“Let no worthless speech proceed out of your mouth, but such as is good for edifying as the need may be, that it may give grace to them that hear. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption.
“Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing be put away from you, with all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you. Be ye therefore imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, even as the Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for an odour of a sweet smell.
“But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covetousness, let it not even be named among you, as becometh saints; nor filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not befitting: but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know of a surety, that no fornicator, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, which is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no man deceive you with empty words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the sons of disobedience.”—Eph. iv. 25—v. 6.
The transformation described in the last paragraph (vv. 17–24) has now to be carried into detail. The vices of the old heathen self must be each of them replaced by the corresponding graces of the new man in Christ Jesus.
The peculiarity of the instructions given by the apostle for this purpose does not lie in the virtues enjoined, but in the light in which they are set and the motives by which they are inculcated. The common conscience condemns lying and theft, malice and uncleanness; they were denounced with eloquence by heathen moralists. But the ethics of the New Testament differed in many respects from the best moral philosophy: in its direct appeal to the conscience, in its vigour and decision, in the clearness with which it traced our maladies to the heart’s alienation from God; but most of all, in the remedy which it applied, the new principle of faith in Christ. The surgeon’s knife lays bare the root of the disease; and the physician’s hand pours in the healing balm.
Let us observe at the outset that St Paul deals with the actual and pressing temptations of his readers. He recalls what they had been, and forbids them to be such again. The associations and habits of former life, the hereditary force of evil, the atmosphere of Gentile society, and added to all this, as we discover from chapter v. 6, the persuasions of the sophistical teachers now beginning to infest the Church, tended to draw the Asian Christians back to Gentile ways and to break down the moral distinctions that separated them from the pagan world.
Amongst the discarded vices of the forsaken Gentile life, the following are here distinguished: lying, theft, anger, idle speech, malice, impurity, greed. These may be reduced to sins of temper, of word, and of act. Let us discuss them in the order in which they are brought before us.
1. “The falsehood”[127] of verse 25 is the antithesis of “the truth” from which righteousness and holiness spring (ver. 24). In accepting the one, Paul’s Gentile readers “had put off” the other. When these heathen converts became Christians, they renounced the great lie of idolatry, the system of error and deceit on which their lives were built. They have passed from the realm of illusion to that of truth. “Now,” the apostle says, “let your daily speech accord with this fact: you have bidden farewell to falsehood; speak truth each with his neighbour.” The true religion breeds truthful men; a sound faith makes an honest tongue. Hence there is no vice more hateful than jesuitry, nothing more shocking than the conduct of those who defend what they call “the truth” by disingenuous arts, by tricks of rhetoric and the shifts of an unscrupulous partizanship. “Will you speak unrighteously for God, and talk deceitfully for Him?” As Christ’s truth is in me cries the apostle, when he would give the strongest possible assurance of the fact he wishes to assert.[128] The social conventions and make-believes, the countless simulations and dissimulations by which the game of life is carried on belong to the old man with his lusts of deceit, to the universal lie that runs through all ungodliness and unrighteousness, which is in the last analysis the denial of God.
St Paul applies here the words of Zechariah viii. 16, in which the prophet promises to restored Israel better days on the condition that they should “speak truth each with his neighbour, and judge truth and the judgement of peace in their gates. And let none of you,” he continues, “imagine evil in his heart against his neighbour; and love no false oath. For all these things do I hate, saith the Lord.” Such is the law of the New Covenant life. No doubt, St Paul is thinking of the intercourse of Christians with each other when he quotes this command and adds the reason, “For we are members one of another.” But the word neighbour, as Jesus showed, has in the Christian vocabulary no limited import; it includes the Samaritan, the heathen man and publican. When the apostle bids his converts “Follow what is good towards one another, and towards all” (1 Thess. v. 15), he certainly presumes the neighbourly obligation of truthfulness to be no less comprehensive.
Believers in Christ represent a communion which in principle embraces all men. The human race is one family in Christ. For any man to lie to his fellow is, virtually, to lie to himself. It is as if the eye should conspire to cheat the hand, or the one hand play false to the other. Truth is the right which each man claims instinctively from his neighbour; it is the tacit compact that binds together all intelligences. Without neighbourly and brotherly love perfect truthfulness is scarcely possible. “Self-respect will never destroy self-seeking, which will always find in self-interest a side accessible to the temptations of falsehood” (Harless).