The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians

by George G. Findlay

The sayings of verses 25–27 set the glory of the vicarious death in a vivid light. Of such worth was the person of the Christ, of such significance and moral value His sacrificial death, that it weighed against the trespass, not of a man—Paul or any other—but of a world of men. He “purchased through His own blood,” said Paul to the Ephesian elders, “the Church of God” (Acts xx. 28)—the whole flock that feeds in the pastures of the Great Shepherd, that has passed or will pass through the gates of His fold. Great was the honour and glory with which he was crowned, when led as victim to the altar of the world’s atonement (Heb. ii. 9). Who will not say, as the meek Son of man treads so willingly His mournful path to Calvary, “Worthy is the Lamb!” Is not the heavenly Bridegroom worthy of the bride, that He consents to win by the sacrifice of Himself!

He is worthy; and she must be made worthy. “He gave up Himself, that He might sanctify her,—that He might Himself present to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind,—that she may be holy and without blemish.” The sanctification of the Church is the grand purpose of redeeming grace. This was the design of God for His sons in Christ before the world’s foundation, “that we should be holy and unblemished before Him” (i. 4). This, therefore, was the end of Christ’s mission upon earth; this was the intention of His sacrificial death. “For their sakes,” said Jesus concerning His disciples, “I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth” (John xvii. 19). His purchase of the Church is no selfish act. To God His Father Christ devotes every spirit of man that is yielded to Him. As the Priest of mankind it was His office thus to consecrate humanity, which is already in purpose and in essence “sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb. x. 10).

Only in this passage, where the apostle is thinking of the preparation of the Church for its perfect union with its Head, does he name Christ as our Sanctifier; in 1 Corinthians i. 2 he comes near this expression, addressing his readers as men “sanctified in Christ Jesus.” In the epistle to the Hebrews this character is largely ascribed to Him, being the function of His priesthood. One in nature with the sanctified, Jesus our great Priest “sanctifies us through His own blood,” so that with cleansed consciences we may draw near to the living God.[142] As Christ the Priest stands towards His people, so Christ the Husband towards His Church. He devotes her with Himself to God. He cleanses her that she may dwell with Him for ever, a spotless bride, dead unto sin and living unto God through Him.

“That He might sanctify her, having cleansed her in the laver of water by the word.” The Church’s purification is antecedent in thought to her sanctification through the sacrifice of Christ; and it is a means thereto. “Ye were washed, ye were sanctified,” writes the apostle in 1 Corinthians vi. 11, putting the two things in the same order. It is the order of doctrine which he has laid down in the epistle to the Romans, where sanctification is built on the foundation laid in justification through the blood of Christ. Through the virtue of the sacrificial death the Church in all her members was washed from the defilements of sin, that she might enter upon God’s service. Of the same initial purification of the heart St John writes in his first epistle (i. 7–9): “The blood of Jesus, God’s Son, cleanses us from all sin.... He is faithful and just, that He should forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” This is “the redemption through Christ’s blood,” for which St Paul in his first words of praise called upon us to bless God (i. 7). It is the special distinction of the New Covenant, which renders possible its other gifts of grace, that “the worshippers once cleansed” need have “no further consciousness of sins” (Heb. x. 2, 14–18). In the theological use here made of the idea of cleansing, St Paul comes into line with St John and the epistle to the Hebrews. The purification is nothing else than that which he has elsewhere styled justification. He employs the terms synonymously in the later epistle to Titus (ii. 14; iii. 7).

“Having cleansed” is a phrase congruous with the figure of the laver, or bath (comp. again Tit. iii. 5–7),—an image suggested, as one would think, by the bride-bath of the wedding-day in the ancient marriage customs. To this St Paul sees a counterpart in baptism, “the laver of water in the word.” The cleansing and withal refreshing virtues of water made it an obvious symbol of regeneration. The emblem is twofold; it pictures at once the removal of guilt, and the imparting of new strength. One goes into the bath exhausted, and covered with dust; one comes out clean and fresh. Hence the baptism of the new believer in Christ had, in St Paul’s view, a double aspect.[143] It looked backward to the old life of sin abandoned, and forward to the new life of holiness commenced. Thus it corresponded to the burial of Jesus (Rom. vi. 4), the point of juncture between death and resurrection. Baptism served as the visible and formal expression of the soul’s passage through the gate of forgiveness into the sanctified life.

Along with this older teaching, a further and kindred significance is now given to the baptismal rite. It denotes the soul’s affiance to its Lord. As the maiden’s bath on the morning of her marriage betokened the purity in which she united herself to her betrothed, so the baptismal laver summons the Church to present herself “a chaste virgin unto Christ” (2 Cor. xi. 2). It signifies and seals her forgiveness, and pledges her in all her members to await the Bridegroom in garments unspotted from the world, with the pure and faithful love which will not be ashamed before Him at His coming. For this end Christ set up the baptismal laver. Upon our construction of the text, the words “that He might sanctify her” express a purpose complete in itself—viz., that of the Church’s consecration to God. Then follow the means to this sanctification: “having cleansed her in the water-bath through the word,”—which washing, at the same time, has its purpose on the part of the Lord who appointed it—viz., “that He might present her to Himself” a glorious and spotless Church.

At the end of verse 27 the sentence doubles back upon itself, in Paul’s characteristic fashion. The twofold aim of Christ’s sacrifice of love on the Church’s behalf—viz., her consecration to God, and her spotless purity fitting her for perfect union with her Lord—is restated in the final clause, by way of contrast with the “spots and wrinkles and such-like things” that are washed out: “but that she may be holy and without blemish.”

We passed by, for the moment, the concluding phrase of verse 26, with which the apostle qualifies his reference to the baptismal cleansing; we are by no means forgetting it. “Having cleansed her,” he writes, “by the laver of water in [the] word.” This adjunct is deeply significant. It impresses on baptism a spiritual character, and excludes every theurgic conception of the rite, every doctrine that gives to it in the least degree a mechanical efficacy. “Without the word the sacrament could only influence man by magic, outward or inward” (Dorner). The “word” of which the apostle speaks,[144] is that of chapter vi. 17, “God’s word—the Spirit’s sword”; of Romans x. 8, “the word of faith which we proclaim”; of Luke i. 37, “the word from God which shall not be powerless”; of John xvii. 8, etc., “the words” that the Father had given to the Son, and the Son in turn to men. It is the Divine utterance, spoken and believed. In this accompaniment lies the power of the laver. The baptismal affusion is the outward seal of an inward transaction, that takes place in the spirit of believing utterers and hearers of the gospel word. This saving word receives in baptism its concrete expression; it becomes the verbum visibile.

The “word” in question is defined in Romans x. 8, 9: “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thy heart that God raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved!” Let the hearer respond, “I do so confess and believe,” on the strength of this confession he is baptized, and in the conjoint act of faith and baptism—in the obedience of faith signified by his baptism—he is saved from his past sins and made an heir of life eternal. The rite is the simplest and most universal in application one can conceive. In heathen countries baptism recovers its primitive significance, as the decisive act of rupture with idolatry and acceptance of Christ as Lord, which in our usage is often overlaid and forgotten.

This interpretation gives a key to the obscure text of St Peter upon the same subject (1 Ep. iii. 21): “Baptism saves you—not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the questioning with regard to God of a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The vital constituent of the rite is not the application of water to the body, but the challenge which the word makes therein to the conscience respecting the things of God,—the inquiry thus conveyed, to which a sincere believer in the resurrection of Christ makes joyful and ready answer. It is, in fine, the appeal to faith contained in baptism that gives to the latter its saving worth.