The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians

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 Thomas, made them fearful of self-deception. It is a shallow and an unjust criticism that dismisses the disciples as interested witnesses and predisposed to faith in the resurrection of their dead Master. Should we be thus credulous in the case of our best-beloved dead? The instinctive feeling that meets any thought of the kind, after the fact of death is once certain, is rather that of deprecation and aversion, such as Martha expressed when Jesus went to call her brother from his grave. In all the long record of human imposture and illusion, no resurrection story has ever found general credence outside of the Biblical revelation. No system of faith except our own has ever been built on the allegation that a dead man rose from the grave.

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.”69 Hence the alteration manifest in the risen form of Jesus. He was “changed,” as St Paul conceives those will be who await on earth their Lord’s return (1 Cor. xv. 51). The mortal in Him was swallowed up of life. The corpse that was laid in Joseph’s tomb was there no longer. From it another body has issued, recognized for the same person by look and voice and movement, but indescribably transfigured. Visible and tangible as the body of the Risen One was – “Handle me, and see,” He said – it was superior to material limitations; it belonged to a state whose laws transcend the range of our experience, in which the body is the pliant instrument of the animating spirit. From the Person of the risen Saviour the apostle formed his conception of the “spiritual body,” the “house from heaven” with which, as he teaches, each of the saints will be clothed – the wasted form that we lay down in the grave being transformed into the semblance of His “body of glory, according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things to Himself” (Phil. iii. 20, 21).

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” (Col. i. 18). With the harvest filling our granaries, we cease to wonder at the firstfruits; and in the new heavens and earth Christ’s resurrection will seem an entirely natural thing. Immortality will then be the normal condition of human existence.

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 His Person, in its absolute purity and godlikeness, which repelled the touch of corruption. He was “marked out,” writes our apostle, “as Son of God, according to His spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead” (Rom. i. 4). These two signs of Godhead agree in Jesus; and the second is no more superhuman than the first. For Him the supernatural was natural. There was a mighty working of the being of God latent in Him, which transcended and subdued to itself the laws of our physical frame, even more completely than they do the laws and conditions of the lower realms of nature.

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 and everywhere, like the Father (John xiv. 23). From this time Christ will not be known after the flesh, but as the “Lord of the Spirit” (2 Cor. iii. 18).

“In the heavenlies” now abides the Risen One. This expression, so frequent in the epistle as to be characteristic of it,70 denotes not locality so much as condition and sphere. It speaks of the bright and deathless world of God and the angels, of which the sky has always been to men the symbol. Thither Christ ascended in the eyes of His apostles on the fortieth day from His rising. Once before His death its brightness for a moment had irradiated His form upon the Mount of Transfiguration. Clad in the like celestial splendour He showed Himself to His future apostle Paul, as to one born out of due time, to make him His minister and witness. Since then, of all the multitudes that have loved His appearing, no other has looked upon Him with bodily eyes. He dwells with the Father in light unapproachable.

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.”

In his enumeration of the angelic orders in verse 21, the apostle follows the phraseology current at the time, without giving any precise dogmatic sanction to it. The epistle to the Colossians furnishes a somewhat different list (ch. i. 16); and in 1 Corinthians xv. 24 we find the “principality, dominion, and power” without the “lordship.” As Lightfoot says,71 St Paul “brushes away all these speculations” about the ranks and titles of the angels, “without inquiring how much or how little truth there may be in them… His language shows a spirit of impatience with this elaborate angelology.” There is, perhaps, a passing reproof conveyed by this sentence to the “worshipping of the angels” inculcated at the present time in Colossæ, to which other Asian Churches may have been drawn. “Paul’s faith saw the Risen and Rising One passing through and beyond and above successive ranks of angelic powers, until there was in heaven no grandeur which He had not left behind. Then, after naming heavenly powers known to him, he uses a universal phrase covering ‘not only’ those known by men living on earth ‘in the’ present ‘age, but also’ those names which will be needed and used to describe men and angels throughout the eternal future” (Beet).

The apostle appropriates here two sentences of Messianic prophecy, from Psalms cx. and viii. The former was addressed to the Lord’s Anointed, the King-Priest enthroned in Zion: “Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool!” The latter text describes man in his pristine glory, as God formed him after His likeness and set him in command over His creation. This saying St Paul applies, with an unbounded scope, to the God-man raised from the dead, Founder of the new creation: “Thou madest Him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under His feet.” To the former of these passages St Paul repeatedly alludes; indeed, since our Lord quoted it in this sense, it became the standing designation of His heavenly dignity.72 The words of Psalm viii. are brought in evidence again in Hebrews ii. 5–10, and expounded from a somewhat different standpoint. As the writer of the other epistle shows, this coronation belongs to the human race, and it falls to the Son of man to win it. St Paul in quoting the same Psalm is not insensible of its human reference. It was a prophecy for Jesus and His brethren, for Christ and the Church. So it forms a natural transition from the thought of Christ’s dominion over the universe (ver. 21) to that of His union with the Church (ver. 22b).

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 body, by the like fitness the Christ in His surpassing glory is the possession of the community of believing men. The body claims its head, the wife her husband. No matter where Christ is, however high in heaven, He belongs to us. Though the Bride is lowly and of poor estate, He is hers! and she knows it, and holds fast His heart. She recks little of the people’s ignorance and scorn, if their Master is her affianced Lord, and she the best-beloved in His eyes.

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 and greater still; for it shows what God makes the Christ to be, not to the creatures, to the angels, to the Church, but to God Himself!73

Our text is in strict agreement with the sayings about “the fulness” in Colossians i. 15–20 and ii. 9, 10; as well as with the later references of this epistle, in chapter iii. 19, iv. 13; and with John i. 16. This title belongs to Christ as God is in Him and communicates to Him all Divine powers. It was, in the apostle’s view, a new and distinct act by which the Father bestowed on the incarnate Son, raised by His power from the dead, the functions of Deity. Of this glory Christ had of His own accord “emptied Himself” in becoming man for our salvation (Phil. ii. 6, 7). Therefore when the sacrifice was effected and the time of humiliation past, it “was the Father’s pleasure that all the fulness should make its dwelling in Him” (Col. i. 19). At no point did Christ exalt Himself, or arrogate the glory once renounced. He prayed, when the hour was come: “Now, Father, glorify Thou me with Thine own self, with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” It was for the Father to say, as He raised and enthroned Him: “Thou art my Son; I to-day have begotten Thee!” (Acts xiii. 33).

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. But how great a change meanwhile in Him who received it! This plenitude devolves not now on the eternal Son in His pure Godhead, but on the Christ, the Head and Redeemer of mankind. God who fills the universe with His presence, with His cherishing love and sustaining power, has conferred the fulness of all that He is upon our Christ. He has given Him, so replenished and perfected, to the body of His saints, that He may dwell and work in them for ever.

CHAPTER VII.

FROM DEATH TO LIFE

“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.

We pass by a sudden transition, just as in Colossians i. 21, 22, from the thought of that which God wrought in Christ Himself to that which He works through Christ in believing men. So God raised, exalted, and glorified His Son Jesus Christ (i. 19–23) —and you! The finely woven threads of the apostle’s thought are frequently severed, and awkward chasms made in the highway of his argument by our chapter and verse divisions. The words inserted in our Version (did He quicken) are borrowed by anticipation from verse 5; but they are more than supplied already in the foregoing context. “The same almighty Hand that was laid upon the body of the dead Christ and lifted Him from Joseph’s grave to the highest seat in heaven, is now laid upon your soul. It has raised you from the grave and death of sin to share by faith His celestial life.”

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.”74

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 might no less transcendent, that it may raise us from the dust of death to sit with Him in the heavenly places (vv. 4–6).

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 prophet in his vision, into “the valley full of dry bones,” and He “prophesied to these slain, that they might live.” What a comfort to see, at His first words, a shaking in the valley, – to see some who stirred at His voice, who stood upon their feet and gathered round Him – not yet a great army, but a band of living men! In their breasts, inspired from His, was the life of the future. “I am come,” He said, “that they might have life.” It was the work of Jesus Christ to breathe His vital spirit into the corpse of humanity, to reanimate the world.

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 spring and principle of its being. It sees not the light, it bears not the voices, it breathes not the air of that higher world where its origin and its destiny lie.

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 inner life; ask him what he thinks of Christ, how he stands towards God, how he fares in the spiritual conflict, – and you strike a note to which there is no response. You have taken him out of his element. He is a practical man, he tells you; he does not live in the clouds, or hunt after shadows; he believes in hard facts, in things that he can grasp and handle. “The natural man perceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him.” They are pictures to the eye of the blind, heavenly music to the stone-deaf.

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, —

“The bat and owl inhabit here:The snake nests on the altar stone:The sacred vessels moulder near:The image of the God is gone!”

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 are “doing the desires of the flesh and the thoughts” – who are governed by their own impulses and ideas and serve no will above the world of sense.75 Without distinction of birth or formal religious standing, “all” who thus live and walk are dead while they live. Their trespasses and sins have killed them. From first to last Scripture testifies: “Your sins have separated between you and your God.” We find a hundred excuses for our irreligion: there is the cause. There is nothing in the universe to separate any one of us from the love and fellowship of his Maker but his own unforsaken sin.