The Expositor's Bible: Ephesians Part 19

The "greediness" with which debauchery was then pursued, is at the bottom self-idolatry, self-deification; it is the absorption of the G.o.d-given pa.s.sion and will of man's nature in the gratification of his appet.i.tes. Here lies the reservoir and spring of sin, the burning deep within the soul of him who knows no G.o.d but his own will, no law above his own desire. He plunges into sensual indulgence, or he grasps covetously at wealth or office; he wrecks the purity, or tramples on the rights of others; he robs the weak, he corrupts the innocent, he deceives and mocks the simple--to feed the gluttonous idol of self that sits upon G.o.d's seat within him. The military hero wading to a throne through seas of blood, the politician who wins power and office by the sleights of a supple tongue, the dealer on the exchange who supplants every compet.i.tor by his shrewd foresight and unscrupulous daring, and absorbs the fruit of the labour of thousands of his fellow-men, the sensualist devising some new and more voluptuous refinement of vice,--these are all the miserable slaves of their own l.u.s.t, driven on by the insatiate craving of the false G.o.d that they carry within their breast.

For the light-hearted Greeks, lovers of beauty and of laughter, self was deified as Aphrodite, G.o.ddess of fleshly desire, who was turned by their wors.h.i.+p into _Aselgeia_,--she of whom of old it was said, "Her house is the way to Sheol." Not such as the chaste wife and house-keeping mother of Hebrew praise, but Las with her venal charms was the subject of Greek song and art. Pure ideals of womanhood the cla.s.sic nations had once known--or never would those nations have become great and famous--a Greek Alcestis and Antigone, Roman Cornelias and Lucretias, n.o.ble maids and matrons. But these, in the dissolution of manners, had given place to other models. The wives and daughters of the Greek citizens were shut up to contempt and ignorance, while the priestesses of vice--_hetaerae_ they were called, or _companions_ of men--queened it in their voluptuous beauty, until their bloom faded and poison or madness ended their fatal days.

Amongst the Jews whom our Lord addressed, the choice lay between "G.o.d and Mammon"; in Corinth and Ephesus, it was "Christ or Belial." These ancient G.o.ds of the world--"mud-G.o.ds," as Thomas Carlyle called them--are set up in the high places of our populous cities. To the slavery of business and the pride of wealth men sacrifice health and leisure, improvement of mind, religion, charity, love of country, family affection. How many of the evils of English society come from this root of all evil!

Hard by the temple of Mammon stands that of Belial. Their votaries mingle in the crowded amus.e.m.e.nts of the day and rub shoulders with each other. Aselgeia flaunts herself, wise observers tell us, with increasing boldness in the European capitals. Theatre and picture-gallery and novel pander to the desire of the eye and the l.u.s.t of the flesh. The daily newspapers retail cases of divorce and hideous criminal trials with greater exactness than the debates of Parliament; and the appet.i.te for this garbage grows by what it feeds upon. It is plain to see whereunto the decay of public decency and the revival of the animalism of pagan art and manners will grow, if it be not checked by a deepened Christian faith and feeling.

_Past feeling_ says the apostle of the brazen impudicity of his time.

The loss of the religious sense blunted all moral sensibility. The Greeks, by an early instinct of their language, had one word for _modesty_ and _reverence_, for self-respect and awe before the Divine.

There is nothing more terrible than the loss of shame. When immodesty is no longer felt as an affront, when there fails to rise in the blood and burn upon the cheek the hot resentment of a wholesome nature against things that are foul, when we grow tolerant and familiar with their presence, we are far down the slopes of h.e.l.l. It needs only the kindling of pa.s.sion, or the removal of the checks of circ.u.mstance, to complete the descent. The pain that the sight of evil gives is a divine s.h.i.+eld against it. Wearing this s.h.i.+eld, the sinless Christ fought our battle, and bore the anguish of our sin.

FOOTNOTES:

[112] "The persons here denounced," says Lightfoot on Phil. iii. 18, "are not the Judaizing teachers, but the antinomian reactionists.... The stress of Paul's grief lies in the fact that they degraded the true doctrine of liberty, so as to minister to their profligate and worldly living." Comp. 1 Peter iv. 3, 4; 2 Peter ii. 18-22.

[113] Comp. Col. ii. 20-iii. 4; Gal. vi. 14, 15.

[114] _Phaeao_: -- x.x.xv.

[115] See p. 129.

[116] "When human life to view lay foully prostrate upon earth, crushed down under the weight of religion, who showed her head from the quarters of heaven with hideous aspect lowering upon mortals, a man of Greece ventured first to lift up his mortal eyes to her face and first to withstand her to her face" (Munro).

[117] 1 Thess. iv. 5; 2 Thess. i. 8; Gal. iv. 8, 9.

CHAPTER XX.

_THE TWO HUMAN TYPES._

"But ye did not so learn the Christ; if so be that ye heard Him, and were taught in Him, even as truth is in Jesus: that ye put away, as concerning your former manner of life, the old man, which waxeth corrupt after the l.u.s.ts of deceit; and that ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, which after G.o.d hath been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth."--EPH. iv.

20-24.

_But as for you!_--The apostle points us from heathendom to Christendom.

From the men of blinded understanding and impure life he turns to the cleansed and instructed. "Not thus did _you_ learn the Christ"--not to remain in the darkness and filth of your Gentile state.

The phrase is highly condensed. The apostle, in this letter so exuberant in expression, yet on occasion is as concise as in Galatians. One is tempted, as Beza suggested[118] and Hofmann insists, to put a stop at this point and to read: "But with you it is not so:[119] you learned the Christ!" In spite of its abruptness, this construction would be necessary, if it were only "the Gentiles" of verse 17 with whose "walk"

St Paul means to contrast that of his readers. But, as we have seen, he has before his eye a third cla.s.s of men, unprincipled Christian teachers (ver. 14), men who had in some sense learnt of Christ and yet walked in Gentile ways and were leading others back to them.[120] Verse 20, after all, forms a coherent clause. It points an ant.i.thesis of solemn import.

There are genuine, and there are supposed conversions; there are true and false ways of learning Christ.

Strictly speaking, it is not _Christ_, but _the Christ_ whom St Paul presumes his readers to have duly learnt.[121] The words imply a comprehending faith, that knows who and what Christ is and what believing in Him means, that has mastered His great lessons. To such a faith, which views Christ in the scope and breadth of His redemption, this epistle throughout appeals; for its impartation and increase St Paul prayed the wonderful prayer of the third chapter. When he writes not simply, "You have believed in Christ," but "You have _learned the Christ_," he puts their faith upon a high level; it is the faith of approved disciples in Christ's school. For such men the "philosophy and vain deceit" of Colossae and the plausibilities of the new "scheme of error" will have no charm. They have found the treasures of wisdom and knowledge that are hidden in Christ.

The apostle's confidence in the Christian knowledge of his readers is, however, qualified in verse 21 in a somewhat remarkable way: "If verily it is He whom you heard, and in Him that you were taught, as truth is in Jesus." We noted at the outset the bearing of this sentence on the destination of the letter. It would never occur to St Paul to question whether the _Ephesian_ Christians were taught Christ's true doctrine.

If there were any believers in the world who, beyond a doubt, had heard the truth as in Jesus in its certainty and fulness, it was those amongst whom the apostle had "taught publicly and from house to house," "not shunning to declare all the counsel of G.o.d" and "for three years night and day unceasingly with tears admonis.h.i.+ng each single one" (Acts xx.

18-35). To suppose these words written in irony, or in a modest affectation, is to credit St Paul with something like an inept.i.tude.

Doubt was really possible as to whether all his readers had heard of Christ aright, and understood the obligations of their faith. Supposing, as we have done, that the epistle was designed for the Christians of the province of Asia generally, this qualification is natural and intelligible.

There are several considerations which help to account for it. When St Paul first arrived at Ephesus, eight years before this time, he "found certain disciples" there who had been "baptized into John's baptism,"

but had not "received the Holy Spirit" nor even heard of such a thing (Acts xix. 1-7). Apollos formerly belonged to this company, having preached and "taught carefully the things about Jesus," while he "knew only the baptism of John" (Acts xviii. 25). One very much desires to know more about this Church of the Baptist's disciples in Asia Minor.

Its existence so far away from Palestine testifies to the power of John's ministry and the deep impression that his witness to the Messiahs.h.i.+p of Jesus made on his disciples. The ready reception of Paul's fuller gospel by this little circle indicates that their knowledge of Jesus Christ erred only by defect; they had received it from Judaea by a source dating earlier than the day of Pentecost. The partial knowledge of Jesus current for so long at Ephesus, may have extended to other parts of the province, where St Paul had not been able to correct it as he had done in the metropolis.

Judaistic Christians, such as those who at Rome "preached Christ of envy and strife," were also disseminating an imperfect Christian doctrine.

They limited the rights of uncirc.u.mcised believers; they misrepresented the Gentile apostle and undermined his influence. A third and still more lamentable cause of uncertainty in regard to the Christian belief of Asian Churches, was introduced by the rise of Gnosticizing error in this quarter. Some who read the epistle had, it might be, received their first knowledge of Christ through channels tainted with error similar to that which was propagated at Colossae. With the seed of the kingdom the enemy was mingling vicious tares. The apostle has reason to fear that there were those within the wide circle to which his letter is addressed, who had in one form or other heard a different gospel and a Christ other than the true Christ of apostolic teaching.

Where does he find the test and touchstone of the true Christian doctrine?--In the historical Jesus: "as there is truth _in Jesus_." Not often, nor without distinct meaning, does St Paul use the birth-name of the Saviour by itself. Where he does, it is most significant. He has in mind the facts of the gospel history; he speaks of "the Jesus"[122] of Nazareth and Calvary. The Christ whom St Paul feared that some of his readers might have heard of was not the veritable _Jesus_ Christ, but a shadowy and notional Christ, lost amongst the crowd of angels, such as was now being taught to the Colossians. This Christ was neither the image of G.o.d, nor the true Son of man. He supplied no sufficient redemption from sin, no ideal of character, no sure guidance and authority to direct the daily walk. Those who followed such a Christ would fall back unchecked into Gentile vice. Instead of the light of life s.h.i.+ning in the character and words of Jesus, they must resort to "the doctrines and commandments of men" (Col. ii. 8-23).

Amongst the Gnostics of the second century there was held a distinction between the human (fleshly and imperfect) _Jesus_ and the Divine _Christ_, who were regarded as distinct beings, united to each other from the time of the baptism of Jesus to His death. The critics who a.s.sert the late and non-Pauline authors.h.i.+p of the epistle, a.s.sert that this peculiar doctrine is aimed at in the words before us, and that the identification of Christ with Jesus has a polemical reference to this advanced Gnostic error. The verses that follow show that the writer has a different and entirely practical aim. The apostle points us to our true ideal, to "the Christ" of all revelation manifest in "the Jesus" of the gospel. Here we see "the new man created after G.o.d," whose nature we must embody in ourselves. The counteractive of a false spiritualism is found in the incarnate life of the Son of G.o.d. The dualism which separated G.o.d from the world and man's spirit from his flesh, had its refutation in "the Jesus" of Paul's preaching, whom we see in the Four Gospels. Those who persisted in the attempt to graft the dualistic theosophy upon the Christian faith, were in the end compelled to divide and destroy the Christ Himself. They broke up into _Jesus and Christ_ the unity of His incarnate Person.

It is an entire mistake to suppose that the apostle Paul was indifferent to the historical tradition of Jesus; that the Christ he taught was a product of his personal inspiration, of his inward experience and theological reflection. This preaching of an abstract Christ, distinct from the actual Jesus, is the very thing that he condemns. Although his explicit references in the epistles to the teaching of Jesus and the events of His earthly life are not numerous, they are such as to prove that the Churches St Paul taught were well instructed in that history.

From the beginning the apostle made himself well acquainted with the facts concerning Jesus, and had become possessor of all that the earlier witnesses could relate. His conception of the Lord Jesus Christ is living and realistic in the highest degree. Its germ was in the visible appearance of the glorified Jesus to himself on the Damascus road; but that expanding germ struck down its roots into the rich soil of the Church's recollections of the incarnate Redeemer as He lived and taught and laboured, as He died and rose again amongst men. Paul's Christ was the Jesus of Peter and of John and of our own Evangelists; there was no other. He warns the Church against all unhistorical, subjective Christs, the product of human speculation.

The Asian Christians who held a true faith, had received Jesus as the Christ. So accepting Him, they accepted a fixed standard and ideal of life for themselves. With Jesus Christ evidently set forth before their eyes, let them look back upon their past life; let them contrast what they had been with what they are to be. Let them consider what things they must "put off" and what "put on," so that they may "be found in Him."

Strangely did the image of Jesus confront the pagan world; keenly its light smote on that gross darkness. There stood the Word made flesh--purity immaculate, love in its very self--shaped forth in no dream of fancy or philosophy, but in the veritable man Christ Jesus, born of Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate,--truth expressed

"In loveliness of perfect deeds, More strong than all poetic thought."

And this life of Jesus, living in those who loved Him (2 Cor. iv. 11), ended not when He pa.s.sed from earth; it pa.s.sed from land to land, speaking many tongues, raising up new witnesses at every step as it moved along. It was not a new system, a new creed, but _new men_ that it gave the world in Christ's disciples, men redeemed from all iniquity, n.o.ble and pure as sons of G.o.d. It was the sight of Jesus, and of men like Jesus, that shamed the old world, so corrupt and false and hardened in its sin. In vain she summoned the gates of death to silence the witnesses of Jesus. At last

"She veiled her eagles, snapped her sword, And laid her sceptre down; Her stately purple she abhorred, And her imperial crown.

She broke her flutes, she stopped her sports, Her artists could not please; She tore her books, she shut her courts, She fled her palaces; l.u.s.t of the eye and pride of life-- She left it all behind, And hurried, torn with inward strife, The wilderness to find" (_Obermann once more_).

The Galilean conquered! The new man was destined to convict and destroy the old. "G.o.d sending His Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh" (Rom. viii. 3). When Jesus lived, died, and rose again, an inconceivable revolution in human affairs had been effected. The cross was planted on the territory of the G.o.d of this world; its victory was inevitable. The "grain of wheat" fell into the ground to die: there might be still a long, cruel winter; many a storm and blight would delay its growth; but the harvest was secure. Jesus Christ was the type and the head of a new moral order, destined to control the universe.

To see the new and the old man side by side was enough to a.s.sure one that the future lay with Jesus. Corruption and decrepitude marked every feature of Gentile life. It was gangrened with vice,--"wasting away in its deceitful l.u.s.ts."

St Paul had before his eyes, as he wrote, a conspicuous type of the decaying Pagan order. He had appealed as a citizen of the empire to _Caesar_ as his judge. He was in durance as _Nero's_ prisoner, and was acquainted with the life of the palace (Phil. i. 13). Never, perhaps, has any line of rulers dominated mankind so absolutely or held in their single hand so completely the resources of the world as did the Caesars of St Paul's time. Their name has ever since served to mark the summit of autocratic power. It was, surely, the vision of Tiberius sitting at Rome that Jesus saw in the wilderness, when "the devil showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory; and said, All this hath been delivered to me, and to whomsoever I will I give it." The Emperor was the topstone of the splendid edifice of Pagan civilization, that had been rearing for so many ages. And Nero was the final product and paragon of the Caesarean house!

At this epoch, writes M. Renan,[123] "_Nero and Jesus_, Christ and Antichrist, stand opposed, confronting each other, if I may dare to say so, like heaven and h.e.l.l.... In face of Jesus there presents itself a monster, who is the ideal of evil as Jesus of goodness.... Nero's was an evil nature, hypocritical, vain, frivolous, prodigiously given to declamation and display; a blending of false intellect, profound wickedness, cruel and artful egotism carried to an incredible degree of refinement and subtlety.... He is a monster who has no second in history, and whose equal we can only find in the pathological annals of the scaffold.... The school of crime in which he had grown up, the execrable influence of his mother, the stroke of parricide forced upon him, as one might say, by this abominable woman, by which he had entered on the stage of public life, made the world take to his eyes the form of a horrible comedy, with himself for the chief actor in it. At the moment we have now reached [when St Paul entered Rome], Nero had detached himself completely from the philosophers who had been his tutors. He had killed nearly all his relations. He had made the most shameful follies the common fas.h.i.+on. A large part of Roman society, following his example, had descended to the lowest level of debas.e.m.e.nt. The cruelty of the ancient world had reached its consummation.... The world had touched the bottom of the abyss of evil; it could only reascend."

Such was the man who occupied at this time the summit of human power and glory,--the man who lighted the torch of Christian martyrdom and at whose sentence St Paul's head was destined to fall, the Wild Beast of John's awful vision. Nero of Rome, the son of Agrippina, embodied the triumph of Satan as the G.o.d of this world. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary, reigned only in a few loving and pure hearts. Future history, as the scroll of the Apocalypse unfolded it, was to be the battle-field of these confronting powers, the war of Christ with Antichrist.

Could it be doubtful, to any one who had measured the rival forces, on which side victory must fall? St Paul p.r.o.nounces the fate of the whole kingdom of evil in this world, when he declares that "the old man" is "peris.h.i.+ng, according to the l.u.s.ts of deceit." It is an application of the maxim he gave us in Galatians vi. 8: "He that soweth to his own flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption." In its mad sensuality and prodigal l.u.s.ts, the vile Roman world he saw around him was speeding to its ruin. That ruin was delayed; there were moral forces left in the fabric of the Roman State, which in the following generations re-a.s.serted themselves and held back for a time the tide of disaster; but in the end Rome fell, as the ancient world-empires of the East had fallen, through her own corruption, and by "the wrath" which is "revealed from heaven against all unG.o.dliness and unrighteousness of men." For the solitary man, for the household, for the body politic and the family of nations the rule is the same. "Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death."

The pa.s.sions which carry men and nations to their ruin are "l.u.s.ts _of deceit_." The tempter is the liar. Sin is an enormous fraud. "You shall not die," said the serpent in the garden; "Your eyes will be opened, and you will be as G.o.d!" So forbidden desire was born, and "the woman _being deceived_ fell into transgression."

"So glistered the dire Snake, and into fraud Led Eve, our credulous mother, to the tree Of prohibition, root of all our woe."

By its baits of sensuous pleasure, and still more by its show of freedom and power to stir our pride, sin cheats us of our manhood; it sows life with misery, and makes us self-despising slaves. It knows how to use G.o.d's law as an incitement to transgression, turning the very prohibition into a challenge to our bold desires. "Sin taking occasion by the commandment deceived me, and by it slew me." Over the pit of destruction play the same dancing lights that have lured countless generations,--the glitter of gold; the purple robe and jewelled coronet; the wine moving in the cup; fair, soft faces lit with laughter. The straying foot and hot desires give chase, till the inevitable moment comes when the treacherous soil yields, and the pursuer plunges beyond escape into sin's reeking gulfs. Then the illusion is over. The gay faces grow foul; the glittering prize proves dust; the sweet fruit turns to ashes; the cup of pleasure burns with the fire of h.e.l.l. And the sinner knows at last that his greed has cheated him, that he is as foolish as he is wicked.

Let us remember that there is but one way of escape from the all-encompa.s.sing deceit of sin. It is in "learning Christ." Not in learning _about_ Christ, but in learning _Him_. It is a common artifice of the great deceit to "wash the outside of cup and platter." The old man is improved and civilized; he is baptized in infancy and called a Christian. He puts off many of his old ways, he dresses himself in a decorous garb and style; and so deceives himself into thinking that he is new, while his heart is unchanged. He may turn ascetic, and deny this or that _to_ himself; and yet never deny _himself_. He observes religious forms and makes charitable benefactions, as though he would compound with G.o.d for his unforsaken sin. But all this is only a plausible and hateful manifestation of the l.u.s.ts of deceit. To learn the Christ, is to learn the way of the cross. "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me," He bids us; "for I am meek and lowly in heart." Till we have done this, we are not even at the beginning of our lesson.

From the peris.h.i.+ng old man the apostle turns, in verses 23, 24, to the new. These two clauses differ in their form of expression more than the English rendering indicates.[124] When he writes, "that ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind," it is a _continual rejuvenation_ that he describes; the verb is present in tense, and the newness implied is that of recency and youth, newness in point of age. But the "new man" to be "put on" (ver. 24) is of a _new kind and order_; and in this instance the verb is of the aorist tense signifying an event, not a continuous act. The new man is put on when the Christian way of life is adopted, when we enter personally into the new humanity founded in Christ. We "put on the Lord Jesus Christ" (Rom. xiii. 14), who covers and absorbs the old self, even as those who await in the flesh His second advent will "put on the house from heaven," when "the mortal" in them will be "swallowed up of life" (2 Cor. v. 2-4). Thus two distinct conceptions of the life of faith are placed before our minds. It consists, on the one hand, of a quickening, constantly renewed, in the springs of our individual thought and will; and it is at the same time the a.s.sumption of another nature, the invest.i.ture of the soul with the Divine character and form of its being.