04. Chapter 4

Chapter 4 The subject pursued--The supreme place of Christ in the Epistle--How this met the special spiritual danger in view--Significance of this for our own day--The possible scene and details of the writing of the Epistle.

Now do we not rightly see in the Epistle to the Ephesians the less direct but still fully intentional reply to the ’Colossian heresy’? It is a reply in advance, and therefore less explicit, but still a reply. As we read the first chapter, the second, and the third, the personal glory of Christ glows through all. The mighty theme is treated indeed, in Ephesians, if I may say so with reverence, under wider and more elaborate adjustments than in Colossians. Observe the great space (this will be reviewed more fully in the next chapter) given in Ephesians to the purpose and action of the Eternal Father; to this we have no complete equivalent in Colossians. Observe again in Ephesians the mass of truth given us about the Eternal Spirit; this feature is quite absent from Colossians. (I can hardly doubt that, as I hinted before, it is mainly with a view to this all-important supplement--the doctrine of the Spirit--that St Paul asks the Colossians to get and read ’the Epistle from Laodicea,’ i.e., if we think aright with Ussher, our ’Ephesians.’) We observe again that the thought of the Church is very largely developed in Ephesians from the comparatively brief mention of it in Colossians. ’The blessed company of all faithful people’ is viewed in this sublime picture as lifted almost wholly above the limitary conditions of time. It shines before us even as it is visible in its ultimate reality to God. It appears as a body in which every member lives, with life indeed; in which every part contributes effectually to the vitality of the whole. In its individuals alike and in its total it follows now and for ever the line of a pre-temporal and sovereign electing grace. It obeys everywhere the touch of the sealing Spirit. It receives into every heart of all its membership the indwelling Lord. It is developing and ascending (Ephesians 2:21-22) with infallible precision towards the hour in which it will eternally be God’s ’habitation in the Spirit.’ The Apostle cannot leave the possessing theme. He has to speak, and that with the utmost practicality, of the sanctities of Christian marriage; and behold he gives us, by the way, that tenderest of revelations (Ephesians 5:22-32), the Song of Songs in its New Testament interpretation, where the Lord Christ ’nourisheth and cherisheth,’ ’as His own flesh,’ His Bride, this wonderful Church, the Church which He loved, for which He gave Himself, and which hereafter He will present to Himself all glorified (ἔνδοξον) in the open Bridal of heaven. But these great developments of revelation and instruction about the Eternal Father, and the Eternal Spirit, and the living universal Church, are all, for the main purpose of the Epistle, grouped around and illuminated by the revelation of the glory of Christ. The purpose of the Eternal Father is above all things the glorification of His Son, and of Himself through Him and through His Son’s fair Bride. The work of the Holy Spirit is above all things, for the individual, to strengthen the will (Ephesians 3:16) for that entire surrender of faith which opens the door to the lasting indwelling of Christ in the heart, and so to the experience of His love which transcends all knowledge. For the Church, the function of the Spirit is so to rule every member as to secure the real oneness (Ephesians 4:4) of the whole organism under the blessed Head, the exalted Christ. And the life and glory of the Church vitally depends upon its growing up (Ephesians 4:15) in its every member, in all things, ’into Him.’ To Him it is ’subject’ (Ephesians 5:24). The Church is ’His fulness,’ His πλήρωμα (Ephesians 1:22), that is to say, the sphere of the realization of all His purposes, the means for the manifestation of all His grace. Such is Christ to the Church that (if with humblest reverence it may be said) the Christ of God, regarded in His official glories, is ’not Himself except as He is in union with His true and living Church. For her He is indeed all things in all things. Is she Bride? He is Bridegroom. Is she Temple? He is Cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20). Is she Body? He is Head (Ephesians 1:22), not only to think and order, to preside and rule, but also and with everything else to minister life (Ephesians 4:16), and every moment to be her Safe-keeper (Ephesians 5:23). The vital requisite for all her members is to hear Him, to be taught in Him (Ephesians 4:20), to have their ’hearts’ eyes’ opened (Ephesians 1:18) that they may know the mighty import of His resurrection and of His exaltation far above every name named in this world and the next, and His headship, and His individual indwelling (Ephesians 3:17)--not fitful but permanent (κατοικῆσαι)--in the heart. Is the believing company regarded as the subject of an eternal choice? ’We were chosen in Him before the foundation of the world’ (Ephesians 1:4). It is regarded in its present union with the now historically exalted One? Its members were once spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1), dislocated from God in the Fall, children of wrath--exposed to that infinite divine repulsion of all that is not in harmony with God which the Scripture calls His wrath. But they were (Ephesians 2:10) ’created’ (a new creation) ’in Christ Jesus, unto good works.’ This wonderful Christ so took them into relation with Himself that He gave Himself for them in death (Ephesians 5:2), so that they are ’made near in His blood’ (Ephesians 2:13); God ’in Him’ forgave them (Ephesians 4:32); Christ’s resurrection was as theirs, and even His ascension was as theirs, in respect of this most sacred union of Church and Lord (Ephesians 2:6); where He is, and because He is there, there are His living members, in the sense that they are welcomed in Him now to the very heart of the Father, and, in the Father’s purpose, are already glorified in His glory. He is with them; yes, no further off than in their hearts, by faith. But also they are with Him, no lower down than ’in the heavenly regions’ in their Lord (Ephesians 2:6). As to experience, they find His riches to be unsearchable (Ephesians 3:8). They have perfect freedom of utterance (παρρησία) through Him in an unhindered approach to the Father (Ephesians 2:18; Ephesians 3:12). They are light in Him their Lord (Ephesians 5:8). They love Him ἐν ἀφθαρσίᾳ (Ephesians 6:24), with a pure, immortal, genuine love, discovering His illimitable love to them. In Him already they, believing, may boldly say σεσωσμένοι ἐσμέν (Ephesians 2:5; Ephesians 2:8), ’we have been saved,’ ’by grace.’ And all the means and ways by which that salvation is worked out for them into realization are of and for Him. The ’laver of water’ (Ephesians 5:26), which signifies and seals the bridal union, is His. From Him, as the gift of His ascension, comes the ordered Ministry which leads and shepherds them (Ephesians 4:8, etc.), and (as to its main function, so we learn, Ephesians 4:12) aims to equip and stimulate all ’the saints’ for their ’ministration’--πρὸς τὸν καταρτισμὸν τῶν ἁγίων εἰς ἔργον διακονίας, εἰς οἰκοδομὴν τοῦ σώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ--’to the furnishing forth of the saints for (their) work of service, for (their) upbuilding of the body of Christ.’

I have thus attempted to indicate with some fulness of detail the place in Ephesians of our Lord Jesus Christ. The result is quite imperfect of course. For in order to any completeness of appreciation we need to read the whole Epistle, with the light of its Inspirer upon it. So seen, Christ radiates from it all. He is the One Beloved of the Eternal Father; He is the one peace, life, law, joy and hope of the saint, and of the Church. On Him the man rests, in Him he moves. By and to Him he lives, alike in the inward life of faith and in the exterior things of neighbourhood, of service, of mastership, of marriage, of parentage, of all that is meant by home. Surrounded by personal powers of spiritual evil (Ephesians 6:14, etc.), the Church, the Christian, is strong only in Him, armed with Him. Watched by personal powers of good (Ephesians 3:10), the Church is the revelation to them, ’to the principalities and powers in heavenly places, of the manifold wisdom of God, according to the plan of the ages (κατὰ πρόθεσιν τῶν αἰώνων) which He planned in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ It is not too much to say that the whole Epistle, as it falls obviously into the two main sections of Spiritual Truth (Ephesians 1:1-23; Ephesians 2:1-22; Ephesians 3:1-21) and Spiritual Living (Ephesians 4:1-32; Ephesians 5:1-33; Ephesians 6:1-24), may be summed up in the two corresponding mottoes, Christ our Salvation, Christ our Law. ’In all things’ indeed ’He hath the preeminence’ here.

It is thus that St Paul, apprised of the theosophic ceremonialism which had infected Asian Colossae, prepares Ephesus and Asia in advance to throw it off. He pours into their spiritual system, into all their thought and all their life, the glory of Christ. To the unwholesome and unlawful intrusions into the unseen which were the temptation of numberless minds then, as they are now, and more and more acutely so now as a second paganism makes its way in our nominal Christendom, he opposes beforehand this absolutely unique Object of knowledge and of faith, of reason and of adoration. He uplifts Jesus Christ our Lord, historical--for He died and rose; eternal--for we were chosen in Him before the world was founded; the purpose of all ages was laid in Him; His wealth cannot be tracked out; His love transcends for all our knowing. St Paul presents Him to the Asians in his relation to our sins, in their guilt; that point which not only theosophy by its nature tends to ignore but which unilluminated human thought in general likes to avoid. He speaks of our ’death in trespasses and sins,’ and of divine wrath, and of a forgiveness, an acceptance, vitally connected with the Blood, the Cross, the Lord’s giving of Himself for us.

Here were antidotes alike to the slumbers of reverie and to the deep exhaustion incident to all efforts after moral purity which are un-related to atoning grace. He meets the requests of the soul for insight into eternal secrets by unfolding something better than visions of angelic mediation with its countless arches of an impossible bridge between the finite and the infinite; he shows them Jesus Christ, spanning at once that gulph in His real oneness with both its sides. He shows them this Lord Jesus Christ the Father’s Beloved, the divine King of Angels, the Head and Life of believing man, as not only the central Fact of an immovable creed, but the mysterious while genuine Experience of the believing soul. Here was an esoteric life indeed; only it was entered by an open door, on which was sprinkled the atoning blood; and it was flooded from within by the daylight of truth and of pure love.

Then he brings the whole directly home into the realities of human life. The system which he had in view, and against which he would guard the Asian saints, never really gravitated towards the realities of life, nor could do so Alike its mysticism and its ceremonialism tended away from the simple but inestimable charities and sanctities of common things. They tended to lodge saintship in an ambitious speculative insight, or in a distorted and misdirected physical asceticism, or in both. The Jesus Christ of history, and of heaven, bore at once and always upon the smallest and most common things of the day, as well as upon the past or the future of an eternal plan. In Him the same disciple who found that inmost secret, ’Christ dwelling in the heart by faith,’ would find, once rightly directed, that other secret, how to live quite through the next common human day delivered from self-will, humble and modest pure and true, punctual and faithful in relationship and intercourse; ’doing the will of God’ in these things ’from the soul’ (Ephesians 6:6). Yet the two secrets, that of the blissful experience and that of the serving life, were one secret at the root. They resided not in an idea, but in a Person. It was all the Lord Jesus Christ. Is it out of place to press the significance of this great phenomenon of the Ephesian Epistle, in view not only of the needs of Asia long ago, but of those of our own life today? Amidst many dangerous symptoms of this age, two, pregnant with great hurt to the glory of Christ in Christendom, are already prominent. The one is a powerful drift towards a disproportioned externalism, not only in modes of worship but in modes and aims of activity and enterprise. The other, natural child of the unlawful parentage of an age of materialistic denials, is a diseased internalism, a restless craving for strange commerce with the unseen. Prevalent far and wide below the surface of our Christian society, that surface which heaves and often breaks asunder with forces of rebellious thought and will, it is at least possible that the next generation, at latest, may find this dark rival of Revelation threatening and aggressive around the Church. Only a few weeks ago I read the report of an occasion when, in a place of Christian worship, and under the presidency of its pastor, the apostoless of modern theosophy, the enthusiastic and able woman who, once a materialist, now preaches in India and England the creed of Mahatmas and of astral bodies, gave by invitation, and with a welcome, a discourse upon her faith. If this is possible already, what will be done in the dry tree? Now I dare to say that there is only one adequate antidote for our day, as for St Paul’s, in view of these complicated wanderings of life and thought in matters of religion. It is the glorification of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Christ of the Holy Scriptures, the Christ, let us say now, of the Epistle to the Ephesians. For us pastors and teachers this is the work above all others, in our ministerial utterance and in our ministerial walk. We must ’preach Christ Jesus as Lord’ (2 Corinthians 4:5), and Christ Jesus as Life, and Christ Jesus as Law. We must lead our brethren by every means of word and work to understand and know Him, in His glory of Person, of Office, of Work, of Power, of Love. We must labour to give them insight into Jesus Christ God and Man, Jesus Christ living and dying, dead and risen again, glorified, enthroned, mediating, dwelling in the heart by faith, and coming again. And we must labour at the delightful but solemn work of applying this same Lord to the facts and duties of life, in the state, in the mart, in the school, in the home, and, below yet also above all, (for without this all else is vain, if people would but see it,) in the will, the life, the man.

Other things ought we to do. But in the name of every need of our age let us not leave this undone. Let us labour at the glorification of the Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the true God, Head of the living Church, Dweller in the believing heart, that He may live and work in the life that issues from it among men.

Only in a few lines do I touch the subject of the personal surroundings of the writer as he composed the Epistle. And this will be enough; for in this matter we have little to do but to indulge an innocent pictorial liberty, that we may just touch our study of the Epistle with some local colour. So we will call it a spring day in the year 63, when Favonius is beginning to breathe, and the seas to open, and Tychicus, who has been long at the Apostle’s side, is preparing to travel from Italy to Asia. The place, we will say, is a floor, a flat, in some block of building near the great camp of the Guards (castra prœtoriana) outside the eastern wall of Rome. There is the ’hired lodging’ of St Paul. His window looks out over what is now the grey-green sea of the Campagna; it was then a landscape brilliant with white villas, and woods, and little towns. He sits to dictate; he is not able, as once, to move freely, to walk as he speaks, for that long chain of iron links fastens him day and night to the sentinel who is his enforced companion; sometimes no doubt a reckless, ribald, and most unwilling companion, but today, we will suppose, one of the many who assuredly learnt Christ from Paul in those hours of infinite opportunity. Observe the fast aging Missionary; the small, slight frame is bent and battered; the eyes are dim, and troubled with disease; but there is an ethereal air in the arches of the brow, and a wonderful power and tenderness in the mobile lips.^[4] Yonder is Epaphras beside him; he has been talking again of Colossae and the Lycus, and of the needs and dangers, as well as of the loving life, of the believers there. There on the other side is Tychicus, with the pen of reed and the strips of papyrus, ready to do the writer’s part. Beside him lie two finished scrolls, the Letter to Colossae and the Note to Philemon. The saints have worshipped. They are sure of the Lord, of His glory, and of His love. The Apostle knows that he has received his Gospel ’not of man, nor through man, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ’ (Galatians 1:1; Galatians 1:12). And in the calm assurance of his commission, and of the eternal truth, he dictates his letter to Ephesus for the missions of Asia.

^[4]I get my suggestions from the medallion, probably of the second century at latest engraved in Lewin’s Life of St Paul, ii. 411.