St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians Part 5

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 G.o.d 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 {79} of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might which he wrought in Christ, when 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 gave him to be head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.

There is very little further explanation needed for this pa.s.sage. But three phrases may be noted:--

(1) St. Paul calls the Father 'the G.o.d of our Lord Jesus Christ,' as our Lord Himself calls Him 'my G.o.d' (John xx. 17) in His resurrection state. It is no doubt of Christ _as man_ that the Father is G.o.d; but this relation of the Son as man to the Father depends upon an eternal subordination in which the Son, even as G.o.d, stands to the Father from whom He derives His divine life. The essential subordination of the Son (and Spirit) to the Father as the one fount of G.o.dhead, is continually suggested in the New Testament; but it involves no inferiority in G.o.dhead, or subsequence in time--'nothing before or after, nothing greater or less,' as the _Quicunque vult_ says. And it conveys to us the moral lesson that a subordinate position is not to be resented as if it were a dishonour.

(2) The spirit of 'wisdom and revelation' vouchsafed to us is to enable us to apprehend in a measure the divine 'wisdom and prudence[1]'

manifested in G.o.d's work of creation and redemption. The humility which is content to correspond patiently and teachably with the method of G.o.d is, as Francis Bacon was at pains to teach, of the essence of all fruitful human science.

(3) The expression 'the fulness' or 'the fulness of the G.o.dhead[2]'

means the sum total of the divine attributes, which, instead of being spread over different angelic mediators, as the Colossians were disposed to imagine, are, by the divine will, all concentrated and combined in the glorified Christ. And here St. Paul teaches the Ephesian Christians that all that belongs to the glorified Christ is to belong also to the Church, which is His body. It is Christ who gives to all creatures whatever various gifts of life they have. He 'filleth all in all'; that is, 'He filleth the whole universe with all variety of {81} gifts.' But something much more than various gifts--the sum total of all He is--He pours, or intends to pour, into the Church, so that the Church as well as the Christ shall embody, and thus be identified with, the fulness of the divine attributes. At present the Church is this only ideally, or in the divine intention: the actually existing Church has still much need of growth that her members 'may be filled (as they are not at present) up to the measure of the divine fulness'; or, in other words, up to 'the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ[3].'

The fulness, according to St. Paul's doctrine, is to be sought first in the eternal G.o.d; then in the glorified Christ; then, through Him, in the fully developed Church; and, finally, through the Church, in a sense in the universe as a whole, when the work of redemption is done and G.o.d is at last 'all in all' throughout His creation.

It may be noticed that St. Paul, in this doctrine of 'the fulness,' is thinking rather of the divine attributes as manifested, than as they are in themselves: and of Christ, not as the eternal {82} Son of G.o.d, but, more particularly, as incarnate and glorified. It was the 'good pleasure' of the Father to fill the exalted Christ, the first-begotten from the dead, with the fulness of divine glory and power as the reward of the humility and love which He showed when He 'emptied himself in taking the form of a servant[4].' This bestowal was no doubt a giving anew to Him, as man and as head of the Church, what was eternally His as Son of the Father.

There is another interpretation adopted by Chrysostom in ancient times, and by Dr. Hort among moderns, of the phrase 'the church which is his body, the fulness of him who filleth all in all.' According to them the Church is regarded as making the Christ complete. It is in this sense the 'fulfilment' of Christ, because without the Church He would be a head without its members: and then the rest of the sentence should be translated differently--'the church which is his body, the fulfilment of him who is fulfilled in all ways with all things.' But this is decidedly less agreeable to the general use of the expression 'the fulness' in the epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians[5].

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[Sidenote: _Some practical lessons_]

We may also pause to recognize one or two ways in which St. Paul's view of the Christian religion, as exhibited in the opening of this epistle, suggests special deficiencies among ourselves.

(1) St. Paul's Christianity is a religion of thankfulness. This epistle is a burst of exuberant praise. Yet he was himself a prisoner, and the church of Ephesus, with the other Asiatic churches, was sorely threatened with moral and spiritual perils of all kinds. The secret of this thankfulness is that he looks straight away from himself and his surroundings up to G.o.d. He measures the value of human life and work not by what immediate experience suggests, but by what he knows of the purpose of G.o.d. In spite of all the obstacles opposed by human wilfulness and weakness and sin, he knows that His purpose will effect itself: therefore he 'rejoices in the Lord always,' and no discouraging circ.u.mstances can quench the springs of his rejoicing. Our Christianity is apt to be of a very 'dutiful' kind. We mean to do our duty, we attend church and go to our communions. But our hearts are full of the difficulties, the hardships, {84} the obstacles which the situation presents, and we go on our way sadly, downhearted and despondent. We need to learn or learn anew from St. Paul that true Christianity is inseparable from deep joy; and the secret of that joy lies in a continual looking away from all else--away from sin and its ways, and from the manifold hindrances to the good we would do--up to G.o.d, His love, His purpose, His will. In proportion as we do look up to Him we shall rejoice, and in proportion as we rejoice in the Lord will our religion have tone and power and attractiveness.

(2) St. Paul appeals to the Asiatic Christians not to become something they are not, or to acquire some spiritual gift that they have not received, but simply to realize what they already are, and to claim the privileges of their baptized state. They are already 'adopted as sons[6].' They have, like the Galatians, received 'the Spirit of adoption.' The point now is that they should realize and put into practice what already belongs to them. This mode of appeal is based on the doctrine--in spite of its many perversions the most valuable doctrine--of baptismal {85} regeneration. The false method of appeal--as if careless Christians needed to _become_ sons of G.o.d--which involves a false idea of 'regeneration,' has been so much identified with popular Protestantism, that I cannot do better than quote some very apposite remarks by the late Congregationalist teacher, Dr. Dale, of blessed memory, from his n.o.ble commentary on this very epistle to the Ephesians:--

'This adoption of which Paul speaks is something more than a mere legal and formal act, conveying certain high prerogatives. We are "called the sons of G.o.d" because we are really made His sons by a new and supernatural birth. Regeneration is sometimes described as though it were merely a change in a man's principles of conduct in his character, his tastes, his habits. The description is theologically false, and practically most pernicious and misleading. If regeneration were nothing more than this, we should have to speak of a man as being more or less regenerate, according to the extent of his moral reformation; but this would be contrary to the idiom of New Testament thought. That a great change in the moral region of a man's nature will certainly follow regeneration is true; this change, however, is not regeneration itself, but the effect of regeneration; and the moral change which regeneration produces varies in many ways in different men. In some the change is immediate, decisive, and apparently complete. In others it is extremely gradual, and may be for a long time hardly discernible.

In some regenerate men grave sins remain for a time unforsaken, perhaps unrecognized. Look at these Ephesian Christians. {86} The Apostle has to tell them that they must put away falsehood and speak the truth; that they must give up thieving, and foul talk, and covetousness, and gross sensual sin.

'He addresses them as "saints." He describes them as having been chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, and foreordained by G.o.d unto adoption as sons unto Himself; and yet he knows that they are in danger of committing these base and flagrant offences. It was hard for them to escape from the vices of heathenism. They were regenerate; but as yet, in some of them, the moral effects of regeneration were very incomplete, the change which regeneration was ultimately certain to produce in their moral life had only begun, and it was checked and hindered by a thousand hostile influences.

'The simplest and most obvious account of regeneration is the truest.

When a man is regenerated he receives a new life and receives it from G.o.d. In itself regeneration is not a change in his old life, but the beginning of a new life which is conferred by the immediate and supernatural act of the Holy Spirit. The man is really "born again."

A higher nature comes to him than that which he inherited from his human parents; he is "begotten of G.o.d," "born of the Spirit."'

This pa.s.sage, especially as coming from Dr. Dale, supplies a very valuable corrective to still current religious mistakes. But surely we have no ground for saying that the moral effects 'certainly' follow regeneration, or follow it in all cases. It is not 'ultimately certain to produce' them in all persons, but only in those who {87} exhibit, sooner or later, the moral correspondence of a converted will.

(3) Most Christians who have reacted from Calvinism and its false doctrine of predestination have ceased to think about the truth which it represents. But we need to make a right instead of a wrong use of these great ideas of predestination and election, and thus to get rid of all the miserable narrowness and hopelessness which settles down upon us when we allow ourselves to think of religion as mainly a process of saving our own souls, and when we live only in our present feelings.

What can be more inspiring and strengthening than to believe that there is an eternal purpose of G.o.d working itself out in the universe through all its stages and parts; that this eternal purpose includes us, and has fastened upon us individually and brought us into Christ and His Church, to make true men of us; and that it has done all this not for our own sakes only, but to disclose something more of G.o.d's glory and for the fulfilment of great and universal purposes, which are to radiate out even from us? Wherever St. Paul sees the hand of G.o.d in present experience, at once his mind works back to an eternal will and therefore also {88} forward to an eternal and adequate result. And this backward and forward look transfigures the present with a new glory and a fresh hope. So will it be with us if this same characteristically Christian way of looking at any apparent movement of G.o.d in the present, in our own souls or in the world outside us, becomes habitually and instinctively ours. G.o.d never acts on a sudden impulse or without purpose of continuance. Certainly He can be trusted not to stop and leave things unfinished. When He hath begun any good work He will a.s.suredly perfect it, if we will let Him.

[1] i. 8.

[2] See Col. i. 19; ii. 9; cf. ii. 3, 'in Christ are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden.'

[3] Eph. iii. 19; iv. 13. It is not certain that by Him 'who filleth all in all' St. Paul does not mean the Father rather than the Son. But iv. 10 supports the interpretation given above.

[4] Col. i. 19; Phil. ii. 9-11.

[5] And the word rendered 'filleth' may have a middle and not a pa.s.sive sense, the idea being perhaps suggested that G.o.d 'fills all things for his own purpose.'

[6] That is, they were 'predestined to an adoption' (Eph. i. 5) which it is implied they have already received.

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DIVISION I. -- 3. CHAPTER II. 1-10.

_Sin and redemption._

[Sidenote: _The depth of sin_]

In the first chapter of the epistle, St. Paul has had before his eyes the glory of G.o.d's redemptive work--the wonder of His purpose of pure love for the universe through the Church. His imagination has kindled at the thought of the length, the breadth, the height of the divine operation:--the length, for it is an eternal purpose slowly worked out through the ages; the breadth, for it is to extend over the whole universe; the height, for it is to carry men up to no lower point than the throne of Christ in the heavenly places. But now he stops to call the attention of his converts to what we may call a 'fourth dimension'

of the divine operation--its depth. How wonderfully low G.o.d had stooped, in order to reach the point to which man had sunk! The Asiatic Christians are bidden to ponder anew, and by {90} contrast to their present experience, the life which they had once lived before they knew Christ or were found in Him.

Let us read the apostle's words, and then consider them in detail:--

And you _did he quicken_, when ye were dead through your trespa.s.ses 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 l.u.s.ts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

We naturally put as a parallel to these and other verses of this epistle (iv. 17-19) the terrible pa.s.sage in Romans i, where St. Paul describes the developement of sin in the Gentile world; how it had its origin in the refusal of the human will to recognize G.o.d, how out of the perversion of will it spread to the blinding of the understanding, and then to giving an overmastering power and an unnatural distortion to the pa.s.sions, so that a state of moral lawlessness was produced and maintained.

What are we to say as to the truth of these accounts of the moral condition of the heathen world? No doubt there is a good deal to be {91} said on the other side. Roman simplicity and virtue, and the sanct.i.ty of domestic life, had not, as contemporary inscriptions and historical records make perfectly evident, faded out of the Roman Empire, and philanthropy and love of the poor were recognized excellences. Nor had philosophic virtue vanished from the schools[1].

And all this St. Paul would not be slow to recognize. In the Epistle to the Romans[2] itself he speaks in language, such as a Stoic might have used, of those who, uninstructed by any special divine law, were a law unto themselves, in that they showed the practical effect of the law written in their hearts. We must therefore recognize that St. Paul is, in the pa.s.sage we are now considering, speaking ideally; that is to say, he is speaking of the general tendency of the heathen life, just as he speaks ideally of the Christian church in view of its general tendency; and he is speaking of it as he mostly knew it himself in the notoriously corrupt cities of the east, Antioch and Ephesus. Ephesus, in particular, had an extraordinarily bad character for vice as much as for superst.i.tion; and what {92} St. Paul says of the heathen life does not in fact make up a stronger indictment or present a blacker picture than what is said by a Stoic philosopher, perhaps his contemporary, who wrote at Ephesus, under the shelter of the name of the great Ephesian of ancient days, Heracleitus[3]. Moreover, St. Paul appeals unhesitatingly to the actual experience of these Asiatic Christians, and there is no reason to doubt that their consciences would have responded to what he said to them about the old life out of which they had been brought.

Let us now a.n.a.lyze a little more exactly this account St. Paul gives of the state of sin which he saw around him in contemporary society.

(1) 'Ye walked according to the course of this world.' By 'this world'

St. Paul, like the other New Testament writers, means practically human society as it organizes itself for its own purposes of pleasure or profit without thought of G.o.d, or at least without thought of G.o.d as He truly is. These Asiatic Christians, then, had formerly ordered their life and conduct according to the demands and expectations of the worldly world, obeying its motives, governed {93} by its fashions and its laws, and indifferent to those considerations which it repudiated or ignored.

(2) But to belong to the world in this sense is, in St. Paul's mind, to belong to the kingdom of Satan. The worldly world had its origin from a false desire of independence on man's part. He did not want to be controlled by G.o.d; he wanted to live his own life for himself. But in liberating himself according to his wishes from the control of G.o.d he fell, according to St. Paul's belief, under another control. Rebellion had been in the universe before man. There are invisible rebel spirits, of whose real existence and influence St. Paul had no more doubt than any other Jew who was not a Sadducee. And, indeed, our Lord had so spoken of good and evil spirits as to a.s.sure His disciples of their existence and influence. These rebel wills are unseen by us and in most respects unknown, but they organize and give a certain coherence and continuity to evil in the world. There thus arises a sort of kingdom of evil over against the kingdom of G.o.d, and those who will not surrender themselves to G.o.d and His kingdom, become perforce servants of Satan and his kingdom. It is in view of this truth that St. Paul {94} tells these Asiatic Christians that they used to walk according 'to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience.' (These evil spirits were, by a natural way of thinking, located in the air, according to the contemporary Jewish ideas; and the idea is, if nothing more, a convenient metaphor for a subtle and pervading influence.) This view of their old life, as a bondage to evil spirits, is one which would be as easily realized by inhabitants of Asiatic cities, where men were largely occupied in finding charms against bad spirits, as by modern Indian converts from devil-worship. Christianity recognizes a basis of reality in the superst.i.tion from which at the same time it delivers men.

(3) The main characteristic of this old G.o.dless life had been lawlessness, but St. Paul here, as in his Epistle to the Romans, a.s.sociates Jews with Gentiles, 'we' with 'you,' in the same condemnation. The spirits, or real selves of the Christians, had been, in their former state, dominated by their appet.i.tes or their imaginations. They were occupied in doing what their flesh or their thoughts suggested. It is noticeable that St. Paul puts 'the mind'

side by side with 'the flesh' as a cause of sin, the intellectual {95} side by side with the sensual and emotional nature. We often in fact, in our age, have experience of people who are not 'sensual' in the ordinary sense, but who live lives which have no goodness, no perseverance, no order, no fruitfulness in them, because they are the slaves of the ideas of their own mind as they present themselves, now one, now another; unregulated ideas being in fact, just as much as unregulated pa.s.sions, fluctuating, arbitrary, and tyrannous. Nothing is more truly needed to-day than the discipline of the imagination.

(4) Men living such a life of bondage are described further as 'dead through their trespa.s.ses and sins.' St. Paul means by death to describe any state of intellectual and moral insensibility. He would have the Christian 'dead' to the motives and voices of the worldly and sensual world. So in the same way he reminds the Asiatic Christians that to all that life of G.o.d in which they were now fruitfully living, they had at one time been insensible or dead--that is, blind to those things which now seemed most apparent, unterrified at what would now seem most horrible, unmoved by what now seemed most fascinating. And if this was their state viewed in itself, in their relation to G.o.d {96} they were, like the Jews also, 'children of wrath.' This expression is used in our catechism to describe 'original sin,' that is to say, that moral disorder or weakness which belongs to our nature as we inherit it, before we have had the opportunity of personal wrong doing. But the application of the phrase by St. Paul is to describe rather the state of _actual_ sin in which Jew and Gentile alike 'naturally' lived.

It implies not that G.o.d hated them, for in the whole context St. Paul is emphasizing 'the great love wherewith he loved them'; but that there was a necessary moral incompatibility between them as they then were, and G.o.d as He essentially and permanently is. G.o.d is so necessarily holy that His being is, and must be, intolerable to the unholy. It must be the case that at the bare idea of the divine coming, 'sinners in Zion' should be 'afraid,' and should say one to another, 'who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire, who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings[4]?' G.o.d necessarily presents Himself as a terror to the G.o.dless; and from the point of view of G.o.d that means that our sinful nature is the subject of His necessary wrath. He resents the {97} perversion, the spoiling, of His own handiwork in us. He cannot tolerate uncleanness, rebellion, unbelief. This wrath of G.o.d, in the case of those whose wills are set to 'hate the light,' is directed against men's persons. But so far as sin is only in our natures, and is something of which we are the unwilling subjects, it appeals only to G.o.d's compa.s.sion to lead Him to apply effective remedies. His wrath is so far against sin, not against sinners; and none could know better than these Asiatic Christians what lengths of resourcefulness and self-sacrifice the divine compa.s.sion had gone in order to redeem men from its tyranny. Thus St. Paul continues:--