Chapter 04. The Salvation of the Ephesians; An Instance of the Work of Redeeming Grace

Chapter 4.
The Salvation of the Ephesians; An Instance of the Work of Redeeming Grace Ephesians 2:1-10

"La connaissance de Dieu sans celle de notre misère fait l’orgueil. La connaissance de notre misère sans celle de Jésus-Christ fait le désespoir. Mais la connaissance de Jésus-Christ nous exempte et de l’orgueil et du désespoir, parce que nous y trouvons Dieu, notre misère, et la voie unique de la réparer."
—Pascal OUR last Study was much occupied "concerning Christ and the Church." First the glory of the Lord, the Head, then the transcendent privileges of His true Body, "the blessed Company of all faithful people"—these were our lines of contemplation. We sought to follow the Apostle along them, not only to learn, but also to worship and to pray. For we found him addressing the Ephesians not as the lecturer or expositor, but as the evangelist whose soul burned with thanksgiving for the victories of grace among them, and who also, who therefore, prayed with intense supplication that they might realize yet more what they possessed in being joined in that Body to that Head.

He has by no means exhausted the theme. There is a great deal yet to be said about salvation in general, and the Ephesians’ salvation in particular. Among other things, he has to dilate upon the miracle of mercy in the matter; the converts are to be reminded what they have been delivered from, as well as what they have been lifted into. The must be led to look down again into the pit, into the grave, from which grace called them out and set them free. So shall they be both the happier and the more secure, because the more humble, on the astonishing height to which that grace has borne them up, "seating them in the heavenly regions," where their Lord is set.

Thus we come to one of the great evangelic passages of the whole New Testament, deeply characteristic of the primeval Gospel in its essence. For never for a moment does the Gospel, in its eagle-flights into the sky of grace and glory, forget the wonder, the miracle, the mercy, of our having access to that sky at all. "Other Gospels, which are not other," may and often do ignore that side of things, till we hear little about the horror, guilt, and doom of man’s sin, and the absolute gratuitousness of the grant of a rescue from it. We might almost think of man, of "humanity," as they present him, rather as of an unfortunate traveller upon some bye-road of the universe, fallen among thieves, "more sinned against than sinning," cruelly robbed and maimed, with nothing to blame but his enemies and his circumstances; so that the supreme King stands in some sense obliged to redress him, and to recover him, and to comfort him after his long calamities. Is not this, too often, not the language to be sure but the spirit of what passes current as Christian teaching? But it is not the Gospel of the Lord and His Apostles. True, while they ply no high-flown rhetoric about "the enthusiasm of humanity," they do unfold in radiant colours "the philanthropy of God our Saviour" ( Titus 3:4); the love of God for "the world" ( John 3:16); the movement of the eternal Heart towards the human Nature made in the divine Image. But all this goes close along with the unceasing recollection that that nature has itself fallen by its own iniquity, and lies not only wounded but guilty on the wayside. Man is not merely a sufferer; he is a runaway, a criminal, a rebel, a conspirator. Eternal Love regards him. But eternal Law, lodged in the same Will with eternal Love lays its arrest upon him, and shews the death-warrant. And meanwhile, as part of the phenomenon of man’s mysterious self-ruin, he lies there not only guilty and arrested, but alienated and resisting still. His destruction of himself expresses itself above all in this—that, in the Fall, he does not love God, he does not choose God. He "forsakes his own mercy." He lays the blame anywhere but on his own head. He loves himself best. Of himself, he is not contrite, penitent, submissive, believing. He is dead to his true life, which is to know God in His redeeming Son.

Let us ask for an entire sympathy with God’s law against ourselves as guilty, and for just such a sight of ourselves, as self-alienated from love of the eternal Love, as shall make us feel the mercy of salvation. Only so, I dare to think, shall we ever fully respond to the real message of the New Testament. It is written ( Acts 5:31) of our glorified Saviour that He is "exalted, to give repentance and remission of sins," not one gift only, but the two. And repentance means little if it does not mean the complete renunciation of the dream of self-wrought claims, and the recognition of salvation as wonderful mercy, from first to last.

I linger upon this side of truth, not as if I could forget the glorious other side; what would life be without it? But I am sure that this side is what the Christian world is forgetting far and wide, while salvation is either taken all too indolently, (a very different thing from taking it simply,) or is practically put aside as what "humanity" can do without. In the course of my ministry I have known impressive examples to the point; one such is present to me at this hour. I have seen hearts actually resist and reject the most benignant offers made by Jesus Christ, in His character of Mediator and Advocate, because God ought not to need an Advocate for His unfortunate "children"; He ought to keep them safe, and bring them home. So it thought, that heart, a little while ago. But now, drawn by a grace divine indeed, it has come to see itself, in the light of an infinite Holiness; and lo, the perplexities and the resistance have fallen like leaves from the autumnal trees, and the "anxious enquirer" has asked that very old-fashioned question, What must I do to be saved? And the glory of Christ has shone upon the whole being, and repentance has kindled into joy unspeakable and full of glory.

Let us be sure of it, that species of joy is inseparably connected with "the broken and contrite heart." Let the Church come to be strange to the experience of conviction of sin; it will come to be equally strange to that of "joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ." Let the Gospel of "the enthusiasm of humanity" take the place of that of our ruin in sin, our redemption by Christ Jesus, and our regeneration by the Holy Ghost, and the "enthusiasm" will have very little in it of the victory which overcomes the world, and in which we go forth to bless the world by commending to it "the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

"Never was there a heresy, but it had something to do with an insufficient estimate of sin." And an insufficient estimate of the "thing which God hateth" is not only the parent of speculative error; it is the secret death of true spiritual joy. So the Apostle is bent upon reminding the Ephesians of their past, and of the absolute mercy which had lifted them out of it into such a present, and for such a future.

"He teaches all the mercy, for he shews them all the sin."

Ephesians 2:1. And you He brought to life[1] (from His viewpoint, it was when Christ rose again; from yours, it was when you believed on Him), being, as you then were, dead men, devoid of life spiritual and eternal, and wholly unable to generate it from within, in respect of your (τοῖς) trespasses and your sins (read ὑμῶν), your manifold forms of discord with the will of God, things which were at once the conditions and the results of that "death";

Ephesians 2:2. in which sins once on a time you walked,[2] as on a path, as in a region, moving from thing to thing in the course of life, determined by (κατά) the course[3]of this world, this present order of human things,^[4] aye, and by a dark personal power behind it and working through it, even by the ruler of the authority of the air,[5] or, in other words, of the spirit now at work,[6] as once it was at work in you, in the sons of disobedience, the human beings characterized by moral alienation from the will of God, and whose attitude therefore gives foothold and opportunity for the subtle "working" of His enemies and theirs.[7] As they are, so you were, nay, so we were; I the Jew, you the Greeks, were all alike in this, till grace found us out. As we look upon the pagans around us, we must say, with

Ephesians 2:3. contrite memory, Among whom we too all lived our life,[8]once on a time, in the desires of our flesh, the bias and preferences of the self-life, whatever form they took, gross or subtle,[9]doing the willings of the flesh and of the thoughts, the volitions of the fallen self, whether coming out in concrete action or lurking in unholy imaginations; and were by nature, not by circumstance only, not by exterior accident and disadvantage, because of bad example or invitation only, but by the inward wrongness of our own condition, antecedent to the grace of God, children of wrath; naturally, normally, exposed, as are also the rest of men, to the moral displeasure of the eternal Holy One.[10]

Such was our position, as mysterious as possible, but as much as possible a matter of fact. Beings profoundly personal, conscious in our depths of moral differences, able to say I will, able to know I ought;—our will was in its depths at discord with our duty; we preferred darkness to light, we followed self-will rather than the will of God. The manifestations of the mischief were infinitely various. One person plunged into bodily profligacy, another followed the star of knowledge, a third worshipped sensuous rather than sensual pleasure, a fourth set himself aflame with religious zealotry. But the root of the mischief was ultimately the same in all. We chose ourselves rather than our God; our will was sweeter to us than His law. And this was "by nature." The disease was indeed of the person, of the individual; but somehow it lay deeper, it was in the state of his nature. Here were no isolated accidents, under which very many human wills were wrong with God. There was a dark "law" in the phenomenon; it was a universal case; all human wills were wrong with Him. And so (how could it be otherwise?) His holiness was displeased with us all; we were "children of His wrath." No tyrannic heat and violence lay in that awful "wrath"; no blind jealousies and unregulated inflictions surged out of that dark but immaculate depth. It was the sinless aversion of Holiness from sin. Yet none the less it was displeasure, personal and incalculably formidable. And beneath its celestial frown we lay.[11]

What was to be done? Was the fate of man, his nature’s self-inflicted fate, sealed and hopeless? No—because of God. "Thou hast destroyed thyself; but

Ephesians 2:4. in Me is thy help" ( Hosea 13:9). But our (ὁ) God, being as He is, in His blessed state "by nature," wealthy in mercy, moved by nothing but Himself, because of His much love with which[12]He loved us, His Church to be, albeit our condition was repulsive to His holiness

Ephesians 2:5. in a degree to us inconceivable, aye (καί) when we were—as just now I said you were, but it was the same with me, with all—dead men in respect of our (τοῖς) trespasses, brought us to life along with His (τῷ) Christ, when the Head lived again for us, and then when we, believing, were made the Members of the Head; (yes, along with Christ, wholly because of His Sacrifice, His Victory, His Covenant; for never forget that not because of any claim on God but by grace, by a pure, free bounty of His goodness, you have been saved (σεσωσμένοι), brought into an actual rescue and

Ephesians 2:6. safekeeping by union with your Lord[13];) and raised you from the grave along with Christ, bringing the new life out into manifestation, as when the living One stepped forth into the morning air in Joseph’s Garden; and seated us along with our Head[14]in the heavenly regions in Christ Jesus. For this glorious "in" must be recorded, to explain the wonderful "with"; we are beside Him there upon His seat of victory and dominion, because we are embodied in Him, by the Spirit’s power and in the bond of faith. So astonishing is the revolution of our condition; from wrath to a wealth of mercy; from death in sin to resurrection-life; from a walk among the sons of disobedience to a session with and in the Lord upon His heavenly throne, looking down from thence on our old miseries and on our terrible but now impotent adversaries. And why was it all done? Assuredly, as we have seen, for pure love to us, but also so as to secure God’s own glorification in His creatures’ view for ever; for He, being what He is, cannot but work for the infinite

Ephesians 2:7. End of His own glory: That He may demonstrate in the ages that are coming on, in the long dispensations of the eternal Future, the overwhelming wealth of His grace seen in kindness showered upon us in Christ Jesus; "in Him," because on Him for ever descends the Father’s love, and so on all that is "found in Him." For, solemnly to recite again that great formula

Ephesians 2:8. of blessing, by His (τῇ) grace you have been saved, by means of faith—by the reliance on His word which makes the provision a possession; and even that, the faith, the fact of your having come to trust Him, is not of yourselves, not generated merely of your unaided will; God’s is the gift of salvation, in all its parts, including the fact that "thy faith hath saved thee"[15]; it is not the resultant of (ἐξ) works, not the outcome of your moral fitness and your moral efforts, (for you were dealt with as "dead men in respect of your trespasses";) so that no one may boast. Yes, the process was divinely steered all along on purpose to keep the saved ones off the quicksands of self-complacency, as if either their strength or their insight were to thank for their blessings; they were to be landed on the firm conviction that "all things are of God," and so to give thanks, now and for ever, to "Him who worketh all things in all" His people.

It shall be reiterated, it shall be summed up, once

Ephesians 2:9. more: For His making (ποίημα) are we, and in no sense our own; not in the least degree is our regenerate state the issue of our unregenerate "works." Our works, that are good works at all, are not the condition up to our faith but the blessed consequent upon it. For we, "His making," were constituted, placed in a totally new state and order, in Christ Jesus, in and by our union with Him, with a view to (ἐπί with the dative) good works, with them as the Maker’s aim and end, works which our (ὁ) God prepared beforehand, long before our resurrection out of spiritual death, for all was ordered in His eternal purpose, that in them we may walk. The passage which we have just paraphrased is, as we remembered above, one of the great passages of all Scripture. The last three verses in particular stand in the front of those brief pregnant oracles which, scattered over the Book of God, seem given on purpose to put in its most concentrated form the message of the Gospel. From the age of the Reformation more particularly those sentences have been often on the lips and in the hearts of believers. For the Reformation was above all things, in its true spiritual aspect, the time of the re-discovery and of the developed apprehension of the apostolic doctrine of Gratuitous Salvation. Then at length, as never before for ages,[16] the Church heard again the glorious paradox of the Apostles, the Evangelium indeed, the promise of life present and eternal to "whosoever believeth on the Son," justification complete and immediate because the Lord has died and risen, and the sinner has "received Him, believing on His Name." Then it was announced far and wide in European Christendom that such is Jesus Christ, and such His work for us, that we are to find in Him a salvation not conveyed to us through our works, but given to us with sovereign simplicity for His sake, in order that now and therefore our works "may be done in God." And so a paragraph like this became inestimably precious, as a divine compendium. In its few lines, what did it not contain? A salvation present and, from the Lord’s viewpoint, completed; σεσωσμένοιἐστέ: a salvation whose every golden link, from eternal purpose to eternal glory, was "by grace; not of works, not of you"; a salvation conveyed to the saved one not by labours and through a process, but "through faith," through taking God at His word in Christ. In that salvation the saved one rests in the noble passiveness of the recollection that he is "God’s making, constituted anew in Christ Jesus"; and then rises up in the blessed activity of one who knows what he possesses, and Who possesses him, and that before him now lies an ordered path of "good works"—the "next thing" of the will of God, and then the next, prepared for the traveller who is now prepared for it. To us, as to our fathers, and to our fathers’ fathers, may Ephesians 2:8-9, Ephesians 2:10, be a watchword, a talisman, of truth, peace and joy, for rest, for labour, for life, for death, and forever. For "the good works prepared for us to walk in" are a path which runs unbroken through the stream of death and up into the hills of immortality; "His servants shall serve Him, and they shall see His face."

Meantime our paragraph leads us to this lofty and memorable close by steps which claim, each of them, the Christian’s deepest thought. The wonder as well as the splendour of the true Gospel is before us in them. Forget not, believing soul, thy original "death in respect of thy trespasses." Thank God if the symptoms of it were so restrained that the ill of it for others was not what it might have been; but do not forget that once, whatever the form and colour of thy conduct, towards God thou wast dead. Thy personality, thy consciousness, understanding, will, affections, all were there, God’s glorious gifts; but thou didst not "know" (as He means knowing) "the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He had sent"; and that, and that alone, is "the life eternal" ( John 17:3). Thou wast dead, needing nothing less than a miracle of resurrection. And an enemy sat at the door of thy grave; "the Prince of the authority of the air," the dread personal antagonist of Christ and ruthless enemy of man; a person, however much human speculation may (surely to his own satisfaction) deny it, ridicule it, ignore it; and personally bent upon thy abiding spiritual death. And over that guarded sepulchre hung the cloud of the displeasure of the Eternal, His abomination of all things at discord with His holiness.

Remember this; ponder the extremity of the ruin. But then with new surprise, and with new assurance, remember that the mercy and the love are facts as certain, and as tangible, and all for thee. As a fact, thou art risen with thy risen Lord, and seated with Him where He sits, a monument of the "kindness" of His Father and thine. As a fact, by grace thou hast been saved. As a fact, thy feet are set upon the rock of the way of holiness, the path to glory. Remember, and rejoice.

^[1]The verb is supplied, as in A.V. and R.V., from ver. 5 below, where the wording is repeated nearly verbatim:ὄνταςἡμᾶς νεκροὺς...συνεζωοποίησε τῷΧριστῷ.

^[2]Περιεπατήσατεthe aorist gathers up the whole experience into a point of thought.

^[3]Αἰών, "age": the word is rendered"course"in A.V. and R.V., and it would be difficult to suggest a better English. We sometimes use "period" in nearly the same derived sense—a timeand its influences.

[4] Such seems to be the meaning ofκόσμοςhere. It certainly is not (as in e.g.John 11:9,τὸφῶς τοῦκ. τούτουthe physical universe; nor again merely mankind, but mankind as conditioned by sin, or rather this present sinful order of human life. So very often in N.T., notably in St John’s First Epistle.

^[5]"The great personal Evil Spirit, Satan; whose existence, sparingly indicated in the O.T., is largely dwelt upon in the N.T.... For St Paul’s recognition of [his existence], cp.Acts 13:10,Acts 26:18;Romans 16:20;1 Corinthians 5:5,1 Corinthians 7:5;2 Corinthians 2:11,2 Corinthians 11:14;1 Thessalonians 2:18; 2 Thess,1 Thessalonians 2:9;1 Timothy 1:20,1 Timothy 3:6-7,1 Timothy 5:15;2 Timothy 2:26, and below [in Eph.]Ephesians 4:27,Ephesians 6:11."—"The authority of the air" appears to mean the organized power of the world of unholy spirits, here indicated as having their abode not precisely on earth but about it. "We must seek a meaning of ’air’ literal and local, rather than otherwise, looking at St Paul’s usage elsewhere (e.g.1 Thessalonians 4:17).... On the whole we gather, as the revelation of this passage, that as earth is the abode of embodied spirits, mankind, so the airy envelope of earth is the abode, for the purposes of action on man, of the spirits of evil, which, if not bodiless, have not ’animal’ bodies.... Observe our Lord’s use of ’thebirds of the sky’(Luke 8:5) as the figure for the Tempter in the parable of the Sower." (Notes in theCambridge Bible.)

^[6]Τοῦπνεύματος, κ.τ.λ.: this genitive puts theπνεῦμαin grammatical apposition not with "the ruler" (ἄρχοντα) but with the "authority" (ἐξουσίας). It is a startling phrase, perhaps best explained by taking it here to be a collective singular; theπνεῦμαis in fact theπνεύματαgathered into one idea, or regarded in the oneness of their malign influence.

^[7]"Sonsof disobedience": a familiar Hebraism; cp.2 Peter 2:14, where the literal rendering is, "children of a curse"; and just below, ver. 3,τέκναὀργῆς)?. "Disobedience" rendersἀπείθειαbetter than "unbelief"; though the two ideas are, in spiritual experience, closely connected.

^[8]Ἀνεστράφημεν: again an aorist, gathering a long experience into one idea.

^[9]In St Paul,σάρξ"means human nature as conditioned by the Fall, or, to word it otherwise, either the state of the unregenerate being, in which state the sinful principle dominates, or the state of that element of the regenerate being in which the principle, dislodged, as it were, from the centre, still lingers and is felt; not dominant in the being, but present." (Note in theCambridge Bible.)

^[10]"It has been suggested that ’children of wrath’ may mean no more than ’beings prone to violent anger,’ or even to ’ungoverned impulse’ generally. But the word ’wrath’ is frequent with St Paul, and in 13 out of the 20 places it unmistakably means the divine wrath.... Add to this that this passage deals with the deepest and most general facts, and thus it is unlikely that any one special phase of sin would be instanced." (Note in theCambridge Bible.)

^[11]On the great mystery and great fact summed up in the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, there are some pregnant remarks in the late Prof. J. B. Mozley’sLectures and Theological Papers(§ ix., pp. 136, etc.). "Original sin is, fundamentally, simplyuniversalsin.... Nobody supposes that anything takes place universally by chance;... we know there must be some law working in the case.... What wecallthe law is a secondary question." I may refer further to my small manual,Outlines of Christian Doctrine(pp. 173, etc.); and to Prof. Shedd’sSermons to the Natural Man,especially Nos. V. and XIV. Browning’s lines are worthy of note:

"I still, to suppose it" [the Christian faith] "true, for my part,
 See reasons and reasons; this, to begin,
’Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart
 At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man’s Heart."
 Gold Hair, a Story of Pornic(1864).

^[12]Ἥν: the accusative takes the place of the dative, by "attraction" toἀγάπην.

^[13]"Have beensaved": so just below,Ephesians 2:8. Much more commonly our salvation is represented as aprocess going on,σώζεσθε, σωζόμενοι. But here the work of eternal mercy is, as it were, seen from the divine viewpoint, from which "that is afait accompliwhich from the human point of view is a thing in process." Or, to put it otherwise, the being already "has been saved" which is in the hands of an omnipotent and unfailing Saviour, though He has much yet to do with it while it is in His hands on the way to glory.

^[14]It seems clearly best, in the context, to referσυνήγειρε, συνεκάθισε, to our unionwith Christrather thanwith one another.

^[15]It is of course possible to refer the words "and that, not of yourselves,etc.," not to the thought that we "have been savedthrough faith"but to the more general statement that we have been saved"by grace."This is the more possible, becauseτοῦτοis neuter, andπίστιςfeminine; we might have expectedδιὰταύτηςif the reference were to "faith." Accordingly many expositors, including Calvin, one of the wisest and most impartial of all interpreters, do take"and that,etc.," to refer to the whole previous thought of our grace-given salvation. Yet I still advocate the special reference to "faith"; and for the main reason thatκαὶτοῦτοis a phrase which always denotes somemarked additionalelement in the statement. Such an addition, if I am right, can only be found here by bringing in the thought thateven our believingis "by grace." But for the grace of God, opening our eyes, we should not see the infinite trustworthiness of Christ, and so be (not driven by force, but)decidedto trust Him. Thus explaining the clause, we must explainτοῦτοto refer not to the feminine nounπίστιςprecisely, but to the fact of our exercisingπίστις.—For "faith" as a "gift," cp.Php 1:29.

^[16]I refer of course to the public and prevalent teaching of the Christian Churches. All along the centuries a bright stream can be traced of personal, individual faith of the noblest evangelic type. And in such writers at St Anselm and St Bernard utterances occur than which nothing could be more true to the teaching of St Paul. But the medieval "Gospel" in its prevalent form was a sorrowful distortion.