05. Chapter 5

Chapter 5 The Epistle approached for direct study--As if it were a newly-discovered document--Its doctrine of the Eternal Father--His primacy--Dr A. Bonar’s illustration--The Father’s Creatorship--Wrath--Sovereignty--Love--His relation to the redeeming Son--In whom alone we can meet Him. in peace--His relation to the Holy Spirit.

We have now in some sort examined the main literary and historical questions raised by the Epistle. In our last study particularly an answer was attempted to the question why precisely the Epistle was written. In the course of that answer we have already, of necessity, reviewed some of the contents of Ephesians, and primarily that large and glorious element, the witness of the Epistle to the preeminence, all-necessity and all-sufficiency of Christ. In the space which now remains I shall ask my reader to come directly and explicitly to the teaching of the Epistle; to scrutinize the pages with reverent care for their treasures of truth and of life, not for historical but for spiritual purposes. In the present chapter and in the next to it I propose to examine the testimony of Ephesians on one or two great matters of belief. In our final studies we shall collect and review its account of the true disciple’s true life. In this simple enterprise of research let us give a little exercise to our imagination, taking a perfectly lawful direction, with a view only and directly to the assistance of thought and faith. Let us imagine, so far as we can--of course imperfectly at the best, but so far as we can--that in the Epistle to the Ephesians we have not, as we have, a document incorporated from the first into the open volume of the Christian Scriptures, but one which has been recently disinterred from ages of oblivion. Let us try in some measure to regard it, for our purpose, as if it were in this respect like The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, the recovery of which a few years ago awoke so deep and eager a curiosity in all studious Christian circles, and far beyond them; or again like The Apology of Aristides, which more lately has occasioned a similar stir of inquiry. For us today this letter shall be a new thing, a ’find,’ brought lately from some sepulchre in Egypt or from the library of some Asiatic monastery. It has been examined and tested, and it bears on its face, and in its depths, proofs of its origin in the apostolic age, nay, the seals of the authorship of St Paul. With something like the minute attention and animated interest which such conditions would instantly excite we will take up again our Ephesian Epistle, and ask it what it says.

I need not apologize for the thought. The whole thing is of course a case of the per impossibile. Not only can no mental effort quite make the thing which is so sacredly familiar really seem to us thus crudely new; but in supposing the discovery now, after ages of slumber, of an apostolic Epistle, great and authoritative, we suppose what is forbidden alike by the history of the Church of God and by faith in the providence of the God of Scripture. But we may, for a purpose, try to imagine anything. And our purpose here is just to shake off, if we may, something of that use and habitude which lets us too readily ’take’ Scripture ’as read,’ even while we are reading it. We want to brush away the dust of an otiose familiarity from the sacred Word, that we may read the divine legend in a sharper definition, and in all its lines. We would remind ourselves thus by an artificial shock of what is all the while, thank God, the present and lasting fact. We would realize afresh that we have here before us nothing short of the message of our Master, given through His own contemporary Delegate, telling us what to believe and how to live. To scrutinize thus the Epistle to the Ephesians for its theology at large would not be possible in our short space. Nor indeed would it be necessary. I speak in these pages as to brother-teachers, fellow-ministers of the Word of God. All I need is to offer what such readers may think worth the hearing by way of specimen and suggestion, to be bettered in their own inexhaustible work of pastoral teaching, as they may please, or rather as they may be led by our heavenly Master’s hand.

Here then I take up our new-found Epistle, and scrutinize it as a primeval, apostolic informant on two great topics of Theology, in the strictest sense of that much misused word, Theology. We will trace its doctrine of the Father, and then, in the next chapter, its doctrine of the Spirit. May the light of the Spirit, by the mercy of the Father, rest upon our brief study.

I. The Doctrine of the Epistle concerning the Eternal Father.

I select this infinitely sacred article partly because in our last study we were much occupied with the doctrine of the Epistle concerning our Lord Jesus Christ, Whose sacred Name in its majesty and divine endearment is, as I sought to show, the immediate watchword of Ephesians. Christ is indeed everywhere in it, and on purpose. And assuredly He is seen in it as being, while Human and Historical, also Eternal and Divine. His Godhead is nowhere explicitly affirmed, but it is everywhere assumed. With the Father He is the Giver of grace and peace (Ephesians 1:2). He fills all in all (Ephesians 1:23). His love passes knowledge (Ephesians 3:19). To love Him in spiritual purity (Ephesians 6:24) is the breath of the Christian life. In Him ’the purpose of the ages’ resides, and is to be eternally developed (Ephesians 3:2). Such a Being cannot be too absolutely trusted, too humbly adored, too unreservedly and everlastingly delighted in by the human soul. But that is to say that He is, in the proper sense, Divine. When it is a Scripture that makes these claims for Him, the claim means Deity. But exactly therefore it is all-important to read the Epistle for its doctrine of the Father.

’Hail, son of God, Saviour of men; Thy name Shall be the copious matter of my song Henceforth, nor ever shall my harp Thy praise Forget, nor from Thy Father’s praise disjoin.’ So sings the great poet, rightly.^[5] He glorifies Christ, but only so as to glorify in Him the Father. And all true Theology contributes its music to that strain. We remember indeed, with thanksgiving and worship, what St Chrysostom has nobly said, commenting on Php 2:2, that our utmost thought of the glory of Christ, our magnification of our Saviour-God above all heights and heavens, is all the while necessarily a tribute to the Father; for what must He be who is the true and eternal Father of such a Son? But then we remember too that we need, deliberately and consciously, worshipping the Son, to direct our worship so; to bear in our minds not only His glorious Godhead but his most blessed Filiation. He is Eternal; He is Necessary. He in His supreme Nature is as infinitely different from creaturehood as is the Father. But then, in the sphere of uncreated Being, He is, necessarily and eternally, the Son; He is ’of the Father.’ So, to glorify our beloved Lord without continual reference of our love and praise to the Father through Him, is an aberration from His own Gospel; and it may bring grave spiritual loss to the worshipper, where he least thinks of it.

^[5]Paradise Lost, iii. 412.

I recall, from some four or five years ago, a discourse by that true saint of God, the late Dr Andrew Bonar. To his soul, at once deep and full of sunshine, Christ was indeed all in all. At fourscore he would speak on all occasions of Him in whom he lived (and whom now he beholds in the heavenly rest) with more than the beautiful warmth of the ’first love.’ But therefore, so it seemed to me, he all the more delighted to pass on in due order to the theme of the love and glory of his Lord’s everlasting Father. He had been lately reading, when I met him, Mr Stanley’s striking account of his passage near the great range of Ruwenzori, the source of the abundant waters of inner equatorial Africa. Only now and then in the year do the worlds of mist roll away from those giant hills; the descending floods rush down their channels as if born directly of the clouds. But then, in some rare and favourable hour, the veil rises, and you see the snows of the vast and radiant heights, the majestic cause of the rivers and the fertility. Somewhat thus it is with the Christian, said my venerable friend, when he gets, in the Word of God, under the light of the Spirit, through the Name of the beloved Son, some sight of the glory of the Father, some view of Him in His life, His will, His love, His power. He sees the ultimate Source of all the waters of the life eternal. But now again to the Epistle, and its deliverance on this first Article. What does our new-discovered document say to it? We shall find the word ’Father’ often as we turn the pages; and often also we shall find the word ’God’ used in connexions which point, more or less obviously, to the Father in personal distinction from the Son. On this use of the word ’God’ Pearson remarks (Exposition, p. 40, margin): ’The name of the Father speaks nothing of dependence, nor supposeth any kind of priority in another. From hence it is observed that the name of God, taken absolutely, is often in the Scriptures spoken as of the Father; as when we read of God sending His own Son; of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God.’ And he quotes a sentence from a corner in the patristic literature of the eighth century, from Theodorus Abucara (opusc. 42) to the effect that ’the Apostles, and the Holy Scriptures almost universally, when they say God, thus, absolutely and undistinctively (ἀπολύτως καὶἀπροσδιορίστως), and commonly without the article (ἀνάρθρως), and without special mention of Person, indicate the Father.’ I refer to this here that it may not. be needful to dwell upon it in each instance. Our Epistle in its imagined newness lies before us. We ask for its doctrine of the Father; in His Person and operation in general; and then in His relation to the Son, to the Spirit, to the Church, and to the members of the Church.

’The Father’ is His brief august designation in Ephesians 3:14; for we certainly must remove there from the text the words ’of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ ’Father’ is given there as almost absolutely His style. No explicit mention is made of the reference of His Paternity, whether to the Eternal Son, or to the Church in Him. Only this latter is not quite out of sight, if we retain (as I for one would do) the A.V. of Ephesians 3:15, ’from whom the wholeπατριὰ in heaven and earth gets its name.’ But I must not venture here to discuss the rendering of πᾶσα πατριά, which undoubtedly in classical Greek, but by no means so certainly in that of the N.T., would need to be rendered ’every family,’ or ’every fatherhood.’ In Ephesians 1:17 He is ’the Father τῆς δόξης, of the glory.’ Is this merely a Hebraism, so called, for ’the Father most glorious’? Or is it not a phrase deeper and richer, as if to indicate that all ’the glory,’ the manifestation of Godhead, with which as it were He robes and shows Himself, has its source and birth for ever in Himself? In Ephesians 3:9 He is the sole and universal Creator, θεός ό τὰ πάντα κτίσας: that strong foundation truth of the faith, so much more characteristic of revealed religion than sometimes we remember it to be. In 4:18 it is implied that He is not only the God who willed creation into being, but also, in the true idea, the Life of the human creature He has made, the inner and eternal Life; for man in his fall, by his own fault, is now, so we read here, ’alienated from the life of God;’ implying that once, in his creation, he was in union with that life. In Ephesians 2:3 we find that the fallen creature is ’child of wrath’; he is as it were marked and characterized by divine displeasure. In Ephesians 5:6, ’the wrath of God is coming upon the sons of disobedience.’ So the Father is indeed Personal and Moral; personally and eternally the Adversary of Sin, whether as it infects the nature (φύσει) or as it develops its infection into action (ἀπείθεια). As such, He is to be remembered, even by His regenerate human children, with ’fear’ (Ephesians 5:22); the awe which recollects not only His benignity but His holiness; not indeed the terror of the rebel, but the tender reverence which cannot forget the Father’s thought of sin.

Sovereign and ultimate is the majesty of this Holy One. ’He worketh all things after the counsel (βουλὴ) of His own will’ (θέλημα; Ephesians 1:11); ’according to the good pleasure’ (εὐδοκία, almost ’the fiat’) ’of His will’ (Ephesians 1:5); ’the good pleasure which He purposed’ (Ephesians 1:9). With this will, infinitely free and uncaused from without, as it is infinitely good, He, antecedent to the existence of contingent being, πρὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου (Ephesians 1:4), words on whose sublime significance human discoveries of the antiquity of Nature throw light always new, ’selected’ (ἐξελέξατο) and ’defined beforehand’ (προώρισε) the Church, the Flock, the Body, that was to be in time. So that to Him, alone and for ever, (we note this great element of truth, perverted into a fallacy only when it is treated as if it were all the truth,) is due the whole praise of the whole salvation of the Body, and of course of every part and member of it. It is ’given them of the Father’ (John 6:65).

Infinite Power is in this Will: He is ’able to do overflowingly above all petition and all thought’ (Ephesians 3:20). His power is of exceeding greatness; ’the working of the strength of His might’ (Ephesians 1:19).

Meanwhile this awful Sovereignty is in the sure hands of One whose inmost action is Love. ’God is rich in mercy’ (Ephesians 2:4); He loved us ’with His great love’; He is bent upon ’showing His kindness’ (Ephesians 2:7). He is the God ’of grace,’ of free favour; He is personally characterized by delight in freely favouring and giving. Such is His ’grace’ that it has a ’glory,’ a δόξα (Ephesians 1:6), of its own; it has a heavenly ’wealth’ (Ephesians 1:7; Ephesians 2:7) of its own. He is the Origin of all good; and on the other hand He is, eternally and rightly, the End of all praise and gratitude from the creature; He is, and ever is to be, ’Blessed,’ Εὐλογητὸς, the Theme of our benedictions (Ephesians 1:3). ’To Him is to be glory throughout all ages’ (Ephesians 3:21). ’To our God and Father thanks for all things are to be always given’ (Ephesians 5:20).

We come to ask what He is in His relation to the Saviour. Of Him, in a sense evidently supreme and apart, He is Father; ’the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Ephesians 1:3; Ephesians 1:17), Who is therefore (Ephesians 4:13) ὁ Υἱός τοῦ Θεοῦ. Yea further, He is His ’God’ (Ephesians 1:3), ὁ θεὸς . τοῦ Κυρίου: words which, in the light of the whole teaching of the Epistle, leave untouched the necessary and eternal Nature of the Lord Christ, but are perfectly explained by His Incarnation. On His Son the Father pours love indeed; Christ is to Him ’the Beloved,’ ὁ Ἠγαπημένος (Ephesians 1:6). The form of the word, the perfect passive participle, not the verbal ἀγαπητός, indicates that on Christ continuously, eternally, up to this moment, the infinite Love settles and abides. Hence the ample joy and safety of those who are ’found in Him’; they are indeed ’in the love of God.’ All the purpose of the Father, all the action of the Father, appears, in this wonderful Letter, as living and moving ’in’ the Son. ’In the Son’ He ’purposed His good pleasure’ (Ephesians 1:9). In Him He forms ’the purpose (may we use the word ’programme’?) of the ages,’ ἡ πρόθεσις τῶν αἰώνων (Ephesians 3:11); so indissolubly is its cause and its process concerned with Him. (Here is a truth full of awe and of calm when our poor thoughts are lost, as they are so soon, amidst the seeming confusions of time.) His purpose is to ’sum up all things, heavenly and earthly, in Christ as Head’ (Ephesians 1:10). ’In Him’ originates and proceeds the whole work of mercy and glory for the regenerate Church. The Father (He is always the ultimate Agent) chooses His saints in Him (Ephesians 1:4), and ’creates them’ in Him (Ephesians 2:10) for a life of holiness, and ’gives them grace’ in Him (Ephesians 1:6), and ’forgives them in Him’ (Ephesians 4:32; note the Greek), and raises them from the death of wrath and sin in Him (Ephesians 2:1; Ephesians 2:5), and seats them in Him in heavenly exaltation (Ephesians 2:6), and has blessed them in Him with all spiritual benediction (Ephesians 1:3), and builds them stone by stone into His own eternal abode in Him (Ephesians 2:21-22). And when we look into the prospect of the coming bliss, in its long and circling ’ages,’ we see ’glory’ brought to the Everlasting Father not only in the Church but ’in Christ Jesus’ (note the Greek, Ephesians 3:21). For ever will the Father be praised, as He is seen revealed, not only in our salvation taken in itself, but in what His Son, incarnate, sacrificed, glorified, united to His Bride, is seen in the eternal Light to be. The whole Epistle, from this point of view, is a development of that wonderful utterance at its opening, ’Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’; that benediction so dear to the Apostles, used by St Paul here and in 2 Corinthians 1:3, and by St Peter in the same place in his First Epistle,^[6] ’The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’; let us continually call Him so with all our thought, and from all our heart. Here is the Supreme Being, but more; the First Cause, but more; the Creator, but more; the eternal Moral Governor, but more. Seen in His Son, He is Love, personal and paternal Love. We find here the Ultimate of Existence, its everlasting Cause and Law; and it is not It, a Βύθος, ’an Abyss,’ as in the Gnostic’s dream; it is He, He to Whom the Son looked up, and said, ’Holy Father, I have glorified Thee; I come to Thee; Thou lovedst Me before the foundation of the world.’ ’God absolute,’ says Martin Luther, in a noble and characteristic passage (on Psalms 51:1), ’all men must fly from who do not wish to perish, for human nature and God absolute are deadly foes; by such majesty our nature must be overwhelmed. Let us speak with God robed and clothed in His word and promises, and including Christ in His name. This God we can embrace, and can behold with joy and trust. God absolute is as a brazen wall, on which we cannot run without our own destruction.’^[7] ’God is love.’ We know it--for He is eternally the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

^[6] The Epistle whose many likenesses to this of St Paul’s (both, by the way, addressed to Christians of Asia Minor) have been remarked.

^[7] It has been objected by a friendly critic of these studies that Luther’s words seem to suggest that ’God Absolute’ and ’human nature’ are in all respects ’foes.’ But surely the thought of Luther, than whom no man ever more fully believed that God is Love, is concerned here with the practical relations between man viewed simply as a sinner, and God considered apart from His own provision of redeeming grace in His Son. The Father appears in the Epistle in revealed relation also to the Spirit. The Holy Spirit is ’of God’ (Ephesians 4:30), τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον τοῦ θεοῦ, ’His’ in eternal Origin and Union. In the great passage of spiritual experience at the close of ch. 3. the Apostle (Ephesians 3:14) ’bows His knees to the Father, that the saints may be strengthened in the inner man by His Spirit;’ as ever, the Father is the ultimate Cause of blessing, while the Spirit is the immediate agent in the soul. Again, in Ephesians 1:17, in the prayer that a deeper illumination may be granted to the Ephesians, it is ’the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory,’ whom he approaches with the request that πνεῦμα σοφιάς καὶ ἀποκαλύψεως, ’the Spirit of wisdom and revelation,’ may come as His gift from heaven, to lift the veil from the full sight of the treasures of faith and to effect a new spiritual sight of Him.^[8] Again, the Spirit (Ephesians 1:13) is ’the Holy Spirit of promise,’ words evidently bearing the same reference as the Lord’s own (Luke 24:49. ), ’I send the promise of my Father upon you.’ It is to the Father that we have access (Ephesians 2:18) ’in the one Spirit.’ It is for the Father’s eternal inhabitation that the mystical temple is preparing ’in the Spirit’ (Ephesians 2:22). It is the Father who, ’in the Spirit,’ has revealed to His Apostles and Prophets (Ephesians 3:5) the glorious catholicity of the true Church, the equal part and lot in His Son, through faith, of Gentiles with Israel; one Body, one Spirit. It is the Father, manifestly, who ’seals’ the believers with His Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:13; Ephesians 4:30). Lastly, ’the sword of the Spirit,’ ἡ μάχαιρα τοῦ Πνεύματος (Ephesians 6:17), is ’the Word of God,’ the revelation of the Father’s truth and love in the Scriptures, in the Gospel.

^[8] I render here, notwithstanding the absence of the article, ’The Spirit of wisdom, etc.’; but of this more will be said later.