The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians

“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”;149 but it has a wider sense, embracing instruction besides.150 It includes the whole course of training by which the boy is reared into a man. —Admonition is a still more familiar word with St Paul.151 It may be reproof bearing upon errors in the past; or it may be warning, that points out dangers lying in the future. Both these services parents owe to their children. Admonition implies faults in the nature of the child, and wisdom in the father to see and correct them.

“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 his memory a guard in days of temptation and an object of tender reverence.

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 are wanting. The ideas which children form of Christ and His religion, are gathered from what they see and hear in the school. Many a child receives its bias for life from the influence of the teacher before whom it sits on Sunday. The love and meekness of wisdom, or the coldness or carelessness of the one who thus stands between Christ and the infant soul, will make or mar its spiritual future.

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.152

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. Let it be remembered that the slave population outnumbered the free citizens of the Roman and Greek cities by many times; that they were frequently of the same race, and might be even superior in education to their masters. Indeed, it was a lucrative trade to rear young slaves and train them in literary and other accomplishments, and then to let them out in these capacities for hire. Let any one consider the condition of society which all this involved, and he will have some conception of the degradation in which the masses of mankind were plunged, and of the crushing tyranny that the world laboured under in the boasted days of republican liberty and Hellenic art.

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 1 Corinthians vii. 20–24 he even advises the slave who has the chance of manumission to remain where he is, content to be “the Lord’s freedman.” To the Christian slave what mattered it who ruled over his perishing body! his spirit was free, death would be his discharge and enfranchisement. No decree is issued to abolish bond-service between man and man; but it was destroyed in its essence by the spirit of Christian brotherhood. It melted away in the spread of the gospel, as snow and winter melt before the face of spring.

“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 Colossians iii. 22–iv. 1, the apostle designates the earthly master not by his common title (despotēs), but by the very word (kyrios) that is the title of the Lord Christ, giving the slave in this way to understand that he has, in common with his master (ver. 9), a higher Lord in the spirit. “Ye are slaves to the Lord Christ!” (Col. iii. 24). St Paul is accustomed to call himself “a slave of Christ Jesus.”153 Nay, it is even said, in Philippians ii. 7, that Christ Jesus “took the form of a slave!”

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 (Tit. ii. 9, 10). Affectionate, gentle, bearing injury with joyful courage, the Christian slave held up to that hardened and jaded Pagan age the example which it most required. God chose the base things of the world to bring to nought the mighty.

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” (Phil. ii. 12). The inward work of the soul’s salvation and the outward work of the busy hands labouring in the mine or at the loom, or in the lowliest domestic duties, – all alike are to be performed under a solemn responsibility to God and in the presence of Christ, the Lord of nature and of men, who understands every sort of work, and will render to each of His servants a just and exact reward. No man, whether he be minister of state or stable-groom, will dare to do heedless work, who lives and acts in that august Presence, —

“As ever in the great Task-master’s eye.”

2. The sense of Christ’s Lordship ensures honesty in work.

So the apostle continues: “Not with eye-service, as men-pleasers.” Both these are rare compound words, – the former indeed occurring only here and in the companion letter, being coined, probably, by the writer for this use. It is the common fault and temptation of servants in all degrees to observe the master’s eye, and to work busily or slackly as they are watched or not. Such workmen act as they do, because they look to men and not to God. Their work is without conscience and self-respect. The visible master says “Well done!” But there is another Master looking on, who says “Ill done!” to all pretentious doings and works of eye-service, – who sees not as man sees, but judges with the act the motive and intent.

“Not on the vulgar massCalled ‘work’ must sentence pass,Things done, which took the eye and had the price.”

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 of Christ doing the will of God from the soul, with good will doing service, as to the Lord and not to men.”

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 in the “few things” of his drudging earthly lot, will receive the “many things” of a son of God and a joint-heir with Christ!

“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.

ON THE APPROACHING CONFLICT

Chapter vi. 10–20

Ἰδοὺ ὁ Σατανᾶς ἐξῃτήσατο ὑμᾶς, τοῦ σινιάσαι ὡς τὸν σῖτον.

Luke xxii. 31.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE FOES OF THE CHURCH

“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.

We follow the Revised reading of the opening word of this paragraph, and the preferable rendering given by the Revisers in their margin. The adverb is the same that is found in Galatians vi. 17 (“Henceforth let no man trouble me”); not that used in Philippians iii. 1 and elsewhere (“Finally, my brethren,” etc.). The copyists have conformed our text, seemingly, to the latter passage. We are recalled to the circumstances and occasion of the epistle. High as St Paul soars in meditation, he does not forget the situation of his readers. The words of chapter iv. 14 showed us how well aware he is of the dangers looming before the Asian Churches.

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 hostile arms is heard approaching. This is no time for sloth or fear, for a faith half-hearted or half-equipped. “You have need of your best manhood and of all the weapons of the spiritual armoury, to hold your ground in the conflict that is coming upon you. Henceforth be strong in the Lord, and in the might of His strength.”

It is the apostle’s call to arms! – “Be strengthened in the Lord,” he says (to render the imperative literally: so in 2 Timothy ii. I). Make His strength your own. The strength he bids them assume is power, ability, strength adequate to its end.154 “The might of His strength” repeats the combination of terms we found in chapter i. 19. That sovereign power of the Almighty which raised Jesus our Lord from the dead, belongs to the Lord Christ Himself. From its resources He will clothe and arm His people. “In the Lord,” says Israel evermore, “is righteousness and strength. The rock of my salvation and my refuge is in God.” The Church’s strength lies in the almightiness of her risen Lord, the Captain of her warfare.

“The panoply of God” (ver. II) reminds us of the saying of Jesus in reference to His casting out of demons, recorded in Luke xi. 21, 22 – the only other instance in the New Testament of this somewhat rare Greek word. The Lord Jesus describes Himself in conflict with Satan, who as “the strong one armed keeps his possessions in peace,” – until there “come upon him the stronger than he,” who “conquers him and takes away his panoply wherein he trusted, and divides his spoils.” In this text the situation is reversed; and the “full armour” belongs to Christ’s servants, who are equipped to meet the counter-attack of Satan and the powers of evil. There is a Divine and a Satanic panoply – arms tempered in heaven and in hell, to be wielded by the sons of light and of darkness respectively (comp. Rom. xiii. 12). The weapons of warfare on the two sides are even as the two leaders that furnish them – “the strong one armed” and the “Stronger than he.” Mightier are faith and love than unbelief and hate; “greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.”

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 methods155] of the devil.”

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 accepts it; and it entered into His own deepest experiences. In the visible forms of sin Jesus saw the shadow of His great antagonist. “From the Evil One” He taught His disciples to pray that they might be delivered. The victims of disease and madness whom He healed, were so many captives rescued from the malignant power of Satan. And when Jesus went to meet His death, He viewed it as the supreme conflict with the usurper and oppressor who claimed to be “the prince of this world.”156

Satan is the consummate form of depraved and untruthful intellect. We read of his “thoughts,” his “schemes,” his subtlety and deceit and impostures;157 of his slanders against God and man,158 from which, indeed, the name devil (diabolus) is given him. Falsehood and hatred are his chief qualities. Hence Jesus called him “the manslayer” and “the father of falsehood” (John viii. 44). He was the first sinner, and the fountain of sin (1 John iii. 8). All who do unrighteousness or hate their brethren are, so far, his offspring (1 John iii. 10). With a realm so wide, Satan might well be called not only “the prince,” but the very “god of this world” (2 Cor. iv. 4). Plausibly he said to Jesus, in showing Him the kingdoms of the world, at the time when Tiberius Cæsar occupied the imperial throne: “All this authority and glory are delivered unto me. To whomsoever I will, I give it.” His power is exercised with an intelligence perhaps as great as any can be that is morally corrupt; but it is limited on all sides. In dealing with Jesus Christ he showed conspicuous ignorance.

Chief amongst the wiles of the devil at this time was the “scheme of error,” the cunningly woven net of the Gnostical delusion, in which the apostle feared that the Asian Churches would be entangled. Satan’s empire is ruled with a settled policy, and his warfare carried on with a system of strategy which takes advantage of every opening for attack.159 The manifold combinations of error, the various arts of seduction and temptation, the ten thousand forms of the deceit of unrighteousness constitute “the wiles of the devil.”

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 (Matt. xxv. 41). These unhappy beings are, again, identified with the “demons,” or “unclean spirits,” having Satan for their “prince,” whom our Lord expelled wherever He found them infesting the bodies of men.160 They are represented in the New Testament as fallen beings, expelled from a “principality” and “habitation of their own” (Jude 6) which they once enjoyed, and reserved for the dreadful punishment which Christ calls “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” They are here entitled principalities and powers (or dominions), after the same style as the angels of God, to whose ranks, as we are almost compelled to suppose, these apostates once belonged.

In contrast with the “angels of light” (2 Cor. xi. 14) and “ministering spirits” of the kingdom of God (Heb. i. 14), the angels of Satan have constituted themselves the world-rulers of this darkness. We find the compound expression cosmo-krator (world-ruler) in later rabbinical usage, borrowed from the Greek and applied to “the angel of death,” before whom all mortal things must bow. Possibly, St Paul brought the term with him from the school of Gamaliel. Satan being the god of this world and swaying “the dominion of darkness,”161 according to the same vocabulary his angels are “the rulers of the world’s darkness”; and the provinces of the empire of evil fall under their direction.

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,”162 and is equivalent to “wicked spirits.” The adjective “spiritual,” which does duty for a substantive – “the spiritual [forces, or elements] of wickedness”163– brings out the collective character of these hostile powers.

St Paul’s demonology164 is identical with that of Jesus Christ. The two doctrines stand or fall together. The advent of Christ appears to have stirred to extraordinary activity the satanic powers. They asserted themselves in Palestine at this particular time in the most open and terrifying manner. In an age of scepticism and science like our own, it belongs to “the wiles of the devil” to work obscurely. This is dictated by obvious policy. Moreover, his power is greatly reduced. Satan is no longer the god of this world, since Christianity rose to its ascendant. The manifestations of demonism are, at least in Christian lands, vastly less conspicuous than in the first age of the Church. But those are more bold than wise who deny their existence, and who profess to explain all occult phenomena and phrenetic moral aberrations by physical causes. The popular idolatries of his own day, with their horrible rites and inhuman orgies, St Paul ascribed to devilry. He declared that those who sat at the feast of the idol and gave sanction to its worship, were partaking of “the cup and the table of demons” (1 Cor. x. 20, 21). Heathen idolatries at the present time are, in many instances, equally diabolical; and those who witness them cannot easily doubt the truth of the representations of Scripture upon this subject.