The Expositor's Bible: Ephesians Part 23

Great Christian teachers have spoken of the virtues of the heathen as "splendid sins." But Christ and His apostles never said so. He said: "Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold." And they said: "In every nation he that feareth G.o.d and worketh righteousness, is accepted of Him." The Christian creed has no jealousy in regard to human excellence. "Whatsoever things are true and honourable and just and pure," wherever and in whomsoever they are found, our faith honours and delights in them, and accepts them to the utmost of their worth. But then it claims them all for its own,--as the fruit of the one "true light which lighteth every man." Wherever this fruit appears, we know that that light has been, though its ways are past finding out. Through secret crevices, by subtle refractions and multiplied reflections, the true light reaches many a life lying far outside its visible course.

All goodness has one source; for, said Jesus, "there is none good but one, that is G.o.d." The channels may be tortuous, obstructed and obscure: the stream is always one. There is nothing more touching, and nothing more encouraging to our faith in G.o.d's universal love and His will that all men should be saved, than to see, as we do sometimes under conditions most adverse and in spots the most unlikely, features of moral beauty and Christlike goodness appearing like springs in the desert or flowers blooming in Alpine snows,--signs of the universal light,

"Which yet in the absolutest drench of dark Ne'er wants its witness, some stray beauty-beam To the despair of h.e.l.l!"

The action of G.o.d's grace in Christ is by no means limited to the sphere of its recognized working. All the more earnestly on this account do we vindicate this grace against those who deny its necessity or the permanence of its moral influence. The fruit, in the main, they approve.

But they would cut down the plant from which it came; they seek to quench the light under which it grew. They are like men who should take you to some lofty tree that has flourished for ages rooted in the rock, and who should say: "See how wide its branches and how stout its stem, how firmly it stands upon its native soil! Let us cut it loose from those dark and ugly roots--that mysterious theology, those superst.i.tions of the past. The human mind has outgrown them. Virtue can support itself on its own proper basis. It is time to a.s.sert the dignity of man, and to proclaim the independence of morality." If these men have their way, and if European society renounces the authority of G.o.d, how quickly will that tree of the Lord's planting, the vast growth of Christian virtue and beneficence, wither to its topmost bough; and the next storm will bring it to the ground, with all its stately strength and summer beauty.

Unbelief in G.o.d lays the axe at the root of human society. Our life--the life of individuals, of families and nations--is rooted in the unseen and hid with Christ in G.o.d. Thence it draws its vitality and virtue, through those spiritual fibres by which we are linked to G.o.d and lay hold on eternal life. Since Christ Jesus our forerunner entered the heavenly places, the anchor of human hopes has been cast within the veil; if that anchor drags, there is no other that will hold. The rocks are plain to see on which our richly freighted s.h.i.+p of life will founder. Without the religion of Jesus Christ, our civilization is not worth a hundred years' purchase.

Moral effects do not follow upon their causes as rapidly as physical effects: they follow as certainly. We live largely upon the acc.u.mulated ethical capital of our forefathers. When that is spent, we are left to our intrinsic poverty of soul, to our faithlessness and feebleness. The scepticism of one generation bears fruit in the immorality of the next, or the next after that; the unbelief and cynicism of the teacher in the vice of his disciple. Such fruit of blasting and mildew the decay of faith has never failed to bear.

The corresponding truth will be at once acknowledged. There is no real religion without virtue. If the G.o.dly man is not a good man, if he is not a sincere and pure-hearted man, "that man's religion is vain": no matter what his professions or his emotions, no matter what his services to the Church. He is one of those to whom Jesus Christ will say: "I know you not; depart from me, all ye that work iniquity." There is a flaw in him somewhere, a rift within the lute that spoils all its music. "A good tree cannot bring forth corrupt fruit."

In Christ's garden there forms in cl.u.s.tered beauty and perfectness the ripe growth of virtue, which in the suns.h.i.+ne of His love and under the freshening breath of His Spirit sends forth its spices and "yieldeth its fruit every month." In it there abide _goodness_, _righteousness_, _truth_--these three; and who shall say which of them is greatest?

I. _Goodness_ stands first, as the most visible and obvious form of Christian excellence,--that which every one looks for in a religious man, and which every one admires when it is to be seen. Righteousness, regarded by itself, is not so readily appreciated. There is something austere and forbidding in it. "For a righteous man scarcely would one die"--you respect, even revere him; but you do not love him: "but for the good man peradventure, one would even dare to die."

Christian goodness is the sanctification of the heart and its affections, renewed and governed by the love of G.o.d in Christ. It is, notwithstanding, but seldom inculcated in the New Testament;[136]

because it is referred to its spring and principle in _love_. Goodness is love embodied. Now love, as the Christian knows it, is of G.o.d. "We love," says the apostle John, "because He first loved us.... He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." This is the faith that makes good men,--the best the world has ever known, the best that it holds now. Vanity, selfishness, evil temper and desire are shamed and burnt out of the soul by the holy fire of the love of G.o.d in Jesus Christ our Lord. In the warm, tender light of the cross the heart is softened and cleansed, and expanded to the widest charity. It becomes the home of all generous instincts and pure affections. So "the fruit of the light is in all goodness."

2. And _righteousness_.

This second and central definition applies a searching test to all spurious forms of goodness, superficial or sentimental,--to the goodness of mere good manners, or good nature. The principle of righteousness, fully understood, includes everything in moral worth, and is often used to denote in one word the entire fruit of G.o.d's grace in man. For righteousness is the sanctification of the conscience. It is loyalty to G.o.d's holy and perfect law. It is no mere outward keeping of formal rules, such as the legal righteousness of Judaism, no submission to necessity or calculation of advantages: it is a love of the law in a man's inmost spirit; it is the quality of a heart one with that law, reconciled to it as it is reconciled to G.o.d Himself in Jesus Christ.

At the bottom, therefore, righteousness and goodness are one. Each is the counterface and complement of the other. Righteousness is to goodness as the strong backbone of principle, the firm hand and the vigorous grasp of duty, the steadfast foot that plants itself on the eternal ground of the right and true and stands against a world's a.s.sault. Goodness without righteousness is a weak and fitful sentiment: righteousness without goodness is a dead formality. He cannot love G.o.d or his neighbour truly, who does not love G.o.d's law; and he knows nothing aright of that law, who does not know that it is the law of love.

This also, this above all is "the fruit of the light." Two watchwords we have from the lips of Jesus, two mottoes of His own life and mission,--the one given at the end, the other at the beginning of His course: "Greater _love_ hath none than this, that one lay down his life for his friends"; and, "Thus it becometh us to fulfil all _righteousness_." By a double flame was He consumed a sacrifice upon the cross,--by the pa.s.sion of His zeal for G.o.d's righteousness, and by the pa.s.sion of His pity for mankind. In that twofold light we see light, and become "light in the Lord." Therefore the fruit of the light, the moral product of a true faith in the gospel, is in all _goodness and righteousness_.

There is a danger of merging the latter in the former of these attributes. Evangelical piety is credited with an excess of the sentimental and emotional disposition, cultivated at the expense of the more sterling elements of character. High principle, scrupulous honour, stern fidelity to duty are no less essential to the image of Christ in the soul than are warm feeling and zealous devotion to His service.

_Jesus Christ the righteous_, as His apostles loved to call Him, is the pattern of a manly faith, up to which we must grow in all things. "_He_ is the propitiation for our sins." Never was there an act of such unswerving integrity and absolute loyalty to the law of right as the sacrifice of Calvary. G.o.d forbid that we should magnify love at the expense of law, or make good feeling a subst.i.tute for duty.

3. _Truth_ comes last in this enumeration, for it signifies the inward reality and depth of the other two.

Truth does not mean veracity alone, the mere truth of the lips. Heathen honesty goes as far as this. Men of the world expect as much from each other, and brand the liar with their contempt. Truth of words requires a reality behind itself. The acted falsehood is excluded, the hinted and intended lie no less than that expressly uttered. Beyond all this, it is the truth of the man that G.o.d requires--speech, action, thought, all consistent, harmonious and transparent, with the light of G.o.d's truth s.h.i.+ning through them. Truth is the harmony of the inward and the outward, the correspondence of what the man is in himself with that which he appears and wishes to appear to be.

Now, it is only children of the light, only men thoroughly good and upright who can, in this strict sense, be men of truth. So long as any malice or iniquity is left in our nature, we have something to conceal.

We cannot afford to be sincere. We are compelled to pay, by very shame, the degrading tribute which vice renders to virtue, the homage of hypocrisy. But find a man whose intellect, whose heart and will, tried at whatever point, ring sound and true, in whom there is no affectation, no make-believe, no pretence or exaggeration, no discrepancy, no discord in the music of his life and thought, "an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile"--there is a saint for you, and a man of G.o.d; there is one whom you may "grapple to your soul with hoops of steel."

Truth is the hall-mark of entire sanctification; it is the highest and rarest attainment of the Christian life. It is equally the charm of an innocent, unspoilt childhood, and of a ripe and purified old age. The apostle John, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," is the most perfect embodiment, after his Master, of this consummating grace. In him righteousness and love were blended in the translucence of an utter simplicity and truth.

We must beware of giving a subjective and merely personal aspect to this divine quality. While truth is the unity of the outward and inward, of heart and act and word in the man, it is at the same time the agreement of the man with the reality of things as they exist in G.o.d. The former kind of truth rests upon the latter; the subjective upon the objective order. The truth of G.o.d makes us true. We magnify our own sincerity, until it becomes vitiated and pretentious. In our eagerness to realize and express our own convictions, we give too little pains to form them upon a sound basis; we make a great virtue of _speaking out_ what is in our hearts, but take small heed of what _comes in_ to the heart, and speak out of a loose self-confidence and idolatry of our own opinions.

So the Pharisees were true, who called Christ an impostor. So every careless slanderer, and scandalmonger credulous of evil, who believes the lies he propagates. "Imagination has pictured to itself a domain in which every one who enters should be compelled to speak only what he thought, and pleased itself by calling such domain the Palace of Truth.

A palace of veracity, if you will; but no temple of the truth. A place where each one would be at liberty to utter his own crude unrealities, to bring forth his delusions, mistakes, half-formed, hasty judgements; where the depraved ear would reckon discord harmony, and the depraved eye mistake colour; the depraved moral taste take Herod or Tiberius for a king, and shout beneath the Redeemer's cross, 'Himself He cannot save!' A temple of the truth? Nay, only a palace echoing with veracious falsehoods, a Babel of confused sounds, in which egotism would rival egotism, and truth would be each man's own lie."[137] In the pride of our veracity, we miss the verity of things; we are true only to our blind self, false to the light of G.o.d. "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice:" so said He who was Truth incarnate, making His word a law for all true men.

"In _all_ goodness and righteousness and truth," says the apostle. Let us seek them all. We are apt to become specialists in virtue, as in other departments of life. Men will endeavour even to compensate by extreme efforts in one direction for deficiencies in some other direction, which they scarcely desire to make good. So they grow out of shape, into oddities and moral malformations. There is a want of balance and of finish about a mult.i.tude of Christian lives, even of those who have long and steadily pursued the way of faith. We have sweetness without strength, and strength without gentleness, and truth spoken without love, and words of pa.s.sionate zeal without accuracy and heedfulness.

All this is infinitely sad, and infinitely damaging to the cause of our religion.

"It is the little rift within the lute That by-and-by will make the music mute, And ever widening slowly silence all; The little rift within the lover's lute, Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit, That rotting inward slowly moulders all."

Let us judge ourselves, that we be not judged by the Lord. Let us count no wrong a trifle. Let us never imagine that our defects in one kind will be atoned for by excellencies in another. Our friends may say this, in charity, for us; it is a fatal thing when a man begins to say so to himself. "May the G.o.d of peace sanctify you fully. May your whole spirit, soul, and body in blameless integrity be preserved to the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thess. v. 23).

II. The _effect_ upon surrounding darkness of the light of G.o.d in Christian lives is described in verses 11-14, in words which it remains for us briefly to examine.

Verse 12 distinguishes "the things secretly done" by the Gentiles, "of which it is a shame even to speak," from the open and manifest forms of evil in which they invite their Christian neighbours to join (ver. 11).

Instead of doing this and "having fellows.h.i.+p with the unfruitful works of darkness," they must "rather reprove them." Silent absence, or abstinence is not enough. Where sin is open to rebuke, it should at all hazards be rebuked. On the other hand, St Paul does not warrant Christians in prying into the hidden sins of the world around them and playing the moral detective. Publicity is not a remedy for all evils, but a great aggravation of some, and the surest means of disseminating them. "It is a shame"--a disgrace to our common nature, and a grievous peril to the young and innocent--to fill the public prints with the nauseous details of crime and to taint the air with its putridities.

"But all things," the apostle says--whether it be those open works of darkness, profitless of good, which expose themselves to direct conviction, or the depths of Satan that hide their infamy from the light of day--"all things being reproved by the light, are made manifest"

(ver. 13). The fruit of the light convicts the unfruitful works of darkness. The daily life of a Christian man amongst men of the world is a perpetual reproof, that tells against secret sins of which no word is spoken, of which the reprover never guesses, as well as against open and unblus.h.i.+ng vices.

"This is the condemnation," said Jesus, "that light is come into the world." And this condemnation every one who walks in Christ's steps, and breathes His Spirit amid the corruptions of the world, is carrying on, more frequently in silence than by spoken argument. Our unconscious and spontaneous influence is the most real and effective part of it. Life is the light of men--words only as the index of the life from which they spring. Just so far as our lives touch the conscience of others and reveal the difference between darkness and light, so far do we hold forth the word of life and carry on the Holy Spirit's work in convincing the world of sin. "Let your light so s.h.i.+ne."

This manifestation leads to a transformation: "For everything that is made manifest _is light_" (ver. 13). "You are light in the Lord," St Paul says to his converted Gentile readers,--you who were "once darkness," once wandering in the l.u.s.ts and pleasures of the heathen around you, without hope and without G.o.d. The light of the gospel disclosed, and then dispelled the darkness of that former time; and so it may be with your still heathen kindred, through the light you bring to them. So it will be with the night of sin that is spread over the world. The light which s.h.i.+nes upon sin-laden and sorrowful hearts, s.h.i.+nes on them to change them into its own nature. _The manifested is light_: in other words, if men can be made to see the true nature of their sin, they will forsake it. If the light can but penetrate their conscience, it will save them. "Wherefore He saith:--

Awake, O sleeper; and arise from out of the dead!

And the Christ shall dawn upon thee!"

The speaker of this verse can be no other than G.o.d, or the Spirit of G.o.d in Scripture. The sentence is no mere quotation. It re-utters, in the style of Mary's or Zechariah's song, the promise of the Old Covenant from the lips of the New. It gathers up the import of the prophecies concerning the salvation of Christ, as they sounded in the apostle's ears and as he conveyed them to the world. Isaiah lx. 1-3 supplies the basis of our pa.s.sage, where the prophet awakens Zion from the sleep of the Exile and bids her s.h.i.+ne once more in the glory of her G.o.d and show forth His light to the nations: "Arise," he cries, "s.h.i.+ne, for thy light is come!" There are echoes in the verse, besides, of Isaiah li. 17, xxvi. 19; perhaps even of Jonah i. 6: "What meanest thou, O sleeper?

arise, and call upon thy G.o.d!" We seem to have here, as in chapter iv.

4-6, a s.n.a.t.c.h of the earliest Christian hymns. The lines are a free paraphrase from the Old Testament, formed by weaving together Messianic pa.s.sages--belonging to such a hymn as might be sung at baptisms in the Pauline Churches. Certainly those Churches did not wait until the second century to compose their hymns and spiritual songs (comp. ver. 19). Our Lord's sublime announcement (John v. 25), already verified, that "the hour had come when the dead should hear the voice of the Son of G.o.d, and they that heard should live," gave the key to the prophetic sayings which promised through Israel the light of life to all nations.

With this song on her lips the Church went forth, clad in the armour of light, strong in the joy of salvation; and darkness and the works of darkness fled before her.

FOOTNOTES:

[135] Mr. Wesley adopted this and other emendations from Bengel, "that great light of the Christian world," in the translation accompanying his _Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament_. He there supplied the Methodist preachers with many of the most valuable improvements made in the Revised Version, a hundred years before the time.

[136] The word belongs to Paul's vocabulary; it is found besides in 2 Thess. i. 11; Rom. xv. 14; and Gal. v. 22. See the Commentary on this last epistle in the _Expositor's Bible_, pp. 384, 385.

[137] F. W. Robertson: _Sermons_ (First Series), xix., on "The Kingdom of the Truth."

CHAPTER XXIV.

_THE NEW WINE OF THE SPIRIT._

"Look therefore carefully how ye walk, not as unwise, but as wise; redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.

"And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with the Spirit; speaking one to another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to G.o.d, even the Father; subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ."--EPH. v. 15-21.

Very solemnly did the moral homily to the Asian Christians begin in chapter iv. 17: "This therefore I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles walk." So much has now been said and testified in the intervening paragraphs, by way both of dehortation and exhortation. Here the apostle pauses; and casting his eye over the whole pathway of life he has marked out in this discourse, he bids his readers: "Look then carefully how you walk. Show that you are not fools, but wise to observe your steps and to seize your opportunities in these evil times,--days so perilous that you need your best wisdom and knowledge of G.o.d's will to save you from fatal stumbling."

So far St Paul's renewed exhortation, in verses 15-17, inculcates care and wary discretion,--the skill that in the strategy of life finds its vantage in unequal ground, that makes opposing winds help forward the seafarer. In this sober wisdom it is likely the Asian Christians were deficient. In many ways, both directly and indirectly, the need of increased thoughtfulness on the readers' part has been indicated. But there is another side to the Christian nature: it has its moods of exhilaration, as well as of caution and reflection; ardent emotion, eager speech and exultant song are things proper to a high religious life. For these the apostle makes room in verses 18-20, while the three foregoing verses enjoin the circ.u.mspection and vigilance that become the good soldier of Christ Jesus.

A striking contrast thus arises between the _sobriety_ and the _excitement_ that mark the life of grace. We see with what strictness we must watch over ourselves, and guard the character and interests of the Church; and with what joyousness and holy freedom we may take our part in its communion. Temperament and const.i.tution modify these injunctions in their personal application. The Holy Spirit does not enable us all to speak with equal fervour and freedom, nor to sing with the same tunefulness. His power operates in the limbs of Christ's body "according to the measure of each single part." But the self-same Spirit works in both these contrasted ways,--in the sanguine and the melancholic disposition, in the demonstrative and in the reserved, in the quick play of fancy and the brightness and impulsiveness of youth no less than in the sober gait and solid sense of riper age. Let us see how the two opposite aspects of Christian experience are set out in the apostle's words.