Chapter 11. Holy Results of Heavenly Blessing: The Old Man and the New

Chapter 11.
Holy Results of Heavenly Blessing: The Old Man and the New Ephesians 4:17-24

"A Christian praises God for His justice, and yet fears Him for His mercy. He is so ashamed as that he dares not open his mouth before God, and yet he comes with boldness to God, and asks Him anything he needs. He is so humble as to acknowledge himself to deserve nothing but evil, and yet believes that God means him all good. He is the most lowly-minded, yet the greatest aspirer; most contented, yet ever craving."
—Bacon: Characters of a Christian in Paradoxes

ST PAUL pursues the theme of practical Holiness. He draws nearer and nearer, as he pursues it, to the duties of the common day, to the application of eternal principle, eternal blessing, in the intercourse of the city, the street, the home. He has led us, as we saw in the last chapter but one, from the mysteries and bliss of our heavenly life with Christ and His living presence in us, to the resultant precepts of humility, of mutual forbearance, of watchful avoidance of the separatism which comes of selfishness. In view of the oneness of believers in their glorious Head, he has gone on, as we saw in our last chapter, to speak of a living unity whose growth and exercise are aided by the diversity of the members in their gifts and functions in the Body. Alike their spiritual fulness in Christ, and their limits and imperfections of experience, and their differences of practical gift and mission, are to draw them nearer to Him, and nearer to one another. "Growing into Him," they will indeed each individually grow, with a rich maturity of the soul, and they will mutually contribute each to the whole Body’s growth, in its cohesion and its capacity.

He now draws closer to the thought of "holiness in common things." He cannot speak only of the larger aspects of life and relation; he must deal in minute but firm touches with the individual’s call to purity, and truthfulness, and fidelity, and the spirit of forgiveness. It will not do only to soar into true conceptions of the mystical Body, and to remain aloft; we must come down to be "sweet at home." The close practicality of the appeal, meanwhile, will have all along the support of the recollection of eternal truths; it will root itself in the doctrine of the Old Man and the New.

Ephesians 4:17. This then I say and protest (μαρτύρομαι), calling you in as it were as witnesses, by the response of conscience, to the eternal facts of grace and duty, in the Lord, (for I am in Him, and you are in Him, living limbs of the One Head, and therefore related Christ-wise to each other in everything,) that no longer should you walk, live, act, converse, as once you did (μηκέτι), in the way in which actually (καί) the Nations[1]are walking all around you. And what is the character of that "walk"? It is in the vanity of their mind, under an illusion (ματαιότης)[2] beclouding their reason; for the principles of it can only seem good to man’s mind when the eternal facts are hidden from it, and sin, the great failure of all failures, seems to bring freedom and gain. They "walk" as those who have

Ephesians 4:18. been and are darkened in their (τῇ) understanding,[3] aye, as alienated from the life of God, dislocated from man’s ideal union and communion with the blessed Creator who is his true "Life Eternal"; on account of the ignorance which exists in them, ignorance of their great need and of His fair surpassing glory of love and holiness; in other words, on account of the hardening[4]of their heart, the loss of the sensibility of their inner being (καρδία) towards the Highest Good, under the dreadful anæsthetic, sin. Do we ask for visible evidence of the existence of such a condition? Look at the characteristics of the developed grace-less life; they who live it are such as,[5]

Ephesians 4:19. having got beyond the pain (ἀπηλγηκότες) of doing iniquity, gave over[6] themselves, yes, themselves by their own act,[7]to wantonness, the scorn of all moral restraint; ("Who is Lord over us"); resulting in an active dealing in all impurity, in a spirit of greed; yes, the pursuit of evil becomes in time a business, a trade (ἐργασία), followed up with all the keen and unscrupulous pertinacity of the selfish hunter after gold.

It is a tremendous picture. Do we hesitate to accept it as it stands? It is inevitable that we should feel some difficulty in so accepting it, unless we read altogether without thought. For who is not aware that, even among the most abandoned, there are differences in actual sinfulness? And who is not aware that in heathendom, ancient and modern alike, there have been and are manifestations of the power of conscience, and exercises of the human will on the side of virtue, which we cannot possibly put down as so much falsehood and illusion? Are we indeed to think, in view of all this, that "the Nations," in their countless numbers, have all "got beyond the pain" of sin, and have "given themselves over to wantonness"? In reply, we may first remark that assuredly the Apostle is here speaking broadly and generally, as regards a developed and manifested wickedness in the world. His own words and actions’ on occasion assure us that he did not as a fact look upon every pagan person as an advanced and abandoned transgressor. "I am not mad, most noble Festus"; these are words which indicate, as they come from an absolutely truthful man, a certain moral regard for the person addressed. So with Sergius Paulus in Cyprus, so with the Athenians on Areopagus, so with the Lystrians in their turn; the tone is that of one who speaks with candour and sympathy, as well as with fidelity and decision, in his appeal to man for God. It seems reasonable to say that here, to the Ephesians, he is speaking of a broad phenomenon of open sin, yet with a full recollection, behind his words, of reserves and exceptions. But then, other things are to be remembered. First, as regards the actual condition of heathenism, of heathen society in its mass and its rule. Is it easy to overrate its horrible corruption? Those of my readers who are familiar with classical literature will surely bear me out when I answer, No. I appeal for justification not only to deliberate pictures of wickedness, drawn by Greek or Roman pens, but to passing allusions to current morals in all kinds of places in the old authors. Is it not rare to find an amatory poem of theirs which, however beautiful in form, is also pure? Are not the biographies of even comparatively worthy personages, for instance, the Galba of Suetonius, defaced with unblushing allusions to sins now unnamable? Is the taint of even that deep pollution absent from the Platonic page itself? But if such things can be said of circles where things were at the best, what must have been the corruption of the mass?

One thing is certain, that the early literary "Defenders of the Faith," the "Apologists," do not hesitate to appeal to their heathen readers to confess the conspicuous moral difference between the Christians and "the Nations." Notably is this the case with Aristides, in the second century; and his witness is the more impressive because he appears to stand on a sort of border-line, and not yet to have cast in his lot personally with the Lord and His people. He recites the sins of "the Greeks" in terms which compel a translator for general readers to leave frequent gaps in the translation; summing up with the sentence (ch. 26): "I have no doubt that the world stands by reason of the intercession of the Christians. But the rest of the peoples are deceived and deceivers; and they grope as if in the dark, and are unwilling to know the truth, and like drunken men they stagger, and thrust one another, and fall down. The Greeks practise foul things, and then turn the ridicule of their foulness upon the Christians."[8] And is the non-Christian world of our own time better than that old world? I fear it is only an optimistic dream which finds in it anything greatly to modify the estimate of an Aristides. Everywhere, still, as St James tells us ( James 3:9), men are "made after the similitude of God," made in the mystery of a moral personality; conscience and will are present everywhere. But everywhere man is fallen. And the developments of the fallen state, left really to themselves, are awful still. As I write, I hear of a recent laborious and accurate examination, by an American student, of the actual moral condition of non-Christian peoples, which tends to bring this out in the light of provable facts; certainly with sufficient fulness to silence in candid hearts the thought that pagan humanity can do without the Gospel. But before we leave this passage let us remember that it points, with its deepest meaning, not only at the actual sinfulness of the dark world but at its potential evil. It speaks, in universal terms, of gross iniquities. Those iniquities are, in the divine mercy, largely restrained from their natural developments, even in the non-Christian regions, by the presence of conscience. But they are all latent, all implicit, in the awful principle of sin in (not some selected human hearts, exceptionally bad, but) the human heart, fallen from dependence upon God. Does my reader, in some real measure, know his own heart? Has he, in serious earnest, I do not mean in a morbid restlessness of conscience, but with a conscience soberly and fully awake, learnt to weigh his motives, and to watch the play of his thoughts? Has God drawn near to him in conviction "of sin, and righteousness, and judgment"? Then I need not write at any further length to give moral proof of the point.

Before we leave this stern paragraph, let us however remember that even through its darkness shine the rays of salvation. For what does it imply concerning this terribly fallen and sinning world? That it is a world, a race, a mankind, which by the very fact of its fall bears witness to its having been made by a Blessed Creator for infinitely better things. True, it is lost, it is condemned, it is dead in trespasses and sins. It is "alienated from the life of God"; "ignorance is in it"; "blindness of heart." But those very terms imply that in its origin as a race, in the idea of its being, it was altogether otherwise. "Man," in his idea, was once in communion with "the life of God," or he could not be said to be "alienated" from it; who can be alienated from a position he has never occupied?[9] If so, we have here not only an account of ourselves as men which should drive us in awe and penitence to the feet of God, crying, "Unclean, unclean"; we have a hope put already into our hands. Were we but "stones," He could "raise up of us children to Abraham." But we are not stones. We are ruined men; and Man was made to be in contact with "the life of God." Will it not be the Maker’s joy to restore us? Shall it not be to Him no "strange work," but divinely congenial, to act for us in our awful need, in His Son, and according to His promise? From the very depth of our discovered iniquity, then, de profundis, let us look up to Him. We deserve only His death-sentence. But He created our nature on purpose for life and holiness in contact with Himself. And in the Second Man He has provided for what is indeed, from one side, a "New Creation," altogether new, but from another, the Restoration of ruins which still bear, in their polluted fragments, the impress of His hand. But let us take up the Apostle’s words again. He has given us a view of the awful darkness; he passes now to the light, and to the children of the light.

Ephesians 4:20. But you did not so, in such sympathy with the deadly tendencies of sin, learn our (τόν) Christ, when, in your conversion, you found in Him the true Subject-matter of His own Gospel, the "hidden wisdom" of

Ephesians 4:21. pardon, holiness, and heaven; if indeed, taking it for granted that,[10]it was He whom you heard,[11] as the Message spoken to your souls, and if it was in Him that you were taught, so that your teachers’ words were all summed up "in" Him, and you, as hearers, found yourselves learning "in" union with Him as Saviour and Head; even as in our (τῷ) Jesus, and in Him only, truth is. For indeed there, and only there, is truth to be found; the lines of solid fact and spiritual reality meet nowhere but in Him, in this divine Christ who is also "the Man Christ Jesus," as historical as He is eternal. And what line in particular did the "hearing," and the "teaching," and the "truth," take, for the purpose before us now, this purpose of practical holiness? It was all with reference

Ephesians 4:22. to your putting off, your laying aside, (as regards your former course of life, in "regard" of the need of a revolution and conclusion for that dark "course,") the Old Man, the old, the former, the now past, state of things for your humanity, in which, as unrenewed sons of Adam, you were under the death-sentence of the broken law and under the bondage of sin within; that "Man," that personified state of you men, which is decaying, corrupting, like a moral corpse, on its way to final ruin, according to, in the fashion inevitably due to, the desires of its (τῆς) deceit—the lusts which respond to the wiles of temptation with which it plays and parleys. And the "teaching" and the "truth" were not negative only, speaking only of a "putting-off"; they were positive, with the glorious watchwords of renewal and investiture: with

Ephesians 4:23. reference, on the other side (δέ), to your being renewed, in a holy process[12] of new development, the bright antithesis to the process of "decay" now arrested and reversed a "renewal" in respect of the spirit of your mind—your spiritual life and faculty coming out in mental action; your human spirit awakened and enabled to grasp saving truth, and so to find the secret of an abiding blessing. And along with this, the "teaching" had reference to the fact that you did put on[13]the New Man, the new, the grace-given, state of things for your humanity, in which, as regenerated members of Christ, you have exchanged doom for peace and moral bondage for spiritual freedom; that "Man," that personified state of you "men in Christ," which, true to God (κατὰΘεόν), "answering His great idea," was created, constituted, when it was provided in Christ Jesus, the Second Man, in righteousness, in loyal correspondence to the Will of God, and sanctity, piety,[14]of the truth, the truth of the Gospel; for to that truth "sanctity" belongs, as a fruit which the truth ever tends to produce, and as the fair adornment of its holy stem. The passage thus before us is important in more than one respect. It is instructive in the first place as an example of what the Epistle has already so often illustrated to us, the connexion of doctrine with life. St Paul is intent here upon the practical holiness of the Ephesians. He is unalterably desirous that in every detail of daily life they shall "walk uprightly, and work righteousness, and speak the truth from the heart" ( Psalms 15:2). How does he approach this matter, with all its infinite importance for the realities of human intercourse? By taking his disciples inward and upward to the secret things of the grace of God. He conducts their thought, that he may conduct their faith, straight to the personal Christ, to the wonderful Lord Jesus, as the meeting-point of all the lines of truth. And then he reminds them (it is a reminder, not a new announcement; he must be referring to lessons given long before in "the school of Tyrannus") of facts and principles which sound at first as visionary and far away as possible, but which are potent for immediate use. He speaks to them about an Old Man and a New Man, and about "putting off" the one and "putting on" the other, as of facts in a mysterious biography of the human spirit.

How dreamy, how exquisitely unpractical, says the wisdom of the world! But the Apostle is wiser than that wisdom. He is speaking practically, for he is speaking of facts which are as solid and operative for the spirit as gravitation and magnetism are for the body. He knows that behind the term "the Old Man" lie facts, deep as man himself, of sin, righteousness, judgment, guilt, bondage—a chain which no force of the human will can break, if only because it can have no adequate fulcrum apart from Christ. And he knows that behind the term "New Man" lie all the solid treasures of redemption; Christ for us, Christ in us; a contact with eternal love, and with divine power for victory and freedom in the soul, which can work with glorious practicality in the hour of present-day temptation. So he takes the Asian believer in to the hidden place, and bids him take out of it, clasped firmly in his hands, the facts of his supernatural salvation, in order to a supernatural result—a life of heavenly purity and love lived amidst perfectly earthly circumstances. Do we not know in experience, in our measure, what this means? True it is that nothing is more lifeless than a theory of life without practice. But nothing is more living than a life really lived with a strong, sure, theory behind it. The man knows the law of action, as well as the line of it, and loses no time in fumbling for his resource. He has learned the nature of his weapon, and the use of it; so far from his being encumbered by his knowledge, in the hour of conflict, it is just his knowledge which makes him move and strike with decision. Did we never experience, in our own inner history, a time when, after long uncertainties and confusions, we came (perhaps on a sudden) to find that our way to inward conquest was a way quite definite and quite supernatural, that is to say, Christ used by faith? And was not that discovery instantly applicable to "the next thing" in the path of common duty? Was it not our delight to spend it upon the most concrete difficulties—to find it act upon the next solicitation to impatience, to envy, to unfaithfulness, to cowardice, to indolence, to impure thought?

Mystery may stand in the closest possible relation to all that is practical. Who can tell us all about the physical mystery of electricity? But for all that, there is no unreality about the electric telegraph, and the electric lamp, and the electric carriage. These are things practical enough to be matters of common use, commercial investment, and state legislation. In conclusion, we note a point or two in the phraseology of the passage.

I. "The Old Man"; "the New Man." It seems important to observe that these terms are not synonyms for "the flesh" and "the Spirit" respectively. They are such that the Apostle here contemplates our definitely and altogether quitting the Old Man to enter the New. On the other hand he contemplates (e.g. Galatians 5:16-17) the abiding presence and counteraction in our being of "the flesh" and "the Spirit," though he expressly reminds us that the divine purpose is that the Spirit shall be the continuous Conqueror of the flesh.

"The Old Man," "the New Man," are not elements or presences in us; they are, highly personified, relations and connexions attaching to us. As such the one may be definitely left, the other definitely entered.

II. "Put off," "put on." If I have understood and expounded aright, the immediate thought of the Apostle, in the ἀποθέσθαι and ἐνδύσασθαι, deals with the "accomplished facts" of divine Redemption; the provision for us in the Lord Jesus Christ of a complete transference and emancipation, so that the believer, once "in the Lord," has stepped out of the old position and has entered upon the new, however imperfect his consciousness of it may be, and however much he may have to learn of the further possibilities of his present position. This is an aspect of truth which needs often and earnestly to be remembered and used. A grasp of the facts of the Covenant of God, a handling of our present possessions in Christ, is one of the mightiest secrets of the disciple’s life of faith.

Only, that aspect will continually translate itself into another; the recollection of covenant possession will pass on into the action of conscious acquisition. The man who knows that he possesses Christ will evermore resolve, in experience, to find Him. The man who knows that, by the grace of God, he has put the New Man on, will therefore rise up, in working experience, in view of each hour’s need, to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ."

^[1]Probably omit the wordλοιπάbeforeἔθνη.

^[2]No idea of "self-conceit"resides in such "vanity." It is the emptiness, the delusion, the "vain shew" of substance without reality. They mistake lie for truth, sin for happiness.

^[3]"[Διάνοια] may fairly be said to be the reason [νοῦς] in action. Here accordingly the phrase defines, so to speak, the phrase just previous; the general illusion of the reason comes out in obfuscated acts of thought" (Cambridge Bible).—"Have been and are" is an attempt to renderἐσκοτωμένοιὄντες. (It seems better, in view of rhythm, to connectὄντεςwithἐσκοτωμένοιthan withἀπηλλοτριωμένοι

^[4]Πώρωσις: the word means failure of sensation in general; "blindness" is one phase of such failure, but only one.

^[5]Οἵτινες: "ὅστιςis more thanquiand less thanquippe qui."It does just more than merelydenote;it borders upondescription.—The translation here is a little paraphrastic, to bring out the meaning better.

^[6]Observe the aorist. An ideal crisis is in view; a definite choice; "evil, be thou my good." In too many an experience such crises are actual, not only ideal.

^[7]Ἑαυτούςis emphatic by position, ^[8]I quote, somewhat freely, from the excellent translation of Aristides by Mrs Rendel Harris.

^[9]I would be careful not to be misunderstood, as if I could mean that the individual, I for instance or my reader, began his personal life in harmony with God, and therefore holy and good, andthenpersonally fell from holiness to sin. Scripture and consciousness alike witness against the Pelagian theory. But the Race, the Nature, was "created upright," and fell by its own act. And that most mysterious fact is as it were reflected in each individual by the equally mysterious (but not less certain) fact that we freely speak of ourselves as "fallen"beings. We arewhere our nature was not made to be—in personal sin. And this is at once an alarm and shame,andthe condition to a blessed hope, for every individual who looks up to the Restorer.

^[10]This is the practical meaning ofεἴγε(as inEphesians 3:2). It does not imply any doubt, necessarily, but calls the reader to verify the statement.

^[11]Αὐτόνis emphatic by position. And the accusative afterἀκούεινsuggests "hearing Him" rather as Message than as Teacher.

^[12]Ἀνανεοῦσθαι: apresentinfinitive.

^[13]I paraphrase freely here, to bring out the force of theaoristinfinitive,ἐνδύσασθαι, and the reference (which I believe to be intended) to not adutybut afact.The "putting-on," like the "putting-off," is viewed, I believe, asfait accompli.

^[14]Οσιότης: see Trench,N. T. Synonyms,series ii., § xxxviii. It is the virtue which "reverences everlasting sanctities and owns their obligation,"