Chapter 13. Holy Results of Heavenly Blessing: The Works of Darkness and the Fruit of Light

Chapter 13.
Holy Results of Heavenly Blessing: The Works of Darkness and the Fruit of Light Ephesians 5:3-14

"He who examines is startled to find that the phrase, ’fear of the Lord,’ is woven into the whole web of Revelation, from Genesis to the Apocalypse. Well and blessed would it be for this irreverent and unfearing age, in which the advance in mechanical arts and vice is greater than that in letters and virtue, if the popular mind could be made reflective and solemn by this great emotion."
—Shedd, Sermons to the Natural Man, § xvi

Ephesians 5:3. But fornication, a sin so lightly thought of among the heathen as hardly to be held by them a wrong or shame at all,[1]and all impurity; all, absolutely all, which falls under the same class, sin of the soul against the body, all that is unworthy of the "children beloved" of the All-Pure; or greed of whatever is another’s, but now specially sensual greed, directed towards the ruin of another’s purity,[2]be it not even named amongst you, as beseems holy ones, men and women dedicated to the Holy One, His purchased and surrendered possession. No, let not such things even play upon your lips. True, those lips may sometimes need to refer to them, quite explicitly, (even as in these very sentences they are referred to,) to expose, to condemn, to warn. But even so, let the mentions be as brief and as reserved as may be, or they may hurt both speaker and hearer; and as for any lighter "naming" of them, any treatment of them in talk as mere inevitable incidents in human life, or any lingering round them in conversation, as round what has the slightest attraction to the mind, any talk such as dresses them in colours of sentiment or romance, beware; put the thing utterly away. In such "naming" there is always a sinful motive behind, however little realized; and the "naming" reacts upon the motive, to develope and to quicken it. All round the circle of such evil let the same absolute rule prevail; "name" not ever[3]filthiness,

Ephesians 5:4. αἰσχρότητα, vice in its aspect of deformity, hideousness, that aspect which by a dreadful law of evil sympathy can become positively attractive to a once tainted imagination; nor fool-talk, the horrible trifling and soulless "frankness" over what is bad which marks the fool of fools, who makes a toy of "the abominable thing which God hateth" ( Jeremiah 44:4); nor jesting, the wretched pleasantry, as different as possible from the play of pure and wholesome mirth; the pleasantry of unclean badinage, of epigrammatic allusion to vice, of half-meanings wholly foul, which defile not only common talk but many a brilliant page of literature; things, all of them, which are not befitting, unutterably unseemly to the sinner who has become in Christ a saint. And let not your abstinence, here again, be merely negative. Let your Lord so fill your hearts that from them to your lips shall rise not only no pollution but the clear sweet stream of glad thankfulness, pervading all your talk with its light and life. "Name" not evil, but rather "name," utter, as out of an inner abundance, thanksgiving.

We rest a few moments upon that word, in its deep significance and fitness here. Why does St Paul, just in this passage of awful insistence upon purity of speech, call for a habit of thanksgiving in the Christian’s lips? He does not mean, of course, that we are never to articulate any words but those which speak gratitude to God; we have, in the path of duty, to talk upon countless matters, and often upon matters that sadden the speaker to the heart; the Apostle is at this moment doing so himself, with that sort of speech which flows through the pen. But he does plainly mean that our talk is to have a habitual tendency to the utterance, somehow, of thankful love to God. Is not the reason this, that "thanksgiving," as a fact, so it be pure and genuine, and not fatally spoiled by artificial motives, is both a symptom of inner wholesomeness and a means to its development? It is the positive exercise of spiritual health, the instinctive movement of holy happiness. It is the outcoming of the "joy of the Lord"; and that joy is not only our "strength" ( Nehemiah 8:10) for toil and suffering, but our strength too, in a wonderful measure, against the very subtlest and the very fiercest forms of temptation. Who that knows at all the power of even one minute’s joyful consciousness of what the Lord Christ is to him, and he to Christ, does not understand this without explanation? Is it too much to say that the Christian is (in a practical sense) invulnerable to the poisoned dart while he is "giving thanks," with a true heart, for a great and a present redemption, or rather for a great Redeemer, present in all His fulness to him? The classic legend is in point here. Orpheus, the minstrel of the Argonauts, when the ship passed near the island of the Sirens, and their sweet but fatal song was audible to the mariners, and began to tell upon their wills, struck his harp and raised his voice aloft in praise of the heavenly Powers. The better song overpowered the worse, with its pure positive. Let us practise not Orphean but Christian music in our hearts, and we shall find its power upon the enemy, so that it be music really learnt from the sight of our Redeemer. Nor let us fail to notice that the Apostle here is enjoying not only the feeling within but the expression without. Thanksgiving is to take the place of the "naming" of evil with our lips. Of course, in this matter, as in every matter, there are rules of wisdom as well as of love. Circumstances are very easy to conceive in which an audible utterance of spiritual gratitude would not only do no good but would do much harm; above all, if that expression were in any degree forced and mechanical. But far oftener, probably, than we think, the modest but free expression of a really happy soul would do the deepest good. And it may and it does react in a wonderful way, rightly exercised, upon the heart from which it comes. The application of the thought is obvious, meantime, to the united and public expression of Christian thanksgiving. More will be said of this below by the Apostle ( Ephesians 5:19-20). Here it is enough to remember that holy hymns, whether sung in the congregation, or in the home, are powerful means of grace in the hand of the Spirit, and above all when they are hymns of praising gratitude.

"Sing, till you feel your hearts Ascending with your songs;

Sing, till the love of sin departs, And grace inspires your tongues."
But let us return to the Apostle’s text, as he passes from precept to urgent and anxious warning:

Ephesians 5:5. For this you know with clear recognition,[4] as a tremendous fact, resting upon eternal and inexorable truth, that every fornicator, without exception or extenuation, and[5]unclean man, whatever his form of moral foulness, and greedy man, with the "greed" denoted above ( Ephesians 5:3), which meansὅ ἐστινidolater, (for his "greed" is a dreadful and debasing worship of the creature, or rather of his own vile pleasure in the creature,) possesses no inheritance in the kingdom of ourτοῦChrist and of God. No; let him flatter himself as he will; his willing sin precludes absolutely his title to entrance and to place in that kingdom, and as absolutely negatives his capacity for its life. He cannot possibly be a genuine subject of the holy Saviour and the holy Father now, happy in that blessed Rule loyally welcomed, and that sovereign Protection thankfully enjoyed. And when that kingdom passes into its eternal development, when the throne of God and of the Lamb is the centre of the Holy City ( Revelation 22:3), and the blessed ones for ever and ever serve around it, with the Name on their foreheads, "where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?" ( 1 Peter 4:18). "I never knew you; depart from Me, ye that work iniquity" ( Matthew 7:23).[6] The Apostle urges his warning home, for he knows that there is need. Now from the heart within, now from outward influences, as conversation, literature, or what not, comes the suggestion that things are not so bad as the prophets of judgment paint them. Sin is not all that they would have it; is it not after all an incident of our finite nature? Is it not perhaps even a step upwards, (though it stumbles on the slope, and finds the ground miry,) in the development of that nature into a larger experience? Anywise, the large, the boundless, insight and sympathies of an all-benignant Power will preclude the "taking of strong measures in the Universe." Tout savoir c’est tout pardonner.

We are poor unfortunates at the worst, who have gone astray under very dark skies, on very rough ground. There will be a large indulgence on the part of "the good God." He will arrange that this world shall somehow be set happily to rights in the next. So let us walk, though at a moderate pace, along the broad road still; certainly let us not be too unhappy, too despondent, too full of forebodings, about those who are upon it, whether or no we go along with them there.

"Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil. Ye shall not surely die."

It is remarkable how soon, however, in the depth of some hearts at least, these "vain words" get hushed into an awful silence, when other words come meet them. Perhaps it is a record, simple and authentic, of a case of conviction of sin; possibly of some hour, unutterably dark, within the outskirts of an infinite night, when a dying man tells those around him that he finds he has put God off just too long, and no argument of love, no pressure of divine promises upon that heart, appears to have the least effect, save to evoke answers, terribly pointed, repelling the inference of mercy. Perhaps it is the very simplest statement, unattended by the least circumstance of terror, of eternal moral principles; the absolute and formidable difference of right and wrong; the distinction between divine Love in its essential harmony with divine Holiness and a loose benevolence, weak and vague. Perhaps it is a simple re-perusal of some of our Lord Jesus Christ’s own urgent words about sin and the judgment upon sin beyond death; above all, His "depart from Me," His "I never knew you." We may have come to take "liberal" views of the Bible, till we hardly know what it is to approach the Bible except as its critics. Yet on a sudden this Book turns upon us, rises as it were in new and awful life from the dissecting-table, and speaks to us with even more than its old authority about temperance, righteousness, and judgment to come, till we tremble all through. We begin to know again that sin is something other than development, or than misfortune, and that the wrath of God has an awful element in it that is very far from remedial, and that somehow time has terribly much to do with eternity, and that all this is true for us. "Vain words" of fallacious reassurance, poor parodies of the true message of a love and a mercy unspeakable, but holy, can, as I said, sink into dead silence in face of such replies. But they will be always ready to revive, and talk again. So we need often to recall the counter-words, the tender, awful warnings of the holy Book, "lest we forget." Here then is one of these.

Ephesians 5:6. Let no one deceive you with empty words, true successors of the fatal words of the primeval Temptation; "empty" of the eternal facts of the unknown horror of sin, of the sure, tremendous law of retribution, of the dread reality of divine wrath, of the certainty, deep as all truth, that divine love will never bend divine holiness aside, no, not for a hair’s-breadth, nor for a moment. All such words are empty, all such teaching is deceiving. For on account of these things, because of these lightly tolerated sins, these "frailties," these "irregularities," these "falls upward," there is coming—it is already on its stern, straight way—the wrath of our God, the personal, infinite, energetic displeasure and hostility of the revealed Holy One against sin and against the wills that choose it; upon—as a resistless force marches "upon" a doomed town—the sons of this (τῆς) disobedience, the beings who have linked themselves, by their choice of evil as their good, to the cause of rebellion against Him. "As it was in the days of Noah; as it was in the days of Lot." All things looked "peace and safety"; there was apparently a "silence of God" deep and permanent, a tolerance, an indifference, an absence. But "the wrath was coming," and at length, without mistake, it came.

Ephesians 5:7. So do not become sharers along with them; "becoming" such, by allowing temptation to "become" transgression, and the acts to grow into the habit; do not become "sharers" of their fatal "disobedience," and so of their hopeless ruin—"consumed in the iniquity of the city." Let not "empty words" allure you into that complicity. No, nor let holy words do so, misused to the purposes of the enemy. Let not the blessed revelations of this very Letter do so, its messages about an eternal and electing love, and a completed salvation, and a session with the Lord in heavenly places. Whether or no you apprehend the sublime harmony, (which there is,) between the song of salvation and the thunder-voices of warning, listen to each in its turn with the whole heart. And, however, use the certainty of your Lord’s love and mercy wholly and only in the interests of your Lord’s will. You have His blessings, and are invited to the fullest assurance of them; you know what you were, and what you are; therefore live

Ephesians 5:8. wholly in His will. For you were once darkness; not merely in the dark, but impregnated and as it were identified with the "darkness" of ignorance and sin; but now, in the blessed present of the converted life, you are light; not merely in the light, but filled and as it were identified with the sunshine of knowledge and of holiness; in the Lord, in your grace-given union with Him who is the Light; in whom is now your home, your sphere, so that if His radiance does not consciously fill you it is only that you do not open your eyes to take it in. So, as Light’s children, walk, live out your real life, in the real world of duty and temptation, as those who are in living and intense connexion with the truth and the purity that is for you in Christ. In that "childhood," break utterly with "the sons of disobedience," and take that narrow path which "is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the

Ephesians 5:9. perfect day" ( Proverbs 4:18). For the fruit of the Light,[7] the blessed outgrowth of our knowledge of Him in whom we see God, is, consists of, and is developed in, all goodness, every form of all that is the pure opposite of evil,[8]and righteousness, holy regard of the rights of others, in respect of both honesty and purity, and truth, the deep reality and sincerity of purpose which is the one possible basis for a right life.

Thus "walk," at once in holy liberty and in the exactest correspondence to its "perfect law" ( James 1:25), the will of God, which alone secures our emancipated happiness. And as you do so, watch; for on the King’s highway you still have both clouds and enemies to

Ephesians 5:10. reckon with. So go on, testing by the touchstone of His "sweet, beloved will," what is well-pleasing to the Lord; that question which will ever be rising in the heart which loves Him; not with the weary feeling, "What will be the next restriction, the next imposed chain, the new addition to the load upon my shoulders?" but with the responsive look of love, the "asking eye" which would gladly anticipate His perfect purpose and infinitely beautiful desire, so dear to His loving bondservant’s heart. "How can I please Thee in this thing, and in that? How can my thought meet Thine, and my will have the joy of being laid along the line of Thy good pleasure?" Happy they who thus "walk," thus "testing"! Their souls acquire more and more a holy, prescient instinct; a sympathy in the very depths with God.

Yet again the Apostle returns upon his warnings; so great is the risk, so infinitely important the escape.

Ephesians 5:11. And have no part and lot in the barren works[9]of the darkness, the actions and habits congenial to the life of sin, things awfully "barren," for their "harvest is a heap in the day of desperate sorrow" ( Isaiah 17:11); their "end is death" ( Romans 6:21). Rather even, going beyond a mere abstinence, however total, bring them to conviction,ἐλέγχετε, bring them to book, evince their dreadful fallacy and mortal futility by appeals to conscience in the name of God. There is need for such aggression on "the darkness," and you will find souls there conscious of their degradation, and so far

Ephesians 5:12. accessible; for of the things secretly done by them, by the miserable rebels there, it is a shame even to speak; the details could only defile the teller; "let them not be named."[10] Is such a field hopeless then for the influence of the Christian? Is it practical to seek to "bring to conviction" such works of the darkness? Yes, if it is done in the right way, done by the light, by those who are not merely censors and denouncers, but "light in the Lord," speaking first and most with the convicting eloquence of transfigured lives in Christ. It is "a shame to

Ephesians 5:13. speak of the things done in secret." But all things which are brought to conviction are by the light made manifest; nothing but the light will do the work; and you are now light, in Him who is pure Light. Therefore, while you watch and pray against infection from the darkness, shine into it; let the Lord’s light in upon it, in any way possible, the light of holy truth with holy love, and then shall the inhabitants of the darkness (such as you once were) become "light" too; for everything which is being manifested,[11] exposed to the pure day, is light; that holy Day cannot but transform where it really gets entrance. Happy they whose word and whose life, acting together, pierce those shadows and carry there the Lord’s life-giving light!

Ephesians 5:14. Wherefore, in view of this work of life by light, it, the Scripture, says, Awake, sleeping one, and rise from out of the dead, and our (ὁ) Christ shall dawn upon thee.[12] So we find a paragraph again, and make pause a little while. May He who is the everlasting Light, and ’in whom is no darkness at all,’ so shine in us that the awful darkness may be kept, by His presence, outside our wills, outside our lives. And may He so shine from us that we may be the blessed vehicles for carrying His transforming radiance even to the inhabitants of the night.

"Brightly beams our Father’s mercy From His lighthouse evermore; But to us He gives the keeping Of the lights along the shore."

Bliss

^[1]And too lightly thought of in our modern nominal Christendom, to judge by much of its public opinion and of its legislation.

^[2]See onEphesians 4:19above for the wider and narrower meanings ofπλεονεξία.

^[3]The construction is continuous in the Greek:καὶαἰσχρότης, κ.τ.λ.; but I have broken it for the purposes of the paraphrase.

^[4]Τοῦτο γὰρἴστε(notἐστε)γινώσκοντες: "you know (as fact), knowing (with insight into the reason)."

^[5]Lit. "or" (ἤ); and so in the next words. But our idiom seems to require "and."

^[6]"What is the ’Kingdom’ here? On the whole, the glorified state, the goal of the process of grace. True, the word often, with obvious fitness, includes the period of grace in this life in which most truly the Christian is a subject of the King (see e.g.Matthew 11:11. ). But usage often gives the word a special connexion with the final state, glory; cp. esp.Matthew 25:34. See also the passages, closely akin to the present,1 Corinthians 6:9-10;Galatians 5:21; where the’shallnot inherit’... points to the idea ofa coming’Kingdom’... The practical meaning here then is, ’no such moral rebel can be, while such, a citizen of and pilgrim to the heavenly city." (Note in theCambridge Bible.)

^[7]A.V., "the fruit of theSpirit." SoGalatians 5:22; (where note the phrase, "thefruitof the Spirit," not"fruits": the graces make one beautiful and perfect whole). But here the evidence decidedly supports the readingφωτός, notπνεύματος, "light," not "Spirit." Happily the ultimate message of the two is the same; it is only by the Spirit that we have Him who is the Light.

^[8]Ἀγαθωσύνη: the word tends to the special meaning of kindliness, beneficence. But its wider original meaning seems more in place here.

^[9]Ἔργοις: just before we have hadκαρπὸς τοῦφωτός. Possibly the collocation is intentional, as inGalatians 5:19,Galatians 5:22, where the weary"works"of the flesh are contrasted with the genial, living,"fruit"of the Spirit.

^[10]Only too well is this charge borne out by many a black line in classical literature and art. But is not the same charge awfully true in a Christendom which is all too much "the world," decorated with certain Christian elements in thought and practice, but at heart in "the darkness" still? See above, Chapter 11.

^[11]So certainly we must render; not, "whatsoever doth make manifest."

^[12]The passage chiefly in view, we can hardly doubt, isIsaiah 60:1, "Arise, shine, for thy light is come, etc." But other Scriptures appear to blend with this in the Apostle’s inspired thought; asIsaiah 52:1-2, "Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion," andIsaiah 51:17, "Awake, awake, stand up, etc." See Kay onIsaiah 60:1. And cp. Edersheim,The Temple and its Services,for a possible reference to Jewish liturgical language at the Feast of Tabernacles. Some have suggested that we have here the words of a primeval Christian psalm. But the phrase"it says,"λέγει, seems to prove at least an ultimate reference to Scripture itself. St Paul writes, "Christshall dawn upon thee." But to him this would be no unfaithful citation of the words, "the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee." See St John’s reference toIsaiah 6:1(John 12:41), and St Peter’s toIsaiah 8:12-13(1 Peter 3:15, where read, "the LordChrist").