Chapter ii: to be literally intended in that passage, it belongs to earth and not

to be literally intended in that passage, it belongs to earth and not to heaven. [165] Nor do the parallels from other Scriptures adduced supply any but the most precarious basis for an interpretation against which the use of the exalted phrase in our epistle revolts.

No; Satan and his hosts do not dwell with Christ and the holy angels "in the heavenly places." But the Church dwells there already, by her faith; and it is in the heavenly places of her faith and hope that she is assailed by the powers of hell. This final prepositional clause should be separated by a comma from the words immediately foregoing; it forms a distinct predicate to the sentence contained in verse 12. It specifies the locality of the struggle; it marks out the battle-field. "Our wrestling is ... in the heavenly places." [166] So we construe the sentence, following the ancient Greek commentators.

The life of the Church "is hid with the Christ in God"; her treasure is laid up in heaven. She is assailed by a philosophy and vain deceit that perverts her highest doctrines, that clouds her vision of Christ and limits His glory, and threatens to drag her down from the high places where she sits with her ascended Lord. [167] Such was, in effect, the aim of the Colossian heresy, and of the great Gnostical movement to which this speculation was a prelude, that for a century and more entangled Christian faith in its metaphysical subtleties and false mysticism. The epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians strike the leading note of the controversies of the Church in this region during its first ages. Their character was thoroughly transcendental. "The heavenly things" were the subject-matter of the great conflicts of this epoch.

The questions of religious controversy characteristic of our own times, though not identical with those of Colossæ or Ephesus, concern matters equally high and vital. It is not this or that doctrine that is now at stake--the nature or extent of the atonement, the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son with the Father, the verbal or plenary inspiration of Scripture; but the personal being of God, the historical truth of Christianity, the reality of the supernatural,--these and the like questions, which formed the accepted basis and the common assumptions of former theological discussions, are now brought into dispute. Religion has to justify its very existence. Christianity must answer for its life, as at the beginning. God is denied. Worship is openly renounced. Our treasures in heaven are proclaimed to be worthless and illusive. The entire spiritual and celestial order of things is relegated to the region of obsolete fable and fairy tales. The difficulties of modern religious thought lie at the foundation of things, and touch the core of the spiritual life. Unbelief appears, in some quarters, to be more serious and earnest than faith. While we quarrel over rubrics and ritual, thoughtful men are despairing of God and immortality. The Churches are engaged in trivial contentions with each other, while the enemy pushes his way through our broken ranks to seize the citadel.

"The apostle incites the readers," says Chrysostom, "by the thought of the prize at stake. When he has said that our enemies are powerful, he adds thereto that these are great possessions which they seek to wrest from us. When he says in the heavenly places, this implies for the heavenly things. How it must rouse and sober us to know that the hazard is for great things, and great will be the prize of victory. Our foe strives to take heaven from us." Let the Church be stripped of all her temporalities, and driven naked as at first into the wilderness. She carries with her the crown jewels; and her treasure is unimpaired, so long as faith in Christ and the hope of heaven remain firm in her heart. But let these be lost; let heaven and the Father in heaven fade with our childhood's dreams; let Christ go back to His grave--then we are utterly undone. We have lost our all in all! __________________________________________________________________

[154] Endunamousthe [from dunamis] en Kurio kai en to kratei tes ischuos autou. See the note on these synonyms, on p. 76. Comp., for this verb, Col. i. II; 2 Tim. iv. 17; Phil. iv. 13: Panta ischuo en to endunamounti me,--"I have strength for everything in Him that enables me."

[155] Comp. remark on methodeia (iv. 14), p. 247.

[156] John xii. 31, xiv. 30, xvi. 11: comp. Luke iv. 5-7; Heb. ii. 14.

[157] 2 Cor. ii. 11, xi. 3; 2 Thess. ii. 9, 10; 2 Tim. ii. 26, etc.

[158] Rev. xii, 7-10; Gen. iii. 4, 5; Zech. iii. 1; Job i.

[159] Ch. iv. 27; 2 Cor. ii. 11; Luke xxii. 31.
[160] Luke x. 17-20, xi. 14-26.
[161] Col. i. 13: comp. Acts xxvi. 18, etc.
[162] Luke xvi. 8, xviii. 6.
[163] Ta pneumatika tes ponerias.

[164] Mr. Moule aptly observes, in his excellent and most useful Commentary on Ephesians in the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges: St Paul's "testimony to the real and objective existence" of evil spirits "gains in strength when it is remembered that the epistle was addressed (at least, among other designations) to Ephesus, and that Ephesus (see Acts xix.) was a peculiarly active scene of asserted magical and other dealings with the unseen darkness. Supposing that the right line to take in dealing with such beliefs and practices had been to say that the whole basis of them was a fiction of the human mind, not only would such a verse as this [vi. 12] not have been written, but, we may well assume, something would have been written strongly contradictory to the thought of it" (p. 176).

[165] See p. 103.

[166] The objection against the common rendering taken from the absence of the Greek article (ta) before the phrase en tois epouraniois, required to link it to ta pneumatika tes ponerias, is not decisive.

[167] Col. ii. 8-10, iii. 1-4; Phil. iii. 20, 21: comp. Eph. i. 3, ii. 6, 18, iv. 10, 15; Heb. vi. 19, 20, etc. __________________________________________________________________