The witness of the Holy Spirit is the seal of God’s possession in us;[129] it is the assurance to ourselves that we are His sons in Christ and heirs of life eternal. From the day it is affixed to the heart, this seal need never be broken nor the witness withheld, “until the day of redemption.” Dwelling within the Church as the guard of its communion, and loving us with the love of God, the Spirit of grace is hurt and grieved by foolish words coming from lips that He has sanctified. As Israel in its ancient rebellions “vexed His Holy Spirit” (Isai. lxiii. 10), so do those who burden Christian fellowship and who enervate their own inward life by speech without worth and purpose. As His fire is quenched by distrust (1 Thess. v. 19), so His love is vexed by folly. His witness grows faint and silent; the soul loses its joyous assurance, its sense of the peace of God. When our inward life thus declines, the cause lies not unfrequently in our own heedless speech. Or we have listened willingly and without reproof to “words that may do hurt,” words of foolish jesting or idle gossip, of mischief and backbiting. The Spirit of truth retires affronted from His desecrated temple, not to return until the iniquity of the lips is purged and the wilful tongue bends to the yoke of Christ. Let us grieve before the Holy Spirit, that He be not grieved with us for such offences. Let us pray evermore: “Set a watch, O Jehovah, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.”
5. In his previous reproofs the apostle has glanced in various ways at love as the remedy of our moral disorders and defects. Falsehood, anger, theft, misuse of the tongue involve disregard of the welfare of others; if they do not spring from positive ill-will, they foster and aggravate it. It is now time to deal directly with this evil that assumes so many forms, the most various of our sins and companion to every other: “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and railing be put away from you, with all malice.”
The last of these terms is the most typical. Malice is badness of disposition, the aptness to envy and hatred, which apart from any special occasion is always ready to break out in bitterness and wrath. Bitterness is malice sharpened to a point and directed against the exasperating object. Wrath and anger are synonymous, the former being the passionate outburst of resentment in rage, the latter the settled indignation of the aggrieved soul: this passion was put under restraint already in verses 26, 27. Clamour and railing give audible expression to these and their kindred tempers. Clamour is the loud self-assertion of the angry man, who will make every one hear his grievance; while the railer carries the war of the tongue into his enemy’s camp, and vents his displeasure in abuse and insult.
These sins of speech were rife in heathen society; and there were some amongst Paul’s readers, doubtless, who found it hard to forgo their indulgence. Especially difficult was this when Christians suffered all manner of evil from their heathen neighbours and former friends; it cost a severe struggle to be silent and “keep the mouth as with a bridle” under fierce and malicious taunts. Never to return evil for evil and railing for railing, but contrariwise blessing,—this was one of the lessons most difficult to flesh and blood.
Kindness in act, tenderheartedness of feeling are to take the place of malice with its brood of bitter passions. Where injury used to be met with reviling and insult retorted in worse insult, the men of the new life will be found “forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave” them. Here we touch the spring of Christian virtue, the master motive in the apostle’s theory of life. The cross of Jesus Christ is the centre of Pauline ethics, as of Pauline theology. The sacrifice of Calvary, while it is the ground of our salvation, supplies the standard and incentive of moral attainment. It makes life an imitation of God.
The commencement of the new chapter at this point makes an unfortunate division; for its first two verses are in close consecution with the last verse of chapter iv. By kindness and pitifulness of heart, by readiness to forgive, God’s “beloved children” will “show themselves imitators” of their Father. The apostle echoes the saying of his Master, in which the law of His kingdom was laid down: “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend never despairing; and your reward shall be great, and you shall be called children of the Highest: for He is kind to the thankless and evil. Be ye therefore pitiful, as your Father is pitiful” (Luke vi. 35, 36). Before the cross of Jesus was set up, men could not know how much God loved the world and how far He was ready to go in the way of forgiveness. Yet Christ Himself saw the same love displayed in the Father’s daily providence. He bids us imitate Him who makes His sun shine and His rain fall on the just and unjust, on the evil and the good. To the insight of Jesus, nature’s impartial bounties in which unbelief sees only moral indifference, spoke of God’s compassion; they proceed from the same love that gave His Son to taste death for every man.
In chapter iv. 32–v. 2 the Father’s love and the Son’s self-sacrifice are spoken of in terms precisely parallel. They are altogether one in quality. Christ does not by His sacrifice persuade an angry Father to love His children; it is the Divine compassion in Christ that dictates and carries into effect the sacrifice. At the same time it was “an offering and a sacrifice to God.” God is love; but love is not everything in God. Justice is also Divine, and absolute in its own realm. Law can no more forgo its rights than love forget its compassions. Love must fulfil all righteousness; it must suffer law to mark out its path of obedience, or it remains an effusive, ineffectual sentiment, helpless to bless and save. Christ’s feet followed the stern and strait path of self-devotion; “He humbled Himself and became obedient,” He was “born under law.” And the law of God imposing death as the penalty for sin, which shaped Christ’s sacrifice, made it acceptable to God. Thus it was “an odour of a sweet smell.”
Hence the love which follows Christ’s example, is love wedded with duty. It finds in an ordered devotion to the good of men the means to fulfil the all-holy Will and to present in turn its “offering to God.” Such love will be above the mere pleasing of men, above sentimentalism and indulgence; it will aim higher than secular ideals and temporal contentment. It regards men in their kinship to God and obligation to His law, and seeks to make them worthy of their calling. All human duties, for those who love God, are subordinate to this; all commands are summed up in one: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” The apostle pronounced the first and last word of his teaching when he said: Walk in love, as the Christ also loved us.
6. Above all others, one sin stamped the Gentile world of that time with infamy,—its uncleanness.
St Paul has stigmatized this already in the burning words of verse 19. There we saw this vice in its intrinsic loathsomeness; here it is set in the light of Christ’s love on the one hand (ver. 2), and of the final judgement on the other (vv. 5, 6). Thus it is banished from the Christian fellowship in every form—even in the lightest, where it glances from the lips in words of jest: “Fornication and all uncleanness, let it not even be named among you.” Along with “filthiness, foolish talk and jesting” are to be heard no more. Passing from verse 2 to verse 3 by the contrastive But, one feels how repugnant are these things to the love of Christ. The perfume of the sacrifice of Calvary, so pleasing in heaven, sweetens our life on earth; its grace drives wanton and selfish passions from the heart, and destroys the pestilence of evil in the social atmosphere. Lust cannot breathe in the sight of the cross.