01.16. ESSAY NO. 16

ESSAY NO. 16 To Ephesian saints, Paul’s contrast between Christi­anity and heathenism in life and worship must have been very realistic. Their former elaborate, drunken, licentious feasts, honoring heathen gods and goddess­es, in which abominable rites were practiced in the name of religion, had been given up for simple, sober, spiritual singing and thanksgiving. Inasmuch as mu­sic, a tonic to mind and heart, is so closely allied to behavior, his exhortation, "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" (Ephesians 5:18-20), with divine penetration digs down to the roots of society. Even pagan Plato long before had said that to change the music of a people was to change their morals. In studying the subject of Christian music, this scripture is pivotal. The Greek Catholic church, which should know Greek, never believing that "psallo" in this passage authorizes instrumental music in wor­ship, has never used it even until now. To use it when the New Testament here, nor elsewhere, authorizes it is to show lack of faith in and respect for God’s wisdom and authority. In principle, to use it is to start back through Protestantism and Roman Cathol­icism to ancient, sensuous heathenism. Christian wor­ship must be spiritual in its nature, not sensuous. God knows how to safeguard his church against worldliness.

Subject One to Another In the next twenty verses, Paul discusses three phases of "subjecting yourselves to one another" (Ephesians 5:21): wives in subjection to their husbands, children to their parents, and servants to their masters, re­spectively. Wine makes men boastfully self-important; it foments licentiousness, discord and strife, and is a troublemaker generally. Operating in reverse to all this, submission reduces the friction of life and pro­motes peace and comfort. Unnecessary trouble arises when somebody in home, business, or religious life, instead of being subject to others, in non-essential things, contentiously stands upon his own "rights."

Two Great Mysteries The last paragraph of Ephesians 5:1-33 reveals that God’s eternal plan for his church begins to take form in the creation and marriage of Eve. It reveals also that Eve is a type of things to come. The mystery of the creation of Adam’s wife from his opened side is a prophetic representation of the greater mystery of the creation of Christ’s bride (his church) from his pierced side. The similitude of these two mysteries is so complete that Paul in discussing them often steps back and forth from one to the other. His immediate objective is to show the balanced parallel that wives should be subject to their husbands as the church is subject to Christ, and that husbands should love their wives as Christ loves the church. This is indeed an astonishingly fruitful study that, according to the attention given it, yields more and more treasures. As Adam was lonely and incomplete until God gave him Eve, of his own body, to meet his need, so Christ after sin despoiled heaven and earth had a sense of loss and incompleteness until God gave him "the church, which is his body, the fullness (com­pleteness)" of his instrument "to reconcile all things unto himself . . . whether things upon the earth, or things in the heavens" (Colossians 1:20). As "Adam was not beguiled," but chose rather than to give Eve up to suffer and to die with her, so Christ, "who did no sin," chose from all eternity to identify himself with his church in suffering and in glory. The inviolable oneness of Adam and Eve is typical of the mystical, spiritual oneness of Christ and his church. Christians are "added to the Lord" (Acts 5:14) and become his body. Christ from heaven said to Saul, who was per­secuting his church, "Saul, why persecutest thou me" (Acts 9:4). When we are tempted to speak or write harshly to or about a Christian, should not the truth that Christ considers it as done to him personally shock us into frozen silence? "If we endure, we shall also reign with him" (2 Timothy 2:12).

Yes, God so ordered the mutual relationship between Adam and Eve as to prefigure the mutual relation­ship between Christ and his bride on earth and in heaven. The language of Tennyson’s saint as she medi­tates upon her eternity with Christ, "One sabbath deep and wide . . . the bridegroom with his bride," puts this beautiful truth into beautiful words. When we think on these things and come to realize what "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27) really means for time and eternity, our whole lives will take on new meaning and worth.

Idealism Is Realistic The true idealist is the only true realist. Paul’s Christian idealism and other-worldness is the only feasible way to improve this world. He knows that the way to have better homes is to get husbands and wives to understand the sacred place and honor God gives marriage and home. After this epistle was read in the church at Ephesus would not indifference, un-kindness, bickering, fornication, adultery of the heart, and divorce grow less within its homes? Paul knows too that as the church improves it will spread. The fact that earnest Christian missionaries set a high value on the influence of their own Christian homes in propagating Christianity among heathen peoples today corroborates the wisdom, power, and reality of Paul’s teaching and exhorting.

Christian marriage is a threefold mating: biologi­cal, mental, and spiritual. And a Christian home is a place for husbands to learn to exercise authority gra­ciously and wives to submit becomingly. It does not behoove two Christians, welded into one for life, as they pledge in their marriage vows, for the purpose of making a Christian home, the most heavenly achievement on earth, for the husband to exercise despotic authority or for the wife to yield slavish sub­mission. When things go wrong in the home of world­lings, they have little recourse but alienation and divorce. If misunderstandings arise, as well they may, in the homes of Christians, they should be thankful for an opportunity to learn humility, patience, for­giveness, and love—all qualities they must learn some­where, some way, sometime before they enter heaven.