Read Ebook: St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition by Gore Charles

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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.

Col. i. 19; Phil. ii. 9-11.

And the word rendered 'filleth' may have a middle and not a passive sense, the idea being perhaps suggested that God 'fills all things for his own purpose.'

That is, they were 'predestined to an adoption' which it is implied they have already received.

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:--

We naturally put as a parallel to these and other verses of this epistle 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. And all this St. Paul would not be slow to recognize. In the Epistle to the Romans 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. 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.

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.' 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.

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.

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.

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.'

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.'

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.

Rom. ii. 14.

See app. note B, p. 255.

Is. xxxiii. 14, 15.

Cf. app. note C, p. 263, for a similar thought in a contemporary Jewish book.

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.' 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 , 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; 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.

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 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.

Now we can turn from the negative to the positive statement, and observe what St. Paul says of the new privileges of the once heathen converts. He pictures them under four metaphors, each describing a social state.

They are citizens in the holy state, the commonwealth of the people consecrated to God--citizens with full rights, and no longer strangers or unenfranchised residents .

More intimately still, they belong to the family or household of God.

They are being built all together into a sanctuary for God to dwell in--a holy structure of which the foundation stones are the apostles, and the Christian prophets who were their companions; and of which the corner-stone, determining the lines of the building and compacting it into one, is Jesus Christ, according to the word of God by Isaiah, 'Behold I lay in Zion for a foundation stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone of sure foundation.'

So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God, being built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief corner stone; in whom each several building, fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.

These are indeed metaphors expressive of glorious realities, which have no doubt become dulled in meaning through a conventional Christianity, which involves no sacrifice and therefore attains no sense of blessedness, but which a little meditation may easily restore to something of their original freshness.

The idea of the chosen people all through the Old Testament is that they are as a whole consecrated to God. Priests and kings appointed by God to their several offices may indeed fulfil special functions in the national life, yet the fundamental idea is never lost that the entire nation is holy, 'a kingdom of priests.' It is because this is true that the prophets can appeal as they do to the people in general, as well as to priests and rulers, as sharing altogether the responsibility of the national life. Now the whole of this idea is transferred, only deepened and intensified, to the Christian Church. That too has its divinely-ordained ministers, its differentiation of functions in the one body, but the whole body is priestly, and all are citizens--not merely residents but citizens, that is, intelligent participators in a common corporate life consecrated to God. How truly realized this idea was in the early Christian communities, St. Paul's letters are our best witnesses. They are really--except the pastoral epistles--letters to the churches and not to the clergy. It is the whole body which is at Thessalonica and Corinth to concern itself with the exercise of moral discipline--the whole body in the Galatian churches and at Colossae who are to concern themselves with the apprehension and protection of the full Christian truth. They are all to be 'perfectly initiated' in Christ Jesus, full participators in the affairs of the divine society. Whatever needs to be said afterwards about the special functions of special officers, this is the first thing to be said and recognized; and it gives us a profound sense of the distance we have fallen from our ideal. The laity, it is generally understood among us, are to come to church and perhaps to communion, are to accept the ministries of religion at marriages and funerals, and are to subscribe a little money to religious objects; but they may leave it to the clergy, as a matter of course, to carry on the business of religion--that is, worship and doctrine, for discipline has been dropped out--and confine themselves to a certain amount of irresponsible criticism of the sermons of the clergy and their proceedings generally.

For this state of things--this very false sacerdotalism--the responsibility is generally laid at the door of 'clerical arrogance.' It is not necessary to consider how large a factor in the result clerical arrogance has really been, for certainly what alone has given the clergy the opportunity to put themselves in false isolation, and what has been an immensely more powerful factor in the general result, has been the spiritual apathy of the mass of church members, an apathy which began as soon as the Christian profession began to cost men little or nothing.

Are we to set to work to revive St. Paul's ideal of the life of a Church? If so, what we need is not more Christians, but better Christians. We want to make the moral meaning of church membership understood and its conditions appreciated. We want to make men understand that it costs something to be a Christian; that to be a Christian, that is a Churchman, is to be an intelligent participator in a corporate life consecrated to God, and to concern oneself therefore, as a matter of course, in all that touches the corporate life--its external as well as its spiritual conditions. For the houses people live in, their wages, their social and commercial relations to one another, their amusements, the education they receive, the literature they read, these, no less truly than religious forces strictly so called, affect intimately the health and well-being of any society of men. We Christians are fellow-citizens together in the commonwealth that is consecrated to God, a commonwealth of mortal men with bodies as well as souls.

But St. Paul also describes the Church as the 'household of God.' When our Lord was speaking to St. Peter about the ministry which was being entrusted to the apostles, He said to him, 'Who then is the faithful and wise steward whom his Lord shall set over his household to give them their portion of food in due season?' This description opens to us part of the meaning of the divine household. A household is a place where a family is provided for, where there is a regular and orderly supply of ordinary needs. And the Church is the divine household in which God has provided stewards to make regular spiritual provision for men, so that they shall feel and know themselves members of a family, understood, sympathized with, helped, encouraged, disciplined, fed. What in fact are the sacraments and sacramental rites, what are baptism, confirmation and communion, marriage and ordination, the administration of the word of God, the dealings with the penitent, the sick, the dead, but the 'portions of food in due season,' the orderly distribution of the bread of life in the family or household of God?

But there is another idea which, in St. Paul's mind, attaches itself strongly to the idea of the 'divine family.' It is that in this household we are sons and not servants--that is intelligent co-operators with God, and not merely submissive slaves. It is noticeable how often he speaks with horror of Christians allowing themselves again to be 'subject to ordinances,' or to 'the weak and beggarly rudiments,' the alphabet of that earlier education when even children are treated as slaves under mere obedience. 'Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years, I am afraid of you.' 'Why do ye subject yourselves to ordinances, handle not, taste not, touch not.' It is perfectly true to say that what St. Paul is deprecating is a return to Jewish or pagan observances. But this is not all. He demands not a change of observance only, but a change of spirit. Their attitude towards observances as such is to be different. Not that St. Paul does not insist on that readiness to obey reasonable authority which is a condition of corporate life, or would hesitate to lay stress upon corporate religious acts in the Christian body. The truth is very far from that. 'We have no such custom, neither the churches of God,' is an argument which ought to be sufficient to suppress eccentricity. To 'keep the traditions' is a mark of a good Christian. 'A man that is heretical' after the first and second admonition is to be 'refused'. Government is to be a constant element in the Christian life. But the character of authority and of obedience is to be changed. The authority is to be reasonable authority, and the obedience intelligent obedience. Passive obedience to an authority which does not explain itself, whether in a spiritual director or in the Church as a whole, St. Paul would have thought of meanly as a Christian virtue. And the multiplication of authoritative observances he would have dreaded as a bondage. Our Lord was very unwilling to give His disciples, when He was on earth, much direction. And St. Paul is true to his Master's spirit. Our life should be ordered by principles, rather than directed in detail. For to rely upon direction from outside dwarfs our sense of personal responsibility, and personal relationship to the divine Spirit. A certain amount of confusion, hesitation, difference, due to men feeling their way, due to their different individualities having free scope, St. Paul would apparently have thought preferable to that sort of order which is the product of a very strong and exacting external government, and to an undue exaltation of the virtue of passive obedience.

St. Paul describes the Church as a sanctuary which is gradually to be built for God to dwell in. We remember how our Lord had said of the temple at Jerusalem, 'Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.' 'He spake,' St. John explains, 'of the temple of his body.' That--His own humanity proved triumphant over death--was to be henceforth the tabernacle of God's presence among men. Where that is God is, and the true worship of the Father in spirit and in truth. But that body, raised again the third day and become 'quickening Spirit' as the body of the risen Christ, takes within its influence the whole circle of believers. The 'body of Christ,' which is God's temple, comes to mean the Church which lives in Christ's life, and worships in Christ's Spirit. This is still the Church of the fathers of the old covenant, but fundamentally reconstituted. God, as St. James perceived, was fulfilling His promise to 'build again the tabernacle of David which had fallen.' It was being built anew upon the apostles and their companions the prophets, the immediate ambassadors of Christ, as foundation-stones of the renewed building, who themselves have their positions determined and secured by Christ Jesus as chief corner-stone. It was a spiritual fabric combining, like a Gothic cathedral, various parts or 'several buildings,' with their distinctive characteristics, all however united in one construction, one great sanctuary of a redeemed humanity in which God dwells.

The metaphor suggests further that the social organization of the Church is an organization for worship. It is a house and a citizenship, because it is also a sanctuary. The strength of corporate Christianity is to be measured by the vitality of corporate worship. A church life in which the eucharist is not the centre, for all the vigour which it may show in learning, or preaching, or philanthropy, is after all but a maimed life.

But the Church, as a visible organization of men, can be what it is--the city of God, His household and His sanctuary--only because it is pervaded by Christ's life and spirit. The 'stones of the building' are not merely placed side by side of one another, or held together by any external agency of government; they are as branches of a living tree, limbs of a living body. In this recurrent thought, which will be presented to us in another form when St. Paul comes to speak of the head and the body, is the interpretation of all his theory of the Church. It is verily and indeed the extension of the life of Christ.

How are we to receive this great and manifold ideal of what the Church means? It is by meditating upon it till St. Paul's conceptions--and not any lower or narrower ones, Roman or Anglican or Nonconformist--become vivid to our minds. Then, knowing what we aim at restoring, we shall seek, in each parish and ecclesiastical centre, to concentrate almost more than to extend the Church, to give it spiritual, moral, and social reality, rather than to multiply a membership which means little. For if men can understand the meaning of the Church, as the city of God, the family of God, the sanctuary of God, in the world, there is little fear that whatever is good in humanity will fail of allegiance to her. The kings of the earth will bring their glory and honour into her, and the nations of the earth shall walk in her light.

Hebr. ix. 8.

Col. i. 28.

Luke xii. 42.

Gal. iv. 11; v. 1.

Col. ii. 20-22.

Cor. xi. 2, 16.

Tit. iii. 10.

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