The Expositor's Bible: Ephesians Part 9

CHAPTER IX.

_THE FAR AND NEAR._

"Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncirc.u.mcision by that which is called Circ.u.mcision in the flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without G.o.d in the world: but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometime were far off are made nigh in the blood of Christ."--EPH. ii. 11-13.

The apostle's _Wherefore_ sums up for his readers the record of their salvation rehea.r.s.ed in the previous verses. "You were buried in your sins, sunk in their corruption, ruined by their guilt, living under G.o.d's displeasure and in the power of Satan. All this has pa.s.sed away.

The almighty Hand has raised you with Christ into a heavenly life. G.o.d has become your Father; His love is in your heart; by the strength of His grace you are enabled to walk in the way marked out for you from your creation. _Wherefore remember_: think of what you were, and of what you are!"

To such recollections we do well to summon ourselves. The children of grace love to recall, and on fit occasions recount for G.o.d's glory and the help of their fellows, the way in which G.o.d led them to the knowledge of Himself. In some the great change came suddenly. He "made speed" to save us. It was a veritable resurrection, as signal and unlooked for as the rising of Christ from the dead. By a swift pa.s.sage we were "translated from the power of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love." Once living without G.o.d in the world, we were arrested by a strange providence--through some overthrow of fortune or shock of bereavement, or by a trivial incident touching unaccountably a hidden spring in the mind--and the whole aspect of life was altered in a moment. We saw revealed, as by a lightning flash at night, the emptiness of our own life, the misery of our nature, the folly of our unbelief, the awful presence of _G.o.d_--G.o.d whom we had forgotten and despised! We sought, and found His mercy. From that hour the old things pa.s.sed away: we lived who had been dead,--made alive to G.o.d through Jesus Christ.

This instant conversion, such as Paul experienced, this sharp and abrupt transition from darkness to light, was common in the first generation of Christians, as it is wherever religious awakening takes place in a society that has been largely dead to G.o.d. The advent of Christianity in the Gentile world was much after this fas.h.i.+on,--like a tropical sunrise, in which day leaps on the earth full-born. This experience gives a stamp of peculiar decision to the convictions and character of its subjects.

The change is patent and palpable; no observer can fail to mark it. And it burns itself into the memory with an ineffaceable impression. The violent throes of such a spiritual birth cannot be forgotten.

But if our entrance into the life of G.o.d was gradual, like the dawn of our own milder clime, where the light steals by imperceptible advances upon the darkness--if the glory of the Lord has thus risen upon us, our certainty of its presence may be no less complete, and our remembrance of its coming no less grateful and joyous. One leaps into the new life by a single eager bound; another reaches it by measured, thoughtful steps: but both are _there_, standing side by side on the common ground of salvation in Christ. Both walk in the same light of the Lord, that floods the sky from east to west. The recollections which the latter has to cherish of the leading of G.o.d's kindly light--how He touched our childish thought, and checked gently our boyish waywardness, and mingled reproof with the first stirrings of pa.s.sion and self-will, and wakened the alarms of conscience and the fears of another world, and the sense of the beauty of holiness and the shame of sin,--

"Shaping to truth the froward will Along His narrow way,"--

such remembrances are a priceless treasure, that grows richer as we grow wiser. It awakens a joy not so thrilling nor so prompt in utterance as that of the soul s.n.a.t.c.hed like a brand from the burning, but which pa.s.ses understanding. Blessed are the children of the kingdom, those who have never roamed far from the fold of Christ and the commonwealth of Israel, whom the cross has beckoned onwards from their childhood. But however it was--by whatever means, at whatever time it pleased G.o.d to call you from darkness to His marvellous light, _remember_.

But we must return to Paul and his Gentile readers. The old death in life was to them a sombre reality, keenly and painfully remembered. In that condition of moral night out of which Christ had rescued them, Gentile society around them still remained. Let us observe its features as they are delineated in contrast with the privileges long bestowed on Israel. The Gentile world was _Christless_, _hopeless_, _G.o.dless_. It had no share in the Divine polity framed for the chosen people; the outward mark of its uncirc.u.mcision was a true symbol of its irreligion and debas.e.m.e.nt.

Israel had a _G.o.d_. Besides, there were only "those who are called G.o.ds." This was the first and cardinal distinction. Not their race, not their secular calling, their political or intellectual gifts, but their faith formed the Jews into a nation. They were "the people of G.o.d," as no other people has been--of _the_ G.o.d, for theirs was "the true and living G.o.d"--Jehovah, the I AM, the One, the Alone. The monotheistic belief was, no doubt, wavering and imperfect in the ma.s.s of the nation in early times; but it was held by the ruling minds amongst them, by the men who have shaped the destiny of Israel and created its Bible, with increasing clearness and intensity of pa.s.sion. "All the G.o.ds of the nations are idols--vapours, phantoms, nothings!--but Jehovah made the heavens." It was the ancestral faith that glowed in the breast of Paul at Athens, amidst the fairest shrines of Greece, when he "saw the city wholly given to idolatry"--man's highest art and the toil and piety of ages lavished on things that were no G.o.ds; and in the midst of the splendour of a hollow and decaying Paganism he read the confession that G.o.d was "unknown."

Ephesus had her famous G.o.ddess, wors.h.i.+pped in the most sumptuous pile of architecture that the ancient world contained. Behold the proud city, "temple-keeper of the great G.o.ddess Artemis," filled with wrath!

Infuriate Demos flashes fire from his thousand eyes, and his brazen throat roars hoa.r.s.e vengeance against the insulters of "her magnificence, whom all Asia and the world wors.h.i.+ppeth"! Without G.o.d--_atheists_, in fact, the apostle calls this devout Asian population; and Artemis of Ephesus, and Athene, and Cybele of Smyrna, and Zeus and Asclepius of Pergamum, though all the world wors.h.i.+p them, are but "creatures of art and man's device."

The Pagans retorted this reproach. "Away with _the atheists_!" they cried, when Christians were led to execution. Ninety years after this time the martyr Polycarp was brought into the arena before the magistrates of Asia and the populace gathered in Smyrna at the great Ionic festival. The Proconsul, wis.h.i.+ng to spare the venerable man, said to him: "Swear by the Fortune of Caesar; and say, Away with the atheists!" But Polycarp, as the story continues, "with a grave look gazing on the crowd of lawless Gentiles in the stadium and shaking his hand against them, then groaning and looking up to heaven, said, _Away with the atheists_!" Pagan and Christian were each G.o.dless in the eyes of the other. If visible temples and images, and the local wors.h.i.+p of each tribe or city made a G.o.d, then Jews and Christians had none: if G.o.d was a Spirit--One, Holy, Almighty, Omnipresent--then polytheists were in truth atheists; their many G.o.ds, being many, were no G.o.ds; they were idols,--_eidola_, illusive shows of the G.o.dhead.

The more thoughtful and pious among the heathen felt this already. When the apostle denounced the idols and their pompous wors.h.i.+p as "these vanities," his words found an echo in the Gentile conscience. The cla.s.sical Paganism held the mult.i.tude by the force of habit and local pride, and by its sensuous and artistic charms; but such religious power as it once had was gone. In all directions it was undermined by mystic Oriental and Egyptian rites, to which men resorted in search of a religion and sick of the old fables, ever growing more debased, that had pleased their fathers. The majesty of Rome in the person of the Emperor, the one visible supreme power, was seized upon by the popular instinct, even more than it was imposed by state policy, and made to fill the vacuum; and temples to Augustus had already risen in Asia, side by side with those of the ancient G.o.ds.

In this despair of their ancestral religions many piously disposed Gentiles turned to Judaism for spiritual help; and the synagogue was surrounded in the Greek cities by a circle of earnest proselytes. From their ranks St Paul drew a large proportion of his hearers and converts.

When he writes, "Remember that you were at that time _without G.o.d_," he is within the recollection of his readers; and they will bear him out in testifying that their heathen creed was dead and empty to the soul. Nor did philosophy construct a creed more satisfying. Its G.o.ds were the Epicurean deities who dwell aloof and careless of men; or the supreme Reason and Necessity of the Stoics, the _anima mundi_, of which human souls are fleeting and fragmentary images. "Deism finds G.o.d only in heaven; Pantheism, only on earth; Christianity alone finds Him both in heaven and on earth" (Harless). The Word made flesh reveals _G.o.d in the world_.

When the apostle says "without G.o.d _in the world_," this qualification is both reproachful and sorrowful. To be without G.o.d in the world that He has made, where His "eternal power and G.o.dhead" have been visible from creation, argues a darkened and perverted heart.[86] To be without G.o.d in the world is to be in the wilderness, without a guide; on a stormy ocean, without harbour or pilot; in sickness of spirit, without medicine or physician; to be hungry without bread, and weary without rest, and dying with no light of life. It is to be an orphaned child, wandering in an empty, ruined house.

In these words we have an echo of Paul's preaching to the Gentiles, and an indication of the line of his appeals to the conscience of the enlightened pagans of his time. The despair of the age was darker than the human mind has known before or since. Matthew Arnold has painted it all in one verse of those lines, ent.i.tled _Obermann once more_, in which he so perfectly expresses the better spirit of modern scepticism.

"On that hard Pagan world disgust And secret loathing fell; Deep weariness and sated l.u.s.t Made human life a h.e.l.l."

The saying by which St Paul reproved the Corinthians, "Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," is the common sentiment of pagan epitaphs of the time. Here is an extant specimen of the kind: "Let us drink and be merry; for we shall have no more kissing and dancing in the kingdom of Proserpine. Soon shall we fall asleep, to wake no more." Such were the thoughts with which men came back from the grave-side. It is needless to say how depraving was the effect of this hopelessness. At Athens, in the more religious times of Socrates, it was even considered a decent and kindly thing to allow a criminal condemned to death to spend his last hours in gross sensual indulgence. There is no reason to suppose that the extinction of the Christian hope of immortality would prove less demoralizing. We are "saved by hope," said St Paul: we are ruined by despair. Pessimism of creed for most men means pessimism of conduct.

Our modern speech and literature and our habits of feeling have been for so many generations steeped in the influence of Christ's teaching, and it has thrown so many tender and hallowed thoughts around the state of our beloved dead, that it is impossible even for those who are personally without hope in Christ to realize what its general decay and disappearance would mean. To have possessed such a treasure, and then to lose it! to have cherished antic.i.p.ations so exalted and so dear,--and to find them turn out a mockery! The age upon which this calamity fell would be of all ages the most miserable.

The hope of Israel which Paul preached to the Gentiles was a hope for the world and for the nations, as well as for the individual soul. "The commonwealth [or _polity_] of Israel" and "the covenants of promise"

guaranteed the establishment of the Messianic kingdom upon earth. This expectation took amongst the ma.s.s of the Jews a materialistic and even a revengeful shape; but in one form or other it belonged, and still belongs to every man of Israel. Those n.o.ble lines of Virgil in his fourth Eclogue[87]--like the words of Caiaphas, an unintended Christian prophecy--which predicted the return of justice and the spread of a golden age through the whole world under the rule of the coming heir of Caesar, had been signally belied by the imperial house in the century that had elapsed. Never were human prospects darker than when the apostle wrote as Nero's prisoner in Rome. It was an age of crime and horror. The political world and the system of pagan society seemed to be in the throes of dissolution. Only in "the commonwealth of Israel" was there a light of hope and a foundation for the future of mankind; and of this in its wisdom the world knew nothing.

The Gentiles were "alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,"--that is to say, treated as aliens and made such by their exclusion. By the very fact of Israel's election, the rest of mankind were shut out of the visible kingdom of G.o.d. They became mere _Gentiles_, or _nations_,--a herd of men bound together only by natural affinity, with no "covenant of promise," no religious const.i.tution or destiny, no definite relations.h.i.+p to G.o.d, Israel being alone the acknowledged and organized "_people_ of Jehovah."

These distinctions were summed up in one word, expressing all the pride of the Jewish nature, when the Israelites styled themselves "the Circ.u.mcision." The rest of the world--Philistines or Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, or Barbarians, it mattered not--were "the Uncirc.u.mcision." How superficial this distinction was in point of fact, and how false the a.s.sumption of moral superiority it implied in the existing condition of Judaism, St Paul indicates by saying, "those who are _called_ Uncirc.u.mcision by that which is _called_ Circ.u.mcision, in flesh, wrought by human hands." In the second and third chapters of his epistle to the Romans he exposed the hollowness of Jewish sanct.i.ty, and brought his fellow-countrymen down to the level of those "sinners of the Gentiles"

whom they so bitterly despised.

The dest.i.tution of the Gentile world is put into a single word, when the apostle says: "You were at that time _separate from Christ_"--without a Christ, either come or coming. They were deprived of the world's one treasure,--shut out, as it appeared, for ever[88] from any part in Him who is to mankind all things and in all.--_Once far off!_

"But now in Christ Jesus ye were _made nigh_." What is it that has bridged the distance, that has transported these Gentiles from the wilderness of heathenism into the midst of the city of G.o.d? It is "the blood of Christ." The sacrificial death of Jesus Christ transformed the relations of G.o.d to mankind, and of Israel to the Gentiles. In Him G.o.d reconciled not a nation, but "a world" to Himself (2 Cor. v. 19). The death of the Son of man could not have reference to the sons of Abraham alone. If sin is universal and death is not a Jewish but a human experience, and if one blood flows in the veins of all our race, then the death of Jesus Christ was a universal sacrifice; it appeals to every man's conscience and heart, and puts away for each the guilt which comes between his soul and G.o.d.

When the Greeks in Pa.s.sion week desired to see Him, He exclaimed: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw _all_ unto me." The cross of Jesus was to draw humanity around it, by its infinite love and sorrow, by the perfect apprehension there was in it of the world's guilt and need, and the perfect submission to the sentence of G.o.d's law against man's sin. So wherever the gospel was preached by St Paul, it won Gentile hearts for Christ. Greek and Jew found themselves weeping together at the foot of the cross, sharing one forgiveness and baptized into one Spirit.

The union of Caiaphas and Pilate in the condemnation of Jesus and the mingling of the Jewish crowd with the Roman soldiers at His execution were a tragic symbol of the new age that was coming. Israel and the Gentiles were accomplices in the death of the Messiah--the former of the two the more guilty partner in the counsel and deed. If this Jesus whom they slew and hanged on a tree was indeed the Christ, G.o.d's chosen, then what availed their Abrahamic sons.h.i.+p, their covenants and law-keeping, their proud religious eminence? They had killed their Christ; they had forfeited their calling. His blood was on them and on their children.

Those who seemed nigh to G.o.d, at the cross of Christ were found far off,--that both together, the far and the near, might be reconciled and brought back to G.o.d. "He shut up all unto disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all."

FOOTNOTES:

[86] Rom. i. 19-23; comp. John i. 10: "He [the true Light] was _in the world_, and the world knew Him not."

[87]

Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna; Jam nova progenies clo demitt.i.tur alto.

Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum Desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo, Casta, fave, Lucina.

[88] Observe the perfect participle ?p????t???????, which signifies an abiding fact or fixed condition. Similar is the turn of expression in ch. iii. 9, and in Col. i. 26, Rom. xvi. 25, Matt. xiii. 35.

CHAPTER X.

_THE DOUBLE RECONCILIATION._

"For He is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle wall of part.i.tion, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, _even_ the law of commandments _contained_ in ordinances, that He might create in Himself of the twain one new man, _so_ making peace; and might reconcile them both in one body unto G.o.d through the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: and He came and preached good tidings of peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that were nigh: for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit unto the Father."--EPH. ii. 14-18.

_Peace, peace--to the far off, and to the near!_ Such was G.o.d's promise to His scattered people in the times of the exile (Isai. lvii. 19). St Paul sees that peace of G.o.d extending over a yet wider field, and terminating a longer and sadder banishment than the prophet had foreseen. Christ is "our peace"--not for the divided members of Israel alone, but for all the tribes of men. He brings about a universal pacification.

There were two distinct, but kindred enmities to be overcome by Christ, in preaching to the world His good tidings of peace (ver. 17). There was the hostility of Jew and Gentile, which was removed in its cause and principle when Christ "in His flesh" (by His incarnate life and death) "abolished the law of commandments in decrees"--_i.e._, the law of Moses as it const.i.tuted a body of external precepts determining the way of righteousness and life. This abolition of the law by the evangelical principle "dissolved the middle wall of part.i.tion." The occasion of quarrel between Israel and the world was destroyed; the barrier disappeared that had for so long fenced off the privileged ground of the sons of Abraham (vv. 14, 15). But behind this human enmity, underneath the feud and rancour existing between the Jews and the nations, there lay the deeper quarrel of mankind with G.o.d. Both enmities centred in the law; both were slain by one stroke, in the reconciliation of the cross (ver. 16).

The Jewish and Gentile peoples formed two distinct types of humanity.

Politically, the Jews were insignificant and had scarcely counted amongst the great powers of the world. Their religion alone gave them influence and importance. Bearing his inspired Scriptures and his Messianic hope, the wandering Israelite confronted the vast ma.s.ses of heathenism and the splendid and fascinating cla.s.sical civilization with the proudest sense of his superiority. To his G.o.d he knew well that one day every knee would bow and every tongue confess. The circ.u.mstances of the time deepened his isolation and aggravated to internecine hate his spite against his fellow-men, the _adversus omnes alios hostile odium_ stigmatized by the incisive pen of Tacitus. Within three years of the writing of this letter the Jewish war against Rome broke out, when the enmity culminated in the most appalling and fateful overthrow recorded in the pages of history. Now, it is this enmity at its height--the most inveterate and desperate one can conceive--that the apostle proposes to reconcile; nay, that he sees already slain by the sacrifice of the cross, and within the brotherhood of the Christian Church. It was slain in the heart of Saul of Tarsus, the proudest that beat in Jewish breast.

In his earlier writings the apostle has been concerned chiefly to guard the position and rights of the two parties within the Church. He has abundantly maintained, especially in the epistle to the Galatians, the claims of Gentile believers in Christ against Judaic a.s.sumptions and impositions. He has defended the just prerogative of the Jew and his hereditary sentiments from the contempt to which they were sometimes exposed on the part of the Gentile majority.[89] But now that this has been done, and that Gentile liberties and Jewish dignity have been vindicated and safeguarded on both sides, St Paul advances a step further: he seeks to amalgamate the Jewish and Gentile section of the Church, and to "make of the twain one new man, so making peace." This, he declares, was the end of Christ's mission; this a chief purpose of His atoning death. Only by such union, only through the burying of the old enmity slain on the cross, could His Church be built up to its completeness. St Paul would have Gentile and Jewish believers everywhere forget their differences, efface their party lines, and merge their independence in the oneness of the all-embracing and all-perfecting Church of Jesus Christ, G.o.d's habitation in the Spirit. Instead of saying that a catholic ideal like this belongs to a later and post-apostolic age, we maintain, on the contrary, that a catholic mind like St Paul's, under the conditions of his time, could not fail to arrive at this conception.

It was his confidence in the victory of the cross over all strife and sin that sustained St Paul through these years of captivity. As he looks out from his Roman prison, under the shadow of Nero's palace, the future is invested with a radiance of hope that makes the heart of the chained apostle exult within him. The world is lost, to all outward seeming: he knows it is saved! Jew and Gentile are about to close in mortal conflict: he proclaims peace between them, a.s.sured of their reconcilement, and knowing that in their reunion the salvation of human society is a.s.sured.