PRAISE AND PRAYER.
Chapter i. 3–19.
Οὓς προέγνω, καὶ προώρισεν
συμμόρφους τῆς εἰκόνος τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ,
εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτὸν πρωτότοκον ἐν πολλοῖς ἀδέλφοις;
οὕς δὲ προώρισεν, τούτους καὶ ἐκάλεσεν;
καὶ οὓς ἐκάλεσεν, τούτους καὶ ἐδικαίωσεν;
οὓς δὲ ἐδικαίωσεν, τούτους καὶ ἐδόξασεν.
CHAPTER II.
THE ETERNAL PURPOSE.
We enter this epistle through a magnificent gateway. The introductory Act of Praise, extending from verse 3 to 14, is one of the most sublime of inspired utterances, an overture worthy of the composition that it introduces. Its first sentence compels us to feel the insufficiency of our powers for its due rendering.
The apostle surveys in this thanksgiving the entire course of the revelation of grace. Standing with the men of his day, the new-born community of the sons of God in Christ, midway between the ages past and to come,[26] he looks backward to the source of man’s salvation when it lay a silent thought in the mind of God, and forward to the hour when it shall have accomplished its promise and achieved our redemption. In this grand evolution of the Divine plan three stages are marked by the refrain, thrice repeated, To the praise of His glory, of the glory of His grace (vv. 6, 12, 14). St Paul’s psalm is thus divided into three strophes, or stanzas: he sings the glory of redeeming love in its past designs, its present bestowments, and its future fruition. The paragraph, forming but one sentence and spun upon a single golden thread, is a piece of thought-music,—a sort of fugue, in which from eternity to eternity the counsel of love is pursued by Paul’s bold and exulting thought.
Despite the grammatical involution of the style here carried to an extreme, and underneath the apparatus of Greek pronouns and participles, there is a fine Hebraistic lilt pervading the doxology. The refrain is in the manner of Psalms xlii.–xliii., and xcix., where in the former instance “health of countenance,” and in the latter “holy is He” gives the key-note of the poet’s melody and parts his song into three balanced stanzas. In such poetry the strophes may be unequal in length, each developing its own thought freely, and yet there is harmony in their combination. Here the central idea, that of God’s actual bounty to believers, fills a space equal to that of the other two. But there is a pause within it, at verse 10, which in effect resumes the idea of the first strophe and works it in as a motif to the second, carrying on both in a full stream till they lose themselves in the third and culminating movement. Throughout the piece there runs in varying expression the phrase “in Christ—in the Beloved—in Him—in whom,” weaving the verses into subtle continuity. The theme of the entire composition is given in verse 3, which does not enter into the threefold division we have described, but forms a prelude to it.
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ: who hath blessed us,
In every blessing of the spirit, in the heavenly places, in Christ.”
Blessed be God!—It is the song of the universe, in which heaven and earth take responsive parts. “When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy,” this concert began, and continues still through the travail of creation and the sorrow and sighing of men. The work praises the Master. All sinless creatures, by their order and harmony, by the variety of their powers and beauty of their forms and delight of their existence, declare their Creator’s glory. That praise to the Most High God which the lower creatures act instrumentally, it is man’s privilege to utter in discourse of reason and music of the heart. Man is Nature’s high priest; and above other men, the poet. Time will be, as it has been, when it shall be accounted the poet’s honour and the crown of his art, that he should take the high praises of God into his mouth, making hymns to the glory of the Supreme Maker and giving voice to the dumb praise of inanimate nature and to the noblest thoughts of his fellows concerning the Blessed God.
Blessed be God!—It is the perpetual strain of the Old Testament, from Melchizedek down to Daniel,—of David in his triumph, and Job in his misery. But not hitherto could men say, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! He was “the Most High God, the God of heaven,”—“Jehovah, God of Israel, who only doeth wondrous things,”—“the Shepherd” and “the Rock” of His people,—“the true God, the living God, and an everlasting King”; and these are glorious titles, which have raised men’s thoughts to moods of highest reverence and trust. But the name of Father, and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, surpasses and outshines them all. With wondering love and joy unspeakable St Paul pronounced this Benedictus. God was not less to him the Almighty, the High and Holy One dwelling in eternity, than in the days of his youthful Jewish faith; but the Eternal and All-holy One was now his Father in Jesus Christ. Blessed be His name: and let the whole earth be filled with His glory!
The apostle’s psalm is a psalm of thanksgiving to God blessing and blessed. The second clause rhythmically answers to the first. True, our blessing of Him is far different from His blessing of us: ours in thought and words; His in mighty deeds of salvation. Yet in the fruit of lips giving thanks to His name there is a revenue of blessing paid to God which He delights in, and requires. “O Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel,” grant us to bless Thee while we live and to lift up our hands in Thy name!
By three qualifying adjuncts the blessing which the Father of Christ bestowed upon us is defined: in respect of its nature, its sphere, and its personal ground.
The blessings that prompt the apostle’s praise are not such as those conspicuous in the Old Covenant: “Blessed shalt thou be in the city, and in the field; in the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the increase of thy kine; blessed shall be thy basket, and thy kneading-trough” (Deut. xxviii. 3–5). The gospel pronounces beatitudes of another style: “Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the persecuted.” St Paul had small share indeed in the former class of blessings,—a childless, landless, homeless man. Yet what happiness and wealth are his! Out of his poverty he is making all the ages rich! From the gloom of his prison he sheds a light that will guide and cheer the steps of multitudes of earth’s sad wayfarers. Not certainly in the earthly places where he finds himself is Paul the prisoner of Christ Jesus blessed; but “in spiritual blessing” and “in heavenly places” how abundantly! His own blessedness he claims for all who are in Christ.
Blessing spiritual in its nature is, in St Paul’s conception of things, blessing in and of the Holy Spirit.[27] In His quickening our spirit lives; through His indwelling health, blessedness, eternal life are ours. In this verse justly the theologians recognize the Trinity of the Father, Christ, and the Holy Spirit.—Blessing in the heavenly places is not so much blessing coming from those places—from God the Father who sits there—as it is blessing which lifts us into that supernal region, giving to us a place and heritage in the world of God and of the angels. Two passages of the companion epistles interpret this phrase: “Your life is hid with Christ in God” (Col. iii. 3); and again, “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. iii. 20).—The decisive note of St Paul’s blessedness lies in the words “in Christ.” For him all good is summed up there. Spiritual, heavenly, and Christian: these three are one. In Christ dying, risen, reigning, God the Father has raised believing men to a new heavenly life. From the first inception of the work of grace to its consummation, God thinks of men, speaks to them and deals with them in Christ. To Him, therefore, with the Father be eternal praise!
“As He chose us in Him before the world’s foundation,
That we should be holy and unblemished before Him:
When in love He foreordained us
To filial adoption through Jesus Christ for Himself,
According to the good pleasure of His will,—
To the praise of the glory of His grace” (vv. 4–6a).
Here is St Paul’s first chapter of Genesis. In the beginning was the election of grace. There is nothing unprepared, nothing unforeseen in God’s dealings with mankind. His wisdom and knowledge are as deep as His grace is wide (Rom. xi. 33). Speaking of his own vocation, the apostle said: “It pleased God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb, to reveal His Son in me” (Gal. i. 15, 16). He does but generalize this conception and carry it two steps further back—from the origin of the individual to the origin of the race, and from the beginning of the race to the beginning of the world—when he asserts that the community of redeemed men was chosen in Christ before the world’s foundation.
“The world” is a work of time, the slow structure of innumerable yet finite ages. Science affirms on its own grounds that the visible universe had a beginning, as it has its changes and its certain end. Its structural plan, its unity of aim and movement, show it to be the creation of a vast Intelligence. Harmony and law, all that makes science possible is the product of thought. Reason extracts from nature what Reason has first put there. The longer, the more intricate and grand the process, the farther science pushes back the beginning in our thoughts, the more sublime and certain the primitive truth becomes: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
The world is a system; it has a method and a plan, therefore a foundation. But before the foundation, there was the Founder. And man was in His thoughts, and the redeemed Church of Christ. While yet the world was not and the immensity of space stretched lampless and unpeopled, we were in the mind of God; His thought rested with complacency upon His human sons, whose “name was written in the book of life from the foundation of the world.” This amazing statement is only the logical consequence of St Paul’s experience of Divine grace, joined to his conviction of the infinite wisdom and eternal being of God.
When he says that God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world”—or before founding the world—this is not a mere mark of time. It intimates that in laying His plans for the world the Creator had the purpose of redeeming grace in view. The kingdom which the “blessed children” of the Father of Christ “inherit,” is the kingdom “prepared for them from the foundation of the world” (Matt. xxv. 34). Salvation lies as deep as creation. The provision for it is eternal. For the universe of being was conceived, fashioned, and built up “in Christ.” The argument of Colossians i. 13–22 lies behind these words. The Son of God’s love, in whom and for whom the worlds were made, always was potentially the Redeemer of men, as He was the image of God (Col. i. 14, 15). He looked forward to this mission from eternity, and was in spirit “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. xiii. 8). Creation and redemption, Nature and the Church, are parts of one system; and in the reconciliation of the cross all orders of being are concerned, “whether the things upon the earth or the things in the heavens.”
Evil existed before man appeared on the earth to be tempted and to fall. Through the geological record we hear the voice of creation groaning for long æons in its pain.
“Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,”
grim prophets of man’s brutal and murderous passions, bear witness to a war in nature that goes back far towards the foundation of the world. And this rent and discord in the frame of things it was His part to reconcile “in whom and for whom all things were created.” This universal deliverance, it seems, is dependent upon ours. “The creation itself lifts up its head, and is looking out for the revelation of the sons of God” (Rom. viii. 19). In founding the world, foreseeing its bondage to corruption, God prepared through His elect sons in Christ a deliverance the glory of which will make its sufferings to seem but a light thing. “In thee,” said God to Abraham, “shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed”: so in the final “adoption,—to wit, the redemption of our body” (Rom. viii. 23), all creatures shall exult; and our mother earth, still travailing in pain with us, will remember her anguish no more.
The Divine election of men in Christ is further defined in the words of verse 5: “Having in love predestined us,” and “according to the good pleasure of His will.” Election is selection; it is the antecedent in the mind of God in Christ of the preference which Christ showed when He said to His disciples, “I have chosen you out of the world.” It is, moreover, a fore-ordination in love: an expression which indicates on the one hand the disposition in God that prompted and sustains His choice, and on the other the determination of the almighty Will whereby the all-wise Choice is put into operation and takes effect. In this pre-ordaining control of human history God “determined the fore-appointed seasons and the bounds of human habitation” (Acts xvii. 26). The Divine prescience—that “depth of the wisdom and knowledge of God”—as well as His absolute righteousness, forbids the treasonable thought of anything arbitrary or unfair cleaving to this pre-determination—anything that should override our free-will and make our responsibility an illusion. “Whom He did foreknow, He also did predestinate” (Rom. viii. 29). He foresees everything, and allows for everything.
The consistence of foreknowledge with free-will is an enigma which the apostle did not attempt to solve. His reply to all questions touching the justice of God’s administration in the elections of grace—questions painfully felt and keenly agitated then as they are now, and that pressed upon himself in the case of his Jewish kindred with a cruel force (Rom. ix. 3)—his answer to his own heart, and to us, lies in the last words of verse 5: “according to the good pleasure of His will.” It is what Jesus said concerning the strange preferences of Divine grace: “Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight.” What pleases Him can only be wise and right. What pleases Him, must content us. Impatience is unbelief. Let us wait to see the end of the Lord. In numberless instances—such as that of the choice between Jacob and Esau, and that of Paul and the believing remnant of Israel as against their nation—God’s ways have justified themselves to after times; so they will universally. Our little spark of intelligence glances upon one spot in a boundless ocean, on the surface of immeasurable depths.
The purpose of this loving fore-ordination of believing men in Christ is twofold; it concerns at once their character and their state: “He chose us out—that we should be holy and without blemish in His sight,” and “unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ for Himself.” These two purposes are one. God’s sons must be holy; and holy men are His sons. For this end “we” were elected of God in the beginning. Nay, with this end in view the world was founded and the human race came into being, to provide God with such sons[28] and that Christ might be “the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. viii. 28–30).
“That we should be holy”—should be saints. This the readers are already: “To the saints” the apostle writes (ver. 1). They are men devoted to God by their own choice and will, meeting God’s choice and will for them. Imperfect saints they may be, by no means as yet “without blemish”; but they are already, and abidingly, “sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. i. 2) and “sealed” for God’s possession “by the Holy Spirit” (vv. 13, 14). In this fact lies their hope of moral perfection and the impulse and power to attain it. Their task is to “perfect” their existing “holiness” (2 Cor. vii. 1), “cleansing themselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit.” Let no Christian say, “I do not pretend to be a saint.” This is to renounce your calling. You are a saint if you are a true believer in Christ; and you are to be an unblemished saint.
Thus the Church is at last to be presented, and every man in his own order, “faultless before the presence of His glory, with exceeding joy.”[29] God could not invite us in His grace to anything inferior. A blemished saint—a smeared picture, a flawed marble—this is not like His work; it is not like Himself. Such saintship cannot approve itself “before Him.” He must carry out His ideal, must fashion the new man as he was created in Christ after His own faultless image, and make human holiness a transcript of the Divine (1 Peter i. 16).
Now, this Divine character is native to the sons of God. The ideal which God had for men was always the same. The father of the race was made in His image. In the Old Testament Israel receives the command: “You shall be holy, for I, Jehovah your God, am holy.” But it was in Jesus Christ that the breadth of this command was disclosed, and the possibility of our personal obedience to it. The law of Christian sonship, manifest only in shadow in the Levitical sanctity, is now pronounced by Jesus: “You shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Verses 4 and 5 are therefore strictly parallel: God elected us in Christ to be perfect saints; for He predestined us through Jesus Christ to be His sons.
Sonship to Himself is the Christian status, the rank and standing which God confers on those who believe in His Son; it accrues to them by the fact that they are in Christ.[30] It is defined by the term adoption, which St Paul employs in this sense in Romans viii. 15, 23, as well as in Galatians iv. 5. Adoption was a peculiar institution of Roman law, familiar to Paul as a citizen of Rome; and it aptly describes to Gentile believers their relation to the family of God. “By adoption under the Roman law an entire stranger in blood became a member of the family into which he was adopted, exactly as if he had been born in it. He assumed the family name, partook in its system of sacrificial rites, and became, not on sufferance or at will, but to all intents and purposes a member of the house of his adopter.... This metaphor was St Paul’s translation into the language of Gentile thought of Christ’s great doctrine of the New Birth. He exchanges the physical metaphor of regeneration for the legal metaphor of adoption. The adopted becomes in the eye of the law a new creature. He was born again into a new family. By the aid of this figure the Gentile convert was enabled to realize in a vivid manner the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of the faithful, the obliteration of past penalties, the right to the mystic inheritance. He was enabled to realize that upon this spiritual act ‘Old things passed away and all things became new.’”[31]
This exalted status belonged to men in the purpose of God from eternity; but as a matter of fact it was instituted “through Jesus Christ,” the historical Redeemer. Whether previously (Jewish) servants in God’s house or (Gentile) aliens excluded from it (ii. 12), those who believed in Jesus as the Christ received a spirit of adoption and dared to call God Father! This unspeakable privilege had been preparing for them through the ages past in God’s hidden wisdom. Throughout the wild course of human apostasy the Father looked forward to the time when He might again through Jesus Christ make men His sons; and His promises and preparations were directed to this one end. The predestination having such an end, how fitly it is said: “in love having foreordained us.”
Four times, in these three verses, with exulting emphasis, the apostle claims this distinction for “us.” Who, then, are the objects of the primordial election of grace? Does St Paul use the pronoun distributively, thinking of individuals—you and me and so many others, the personal recipients of saving grace? or does he mean the Church, as that is collectively the family of God and the object of His loving ordination? In this epistle, the latter is surely the thought in the apostle’s mind.[32] As Hofmann says: “The body of Christians is the object of this choice, not as composed of a certain number of individuals—a sum of ‘the elect’ opposed to a sum of the non-elect—but as the Church taken out of and separated from the world.”
On the other hand, we may not widen the pronoun further; we cannot allow that the sonship here signified is man’s natural relation to God, that to which he was born by creation. This robs the word “adoption” of its distinctive force. The sonship in question, while grounded “in Christ” from eternity, is conferred “through” the incarnate and crucified “Jesus Christ”; it redounds “to the praise of the glory of His grace.” Now, grace is God’s redeeming love toward sinners. God’s purpose of grace toward mankind, embedded, as one may say, in creation, is realized in the body of redeemed men. But this community, we rejoice to believe, is vastly larger than the visible aggregate of Churches; for how many who knew not His name, have yet walked in the true light which lighteth every man.
There lies in the words “in Christ” a principle of exclusion, as well as of wide inclusion. Men cannot be in Christ against their will, who persistently put Him, His gospel and His laws, away from them. When we close with Christ by faith, we begin to enter into the purpose of our being. We find the place prepared for us before the foundation of the world in the kingdom of Divine love. We live henceforth “to the praise of the glory of His grace!”
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Ch. ii. 7, iii. 5, 21; Col. i. 26.
[27] Vv. 13, 14; Rom. viii. 2–6, 16; 1 Cor. ii. 12; Gal v. 16, 22–25.
[28] εἰς αὐτόν, for Him; not αὐτῳ, to Him.
[29] Ch. v. 25–27; Col. i. 27–29; Jude 24.
[30] On sonship, see Chapters XV.–XVII. and XIX. in The Epistle to the Galatians (Expositor’s Bible).
[31] From a valuable and suggestive paper by W. E. Ball, LL.D., on “St Paul and the Roman Law,” in the Contemporary Review, August 1891.
[32] See vv. 12, 13, where Jews and Gentiles, collectively, are distinguished; and ch. ii. 11, 12, iii. 2–6, 21, iv. 4, 5, v. 25–27.
CHAPTER III.
THE BESTOWMENT OF GRACE.
“Which grace He bestowed on us, in the Beloved One:
In whom we have the redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses,
According to the riches of His grace:
Which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, making known to us the mystery of His will,
According to His good pleasure:
Which He purposed in Him, for dispensation in the fulness of the times,
Purposing to gather into one body all things in the Christ—
The things belonging to the heavens, and the things upon the earth—yea, in Him,
In whom also we received our heritage, as we had been foreordained,
According to purpose of Him who worketh all things
According to the counsel of His will,—
That we might be to the praise of His glory.”[33]
Eph. i. 6b–12a.
The blessedness of men in Christ is not matter of purpose only, but of reality and experience. With the word grace in the middle of the sixth verse the apostle’s thought begins a new movement. We have seen Grace hidden in the depths of eternity in the form of sovereign and fatherly election, lodging its purpose in the foundation of the world. From those mysterious depths we turn to the living world in our own breast. There, too, Grace dwells and reigns: “which grace He imparted to us, in the Beloved,—in whom we have redemption through His blood.”
The leading word of this clause we can only paraphrase; it has no English equivalent. St Paul perforce turns grace into a verb; this verb occurs in the New Testament but once besides,—in Luke i. 28, the angel’s salutation to Mary: “Hail thou that art highly favoured (made-an-object-of-grace).”[34] If we could employ our verb to grace in a sense corresponding to that of the noun grace in the apostle’s dialect and nearly the opposite of to disgrace, then graced would signify what he means here, viz., treated with grace, made its recipients.
God “showed us grace in the Beloved”—or, to render the phrase with full emphasis, “in that Beloved One”—even as He “chose us in Him before the world’s foundation” and “in love predestined us for adoption.” The grace is conveyed upon the basis of our relationship to Christ: on that ground it was conceived in the counsels of eternity. The Voice from heaven which said at the baptism of Jesus and again at the transfiguration, “This is my Son, the Beloved,” uttered God’s eternal thought regarding Christ. And that regard of God toward the Son of His love is the fountain of His love and grace to men.
Christ is the Beloved not of the Father alone, but of the created universe. All that know the Lord Jesus must needs love and adore Him—unless their hearts are eaten out by sin. Not to love Him is to be anathema. “If any man love me,” said Jesus, “my Father will love him.” Nothing so much pleases God and brings us into fellowship with God so direct and joyous, as our love to Jesus Christ. About this at least heaven and earth may agree, that He is the altogether lovely and love-worthy. Agreement in this will bring about agreement in everything. The love of Christ will tune the jarring universe into harmony.
1. Of grace bestowed, the first manifestation, in the experience of Paul and his readers, was the forgiveness of their trespasses (comp. ii. 13–18). This is “the redemption” that “we have.” And it comes “through His blood.” The epistles to the Galatians and Romans[35] expound at length the apostle’s doctrine touching the remission of sin and the relation of Christ’s death to human transgression. To redemption we shall return in considering verse 14, where the word is used, as again in chapter iv. 30, in its further application.
In Romans iii. 22–26 “the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” is declared to be the means by which we are acquitted in the judgement of God from the guilt of past transgressions. And this redemption consists in the “propitiatory sacrifice” which Christ offered in shedding His blood—a sacrifice wherein we participate “through faith.” The language of this verse contains by implication all that is affirmed there. In this connexion, and according to the full intent of the word, redemption is release by ransom. The life-blood of Jesus Christ was the price that He paid in order to secure our lawful release from the penalties entailed by our trespasses.[36] This Jesus Christ implied beforehand, when He spoke of “giving His life a ransom for many”; and when He said, in handing to His disciples the cup of the Last Supper: “This is my blood, the blood of the covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” Using another synonymous term, St Paul tells us that “Christ bought us out of the curse of the law”; and he bases on this expression a strong practical appeal: “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.”[37] These sayings, and others like them, point unmistakably to the fact that our trespasses as men against God’s inflexible law, apart from Christ’s intervention, must have issued in our eternal ruin. By His death on the cross Christ has made such amends to the law, that the awful sentence is averted, and our complete release from the power of sin is rendered possible.
On rising from the dead our Saviour commissioned the apostles to “proclaim in His name repentance and remission of sins to all nations” (Luke xxiv. 47). It was thus He proposed to save the world. This proclamation is the “good news” of the gospel. The announcement meets the first need of the serious and awakened human spirit. It answers the question which arises in the breast of every man who thinks earnestly about his personal relations to God and to the laws of his being. We cannot wonder that St Paul sets the remission of sins first amongst the bestowments of God’s grace, and makes it the foundation of all the rest.
Does it occupy the like position in modern Christian teaching? Do we realize the criminality of sin, the fearfulness of God’s displeasure, the infinite worth of His forgiveness and the obligations under which it places us, as St Paul and his converts did? or even as our fathers did a few generations ago? “It is my impression,” writes Dr. R. W. Dale,[38] “that both religious people and those who do not profess to be religious must be conscious that God’s Forgiveness, if they ever think of it at all, does not create any deep and strong emotion.... The difference between the way in which we think of the Divine Forgiveness and the way in which it was thought of by David and Isaiah, by Christ Himself, by Peter, Paul, and John; by the saints of all Christian Churches in past times, both in the East and in the West; ... by the leaders of the Evangelical Revival in the last century—the difference, I say, between the way in which the Forgiveness of sins was thought of by them, and the way in which we think of it, is very startling. The difference is so great, it affects so seriously the whole system of the religious thought and life, that we may be said to have invented a new religion.... The difference between our religion and the religion of other times is this—that we do not believe that God has any strong resentment against sin or against those who are guilty of sin. And since His resentment has gone, His mercy has gone with it. We have not a God who is more merciful than the God of our fathers, but a God who is less righteous; and a God who is not righteous, a God who does not glow with fiery indignation against sin, is no God at all.”
These are solemn words, to be deeply pondered. They come from one of the most sagacious observers and justly revered teachers of our time. We have made a real advance in breadth and human sympathy; and there has been throughout our Churches a genuine and much needed awakening of philanthropic activity. But if we are departing from the living God, what will this avail us? If “the redemption through Christ’s blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses,” is no longer to us the momentous and glorious fact that it was to the apostles, then it is time to ask whether our God is in truth the same as theirs, whether He is still the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ—whether we are not, haply, fabricating for ourselves another gospel. Without a piercing sense of the shame and ruin involved in human sin, we shall not put its remission where St Paul does, at the foundation of God’s benefits to men. Without this sentiment, we can only wonder at the passionate gratitude with which he receives the atonement and measures by its completeness the riches of God’s grace.
II. Along with this chief blessing of forgiveness, there came another to the apostolic Church. With the heart the mind, with the conscience the intellect was quickened and endowed: “which [grace] He shed abundantly upon us in all wisdom and intelligence.”
This sequel to verse 7 is somewhat of a surprise. The reader is apt to slur over verse 8, half sensible of some jar and incongruity between it and the context. It scarcely occurs to us to associate wisdom and good sense with the pardon of sin, as kindred bestowments of the gospel. Minds of the evangelical order are often supposed, indeed, to be wanting in intellectual excellencies and indifferent to their value. Is it not true that “not many wise after the flesh were called”? Do we not glory above everything in preaching a “simple gospel”?
But there is another side to all this. “Christ was made of God unto us wisdom.” This attribute the apostle even sets first when he writes to the wisdom-seeking Greeks, mocked by their worn-out and confused philosophies (1 Cor. i. 30). To a close observer of the primitive Christian societies few things must have been more noticeable than the powerful mental stimulus imparted by the new faith. These epistles are a witness to the fact. That such letters could be addressed to communities gathered mainly from the lower ranks of society—consisting of slaves, common artizans, poor women—shows that the moral regeneration effected in St Paul’s converts was accompanied by an extraordinary excitement and activity of thought. In this the apostle recognised the work of the Holy Spirit, a mark of God’s special favour and blessing. “I give thanks always for you,” he writes to the Corinthians, “for the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in everything you were enriched by Him, in all word and all knowledge.” The leaders of the apostolic Church were the profoundest thinkers of their day; though at the time the world held them for babblers, because their dialect was not of its schools. They drew from stores of wisdom and knowledge hidden in Christ, which none of the princes of this world knew.
Of such wisdom our epistle is full, and God “has made it to abound” to the readers in these inspired pages. Paul’s “understanding in the mystery of Christ” was always deepening. In his lonely prison musings the length and breadth of the Divine counsels are disclosed to him as never before. He sees the course of the ages and the universe of being illuminated by the light of the knowledge of Christ. And what he sees, all men are to see through him (iii. 9). Blessed be God who has given to His Church through His apostles, and through the great Christian teachers of every age, His precious gifts of wisdom and prudence, and made His grace richly to overflow from the heart into the mind and understanding of men!
This intellectual gift is twofold: phronēsis as well as sophia,—the bestowment not only of deep spiritual thought, but of moral sagacity, good sense and thoughtfulness. This is a choice charism—a mercy of the Lord. For want of it how sadly is the fruit of other graces spoilt and wasted. How brightly it shines in St Paul himself! What luminous and wholesome views of life, what a fund of practical sense there is in the teaching of this letter.
St Paul rejoices in these gifts of the understanding and claims them for the Church, having in his view the false knowledge, the “philosophy and vain deceit” that was making its appearance in the Asian Churches (Col. ii. 4, 8, etc.). Our safeguard against intellectual perils lies not in ignorance, but in deeper heart-knowledge. When the grace that bestows redemption through Christ’s blood adds its concomitant blessing of enlightenment, when it elevates the mind as it cleanses the heart, and abounds to us in all wisdom and prudence, the winds of doctrine and the waves of speculation blow and beat in vain; they can but bring health to a Church thus established in its faith.
Verses 9 and 10 describe the object of this new knowledge. They state the doctrine which gave this powerful mental impulse to the apostolic Church, disclosing to it a vast field of view, and supplying the most fertile and vigorous principles of moral wisdom. This impulse lay in the revelation of God’s purpose to reconstitute the universe in Christ. The declaration of “the mystery of His will” comes in at this point episodically, and by the way; and we reserve it for consideration to the end of the present Chapter.
But let us observe here that our wisdom and prudence lie in the knowledge of God’s will. Truth is not to be found in any system of logical notions, in schemes and syntheses of the laws of nature or of thought. The human mind can never rest for long in abstractions. It will not accept for its basis of thought that which is less real and positive than itself. By its rational instincts it is compelled to seek a Reason and a Conscience at the centre of things,—a living God. It craves to know the mystery of His will.
III. Verse 11 fills up the measure of the bestowment of grace on sinful men. The present anticipates the future; faith and love are lifted to a glorious hope. “In whom also—i.e., in Christ—we received our heritage, predestinated [to it], according to His purpose who works all things according to the counsel of His will.”
Following Meyer and other great interpreters, we prefer in this passage the rendering of the English Authorized Version (we obtained an inheritance) to that of the Revised (we were made a heritage).[39] “Foreordained” carries us back to verse 5—to the phrase “foreordained to sonship.” The believer cannot be predestinated to sonship without being predestinated to an inheritance.[40] “If children, then heirs” (Rom. viii. 17). But while in the parallel passage we are designated heirs with Christ, we appear in this place, according to the tenor of the context, as heirs in Him. Christ is Himself the believer’s wealth, both in possession and hope: all his desire is to gain Christ (Phil. iii. 8). The apostle gives thanks here in the same strain as in Colossians i. 12–14, “to the Father who qualified us [by making us His sons] to partake of the inheritance of the saints in the light.” In that thanksgiving we observe the same connexion as in this between our forgiveness (ver. 7) and our enfeoffment, or investment with the forfeited rights of sons of God (vv. 5, 11).[41]
The heritage of the saints in Christ is theirs already, by actual investiture. The liberty of sons of God, access to the Father, the treasures of Christ’s wisdom and knowledge, the sanctifying Spirit and the moral strength and joy that He imparts, these form a rich estate of which ancient saints had but foretastes and promises. In the all-controlling “counsel of His will,” God wrought throughout the course of history to convey this heritage to us. We are children of “the fulness of the times,” heirs of all the past. For us God has been working from eternity. On us the ends of the world have come. Thus from the summit of our exaltation in Christ the apostle looks backward to the beginning of Divine history.
From the same point his gaze sweeps onward to the end. God’s purpose embraces the ages to come with those that are past. His working will not cease till the whole counsel is fulfilled. What we have of our inheritance, though rich and real, holds in it the promise of infinitely more; and the Holy Spirit is the “earnest of our inheritance” (ver. 14). God intends “that we should be to the praise of His glory.” As things are, His glory is but obscurely visible in His saints. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be,”—and it will not appear until the unveiling of the sons of God (Rom. viii. 18–25). One day God’s glory in us will burst forth in its splendour. All beholders in heaven and earth will then sing to the praise of His glory, when it is seen in His redeemed and godlike sons.
Verses 9 and 10 (which He purposed ... upon the earth) are, as we have said, a parenthesis or episode in the passage just reviewed. Neither in structure nor in sense would the paragraph be defective, had this clause been wanting. With the “in Him” repeated at the end of verse 10, St Paul resumes the main current of his thanksgiving, arrested for a moment while he dwells on “the mystery of God’s will.”
This last expression (ver. 9), notwithstanding what he has said in verses 4 and 5, still needs elucidation. He will pause for an instant to set forth once more the eternal purpose, to the knowledge of which the Church is now admitted. The communication of this mystery is, he says, “according to God’s good pleasure which He purposed in Christ [comp. ver. 4], for a dispensation of the fulness of the times, intending to gather up again all things in the Christ—the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth.”
God formed in Christ the purpose, by the dispensation of His grace, in due time to re-unite the universe under the headship of Christ. This mysterious design, hitherto kept secret, He has “made known unto us.” Its manifestation imparts a wisdom that surpasses all the wisdom of former ages.[42] Such is the drift of this profound deliverance.
The first clause of verse 10 supplies a datum for its interpretation. The fulness of the times, in St Paul’s dialect, can only be the time of Christ.[43] The dispensation which God designed of old is that in which the apostle himself is now engaged;[44] it is the dispensation, or administration (economy), of the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ, whether God be conceived as Himself the Dispenser, or through the stewards of His mysteries. The Messianic end was to Paul’s Jewish thought the dénouement of antecedent history. How long this age would continue, into what epochs it might unfold itself, he knew not; but for him the fulness of the times had arrived. The Son of God was come; the kingdom of God was amongst men. It was the beginning of the end. It is a mistake to relegate this text to the dim and distant future, to some far-off consummation. We are in the midst of the Christian reconstruction of things, and are taking part in it. The decisive epoch fell when “God sent forth His Son.” All that has followed, and will follow, is the result of this mission. Christ is all things, and in all; and we are already complete in Him.
What, then, signifies this gathering-into-one or summing-up of all things in the Christ? Our recapitulate is the nearest equivalent of the Greek verb, in its etymological sense. In Romans xiii. 8, 9 the same word is used, where the several commands of the second table of the Decalogue are said to be “comprehended in this word, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This summing up is not a generalization or compendious statement of the commands of God; it signifies their reduction to a fundamental principle. They are unified by the discovery of a law that underlies them all. And while thus theoretically explained, they are made practically effective: “For love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Similarly, St Paul finds in Christ the fundamental principle of the creation. For those who think with him, God has by the Christian revelation already brought all things to their unity. This summing up—the Christian inventory and recapitulation of the universe—the apostle has formally stated in Colossians i. 15–20: “Christ is God’s image and creation’s firstborn. In Him, through Him, for Him all things were made. He is before them all; and in Him they have their basis and uniting bond. He is equally the Head of the Church and the new creation, the firstborn out of the dead, that He might hold a universal presidence—charged with all the fulness, so that in Him is the ground of the reconciliation no less than of the creation of all things in heaven and earth.” What can we desire more comprehensive than this? It is the theory and programme of the world revealed to God’s holy apostles and prophets.
The “gathering into one” of this text includes the “reconciliation” of Colossians i. 20, and more. It signifies, beside the removal of the enmities which are the effect of sin (ii. 14–16), the subjection of all powers in heaven and earth to the rule of Christ (vv. 21, 22),[45] the enlightenment of the angelic magnates as to God’s dealings with men (iii. 9, 10),—in fine, the rectification and adjustment of the several parts of the great whole of things, bringing them into full accord with each other and with their Creator’s will. What St Paul looks forward to is, in a word, the organization of the universe upon a Christian basis. This reconstitution of things is provided for and is being effected “in the Christ.” He is the rallying point of the forces of peace and blessing. The organic principle, the organizing Head, the creative nucleus of the new creation is there. The potent germ of life eternal has been introduced into the world’s chaos; and its victory over the elements of disorder and death is assured.
Observe that the apostle says “in the Christ.”[46] He is not speaking of Christ in the abstract, considered in His own Person or as He dwells in heaven, but in His relations to men and to time. The Christ manifest in Jesus (iv. 20, 21), the Christ of prophets and apostles, the Messiah of the ages, the Husband of the Church (v. 23), is the author and finisher of this grand restoration.
Christ’s work is essentially a work of restoration. We must insist, with Meyer, upon the significance of the Greek preposition in Paul’s compound verb (ana-, equal to re-in restore or resume). The Christ is not simply the climax of the past—the Son of man and the recapitulation of humanity, as man is of the creatures below him, summing up human development and lifting it to a higher stage—though He is all that. Christ rehabilitates man and the world. He re-asserts the original ground of our being, as that exists in God. He carries us and the world forward out of sin and death, by carrying us back to God’s ideal. The new world is the old world repaired, and in its reparation infinitely enhanced—rich in the memories of redemption, in the fruit of penitence and the discipline of suffering, in the lessons of the cross.
All things in heaven and earth it was God’s good pleasure in the Christ to gather again into one. Is this a general assertion concerning the universe as a whole, or may we apply it with distributive exactness to each particular thing? Is there to be, as we fain would hope, no single exception to the “all things”—no wanderer lost, no exile finally shut out from the Holy City and the tree of life? Are all evil men and demons, willing or against their will, to be embraced somehow and at last—at last—in the universal peace of God?
It is impossible that the first readers should have so construed Paul’s words (comp. v. 5). He has not forgotten the “unquenchable fire,” the “eternal punishment”; nor dare we. “If anything is certain about the teaching of Christ and His apostles, it is that they warned men not to reject the Divine mercy and so to incur irrevocable exile from God’s presence and joy. They assumed that some men would be guilty of this supreme crime, and would be doomed to this supreme woe” (Dale). There is nothing in this text to warrant any man in presuming on the mercy or the sovereignty of God, nothing to justify us in supposing that, deliberately refusing to be reconciled to God in Christ, we shall yet be reconciled in the end, despite ourselves.
St Paul assures us that God and the world will be reunited, and that peace will reign through all realms and orders of existence. He does not, and he could not say that none will exclude themselves from the eternal kingdom. Making men free, God has made it possible for them to contradict Him, so long as they have any being. The apostle’s words have their note of warning, along with their boundless promise. There is no place in the future order of things for aught that is out of Christ. There is no standing-ground anywhere for the unclean and the unjust, for the irreconcilable rebel against God. “The Son of man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend and them that do iniquity.”
FOOTNOTES:
[33] The arrangement above made of the lines of this intricate passage is designed to guide the eye to its elucidation. Our disposition of the verses has not been determined by any preconceived interpretation, but by the parallelism of expression and cadences of phrase. The rhythmical structure of the piece, it seems to us, supplies the key to its explanation, and reduces to order its long-drawn and heaped-up relative and prepositional clauses, which are grammatically so unmanageable.
[34] Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη. It is impossible to reproduce in English the beautiful assonance—the play of sound and sense—in Gabriel’s greeting, as St Luke renders it.
[35] See Rom. i. 16–18, iii. 19–v. 21, vi. 7, vii. 1–6, viii. 1–4, 31–34, x. 6–9; 1 Cor. xv. 3, 4, 17, 56, 57; 2 Cor. v. 18–21; Gal. ii. 14–iii. 14, vi. 12–14. The latter passages the writer has endeavoured to expound in Chapters X. to XII. and XXVIII. of his Commentary on Galatians in this series.
[36] It is an error to suppose, as one sometimes hears it said, that trespasses or transgressions are a light and comparatively trivial form of sin. Both words denote, in the language of Scripture, definite offences against known law, departures from known duty. Adam’s sin was the typical “transgression” and “trespass” (Rom. v. 14, 15, etc.; comp. ii. 23; Gal. iii. 19).
[37] Gal. iii. 13; 1 Cor. vi. 19, 20.
[38] See The Evangelical Revival, and other Sermons, pp. 149–170, on “The Forgiveness of Sins.”
[39] Bishop Ellicott, who advocates the latter rendering, objects to Meyer’s interpretation that it is “doubtful in point of usage.” Pace tanti viri, we must retort this objection upon the new translation. To obtain by lot, to have (a thing) allotted to one, is the meaning regularly given to κληροῦσθαι in the classical dictionaries; and in O.T. usage the lot (κλῆρος) becomes the inheritance (the thing allotted). The verb is repeatedly used by Philo with the meaning to obtain, or receive an inheritance; whereas there seems to be no real parallel to the other rendering. It is true that κληροῦσθαι in the sense of the A.V. requires an object; but that is virtually supplied by ἐν ᾧ: “we had our inheritance allotted in Christ.” Comp. Col. i. 12, “the lot of the saints in the light,” which signifies not the locality, but the nature and content of the saints’ heritage.
[40] See Gal. iii. 22—iv. 7; and Chapters XV.—XVII. in the Expositor’s Bible (Galatians), on Sonship and Inheritance in St Paul.
[41] Compare Acts xxvi. 18, which also speaks to this association of ideas in St Paul’s mind, with vers. 4, 5, 7, and 11 in this chapter.
[42] Vv. 8, 9, ch. iii. 4, 5; comp. Col. ii. 2, 3; 1 Cor. ii. 6–9.
[43] “The fulness of the time,” Gal. iv. 4; “in due season,” Rom. v. 6; “in its own times,” 1 Tim. ii. 6. These are all synonymous expressions for the Messianic era. Comp. Heb. i. 2, ix. 26; 1 Pet. i. 20.
[44] Ch. iii. 8, 9; Col. i. 25; 1 Cor. iv. 1; 1 Tim. i. 4, i. 7; 2 Tim. i. 9–11; and especially Rom. xvi. 25, 26.
[45] Comp. ch. v. 5; 1 Cor. xv. 24–28; Phil. ii. 9–12; Heb. ii. 8; Rev. i. 5, xi. 15, xvii. 14; Dan. vii. 13, 14.
[46] One wonders that our Revisers, so attentive to all points of Greek idiom, did not think it worth while to discriminate between Christ and the Christ in such passages as this. In Ephesians this distinction is especially conspicuous and significant. See vv. 12, 20 iii. 17, iv. 20, v. 23; similarly in 1 Cor. xv. 22; Rom. xv. 3.
CHAPTER IV.
THE FINAL REDEMPTION.
“[That we might be to the praise of His glory:]
We who had before hoped in the Christ, in whom also ye have hoped,
Since ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation,—
In whom indeed, when ye believed, ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of the promise,
Which is the earnest of our inheritance, till the redemption of God’s possession,—
To the praise of His glory.”
Eph. i. 12–14.
When the apostle reaches the “heritage” conferred upon us in Christ (ver. 11), he is on the boundary between the present and the future. Into that future he now presses forward, gathering from it his crowning tribute “to the praise of God’s glory.” We shall find, however, that this heritage assumes a twofold character, as did the conception of the inheritance of the Lord in the Old Testament. If the saints have their heritage in Christ, partly possessed and partly to be possessed, God has likewise, and antecedently, His inheritance in them, of which He too has still to take full possession.[47]
Opening upon this final prospect, St Paul touches on a subject of supreme interest to himself and that could not fail to find a place in his great Act of Praise—viz., the admission of the Gentiles to the spiritual property of Israel. The thought of the heirship of believers and of God’s previous counsel respecting it (ver. 11), brought before his mind the distinction between Jew and Gentile and the part assigned to each in the Divine plan. Hence he varies the general refrain in verse 12 by saying significantly, “that we might be to the praise of His glory.” This emphatic we is explained in the opening phrase of the last strophe: “that have beforehand fixed our hope on the Christ,”—the heirs of Israel’s hope in “Him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write.” With this “we” of Paul’s Jewish consciousness the “ye also” of verse 13 is set in contrast by his vocation as Gentile apostle. This second pronoun, by one of Paul’s abrupt turns of thought, is deprived of its predicating verb; but that is given already by the “hoped” of the last clause. “The Messianic hope, Israel’s ancient heirloom, in its fulfilment is yours as much as ours.”
This hope of Israel pointed Israelite and Gentile believer alike to the completion of the Messianic era, when the mystery of God should be finished and His universe redeemed from the bondage of corruption (vv. 10, 14). By the “one hope” of the Christian calling the Church is now made one. From this point of view the apostle in chapter ii. 12 describes the condition in which the gospel found his Gentile readers as that of men cut off from Christ, strangers to the covenants of promise,—in a word, “having no hope”; while he and his Jewish fellow-believers held the priority that belonged to those whose are the promises. The apostle stands precisely at the juncture where the wild shoot of nature is grafted into the good olive tree. A generation later no one would have thought of writing of “the Christ in whom you (Gentiles) also have found hope”; for then Christ was the established possession of the Gentile Church.
To these Christless heathen Christ and His hope came, when they “heard the word of truth, the gospel of their salvation.” A great light had sprung up for them that sat in darkness; the good tidings of salvation came to the lost and despairing. “To the Gentiles,” St Paul declared, addressing the obstinate Jews of Rome, “this salvation of God was sent: they indeed will hear it” (Acts xxviii. 28). Such was his experience in Ephesus and all the Gentile cities. There were hearing ears and open hearts, souls longing for the word of truth and the message of hope. The trespass of Israel had become the riches of the world. For this on his readers’ behalf he gives joyful thanks,—that his message proved to be “the gospel of your salvation.”
Salvation, as St Paul understands it, includes our uttermost deliverance, the end of death itself (1 Cor. xv. 26). He renders praise to God for that He has sealed Gentile equally with Jewish believers with the stamp of His Spirit, which makes them His property and gives assurance of absolute redemption.
There are three things to be considered in this statement: the seal itself, the conditions upon which, and the purpose for which it is affixed.
I. A seal is a token of proprietorship put by the owner upon his property;[48] or it is the authentication of some statement or engagement, the official stamp that gives it validity;[49] or it is the pledge of inviolability guarding a treasure from profane or injurious hands.[50] There is the protecting seal, the ratifying seal, and the proprietary seal. The same seal may serve each or all of these purposes. Here the thought of possession predominates (comp. ver. 4); but it can scarcely be separated from the other two. The witness of the Holy Spirit marks men out as God’s purchased right in Christ (1 Cor. vi. 19, 20). In that very fact it guards them from evil and wrong (iv. 30), while it ratifies their Divine sonship (Gal. iv. 6) and guarantees their personal share in the promises of God (2 Cor. i. 20–22). It is a bond between God and men; a sign at once of what we are and shall be to God, and of what He is and will be to us. It secures, and it assures. It stamps us for God’s possession, and His kingdom and glory as our possession.
This seal is constituted by the Holy Spirit of the promise,—in contrast with the material seal, “in the flesh, wrought by hand,”[51] which marked the children of the Old Covenant from Abraham downwards, previously to the fulfilment of the promise (Gal. iii. 14). We bear it in the inmost part of our nature, where we are nearest to God: “The Spirit witnesseth to our spirit.” “The Israelites also were sealed, but by circumcision, like cattle and irrational animals. We were sealed by the Spirit, as sons” (Chrysostom). The stamp of God is on the consciousness of His children. “We know that Christ abides in us,” writes St John, “from the Spirit which He gave us” (1 Ep. iii. 24). Under this seal is conveyed the sum of blessing comprised in our salvation. Jesus promised, “Your heavenly Father will give His Holy Spirit to them that ask” (Luke xi. 13), as if there were nothing else to ask. Giving us this, God gives everything, gives us Himself! In substance or anticipation, this one bestowment contains all good things of God.
The apostle writes “the Spirit of the promise, the Holy [Spirit],” with emphasis on the word of quality; for the testifying power of the seal lies in its character. “Beloved, believe not every spirit; but try the spirits, whether they are of God” (1 John iv. 1). There are false prophets, deceiving and deceived; there are promptings from “the spirit that works in the sons of disobedience,” diabolical inspirations, so plausible and astonishing that they may deceive the very elect. It is a most perilous error to identify the supernatural with the Divine, to suppose mere miracles and communications from the invisible sphere a sign of the working of God. Antichrist can mimic Christ by his “lying wonders and deceit of unrighteousness” (2 Thess. ii. 8–12). Jesus never appealed to the power of His works in proof of His mission, apart from their ethical quality. God’s Spirit works after His kind, and makes ours a holy spirit. There is an objective and subjective witness—the obverse and reverse of the medal (2 Tim. ii. 19). To be sealed by the Holy Spirit is, in St Paul’s dialect, the same thing as to be sanctified; only, the phrase of this text brings out graphically the promissory aspect of sanctification, its bearing on our final redemption.[52]
When the sealing Spirit is called the Spirit of promise, does the expression look backward or forward? Is the apostle thinking of the past promise now fulfilled, or of some promise still to be fulfilled? The former, undoubtedly, is true. The promise (the article is significant[53]) is, in the words of Christ, “the promise of the Father.” On the day of Pentecost St Peter pointed to the descent of the Holy Spirit as God’s seal upon the Messiahship of Jesus, fulfilling what was promised to Israel for the last days. When this miraculous effusion was repeated in the household of Cornelius, the Jewish apostle saw its immense significance. He asked, “Can any one forbid water that these should be baptized, who have received the Holy Spirit as well as we?” (Acts x. 47). This was the predicted criterion of the Messianic times. Now it was given, and with an abundance beyond hope,—poured out, in the full sense of Joel’s words, upon all flesh.
Now, if God has done so much—for this is the implied argument of verses 13, 14—He will surely accomplish the rest. The attainment of past hope is the warrant of present hope. He who gives us His own Spirit, will give us the fulness of eternal life. The earnest implies the sum. In the witness of the Holy Spirit there is for the Christian man the power of an endless life, a spring of courage and patience that can never fail.
II. But there are very definite conditions, upon which this assurance depends. “When you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation”—there is the outward condition: “when you believed”—there is the inward and subjective qualification for the affixing of the seal of God to the heart.
How characteristic is this antithesis of hearing and faith![54] St Paul delights to ring the changes upon these terms. The gospel he carried about with him was a message from God to men, the good news about Jesus Christ. It needs, on the one hand, to be effectively uttered, proclaimed so as to be heard with the understanding; and, on the other hand, it must be trustfully received and obeyed. Then the due result follows. There is salvation,—conscious, full.
If they are to believe unto salvation, men must be made to hear the word of truth. Unless the good news reaches their ears and their heart, it is no good news to them. “How shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? how shall they hear without a preacher?” (Rom. x. 14). The light may be true, and the eyes clear and open; but there is no vision till both meet, till the illuminating ray falls on the sensitive spot and touches the responsive nerve. How many sit in darkness, groping and wearying for the light, ready for the message if there were any to speak it to them! Great would Paul’s guilt have been, if when Christ called him to preach to the heathen, he had refused to go, if he had withheld the gospel of salvation from the multitudes waiting to receive it at his lips. Great also is our fault and blame, and heavy the reproach against the Church to-day, when with means in her hand to make Christ known to almost the whole world, she leaves vast numbers of men within her reach in ignorance of His message. She is not the proprietor of the Christian truth: it is God’s gospel; and she holds it as God’s trustee for mankind,—that through her “the message might be fully preached, and that all the nations might hear” (2 Tim. iv. 17). She has St Paul’s programme in hand still to complete, and loiters over it.
The nature of the message constitutes our duty to proclaim it. It is “the word of truth.” If there be any doubt upon this, if our certainty of the Christian truth is shaken and we can no longer announce it with full conviction, our zeal for its propagation naturally declines. Scepticism chills and kills missionary fervour, as the breath of the frost the young growth of spring. At home and amongst our own people evangelistic agencies are supported by many who have no very decided personal faith, from secondary motives,—with a view to their social and reformatory benefits, out of philanthropic feeling and love to “the brother whom we have seen.” The foreign missions of the Church, like the work of the Gentile apostle, gauge her real estimate of the gospel she believes and the Master she serves.
But if we have no sure word of prophecy to speak, we had better be silent. Men are not saved by illusion or speculation. Christianity did not begin by offering to mankind a legend for a gospel, or win the ear of the world for a beautiful romance. When the apostles preached Jesus and the resurrection, they declared what they knew. To have spoken otherwise, to have uttered cunningly devised fables or pious phantasies or conjectures of their own, would have been, in their view, to bear false witness against God. Before the hostile scrutiny of their fellow-men, and in prospect of the awful judgement of God, they testified the facts about Jesus Christ, the things that they had “heard, and seen with their eyes, and which their hands had handled concerning the word of life.” They were as sure of these things as of their own being. Standing upon this ground and with this weapon of truth alone in their hands, they denounced “the wiles of error” and the “craftiness of men who lie in wait to deceive” (iv. 14).
And they could always speak of this word of truth, addressing whatsoever circle of hearers or of readers, as “the good news of your salvation.” The pronoun, as we have seen, is emphatic. The glory of Paul’s apostolic mission was its universalism. His message was to every man he met. His latest writings glow with delight in the world-wide destination of his gospel.[55] It was his consolation that the Gentiles in multitudes received the Divine message to which his countrymen closed their ears. And he rejoiced in this the more, because he foresaw that ultimately the gospel would return to its native home, and at last amid “the fulness of the Gentiles all Israel would be saved” (Rom. xi. 13–32). At present Israel was not prepared to seek, while the Gentiles were seeking righteousness by the way of faith (Rom. ix. 30–33).
For it is upon this question of faith that the whole issue turns. Hearing is much, when one hears the word of truth and news of salvation. But faith is the point at which salvation becomes ours—no longer a possibility, an opportunity, but a fact: “in whom indeed, when you believed, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit.” So characteristic is this act of the new life to which it admits, that St Paul is in the habit of calling Christians, without further qualification, simply believers (“those who believe,” or “who believed”). Faith and the gift of the Holy Spirit are associated in his thoughts, as closely as Faith and Justification. “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” was the question he put to the Baptist’s disciples whom he found at Ephesus on first arriving there (Acts xix. 2). This was the test of the adequacy of their faith. He reminds the Galatians that they “received the Spirit from the hearing of faith,” and tells them that in this way the blessing and the promise of Abraham were theirs already (Gal. iii. 2, 7, 14). Faith in the word of Christ admits the Spirit of Christ, who is in the word waiting to enter. Faith is the trustful surrender and expectancy of the soul towards God; it sets the heart’s door open for Christ’s incoming through the Spirit This was the order of things from the beginning of the new dispensation. “God gave to them,” says St Peter of the first baptized Gentiles, “the like gift as He did also unto us, when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. The Holy Ghost fell on them, as on us at the beginning” (Acts xi. 15–18). Upon our faith in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit enters the soul and announces Himself by His message of adoption, crying in us to God, Abba, Father (Gal. iv. 6, 7).
In the chamber of our spirit, while we abide in faith, the Spirit of the Father and the Son dwells with us, witnessing to us of the love of God and leading us into all truth and duty and divine joy, instilling a deep and restful peace, breathing an energy that is a fire and fountain of life within the breast, which pours out itself in prayer and labour for the kingdom of God. The Holy Spirit is no mere gift to receive, or comfort to enjoy; He is an almighty Force in the believing soul and the faithful Church.
III. The end for which the seal of God was affixed to Paul’s Gentile readers, along with their Jewish brethren in Christ, appears in the last verse, with which the Act of Praise terminates: “sealed,” he says, “with the Holy Spirit, which is the earnest of our inheritance, until the redemption of the possession.”
The last of these words is the equivalent of the Old Testament phrase rendered in Exodus xix. 5, and elsewhere, “a peculiar treasure unto me”; in Deuteronomy vii. 6, etc., “a peculiar people” (i.e., people of possession). The same Greek term is employed by the Septuagint translators in Malachi iii. 17, where our Revisers have substituted “a peculiar treasure” for the familiar, but misleading “jewels” of the older Version. St Peter in his first epistle (ii. 9, 10) transfers the title from the Jewish people to the new Israel of God, who are “an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession.” In that passage, as in this, the Revisers have inserted the word God’s in order to signify whose possession the term signifies in Biblical use. In the other places in the New Testament where the same Greek noun occurs,[56] it retains its primary active force, and denotes “obtaining of the glory,” etc., “saving of the soul.” The word signifies not the possessing so much as the acquiring or securing of its object. The Latin Vulgate suitably renders this phrase, in redemptionem acquisitions,—“till the redemption of the acquisition.”
God has “redeemed unto Himself a people”; He has “bought us with a price.” His rights in us are both natural and acquired; they are redemptional rights, the recovered rights of the infinite love which in Jesus Christ saved mankind by extreme sacrifice from the doom of death eternal. This redemption “we have, in the remission of our trespasses” (ver. 7). But this is only the beginning. Those whose sin is cancelled and on whom God now looks with favour in Christ, are thereby redeemed and saved (ii. 5, 8).[57] They are within the kingdom of grace; they have passed out of death into life. They have but to persist in the grace into which they have entered, and all will be well. “Now,” says the apostle to the Romans, “you are made free from sin and made servants to God; you have your fruit unto holiness, and the end eternal life.”
Our salvation is come; but, after all, it is still to come. We find the apostle using the words “save” and “redeem” in this twofold sense, applying them both to the commencement and the consummation of the new life.[58] The last act, in Romans viii. 23, he calls “the redemption of the body.” This will reinstate the man in the integrity of his twofold being as a son of God. Hence our bodily redemption is there called an adoption. For as Jesus Christ by His resurrection was “marked out [or instated] as Son of God in power” (Rom. i. 4), not otherwise will it be with His many brethren. Their reappearance in the new “body of glory” will be a “revelation” to the universe “of the sons of God.”
But this last redemption—or rather this last act of the one redemption—like the first, is through the blood of the cross. Christ has borne for us in His death the entire penalty of sin; the remission of that penalty comes to us in two distinct stages. The shadow of death is lifted off from our spirits now, in the moment of forgiveness. But for reasons of discipline it remains resting upon our bodily frame. Death is a usurper and trespasser in the bounds of God’s heritage. Virtually and in principle, he is abolished; but not in effect. “I will ransom them from the power of the grave,”[59] the Lord said of His Israel, with a meaning deeper than His prophet knew. When that is done, then God will have redeemed, in point of fact, those possessions in humanity which He so much prizes, that for their recovery He spared not His Son.
So long as mortality afflicts us, God cannot be satisfied on our account. His children are suffering and tortured; His people mourn under the oppression of the enemy. They sigh, and creation with them, under the burdensome and infirm tabernacle of the flesh, this body of our humiliation for which the hungry grave clamours. God’s new estate in us is still encumbered with the liabilities in which the sin of the race involved us, with the “ills that flesh is heir to.” But this mortgage—that we call, with a touching euphemism, the debt of nature—will at last be discharged. Soon shall we be free for ever from the law of sin and death. “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come with singing to Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads: they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”
To God, as He looks down upon men, the seal of His Spirit upon their hearts anticipates this full emancipation. He sees already in the redeemed spirit of His children what will be manifest in their glorious heavenly form. The same token is to ourselves as believing men the “earnest of our inheritance.” Note that at this point the apostle drops the “you” by which he has for several sentences distinguished between Jewish and Gentile brethren. He identifies them with himself and speaks of “our inheritance.” This sudden resumption of the first person, the self-assertion of the filial consciousness in the writer breaking through the grammatical order, is a fine trait of the Pauline manner.[60]
Arrhabon, the earnest (fastening penny), is a Phœnician word of the market, which passed into Greek and Latin,—a monument of the daring pioneers of Mediterranean commerce. It denotes the part of the price given by a purchaser in making a bargain, or of the wages given by the hirer concluding a contract of service, by way of assurance that the stipulated sum will be forthcoming. Such pledge of future payment is at the same time a bond between those concerned, engaging each to his part in the transaction.
The earnest is the seal, and something more. It is an instalment, a token in kind, a foretaste of the feast to come. In the parallel passage, Romans viii. 23, the same earnest is called “the firstfruit of the Spirit.” What the earliest sheaf is to the harvest, that the entrance of the Spirit of God into a human soul is to the glory of its ultimate salvation. The sanctity, the joy, the sense of recovered life is the same in kind then and now, differing only in degree and expression.
Of the “earnest of the Spirit” St Paul has spoken twice already, in 2 Corinthians i. 22 and v. 5, where he cites this inner witness to assure us, in the first instance, that God will fulfil to us His promises, “how many soever they be”; and in the second, that our mortal nature shall be “swallowed up of life”—assimilated to the living spirit to which it belongs—and that “God has wrought us for this very thing.” These earlier sayings explain the apostle’s meaning here. God has made us His sons, in accordance with His purpose formed in the depths of eternity (ver. 5). As sons, we are His heirs in fellowship with Christ, and already have received rich blessings out of this heritage (ver. 11). But the richest part of it, including that which concerns the bodily form of our life, is still unredeemed, notwithstanding that the price of its redemption is paid.
For this we wait till the time appointed of the Father,—the time when He will reclaim His heritage in us, and give us full possession of our heritage in Christ. We do not wait, as did the saints of former ages, ignorant of the Father’s purpose for our future lot. “Life and immortality are brought to light through the gospel.” We see beyond the chasm of death. We enjoy in the testimony of the Holy Spirit the foretaste of an eternal and glorious life for all the children of God—nay, the pledge that the reign of evil and death shall end throughout the universe.
With this hope swelling their hearts, the apostle’s readers once more triumphantly join in the refrain: To the praise of His glory.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] Exod. xix. 3–6; Deut. iv. 20, 21; 1 Kings viii. 51, 53; Ps. lxxviii. 71, etc. With the above comp. Gen. xv. 8; Numb. xviii. 20; Jos. xiii. 33; Ps. xvi. 5.
[48] Ch. iv. 30. The “seal” of 2 Tim. ii. 19 has both the first and third of these meanings.
[49] Rom. iv. 11; 1 Cor. ix. 2; John iii. 33, vi. 27.
[50] Matt. xxvii. 66; Rev. v. 1, etc.
[51] Ch. ii. 11; comp. Rom. i. 28, 29; Gal. v, 5, 6; Phil. iii. 2, 3.
[52] Comp. Rom. viii. 9–11; 2 Cor. v. 1–5.
[53] Acts i. 4, ii. 33, 39, xiii. 32, xxvi. 6; Rom. iv. 13–20; Gal. iii. 14–29.
[54] See Rom. x. 14–18; Gal. iii. 2, 5; Col. i. 6, 23; 1 Thess. ii. 13; 2 Tim. i. 13.
[55] 1 Tim. ii. 1–7, iv. 10; Tit. ii. 11.
[56] 1 Thess. v. 9; 2 Thess. ii. 14; Heb. x. 39.
[57] Comp. Chapter VIII.
[58] For the former usage see, along with ver. 7 and ch. ii. 5, 8; Rom. iii, 24, x. 9; Titus iii. 5; 2 Tim. i. 9; Col. i. 14; Heb. ix. 15; for the latter, ch. iv. 30; Luke xxi. 28; Rom. v. 9, 10, viii. 23; Phil. ii. 12; 1 Thess. v. 8, 9; 2 Tim. ii. 10, iv. 18. It may be doubted whether St Paul ever uses these terms to denote present salvation or redemption without the final issue being also in his thoughts. Perhaps he would have called the redemption of ver. 7, in contrast with that of Rom. viii. 23, “the redemption of the spirit.”
[59] Hosea xiii. 14; Isa. xxv. 8.
[60] The same incoherence occurs in Gal. iv. 5–7: “that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts.”
CHAPTER V.
FOR THE EYES OF THE HEART.
“For this cause I also, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you, and which ye shew toward all the saints, cease not to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers:
“That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him; having the eyes of your heart enlightened, that ye may know what is the hope of His calling, what the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to that working of the might of His strength, which He wrought in the Christ, when He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places.”—Eph. i. 15–20.
Because of this: because you have heard the glad tidings, and believing it have been sealed with the Holy Spirit (vv. 13, 14). I too: I your apostle, with so great an interest in your salvation, in return give thanks for you. Thus St Paul, having extolled to the uttermost God’s counsel of redemption unfolded through the ages, claims to offer especial thanksgiving for the faith of those who belong to his Gentile province and are, directly or indirectly, the fruit of his own ministry (iii. 1–13).
The intermediate clause of verse 15, describing the readers’ faith, is obscure. This form of expression occurs nowhere else in St Paul; but the construction is used by St Luke,—e.g., in Acts xxi. 21: “All the Jews which are among the Gentiles,” where it implies diffusion over a wide area. This being a circular letter, addressed to a number of Churches scattered through the province of Asia, of whose faith in many cases St Paul knew only by report, we can understand how he writes: “having heard of the faith that is [spread] amongst you.”—The love, completing faith in the ordinary text (as in Col. i. 4), is relegated by the Revisers to the margin, upon evidence that seems conclusive.[61] The commentators, however, feel so strongly the harshness of this ellipsis that, in spite of the ancient witnesses, they read, almost with one consent,[62] “your love toward all the saints.” The variation of the former clause prepares us, however, for something peculiar in this. In verse 13 we found St Paul’s thought fixed on the decisive fact of his readers’ faith. On this he still dwells lingeringly. The grammatical link needed between “faith” and “unto all the saints” is supplied in the Revised Version by ye show, after the analogy of Philemon 5. Perhaps it might be supplied as grammatically, and in a sense better suiting the situation, by is come. Then the co-ordinate prepositional phrases qualifying “faith” have both alike a local reference, and we paraphrase the clause thus: “since I heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is spread amongst you, and whose report has reached all the saints.”
We are reminded of the thanksgiving for the Roman Church, “that your faith is proclaimed throughout the whole world.”[63] The success of the gospel in Asia gave encouragement to believers in Christ everywhere. St Paul loves in this way to link Church to Church, to knit the bonds of faith between land and land: in this letter most of all; for it is his catholic epistle, the epistle of the Church œcumenical.
In verse 16 we pass from praise to prayer. God is invoked by a double title peculiar to this passage, as “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory.” The former expression is in no way difficult. The apostle often speaks, as in verse 3, of “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”: intending to qualify the Divine Fatherhood by another epithet, he writes for once simply of “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This reminds us of the dependence of the Lord Jesus upon the eternal Father, and accentuates the Divine sovereignty so conspicuous in the foregoing Act of Praise. Christ’s constant attitude towards the Father was that of His cry of anguish on the cross, “My God, my God!” Yet He never speaks to men of our God. To us God is “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,” as He was to the men of old time “the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob.”
The key to the designation Father of glory is in Romans vi. 4: “Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father.” In the light of this august manifestation of God’s power to save His lost sons in Christ, we are called to see light (vv. 19, 20). Its glory shines already about God’s blessed name of Father, thrice glorified in the apostle’s praise (vv. 3–14). The title is the counterpart of “the Father of compassions” in 2 Corinthians i. 3.
And now, what has the apostle to ask of the Father of men under these glorious appellations? He asks “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full-knowledge[64] of Him,—the eyes of your heart enlightened, in order that you may know,” etc. This recalls the emphasis with which in verses 8 and 9 he set “wisdom and intelligence” amongst the first blessings bestowed by Divine grace upon the Church. It was the gift which the Asian Churches at the present juncture most needed; this is just now the burden of the apostle’s prayers for his people.
The spirit of wisdom and revelation desired will proceed from the Holy Spirit dwelling in these Gentile believers (ver. 13). But it must belong to their own spirit and direct their personal mental activity, the spirit of revelation becoming “the spirit of their mind” (iv. 23). When St Paul asks for “a spirit of wisdom and revelation,” he desires that his readers may have amongst themselves a fountain of inspiration and share in the prophetic gifts diffused through the Church.[65] And “the knowledge—the full, deep knowledge of God” is the sphere “in” which this richer inspiration and spiritual wisdom are exercised and nourished. “Philosophy, taking man for its centre, says, Know thyself: only the inspired word, which proceeds from God, has been able to say, Know God.”[66]
The connexion of the first clause of verse 18 with the last of verse 17 is not very clear in St Paul’s Greek; there is a characteristic incoherence of structure. The continuity of thought is unmistakable. He prays that through this inspired wisdom his readers may have their reason enlightened to see the grandeur and wealth of their religion. This is a vision for “the eyes of the heart.” It is disclosed to the eye behind the eye, to the heart which is the true discerner.
“The seeing eyes
See best by the light in the heart that lies.”
Yonder is an ox grazing in the meadow on a bright summer’s day. Round him is spread the fairest landscape,—a broad stretch of herbage embroidered with flowers, the river gleaming in and out amongst the distant trees, the hills on both sides bounding the quiet valley, sunshine and shadows chasing each other as they leap from height to height. But of all this what sees the grazing ox? So much lush pasture and cool shade and clear water where his feet may plash when he has done feeding. In the same meadow there stands a poet musing, or a painter busy at his easel; and on the soul of that gifted man there descends, through eyes outwardly discerning no more than those of the beast at his side, a vision of wonder and beauty which will make all time richer. The eyes of the man’s heart are opened, and the spirit of wisdom and revelation is given him in the knowledge of God’s work in nature.
Like differences exist amongst men in regard to the things of religion. “So foolish was I and ignorant,” says the Psalmist, speaking of his former dejection and unbelief, “I was as a beast before Thee!” There shall be two men sitting side by side in the same house of prayer, at the same gate of heaven. The one sees heaven opened; he hears the eternal song; his spirit is a temple filled with the glory of God. The other sees the place and the aspect of his fellow-worshippers; he hears the music of organ and choir, and the sound of some preacher’s voice. But as for anything besides, any influence from another world, it is no more to him at that moment than is the music in the poet’s soul or the colours on the painter’s canvas to the ox that eateth grass.
It is not the strangeness and distance of Divine things alone that cause insensibility; their familiarity has the same effect. We know all this gospel so well. We have read it, listened to it, gone over its points of doctrine a hundred times. It is trite and easy to us as a worn glove. We discuss without a tremor of emotion truths the first whisper and dim promise of which once lifted men’s souls into ecstasy, or cast them down into depths of shame and bewilderment so that they forgot to eat their bread. The awe of things eternal, the mystery of our faith, the Spirit of glory and of God rest on us no longer. So there come to be, as one hears it said, gospel-hardened hearers—and gospel-hardened preachers! The eyes see—and see not; the ears hear—and hear not; the lips speak without feeling; the heart is waxen fat. This is the nemesis of grace abused. It is the result that follows by an inevitable psychological law, where outward contact with spiritual truth is not attended with an inward apprehension and response. How do we need to pray, in handling these dread themes, for a true sense and savour of Divine things,—that there may be given, and ever given afresh to us “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God.”
Three things the apostle desires that his readers may see with the heart’s enlightened eyes: the hope to which God calls them, the wealth that He possesses in them, and the power which He is prepared to exert upon them as believing men.
I. What, then, is our hope in God? What is the ideal of our faith? For what purpose has God called us into the fellowship of His Son? What is our religion going to do for us and to make of us?
It will bring us safe home to heaven. It will deliver us from the present evil world, and preserve us unto Christ’s heavenly kingdom. God forbid that we should make light of “the hope laid up for us in the heavens,” or cast it aside. It is an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast. But is it the hope of our calling? Is this what St Paul here chiefly signifies? We are very sure that it is not. But it is the one thing which stands for the hope of the gospel in many minds. “We trust that our sins are forgiven: we hope that we shall get to heaven!” The experience of how many Christian believers begins and ends there. We make of our religion a harbour of refuge, a soothing anodyne, an escape from the anguish of guilt and the fear of death; not a life-vocation, a grand pursuit. The definition we have quoted may suffice for the beginning and the end; but we need something to fill out that formula, to give body and substance, meaning and movement to the life of faith.
Let the apostle tell us what he regarded, for himself, as the end of religion, what was the object of his ambition and pursuit. “One thing I do,” he writes to the Philippians, opening to them all his heart,—“One thing I do. I press towards the mark for the prize of my high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” And what, pray, was that mark? —“that I may gain Christ and be found in Him!—that I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if by any means I may attain unto the final resurrection from the dead.” Yes, Paul hopes for heaven; but he hopes for something else first, and most. It is through Christ that he sees heaven. To know Christ, to love Christ, to serve Christ, to follow Christ, to be like Christ, to be with Christ for ever!—that is what St Paul lived for. Whatever aim he pursues or affection he cherishes, Christ lies in it and reaches beyond it. In doing or in suffering, in his intellect and his heart, in his thoughts for himself or for others, Christ is all things to him and in all. When life is thus filled with Christ, heaven becomes, as one may say, a mere circumstance, and death but an incident upon the way,—in the soul’s everlasting pursuit of Christ.
Behold, then, brethren, the hope of our calling. God could not call us to any destiny less or lower than this. It would have been unworthy of Him,—and may we not say, unworthy of ourselves, if we are in truth His sons? From eternity the Father of spirits has predestined you and me to be holy and without blemish before Him,—in a word, to be conformed to the image of His Son. Every other hope is dross compared to this.
II. Another vision for the heart’s eyes, still more amazing than that we have seen: “what is,” St Paul writes, “the riches of the glory of God’s inheritance in the saints.”
We saw, in considering the eleventh and fourteenth verses, how the apostle, in characteristic fashion, plays upon the double aspect of the inheritance, regarding it now as the heritage of the saints in God and again as His heritage in them. The former side of this relationship was indicated in the “hope of the Divine calling,”—which we live and strive for as it is promised us by God; and the latter comes out, by way of contrast, in this second clause. Verse 18 repeats in another way the antithesis of verse 14 between our inheritance and God’s acquisition. We must understand that God sets great store by us His human children, and counts Himself rich in our affection and our service. How deeply it must affect us to know this, and to see the glory that in God’s eyes belongs to His possession in believing men.
What presumption is all this, some one says. How preposterous to imagine that the Maker of the worlds interests Himself in atoms like ourselves,—in the ephemera of this insignificant planet! But moral magnitudes are not to be measured by a foot-rule. The mind which can traverse the immensities of space and hold them in its grasp, transcends the things it counts and weighs. As it is amongst earthly powers, so the law may hold betwixt sphere and sphere in the system of worlds, in the relations of bodies terrestrial and celestial to each other, that “God has chosen the weak things to put to shame the mighty, and the things that are not to bring to nought the things that are.” Through the Church He is “making known to the potentates in the heavenly places His manifold wisdom” (iii, 10). The lowly can sing evermore with Mary in the Magnificat: “He that is mighty hath magnified me.” If it be true that God spared not His Son for our salvation and has sealed us with the seal of His Spirit, if He chose us before the world’s foundation to be His saints, He must set upon those saints an infinite value. We may despise ourselves; but He thinks great things of us.
And is this, after all, so hard to understand? If the alternative were put to some owner of wide lands and houses full of treasure: “Now, you must lose that fine estate, or see your own son lost and ruined! You must part with a hundred thousand pounds—or with your best friend!” there could be no doubt in such a case what the choice would be of a man of sense and worth, one who sees with the eyes of the heart. Shall we think less nobly of God than of a right-minded man amongst ourselves?—Suppose, again, that one of our great cities were so full of wealth that the poorest were housed in palaces and fared sumptuously every day, though its citizens were profligates and thieves and cowards! What would its opulence and luxury be worth? Is it not evident that character is the only possession of intrinsic value, and that this alone gives worth and weight to other properties? “The saints that are in the earth and the excellent” are earth’s riches.
So far as we can judge of His ways, the great God who made us cares comparatively little about the upholstery and machinery of the universe; but He cares immensely about men, about the character and destiny of men. There is nothing in all that physical science discloses for God to love, nothing kindred to Himself. “Hast thou considered my servant Job?” the Hebrew poet pictures Him saying before heaven and hell!—“Hast thou considered my servant Job?—a perfect man and upright: there is none like him in the earth.” How proud God is of a man like that, in a world like this. Who can tell the value that the Father of glory sets upon the tried fidelity of His humblest servant here on earth; the intensity with which He reciprocates the confidence of one timid, trembling human heart, or the simple reverence of one little child that lisps His awful name? “He taketh pleasure in them that fear Him, in those that hope in His mercy!” Beneath His feet all the worlds lie spread in their starry splendour, our sun with its train of planets no more than one glimmering spot of light amongst ten thousand. But amidst this magnificence, what is the sight that wins His tender fatherly regard? “To that man will I look, that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and that trembles at my word.” Thus saith the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity. The Creator rejoices in His works as at the beginning, the Lord of heaven and earth in His dominion. But these are not His “inheritance.” That is in the love of His children, in the character and number of His saints. We are to be the praise of His glory.
Let us learn, then, to respect ourselves. Let us not take the world’s tinsel for wealth, and spend our time, like the man in Bunyan’s dream, scraping with “the muck-rake” while the crown of life shines above our head. The riches of a Church—nay, of any human community—lies not in its moneyed resources, but in the men and women that compose it, in their godlike attributes of mind and heart, in their knowledge, their zeal, their love to God and man, in the purity, the gentleness, the truthfulness and courage and fidelity that are found amongst them. These are the qualities which give distinction to human life, and are beautiful in the eyes of God and holy angels. “Man that is in honour and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish.”
III. One thing more we need to understand, or what we have seen already will be of little practical avail. We may see glorious visions, we may cherish high aspirations; and they may prove to be but the dreams of vanity. Nay, it is conceivable that God Himself might have wealth invested in our nature, a treasure beyond price, shipwrecked and sunk irrecoverably through our sin. What means exist for realizing this inheritance? what power is there at work to recover these forfeited hopes, and that glory of God of which we have come so miserably short?
The answer lies in the apostle’s words: “That ye may know what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us that believe,”—a power measured by “the energy of the might of His strength[67] which He wrought in the Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at His right hand in the heavenly places.” This is the power that we have to count upon, the force that is yoked to the world’s salvation and is at the service of our faith. Its energy has turned the tide and reversed the stream of nature—in the person of Jesus Christ and in the course of human history. It has changed death to life. Above all, it certifies the forgiveness of sin and releases us from its liabilities; it transforms the law of sin and death into the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus.
We preachers hear it said sometimes: “You live in a speculative world. Your doctrines are ideal and visionary,—altogether too high for men as they are and the world as we find it. Human nature and experience, the coarse realities of life are all against you.”
What would our objectors have said at the grave-side of Jesus? “The beautiful dreamer, the sublime idealist! He was too good for a world such as ours. It was sure to end like this. His ideas of life were utterly impracticable.” So they would have moralized. “And the good prophet talked—strangest fanaticism of all—of rising again on the third day! One thing at least we know, that the dead are dead and gone from us. No, we shall never see Jesus or His like again. Purity cannot live in this infected air. The grave ends all hope for men.” But, despite human nature and human experience, He has risen again, He lives for ever! That is the apostle’s message and testimony to the world. For those “who believe” it, all things are possible. A life is within our reach that seemed far off as earth from heaven. You may become a perfect saint.
From His open grave Christ breathed on His disciples, and through them on all mankind, the Holy Spirit. This is the efficient cause of Christianity,—the Spirit that raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. The limit to its efficacy lies in the defects of our faith, in our failure to comprehend what God gave us in His Son. Is anything now too hard for the Lord? Shall anything be called impossible, in the line of God’s promise and man’s spiritual need? Can we put an arrest upon the working of this mysterious force, upon the Spirit of the new life, and say to it: Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther?
Look at Jesus where He was—the poor, tortured, wounded body, slain by our sins, lying cold and still in Joseph’s grave: then lift up your eyes and see Him where He is,—enthroned in the worship and wonder of heaven! Measure by that distance, by the sweep and lift of that almighty Arm, the strength of the forces engaged to your salvation, the might of the powers at work through the ages for the redemption of humanity.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] See Westcott and Hort’s New Testament in Greek, vol. ii., pp. 124, 125.
[62] Dr. Beet abides by the critical text. He solves the difficulty by giving πίστις a double sense: “the faith among you in the Lord Jesus, and the faithfulness towards all the saints.” See his Commentary on Ephesians, etc., pp. 284–6.
[63] In 1 Thess. i. 7–9; 2 Thess. i. 4, the same thought enters into Paul’s thanksgiving; comp. 2 Cor. ix. 2.
[64] This is the emphatic ἐπιγνῶσις, so frequent in the later epistles. See Lightfoot’s note on Col. i. 9; or Cremer’s Lexicon to N.T. Greek.
[65] See ch. iii. 3–5, iv. 11; and comp. 1 Cor. xiv. 26–40, etc.
[66] Adolphe Monod: Explication de l’épître de S. Paul aux Éphésiens. A deeply spiritual and suggestive Commentary.
[67] In this amplitude of expression there is no idle heaping up of words. The four synonyms for power have each a distinct force in the sentence. Δύναμις is power in general, as that which is able to effect some purpose; ἐνέργεια is energy, power in effective action and operation; κράτος is might, mastery, sovereign power,—in the New Testament used chiefly of the power of God; ἰσχύς is force, strength, power resident in some person and belonging to him. This is the order in which the words follow each other. Compare vi. 10 in the Greek.
THE DOCTRINE.
Chapter i. 20–iii. 13.
Ὑψηλῶν σφόδρα γέμει τῶν νοημάτων καὶ ὑπερόγκων. Ἃ γὰρ μηδαμοῦ σχέδον ἐφθέγξατο, ταῦτα ἐνταῦθά φησιν.
John Chrysostom: In epistolam ad Ephesios.
CHAPTER VI.
WHAT GOD WROUGHT IN THE CHRIST.
“He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule, and authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come: and He put all things in subjection under His feet, and Him He gave—the head over all things—to the Church which is His body,—the fulness of Him that filleth all in all.”—Eph. i. 20–23.
The division that we make at verse 20, marking off at this point the commencement of the Doctrine of the epistle, may appear somewhat forced. The great doxology of the first half of the chapter is intensely theological; and the prayer which follows it, like that of the letter to the Colossians, melts into doctrine imperceptibly. The apostle teaches upon his knees. The things he has to tell his readers, and the things he has asked on their behalf from God, are to a great extent the same. Still the writer’s attitude in the second chapter is manifestly that of teaching; and his doctrine there is so directly based upon the concluding sentences of his prayer, that it is necessary for logical arrangement to place these verses within the doctrinal section of the epistle.
The resurrection of Christ made men sensible that a new force of life had come into the world, of incalculable potency. This power was in existence before. In prelusive ways, it has wrought in the world from its foundation, and since the fall of man. By the incarnation of the Son of God it took possession of human flesh; by His sacrificial death it won its decisive triumph. But the virtue of these acts of Divine grace lay in their hiding of power, in the self-abnegation of the Son of God who emptied Himself and took a servant’s form, and became obedient unto death.
With what a rebound did the “energy of the might of God’s strength” put forth itself in Him, when once this sacrifice was accomplished! Even His disciples who had seen Jesus still the tempest and feed the multitude from a handful of bread and call back the spirit to its mortal frame, had not dreamed of the might of Godhead latent in Him, until they beheld Him risen from the dead. He had promised this in words; but they understood His words only when they saw the fact, when He actually stood before them “alive after His passion.” The scene of Calvary—the cruel sufferings of their Master, His helpless ignominy and abandonment by God, the malignant triumph of his enemies—gave to this revelation an effect beyond measure astonishing and profound in its impression. From the stupor of grief and despair they were raised to a boundless hope, as Jesus rose from the death of the cross to glorious life and Godhead.
Of the same nature was the effect produced by His manifestation to Paul himself. The Nazarene prophet known to Saul by report as an attractive teacher and worker of miracles, had made enormous pretensions, blasphemous if they were not true. He put Himself forward as the Messiah and the very Son of God! But when brought to the test, His power utterly failed. God disowned and forsook Him; and He “was crucified of weakness.” His followers declared, indeed, that He had returned from the grave. But who could believe them, a handful of Galilean enthusiasts, desperately clinging to the name of their disgraced leader! If He has risen, why does He not show Himself to others? Who can accept a crucified Messiah? The new faith is a madness, and an insult to our common Judaism! Such were Saul’s former thoughts of the Christ. But when his challenge was met and the Risen One confronted him in the way to Damascus, when from that Form of insufferable glory there came a voice saying, “I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest!” it was enough. Instantly the conviction penetrated his soul, “He liveth by the power of God.” Saul’s previous reasonings against the Messiahship of Jesus by the same rigorous logic were now turned into arguments for Him.
It is “the Christ,” let us observe, in whom God “wrought raising Him from the dead”: the Christ of Jewish hope (ver. 12), the centre and sum of the Divine counsel for the world (ver. 10),[68] the Christ whom in that moment never to be forgotten the humbled Saul recognized in the crucified Nazarene.
The demonstration of the power of Christianity Paul had found in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The power which raised Him from the dead is the working energy of our faith. Let us see what this mysterious power wrought in the Redeemer Himself; and then we will consider how it bears upon us. There are two steps indicated in Christ’s exaltation: He was raised from the death of the cross to new life amongst men; and again from the world of men He was raised to the throne of God in heaven. In the enthronement of Jesus Christ at the Father’s right hand, verses 22, 23 further distinguish two separate acts: there was conferred on Him a universal Lordship; and He was made specifically Head of the Church, being given to her for her Lord and Life, He who contains the fulness of the Godhead. Such is the line of thought marked out for us.
I. God raised the Christ from the dead.
This assertion is the corner-stone of St Paul’s life and doctrine, and of the existence of Christendom. Did the event really take place? There were Christians at Corinth who affirmed, “There is no resurrection of the dead.” And there are followers of Jesus now who with deep sadness confess, like the author of Obermann once more:
“Now He is dead! Far hence He lies
In the lorn Syrian town;
And on His grave, with shining eyes,
The Syrian stars look down.”
If we are driven to this surrender, compelled to think that it was an apparition, a creation of their own passionate longing and heated fancy that the disciples saw and conversed with during those forty days, an apparition sprung from his fevered remorse that arrested Saul on the Damascus road—if we no longer believe in Jesus and the resurrection, it is in vain that we still call ourselves Christians. The foundation of the Christian creed is struck away from under our feet. Its spell is broken; its energy is gone.
Individual men may and do continue to believe in Christ, with no faith in the supernatural, men who are sceptics in regard to His resurrection and miracles. They believe in Himself, they say, not in His legendary wonders; in His character and teaching, in His beneficent influence—in the spiritual Christ, whom no physical marvel can exalt above His intrinsic greatness. And such trust in Him, where it is sincere, He accepts for all that it is worth, from the believer’s heart. But this is not the faith that saved Paul, and built the Church. It is not the faith which will save the world. It is the faith of compromise and transition, the faith of those whose conscience and heart cling to Christ while their reason gives its verdict against Him. Such belief may hold good for the individuals who profess it; but it must die with them. No skill of reasoning or grace of sentiment will for long conceal its inconsistency. The plain, blunt sense of mankind will decide again, as it has done already, that Jesus Christ was either a blasphemer, or He was the Son of the eternal God; either He rose from the dead in very truth, or His religion is a fable. Christianity is not bound up with the infallibility of the Church, whether in Pope or Councils, nor with the inerrancy of the letter of Scripture: it stands or falls with the reality of the facts of the gospel, with the risen life of Christ and His presence in the Spirit amongst men.
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[68] See the note upon this definite article on p. 47.
[69] Πρωτότοκος ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν, Col. i. 18: comp. Rom. vi. 13, x. 7, for the force of the preposition. Hence the peculiar ἐξανάστασιν τὴν ἐκ νεκρῶν of Phil. iii. 10, 11,—the out-and-out resurrection, which will utterly remove us from the sphere of death.
[70] Ver. 3, ch. ii. 6, iii. 10, vi. 12; nowhere else in the New Testament. Comp., however, 1 Cor. xv. 40, 48; Phil. ii. 10; Heb. viii. 5, ix. 23, xi. 16, xii. 22, where the adjective has the same kind of use.
[71] Note on Col. i. 16.
[72] Matt. xxii. 41–46, also in Mark and Luke; Acts ii. 34, 35; Rom. viii. 34; Col. iii. 1; Heb. i. 13; 1 Peter iii. 22, etc.
[73] The reader of the Old Testament, unless otherwise advertized, must inevitably have referred the words who filleth all things in all to the Supreme God. See Jer. xxiii. 24; Isai. vi. 1, 3; Hag. ii. 7; Ps. xxxiii. 5, etc.; Exod. xxxi. 3. “That filleth all in all” is an attribute belonging to “the same God, that worketh all in all” (1 Cor. xii. 6). Comp. iv. 6.
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.
It is true, there are other hindrances to faith, intellectual difficulties of great weight and seriousness, that press upon many minds. For such men Christ has all possible sympathy and patience. There is a real, though hidden faith that “lives in honest doubt.” Some men have more faith than they suppose, while others certainly have much less. One has a name to live, and yet is dead; another, perchance, has a name to die, and yet is alive to God through Jesus Christ. There are endless complications, self-contradictions, and misunderstandings in human nature. “Many are first” in the ranks of religious profession and notoriety, “which shall be last, and the last first.” We make the largest allowance for this element of uncertainty in the line that bounds faith from unfaith; “The Lord knoweth them that are His.” No intellectual difficulty, no mere misunderstanding, will ultimately or for long separate between God and the soul that He has made.
It is antipathy that separates. “They did not like to retain God in their knowledge”; that is Paul’s explanation of the ungodliness and vice of the ancient world. And it holds good still in countless instances. “Numbers in this bad world talk loudly against religion in order to encourage each other in sin, because they need encouragement. They know that they ought to be other than they are; but are glad to avail themselves of anything that looks like argument, to overcome their consciences withal” (Newman). The fashionable scepticism of the day too often conceals an inner revolt against the moral demands of the Christian life; it is the pretext of a carnal mind, which is “enmity against God, because it is not subject to His law.” Christ’s sentence upon unbelief as He knew it was this: “Light is come into the world; and men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.” So said the keenest and the kindest judge of men. If we are refusing Him our faith, let us be very sure that this condemnation does not touch ourselves. Is there no passion that bribes and suborns the intellect? no desire in the soul that dreads His entrance? no evil deeds that shelter themselves from His accusing light?
When the apostle says of his Gentile readers that they “once walked in the way of the age, according to the course of this world,[76] according to the prince of the power of the air,” the former part of his statement is clear enough. The age in which he lived was godless to the last degree; the stream of the world’s life ran in turbid course toward moral ruin. But the second clause is obscure. The “prince” (or “ruler”) who guides the world along its career of rebellion is manifestly Satan, the spirit of darkness and hate whom St Paul entitles “the god of this world” (2 Cor. iv. 4), and in whom Jesus recognized, under the name of “the prince of the world,” His great antagonist (John xiv. 30).
But what has this spirit of evil to do with “the air”? The Jewish rabbis supposed that the terrestrial atmosphere was Satan’s abode, that it was peopled by demons flitting about invisibly in the encompassing element. But this is a notion foreign to Scripture—certainly not contained in chapter vi. 12—and, in its bare physical sense, without point or relevance to this passage. There follows in immediate apposition to “the domain of the air, the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedience.” Surely, the air here partakes (if it be only here) of the figurative significance of spirit (i.e. breath). St Paul refines the Jewish idea of evil spirits dwelling in the surrounding atmosphere into an ethical conception of the atmosphere of the world, as that from which the sons of disobedience draw their breath and receive the spirit that inspires them. Here lies, in truth, the dominion of Satan. In other words, Satan constituted the Zeitgeist.
As Beck profoundly remarks upon this text:[77] “The Power of the air is a fitting designation for the prevailing spirit of the times, whose influence spreads itself like a miasma through the whole atmosphere of the world. It manifests itself as a contagious nature-power; and a spiritus rector works within it, which takes possession of the world of men, alike in individuals and in society, and assumes the direction of it. The form of expression here employed is based on the conception of evil peculiar to Scripture. In Scripture, evil and the principle of evil are not conceived in a purely spiritual way; nor could this be the case in a world of fleshly constitution, where the spiritual has the sensuous for its basis and its vehicle. Spiritual evil exists as a power immanent in cosmical nature.”[78] Concerning great tracts of the earth, and large sections even of Christianized communities, we must still confess with St John: “The world lieth in the Evil One.” The air is impregnated with the infection of sin;[79] its germs float about us constantly, and wherever they find lodgement they set up their deadly fever. Sin is the malarial poison native to our soil; it is an epidemic that runs its course through the entire “age of this world.”
Above this feverous, sin-laden atmosphere the apostle sees God’s anger brooding in threatening clouds. For our trespasses and sins are, after all, not forced on us by our environment. Those offences by which we provoke God, lie in our nature; they are no mere casual acts, they belong to our bias and disposition. Sin is a constitutional malady. There exists a bad element in our human nature, which corresponds but too truly to the course and current of the world around us. This the apostle acknowledges for himself and his law-honouring Jewish kindred: “We were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” So he wrote in the sad confession of Romans vii. 14–23: “I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”
It is upon this “other law,” the contradiction of His own, upon the sinfulness beneath the sin, that God’s displeasure rests. Human law notes the overt act: “the Lord looketh upon the heart.” There is nothing more bitter and humiliating to a conscientious man than the conviction of this penetrating Divine insight, this detection to himself of his incurable sin and the hollowness of his righteousness before God. How it confounds the proud Pharisee to learn that he is as other men are,—and even as this publican!
“The sons of disobedience” must needs be “children of wrath.” All sin, whether in nature or practice, is the object of God’s fixed displeasure. It cannot be matter of indifference to our Father in heaven that His human children are disobedient toward Himself. Children of His favour or anger we are each one of us, and at every moment. We “keep His commandments, and abide in His love”; or we do not keep them, and are excluded. It is His smile or frown that makes the sunshine or the gloom of our inner life. How strange that men should argue that God’s love forbids His wrath! It is, in truth, the cause of it. I could neither love nor fear a God who did not care enough about me to be angry with me when I sin. If my child does wilful wrong, if by some act of greed or passion he imperils his moral future and destroys the peace and well-being of the house, shall I not be grieved with him, with an anger proportioned to the love I bear him? How much more shall your heavenly Father—how much more justly and wisely and mercifully!
St Paul feels no contradiction between the words of verse 3 and those that follow. The same God whose wrath burns against the sons of disobedience while they so continue, is “rich in mercy” and “loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses!” He pities evil men, and to save them spared not His Son from death; but Almighty God, the Father of glory, hates and loathes the evil that is in them, and has determined that if they will not let it go they shall perish with it.
II. Such was the death in which Paul and his readers once had lain. But God in His “great love” has “made them to live along with the Christ.”
How wonderful to have witnessed a resurrection: to see the pale cheek of the little maid, Jairus’ daughter, flush again with the tints of life, and the still frame begin to stir, and the eyes softly open—and she looks upon the face of Jesus! or to watch Lazarus, four days dead, coming out of his tomb, slowly, and as one dreaming, with hands and feet bound in the grave-clothes. Still more marvellous to have beheld the Prince of Life at the dawn of the third day issue from Joseph’s grave, bursting His prison-gates and stepping forth in new-risen glory as one refreshed from slumber.
But there are things no less divine, had we eyes for their marvel, that take place upon this earth day by day. When a human soul awakes from its trespasses and sins, when the love of God is poured into a heart that was cold and empty, when the Spirit of God breathes into a spirit lying powerless and buried in the flesh, there is as true a rising from the dead as when Jesus our Lord came out from His sepulchre. It was of this spiritual resurrection that He said: “The hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.” Having said that, He added, concerning the bodily resurrection of mankind: “Marvel not at this; for the hour cometh, in which all that are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and shall come forth!” The second wonder only matches and consummates the first (John v. 24–28).
“This is life eternal, to know God the Father,”—the life, as the apostle elsewhere calls it, that is “life indeed.” It came to St Paul by a new creation, when, as he describes it, “God who said, Light shall shine out of darkness, shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ.” We are born again—the God-consciousness is born within us: an hour mysterious and decisive as that in which our personal consciousness first emerged and the soul knew itself. Now it knows God. Like Jacob at Peniel it says: “I have seen God face to face; and my life is preserved.” God and the soul have met in Christ—and are reconciled.
The words the apostle uses—gave us life—raised us up—seated us in the heavenly places—embrace the whole range of salvation. “Those united with Christ are through grace delivered from their state of death, not only in the sense that the resurrection and exaltation of Christ redound to their benefit as Divinely imputed to them; but by the life-giving energy of God they are brought out of their condition of death into a new and actual state of life. The act of grace is an act of the Divine power and might, not a mere judicial declaration” (Beck). This comprehensive action of the Divine grace upon believing men takes place by a constant and constantly deepening union of the soul with Christ. This is well expressed by A. Monod: “The entire history of the Son of man is reproduced in the man who believes in Him, not by a simple moral analogy, but by a spiritual communication which is the true secret of our justification as well as of our sanctification, and indeed of our whole salvation.”
There is no repetition in the three verbs employed, which are alike extended by the Greek preposition with (syn). The first sentence (raised us up with the Christ) virtually includes everything; it shows us one with Christ who lives evermore to God. The second sentence gathers into its scope all believers—the you of verse 1 and the we of verse 3: “He raised us up together, and together made us sit in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Nothing is more characteristic of our epistle than this turn of thought. To the conception of our union with Christ in His celestial life, it adds that of our union with each other in Christ as sharers in common of that life. Christ “reconciles us in one body unto God” (ver. 16). We sit not alone, but together in the heavenly places. This is the fulness of life; this completes our salvation.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] For the antithesis of “you” and “we,” comp. vv. 11–18, ch. i, 12, 13; also Rom. iii. 19, 23 (For there is no distinction), Gal. ii. 15.
[75] Ποιοῦντες τὰ θελήματα τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ τῶν διανοιῶν (ver. 3).
[76] Perhaps this double rendering may bring out the force of κατὰ τὸν αἰῶνα τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.
[77] In the posthumous Erklärung des Briefes Pauli an die Epheser—a valuable exposition, marked by Beck’s theological acumen and lucidity.
[78] The φύσει of verse 3 thus corresponds to the ἐξουσία τοῦ ἀέρος of verse 2. “Sin entered into the world” ( κόσμος), Rom. v. 12, which signifies more than the nature of individual men.
[79] I John iii. 8; comp. John viii. 41–44.
CHAPTER VIII.
SAVED FOR AN END.
“That in the ages to come He might show 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.”—Eph. ii. 7–10.
The plan which God has formed for men in Christ is of great dimensions every way,—in its length no less than in its breadth and height. He “raised us up and seated us together [Gentiles with Jews] in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages which are coming on He might show the surpassing riches of His grace.” All the races of mankind and all future ages are embraced in the redeeming purpose, and are to share in its boundless wealth. Nor are the ages past excluded from its operations. God “afore prepared the good works in which” He summons us to walk. The highway of the new life has been in building since time began.
Thus large and limitless is the range of “the purpose and grace given us in Christ Jesus before times eternal” (2 Tim. i. 9). But what strikes us most in this passage is the exuberance of the grace itself. Twice over the apostle exclaims, “By grace you are saved”: once in verse 5, in an eager, almost jealous parenthesis, where he hastens to assure the readers of their deliverance from the fearful condition just described (vv. 1–3, 5). Again, deliberately and with full definition he states the same fact, in verse 8: “For by grace you are saved, through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. It does not come of works, to the end that none may boast.”
These words place us on familiar ground. We recognize the Paul of Galatians and Romans, the dialect and accent of the apostle of salvation by faith. But scarcely anywhere do we find this wonder-working grace so affluently described. “God being rich in mercy, for the great love wherewith He loved us—the exceeding riches of His grace, shown in kindness toward us—the gift of God.” Mercy, love, kindness, grace, gift: what a constellation is here! These terms present the character of God in the gospel under the most delightful aspects, and in vivid contrast to the picture of our human state outlined in the beginning of the chapter.
Mercy denotes the Divine pitifulness towards feeble, suffering men, akin to those “compassions of God” to which the apostle repeatedly appeals.[80] It is a constant attribute of God in the Old Testament, and fills much the same place there that grace does in the New. “Of mercy and judgement” do the Psalmists sing—of mercy most. Out of the thunder and smoke of Sinai He declared His name: “Jehovah, a God full of compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and truth, keeping mercy for thousands.” The dread of God’s justice, the sense of His dazzling holiness and almightiness threw His mercy into bright relief and gave to it an infinite preciousness. It is the contrast which brings in “mercy” here, in verse 4, by antithesis to “wrath” (ver. 3).[81] These qualities are complementary. The sternest and strongest natures are the most compassionate. God is “rich in mercy.” The wealth of His Being pours itself out in the exquisite tendernesses, the unwearied forbearance and forgivingness of His compassion towards men. The Judge of all the earth, whose hate of evil is the fire of hell, is gentler than the softest-hearted mother,—rich in mercy as He is grand and terrible in wrath.
God’s mercy regards us as we are weak and miserable: His love regards us as we are, in spite of trespass and offence, His offspring,—objects of “much love” amid much displeasure, “even when we were dead through our trespasses.” What does the story of the prodigal son mean but this? and what Christ’s great word to Nicodemus (John iii. 16)?—Grace and kindness are love’s executive. Grace is love in administration, love counteracting sin and seeking our salvation. Christ is the embodiment of grace; the cross its supreme expression; the gospel its message to mankind; and Paul himself its trophy and witness.[82] The “overpassing riches” of grace is that affluence of wealth in which through Christ it “superabounded” to the apostolic age and has outdone the magnitude of sin (Rom. v. 20), in such measure that St Paul sees future ages gazing with wonder at its benefactions to himself and his fellow-believers. Shown “in kindness toward us,” he says,—in a condescending fatherliness, that forgets its anger and softens its old severity into comfort and endearment. God’s kindness is the touch of His hand, the accent of His voice, the cherishing breath of His Spirit. Finally, this generosity of the Divine grace, this infinite goodwill of God toward men, takes expression in the gift—the gift of Christ, the gift of righteousness (Rom. v. 15–18), the gift of eternal life (Rom. vi. 23); or—regarded, as it is here, in the light of experience and possession—the gift of salvation.
The opposition of gift and debt, of gratuitous salvation through faith to salvation earned by works of law, belongs to the marrow of St Paul’s divinity. The teaching of the great evangelical epistles is condensed into the brief words of verses 8 and 9. The reason here assigned for God’s dealing with men by way of gift and making them absolutely debtors—“lest any one should boast”—was forced upon the apostle’s mind by the stubborn pride of legalism; it is stated in terms identical with those of the earlier letters. Men will glory in their virtues before God; they flaunt the rags of their own righteousness, if any such pretext, even the slightest, remains to them. We sinners are a proud race, and our pride is oftentimes the worst of our sins. Therefore God humbles us by His compassion. He makes to us a free gift of His righteousness, and excludes every contribution from our store of merit; for if we could supply anything, we should inevitably boast as though all were our own. We must be content to receive mercy, love, grace, kindness—everything, without deserving the least fraction of the immense sum. How it strips our vanity; how it crushes us to the dust—“the weight of pardoning love!”
Concerning the office of faith in salvation we have already spoken in Chapter IV.[83] It is on the objective fact rather than the subjective means of salvation that the apostle lays stress in this passage. His readers do not seem to have realized sufficiently what God has given them and the greatness of the salvation already accomplished. They measured inadequately the power which had touched and changed their lives (i. 19). St Paul has shown them the depth to which they were formerly sunk, and the height to which they have been raised (vv. 1–6). He can therefore assure them, and he does it with redoubled emphasis: “You are saved; By grace you are saved men!”[84] Not, “You will be saved”; nor, “You were saved”; nor, “You are in course of salvation,”—for salvation has many moods and tenses,—but, in the perfect passive tense, he asserts the glorious accomplished fact. With the same reassuring emphasis in chapter i. 7 he declared, “We have redemption in His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.”
Here is St Paul’s doctrine of Assurance. It was laid down by Christ Himself when He said: “He that believeth on the Son of God hath eternal life.” This sublime confidence is the ruling note of St John’s great epistle: “We know that we are in Him.... We know that we have passed out of death into life.... This is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.” It was this confidence of present salvation that made the Church irresistible. With its foundation secure, the house of life can be steadily and calmly built up. Under the shelter of the full assurance of faith, in the sunshine of God’s love felt in the heart, all spiritual virtues bloom and flourish. But with a faith hesitant, distracted, that is sure of no doctrine in the creed and cannot plant a firm foot anywhere, nothing prospers in the soul or in the Church. Oh for the clear accent, the ringing, joyous note of apostolic assurance! We want a faith not loud, but deep; a faith not born of sentiment and human sympathy, but that comes from the vision of the living God; a faith whose rock and corner-stone is neither the Church nor the Bible, but Christ Jesus Himself.
Greatly do we need, like the Asian disciples of Paul and John, to “assure our hearts” before God. With death confronting us, with the hideous evil of the world oppressing us; when the air is laden with the contagion of sin; when the faith of the strongest wears the cast of doubt; when the word of promise shines dimly through the haze of an all-encompassing scepticism and a hundred voices say, in mockery or grief, Where is now thy God? when the world proclaims us lost, our faith refuted, our gospel obsolete and useless,—then is the time for the Christian assurance to recover its first energy and to rise again in radiant strength from the heart of the Church, from the depths of its mystic life where it is hid with Christ in God.
You are saved! cries the apostle; not forgetting that his readers have their battle to fight, and many hazards yet to run (vi. 10–13). But they hold the earnest of victory, the foretaste of life eternal. In spirit they sit with Christ in the heavenly places. Pain and death, temptation, persecution, the vicissitudes of earthly history, by these God means to perfect that which He has begun in His saints—“if you continue in the faith, grounded and firm” (Col. i. 23). That condition is expressed, or implied, in all assurance of final salvation. It is a condition which excites to watchfulness, but can never cause misgiving to a loyal heart. God is for us! He justifies us, and counts us His elect. Christ Jesus who died is risen and seated at the right hand of God, and there intercedes for us. Quis separabit?[85]
This is the epistle of the Church and of humanity. It dwells on the grand, objective aspects of the truth, rather than upon its subjective experiences. It does not invite us to rest in the comforts and delights of grace, but to lift up our eyes and see whither Christ has translated us and what is the kingdom that we possess in Him. God “quickened us together with the Christ”: He “raised us up, He made us to sit in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Henceforth “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. iii. 20).
This is the inspiring thought of the third group of St Paul’s epistles; we heard it in the first note of his song of praise (i. 3). It supplies the principle from which St Paul unfolds the beautiful conception of the Christian life contained in the third chapter of the companion letter to the Colossians: “Your life is hid with the Christ in God”; therefore “seek the things that are above, where He is.” We live in two worlds at once. Heaven lies about us in this new mystic childhood of our spirit. There our names are written; thither our thoughts and hopes resort. Our treasure is there; our heart we have lodged there, with Christ in God. He is there, the Lord of the Spirit, from whom we draw each moment the life that flows into His members. In the greatness of His love conquering sin and death, time and space, He is with us to the world’s end. May we not say that we, too, are with Him and shall be with Him always? So we reckon in the logic of our faith and at the height of our high calling, though the soul creeps and drudges upon the lower levels.
“With Him we are gone up on high,
Since He is ours and we are His;
With Him we reign above the sky,
We walk upon our subject seas!”
In his lofty flights of thought the apostle always has some practical and homely end in view. The earthly and heavenly, the mystical and the matter-of-fact were not distant and repugnant, but interfused in his mind. From the celestial heights of the life hidden with Christ in God (ver. 6), he brings us down in a moment and without any sense of discrepancy to the prosaic level of “good works” (ver. 10). The love which viewed us from eternity, the counsels of Him who works all things in all, enter into the humblest daily duties.
Grace, moreover, sets us great tasks. There should be something to show in deed and life for the wealth of kindness spent upon us, some visible and commensurate result of the vast preparations of the gospel plan. Of this result the apostle saw the earnest in the work of faith wrought by his Gentile Churches.
St Paul was the last man in the world to undervalue human effort, or disparage good work of any sort. It is, in his view, the end aimed at in all that God bestows on His people, in all that He Himself works in them. Only let this end be sought in God’s way and order. Man’s doings must be the fruit and not the root of his salvation. “Not of works,” but “for good works” were believers chosen. “This little word for” says Monod, “reconciles St Paul and St James better than all the commentators.” God has not raised us up to sit idly in the heavenly places lost in contemplation, or to be the useless pensioners of grace. He sends us forth to “walk in the works, prepared for us,”—equipped to fight Christ’s battles, to till His fields, to labour in the service of building His Church.
The “workmanship” of our Version suggests an idea foreign to the passage. The apostle is not thinking of the Divine art or skill displayed in man’s creation; but of the simple fact that “God made man” (Gen. i. 27). “We are His making, created in Christ Jesus.” The “preparation” to which he refers in verse 10 leads us back to that primeval election of God’s sons in Christ for which we gave thanks at the outset (i. 3). There are not two creations, the second formed upon the ruin and failure of the first; but one grand design throughout. Redemption is creation re-affirmed. The new creation, as we call it, restores and consummates the old. When God raised His Son from the dead, He vindicated His original purpose in raising man from the dust a living soul. He has not forsaken the work of His hands nor forgone His original plan, which took account of all our wilfulness and sin. God in making us meant us to do good work in His world. From the world’s foundation down to the present moment He who worketh all in all has been working for this end—most of all in the revelation of His grace in Jesus Christ.
Far backward in the past, amid the secrets of creation, lay the beginnings of God’s grace to mankind. Far onward in the future shines its lustre revealed in the first Christian age. The apostle has gained some insight into those “times and seasons” which formerly were veiled from him. In his earliest letters, to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, St Paul echoes our Lord’s warning, never out of season, that we should “watch, for the hour is at hand.” Maran atha is his watchword: “Our Lord cometh; the time is short.” Nor does that note cease to the end. But when in this epistle he writes of “the ages that are coming on,” and of “all the generations of the age of the ages” (iii. 21), there is manifestly some considerable period of duration before his eyes. He sees something of the extent of the world’s coming history, something of the magnitude of the field that the future will afford for the unfolding of God’s designs.
In those approaching æons he foresees that the apostolic dispensation will play a conspicuous part. Unborn ages will be blessed in the blessing now descending upon Jews and Gentiles through Christ Jesus. So marvellous is the display of God’s kindness toward them, that all the future will pay homage to it. The overflowing wealth of blessing poured upon St Paul and the first Churches had an end in view that reached beyond themselves, an end worthy of the Giver, worthy of the magnitude of His plans and of His measureless love. If all this was theirs—this fulness of God exceeding the utmost they had asked or thought—it is because God means to convey it through them to multitudes besides! There is no limit to the grace that God will impart to men and to Churches who thus reason, who receive His gifts in this generous and communicative spirit. The apostolic Church chants with Mary at the Annunciation: “For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed!”
Never was any prediction better fulfilled. This spot of history shines with a light before which every other shows pale and commonplace. The companions of Jesus, the humble fraternities of the first Christian century have been the object of reverent interest and intent research on the part of all centuries since. Their history is scrutinized from all sides with a zeal and industry which the most pressing subjects of the day hardly command. For we feel that these men hold the secret of the world’s life. The key to the treasures we all long for is in their hands. As time goes on and the stress of life deepens, men will turn with yet fonder hope to the age of Jesus Christ. “And many nations will say: Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. And He will teach us of His ways; and we will walk in His paths.”
The stream will remember its fountain; the children of God will gather to their childhood’s home. The world will hear the gospel in the recovered accents of its prophets and apostles.
FOOTNOTES:
[80] Rom. xii. 1; 2 Cor. i. 3; Phil. i. 8, ii. 1; comp. Luke i. 78. The οἰκτιρμοὶ τοῦ Θεοῦ, σπλάγχνα καὶ οἰκτιρμοί, rendered in our Version “mercies of God,” denotes something even more affecting,—God’s sense of the woefulness of human life,—“the pitying tenderness Divine.”
[81] Comp. Rom. ix. 22, 23.
[82] On grace, comp. The Epistle to the Galatians (Expositor’s Bible), Chapter X.
[83] Compare also, on Faith, The Epistle to the Galatians (Expositor’s Bible), Chapters X.–XII. and XV.
[84] Ἐστὲ σεσωσμένοι: for the peculiar emphasis of this form of the verb, implying a settled fact, an assured state, compare ver. 12, ἢτε ... ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι; Col. ii. 10; Gal. ii. 11, iv. 3; 2 Cor. iv. 3, etc.
[85] Rom. viii. 31–39; comp. vv. 9–17; also 1 Thess. v. 23, 24; 2 Thess. iii. 3–5; 1 Cor. i. 4–9; Phil. i. 6, iii. 13, 14; 2 Tim. i. 12, iv. 18, for St Paul’s doctrine of Assurance.
CHAPTER IX.
THE FAR AND NEAR.
“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, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometime were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ.”—Eph. ii. 11–13.
The apostle’s Wherefore sums up for his readers the record of their salvation rehearsed in the previous verses. “You were buried in your sins, sunk in their corruption, ruined by their guilt, living under God’s displeasure and in the power of Satan. All this has passed away. The almighty Hand has raised you with Christ into a heavenly life. God has become your Father; His love is in your heart; by the strength of His grace you are enabled to walk in the way marked out for you from your creation. Wherefore remember: think of what you were, and of what you are!”
To such recollections we do well to summon ourselves. The children of grace love to recall, and on fit occasions recount for God’s glory and the help of their fellows, the way in which God led them to the knowledge of Himself. In some the great change came suddenly. He “made speed” to save us. It was a veritable resurrection, as signal and unlooked for as the rising of Christ from the dead. By a swift passage we were “translated from the power of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love.” Once living without God in the world, we were arrested by a strange providence—through some overthrow of fortune or shock of bereavement, or by a trivial incident touching unaccountably a hidden spring in the mind—and the whole aspect of life was altered in a moment. We saw revealed, as by a lightning flash at night, the emptiness of our own life, the misery of our nature, the folly of our unbelief, the awful presence of God—God whom we had forgotten and despised! We sought, and found His mercy. From that hour the old things passed away: we lived who had been dead,—made alive to God through Jesus Christ.
This instant conversion, such as Paul experienced, this sharp and abrupt transition from darkness to light, was common in the first generation of Christians, as it is wherever religious awakening takes place in a society that has been largely dead to God. The advent of Christianity in the Gentile world was much after this fashion,—like a tropical sunrise, in which day leaps on the earth full-born. This experience gives a stamp of peculiar decision to the convictions and character of its subjects. The change is patent and palpable; no observer can fail to mark it. And it burns itself into the memory with an ineffaceable impression. The violent throes of such a spiritual birth cannot be forgotten.
But if our entrance into the life of God was gradual, like the dawn of our own milder clime, where the light steals by imperceptible advances upon the darkness—if the glory of the Lord has thus risen upon us, our certainty of its presence may be no less complete, and our remembrance of its coming no less grateful and joyous. One leaps into the new life by a single eager bound; another reaches it by measured, thoughtful steps: but both are there, standing side by side on the common ground of salvation in Christ. Both walk in the same light of the Lord, that floods the sky from east to west. The recollections which the latter has to cherish of the leading of God’s kindly light—how He touched our childish thought, and checked gently our boyish waywardness, and mingled reproof with the first stirrings of passion and self-will, and wakened the alarms of conscience and the fears of another world, and the sense of the beauty of holiness and the shame of sin,—
“Shaping to truth the froward will
Along His narrow way,”—
such remembrances are a priceless treasure, that grows richer as we grow wiser. It awakens a joy not so thrilling nor so prompt in utterance as that of the soul snatched like a brand from the burning, but which passes understanding. Blessed are the children of the kingdom, those who have never roamed far from the fold of Christ and the commonwealth of Israel, whom the cross has beckoned onwards from their childhood. But however it was—by whatever means, at whatever time it pleased God to call you from darkness to His marvellous light, remember.
But we must return to Paul and his Gentile readers. The old death in life was to them a sombre reality, keenly and painfully remembered. In that condition of moral night out of which Christ had rescued them, Gentile society around them still remained. Let us observe its features as they are delineated in contrast with the privileges long bestowed on Israel. The Gentile world was Christless, hopeless, godless. It had no share in the Divine polity framed for the chosen people; the outward mark of its uncircumcision was a true symbol of its irreligion and debasement.
Israel had a God. Besides, there were only “those who are called gods.” This was the first and cardinal distinction. Not their race, not their secular calling, their political or intellectual gifts, but their faith formed the Jews into a nation. They were “the people of God,” as no other people has been—of the God, for theirs was “the true and living God”—Jehovah, the I AM, the One, the Alone. The monotheistic belief was, no doubt, wavering and imperfect in the mass of the nation in early times; but it was held by the ruling minds amongst them, by the men who have shaped the destiny of Israel and created its Bible, with increasing clearness and intensity of passion. “All the gods of the nations are idols—vapours, phantoms, nothings!—but Jehovah made the heavens.” It was the ancestral faith that glowed in the breast of Paul at Athens, amidst the fairest shrines of Greece, when he “saw the city wholly given to idolatry”—man’s highest art and the toil and piety of ages lavished on things that were no gods; and in the midst of the splendour of a hollow and decaying Paganism he read the confession that God was “unknown.”
Ephesus had her famous goddess, worshipped in the most sumptuous pile of architecture that the ancient world contained. Behold the proud city, “temple-keeper of the great goddess Artemis,” filled with wrath! Infuriate Demos flashes fire from his thousand eyes, and his brazen throat roars hoarse vengeance against the insulters of “her magnificence, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth”! Without God—atheists, in fact, the apostle calls this devout Asian population; and Artemis of Ephesus, and Athené, and Cybelé of Smyrna, and Zeus and Asclepius of Pergamum, though all the world worship them, are but “creatures of art and man’s device.”
The Pagans retorted this reproach. “Away with the atheists!” they cried, when Christians were led to execution. Ninety years after this time the martyr Polycarp was brought into the arena before the magistrates of Asia and the populace gathered in Smyrna at the great Ionic festival. The Proconsul, wishing to spare the venerable man, said to him: “Swear by the Fortune of Cæsar; and say, Away with the atheists!” But Polycarp, as the story continues, “with a grave look gazing on the crowd of lawless Gentiles in the stadium and shaking his hand against them, then groaning and looking up to heaven, said, Away with the atheists!” Pagan and Christian were each godless in the eyes of the other. If visible temples and images, and the local worship of each tribe or city made a god, then Jews and Christians had none: if God was a Spirit—One, Holy, Almighty, Omnipresent—then polytheists were in truth atheists; their many gods, being many, were no gods; they were idols,—eidola, illusive shows of the Godhead.
The more thoughtful and pious among the heathen felt this already. When the apostle denounced the idols and their pompous worship as “these vanities,” his words found an echo in the Gentile conscience. The classical Paganism held the multitude by the force of habit and local pride, and by its sensuous and artistic charms; but such religious power as it once had was gone. In all directions it was undermined by mystic Oriental and Egyptian rites, to which men resorted in search of a religion and sick of the old fables, ever growing more debased, that had pleased their fathers. The majesty of Rome in the person of the Emperor, the one visible supreme power, was seized upon by the popular instinct, even more than it was imposed by state policy, and made to fill the vacuum; and temples to Augustus had already risen in Asia, side by side with those of the ancient gods.
In this despair of their ancestral religions many piously disposed Gentiles turned to Judaism for spiritual help; and the synagogue was surrounded in the Greek cities by a circle of earnest proselytes. From their ranks St Paul drew a large proportion of his hearers and converts. When he writes, “Remember that you were at that time without God,” he is within the recollection of his readers; and they will bear him out in testifying that their heathen creed was dead and empty to the soul. Nor did philosophy construct a creed more satisfying. Its gods were the Epicurean deities who dwell aloof and careless of men; or the supreme Reason and Necessity of the Stoics, the anima mundi, of which human souls are fleeting and fragmentary images. “Deism finds God only in heaven; Pantheism, only on earth; Christianity alone finds Him both in heaven and on earth” (Harless). The Word made flesh reveals God in the world.
When the apostle says “without God in the world,” this qualification is both reproachful and sorrowful. To be without God in the world that He has made, where His “eternal power and Godhead” have been visible from creation, argues a darkened and perverted heart.[86] To be without God in the world is to be in the wilderness, without a guide; on a stormy ocean, without harbour or pilot; in sickness of spirit, without medicine or physician; to be hungry without bread, and weary without rest, and dying with no light of life. It is to be an orphaned child, wandering in an empty, ruined house.
In these words we have an echo of Paul’s preaching to the Gentiles, and an indication of the line of his appeals to the conscience of the enlightened pagans of his time. The despair of the age was darker than the human mind has known before or since. Matthew Arnold has painted it all in one verse of those lines, entitled Obermann once more, in which he so perfectly expresses the better spirit of modern scepticism.
“On that hard Pagan world disgust
And secret loathing fell
Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell.”
The saying by which St Paul reproved the Corinthians, “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” is the common sentiment of pagan epitaphs of the time. Here is an extant specimen of the kind: “Let us drink and be merry; for we shall have no more kissing and dancing in the kingdom of Proserpine. Soon shall we fall asleep, to wake no more.” Such were the thoughts with which men came back from the grave-side. It is needless to say how depraving was the effect of this hopelessness. At Athens, in the more religious times of Socrates, it was even considered a decent and kindly thing to allow a criminal condemned to death to spend his last hours in gross sensual indulgence. There is no reason to suppose that the extinction of the Christian hope of immortality would prove less demoralizing. We are “saved by hope,” said St Paul: we are ruined by despair. Pessimism of creed for most men means pessimism of conduct.
Our modern speech and literature and our habits of feeling have been for so many generations steeped in the influence of Christ’s teaching, and it has thrown so many tender and hallowed thoughts around the state of our beloved dead, that it is impossible even for those who are personally without hope in Christ to realize what its general decay and disappearance would mean. To have possessed such a treasure, and then to lose it! to have cherished anticipations so exalted and so dear,—and to find them turn out a mockery! The age upon which this calamity fell would be of all ages the most miserable.
The hope of Israel which Paul preached to the Gentiles was a hope for the world and for the nations, as well as for the individual soul. “The commonwealth [or polity] of Israel” and “the covenants of promise” guaranteed the establishment of the Messianic kingdom upon earth. This expectation took amongst the mass of the Jews a materialistic and even a revengeful shape; but in one form or other it belonged, and still belongs to every man of Israel. Those noble lines of Virgil in his fourth Eclogue[87]—like the words of Caiaphas, an unintended Christian prophecy—which predicted the return of justice and the spread of a golden age through the whole world under the rule of the coming heir of Cæsar, had been signally belied by the imperial house in the century that had elapsed. Never were human prospects darker than when the apostle wrote as Nero’s prisoner in Rome. It was an age of crime and horror. The political world and the system of pagan society seemed to be in the throes of dissolution. Only in “the commonwealth of Israel” was there a light of hope and a foundation for the future of mankind; and of this in its wisdom the world knew nothing.
The Gentiles were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,”—that is to say, treated as aliens and made such by their exclusion. By the very fact of Israel’s election, the rest of mankind were shut out of the visible kingdom of God. They became mere Gentiles, or nations,—a herd of men bound together only by natural affinity, with no “covenant of promise,” no religious constitution or destiny, no definite relationship to God, Israel being alone the acknowledged and organized “people of Jehovah.”
These distinctions were summed up in one word, expressing all the pride of the Jewish nature, when the Israelites styled themselves “the Circumcision.” The rest of the world—Philistines or Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, or Barbarians, it mattered not—were “the Uncircumcision.” How superficial this distinction was in point of fact, and how false the assumption of moral superiority it implied in the existing condition of Judaism, St Paul indicates by saying, “those who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision, in flesh, wrought by human hands.” In the second and third chapters of his epistle to the Romans he exposed the hollowness of Jewish sanctity, and brought his fellow-countrymen down to the level of those “sinners of the Gentiles” whom they so bitterly despised.
The destitution of the Gentile world is put into a single word, when the apostle says: “You were at that time separate from Christ”—without a Christ, either come or coming. They were deprived of the world’s one treasure,—shut out, as it appeared, for ever[88] from any part in Him who is to mankind all things and in all.—Once far off!
“But now in Christ Jesus ye were made nigh.” What is it that has bridged the distance, that has transported these Gentiles from the wilderness of heathenism into the midst of the city of God? It is “the blood of Christ.” The sacrificial death of Jesus Christ transformed the relations of God to mankind, and of Israel to the Gentiles. In Him God reconciled not a nation, but “a world” to Himself (2 Cor. v. 19). The death of the Son of man could not have reference to the sons of Abraham alone. If sin is universal and death is not a Jewish but a human experience, and if one blood flows in the veins of all our race, then the death of Jesus Christ was a universal sacrifice; it appeals to every man’s conscience and heart, and puts away for each the guilt which comes between his soul and God.
When the Greeks in Passion week desired to see Him, He exclaimed: “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all unto me.” The cross of Jesus was to draw humanity around it, by its infinite love and sorrow, by the perfect apprehension there was in it of the world’s guilt and need, and the perfect submission to the sentence of God’s law against man’s sin. So wherever the gospel was preached by St Paul, it won Gentile hearts for Christ. Greek and Jew found themselves weeping together at the foot of the cross, sharing one forgiveness and baptized into one Spirit.
The union of Caiaphas and Pilate in the condemnation of Jesus and the mingling of the Jewish crowd with the Roman soldiers at His execution were a tragic symbol of the new age that was coming. Israel and the Gentiles were accomplices in the death of the Messiah—the former of the two the more guilty partner in the counsel and deed. If this Jesus whom they slew and hanged on a tree was indeed the Christ, God’s chosen, then what availed their Abrahamic sonship, their covenants and law-keeping, their proud religious eminence? They had killed their Christ; they had forfeited their calling. His blood was on them and on their children.
Those who seemed nigh to God, at the cross of Christ were found far off,—that both together, the far and the near, might be reconciled and brought back to God. “He shut up all unto disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all.”
FOOTNOTES:
[86] Rom. i. 19–23; comp. John i. 10: “He [the true Light] was in the world, and the world knew Him not.”
Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.
Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;
Jam nova progenies cœlo demittitur alto.
Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum
Desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,
Casta, fave, Lucina.
[88] Observe the perfect participle ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι, which signifies an abiding fact or fixed condition. Similar is the turn of expression in ch. iii. 9, and in Col. i. 26, Rom. xvi. 25, Matt. xiii. 35.
CHAPTER X.
THE DOUBLE RECONCILIATION.
“For He is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of partition, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances, that He might create in Himself of the twain one new man, so making peace; and might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: and He came and preached good tidings of peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father.”—Eph. ii. 14–18.
Peace, peace—to the far off, and to the near! Such was God’s promise to His scattered people in the times of the exile (Isai. lvii. 19). St Paul sees that peace of God extending over a yet wider field, and terminating a longer and sadder banishment than the prophet had foreseen. Christ is “our peace”—not for the divided members of Israel alone, but for all the tribes of men. He brings about a universal pacification.
There were two distinct, but kindred enmities to be overcome by Christ, in preaching to the world His good tidings of peace (ver. 17). There was the hostility of Jew and Gentile, which was removed in its cause and principle when Christ “in His flesh” (by His incarnate life and death) “abolished the law of commandments in decrees”—i.e., the law of Moses as it constituted a body of external precepts determining the way of righteousness and life. This abolition of the law by the evangelical principle “dissolved the middle wall of partition.” The occasion of quarrel between Israel and the world was destroyed; the barrier disappeared that had for so long fenced off the privileged ground of the sons of Abraham (vv. 14, 15). But behind this human enmity, underneath the feud and rancour existing between the Jews and the nations, there lay the deeper quarrel of mankind with God. Both enmities centred in the law; both were slain by one stroke, in the reconciliation of the cross (ver. 16).
The Jewish and Gentile peoples formed two distinct types of humanity. Politically, the Jews were insignificant and had scarcely counted amongst the great powers of the world. Their religion alone gave them influence and importance. Bearing his inspired Scriptures and his Messianic hope, the wandering Israelite confronted the vast masses of heathenism and the splendid and fascinating classical civilization with the proudest sense of his superiority. To his God he knew well that one day every knee would bow and every tongue confess. The circumstances of the time deepened his isolation and aggravated to internecine hate his spite against his fellow-men, the adversus omnes alios hostile odium stigmatized by the incisive pen of Tacitus. Within three years of the writing of this letter the Jewish war against Rome broke out, when the enmity culminated in the most appalling and fateful overthrow recorded in the pages of history. Now, it is this enmity at its height—the most inveterate and desperate one can conceive—that the apostle proposes to reconcile; nay, that he sees already slain by the sacrifice of the cross, and within the brotherhood of the Christian Church. It was slain in the heart of Saul of Tarsus, the proudest that beat in Jewish breast.
In his earlier writings the apostle has been concerned chiefly to guard the position and rights of the two parties within the Church. He has abundantly maintained, especially in the epistle to the Galatians, the claims of Gentile believers in Christ against Judaic assumptions and impositions. He has defended the just prerogative of the Jew and his hereditary sentiments from the contempt to which they were sometimes exposed on the part of the Gentile majority.[89] But now that this has been done, and that Gentile liberties and Jewish dignity have been vindicated and safeguarded on both sides, St Paul advances a step further: he seeks to amalgamate the Jewish and Gentile section of the Church, and to “make of the twain one new man, so making peace.” This, he declares, was the end of Christ’s mission; this a chief purpose of His atoning death. Only by such union, only through the burying of the old enmity slain on the cross, could His Church be built up to its completeness. St Paul would have Gentile and Jewish believers everywhere forget their differences, efface their party lines, and merge their independence in the oneness of the all-embracing and all-perfecting Church of Jesus Christ, God’s habitation in the Spirit. Instead of saying that a catholic ideal like this belongs to a later and post-apostolic age, we maintain, on the contrary, that a catholic mind like St Paul’s, under the conditions of his time, could not fail to arrive at this conception.
It was his confidence in the victory of the cross over all strife and sin that sustained St Paul through these years of captivity. As he looks out from his Roman prison, under the shadow of Nero’s palace, the future is invested with a radiance of hope that makes the heart of the chained apostle exult within him. The world is lost, to all outward seeming: he knows it is saved! Jew and Gentile are about to close in mortal conflict: he proclaims peace between them, assured of their reconcilement, and knowing that in their reunion the salvation of human society is assured.
The enmity of Jew and Gentile was representative of all that divides mankind. In it were concentrated most of the causes by which society is rent asunder. Along with religion, race, habits, tastes and culture, moral tendencies, political aspirations, interests of trade, all helped to widen the breach. The cleavage ran deep into the foundations of life; the enmity was the growth of two thousand years. It was not a case of local friction, nor a quarrel arising from temporary causes. The Jew was ubiquitous, and everywhere was an alien and an irritant to Gentile society. No antipathy was so hard to subdue. The grace that conquers it, can and will conquer all enmities.
St Paul’s view embraced, in fact, a world-wide reconcilement. He contemplates, as the Hebrew prophets themselves did, the fraternization of mankind under the rule of the Christ. After this scale he laid down the foundation of the Church, “wise master-builder” that he was. It was destined to bear the weight of an edifice in which all the races of men should dwell together, and every order of human faculty should find its place. His thoughts were not confined within the Judaic antithesis. “There is no Jew and Greek,” he says in another place; yes, and “no barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, male or female. Ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”[90] Birth, rank, office in the Church, culture, even sex are minor and subordinate distinctions, merged in the unity of redeemed souls in Christ. That which He “creates in Himself of the twain” is one new man—one incorporate humanity, neither Jew nor Gentile, Englishman nor Hindu, priest nor layman, male nor female; but simply man, and Christian.
At the present time we are better able to enter into these views of the apostle than at any intervening period of history. In his day almost the whole visible world, lying round the Mediterranean shores, was brought under the government and laws of Rome. This fact made the establishment of one religious polity a thing quite conceivable. The Roman empire did not, as it proved, allow Christianity to conquer it soon enough and to leaven it sufficiently to save it. That huge construction, the mightiest fabric of human polity, fell and covered the earth with its ruins. In its fall it reacted disastrously upon the Church, and has bequeathed to it the corrupt and despotic unity of Papal Rome. Now, in these last days, the whole world is opened to the Church, a world stretching far beyond the horizon of the first century. Science and Commerce, those two strong-winged angels and giant ministers of God, are swiftly binding the continents together in material ties. The peoples are beginning to realize their brotherhood, and are feeling their way in many directions towards international union; while in the Churches a new, federal catholicity is taking shape, that must displace the false catholicism of external uniformity and the disastrous absolutism inherited from Rome. The spread of European empire and the marvellous expansion of our English race are carrying forward the world’s unification with enormous strides,—towards some end or other. What end is this to be? Is the kingdom of the world about to become the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ? and are the nations preparing to be “reconciled in one body unto God”?
If Christendom were worthy of her Master and her name, this question would be answered with no doubtful affirmative. The Church is well able, if she were prepared, to go up and possess the whole earth for her Lord. The way is open; the means are in her hand. Nor is she ignorant, nor wholly negligent of her opportunity and of the claims that the times impose upon her. She is putting forth new strength and striving to overtake her work, notwithstanding the weight of ignorance and sloth that burdens her. Soon the reconciling cross will be planted on every shore, and the praises of the Crucified sung in every human language.
But there are dark as well as bright auguries for the future. The advance of commerce and emigration has been a curse and not a blessing to many heathen peoples. Who can read without shame and horror the story of European conquest in America? And it is a chapter not yet closed. Greed and injustice still mark the dealings of the powerful and civilized with the weaker races. England set a noble example in the abolition of negro slavery; but she has since inflicted, for purposes of gain, the opium curse on China, putting poison to the lips of its vast population. Under our Christian flags fire-arms are imported, and alcohol, amongst tribes of men less able than children to resist their evils. Is this “preaching peace to those far off”? It is likely that the commercial profits made in the destruction of savage races as yet exceed all that our missionary societies have spent in saving them. One of these days Almighty God may have a stern reckoning with modern Europe about these things. “When He maketh inquisition for blood, He will remember.”
And what shall we say of ourselves at home, in our relation to this great principle of the apostle? The old “middle wall of partition,” the temple-barrier that sundered Jew and Gentile, is “broken down,”—visibly levelled by the hand of God when Jerusalem fell, as it had been virtually and in its principle destroyed by the work of Christ. But are there no other middle walls, no barriers raised within the fold of Christ? The rich man’s purse, and the poor man’s penury; aristocratic pride, democratic bitterness and jealousy; knowledge and refinement on the one hand, ignorance and rudeness on the other—how thick the veil of estrangement which these influences weave, how high the party walls which they build in our various Church communions!
It is the duty of the Church, as she values her existence, with gentle but firm hands to pull down and to keep down all such partitions. She cannot abolish the natural distinctions of life. She cannot turn the Jew into a Gentile, nor the Gentile into a Jew. She will never make the poor man rich in this world, nor the rich man altogether poor. Like her Master, she declines to be “judge or divider” of our secular inheritance. But she can see to it that these outward distinctions make no difference in her treatment of the men as men. She can combine in her fellowship all grades and orders, and teach them to understand and respect each other. She can soften the asperities and relieve many of the hardships which social differences create. She can diffuse a healing and purifying influence upon the contentions of society around her.
Let us labour unweariedly for this, and let our meeting at the Lord’s table be a symbol of the unreserved communion of men of all classes and conditions in the brotherhood of the redeemed sons of God. “He is our peace”; and if He is in our hearts, we must needs be sons of peace. “Behold the secret of all true union! It is not by others coming to us, nor by our going over to them; but it is by both them and ourselves coming to Christ” that peace is made (Monod).
Thus within and without the Church the work of atonement will advance, with Christ ever for its preacher (ver. 17). He speaks through the words and the lives of His ten thousand messengers,—men of every order, in every age and country of the earth. The leaven of Christ’s peace will spread till the lump is leavened. God will accomplish His purpose of the ages, whether in our time, or in another worthier of His calling. His Church is destined to be the home of the human family, the universal liberator and instructor and reconciler of the nations. And Christ shall sit enthroned in the loyal worship of the federated peoples of the earth.
But the question remains: What is the foundation, what the warrant of this grand idealism of the apostle Paul? Many a great thinker, many an ardent reformer before and since has dreamed of some such millennium as this. And their enthusiastic plans have ended too often in conflict and destruction. What surer ground of confidence have we in Paul’s undertaking than in those of so many gifted visionaries and philosophers? The difference lies here: his expectation rests on the word and character of God; his instrument of reform is the cross of Jesus Christ.
God is the centre of His own universe. Any reconciliation that is to stand, must include Him first of all. Christ reconciled Jew and Gentile “both in one body to God.” There is the meeting point, the true focus of the orbit of human life, that can alone control its movements and correct its wild aberrations. Under the shadow of His throne of justice, in the arms of His fatherly love, the kindreds of the earth will at last find reconciliation and peace. Humanitarian and secularist systems make the simple mistake of ignoring the supreme Factor in the scheme of things; they leave out the All in all.
“Be ye reconciled to God,” cries the apostle. For Almighty God has had a great quarrel with this world of ours. The hatred of men towards each other is rooted in the “carnal mind which is enmity against God.” The “law of commandments contained in ordinances,” in whose possession the Jew boasted over the lawless and profane Gentile, in reality branded both as culprits.
The secret disquiet and dread lurking in man’s conscience, the pangs endured in his body of humiliation, the groaning frame of nature declare the world unhinged and out of course. Things have gone amiss, somehow, between man and his Creator. The face of the earth and the field of human history are scarred with the thunderbolts of His displeasure. God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the King of the ages, is not the amiable, almighty Sentimentalist that some pious people would make Him out to be. The men of the Bible felt and realized, if we do not, the grave and tremendous import of the Lord’s controversy with all flesh. He is unceasingly at war with the sins of men. “God is love”—oh yes; but then He is also “a consuming fire”! There is no anger so crushing as the anger of love, for there is none so just; no wrath to be feared like “the wrath of the Lamb.” God is not a man, weak and passionate, whom a spark of anger might set all on fire, burning out His justice and compassion. “In His wrath He remembers mercy.” Within that infinite nature there is room for an absolute loathing and resentment towards sin, in consistence with an immeasurable pity and yearning towards His sinful children. Hence the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Look at it from what side you will (and it has many sides), propound it in what terms you may (and it translates itself anew into the dialect of every age), you must not explain the cross of Christ away nor cause its offence to cease. “The atonement has always been a scandal and a folly to those who did not receive it; it has always contained something which to formal logic is false and to individualistic ethics immoral; yet in that very element which has been branded as immoral and false, has always lain the seal of its power and the secret of its truth.” The Holy One of God, the Lamb without spot and blemish, He died by His own consent a sinner’s death. That sacrifice, undergone by the Son of God and Son of man dying as man for men, in love to His race and in obedience to the Divine will and law, gave an infinite satisfaction to God in His relation to the world, and there went up to the Divine throne from the anguish of Calvary a “savour of sweet smell.” The moral glory of the act of Jesus Christ in dying for His guilty brethren outshone its horror and disgrace; and it redeemed man’s lost condition, and clothed human nature with a new character and aspect in the eyes of God Himself. “Now therefore there is no more condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” The mercy of God, if we may so say, is set free to act in forgiveness and restoration, without any compromise of justice and inflexible law. No peace without this: no peace that did not satisfy God, and satisfy that law, deep as the deepest in God, that binds suffering to wrong-doing and death to sin.
Perhaps you say: This is immoral, surely, that the just should suffer for the unjust; that one commits the offence, and another bears the penalty.—Stay a moment: that is only half the truth. We are more than individuals; we are members of a race; and vicarious suffering runs through life. Our sufferings and wrong-doings bind the human family together in an inextricable web. We are communists in sin and death. It is the law and lot of our existence. And Christ, the Lord and centre of the race, has come within its scope. He bound Himself to our sinking fortunes. He became co-partner in our lost estate, and has redeemed it to God by His blood. If He was true and perfect man, if He was the creative Head and Mediator of the race, the eternal Firstborn of many brethren, He could do no other. He who alone had the right and the power,—“One died for all.” He took upon His Divine heart the sin and curse of the world, He fastened it to His shoulders with the cross; and He bore it away from Caiaphas’ hall and Pilate’s judgement-seat, away from guilty Jerusalem; He took away the sin of the world, and expiated it once for all. He quenched in His blood the fires of wrath and hate it kindled. He slew the enmity thereby.
Still, we are individuals, as you said, not lost after all in the world’s solidarity. Here your personal right and will must come in. What Christ has done for you is yours, so far as you accept it. He has died your death beforehand, trusting that you would not repudiate His act, that you would not let His blood be spilt in vain. But He will never force His mediation upon you. He respects your freedom and your manhood. Do you now endorse what Jesus Christ did on your behalf? Do you renounce the sin, and accept the sacrifice? Then it is yours, from this moment, before the tribunal of God and of conscience. By the witness of His Spirit you are proclaimed a forgiven and reconciled man. Christ crucified is yours—if you will have Him, if you will identify your sinful self with the sinless Mediator, if as you see Him lifted up on the cross you will let your heart cry out, “Oh my God, He dies for me!”
Coming “in one Spirit to the Father,” the reconciled children join hands again with each other. Social barriers, caste feelings, family feuds, personal quarrels, national antipathies, alike go down before the virtue of the blood of Jesus.
“Neither passion nor pride
His cross can abide,
But melt in the fountain that streams from His side!”
“Beloved,” you will say to the man that hates or has wronged you most,—“Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” In these simple words of the apostle John lies the secret of universal peace, the hope of the fraternization of mankind. Nations will have to say this one day, as well as men.
FOOTNOTES:
[89] See to this effect such passages as Rom. i. 16 (to the Jew first), ix. 4, 5; and especially xi. 13–32.
[90] Gal. iii. 28; Col. iii. 11. Comp. John x. 16, xi. 52. See The Epistle to the Galatians (Expositor’s Bible), Chapter XV.
CHAPTER XI.
GOD’S TEMPLE IN HUMANITY.
“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.”—Eph. ii. 19–22.
Not unfrequently it is the last word or phrase of the paragraph that gives us the clue to St Paul’s meaning and discloses the point at which he has aimed all along. So in this instance. “For a habitation of God in the Spirit”: behold the goal of God’s ways with mankind! For this end the Divine grace has wrought through countless ages and has made its great sacrifice. For this end Jew and Gentile are being gathered into one and compacted into a new humanity.
I. The Church is a house built for an Occupant. Its quality and size, and the mode of its construction are determined by its destination. It is built to suit the great Inhabitant, who says concerning the new Zion as He said of the old in figure: “This is my rest for ever! Here will I dwell, for I have desired it.” God, who is spirit, cannot be satisfied with the fabric of material nature for His temple, nor does “the Most High dwell in houses made by men’s hands.” He seeks our spirit for His abode, and
“Doth prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure.”
In the collective life and spirit of humanity God claims to reside, that He may fill it with His glory and His love. “Know you not,” cries the apostle to the once debased Corinthians, “that you are God’s temple, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”
Nothing that is bestowed upon man terminates in himself. The deliverance of Jewish and Gentile believers from their personal sins, their re-instatement into the broken unity of mankind and the destruction in them of their old enmities, of the antipathies generated by their common rebellion against God—these great results of Christ’s sacrifice were means to a further end. “Hallowed be Thy name” is our first petition to the Father in heaven; “Glory to God in the highest” is the key-note of the angels’ song, that runs through all the harmonies of “peace on earth,” through every strain of the melody of life. Religion is the mistress, not the handmaid in human affairs. She will never consent to become a mere ethical discipline, an instrument and subordinate stage in social evolution, a ladder held for men to climb up into their self-sufficiency.
The old temptation of the Garden, “Ye shall be as gods,” has come upon our age in a new and fascinating form, “You shall be as gods,” it is whispered: “nay, you are God, and there is no other. The supernatural is a dream. The Christian story is a fable. There is none to fear or adore above yourselves!” Man is to worship his collective self, his own humanity. “I am the Lord thy God,” the great idol says, “that brought thee up out of animalism and savagery, and me only shalt thou serve!—Love and faithful service to one’s kind, a holy passion for the welfare of the race, for the relief of human ignorance and poverty and pain, this is the true religion; and you need no other. Its obligation is instinctive, its benefits immediate and palpable; and it gives a consecration to individual life that dignifies and chastens, while it calls into exercise all our faculties.”
Yes, we willingly admit, such human service is “religion pure and undefiled, before our God and Father.” If service is rendered to our kind as worship to the Father of men; if we reverence in each man the image of God and the shrine of His Spirit; if we are seeking to cleanse and adorn in men the temple where the Most High shall dwell, the humblest work done for our fellows’ good is done for Him. The best human charity is rendered for the love of God. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, mind, soul, and strength. This,” said Jesus, “is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” On these two hangs the welfare of men and nations.
But the first commandment must come first. The second law of Jesus never has been or will be kept to purpose without the first. Humanitarian sentiments, dreams of universal brotherhood, projects of social reform, may seem for the moment to gain by their independence of religion a certain zest and emphasis; but they are without root and vitality. Their energy fails, or spends itself in revolt; their glow declines, their purity is stained. The leaders and first enthusiasts trained in the school of Christ, whose spirit, in vain repudiated, lives on in them, find themselves betrayed and alone. The coarse selfishness and materialism of the human heart win an easy triumph over a visionary altruism. “Without me,” says Jesus Christ, “ye can do nothing.”
In the light of God’s glory man learns to reverence his nature and understand the vocation of his race. The love of God touches the deep and enduring springs of human action. The kingdom of Christ and of God commands an absolute devotion; its service inspires unfaltering courage and invincible patience. There is a grandeur and a certainty, of which the noblest secular aims fall short, in the hopes of those who are striving together for the faith of the gospel, and who work to build human life into a dwelling-place for God.
II. God’s temple in the Church of Jesus Christ, while it is one, is also manifold. “In whom each several building [or every part of the building[91]], while it is compacted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord.”
The image is that of an extensive pile of buildings, such as the ancient temples commonly were, in process of construction at different points over a wide area. The builders work in concert, upon a common plan. The several parts of the work are adjusted to each other; and the various operations in process are so harmonized, that the entire construction preserves the unity of the architect’s design. Such an edifice was the apostolic Church—one, but of many parts—in its diverse gifts and multiplied activities animated by one Spirit and directed towards one Divine purpose.
Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome—what a various scene of activity these centres of Christian life presented! The Churches founded in these great cities must have differed in many features. Even in the communities of his own province the apostle did not, so far as we can judge, impose a uniform administration. St Peter and St Paul carried out their plans independently, only maintaining a general understanding with each other. The apostolic founders, inspired by one and the self-same Spirit, could labour at a distance, upon material and by methods extremely various, with entire confidence in each other and with an assurance of the unity of result which their teaching and administration would exhibit. The many buildings rested on the one foundation of the apostles. “Whether it were I or they,” says our apostle, “so we preach, and so you believed.” Where there is the same Spirit and the same Lord, men do not need to be scrupulous about visible conformity. Elasticity and individual initiative admit of entire harmony of principle. The hand may do its work without irritating and obstructing the eye; and the foot run on its errands without mistrusting the ear.
Such was the catholicism of the apostolic age. The true reading of verse 21, as it is restored by the Revisers, is an incidental witness to the date of the epistle. A churchman of the second century, writing under Paul’s name in the interests of catholic unity as it was then understood, would scarcely have penned such a sentence without attaching to the subject the definite article: he must have written “all the building,” as the copyists from whom the received text proceeds very naturally have done. From that time onwards, as the system of the ecclesiastical hierarchy was developed, external unity was more and more strictly imposed. The original “diversity of operations” became a rigid uniformity. The Church swallowed up the Churches. Finally, the spiritual bureaucracy of Rome gathered all ecclesiastical power into one centre, and placed the direction of Western Christendom in the hands of a single priest, whom it declared to be the Vicar of Jesus Christ and endowed with the Divine attribute of infallibility.
Had not Jerusalem been overthrown and its Church destroyed, the hierarchical movement would probably have made that city, rather than Rome, its centre. This was in fact the tendency, if not the express purpose of the Judaistic party in the Church. St Paul had vindicated in his earlier epistles the freedom of the Gentile Christian communities, and their right of non-conformity to Jewish usage. In the words “each several building, fitly framed together,” there is an echo of this controversy. The Churches of his mission claim a standing side by side with those founded by other apostles. For himself and his Gentile brethren he seems to say, in the presence of the primitive Church and its leaders: “As they are Christ’s, so also are we.”
The co-operation of the different parts of the body of Christ is essential to their collective growth. Let all Churches beware of crushing dissent. Blows aimed at our Christian neighbours recoil upon ourselves. Undermining their foundation, we shake our own. Next to positive corruption of doctrine and life, nothing hinders so greatly the progress of the kingdom of God as the claim to exclusive legitimacy made on behalf of ancient Church organizations. Their representatives would have every part of God’s temple framed upon one pattern. They refuse a place on the apostolic foundation to all Churches, however numerous, however rich in faith and good works, however strong the historical justification for their existence, however clear the marks they bear of the Spirit’s seal, which do not conform to the rule they themselves have received. Their rites and ministry, they assert, are those alone approved by Christ and authorized by His apostles, within a given area. They refuse the right hand of fellowship to men who are doing Christ’s work by their side; they isolate their flocks, as far as possible, from intercourse with the Christian communities around them.
This policy on the part of any Christian Church, or Church party, is contrary to the mind of Christ and to the example of His apostles. Those who hold aloof from the comity of the Churches and prevent the many buildings of God’s temple being fitly framed together, must bear their judgement, whosoever they be. They prefer conquest to peace, but that conquest they will never win; it would be fatal to themselves. Let the elder sister frankly allow the birthright of the younger sisters of Christ’s house in these lands, and be our example in justice and in charity. Great will be her honour; great the glory won for our common Lord.
“Every building fitly framed together groweth into a holy temple in the Lord.” The subject is distributive; the predicate collective. The parts give place to the whole in the writer’s mind. As each several piece of the structure, each cell or chapel in the temple, spreads out to join its companion buildings and adjusts itself to the parts around it, the edifice grows into a richer completeness and becomes more fit for its sacred purpose. The separate buildings, distant in place or historical character, approximate by extension, as they spread over the unoccupied ground between them and as the connecting links are multiplied. At last a point is reached at which they will become continuous. Growing into each other step by step and forming across the diminishing distance a web of mutual attachment constantly thickening, they will insensibly, by a natural and vital growth, become one in visible communion as they are one in their underlying faith.
When each organ of the body in its own degree is perfect and holds its place in keeping with the rest, we think no longer of their individual perfection, of the charm of this feature or of that; they are forgotten in the beauty of the perfect frame. So it will be in the body of Christ, when its several communions, cleansed and filled with His Spirit, each honouring the vocation of the others, shall in freedom and in love by a spontaneous movement be gathered into one. Their strength will then be no longer weakened and their spirit chafed by internal conflict. With united forces and irresistible energy, they will assail the kingdom of darkness and subjugate the world to Christ.
For this consummation our Saviour prayed in the last hours before His death: “that they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me and I in Thee, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that Thou didst send me” (John xvii. 21). Did He fear that His little flock of the Twelve would be parted by dissensions? Or did He not look onward to the future, and see the “offences that must come,” the alienations and fierce conflicts that would arise amongst His people, and the blood that would be shed in His name? Yet beyond these divisions, on the horizon of the end of the age, He foresaw the day when the wounds of His Church would be healed, when the sword that He had brought on the earth would be sheathed, and through the unity of faith and love in His people all mankind would at last come to acknowledge Him and the Father who had sent Him.
III. To appearance, we are many rather than one who bear the name of Christ. But we are one notwithstanding, if below the variety of superstructure our faith rests upon the witness of the apostles, and the several buildings have Christ Jesus Himself for chief corner-stone. The one foundation and the one Spirit constitute the unity of God’s temple in the Church.
“The apostles and prophets” are named as a single body, the prophets being doubtless, in this passage and in chapters iii. 5 and iv. 11, the existing prophets of the apostolic Church, whose inspired teaching supplemented that of the apostles and helped to lay down the foundation of revealed truth. That foundation has been, through the providence of God, preserved for later ages in the Scriptures of the New Testament, on which the faith of Christians has rested ever since. Such a prophet Barnabas was in the first days (Acts xiii. 1), and such was the unknown, but deeply inspired writer of the epistle to the Hebrews; such prophets, again, were SS. Mark and Luke, the Evangelists. Prophecy was not a stated gift of office. Just as there were “teachers” in the early Church whose knowledge and eloquence did not entitle them to bear rule, so prophecy was frequently exercised by private persons and carried with it no such official authority as belonged in the highest degree to the apostles.
It is thought surprising that St Paul should write thus, in so general and distant a fashion, of the order to which he belonged (comp. iii. 5). This, it is said, is the language of a later generation, which looks back with reverence to the inspired Founders. But this letter is written, as we observed at the outset, from a peculiarly objective and impersonal standpoint. It differs in this respect from other epistles of St Paul. He is addressing a number of Churches, with some of which his personal relations were slight and distant. He is contemplating the Church in its most general character. He is not the only founder of Churches; he is one of a band of colleagues, working in different regions. It is natural that he should use the plural here. He sets his successors an example of the recognition due to fellow-labourers whose work bears the seal of Christ’s Spirit.
These men have laid the foundation—Peter and Paul, John and James, Barnabas and Silas, and the rest. They are our spiritual progenitors, the fathers of our faith. We see Jesus Christ through their eyes; we read His teaching, and catch His Spirit in their words. Their testimony, in its essential facts, stands secure in the confidence of mankind. Nor was it their word alone, but the men themselves—their character, their life and work—laid for the Church its historical foundation. This “glorious company of the apostles” formed the first course in the new building, on whose firmness and strength the stability of the entire structure depends. Their virtues and their sufferings, as well as the revelations made through them, have guided the thoughts and shaped the life of countless multitudes of men, of the best and wisest men in all ages since. They have fixed the standard of Christian doctrine and the type of Christian character. At our best, we are but imitators of them as they were of Christ.
In regard to the chief part of their teaching, both as to its meaning and authority, the great bulk of Christians in all communions are agreed. The keen disputes which engage us upon certain points, testify to the cardinal importance which is felt on all hands to attach to the words of Christ’s chosen apostles. Their living witness is in our midst. The self-same Spirit that wrought in them, works amongst men and dwells in the communion of saints. He still reveals the things of Christ, and guides into truth the willing and obedient.
So “the firm foundation of God standeth”; though men, shaken themselves, seem to see it tremble. On that basis we may labour confidently and loyally, with those amongst whom the Master has placed us. Some of our fellow-workmen disown and would hinder us: that shall not prevent us from rejoicing in their good work, and admiring the gold and precious stones that they contribute to the fabric. The Lord of the temple will know how to use the labour of His many servants. He will forgive and compose their strife, who are jealous for His name. He will shape their narrow aims to His larger purposes. Out of their discords He will draw a finer harmony. As the great house grows to its dimensions, as the workmen by the extension of their labours come nearer to each other and their sectional plans merge in Christ’s great purpose, reproaches will cease and misunderstandings vanish. Over many who followed not with us and whom we counted but as “strangers and sojourners,” as men whose place within the walls of Zion was doubtful and unauthorized, we shall hereafter rejoice with a joy not unmixed with self-upbraiding, to find them in the fullest right our fellow-citizens amongst the saints and of the household of God.
The Holy Spirit is the supreme Builder of the Church, as He is the supreme witness to Jesus Christ (John xv. 26, 27). The words in the Spirit, closing the verse with solemn emphasis, denote not the mode of God’s habitation—that is self-evident—but the agency engaged in building this new house of God. With one “chief corner-stone” to rest upon and one Spirit to inspire and control them, the apostles and prophets laid their foundation and the Church was “builded together” for a habitation of God. Hence its unity. But for this sovereign influence the primitive founders of Christianity, like later Church leaders, would have fallen into fatal discord. Modern critics, reasoning upon natural grounds and not understanding the grace of the Holy Spirit, assume that they did thus quarrel and contend. Had this been so, no foundation could ever have been laid; the Church would have fallen to pieces at the very beginning.
In the hands of these faithful and wise stewards of God’s dispensation, “the stone which the builders rejected was made the head of the corner.” Their work has been tried by fire and by flood; and it abides. The rock of Zion stands unworn by time, unshaken by the conflict of ages,—amidst the movements of history and the shifting currents of thought the one foundation for the peace and true welfare of mankind.
FOOTNOTES:
[91] Πᾶσα οἰκοδομή, according to the well-established critical reading. For πᾶς without the article, implying a various whole, compare πάσης κτίσεως in Col. i. 15; πᾶσα γραφή, 2 Tim. iii. 16; ἐν πάσῃ ἀναστροφῇ, 1 Peter i. 15; and Θεὸς πάσης χάριτος, 1 Peter v. 10.
CHAPTER XII.
THE SECRET OF THE AGES.
“For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you Gentiles,—if so be that ye have heard of the dispensation of that grace of God which was given me toward you; how that by revelation was made known unto me the mystery (as I wrote afore in few words, whereby, when ye read, ye can perceive my understanding in the mystery of Christ), which in other generations was not made known unto the sons of men, as it hath now been revealed unto His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit; to wit, that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs, and fellow-members of the body, and fellow-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel, whereof I was made a minister, according to the gift of that grace of God which was given me according to the working of His power. Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ; and to bring to light what is the dispensation of the mystery which from all ages hath been hid in God who created all things.”—Eph. iii. 1–9.
Verses 2–13 are in form a parenthesis. They interrupt the prayer which appears to be commencing in the first verse and is not resumed until verse 14. This intervening period is parenthetical, however, in appearance more than in reality. The matter it contains is so weighty and so essential to the argument and structure of the epistle, that it is impossible to treat it as a mere aside. The writer intends, at the pause which occurs after the paragraph just concluded (ii. 22), to interpose a few words of prayer before passing on to the next topic. But in the act of doing so, this subject of which his mind is full—viz., that of his own relation to God’s great purpose for mankind—forces itself upon him; and the prayer that was on his lips is pent up for a few moments longer, until it flows forth again, in richer measure, in verses 14–19.
Like chapter i. 3–14, this passage is an extreme instance of St Paul’s amorphous style. His sentences are not composed; they are spun in a continuous thread, an endless chain of prepositional, participial, and relative adjuncts. They grow under our eyes like living things, putting forth new processes every moment, now in this and now in that direction. Within the main parenthesis we soon come upon another parenthesis including verses 3b and 4 (“as I wrote afore,” etc.); and at several points the grammatical connexion is uncertain. In its general scope, this intricate sentence resolves itself into a statement of what God has wrought in the apostle toward the accomplishment of His great plan. It thus completes the exposition given already of that which God wrought in Christ for the Church, and that which He has wrought through Christ in Gentile believers in fulfilment of the same end.
Verses 1–9 speak (1) of the mystery itself—God’s gracious intention toward the human race, unknown in earlier times; and (2) of the man to whom, above others, it was given to make known the secret.
I. The mystery is defined twice over. First, it consists in the fact that “in Christ Jesus through the gospel the Gentiles are co-heirs and co-incorporate and co-partners in the promise” (ver. 6); and secondly, it is “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (ver. 8). The latter phrase gathers to a point what is diversely expressed in the former.
Christ is, to St Paul, the centre and the sum of the mysteries of Divine truth, of the whole enigma of existence. In the parallel epistle he calls Him “the mystery of God—in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden” (Col. ii. 2, 3: R.V.). The mystery of God, discovered in Christ, was hidden out of the sight and reach of previous times. Now, by the preaching of the gospel, it is made the common property of mankind (Col. i. 25–28).
In close connexion with these statements, St Paul speaks there, as he does here, of his own heavy sufferings endured on this account and the joy they gave him. He is the instrument of a glorious purpose worthy of God; he is the mouthpiece of a revelation waiting to be spoken since the world began, that is addressed to all mankind and interests heaven along with earth. The greatness of his office is commensurate with the greatness of the truth given him to announce.
The mystery, as we have said, consists in Christ. This we learned from chapter i. 4, 5, and 9, 10. In Christ the Eternal lodged His purpose and laid His plans for the world. It is His fulness that the fulness of the times dispenses. The Old Testament, the reservoir of previous revelation, had Him for its close-kept secret, “held in silence through eternal times” (Rom. xvi. 25–27). The drift of its prophecies, the focus of its converging lights, the veiled magnet towards which its spiritual indications pointed, was “Christ.” He “was the spiritual rock that followed” Israel in its wanderings, from whose springs the people drank, as it answered to the touch of one and now another of the holy men of old. The revelation of Jesus Christ gives unity, substance, and meaning to the history of Israel, which is otherwise a pathway without goal, a problem without solution. Priest and prophet, law and sacrifice; the kingly Son of David, and the suffering Servant of Jehovah; the Seed of the woman with bruised foot bruising the serpent’s head; the Lord whom His people seek, suddenly coming to His temple; the Stone hewn from the mountains without hands, that grows till it fills the earth—the manifold representations of Israel’s ideal, centre in the Lord Jesus Christ. The lines of the great figure drawn on the canvas of prophecy—disconnected as they seemed and without a plan, giving rise to a thousand dreams and speculations—are filled out and drawn into shape and take life and substance in Him. They are found to be parts of a consistent whole, sketches and studies of this fragment or of that belonging to the consummate Person and the comprehensive plan manifest in the revelation of Jesus Christ.
But while Christ gathers into Himself the accumulated wealth of former revelation, His fulness is not measured thereby or exhausted. He solves the problems of the past; He unseals the ancient mysteries. But He creates new and deeper problems, some explained in the continued teaching of His Spirit and His providence, others that remain, or emerge from time to time to tax the faith and understanding of His Church. There are the mysteries surrounding His own Person, with which the Greek Church struggled long—His eternal Sonship, His pre-incarnate relation to mankind and the creatures, the final outcome of the mediatorial reign and its subordination to the absolute sovereignty of God. These depths St Paul sounded with his plummet; but he found them unfathomable. Theological science has explored and defined them, and illuminated them on many sides, but cannot reach to their inmost mystery. Then there is the problem of the atonement, with all the cognate difficulties touching the origin of sin, its heredity and its personal guilt, touching the adjustment of law and grace, the method of justification, the extent and efficacy of Christ’s redeeming work, touching the future destiny and eternal state of souls. Another class of questions largely occupies the minds of thoughtful men to-day. They are studying the relation of Christ and His Church to nature and the outward world, the bearings of Christian truth upon social conditions, the working of the Spirit of God in communities, and the place of man’s collective life in the progress and upbuilding of the kingdom of Christ.
For such inquiries the Spirit of wisdom and revelation is given to those who humbly seek His light. He is given afresh in every age. Out of Christ’s unsearchable riches ever-new resources are forthcoming at His Church’s need, new treasures lying hidden in the old for him who can extract them. But His riches, however far they are investigated, remain unsearchable, and inexhaustible however largely drawn upon. God’s ways may be tracked further and further in each generation; they will remain to the end, as they were to the mind of Paul at the limit of his bold researches, “past finding out.” The inspired apostle confesses himself a child in Divine learning: “We know in part,” he says, “we prophesy in part.” Oh the depths of “hidden wisdom” unimagined now, that are in store for us in Christ, “foreordained before the worlds unto our glory!”
The particular aspect of the mystery of Christ with which the apostle is concerned, is that of His relationship to the Gentile world. “The grace of God,” he says in verse 2, “was given me for you.” Such is “the dispensation” in which God is now engaged. Upon this lavish and undreamed-of scale He is dealing forth salvation to men. St Paul describes this revelation of God’s goodness to the Gentiles by three parallel but distinct terms in verse 6. They “are fellow-heirs”—a word that carries us back to chapter i. 11–13, and assures the Gentile readers of their final redemption and heavenly glory.[92] They “are of the same body”—which sums up all that we have learnt from chapter ii. 11–22. And they “are fellow-partakers of the promise”—receiving upon a footing of equal privilege with Jewish believers the gift of the Spirit and the blessings promised to Israel in the Messianic kingdom.
In virtue of the dispensation committed to him, St Paul formally proclaims the incorporation of the Gentiles into the body of Christ, their investiture with the franchise of faith. The forgiveness of sins is theirs, the light of God’s smile, the breath of His Spirit, the worship and fellowship of His Church, the tasks and honours of His service. The incarnation of Christ is theirs; His life, teaching, and miracles; His cross is theirs, His resurrection and ascension, and His second coming, and the glories of His heavenly kingdom—all made their own on the bare condition of a penitent and obedient faith. The past is theirs—is ours, along with the present and the future. The God of Israel is our God. Abraham is our father, though his sons after the flesh acknowledge us not. Their prophets prophesied of the grace that should come unto us. Their poets sing the songs of Zion to Gentile peoples in a hundred tongues. They lead our prayers and praises. In their words we find expression for our heart-griefs and joys. At the wedding-feast or by the grave-side, amidst “the multitude that keep holy day” and in “dry lands” where the soul thirsts for God’s ordinances, we carry the Psalmists with us and the teachers of Israel.
What a boundless wealth we Gentiles, taught by Jesus Christ, have discovered in the Jewish Bible! When will the Jewish people understand that their greatness is in Him, that the light which lightens the Gentiles is their true glory? When will they accept their part in the riches of which they have made all the world partakers? The mystery of our participation in their Christ has now been “revealed to the sons of men” long enough. Is it not time that they themselves should see it, that the veil should be lifted from the heart of Israel? The disclosure was in the first instance so astounding, so contrary to their cherished expectations, that one can scarcely wonder if it was at first rejected. But God the King of the ages has been asserting and re-asserting the fact in the course of history ever since. How vain to fight against Him! how useless to deny the victory of the Nazarene!
II. But there was in Israel an election of grace,—men of unveiled heart to whom the mystery of ages was disclosed. “The secret of Jehovah is with them that fear Him, and He will show them His covenant.” Such is the rule of revelation. To the like effect Christ said: “The pure in heart shall see God. He that willeth to do His will shall know of the doctrine.”
The light of God’s universal love had come into the world; but where it fell on cold or impure hearts, it shone in vain. The mystery “was made manifest to His saints,” writes the apostle in Colossians i. 26. So in this passage: “revealed to His holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit.” The pure eye sees the true light. This was the condition which made it possible for Paul himself and his partners in the gospel to be the bearers of this august revelation. It needed sincere and devoted men, willing to be taught of God, willing to surrender every prejudice and the preconceptions of flesh and blood, in order to receive and convey to the world thoughts of God so much larger and loftier than the thoughts of men. To such men—true disciples, loyal at all costs to God and truth, holy and humble of heart—Jesus Christ gave His great commission and bade them “go and make disciples of all the nations.”
The secret was further disclosed to Peter, when he was taught at the house of Cornelius “not to call any man common or unclean.” He saw, and the Church of Jerusalem saw and confessed that God “gave the like gift” to uncircumcised Gentiles as to themselves and had “purified their hearts by faith.” Many prophetic voices, unrecorded, confirmed this revelation. Of all this Paul is thinking here. It is to his predecessors in the knowledge of the truth rather than to himself that he refers when he speaks of “holy apostles and prophets” in verse 5. His readers would naturally turn to them in coming to this plural expression. The original apostles of Jesus and witnesses of His truth first attested the doctrine of universal grace; and that they did so was a fact of vital importance to Paul and the Gentile Church. The significance of this fact is shown by the stress which is laid upon it and the prominence given to it in the narrative of the Acts of the Apostles.
The apostle frequently alludes to revelations made to himself; he never claims that this chief matter was revealed personally to himself. It was an open secret when Saul entered the Church. “Whereof,” he says, in verse 7, “I became minister”; again, “to me was this grace given, to preach to the Gentiles Christ’s unsearchable riches.” The leaders of the Jewish Christian Church knew well that their message was meant for all the world. But the abstract knowledge of a truth is one thing; the practical power to realize it is another. Until the new apostle came upon the field, there was no man ready for this great task and equal to it. It was at this crisis that Paul was raised up. Then “it pleased God to reveal His Son” in him, that he might “preach Him among the Gentiles.”
The effect of this summons upon Paul himself was overwhelming, and continued to be so till the end of life. The immense favour humbles him to the dust. He strains language, heaping comparative upon superlative, to describe his astonishment as the import of his mission unfolds itself: “To me, less than the least of all the saints, was this grace given.” That Saul the Pharisee and the persecutor, the most unworthy and most unlikely of men, should be the chosen vessel to bear Christ’s riches to the Gentile world, how shall he sufficiently give thanks for this! how express his wonder at the unfathomable wisdom and goodness that the choice displays in the mind of God! But we can see well that this choice was precisely the fittest. A Hebrew of the Hebrews, steeped in Jewish traditions and glorying in his sacred ancestry, none knew better than the apostle Paul how rich were the treasures stored in the house of Abraham that he had to make over to the Gentiles. A true son of that house, he was the fittest to lead in the aliens, to show them its precious things and make them at home within its walls.
To himself the office was an unceasing delight. The universalism of the gospel—a commonplace of our modern rhetoric—had burst upon his mind in its unspoilt freshness and undimmed splendour. He is sailing out into an undiscovered ocean, with a boundless horizon. A new heaven and earth are opened to him in the revelation that the Gentiles are partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus. He is entranced, as he writes, with the largeness of the Divine purpose, with the magnificent sweep and scope of the designs of grace. These verses give us the warm and genuine impression made upon the hearts of its first recipients by the disclosure of the universal destination of the gospel of Christ.
St Paul’s work, in carrying out the dispensation of this mystery, was twofold. It was both external and internal. He was a “herald and apostle”; he was also “teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth” (1 Tim. ii. 7). He had in the former capacity to carry the good tidings from one end to the other of the Roman empire, to spread it abroad as far as his feet could travel and his voice reach, and thus “to fulfil the gospel of Christ.” But there was another, mental task, as necessary and still more difficult, which likewise fell to his lot. He had to think out the gospel. It was his office to unfold and apply it to the wants of a new world, to solve by its aid the problems that confronted him as evangelist and pastor,—questions that contained the seed and beginning of the intellectual difficulties of the Church in future times. He had to free the gospel from the swaddling-bands of Judaism, to emancipate the spirit from the letter of a mechanical and legal interpretation. On the other hand, he had equally to guard the truth as it is in Jesus from the dissolving influences of Gentile scepticism and theosophy. Fighting his way through fierce and incessant opposition on both sides, the apostle Paul led the mind of the Church onwards and guides it still in the faith and knowledge of the Son of God. These noble epistles are the fruit and record of St Paul’s theological work. Through them he has left a deeper mark on the conscience of the world than any one man besides, except the Master of truth who was more than man.
The apostle was not unaware of the vast influence he now possessed, and that must accrue to him in the future from the transcendent interest of the doctrines committed to his charge. There is no false modesty about this splendidly gifted man. It is his not only to “preach to the Gentiles the good news of Christ’s unsearchable riches”; but more than that, “to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery that has been hidden away from the ages in God who created all things.” The great secret was out while Saul of Tarsus was still a persecutor and blasphemer. But as to the management and dispensation of the mystery, the practical handling of it, as to the mode and way in which God would convey and apply it to the world at large, and as to the bearings and consequences of this momentous truth,—the apostle Paul, and no one but he, had all this to expound and set in order. He was, in fact, the architect of Christian doctrine.
Theologically, Peter and John himself were Paul’s debtors; and are included amongst the “all men” of verse 9 (if this reading of the text is correct). St John had, it is true, a more direct intuition into the mind of Christ and rose to an even loftier height of contemplation; but the labours and the logic of St Paul provided the field into which he entered in his ripe old age spent at Ephesus. John, who absorbed and assimilated everything that belonged to Christ and found for everything its principle and centre in the Master of his youth—“the way, the truth, and the life”—passed through the school of Paul. With the rest, he learnt through the new apostle to see more perfectly “what is the dispensation of the mystery hidden from the ages in God.”
Well persuaded is our apostle that all readers of this letter in the Asian towns, if they have not known it before, will now “perceive” his “understanding in the mystery of Christ.” All ages have discerned it since. And the ages to come will measure its value better than we can do now.
FOOTNOTES:
[92] See Gal. iii. 7, v. 5; Rom. viii. 14–25; 1 Peter i. 4, 5.
CHAPTER XIII.
EARTH TEACHING HEAVEN.
“To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the Church the manifold wisdom of God, according to the purpose of the ages which He formed in the Christ, even Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness and access in confidence through our faith in Him. Wherefore I ask that ye faint not at my tribulations for you, which are your glory.”—Eph. iii. 10–13.
The mystery hidden since the ages began, in God who created all things: so the last paragraph concluded. The added phrase “through Jesus Christ” is a comment of the pious reader, that has been incorporated in the received text; but it is wanting in the oldest copies, and is out of place. The apostle is not concerned with the prerogatives of Christ, but with the scope of the Christian economy. He is displaying the breadth and grandeur of the dispensation of grace, the infinite range of the Divine plans and operations of which it forms the centre. Its secret was cherished in the Eternal Mind. Its foundations are laid in the very basis of the world. And the disclosure of it now being made brings new light and wisdom to the powers of the celestial realms.
“There is nothing covered,” said Jesus, “which shall not be revealed, and hidden which shall not be known.” The mysteries which God sets before His intelligent creatures, are promises of knowledge; they are drafts, to be honoured in due time, upon the treasures of wisdom hidden in Christ. So this great secret of the destiny of the Gentile world was “from all ages hidden, in order that now through the Church it might be made known,” and by its means God’s wisdom, to these sublime intelligences. This intention was a part of the “plan of the ages” formed in Christ (ver. 11). God designed by our redemption to bless higher races along with our own. The elder sons of God, those “morning stars” of creation, are schooled and instructed by what is transpiring here upon earth.
To some this will appear to be mere extravagance. They see in such expressions the marks of an unrestrained enthusiasm, of theological speculation pushed beyond its limits and unchecked by any just knowledge of the physical universe. This censure would be plausible and it might seem that the apostle had extended the mission of the gospel beyond its province, were it not for what he says in verse 11: This “purpose of the ages” God “made in the Christ, even Jesus our Lord.” Jesus Christ links together angels and men. He draws after Him to earth the eyes of heaven. Christ’s coming to this world and identification with it unite to it enduringly the great worlds above us. The scenes enacted upon this planet and the events of its religious history have sent their shock through the universe. The incarnation of the Son of God gives to human life a boundless interest and significance. It is idle to oppose to this conviction the fact of the littleness of the terrestrial globe. Spiritual and physical magnitudes are incommensurable. You cannot measure a man’s soul by the size of his dwelling-house. Science teaches us that the most powerful forces may exist and operate within the narrowest space. A microscopic cell may contain the potential life of a world. If our earth is but a grain of sand to the astronomer, it has been the home of Godhead. It is the world for which God spared not to give His own Son!
Here, then, lies the centre of the apostle’s thoughts in this paragraph: God’s all-comprehending purpose in Christ. The magnitude and completeness of this plan are indicated by the fact that it embraces in its purview the angelic powers and their enlightenment. So understanding it, our human faith gains confidence and courage (vv. 12, 13).
I. The textual critics restore the definite article which later copyists had dropped before the word Christ in verse 11. We have already remarked the frequency of “the Christ” in this epistle.[93] Once besides this peculiar combination of the names of our Saviour occurs—in Colossians ii. 6, where Lightfoot renders it the Christ, even Jesus the Lord. So it should be rendered in this place. St Paul sets forth the purpose of “God who created all things.” He is looking back through “the ages” during which the Divine plan was kept secret. God was all the time designing His work of mercy, pointing meanwhile the hopes of men by token and promise to the Coming One. The Messiah was the burden of those prophetic ages. That inscrutable Christ of the Old Testament, the veiled mystery of Jewish hope, stands manifested before us and challenges our faith in the glorious person of “Jesus our Lord.” This singular turn of expression identifies the ideal and the real, the promise and fulfilment, the dream of Old Testament prophecy and the fact of New Testament history. For Jesus our Lord is the very Christ to whom the generations before His coming looked forward out of their twilight with wistful expectancy.
Not without meaning is He called “Jesus our Lord.” The “principalities and powers” of the heavenly places are in our view (ver. 10). These potentates some of the Asian Christians were fain to worship. “See ye do it not,” Paul seems to say. “Jesus, the Christ of God, is alone our Lord; not these. He is our Lord and theirs (i. 21, 22). As our Lord He commands their homage, and gives them lessons through His Church in God’s deep counsels.” Everything that the apostle says tends to exalt our Redeemer and to enhance our confidence in Him. His position is central and supreme, in regard alike to the ages of time and the powers of the universe. In His hand is the key to all mysteries. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning, middle, and end of God’s ways. He is the centre of Israel, Israel of the world and the human ages; while the world of men is bound through Him to the higher spheres of being, over which He too presides.
There is a splendid intellectual courage, an incredible boldness and reach of thought in St Paul’s conception of the sovereignty of Christ. Remember that He of whom these things are said, but thirty years before died a felon’s death in the sight of the Jewish people. It is not our Lord Jesus Christ, whose name is hallowed by the lips of millions and glorified by the triumphs of centuries upon centuries past, but the Nazarene with the obscurity of His life and the cruel shame of Calvary fresh in the recollection of all men. With what immense force had the facts of His glorification wrought upon men’s minds—His resurrection and ascension, the witness of His Spirit and the virtue of His gospel—for it to be possible to speak of Him thus, within a generation of His death! While “the foolishness of preaching” such a Christ and the weakness in which He was crucified were patent to all eyes, unrelieved by the influence of time and the glamour of success, how was it that the first believers raised Jesus to this limitless glory and dominion? It was through the conviction, certified by outward fact and inward experience, that “He liveth by the power of God.” Thus Peter on the day of Pentecost: “By the right hand of God exalted, He hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear.” The resurrection from the dead, the demonstration of the Spirit proved Jesus Christ to be that which He had claimed to be, the Saviour of men and the eternal Son of God.
The supremacy here assigned to Christ is a consequence of the exaltation described at the close of the first chapter. There we see the height, here the breadth and length of His dominion. If He is raised from the grave so high that all created powers and names are beneath His feet, we cannot wonder that the past ages were employed in preparing His way, that the basis of His throne lies in the foundation of the world.
II. The universe is one. There is a solidarity of rational and moral interests amongst all intelligences. Granting the existence of such beings as the angels of Scripture, we should expect them to be profoundly concerned in the redeeming work of Christ. They are the “watchers” and “holy ones” spoken of by the later Isaiah and Daniel, whom the Lord has “set upon the walls of Jerusalem” and who survey the affairs of nations. Such was “the angel who talked” with Zechariah in his vision, and whom the prophet overheard pleading for Jerusalem. In the Apocalypse, again, we find the angels acting as God’s unseen executive. We decline to believe that these superhuman creatures are nothing more than apocalyptic machinery, that they are creations of fancy employed to give a livelier aspect to spiritual truth. “Cannot I pray to my Father, and He shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” So Jesus said, in the most solemn hour of His life. And who can forget His tender words concerning the little children, whose “angels do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven”?
The apostle Paul, who denounces “worship of the angels” in the fellow epistle to this, earnestly believed in their existence and their interest in human affairs. If he did not write the words of Hebrews i. 14, he certainly held that “they are ministering spirits sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation.” Most clearly is their relationship to the Church affirmed by the words of the revealing angel to the apostle John: “I am a fellow-servant with thee and with thy brethren the prophets, and with them that keep the words of this book.”
Christ’s service is the high school of wisdom for the universe. These princes of heaven win by their ministry to Christ and His Church a great reward. Their intelligence, however lofty its range, is finite. Their keen and burning intuition could not penetrate the mystery of God’s intentions toward this world. The revelations of the latter days—the incarnation, the cross, the publication of the gospel, the outpouring of the Spirit—were full of surprises to the heavenly watchers. They sang at Bethlehem; they hid their faces and shrouded heaven in blackness at the sight of Calvary. They bent down with eager observation and searching thought “desiring to look into” the things made known to men (1 Peter i. 12),—close and sympathetic students of the Church’s history. The apostle felt that there were other eyes bent upon him than those of his fellow-men, and that he was acting in a grander arena than the visible world. “We are a spectacle,” he says, “to angels and to men.” So he enjoins faithfulness on Timothy, and with Timothy on all who bear the charge of the gospel, “before God and Christ Jesus, and the elect angels.” What is public opinion, what the applause or derision of the crowd, to him who lives and acts in the presence of these august spectators?
“Through the Church,” we are told, the angels of God are “now” having His “manifold wisdom made known” to them. It is not from the abstract scheme of salvation, from the theory or theology of the Church that they get this education, but through the living Church herself. The Saviour’s mission to earth created a problem for them, the development of which they follow with the most intense and sympathetic interest. With what solicitude they watch the conflict between good and evil and the varying progress of Christ’s kingdom amongst men! Many things, doubtless, that engage our attention and fill a large space in our Church records, are of little account with them; and much that passes in obscurity, names and deeds unchronicled by fame, are written in heaven and pondered in other spheres. No brave and true blow is struck in Christ’s battle, but it has the admiration of these high spectators. No advance is made in character and habit, in Christian intelligence and efficiency and the application of the gospel to human need, but they notice and approve. When the cause of the Church and the salvation of mankind go forward, when righteousness and peace triumph, the morning stars sing together and the sons of God shout for joy. The joy that there is in the presence of the angels of God over the repenting sinner, is not the joy of sympathy or pity only; it is the delight of growing wisdom, of deepening insight into the ways of God, into the heart of the Father and the love that passes knowledge.
One would suppose from what the apostle hints, that our world presents a problem unique in the kingdom of God, one which raises questions more complicated and crucial than have elsewhere arisen. The heavenly princedoms are learning through the Church “the manifold wisdom of God.” His love, in its pure essence, those happy and godlike beings know. They have lived for ages in its unclouded light. His power and skill they may see displayed in proportions immensely grander than this puny globe of ours presents. God’s justice, it may be, and the thunders of His law have issued forth in other regions clothed with a splendour of which the scenes of Sinai were but a faint emblem. It is in the combination of the manifold principles of the Divine government that the peculiarity of the human problem appears to lie. The delicate and continuous balancing of forces in God’s plan of dealing with this world, the reconciliation of seeming incompatibilities, the issue found from positions of hopeless contradiction, the accord of goodness with severity, of inflexible rectitude and truth with fatherly compassion, afford to the greatest minds of heaven a spectacle and a study altogether wonderful. So amongst ourselves the child of a noble house, reared in cultured ease and shielded from moral peril, in visiting the homes of poverty in the crowded city finds a new world opened to him, that can teach him Divine lessons if he has the heart to learn. His mind is awakened, his sympathies enriched. He hears the world’s true voice, “the still, sad music of humanity.” He measures the heights and depths of man’s nature. A host of questions are thrust upon him, whose urgency he had scarcely guessed; and wide ranges of truth are lighted up for him, which before were distant and unreal. The highest have ever to learn from the lowest in Christ’s school, the seeming-wise from the simple; even the pure and good, from contact with the fallen whom they seek to save.
And “the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places” are, it seems, willing to learn from those below them. As they traced the course of human history in those “eternal times” during which the mystery lay wrapped in silence, the angel watchers were too wise to play the sceptic, too cautious to criticize an unfinished plan and arraign a justice they could not yet understand. With a dignified patience they waited the uplifting of the curtain and the unravelling of the entangled plot. They looked for the coming of the Promised One. So in due time they witnessed and, for their reward, assisted in His manifestation. With the same docility these high sharers of our theological inquiries still wait to see the end of the Lord and to take their part in the dénouement of the time-drama, in the revelation of the sons of God. Let us copy their long patience. God has not made us to mock us. “What thou knowest not now,” said the great Revealer, the Master of all mysteries, to His disciple, “thou shalt know hereafter.”
These wise elder brothers of ours, rich in the lore of eternity, foresee the things to come as we cannot do. They are far above the smoke and dust of the earthly conflict. The doubts that shake the strongest souls amongst us, the cries of the hour which confuse and deceive us, do not trouble them. They behold us in our weakness, our fears and our divisions; but they also look on Him who “sits expecting till His enemies are made His footstool.” They see how calmly He sits, how patiently expectant, while the sound of clashing arms and the rage and tumult of the peoples go up from the earth. They mark the steadiness with which through century after century, in spite of refluent waves, the tide of mercy rises, and still rises on the shores of earth. Thrones, systems, civilizations have gone down; one after another of the powers that strove to crush or to corrupt Christ’s Church has disappeared; and still the name of Jesus lives and spreads. It has traversed every continent and sea; it stands at the head of the living and moving forces of the world. Those who come nearest to the angelic point of view, and judge of the progress of things not by the froth upon the surface but by the trend of the deeper currents, are the most confident for the future of our race. The kingdom of Satan will not fall without a struggle—a last struggle, perhaps more furious than any in the past—but it is doomed, and waning to its end. So far has the kingdom of Christ advanced, so mightily does the word of God grow and prevail in the earth, that faith may well assure itself of the promised triumph. Soon we shall shout: “Alleluia! The Lord God Omnipotent reigneth!”
III. Suddenly, according to his wont, the apostle drops down from the heights of contemplation to the level of ordinary fact. He descends in verse 12 from the thought of the eternal purpose and the education of the angels to the struggling Church. The assurance of its life in the Spirit corresponds to the grandeur of that Divine order to which it belongs. “In whom,” he says—in this Christ, the revealed mystery of ages past, the Teacher of angels and archangels—“we have our freedom and confident access to God through faith in Him.”
If it be “Jesus our Lord” to whom these attributes belong, and He is not ashamed of us, well may we draw near with confidence to the Father, unashamed in the presence of His holy angels. We have no need to be abashed, if we approach the Divine Majesty with a true faith in Christ. His name gives the sinner access to the holiest place. The cherubim sheathe their swords of flame. The heavenly warders at this passport open the golden gates. We “come unto Mount Sion, the city of the living God, and to an innumerable company of angels.” Not one of these mightinesses and ancient peers of heaven, not Gabriel or Michael himself, would wish or dare to bar our entrance.
“We have boldness and access,” says the apostle, as in chapter i. 7: “We have redemption in His blood.” He insists upon the conscious fact. This freedom of approach to God, this sonship of faith, is no hope or dream of what may be; it is a present reality, a filial cry heard in a multitude both of Gentile and Jewish hearts (comp. ii. 18).
This sentence exhibits the richness of synonyms characteristic of the epistle. There is boldness and access, confidence as well as faith. The three former terms Bengel nicely distinguishes: “libertatem oris in orando,” and “admissionem in fiducia in re, et corde”—freedom of speech (in prayer), of status, and of feeling. The second word (as in chapter ii. 18 and Romans v. 2) appears to be active rather than passive in its force, denoting admittance rather than access. So that while the former of the parallel terms (boldness) describes the liberty with which the new-born Church of the redeemed address themselves to God the Father and the unchecked freedom of their petitions, the latter (admittance) takes us back to the act of Christ by which He introduced us to the Father’s presence and gave us the place of sons in the house. Being thus admitted, we may come with confidence of heart, though we be less than the least of saints. Accepted in the Beloved, we are within our right if we say to the Father:—
“Yet in Thy Son divinely great,
We claim Thy providential care.
Boldly we stand before Thy seat;
Our Advocate hath placed us there!”
“Wherefore,” concludes the imprisoned apostle, “I beg you not to lose heart at my afflictions for you.” Assuredly Paul did not pray that he should not lose heart, as some interpret his meaning. But he knew how his friends were fretting and wearying over his long captivity. Hence he writes to the Philippians: “I would have you know that the things which have happened to me have turned out rather to the furtherance of the gospel.” Hence, too, he assures the Colossians earnestly of his joy in suffering for their sake (ch. i. 24).
The Church was fearful for Paul’s life and distressed by his prolonged sufferings. It missed his cheering presence and the inspiration of his voice. But if the Church is so dear to God as the pages of this letter show, and grounded in His eternal purposes, then let all friends of Christ take courage. The ark freighted with such fortunes cannot sink. St Paul is a martyr for Christ, and for Gentile Christendom! Every stroke that falls upon him, every day added to the months of his imprisonment helps to show the worth of the cause he has espoused and gives to it increased lustre: “my afflictions for you, which are your glory.”
Those that love him should boast rather than grieve over his afflictions. “We make our boast in you amongst the Churches of God,” he wrote to the distressed Thessalonians (2 Ep. i. 4), “for your patience and faith in all your persecutions and afflictions”; so he would have the Churches think of him. When good men suffer in a good cause, it is not matter for pity and dread, but rather for a holy pride.
FOOTNOTES:
[93] See note on p. 47; also pp. 83, 189.