St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition

'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 God. 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 God," "born of the Spirit."'

This passage, 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 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 God 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 God'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 God in present experience, at once his mind works back to an eternal will and therefore also 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 God in the present, in our own souls or in the world outside us, becomes habitually and instinctively ours. God 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 assuredly perfect it, if we will let Him.

DIVISION I. § 3. CHAPTER II. 1-10

Sin and redemption

The depth of sin

In the first chapter of the epistle, St. Paul has had before his eyes the glory of God'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 God had stooped, in order to reach the point to which man had sunk! The Asiatic Christians are bidden to ponder anew, and by 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 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.

We naturally put as a parallel to these and other verses of this epistle (iv. 17-19) the terrible passage 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 God, 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 passions, 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 said on the other side. Roman simplicity and virtue, and the sanctity 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[94]. And all this St. Paul would not be slow to recognize. In the Epistle to the Romans[95] 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 passage 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 superstition; and what 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[96]. 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 analyze 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 God, or at least without thought of God 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 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 God; he wanted to live his own life for himself. But in liberating himself according to his wishes from the control of God 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 assure 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 God, and those who will not surrender themselves to God and His kingdom, become perforce servants of Satan and his kingdom. It is in view of this truth that St. Paul 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 superstition from which at the same time it delivers men.

(3) The main characteristic of this old godless life had been lawlessness, but St. Paul here, as in his Epistle to the Romans, associates 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 appetites 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 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 passions, 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 trespasses 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 God 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 God 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 God 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 God as He essentially and permanently is. God 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[97]?' God necessarily presents Himself as a terror to the godless; and from the point of view of God that means that our sinful nature is the subject of His necessary wrath. He resents the perversion, the spoiling, of His own handiwork in us. He cannot tolerate uncleanness, rebellion, unbelief. This wrath of God, 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 God's compassion 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 compassion had gone in order to redeem men from its tyranny. Thus St. Paul continues: —

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 Christ (by grace have ye been saved), and raised us up with him, and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus: that in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus: for by grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, that no man should glory. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.

The method of redemption

Here is St. Paul's description of the method of God in dealing with men when they were in that state of sin, the conditions of which he has just summarised. We take note of the chief points in the method.

(1) St. Paul has in mind here, as always, the divine predestination. There was an eternal purpose in the divine mind to make St. Paul and those to whom he wrote such as they were now on the way to become; it was a purpose not merely general, but extending to details. It belongs, in fact, to the divine perfection, that God does nothing, and purposes nothing, in mere vague generality. The universal range and scope of the divine activity as over all creatures whatsoever, hinders not at all its perfect application to detail. Thus God had 'predestined,' or held in His eternal purpose, not merely the state of Christians as a whole or even of the Asiatic Christians in particular, but the details of conduct which He willed them individually to exhibit. It is the particular 'good works' which God 'prepared beforehand in order that they should walk in them[98].'

(2) What God predestined He accomplished first in summary 'in Christ Jesus.' In Him all that God meant to do for man was exhibited and accomplished as God's own and perfect handiwork, as an effective and final disclosure. Men are to look for everything, for every kind of development and progress, in Christ, but for nothing outside or beyond Him. All is there – 'all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,' all 'the fulness of the Godhead,' all the perfections of mankind, the reconciliation of all seeming opposites. All is brought to the highest possible level of attainment, 'the heavenly place.'

(3) What had been summarily realized in Christ is progressively realized in those who are 'in Him.' Undeterred by their condition of moral and spiritual death, God, out of the heart of His rich mercy, simply because of the great love He bore to men, has brought them, by one act of regeneration, into the new life of His Son; has 'quickened them together with Christ,' that is, has introduced them, at a definite moment of initiation, into the life which has once for all triumphed over death, and been glorified in the heavenly places; and has introduced them into this life in order that, by the gradual assimilation of its forces, future ages might witness in them all the wealth of the goodness which had lain hid in the original act of incorporation. Meanwhile, while their growth is yet imperfect, God sees those who are Christ's as 'in Christ': imputes His merits to them, so we may legitimately say: that is, sees them and deals with them in view of the fact that Christ's Spirit is at work in them; sees them and deals with them 'not as they are, but as they are becoming.' This doctrine of imputation, instead of being full of moral unreality, is in accordance with all that is deepest in the philosophy of evolution. For are we not continually being taught that in order to take a true view of the value of any single thing, we must view it not as it is at a particular moment, but in the light of its tendency? We must ask not merely 'what,' but 'whence' and 'whither.'

(4) It is all pure grace – the free outpouring of unmerited love. The Christians are 'God's workmanship,' His new creation. He, in Christ, had wrought the work all by Himself. They, the subjects of it, had contributed nothing. It remained for them only to welcome and to correspond. This is the summing up of man's legitimate attitude towards God. This is faith. It is at its first stage simply the acceptance of a divine mercy in all its undeserved and unconditional largeness; but it passes at once, as soon as ever the nature of the divine gift is realized, into a glad co-operation with the divine purpose.

This then is, in outline, the method of the great salvation, of which the Asiatic Christians had been and were the subjects.

DIVISION I. § 4. CHAPTER II. 11-22

Salvation in the church

The salvation social

God's deliverance or 'salvation' of mankind is a deliverance of individuals indeed, but of individuals in and through a society; not of isolated individuals, but of members of a body.

It is and has been a popular religious idea that the primary aim of the gospel is to produce saved individuals; and that it is a matter of secondary importance that the saved individuals should afterwards combine to form churches for their mutual spiritual profit, and for promoting the work of preaching the gospel. But this way of conceiving the matter is a reversal of the order of ideas in the Bible. 'The salvation' in the Bible is supposed usually 'to reach the individual through the community[99].' God's dealings with us in redemption thus follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural developement. For man stands out in history as a 'social animal.' His individual developement, by a divine law of his constitution, is only rendered possible because he is first of all a member of some society, tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society alone, and through the submissions and limitations on his personal liberty which such membership involves, does he become capable of any degree of free or high developement as an individual. This law, then, of man's nature appears equally in the method of his redemption. Under the old covenant it was to members of the 'commonwealth of Israel' that the blessings of the covenant belonged. Under the new covenant St. Paul still conceives of the same commonwealth as subsisting (as we shall see directly), and as fulfilling no less than formerly the same religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and enlarged to include the believers of all nations, and not merely one nation; but it is still the same commonwealth, or polity, or church; and it is still through the church that God's 'covenant' dealings reach the individual.

It is for this reason that St. Paul goes on to describe the state of the Asiatic Christians, before their conversion, as a state of alienation from the 'commonwealth of Israel.' They were 'Gentiles in the flesh,' that is by the physical fact that they were not Jews; and were contemptuously described as the uncircumcised by those who, as Jews, were circumcised by human hands. And he conceives this to be only another way of describing alienation from God and His manifold covenants of promise, and from the Messiah, the hope of Israel and of mankind. They were without the Church of God, and therefore presumably without God and without hope.

Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision, in the flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of the promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ.

This alienation of Gentiles from the divine covenant was represented in the structure of the temple at Jerusalem by a beautifully-worked marble balustrade, separating the outer from the inner court, upon which stood columns at regular intervals, bearing inscriptions, some in Greek and some in Latin characters, to warn aliens not to enter the holy place. One of the Greek inscriptions was discovered a few years ago, and is now to be read in the Museum of Constantinople. It runs thus: 'No alien to pass within the balustrade round the temple and the enclosure. Whosoever shall be caught so doing must blame himself for the penalty of death which he will incur.'

This 'middle wall of partition' was vividly in St. Paul's memory. He was in prison at Rome at the time of his writing this epistle, in part at least because he was believed to have brought Trophimus, an Ephesian, within the sacred enclosure at Jerusalem. 'He brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath defiled the holy place.'

It was this 'middle wall of partition,' representing the exclusiveness of Jewish ordinances, which St. Paul rejoiced to believe Christ had abolished. He had made Jew and Gentile one by bringing both alike to God in one body and on a new basis.

There were in fact two partitions in the Jewish temple of great symbolical importance. There was the veil which hid the holy of holies, and symbolized the alienation of man from God[100]; and there was 'the middle wall of partition' already described, representing the exclusion of the world from the privileges of the people of God. The Pharisaic Jews ignored the spiritual lessons of the first partition, and devoutly believed in the permanence of the second. But Saul, while yet a Pharisee, had felt the reality of the first, and had found in his own experience that the abolition of this first barrier by Christ involved also the annihilation of the second.

The breaking down of partitions

It is in the Epistle to the Colossians that he lays stress upon the abolition in Christ of the enmity between man and God. 'It was the good pleasure of the Father … through him to reconcile all things unto himself, having made peace through the blood of his cross.' 'You, being dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh … did he quicken together with Christ, having forgiven us all our trespasses; having blotted out the bond written in ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us: and he hath taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross.' So with the help of various metaphors does St. Paul strive to express the mighty truth that, by the shedding of Christ's blood, that is to say by His sacrifice of perfected obedience, the way had been opened for the forgiveness of our sins and our reconciliation to God in one life, one Spirit. But the symbols and instruments of that former alienation from God which St. Paul had experienced so bitterly, were to his mind the 'ordinances' of the Jewish law. These, he had come to feel, had no other function than to awaken and deepen the sense of sin which they were powerless to overcome. They were nothing but 'a bond written against us'; a continual record of condemnation. To trust in the observance of ordinances was to remain an unreconciled sinner, alienated in mind and unpurified in heart. On the other hand, to have faith in Jesus and receive from Him the unmerited gift of the divine pardon and the Spirit of sonship was, for a Jew, to cast away all that trust in the observance of the ordinances of his nation which was so dear to his heart. It was at once to place himself among the sinners of the Gentiles. For in Jesus Christ all men were indeed brought near to God, but not as meritorious Jews; rather as common men and common sinners, needing and accepting all alike the undeserved mercy of a heavenly Father. Thus it was that Christ, in breaking down one partition, had broken down the other also. In opening the way to God by a simple human trust in a heavenly Father, and not by the complicated arrangements of a special law, He had put all men on the same level of need and of acceptance. He had not indeed abolished the covenant or the covenant people, but He had enlarged its area and altered its basis: there was still to be one visible body or people of the covenant, but membership in it was to be open to all, Jew and Gentile alike, who would feel their need of and put their trust in Jesus. This is what St. Paul proceeds to express, and little more need be added to explain his words. In the 'blood' or 'blood-shedding' of Jesus – that is, His self-sacrifice for men, His obedience carried to the point of the surrender of His life – a way had been opened to the Father that was purely human, that belonged to the Gentiles who had been 'far off' as well as to Jews who were already 'nigh' in the divine covenant. And in being brought near to God by faith, and not by Jewish ordinances, Jew and Gentile had been reconciled on a common basis – the two had been made one in 'the flesh,' that is, the manhood of Christ, for no other reason than because the 'law of commandments contained in (special Jewish) ordinances,' which had hitherto been the basis of separation, was now once for all 'abolished.' Henceforth there was one new man, or new manhood, in Christ, in which all men were, potentially at least, reconciled to God and to one another by His self-sacrifice upon the cross. And to the knowledge of this new manhood all men were being gradually brought by the 'preaching of peace' or of the gospel, which had its origin from Jesus crucified and risen, and which, even now that Jesus was invisibly acting through His apostolic and other ministers, St. Paul attributes directly to Him.