming men as sons, declares its yoke broken.
I will not go into the questions this raises about the “wishes of the flesh or the thoughts,” since Romans settles the sense of those words, which applies here. Nor will I defend my departure from the usual rendering of ὀργή (wrath, anger); it must justify itself by fitting the context, or else let the old translation stand, to which I only object that it seems irrelevant and assumes an ellipsis. What I want the reader to notice carefully is the three compound verbs: συνεζωοποίησεν (co-quickened), συνήγειρεν (co-raised), and συνεκάθισεν (co-seated)—quickened, raised, and seated together with Christ. This joint idea seems to be what the whole Epistle unfolds. The quickening, raising, and ascending are said to have happened already. This is not a bold figure of speech; Paul cannot speak otherwise if he is to be exact, or to lay any ground for faith and obedience. The following clause—“that he may show forth to the ages coming on the surpassing wealth of his grace toward us in Christ Jesus”—links the past revelation with the future: the completed manifestation of God’s love and of man’s redeemed state with the ever-new discovery of that love through all the experiences of the universe, even through men’s rebellion.
For he goes on: by this grace—the grace to be displayed in all ages to come—you have been saved, fully rescued from the tyrant’s hands, fully restored to your estate as sons. God’s grace has freed your wills. And you claim your salvation by believing in your Saviour. Yet even this act of faith is not from you; it is God’s gift. For we are redeemed to carry out the divine purpose of our creation. We are created for good works, which God ordained beforehand that we should walk in. Our wills are in their true restored state when they respond and conform to His will, and so become productive of good deeds.
The passage that follows is thoroughly Pauline. He addresses the Gentiles as having been fleshly—given to fleshly notions, appetites, and gods—and therefore really uncircumcised, though they bore the name “uncircumcised” only because they lacked the fleshly sign of a spiritual calling that their Jewish neighbours had. He reminds them their misery was not that they lacked this sign, but that they were without Christ—not knowing the true Lord of their spirits, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, which existed to testify of Him; strangers to the Covenants of Promise that spoke of God’s electing men to be His people; without hope of the future, rather dreading it; and so without God in the very world He had made, however many gods they fashioned from it. He calls them to believe that they, so far from God, had been brought near in Christ—near to God, to each other, and to those Jews who seemed hopelessly divided from them. The blood of Christ, poured out by the Eternal Spirit, was the life-blood of the whole body, removing whatever had kept its parts divided. For He is our peace, who made both races, circumcised and uncircumcised, one, dissolving in Himself the middle wall of partition—abolishing both the actual enmity between them, arising from their different religious standing, and the divine decree that seemed to declare “these are spiritual, these carnal”—so that He might create the two into one new man, one common humanity, reconciling them, by virtue of the higher reconciliation He made between both and God, by slaying on the Cross that deeper enmity between the distrustful rebel creature and the loving, self-sacrificing Creator. And having done this, He proclaimed His covenant of peace between heaven and earth, both to those far from any spiritual worship and to those God had drawn near by His calling. A Gospel of peace indeed, for through Him we both have access to the same Father by the same Spirit. So, he concludes, you are not strangers, admitted like traders visiting Ephesus, or lodged in its outskirts. You are citizens of this divine city, which holds all the holy men of all ages. You belong to God’s own household. You have been founded on the same foundation on which Prophets and Apostles stand. Christ is the Corner Stone holding them and you together. In Him the whole building, fitly framed, shall grow into a holy temple; in Him your whole Church, all its members, has been built together for a dwelling of God through the Spirit.
Everyone must feel an overflowing fulness in this Epistle’s style, as if Paul’s mind could not hold the thoughts working in it, each utterance trailing a luminous train before and behind that it cannot shake off. Nowhere does the sequence seem more disturbed by ordinary rules than in the passage now following; yet nowhere is the order stricter, more justified to the higher reason. Here one seems to find the very subject and centre of the Apostle’s composition. An unhappy mistranslation, in the sixth verse of chapter three, has kept us from feeling this and from seeing the light shed by the revelation he speaks of—not made to former ages but now made to Apostles and Prophets by the Spirit. We read “that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs and of the same body.” Why “should be”? Was Paul not the herald of a reconciliation that had been made, of a wall that had been broken down? Whatever he means, this cannot be it. As the Apostle of the Gentiles, he is not telling them of a blessing yet to come. He might look forward with sorrow to a time when all Israel should be saved; but he was the herald of a gift already given to the Gentiles, inviting them into the fold. On what ground? Because it had been shown him that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs and of the same body. Beginning from that highest ground before the Fall, before Creation, he had seen God creating all things in Christ, purposing to gather all things up in Christ, men standing only by God’s election of them in Christ. So the truth dawned on him: all men, of every race, form one body in Him; out of Him, circumcised or uncircumcised, they are divided; in Him, circumcised or uncircumcised, they are one by the law of their creation, and become actually one when they believe and submit to it.
Here was the foundation of a Gospel—the Gospel entrusted to Paul: good news to men not of something coming to them, but of their actual state, the state that belongs to them though they do not recognize it. Grace was given him to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all see what is the economy of the mystery hidden from the ages in God, who created all things. That truth of man’s condition, unveiling itself as God unveiled Himself, had now become graspable by all creatures; they could be told of it and know it. And the effect of this revelation is not to be measured by how many receive it, then or ever, on this planet. The revelation of God’s love in Christ—His incarnation, sacrifice, and resurrection, His victory over rebellious wills—was a revelation to the whole universe, to the principalities and powers in heavenly places. The Church, however small and lowly, declares to them the manifold wisdom of God, according to the fore-arrangement of the ages He made in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Such a soaring flight might, one would think, have tempted the Apostle to forget the poor, humble, sinful people he was writing to—their well-being lost in the glory of principalities and powers. But not so. He cannot even end his sentence without adding, “in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him.” And this confidence and faith remind him of all the discipline that led him into them—those tribulations that had often shaken his converts’ faith, though it was to them he owed his power to enter their sufferings and to grasp the glory they would inherit together.
I believe there was in the Apostle’s mind now a sense of opposites: the union of weakness and strength, tribulation and glory, all that had been and all that was to be; of God’s absolute love, its disclosure to man in the Mediator and its working in man through the Spirit; of the fellowship of the poorest earthly creature with the spirits in Heaven; of a canopy of love above and an abyss of love beneath, compassing the whole creation—which could only find expression in a prayer.
And this is the prayer: “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.”
Our translators treat the whole third chapter as a parenthesis. With far better warrant from Paul’s own words (τούτου χάριν opening both the first and the fourteenth verse), Lachmann ends the parenthesis at the start of the prayer. There is no reason Paul should not repeat his familiar phrase “the prisoner in the Lord” without conscious reference to an earlier occurrence. What follows grows out of the revelation he has described and the prayer built upon it. He begs them to walk worthy of their calling—the calling that carried out God’s purpose before the worlds, the calling of men once hostile to one another whom God Himself seemed to have divided—to be one body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. These were the blessings bestowed on them, blessings whose preservation would require strenuous effort. The danger was that they should think they must create a state for themselves instead of accepting and remaining in one already given. Lowliness, gentleness, long-suffering, forbearance—qualities that seem negative rather than positive—were what was asked of them, that they might enter the rich inheritance freely given.
But these blessings were common to all. The one Lord and one faith belonged to the whole body. Here, as in Corinthians, Paul is careful to show that each individual also has his own gift. He who ascended on high as man’s emancipator—an ascent implying a previous descent, a claim on the lowest depths of earth, a victory over the whole universe—had given these gifts in due measure. He gave apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, each meant to build up and consolidate the whole body. Each was a step toward the great end reached when all meet in the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, when all scattered portions of humanity are gathered into the perfect Man, reaching the full stature of Christ. These gifts educate their recipients out of infancy into manhood; out of a state of being tossed by every current of doctrine, carried round in endless circles of error by deceitful men, into steadfast love and steadfast truth in act and word—a steadfastness that means perpetual growth into Him who is the Head, from whom the body draws its form and firmness and continual renewal of life, each part’s life serving the whole.
In all this rapture Paul never loses sight of his first principle: that God is regenerating humanity in Christ according to the purpose He formed before the worlds. Nor does he lose sight of the practical result for the Ephesians and the Gentiles generally. All the exhortations to the end of the Epistle assume that the true state of man—and so their state—is now revealed in Christ; that a divine light surrounded and filled them; and that if their lives were not clear and orderly, it was because they were shutting their eyes.
The next passage brings out powerfully his distinction between the new and old man. He does not for a moment deny that the Gentiles had a light near them, a life of God within them. But he speaks of their minds darkened, alienated from the life of God through the ignorance in them. He traces that ignorance to hardness of heart, which itself comes from the loss of feeling that follows when men give themselves to lasciviousness and greedy uncleanness. On the other hand, he will not let the baptized Ephesians think the evil once in them was gone, or that they were not liable to walk as other Gentiles walk. Only they need not so walk. They had been taught of Christ, the true Light and Lord of their spirits, and taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus—that is, they had heard how the divine life of God was fully shown in the acts of a man. From what He was, they could know what He would have them be. They might put off the old man, corrupt through deceitful lusts, be renewed in the spirit of their mind, and put on the new man, created after God in righteousness and true holiness. So the new Man is that true and divine Man with whom their spirits deal, of whom their consciences testified until they drowned them in lusts, who now revealed Himself to and in man as their righteous Lord—whose righteousness the man who trusts and rejoices in it can claim as his own.
Because there is this righteousness—one for all of them, not as separate creatures but as members of a body—Paul can bid them speak truth each with his neighbour; can bid them keep their anger, which he would not have them stifle, so governed that it injures no one. He can bid the robber become a labourer and giver, and the foul speaker utter gracious, wholesome words. All these are precepts of plain reason that any heathen would grant. But their ground lies in that righteous constitution for man revealed in Christ, and in the Holy Spirit with which He sealed them against the day of redemption. Paul has already spoken of this sealing and redemption. The goods lying in bond on the quay with the owner’s mark, for which he has paid earnest-money and will pay the full price to take possession, suggested the image. Here he dwells on the nature of the seal: the Owner’s own Spirit, the Spirit of holiness and love, has been given them—the earnest, the sign of whose they are. Let them remember it is a Person, a loving Person, dwelling with them, and that all bitterness, wrath, and violence grieve Him more than the tenderest friend. Let them remember He seeks to work in them gentleness, compassion, forgiveness—the very qualities God showed to be His own nature when He forgave them in Christ. Having this Spirit, this seal of adoption, they might imitate God as beloved children, walking in love as Christ loved them and gave Himself a fragrant offering. They might put away fornication, uncleanness, and covetousness, and put thankfulness in place of grovelling foolish talk. For surely they knew the fornicator, the unclean, and the extortioner have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God—these habits of mind necessarily cut them off from the divine fellowship. Whatever foolish people might say, this was the misery they had escaped, this the wrath of God resting on the children of disobedience; to be brought out of these was their salvation. Let them not, then, claim fellowship with them. They knew that darkness; now light shone about them, the light in the Lord. Let them walk as children of light. Light is fruitful—in goodness, righteousness, truth; let them test by it what pleases the Lord. Darkness is unfruitful; let them have no share in its works but expose them to the light. The deeds that court secrecy are shameful even to name. But all things are proved and made manifest by light—manifestation being light’s very characteristic. And that light is about even the deepest sleeper, a voice ever saying, “Awake, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.” Therefore, with this darkness and this light about them, let them walk carefully, not as fools who know not where they go, but as wise men seizing each opportunity and rescuing it from the evil days; keeping their understandings free to know the Lord’s will; not sinking into drunkenness, but filled with the Spirit, keeping merry musical hearts, singing within to the Lord and among themselves, keeping up thankfulness for all things to God in the Name of Him in whom He is reconciled to us, and submitting to one another in the Name of Him who came to be servant of all.
On this same ground he rests all human relationships. Wives must submit to their own husbands as to the Lord, because the man is head of the wife as Christ is Head of the Church. The high universal order shows in the individual order; the subjection of the Church to Christ carries the subjection of wives to husbands. But as He, being Head, is the Saviour of the whole body—loving the Church and giving Himself for it, to cleanse and sanctify it and present it glorious—so the husband’s love should go out to his wife with a like purifying, elevating power. He should feel her part of himself, love and cherish her as his own body, as Christ loves the Church, since we are members of His body. Here is the ground for the original precept that a man shall leave father and mother and cleave to his wife, that they be one flesh. The mystery is very great and deep—the very mystery of Christ’s relation to humanity he had spoken of, unknown to former ages, now made manifest. And each husband and wife may enter more into this mystery by living it out in mutual love and reverence.
All other relations rest on the same foundation. The fifth commandment, with its promise of long life in the land, was not a bare command; there was a righteousness at its root. Children obeying their parents, and parents not provoking their children but bringing them up in the discipline of the Lord and showing it in their own acts, are likewise entering this mystery, carrying out this revelation.
In every case a mutual relationship is unfolded. The servant is to obey his master in simplicity of heart, feeling himself Christ’s servant, doing God’s will, certain that the Lord is no respecter of persons. The masters are to do the same to them, forbearing threats, sure they have a Master in Heaven who will not treat them better than their slaves.
Here is the true divine and human republic, uniting all the universality and spirituality of Plato’s republic with the reverence for relationships that Aristotle saw at the base of every sound polity but could not reconcile with the other. In the God-Man—in whom all things were created and men were chosen, who was born of the Virgin and subject to her, who had brothers and friends, who loved Martha, Mary, and Lazarus—Paul found the eternal centre round which all parts of human society move in their orbits, kept from discord and from disturbing the unity of the whole.
So what remained was that the Ephesians be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Their task was not to win a position but to hold one already given—and no holiday task. It was no battle with flesh and blood; all the powers of spiritual evil were arrayed against them, assaulting their spirits on every side. They needed a spiritual armour to withstand these foes, to stand firm in the evil day, and, having done all, still to stand. Let them stand, then, on the ground won for them—girded with truth, wearing Christ’s righteousness as a breastplate, His Gospel of peace as sandals, faith as a shield over the whole body, the confidence of salvation as a helmet, and the Spirit’s sword, the word of God, to strike down the enemy. And if they would know how to wear this armour and use these weapons, how each man is to fight both for himself and his neighbour, let them pray with all prayer in the Spirit, watching and persevering in supplication for all saints—and among them for him who needed the very exhortations he was giving them, who wanted still more spiritual freedom and courage, being, as to his body, an ambassador in chains. But bondman or free, he could wish all the brethren peace and love with faith—no barren wish, for these come not from him but from the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. And when they loved that Lord in sincerity, the grace to which their love was only a response would come richly and freely upon them all.