Sin and redemption.
The depth of sin
In the first chapter of the epistle, St. Paul has had before his eyes the glory of God's redemptive work—the wonder of His purpose of pure love for the universe through the Church. His imagination has kindled at the thought of the length, the breadth, the height of the divine operation:—the length, for it is an eternal purpose slowly worked out through the ages; the breadth, for it is to extend over the whole universe; the height, for it is to carry men up to no lower point than the throne of Christ in the heavenly places. But now he stops to call the attention of his converts to what we may call a 'fourth dimension' of the divine operation—its depth. How wonderfully low God had stooped, in order to reach the point to which man had sunk! The Asiatic Christians are bidden to ponder anew, and by contrast to their present experience, the life which they had once lived before they knew Christ or were found in Him.
Let us read the apostle's words, and then consider them in detail:—
And you did he quicken, when ye were dead through your trespasses and sins, wherein aforetime ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom we also all once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
We naturally put as a parallel to these and other verses of this epistle (iv. 17-19) the terrible passage in Romans i, where St. Paul describes the developement of sin in the Gentile world; how it had its origin in the refusal of the human will to recognize God, how out of the perversion of will it spread to the blinding of the understanding, and then to giving an overmastering power and an unnatural distortion to the passions, so that a state of moral lawlessness was produced and maintained.
What are we to say as to the truth of these accounts of the moral condition of the heathen world? No doubt there is a good deal to be said on the other side. Roman simplicity and virtue, and the sanctity of domestic life, had not, as contemporary inscriptions and historical records make perfectly evident, faded out of the Roman Empire, and philanthropy and love of the poor were recognized excellences. Nor had philosophic virtue vanished from the schools[[1]]. And all this St. Paul would not be slow to recognize. In the Epistle to the Romans[[2]] itself he speaks in language, such as a Stoic might have used, of those who, uninstructed by any special divine law, were a law unto themselves, in that they showed the practical effect of the law written in their hearts. We must therefore recognize that St. Paul is, in the passage we are now considering, speaking ideally; that is to say, he is speaking of the general tendency of the heathen life, just as he speaks ideally of the Christian church in view of its general tendency; and he is speaking of it as he mostly knew it himself in the notoriously corrupt cities of the east, Antioch and Ephesus. Ephesus, in particular, had an extraordinarily bad character for vice as much as for superstition; and what St. Paul says of the heathen life does not in fact make up a stronger indictment or present a blacker picture than what is said by a Stoic philosopher, perhaps his contemporary, who wrote at Ephesus, under the shelter of the name of the great Ephesian of ancient days, Heracleitus[[3]]. Moreover, St. Paul appeals unhesitatingly to the actual experience of these Asiatic Christians, and there is no reason to doubt that their consciences would have responded to what he said to them about the old life out of which they had been brought.
Let us now analyze a little more exactly this account St. Paul gives of the state of sin which he saw around him in contemporary society.
(1) 'Ye walked according to the course of this world.' By 'this world' St. Paul, like the other New Testament writers, means practically human society as it organizes itself for its own purposes of pleasure or profit without thought of God, or at least without thought of God as He truly is. These Asiatic Christians, then, had formerly ordered their life and conduct according to the demands and expectations of the worldly world, obeying its motives, governed by its fashions and its laws, and indifferent to those considerations which it repudiated or ignored.
(2) But to belong to the world in this sense is, in St. Paul's mind, to belong to the kingdom of Satan. The worldly world had its origin from a false desire of independence on man's part. He did not want to be controlled by God; he wanted to live his own life for himself. But in liberating himself according to his wishes from the control of God he fell, according to St. Paul's belief, under another control. Rebellion had been in the universe before man. There are invisible rebel spirits, of whose real existence and influence St. Paul had no more doubt than any other Jew who was not a Sadducee. And, indeed, our Lord had so spoken of good and evil spirits as to assure His disciples of their existence and influence. These rebel wills are unseen by us and in most respects unknown, but they organize and give a certain coherence and continuity to evil in the world. There thus arises a sort of kingdom of evil over against the kingdom of God, and those who will not surrender themselves to God and His kingdom, become perforce servants of Satan and his kingdom. It is in view of this truth that St. Paul tells these Asiatic Christians that they used to walk according 'to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience.' (These evil spirits were, by a natural way of thinking, located in the air, according to the contemporary Jewish ideas; and the idea is, if nothing more, a convenient metaphor for a subtle and pervading influence.) This view of their old life, as a bondage to evil spirits, is one which would be as easily realized by inhabitants of Asiatic cities, where men were largely occupied in finding charms against bad spirits, as by modern Indian converts from devil-worship. Christianity recognizes a basis of reality in the superstition from which at the same time it delivers men.