The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians

by George G. Findlay

II. The solidarity of mankind in Christ furnishes the apostle with a powerful lever for raising the ethical standard of his readers. The thought that “we are members one of another” forbids deceit. That he may “have whereof to give to the needy” is the purpose that provokes the thief to industry. The desire to “give grace” to the hearers and to “build them up” in truth and goodness imparts seriousness and elevation to social intercourse. The irritations and injuries we inflict on each other, with or without purpose, furnish occasion for us to “be kind one to another, good-hearted, forgiving yourselves”—for this is the expression the apostle uses in chapter iv. 32, and in Colossians iii. 13. Self is so merged in the community, that in dealing censure or forgiveness to an offending brother the Christian man feels as though he were dealing with himself—as though it were the hand that forgave the foot for tripping, or the ear that pardoned some blunder of the eye.

Showing-grace is what the apostle literally says here, speaking both of human and Divine forgiveness.[131] In this lies the charm and power of true forgiveness. The forgiver after the order of grace does not pardon like a judge moved by magnanimity or pity for transgressors, but in love to his own kind and desire for their amendment. He identifies himself with the wrong-doer, weighs his temptation and all that drew him into error. Such forgiveness, while it never ignores the wrong, admits every qualifying circumstance and just extenuation. This is the kind of pardon that touches the sinner’s heart; for it goes to the heart of the sin, isolating it from all other feelings and conditions that are not sin; it takes the wrong upon itself in understanding and perception; it puts its finger upon the aching, festering spot where the criminality lies and applies to that its healing balm.

“Even as God in Christ forgave you.” And how did God forgive? Not by a grand imperial decree, as of some monarch too exalted to resent the injuries of men or to inquire into their futile proceedings. Had such forgiveness been possible to Divine justice, it could have wrought in us no real salvation. Our forgiveness is that of God in Christ. The Forgiver has sat down by the prisoner’s side, has felt his misery and the force of his temptations, and in everything but the actual sin has made Himself one with the sinner, even to bearing the extreme penalty of his guilt. In the act of making sacrifice, Jesus prayed for those that slew Him: “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do!” This intercession breathed the spirit of the new forgiveness. There is a real remission of sins, a release granted justly and upon due satisfaction; but it is the act of justice charged with love, of a justice as tender and considerate as it is strong, and which eagerly takes account of all that bespeaks in the offender a possibility of better things. It is a forgiveness that does justice to the humanity as well as the criminality in the sinner.

To proclaim by word and deed this forgiveness of God to the sinful world is the vocation of the Church. And where she does thus declare it, by whatever means or ministry, Christ’s promise to her is verified: “Whose-soever sins ye remit, they are remitted to them.” We may so reconcile men to ourselves, as to bring them back to God. Has some one done you a wrong? there is your opportunity of saving a soul from death and hiding a multitude of sins. Thus Christ used the great wrong we all did Him. It is your privilege to show the wrong-doer that you and he are made one by the blood of Christ.

“Walk in love,” St Paul says, “as the Christ also loved us and gave up Himself for us a sacrifice.” When the apostle writes the Christ, he points us along the whole line of the revelation of the cross.[132] We think of the Christhood of Jesus, of the Christliness of such love as this. Christ’s was a representative and exemplary love, with its forerunners and its followers all walking in one path. “The Christ loved and gave”; for love that does not give, that prompts to no effort and puts itself to no sacrifice, is but a luxury of the heart,—useless and even selfish. And He “gave up Himself”—the only gift that could suffice. The rich who bestow many gifts in furtherance of humanitarian and religious work and still do not bestow themselves, their sympathetic thought, their presence and personal aid, are withholding the best thing, the one thing required to make their bounties efficacious. In what we give and forgive, it is the accent of sympathy, the giving of the heart with it that adds grace to the act. “Though I dole out all my goods, though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.” We do a thousand things to serve and benefit our fellow-men, and yet evade the real sacrifice,—which is simply to love them.

In studying this epistle, we have felt increasingly that the Church is the centre of humanity. The love born and nourished in the household of faith goes out into the world with a universal mission. The solidarity of moral interests that is realized there, embraces all the kindreds of the earth. The incarnation of Christ knits all flesh into one redeemed family. The continents and races of mankind are members one of another, with Jesus Christ for head. We are brothers and sisters of humanity: He our elder brother, and God our common Father in heaven,—His Father and ours.

Auguste Comte writes in his System of Positive Polity: “The promises of supernatural religion appealed exclusively to man’s selfish instincts.... The sympathetic instincts found no place in the theological synthesis.”[133] It would be impossible to affirm anything more completely at variance with the truth, anything more absolutely opposed to the doctrine of Christ and the theological synthesis of the apostles. And yet it was upon this ground that the great French thinker renounced Christianity, proposing his new religion of humanity as a substitute for a selfish and effete supernaturalism! Why did he not go to the New Testament itself to find out what Christianity means? “To combine permanently concert with independence,” Comte excellently says, “is the capital problem of society, a problem which religion alone can solve, by love primarily, then by faith on a basis of love.”[134] Precisely so; and this is the solution offered by Jesus Christ. His self-sacrificing love is the basis on which our faith rests; and that faith works by love in all those who truly possess it. This is the evangelical theory. The morale of the Church, it is true, has fallen shamefully below its doctrine; but this doctrine is, after all, the one fruitful and progressive moral force in the world; and it is certain to be carried into effect.

In the darkest hour of Israel’s oppression and of international hate, one of her great prophets thus described the triumph of supernatural religion: “In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth; for that the Lord of hosts hath blessed them, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance” (Isai. xix. 24, 25). This is our programme still.

III. Another of St Paul’s ruling ideas lying at the basis of Christian ethics, is his conception of man’s future destiny. The apostle warns his readers that they “grieve not the Holy Spirit, in whom they were sealed till the day of redemption.” He tells them that “the impure and the covetous have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.”

There is thus disclosed a world beyond the world, a life growing out of life, an eternal and invisible kingdom of whose possession the Spirit that lives in Christian men is the earnest and firstfruits. This kingdom is the joint inheritance of the sons of God, brethren with Christ and in Christ, who are conformed to His image and found worthy to “stand before the Son of man.” Those are excluded from the inheritance, who by their moral nature are alien to it: “Without are dogs, sorcerers, whoremongers, idolaters, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie.” This revelation has had a most powerful influence on the progress of ethics. It has given a momentous importance to individual conduct, a new grandeur to the moral issues of the present life. “Man’s life,” viewed in the light of the Christian gospel, “has duties that are alone great, that go up to Heaven, and down to Hell.” The tangled skein is at last to be unravelled, the mysterious problem of mortal life will have its solution at the judgement-seat of Jesus Christ.