discuss without a tremor of emotion truths the first whisper and dim
promise of which once lifted men’s souls into ecstasy, or cast them down
into depths of shame and bewilderment so that they forgot to eat their
bread. The awe of things eternal, the mystery of our faith, the Spirit
of glory and of God rest on us no longer. So there come to be, as one
hears it said, _gospel-hardened_ hearers--and gospel-hardened preachers!
The eyes see--and see not; the ears hear--and hear not; the lips speak
without feeling; _the heart is waxen fat_. This is the nemesis of grace
abused. It is the result that follows by an inevitable psychological
law, where outward contact with spiritual truth is not attended with an
inward apprehension and response. How do we need to pray, in handling
these dread themes, for a true sense and savour of Divine things,--that
there may be given, and ever given afresh to us “a spirit of wisdom and
revelation in the knowledge of God.”

Three things the apostle desires that his readers may see with the
heart’s enlightened eyes: the _hope to which God calls them_, the
_wealth that He possesses in them,_ and the _power which He is prepared
to exert upon them as believing men_.

I. What, then, is our _hope_ in God? What is the ideal of our faith? For
what purpose has God called us into the fellowship of His Son? What is
our religion going to do for us and to make of us?

It will bring us safe home to heaven. It will deliver us from the
present evil world, and preserve us unto Christ’s heavenly kingdom. God
forbid that we should make light of “the hope laid up for us in the
heavens,” or cast it aside. It is an anchor of the soul, both sure and
steadfast. But is it _the_ hope of our calling? Is this what St Paul
here chiefly signifies? We are very sure that it is not. But it is the
one thing which stands for the hope of the gospel in many minds. “We
trust that our sins are forgiven: we hope that we shall get to heaven!”
The experience of how many Christian believers begins and ends there. We
make of our religion a harbour of refuge, a soothing anodyne, an escape
from the anguish of guilt and the fear of death; not a life-vocation, a
grand pursuit. The definition we have quoted may suffice for the
beginning and the end; but we need something to fill out that formula,
to give body and substance, meaning and movement to the life of faith.

Let the apostle tell us what he regarded, for himself, as the end of
religion, what was the object of his ambition and pursuit. “One thing I
do,” he writes to the Philippians, opening to them all his heart,--“One
thing I do. I press towards the mark for the prize of my high calling of
God in Christ Jesus.” And what, pray, was that mark?--“that I may gain
Christ and be found in Him!--that I may know Him, and the power of His
resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to
His death, if by any means I may attain unto the final resurrection from
the dead.” Yes, Paul hopes for heaven; but he hopes for something else
first, and most. It is through Christ that he sees heaven. To know
Christ, to love Christ, to serve Christ, to follow Christ, to be like
Christ, to be with Christ for ever!--that is what St Paul lived for.
Whatever aim he pursues or affection he cherishes, Christ lies in it and
reaches beyond it. In doing or in suffering, in his intellect and his
heart, in his thoughts for himself or for others, Christ is all things
to him and in all. When life is thus filled with Christ, heaven becomes,
as one may say, a mere circumstance, and death but an incident upon the
way,--in the soul’s everlasting pursuit of Christ.

Behold, then, brethren, the hope of our calling. God could not call us
to any destiny less or lower than this. It would have been unworthy of
Him,--and may we not say, unworthy of ourselves, if we are in truth His
sons? From eternity the Father of spirits has predestined you and me to
be holy and without blemish before Him,--in a word, to be conformed to
the image of His Son. Every other hope is dross compared to this.

II. Another vision for the heart’s eyes, still more amazing than that we
have seen: “what is,” St Paul writes, “the riches of the glory of God’s
inheritance in the saints.”

We saw, in considering the eleventh and fourteenth verses, how the
apostle, in characteristic fashion, plays upon the double aspect of the
_inheritance_, regarding it now as the heritage of the saints in God and
again as His heritage in them. The former side of this relationship was
indicated in the “hope of the Divine calling,”--which we live and strive
for as it is promised us by God; and the latter comes out, by way of
contrast, in this second clause. Verse 18 repeats in another way the
antithesis of verse 14 between our inheritance and God’s acquisition. We
must understand that God sets great store by us His human children, and
counts Himself rich in our affection and our service. How deeply it must
affect us to know this, and to see the glory that in God’s eyes belongs
to His possession in believing men.

What presumption is all this, some one says. How preposterous to imagine
that the Maker of the worlds interests Himself in atoms like
ourselves,--in the ephemera of this insignificant planet! But moral
magnitudes are not to be measured by a foot-rule. The mind which can
traverse the immensities of space and hold them in its grasp, transcends
the things it counts and weighs. As it is amongst earthly powers, so the
law may hold betwixt sphere and sphere in the system of worlds, in the
relations of bodies terrestrial and celestial to each other, that “God
has chosen the weak things to put to shame the mighty, and the things
that are not to bring to nought the things that are.” Through the Church
He is “making known to the potentates in the heavenly places His
manifold wisdom” (iii, 10). The lowly can sing evermore with Mary in the
Magnificat: “He that is mighty hath magnified me.” If it be true that
God spared not His Son for our salvation and has sealed us with the seal
of His Spirit, if He chose us before the world’s foundation to be His
saints, He must set upon those saints an infinite value. We may despise
ourselves; but He thinks great things of us.

And is this, after all, so hard to understand? If the alternative were
put to some owner of wide lands and houses full of treasure: “Now, you
must lose that fine estate, or see your own son lost and ruined! You
must part with a hundred thousand pounds--or with your best friend!”
there could be no doubt in such a case what the choice would be of a man
of sense and worth, one who sees with the eyes of the heart. Shall we
think less nobly of God than of a right-minded man amongst
ourselves?--Suppose, again, that one of our great cities were so full of
wealth that the poorest were housed in palaces and fared sumptuously
every day, though its citizens were profligates and thieves and cowards!
What would its opulence and luxury be worth? Is it not evident that
_character_ is the only possession of intrinsic value, and that this
alone gives worth and weight to other properties? “The saints that are
in the earth and the excellent” are earth’s riches.

So far as we can judge of His ways, the great God who made us cares
comparatively little about the upholstery and machinery of the universe;
but He cares immensely about men, about the character and destiny of
men. There is nothing in all that physical science discloses for God to
_love_, nothing kindred to Himself. “Hast thou considered my servant
Job?” the Hebrew poet pictures Him saying before heaven and hell!--“Hast
thou considered my servant Job?--a perfect man and upright: there is
none like him in the earth.” How proud God is of a man like that, in a
world like this. Who can tell the value that the Father of glory sets
upon the tried fidelity of His humblest servant here on earth; the
intensity with which He reciprocates the confidence of one timid,
trembling human heart, or the simple reverence of one little child that
lisps His awful name? “He _taketh pleasure_ in them that fear Him, in
those that hope in His mercy!” Beneath His feet all the worlds lie
spread in their starry splendour, our sun with its train of planets no
more than one glimmering spot of light amongst ten thousand. But amidst
this magnificence, what is the sight that wins His tender fatherly
regard? “To that man will I look, that is poor and of a contrite spirit,
and that trembles at my word.” Thus saith the High and Lofty One that
inhabiteth eternity. The Creator rejoices in His works as at the
beginning, the Lord of heaven and earth in His dominion. But these are
not His “inheritance.” That is in the love of His children, in the
character and number of His saints. _We_ are to be the praise of His
glory.

Let us learn, then, to respect ourselves. Let us not take the world’s
tinsel for wealth, and spend our time, like the man in Bunyan’s dream,
scraping with “the muck-rake” while the crown of life shines above our
head. The riches of a Church--nay, of any human community--lies not in
its moneyed resources, but in the men and women that compose it, in
their godlike attributes of mind and heart, in their knowledge, their
zeal, their love to God and man, in the purity, the gentleness, the
truthfulness and courage and fidelity that are found amongst them. These
are the qualities which give distinction to human life, and are
beautiful in the eyes of God and holy angels. “Man that is in honour and
understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish.”

III. One thing more we need to understand, or what we have seen already
will be of little practical avail. We may see glorious visions, we may
cherish high aspirations; and they may prove to be but the dreams of
vanity. Nay, it is conceivable that God Himself might have wealth
invested in our nature, a treasure beyond price, shipwrecked and sunk
irrecoverably through our sin. What means exist for realizing this
inheritance? what power is there at work to recover these forfeited
hopes, and that glory of God of which we have come so miserably short?

The answer lies in the apostle’s words: “That ye may know what is the
exceeding greatness of His power toward us that believe,”--a power
measured by “the energy of the might of His strength[67] which He
wrought in the Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at
His right hand in the heavenly places.” This is the power that we have
to count upon, the force that is yoked to the world’s salvation and is
at the service of our faith. Its energy has turned the tide and reversed
the stream of nature--in the person of Jesus Christ and in the course of
human history. It has changed death to life. Above all, it certifies the
forgiveness of sin and releases us from its liabilities; it transforms
the law of sin and death into the law of the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus.

We preachers hear it said sometimes: “You live in a speculative world.
Your doctrines are ideal and visionary,--altogether too high for men as
they are and the world as we find it. Human nature and experience, the
coarse realities of life are all against you.”

What would our objectors have said at the grave-side of Jesus? “The
beautiful dreamer, the sublime idealist! He was too good for a world
such as ours. It was sure to end like this. His ideas of life were
utterly impracticable.” So they would have moralized. “And the good
prophet talked--strangest fanaticism of all--of rising again on the
third day! One thing at least we know, that the dead are dead and gone
from us. No, we shall never see Jesus or His like again. Purity cannot
live in this infected air. The grave ends all hope for men.” But,
despite human nature and human experience, He has risen again, He lives
for ever! That is the apostle’s message and testimony to the world. For
those “who believe” it, all things are possible. A life is within our
reach that seemed far off as earth from heaven. _You_ may become a
perfect saint.

From His open grave Christ breathed on His disciples, and through them
on all mankind, the Holy Spirit. This is the efficient cause of
Christianity,--the Spirit that raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. The
limit to its efficacy lies in the defects of our faith, in our failure
to comprehend what God gave us in His Son. Is anything now too hard for
the Lord? Shall anything be called impossible, in the line of God’s
promise and man’s spiritual need? Can we put an arrest upon the working
of this mysterious force, upon the Spirit of the new life, and say to
it: Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther?

Look at Jesus where He was--the poor, tortured, wounded body, slain by
our sins, lying cold and still in Joseph’s grave: then lift up your eyes
and see Him _where He is_,--enthroned in the worship and wonder of
heaven! Measure by that distance, by the sweep and lift of that almighty
Arm, the strength of the forces engaged to your salvation, the might of
the powers at work through the ages for the redemption of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[61] See Westcott and Hort’s _New Testament in Greek_, vol. ii., pp.
124, 125.

[62] Dr. Beet abides by the critical text. He solves the difficulty by
giving πίστις a double sense: “the faith among you in the Lord Jesus,
and the _faithfulness_ towards all the saints.” See his Commentary on
_Ephesians, etc._, pp. 284-6.

[63] In 1 Thess. i. 7-9; 2 Thess. i. 4, the same thought enters into
Paul’s thanksgiving; comp. 2 Cor. ix. 2.

[64] This is the emphatic ἐπιγνῶσις, so frequent in the later epistles.
See Lightfoot’s _note_ on Col. i. 9; or Cremer’s _Lexicon to N.T.
Greek_.

[65] See ch. iii. 3-5, iv. 11; and comp. 1 Cor. xiv. 26-40, etc.

[66] Adolphe Monod: _Explication de l’épître de S. Paul aux Éphésiens_.
A deeply spiritual and suggestive Commentary.

[67] In this amplitude of expression there is no idle heaping up of
words. The four synonyms for _power_ have each a distinct force in the
sentence. Δύναμις is _power_ in general, as that which is able to effect
some purpose; ἐνέργεια is _energy_, power in effective action and
operation; κράτος is _might_, _mastery_, sovereign power,--in the New
Testament used chiefly of the power of God; ἰσχύς is _force_,
_strength_, power resident in some person and belonging to him. This is
the order in which the words follow each other. Compare vi. 10 in the
Greek.

THE DOCTRINE.

CHAPTER i. 20-iii. 13.

    Ὑψηλῶν σφόδρα γέμει τῶν νοημάτων καὶ ὑπερόγκων. Ἃ γὰρ μηδαμοῦ σχέδον
    ἐφθέγξατο, ταῦτα ἐνταῦθά φησιν.

    JOHN CHRYSOSTOM: _In epistolam ad Ephesios._

CHAPTER VI.

_WHAT GOD WROUGHT IN THE CHRIST._

    “He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand
    in the heavenly _places_, far above all rule, and authority, and
    power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this
    world, but also in that which is to come: and He put all things in
    subjection under His feet, and Him He gave--the head over all
    things--to the Church which is His body,--the fulness of Him that
    filleth all in all.”--EPH. i. 20-23.

The division that we make at verse 20, marking off at this point the
commencement of the Doctrine of the epistle, may appear somewhat forced.
The great doxology of the first half of the chapter is intensely
theological; and the prayer which follows it, like that of the letter to
the Colossians, melts into doctrine imperceptibly. The apostle teaches
upon his knees. The things he has to tell his readers, and the things he
has asked on their behalf from God, are to a great extent the same.
Still the writer’s attitude in the second chapter is manifestly that of
teaching; and his doctrine there is so directly based upon the
concluding sentences of his prayer, that it is necessary for logical
arrangement to place these verses within the doctrinal section of the
epistle.

The resurrection of Christ made men sensible that a new force of life
had come into the world, of incalculable potency. This power was in
existence before. In prelusive ways, it has wrought in the world from
its foundation, and since the fall of man. By the incarnation of the Son
of God it took possession of human flesh; by His sacrificial death it
won its decisive triumph. But the virtue of these acts of Divine grace
lay in their hiding of power, in the self-abnegation of the Son of God
who emptied Himself and took a servant’s form, and became obedient unto
death.

With what a rebound did the “energy of the might of God’s strength” put
forth itself in Him, when once this sacrifice was accomplished! Even His
disciples who had seen Jesus still the tempest and feed the multitude
from a handful of bread and call back the spirit to its mortal frame,
had not dreamed of the might of Godhead latent in Him, until they beheld
Him risen from the dead. He had promised this in words; but they
understood His words only when they saw the fact, when He actually stood
before them “alive after His passion.” The scene of Calvary--the cruel
sufferings of their Master, His helpless ignominy and abandonment by
God, the malignant triumph of his enemies--gave to this revelation an
effect beyond measure astonishing and profound in its impression. From
the stupor of grief and despair they were raised to a boundless hope, as
Jesus rose from the death of the cross to glorious life and Godhead.

Of the same nature was the effect produced by His manifestation to Paul
himself. The Nazarene prophet known to Saul by report as an attractive
teacher and worker of miracles, had made enormous pretensions,
blasphemous if they were not true. He put Himself forward as the Messiah
and the very Son of God! But when brought to the test, His power utterly
failed. God disowned and forsook Him; and He “was crucified of
weakness.” His followers declared, indeed, that He had returned from the
grave. But who could believe them, a handful of Galilean enthusiasts,
desperately clinging to the name of their disgraced leader! If He has
risen, why does He not show Himself to others? Who can accept a
crucified Messiah? The new faith is a madness, and an insult to our
common Judaism! Such were Saul’s former thoughts of the Christ. But when
his challenge was met and the Risen One confronted him in the way to
Damascus, when from that Form of insufferable glory there came a voice
saying, “I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest!” it was enough. Instantly
the conviction penetrated his soul, “He liveth by the power of God.”
Saul’s previous reasonings against the Messiahship of Jesus by the same
rigorous logic were now turned into arguments for Him.

It is “_the_ Christ,” let us observe, in whom God “wrought raising Him
from the dead”: the Christ of Jewish hope (ver. 12), the centre and sum
of the Divine counsel for the world (ver. 10),[68] the Christ whom in
that moment never to be forgotten the humbled Saul recognized in the
crucified Nazarene.

The demonstration of the power of Christianity Paul had found in the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. The power which raised Him from the dead
is the working energy of our faith. Let us see what this mysterious
power wrought in the Redeemer Himself; and then we will consider how it
bears upon us. There are two steps indicated in Christ’s exaltation: He
was raised _from the death of the cross to new life amongst men_; and
again from the world of men He was raised _to the throne of God in
heaven_. In the enthronement of Jesus Christ at the Father’s right
hand, verses 22, 23 further distinguish two separate acts: there was
conferred on Him _a universal Lordship_; and He was made specifically
_Head of the Church_, being given to her for her Lord and Life, He who
contains the fulness of the Godhead. Such is the line of thought marked
out for us.

I. _God raised the Christ from the dead._

This assertion is the corner-stone of St Paul’s life and doctrine, and
of the existence of Christendom. Did the event really take place? There
were Christians at Corinth who affirmed, “There is no resurrection of
the dead.” And there are followers of Jesus now who with deep sadness
confess, like the author of _Obermann once more_:

    “Now He is dead! Far hence He lies
      In the lorn Syrian town;
    And on His grave, with shining eyes,
      The Syrian stars look down.”

If we are driven to this surrender, compelled to think that it was an
apparition, a creation of their own passionate longing and heated fancy
that the disciples saw and conversed with during those forty days, an
apparition sprung from his fevered remorse that arrested Saul on the
Damascus road--if we no longer believe in Jesus and the resurrection, it
is in vain that we still call ourselves Christians. The foundation of
the Christian creed is struck away from under our feet. Its spell is
broken; its energy is gone.

Individual men may and do continue to believe in Christ, with no faith
in the supernatural, men who are sceptics in regard to His resurrection
and miracles. They believe in Himself, they say, not in His legendary
wonders; in His character and teaching, in His beneficent influence--in
the _spiritual_ Christ, whom no physical marvel can exalt above His
intrinsic greatness. And such trust in Him, where it is sincere, He
accepts for all that it is worth, from the believer’s heart. But this is
not the faith that saved Paul, and built the Church. It is not the faith
which will save the world. It is the faith of compromise and transition,
the faith of those whose conscience and heart cling to Christ while
their reason gives its verdict against Him. Such belief may hold good
for the individuals who profess it; but it must die with them. No skill
of reasoning or grace of sentiment will for long conceal its
inconsistency. The plain, blunt sense of mankind will decide again, as
it has done already, that Jesus Christ was either a blasphemer, or He
was the Son of the eternal God; either He rose from the dead in very
truth, or His religion is a fable. Christianity is not bound up with the
infallibility of the Church, whether in Pope or Councils, nor with the
inerrancy of the letter of Scripture: it stands or falls with the
reality of the facts of the gospel, with the risen life of Christ and
His presence in the Spirit amongst men.

The fact of Christ’s resurrection is one upon which modern science has
nothing new to say. The law of death is not a recent discovery. Men were
as well aware of its universality in the first century as they are in
the nineteenth, and as little disposed as we are ourselves to believe in
the return of the dead to bodily life. The stark reality of death makes
us all sceptics. Nothing is clearer from the narratives than the utter
surprise of the friends of Jesus at His reappearance, and their complete
unpreparedness for the event. They were not eager, but “_slow_ of heart
to believe.” Their very love to the Master, as in the case of Thomas,
made them fearful of self-deception. It is a shallow and an unjust
criticism that dismisses the disciples as interested witnesses and
predisposed to faith in the resurrection of their dead Master. Should we
be thus credulous in the case of our best-beloved dead? The instinctive
feeling that meets any thought of the kind, after the fact of death is
once certain, is rather that of deprecation and aversion, such as Martha
expressed when Jesus went to call her brother from his grave. In all the
long record of human imposture and illusion, no resurrection story has
ever found general credence outside of the Biblical revelation. No
system of faith except our own has ever been built on the allegation
that a dead man rose from the grave.

Christ’s was not the only resurrection; but it is the only _final_
resurrection. Lazarus of Bethany left his tomb at the word of Jesus, a
living man; but he was still a mortal man, doomed to see corruption. He
returned from the grave on this side, as he had entered it, “bound hand
and foot with grave-clothes.” Not so with the Christ. He passed through
the region of death and issued on the immortal side, escaped from the
bondage of corruption. Therefore He is called the “firstfruits” and “the
firstborn _out of_ the dead.”[69] Hence the alteration manifest in the
risen form of Jesus. He was “changed,” as St Paul conceives those will
be who await on earth their Lord’s return (1 Cor. xv. 51). The mortal in
Him was swallowed up of life. The corpse that was laid in Joseph’s tomb
was there no longer. From it another body has issued, recognized for the
same person by look and voice and movement, but indescribably
transfigured. Visible and tangible as the body of the Risen One
was--“Handle me, and see,” He said--it was superior to material
limitations; it belonged to a state whose laws transcend the range of
our experience, in which the body is the pliant instrument of the
animating spirit. From the Person of the risen Saviour the apostle
formed his conception of the “spiritual body,” the “house from heaven”
with which, as he teaches, each of the saints will be clothed--the
wasted form that we lay down in the grave being transformed into the
semblance of His “body of glory, according to the mighty working whereby
He is able to subdue all things to Himself” (Phil. iii. 20, 21).

The resurrection of the Christ inaugurated a new order of things. It was
like the appearance of the first living organism amidst dead matter, or
of the first rational consciousness in the unconscious world. He “is,”
says the apostle, the “beginning, first-begotten out of the dead” (Col.
i. 18). With the harvest filling our granaries, we cease to wonder at
the firstfruits; and in the new heavens and earth Christ’s resurrection
will seem an entirely natural thing. Immortality will then be the normal
condition of human existence.

That resurrection, nevertheless, did homage to the fundamental law of
science and of reason, that every occurrence, ordinary or extraordinary,
shall have an adequate cause. The event was not more singular and unique
than the nature of Him to whom it befell. Looking back over the Divine
life and deeds of Jesus, St Peter said: “It was not possible that He
should be holden of death.” How unfitting and repugnant to thought, that
the common death of all men should come upon Jesus Christ! There was
that in His Person, in its absolute purity and godlikeness, which
repelled the touch of corruption. He was “marked out,” writes our
apostle, “as Son of God, _according to His spirit of holiness_, by His
resurrection from the dead” (Rom. i. 4). These two signs of Godhead
agree in Jesus; and the second is no more superhuman than the first. For
Him the supernatural was natural. There was a mighty working of the
being of God latent in Him, which transcended and subdued to itself the
laws of our physical frame, even more completely than they do the laws
and conditions of the lower realms of nature.

II. The power which raised Jesus our Lord from the dead could not leave
Him in the world of sin and death. Lifting Him from hades to earth, by
another step it exalted the risen Saviour above the clouds, and _seated
Him at God’s right hand in the heavens_.

The forty days were a halt by the way, a condescending pause in the
operation of the almighty power that raised Him. “I ascend,” He said to
the first that saw Him,--“I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my
God and your God.” He must see His own in the world again; He must “show
Himself alive after His passion by infallible proofs,” that their hearts
may be comforted and knit together in the assurance of faith, that they
may be prepared to receive His Spirit and to bear their witness to the
world. Then He will ascend up where He was before, returning to the
Father’s bosom. It was impossible that a spiritual body should tarry in
a mortal dwelling; impossible that the familiar relations of
discipleship should be resumed. No new follower can now ask of Him,
“Rabbi, where dwellest Thou,” under what roof amid the homes of men? For
He dwells with those that love Him always and everywhere, like the
Father (John xiv. 23). From this time Christ will not be known after the
flesh, but as the “Lord of the Spirit” (2 Cor. iii. 18).

“In the heavenlies” now abides the Risen One. This expression, so
frequent in the epistle as to be characteristic of it,[70] denotes not
locality so much as condition and sphere. It speaks of the bright and
deathless world of God and the angels, of which the sky has always been
to men the symbol. Thither Christ ascended in the eyes of His apostles
on the fortieth day from His rising. Once before His death its
brightness for a moment had irradiated His form upon the Mount of
Transfiguration. Clad in the like celestial splendour He showed Himself
to His future apostle Paul, as to one born out of due time, to make him
His minister and witness. Since then, of all the multitudes that have
loved His appearing, no other has looked upon Him with bodily eyes. He
dwells with the Father in light unapproachable.

But rest and felicity are not enough for Him. Christ sits at the right
hand of power, that He may _rule_. In those heavenly places, it seems,
there are thrones higher and lower, names more or less eminent, but His
stands clear above them all. In the realms of space, in the epochs of
eternity there is none to rival our Lord Jesus, no power that does not
owe Him tribute. God “hath put all things under His feet.” _The Christ_,
who died on the cross, who rose in human form from the grave, is exalted
to share the Father’s glory and dominion, is filled with God’s own
fulness, and made without limitation or exception “Head over all
things.”

In his enumeration of the angelic orders in verse 21, the apostle
follows the phraseology current at the time, without giving any precise
dogmatic sanction to it. The epistle to the Colossians furnishes a
somewhat different list (ch. i. 16); and in 1 Corinthians xv. 24 we find
the “principality, dominion, and power” without the “lordship.” As
Lightfoot says,[71] St Paul “brushes away all these speculations” about
the ranks and titles of the angels, “without inquiring how much or how
little truth there may be in them.... His language shows a spirit of
impatience with this elaborate angelology.” There is, perhaps, a passing
reproof conveyed by this sentence to the “worshipping of the angels”
inculcated at the present time in Colossæ, to which other Asian Churches
may have been drawn. “Paul’s faith saw the Risen and Rising One passing
through and beyond and above successive ranks of angelic powers, until
there was in heaven no grandeur which He had not left behind. Then,
after naming heavenly powers known to him, he uses a universal phrase
covering ‘not only’ those known by men living on earth ‘in the’ present
‘age, but also’ those names which will be needed and used to describe
men and angels throughout the eternal future” (Beet).

The apostle appropriates here two sentences of Messianic prophecy, from
Psalms cx. and viii. The former was addressed to the Lord’s Anointed,
the King-Priest enthroned in Zion: “Sit thou on my right hand, until I
make thine enemies thy footstool!” The latter text describes man in his
pristine glory, as God formed him after His likeness and set him in
command over His creation. This saying St Paul applies, with an
unbounded scope, to the God-man raised from the dead, Founder of the new
creation: “Thou madest Him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands;
Thou hast put all things under His feet.” To the former of these
passages St Paul repeatedly alludes; indeed, since our Lord quoted it in
this sense, it became the standing designation of His heavenly
dignity.[72] The words of Psalm viii. are brought in evidence again in
Hebrews ii. 5-10, and expounded from a somewhat different standpoint. As
the writer of the other epistle shows, this coronation belongs to the
human race, and it falls to the Son of man to win it. St Paul in quoting
the same Psalm is not insensible of its human reference. It was a
prophecy for Jesus and His brethren, for Christ and the Church. So it
forms a natural transition from the thought of Christ’s dominion over
the universe (ver. 21) to that of His union with the Church (ver.
22_b_).

III. The second clause of verse 22 begins with an emphasis upon the
_object_ which the English Version fails to recognize: “and _Him_ He
gave”--the Christ exalted to universal authority--“_Him_ God gave, Head
over all things [as He is], to the Church which is His body,--the
fulness of Him who fills all things in all.”

At the topmost height of His glory, with thrones and princedoms beneath
His feet, _Christ is given to the Church_! The Head over all things, the
Lord of the created universe, He--and none less or lower--is the Head of
redeemed humanity. For the Church “is His body” (this clause is
interjected by way of explanation): she is the vessel of His Spirit, the
organic instrument of His Divine-human life. As the spirit belongs to
its body, by the like fitness the Christ in His surpassing glory is the
possession of the community of believing men. The body claims its head,
the wife her husband. No matter where Christ is, however high in heaven,
He belongs to us. Though the Bride is lowly and of poor estate, He is
hers! and she knows it, and holds fast His heart. She recks little of
the people’s ignorance and scorn, if their Master is her affianced Lord,
and she the best-beloved in His eyes.

How rich is this gift of the Father to the Church in the Son of His
love, the concluding words of the paragraph declare: “Him He gave ... to
the Church ... [gave] the fulness of Him that fills all in all.” In the
risen and enthroned Christ God bestowed on men a gift in which the
Divine plenitude that fills creation is embraced. For this last clause,
it is clear to us, does not qualify “the Church which is His body,” and
expositors have needlessly taxed their ingenuity with the incongruous
apposition of “body” and “fulness”; it belongs to the grand Object of
the foregoing description, to “the Christ” whom God raised from the dead
and invested with His own prerogatives. The two separate designations,
“Head over all things” and “Fulness of the All-filler,” are parallel,
and alike point back to _Him_ who stands with a weight of gathered
emphasis--heaped up from verse 19 onwards--at the front of this last
sentence (ver. 22_b_). There has been nothing to prepare the reader to
ascribe the august title of the _pleroma_, the Divine fulness, to the
Church--enough for her, surely, if she is His body and He God’s gift to
her--but there has been everything to prepare us to crown the Lord Jesus
with this glory. To that which God had wrought in Him and bestowed on
Him, as previously related, verse 23 adds something more and greater
still; for it shows what God makes the Christ to be, not to the
creatures, to the angels, to the Church, _but to God Himself_![73]

Our text is in strict agreement with the sayings about “the fulness” in
Colossians i. 15-20 and ii. 9, 10; as well as with the later references
of this epistle, in chapter iii. 19, iv. 13; and with John i. 16. This
title belongs to Christ as God is in Him and communicates to Him all
Divine powers. It was, in the apostle’s view, a new and distinct act by
which the Father bestowed on the incarnate Son, raised by His power from
the dead, the functions of Deity. Of this glory Christ had of His own
accord “emptied Himself” in becoming man for our salvation (Phil. ii. 6,
7). Therefore when the sacrifice was effected and the time of
humiliation past, it “was the Father’s pleasure that all the fulness
should make its dwelling in Him” (Col. i. 19). At no point did Christ
exalt Himself, or arrogate the glory once renounced. He prayed, when the
hour was come: “Now, Father, _glorify Thou me_ with Thine own self, with
the glory which I had with Thee before the world was.” It was for the
Father to say, as He raised and enthroned Him: “Thou art my Son; I
to-day have begotten Thee!” (Acts xiii. 33).

Again there was poured into the empty, humbled and impoverished form of
the Son of God the brightness of the Father’s glory and the infinitude
of the Father’s authority and power. The majesty that He had foregone
was restored to Him in undiminished measure. But how great a change
meanwhile in Him who received it! This plenitude devolves not now on the
eternal Son in His pure Godhead, but on the Christ, the Head and
Redeemer of mankind. God who fills the universe with His presence, with
His cherishing love and sustaining power, has conferred the fulness of
all that He is upon our Christ. He has given Him, so replenished and
perfected, to the body of His saints, that He may dwell and work in them
for ever.

FOOTNOTES:

[68] See the note upon this definite article on p. 47.

[69] Πρωτότοκος ἐκ τῶν νεκρῶν, Col. i. 18: comp. Rom. vi. 13, x. 7, for
the force of the preposition. Hence the peculiar ἐξανάστασιν τὴν ἐκ
νεκρῶν of Phil. iii. 10, 11,--the _out-and-out_ resurrection, which will
utterly remove us from the sphere of death.

[70] Ver. 3, ch. ii. 6, iii. 10, vi. 12; nowhere else in the New
Testament. Comp., however, 1 Cor. xv. 40, 48; Phil. ii. 10; Heb. viii.
5, ix. 23, xi. 16, xii. 22, where the adjective has the same kind of
use.

[71] _Note_ on Col. i. 16.

[72] Matt. xxii. 41-46, also in Mark and Luke; Acts ii. 34, 35; Rom.
viii. 34; Col. iii. 1; Heb. i. 13; 1 Peter iii. 22, etc.

[73] The reader of the Old Testament, unless otherwise advertized, must
inevitably have referred the words _who filleth all things in all_ to
the Supreme God. See Jer. xxiii. 24; Isai. vi. 1, 3; Hag. ii. 7; Ps.
xxxiii. 5, etc.; Exod. xxxi. 3. “That filleth all in all” is an
attribute belonging to “the same God, that worketh all in all” (1 Cor.
xii. 6). Comp. iv. 6.

CHAPTER VII.

_FROM DEATH TO LIFE._

    “And you _did He quicken_, when ye were dead through your trespasses
    and sins, wherein aforetime ye walked according to the course of
    this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the
    spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom we
    also all once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of
    the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath,
    even as the rest:--but God, being rich in mercy, for His great love
    wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead through our
    trespasses, quickened us together with the Christ (by grace have ye
    been saved), and raised us up together and made us to sit together
    in the heavenly _places_ in Christ Jesus.”--EPH. ii. 1-6.

We pass by a sudden transition, just as in Colossians i. 21, 22, from
the thought of that which God wrought in Christ Himself to that which He
works through Christ in believing men. So God raised, exalted, and
glorified His Son Jesus Christ (i. 19-23)--_and you_! The finely woven
threads of the apostle’s thought are frequently severed, and awkward
chasms made in the highway of his argument by our chapter and verse
divisions. The words inserted in our Version (_did He quicken_) are
borrowed by anticipation from verse 5; but they are more than supplied
already in the foregoing context. “The same almighty Hand that was laid
upon the body of the dead Christ and lifted Him from Joseph’s grave to
the highest seat in heaven, is now laid upon your soul. It has raised
_you_ from the grave and death of sin to share by faith His celestial
life.”

The apostle, in verse 3, pointedly includes amongst the “dead in
trespasses and sins” himself and his Jewish fellow-believers as they
“once lived,” when they obeyed the motions and “volitions of the flesh,”
and so were “by birth” not children of favour, as Jews presumed, but
“children of anger, even as the rest.”[74]

This passage gives us a sublime view of the event of our conversion. It
associates that change in us with the stupendous miracle which took
place in our Redeemer. The one act is a continuation of the other. There
is an acting over again in us of Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection and
ascension, when we realize through faith that which was done for mankind
in Him. At the same time, the redemption which is in Christ Jesus is no
mere legacy, to be received or declined; it is not something done once
for all, and left to be appropriated passively by our individual will.
It is a “_power_ of God unto salvation,” unceasingly operative and
effective, that works “of faith and _unto faith_” that summons men to
faith, challenging human confidence wherever its message travels and
awakening the spiritual possibilities dormant in our nature.

It is a supernatural force, then, which is at work upon us in the word
of Christ. It is a resurrection-power, that turns death into life. And
it is a power instinct with love. The love which went out towards the
slain and buried Jesus when the Father stooped to raise Him from the
dead, bends over us as we lie in the grave of our sins, and exerts
itself with a might no less transcendent, that it may raise us from the
dust of death to sit with Him in the heavenly places (vv. 4-6).

Let us look at the two sides of the change effected in men by the
gospel--at the death they leave, and the life into which they enter. Let
us contemplate the task to which this unmatched power has set itself.

I. _You that were dead_, the apostle says.

Jesus Christ came into a dead world--He the one living man, alive in
body, soul, and spirit--alive to God in the world. He was, like none
besides, aware of God and of God’s love, breathing in His Spirit,
“living not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded from His
mouth.” “This,” He said, “is life eternal.” If His definition was
correct, if it be life to know God, then the world into which Christ
entered by His human birth, the world of heathendom and Judaism, was
veritably dying or dead--“dead indeed unto God.”

Its condition was visible to discerning eyes. It was a world rotting in
its corruption, mouldering in its decay, and which to His pure sense had
the moral aspect and odour of the charnel-house. We realize very
imperfectly the distress, the inward nausea, the conflict of disgust and
pity which the fact of being in such a world as this and belonging to it
caused in the nature of Jesus Christ, in a soul that was in perfect
sympathy with God. Never was there loneliness such as His, the solitude
of life in a region peopled with the dead. The joy which Christ had in
His little flock, in those whom the Father had given Him out of the
world, was proportionately great. In them He found companionship,
teachableness, signs of a heart awakening towards God--men to whom life
was in some degree what it was to Him. He had come, as the prophet in
his vision, into “the valley full of dry bones,” and He “prophesied to
these slain, that they might live.” What a comfort to see, at His first
words, a shaking in the valley,--to see some who stirred at His voice,
who stood upon their feet and gathered round Him--not yet a great army,
but a band of living men! In their breasts, inspired from His, was the
life of the future. “I am come,” He said, “that they might have life.”
It was the work of Jesus Christ to breathe His vital spirit into the
corpse of humanity, to reanimate the world.

When St Paul speaks of his readers in their heathen condition as “dead,”
it is not a figure of speech. He does not mean that they were like dead
men, that their state resembled death; “nor only that they were in peril
of death; but he signifies a real and present death” (Calvin). They
were, in the inmost sense and truth of things, _dead men_. We are
twofold creatures, two-lived,--spirits cased in flesh. Our human nature
is capable, therefore, of strange duplicities. It is possible for us to
be alive and flourishing upon one side of our being, while we are
paralyzed or lifeless upon the other. As our bodies live in commerce
with the light and air, in the environment of house and food and daily
exercise of the limbs and senses under the economy of material nature,
so our spirits live by the breath of prayer, by faith and love towards
God, by reverence and filial submission, by communion with things unseen
and eternal. “With Thee,” says the Psalmist to his God, “is the fountain
of life: in Thy light we see light.” We must daily resort to that
fountain and drink of its pure stream, we must faithfully walk in that
light, or there is no such life for us. The soul that wants a true faith
in God, wants the proper spring and principle of its being. It sees not
the light, it bears not the voices, it breathes not the air of that
higher world where its origin and its destiny lie.

The man who walks the earth a sinner against God, becomes by the act and
fact of his transgression a dead man. He has imbibed the fatal poison;
it runs in his veins. The doom of sin lies on his unforgiven spirit. He
carries death and judgement about with him. They lie down with him at
night and wake with him in the morning; they take part in his
transactions; they sit by his side in the feast of life. His works are
“dead works”; his joys and hopes are all shadowed and tainted. Within
his living frame he bears a coffined soul. With the machinery of life,
with the faculties and possibilities of a spiritual being, the man lies
crushed under the activity of the senses, wasted and decaying for want
of the breath of the Spirit of God. In its coldness and
powerlessness--too often in its visible corruption--his nature shows the
symptoms of advancing death. It is dead as the tree is dead, cut off
from its root; as the fire is dead, when the spark is gone out; dead as
a man is dead, when the heart stops.

As it is with the departed saints sleeping in Christ,--“put to death,
indeed, in the flesh, but living in the spirit,”--so by a terrible
inversion with the wicked in this life. They are put to death, indeed,
in the spirit, while they live in the flesh. They may be and often are
powerfully alive and active in their relations to the world of sense,
while on the unseen and Godward side utterly paralyzed. Ask such a man
about his business or family concerns; touch on affairs of politics or
trade,--and you deal with a living mind, its powers and susceptibilities
awake and alert. But let the conversation pass to other themes; sound
him on questions of the inner life; ask him what he thinks of Christ,
how he stands towards God, how he fares in the spiritual conflict,--and
you strike a note to which there is no response. You have taken him out
of his element. He is a practical man, he tells you; he does not live in
the clouds, or hunt after shadows; he believes in hard facts, in things
that he can grasp and handle. “The natural man perceiveth not the things
of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him.” They are pictures to
the eye of the blind, heavenly music to the stone-deaf.

And yet that hardened man of the world--starve and ignore his own spirit
and shut up its mystic chambers as he will--cannot easily destroy
himself. He has not extirpated his religious nature, nor crushed out,
though he has suppressed, the craving for God in his breast. And when
the callous surface of his life is broken through, under some unusual
stress, some heavy loss or the shock of a great bereavement, one may
catch a glimpse of the deeper world within of which the man himself was
so little conscious. And what is to be seen there? Haunting memories of
past sin, fears of a conscience fretted already by the undying worm,
forms of weird and ghostly dread flitting amid the gloom and dust of
death through that closed house of the spirit,--

    “The bat and owl inhabit here:
      The snake nests on the altar stone:
    The sacred vessels moulder near:
      The image of the God is gone!”

In this condition of death the word of life comes to men. It is the
state not of heathendom alone; but of those also, favoured with the
light of revelation, who have not opened to it the eyes of the heart, of
all who are “doing the desires of the flesh and the thoughts”--who are
governed by their own impulses and ideas and serve no will above the
world of sense.[75] Without distinction of birth or formal religious
standing, “all” who thus live and walk are dead while they live. Their
_trespasses and sins_ have killed them. From first to last Scripture
testifies: “Your sins have separated between you and your God.” We find
a hundred excuses for our irreligion: there is the cause. There is
nothing in the universe to separate any one of us from the love and
fellowship of his Maker but his own unforsaken sin.

It is true, there are other hindrances to faith, intellectual
difficulties of great weight and seriousness, that press upon many
minds. For such men Christ has all possible sympathy and patience. There
is a real, though hidden faith that “lives in honest doubt.” Some men
have more faith than they suppose, while others certainly have much
less. One has a name to live, and yet is dead; another, perchance, has a
name to die, and yet is alive to God through Jesus Christ. There are
endless complications, self-contradictions, and misunderstandings in
human nature. “Many are first” in the ranks of religious profession and
notoriety, “which shall be last, and the last first.” We make the
largest allowance for this element of uncertainty in the line that
bounds faith from unfaith; “The Lord knoweth them that are His.” No
intellectual difficulty, no mere misunderstanding, will ultimately or
for long separate between God and the soul that He has made.

It is _antipathy_ that separates. “They did not like to retain God in
their knowledge”; that is Paul’s explanation of the ungodliness and vice
of the ancient world. And it holds good still in countless instances.
“Numbers in this bad world talk loudly against religion in order to
encourage each other in sin, because they need encouragement. They know
that they ought to be other than they are; but are glad to avail
themselves of anything that looks like argument, to overcome their
consciences withal” (Newman). The fashionable scepticism of the day too
often conceals an inner revolt against the moral demands of the
Christian life; it is the pretext of a carnal mind, which is “enmity
against God, because it is not subject to His law.” Christ’s sentence
upon unbelief as He knew it was this: “Light is come into the world; and
men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.” So
said the keenest and the kindest judge of men. If we are refusing Him
our faith, let us be very sure that this condemnation does not touch
ourselves. Is there no passion that bribes and suborns the intellect? no
desire in the soul that dreads His entrance? no evil deeds that shelter
themselves from His accusing light?

When the apostle says of his Gentile readers that they “once walked in
the way of the age, according to the course of this world,[76] according
to the prince of the power of the air,” the former part of his statement
is clear enough. The age in which he lived was godless to the last
degree; the stream of the world’s life ran in turbid course toward moral
ruin. But the second clause is obscure. The “prince” (or “ruler”) who
guides the world along its career of rebellion is manifestly Satan, the
spirit of darkness and hate whom St Paul entitles “the god of this
world” (2 Cor. iv. 4), and in whom Jesus recognized, under the name of
“the prince of the world,” His great antagonist (John xiv. 30).

But what has this spirit of evil to do with “the air”? The Jewish rabbis
supposed that the terrestrial atmosphere was Satan’s abode, that it was
peopled by demons flitting about invisibly in the encompassing element.
But this is a notion foreign to Scripture--certainly not contained in
chapter vi. 12--and, in its bare physical sense, without point or
relevance to this passage. There follows in immediate apposition to “the
domain of the air, _the spirit_ that now works in the sons of
disobedience.” Surely, _the air_ here partakes (if it be only here) of
the figurative significance of _spirit_ (i.e. _breath_). St Paul refines
the Jewish idea of evil spirits dwelling in the surrounding atmosphere
into an ethical conception of _the atmosphere of the world_, as that
from which the sons of disobedience draw their breath and receive the
spirit that inspires them. Here lies, in truth, the dominion of Satan.
In other words, Satan constituted the _Zeitgeist_.

As Beck profoundly remarks upon this text:[77] “The Power of the air is
a fitting designation for the prevailing spirit of the times, whose
influence spreads itself like a miasma through the whole atmosphere of
the world. It manifests itself as a contagious nature-power; and a
_spiritus rector_ works within it, which takes possession of the world
of men, alike in individuals and in society, and assumes the direction
of it. The form of expression here employed is based on the conception
of evil peculiar to Scripture. In Scripture, evil and the principle of
evil are not conceived in a purely spiritual way; nor could this be the
case in a world of fleshly constitution, where the spiritual has the
sensuous for its basis and its vehicle. Spiritual evil exists as a power
immanent in cosmical nature.”[78] Concerning great tracts of the earth,
and large sections even of Christianized communities, we must still
confess with St John: “The world lieth in the Evil One.” The air is
impregnated with the infection of sin;[79] its germs float about us
constantly, and wherever they find lodgement they set up their deadly
fever. Sin is the malarial poison native to our soil; it is an epidemic
that runs its course through the entire “age of this world.”

Above this feverous, sin-laden atmosphere the apostle sees God’s anger
brooding in threatening clouds. For our trespasses and sins are, after
all, not forced on us by our environment. Those offences by which we
provoke God, lie in our nature; they are no mere casual acts, they
belong to our bias and disposition. Sin is a constitutional malady.
There exists a bad element in our human nature, which corresponds but
too truly to the course and current of the world around us. This the
apostle acknowledges for himself and his law-honouring Jewish kindred:
“We were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” So he wrote in
the sad confession of Romans vii. 14-23: “I see a different law in my
members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into
captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”

It is upon this “other law,” the contradiction of His own, upon the
sinfulness beneath the sin, that God’s displeasure rests. Human law
notes the overt act: “the Lord looketh upon the heart.” There is
nothing more bitter and humiliating to a conscientious man than the
conviction of this penetrating Divine insight, this detection to himself
of his incurable sin and the hollowness of his righteousness before God.
How it confounds the proud Pharisee to learn that he _is_ as other men
are,--and even as this publican!

“The sons of disobedience” must needs be “children of wrath.” All sin,
whether in nature or practice, is the object of God’s fixed displeasure.
It cannot be matter of indifference to our Father in heaven that His
human children are disobedient toward Himself. Children of His favour or
anger we are each one of us, and at every moment. We “keep His
commandments, and abide in His love”; or we do not keep them, and are
excluded. It is His smile or frown that makes the sunshine or the gloom
of our inner life. How strange that men should argue that God’s love
forbids His wrath! It is, in truth, the cause of it. I could neither
love nor fear a God who did not care enough about me to be angry with me
when I sin. If my child does wilful wrong, if by some act of greed or
passion he imperils his moral future and destroys the peace and
well-being of the house, shall I not be grieved with him, with an anger
proportioned to the love I bear him? How much more shall your heavenly
Father--how much more justly and wisely and mercifully!

St Paul feels no contradiction between the words of verse 3 and those
that follow. The same God whose wrath burns against the sons of
disobedience while they so continue, is “rich in mercy” and “loved us
even when we were dead in our trespasses!” He pities evil men, and to
save them spared not His Son from death; but Almighty God, the Father of
glory, hates and loathes the evil that is in them, and has determined
that if they will not let it go they shall perish with it.

II. Such was the death in which Paul and his readers once had lain. But
God in His “great love” has “_made them to live_ along with the Christ.”

How wonderful to have witnessed a resurrection: to see the pale cheek of
the little maid, Jairus’ daughter, flush again with the tints of life,
and the still frame begin to stir, and the eyes softly open--and she
looks upon the face of Jesus! or to watch Lazarus, four days dead,
coming out of his tomb, slowly, and as one dreaming, with hands and feet
bound in the grave-clothes. Still more marvellous to have beheld the
Prince of Life at the dawn of the third day issue from Joseph’s grave,
bursting His prison-gates and stepping forth in new-risen glory as one
refreshed from slumber.

But there are things no less divine, had we eyes for their marvel, that
take place upon this earth day by day. When a human soul awakes from its
trespasses and sins, when the love of God is poured into a heart that
was cold and empty, when the Spirit of God breathes into a spirit lying
powerless and buried in the flesh, there is as true a rising from the
dead as when Jesus our Lord came out from His sepulchre. It was of this
spiritual resurrection that He said: “The hour cometh, and now is, when
the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear
shall live.” Having said that, He added, concerning the bodily
resurrection of mankind: “Marvel not at this; for the hour cometh, in
which all that are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and shall come
forth!” The second wonder only matches and consummates the first (John
v. 24-28).

“This is life eternal, to know God the Father,”--the life, as the
apostle elsewhere calls it, that is “life indeed.” It came to St Paul by
a new creation, when, as he describes it, “God who said, Light shall
shine out of darkness, shined in our hearts, to give the light of the
knowledge of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ.” We are born
again--the God-consciousness is born within us: an hour mysterious and
decisive as that in which our personal consciousness first emerged and
the soul knew itself. Now it knows God. Like Jacob at Peniel it says: “I
have seen God face to face; and my life is preserved.” God and the soul
have met in Christ--and are reconciled.

The words the apostle uses--_gave us life_--_raised us up_--_seated us
in the heavenly places_--embrace the whole range of salvation. “Those
united with Christ are through grace delivered from their state of
death, not only in the sense that the resurrection and exaltation of
Christ redound to their benefit as Divinely imputed to them; but by the
life-giving energy of God they are brought out of their condition of
death into a new and actual state of life. The act of grace is an act of
the Divine power and might, not a mere judicial declaration” (Beck).
This comprehensive action of the Divine grace upon believing men takes
place by a constant and constantly deepening union of the soul with
Christ. This is well expressed by A. Monod: “The entire history of the
Son of man is reproduced in the man who believes in Him, not by a simple
moral analogy, but by a spiritual communication which is the true secret
of our justification as well as of our sanctification, and indeed of our
whole salvation.”

There is no repetition in the three verbs employed, which are alike
extended by the Greek preposition _with_ (_syn_). The first sentence
(raised us up _with the Christ_) virtually includes everything; it shows
us one with Christ who lives evermore to God. The second sentence
gathers into its scope all believers--the _you_ of verse 1 and the _we_
of verse 3: “He raised us up together, and together made us sit in the
heavenly places in Christ Jesus.” Nothing is more characteristic of our
epistle than this turn of thought. To the conception of our _union with
Christ_ in His celestial life, it adds that of our _union with each
other in Christ_ as sharers in common of that life. Christ “reconciles
us in one body unto God” (ver. 16). We sit not alone, but together in
the heavenly places. This is the fulness of life; this completes our
salvation.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] For the antithesis of “you” and “we,” comp. vv. 11-18, ch. i, 12,
13; also Rom. iii. 19, 23 (_For there is no distinction_), Gal. ii. 15.

[75] Ποιοῦντες τὰ θελήματα τῆς σαρκὸς καὶ τῶν διανοιῶν (ver. 3).

[76] Perhaps this double rendering may bring out the force of κατὰ τὸν
αἰῶνα τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.

[77] In the posthumous _Erklärung des Briefes Pauli an die Epheser_--a
valuable exposition, marked by Beck’s theological acumen and lucidity.

[78] The φύσει of verse 3 thus corresponds to the ἐξουσία τοῦ ἀέρος of
verse 2. “Sin entered into _the world_” (κόσμος), Rom. v. 12, which
signifies more than the nature of individual men.

[79] I John iii. 8; comp. John viii. 41-44.

CHAPTER VIII.

_SAVED FOR AN END._

    “That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His
    grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace have ye
    been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, _it is_ the
    gift of God: not of works, that no man should glory. For we are His
    workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore
    prepared that we should walk in them.”--EPH. ii. 7-10.

The plan which God has formed for men in Christ is of great dimensions
every way,--in its length no less than in its breadth and height. He
“raised us up and seated us together [Gentiles with Jews] in the
heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that _in the ages which are coming on_
He might show the surpassing riches of His grace.” All the races of
mankind and all future ages are embraced in the redeeming purpose, and
are to share in its boundless wealth. Nor are the ages past excluded
from its operations. God “afore prepared the good works in which” He
summons us to walk. The highway of the new life has been in building
since time began.

Thus large and limitless is the range of “the purpose and grace given us
in Christ Jesus before times eternal” (2 Tim. i. 9). But what strikes us
most in this passage is the exuberance of the grace itself. Twice over
the apostle exclaims, “By grace you are saved”: once in verse 5, in an
eager, almost jealous parenthesis, where he hastens to assure the
readers of their deliverance from the fearful condition just described
(vv. 1-3, 5). Again, deliberately and with full definition he states the
same fact, in verse 8: “For by grace you are saved, through faith; and
this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. It does not come of
works, to the end that none may boast.”

These words place us on familiar ground. We recognize the Paul of
Galatians and Romans, the dialect and accent of the apostle of salvation
by faith. But scarcely anywhere do we find this wonder-working grace so
affluently described. “God being rich in mercy, for the great love
wherewith He loved us--the exceeding riches of His grace, shown in
kindness toward us--the gift of God.” _Mercy_, _love_, _kindness_,
_grace_, _gift_: what a constellation is here! These terms present the
character of God in the gospel under the most delightful aspects, and in
vivid contrast to the picture of our human state outlined in the
beginning of the chapter.

_Mercy_ denotes the Divine pitifulness towards feeble, suffering men,
akin to those “compassions of God” to which the apostle repeatedly
appeals.[80] It is a constant attribute of God in the Old Testament, and
fills much the same place there that grace does in the New. “Of mercy
and judgement” do the Psalmists sing--of mercy most. Out of the thunder
and smoke of Sinai He declared His name: “Jehovah, a God full of
compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and
truth, keeping mercy for thousands.” The dread of God’s justice, the
sense of His dazzling holiness and almightiness threw His mercy into
bright relief and gave to it an infinite preciousness. It is the
contrast which brings in “mercy” here, in verse 4, by antithesis to
“wrath” (ver. 3).[81] These qualities are complementary. The sternest
and strongest natures are the most compassionate. God is “_rich_ in
mercy.” The wealth of His Being pours itself out in the exquisite
tendernesses, the unwearied forbearance and forgivingness of His
compassion towards men. The Judge of all the earth, whose hate of evil
is the fire of hell, is gentler than the softest-hearted mother,--rich
in mercy as He is grand and terrible in wrath.

God’s mercy regards us as we are weak and miserable: His _love_ regards
us as we are, in spite of trespass and offence, His offspring,--objects
of “much love” amid much displeasure, “even when we were dead through
our trespasses.” What does the story of the prodigal son mean but this?
and what Christ’s great word to Nicodemus (John iii. 16)?--_Grace_ and
_kindness_ are love’s executive. Grace is love in administration, love
counteracting sin and seeking our salvation. Christ is the embodiment of
grace; the cross its supreme expression; the gospel its message to
mankind; and Paul himself its trophy and witness.[82] The “overpassing
riches” of grace is that affluence of wealth in which through Christ it
“superabounded” to the apostolic age and has outdone the magnitude of
sin (Rom. v. 20), in such measure that St Paul sees future ages gazing
with wonder at its benefactions to himself and his fellow-believers.
Shown “in _kindness_ toward us,” he says,--in a condescending
fatherliness, that forgets its anger and softens its old severity into
comfort and endearment. God’s kindness is the touch of His hand, the
accent of His voice, the cherishing breath of His Spirit. Finally, this
generosity of the Divine grace, this infinite goodwill of God toward
men, takes expression in _the gift_--the gift of Christ, the gift of
righteousness (Rom. v. 15-18), the gift of eternal life (Rom. vi. 23);
or--regarded, as it is here, in the light of experience and
possession--_the gift of salvation_.

The opposition of _gift_ and _debt_, of gratuitous salvation through
faith to salvation earned by works of law, belongs to the marrow of St
Paul’s divinity. The teaching of the great evangelical epistles is
condensed into the brief words of verses 8 and 9. The reason here
assigned for God’s dealing with men by way of gift and making them
absolutely debtors--“lest any one should boast”--was forced upon the
apostle’s mind by the stubborn pride of legalism; it is stated in terms
identical with those of the earlier letters. Men will glory in their
virtues before God; they flaunt the rags of their own righteousness, if
any such pretext, even the slightest, remains to them. We sinners are a
proud race, and our pride is oftentimes the worst of our sins. Therefore
God humbles us by His compassion. He makes to us a free gift of His
righteousness, and excludes every contribution from our store of merit;
for if we could supply anything, we should inevitably boast as though
all were our own. We must be content to receive mercy, love, grace,
kindness--everything, without deserving the least fraction of the
immense sum. How it strips our vanity; how it crushes us to the
dust--“the weight of pardoning love!”

Concerning the office of _faith_ in salvation we have already spoken in
Chapter IV.[83] It is on the objective fact rather than the subjective
means of salvation that the apostle lays stress in this passage. His
readers do not seem to have realized sufficiently what God has given
them and the greatness of the salvation already accomplished. They
measured inadequately the power which had touched and changed their
lives (i. 19). St Paul has shown them the depth to which they were
formerly sunk, and the height to which they have been raised (vv. 1-6).
He can therefore assure them, and he does it with redoubled emphasis:
“You _are saved_; By grace you are saved men!”[84] Not, “You will be
saved”; nor, “You were saved”; nor, “You are in course of
salvation,”--for salvation has many moods and tenses,--but, in the
perfect passive tense, he asserts the glorious accomplished _fact_. With
the same reassuring emphasis in chapter i. 7 he declared, “We have
redemption in His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.”

Here is St Paul’s doctrine of Assurance. It was laid down by Christ
Himself when He said: “He that believeth on the Son of God hath eternal
life.” This sublime confidence is the ruling note of St John’s great
epistle: “We know that we are in Him.... We know that we have passed out
of death into life.... This is the victory that overcometh the world,
even our faith.” It was this confidence of present salvation that made
the Church irresistible. With its foundation secure, the house of life
can be steadily and calmly built up. Under the shelter of the full
assurance of faith, in the sunshine of God’s love felt in the heart, all
spiritual virtues bloom and flourish. But with a faith hesitant,
distracted, that is sure of no doctrine in the creed and cannot plant a
firm foot anywhere, nothing prospers in the soul or in the Church. Oh
for the clear accent, the ringing, joyous note of apostolic assurance!
We want a faith not loud, but deep; a faith not born of sentiment and
human sympathy, but that comes from the vision of the living God; a
faith whose rock and corner-stone is neither the Church nor the Bible,
but Christ Jesus Himself.

Greatly do we need, like the Asian disciples of Paul and John, to
“assure our hearts” before God. With death confronting us, with the
hideous evil of the world oppressing us; when the air is laden with the
contagion of sin; when the faith of the strongest wears the cast of
doubt; when the word of promise shines dimly through the haze of an
all-encompassing scepticism and a hundred voices say, in mockery or
grief, Where is now thy God? when the world proclaims us lost, our faith
refuted, our gospel obsolete and useless,--then is the time for the
Christian assurance to recover its first energy and to rise again in
radiant strength from the heart of the Church, from the depths of its
mystic life where it is hid with Christ in God.

_You are saved!_ cries the apostle; not forgetting that his readers have
their battle to fight, and many hazards yet to run (vi. 10-13). But they
hold the earnest of victory, the foretaste of life eternal. In spirit
they sit with Christ in the heavenly places. Pain and death, temptation,
persecution, the vicissitudes of earthly history, by these God means to
perfect that which He has begun in His saints--“if you continue in the
faith, grounded and firm” (Col. i. 23). That condition is expressed, or
implied, in all assurance of final salvation. It is a condition which
excites to watchfulness, but can never cause misgiving to a loyal heart.
God is for us! He justifies us, and counts us His elect. Christ Jesus
who died is risen and seated at the right hand of God, and there
intercedes for us. _Quis separabit?_[85]

This is the epistle of the Church and of humanity. It dwells on the
grand, objective aspects of the truth, rather than upon its subjective
experiences. It does not invite us to rest in the comforts and delights
of grace, but to lift up our eyes and see whither Christ has translated
us and what is the kingdom that we possess in Him. God “quickened us
together with the Christ”: He “raised us up, He made us to sit _in the
heavenly places in Christ Jesus_.” Henceforth “our citizenship is in
heaven” (Phil. iii. 20).

This is the inspiring thought of the third group of St Paul’s epistles;
we heard it in the first note of his song of praise (i. 3). It supplies
the principle from which St Paul unfolds the beautiful conception of the
Christian life contained in the third chapter of the companion letter to
the Colossians: “Your life is hid with the Christ in God”; therefore
“seek the things that are above, where He is.” We live in two worlds at
once. Heaven lies about us in this new mystic childhood of our spirit.
There our names are written; thither our thoughts and hopes resort. Our
treasure is there; our heart we have lodged there, with Christ in God.
_He_ is there, the Lord of the Spirit, from whom we draw each moment
the life that flows into His members. In the greatness of His love
conquering sin and death, time and space, He is with us to the world’s
end. May we not say that we, too, are with Him and shall be with Him
always? So we reckon in the logic of our faith and at the height of our
high calling, though the soul creeps and drudges upon the lower levels.

    “With Him we are gone up on high,
      Since He is ours and we are His;
    With Him we reign above the sky,
      We walk upon our subject seas!”

In his lofty flights of thought the apostle always has some practical
and homely end in view. The earthly and heavenly, the mystical and the
matter-of-fact were not distant and repugnant, but interfused in his
mind. From the celestial heights of the life hidden with Christ in God
(ver. 6), he brings us down in a moment and without any sense of
discrepancy to the prosaic level of “good works” (ver. 10). The love
which viewed us from eternity, the counsels of Him who works all things
in all, enter into the humblest daily duties.

Grace, moreover, sets us great tasks. There should be something to show
in deed and life for the wealth of kindness spent upon us, some visible
and commensurate result of the vast preparations of the gospel plan. Of
this result the apostle saw the earnest in the work of faith wrought by
his Gentile Churches.

St Paul was the last man in the world to undervalue human effort, or
disparage good work of any sort. It is, in his view, the end aimed at in
all that God bestows on His people, in all that He Himself works in
them. Only let this end be sought in God’s way and order. Man’s doings
must be the fruit and not the root of his salvation. “Not _of_ works,”
but “_for_ good works” were believers chosen. “This little word _for_”
says Monod, “reconciles St Paul and St James better than all the
commentators.” God has not raised us up to sit idly in the heavenly
places lost in contemplation, or to be the useless pensioners of grace.
He sends us forth to “walk in the works, prepared for us,”--equipped to
fight Christ’s battles, to till His fields, to labour in the service of
building His Church.

The “workmanship” of our Version suggests an idea foreign to the
passage. The apostle is not thinking of the Divine art or skill
displayed in man’s creation; but of the simple fact that “God made man”
(Gen. i. 27). “We are His _making_, created in Christ Jesus.” The
“preparation” to which he refers in verse 10 leads us back to that
primeval election of God’s sons in Christ for which we gave thanks at
the outset (i. 3). There are not two creations, the second formed upon
the ruin and failure of the first; but one grand design throughout.
Redemption is creation re-affirmed. The new creation, as we call it,
restores and consummates the old. When God raised His Son from the dead,
He vindicated His original purpose in raising man from the dust a living
soul. He has not forsaken the work of His hands nor forgone His original
plan, which took account of all our wilfulness and sin. God in making us
meant us to do good work in His world. From the world’s foundation down
to the present moment He who worketh all in all has been working for
this end--most of all in the revelation of His grace in Jesus Christ.

Far backward in the past, amid the secrets of creation, lay the
beginnings of God’s grace to mankind. Far onward in the future shines
its lustre revealed in the first Christian age. The apostle has gained
some insight into those “times and seasons” which formerly were veiled
from him. In his earliest letters, to the Thessalonians and Corinthians,
St Paul echoes our Lord’s warning, never out of season, that we should
“watch, for the hour is at hand.” _Maran atha_ is his watchword: “Our
Lord cometh; the time is short.” Nor does that note cease to the end.
But when in this epistle he writes of “the ages that are coming on,” and
of “all the generations of the age of the ages” (iii. 21), there is
manifestly some considerable period of duration before his eyes. He sees
something of the extent of the world’s coming history, something of the
magnitude of the field that the future will afford for the unfolding of
God’s designs.

In those approaching æons he foresees that the apostolic dispensation
will play a conspicuous part. Unborn ages will be blessed in the
blessing now descending upon Jews and Gentiles through Christ Jesus. So
marvellous is the display of God’s kindness toward them, that all the
future will pay homage to it. The overflowing wealth of blessing poured
upon St Paul and the first Churches had an end in view that reached
beyond themselves, an end worthy of the Giver, worthy of the magnitude
of His plans and of His measureless love. If all this was theirs--this
fulness of God exceeding the utmost they had asked or thought--it is
because God means to convey it through them to multitudes besides! There
is no limit to the grace that God will impart to men and to Churches who
thus reason, who receive His gifts in this generous and communicative
spirit. The apostolic Church chants with Mary at the Annunciation:
“For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed!”

Never was any prediction better fulfilled. This spot of history shines
with a light before which every other shows pale and commonplace. The
companions of Jesus, the humble fraternities of the first Christian
century have been the object of reverent interest and intent research on
the part of all centuries since. Their history is scrutinized from all
sides with a zeal and industry which the most pressing subjects of the
day hardly command. For we feel that these men hold the secret of the
world’s life. The key to the treasures we all long for is in their
hands. As time goes on and the stress of life deepens, men will turn
with yet fonder hope to the age of Jesus Christ. “And many nations will
say: Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of
the God of Jacob. And He will teach us of His ways; and we will walk in
His paths.”

The stream will remember its fountain; the children of God will gather
to their childhood’s home. The world will hear the gospel in the
recovered accents of its prophets and apostles.

FOOTNOTES:

[80] Rom. xii. 1; 2 Cor. i. 3; Phil. i. 8, ii. 1; comp. Luke i. 78. The
οἰκτιρμοὶ τοῦ Θεοῦ, σπλάγχνα καὶ οἰκτιρμοί, rendered in our Version
“mercies of God,” denotes something even more affecting,--God’s sense of
the woefulness of human life,--“the pitying tenderness Divine.”

[81] Comp. Rom. ix. 22, 23.

[82] On _grace_, comp. _The Epistle to the Galatians_ (Expositor’s
Bible), Chapter X.

[83] Compare also, on Faith, _The Epistle to the Galatians_ (Expositor’s
Bible), Chapters X.-XII. and XV.

[84] Ἐστὲ σεσωσμένοι: for the peculiar emphasis of this form of the
verb, implying a settled fact, an assured state, compare ver. 12, ἢτε
... ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι; Col. ii. 10; Gal. ii. 11, iv. 3; 2 Cor. iv. 3, etc.

[85] Rom. viii. 31-39; comp. vv. 9-17; also 1 Thess. v. 23, 24; 2 Thess.
iii. 3-5; 1 Cor. i. 4-9; Phil. i. 6, iii. 13, 14; 2 Tim. i. 12, iv. 18,
for St Paul’s doctrine of Assurance.

CHAPTER IX.

_THE FAR AND NEAR._

    “Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh,
    who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision
    in the flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from
    Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers
    from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in
    the world: but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometime were far off are
    made nigh in the blood of Christ.”--EPH. ii. 11-13.

The apostle’s _Wherefore_ sums up for his readers the record of their
salvation rehearsed in the previous verses. “You were buried in your
sins, sunk in their corruption, ruined by their guilt, living under
God’s displeasure and in the power of Satan. All this has passed away.
The almighty Hand has raised you with Christ into a heavenly life. God
has become your Father; His love is in your heart; by the strength of
His grace you are enabled to walk in the way marked out for you from
your creation. _Wherefore remember_: think of what you were, and of what
you are!”

To such recollections we do well to summon ourselves. The children of
grace love to recall, and on fit occasions recount for God’s glory and
the help of their fellows, the way in which God led them to the
knowledge of Himself. In some the great change came suddenly. He “made
speed” to save us. It was a veritable resurrection, as signal and
unlooked for as the rising of Christ from the dead. By a swift passage
we were “translated from the power of darkness into the kingdom of the
Son of His love.” Once living without God in the world, we were arrested
by a strange providence--through some overthrow of fortune or shock of
bereavement, or by a trivial incident touching unaccountably a hidden
spring in the mind--and the whole aspect of life was altered in a
moment. We saw revealed, as by a lightning flash at night, the emptiness
of our own life, the misery of our nature, the folly of our unbelief,
the awful presence of _God_--God whom we had forgotten and despised! We
sought, and found His mercy. From that hour the old things passed away:
we lived who had been dead,--made alive to God through Jesus Christ.

This instant conversion, such as Paul experienced, this sharp and abrupt
transition from darkness to light, was common in the first generation of
Christians, as it is wherever religious awakening takes place in a
society that has been largely dead to God. The advent of Christianity in
the Gentile world was much after this fashion,--like a tropical sunrise,
in which day leaps on the earth full-born. This experience gives a stamp
of peculiar decision to the convictions and character of its subjects.
The change is patent and palpable; no observer can fail to mark it. And
it burns itself into the memory with an ineffaceable impression. The
violent throes of such a spiritual birth cannot be forgotten.

But if our entrance into the life of God was gradual, like the dawn of
our own milder clime, where the light steals by imperceptible advances
upon the darkness--if the glory of the Lord has thus risen upon us, our
certainty of its presence may be no less complete, and our remembrance
of its coming no less grateful and joyous. One leaps into the new life
by a single eager bound; another reaches it by measured, thoughtful
steps: but both are _there_, standing side by side on the common ground
of salvation in Christ. Both walk in the same light of the Lord, that
floods the sky from east to west. The recollections which the latter has
to cherish of the leading of God’s kindly light--how He touched our
childish thought, and checked gently our boyish waywardness, and mingled
reproof with the first stirrings of passion and self-will, and wakened
the alarms of conscience and the fears of another world, and the sense
of the beauty of holiness and the shame of sin,--

    “Shaping to truth the froward will
        Along His narrow way,”--

such remembrances are a priceless treasure, that grows richer as we grow
wiser. It awakens a joy not so thrilling nor so prompt in utterance as
that of the soul snatched like a brand from the burning, but which
passes understanding. Blessed are the children of the kingdom, those who
have never roamed far from the fold of Christ and the commonwealth of
Israel, whom the cross has beckoned onwards from their childhood. But
however it was--by whatever means, at whatever time it pleased God to
call you from darkness to His marvellous light, _remember_.

But we must return to Paul and his Gentile readers. The old death in
life was to them a sombre reality, keenly and painfully remembered. In
that condition of moral night out of which Christ had rescued them,
Gentile society around them still remained. Let us observe its features
as they are delineated in contrast with the privileges long bestowed on
Israel. The Gentile world was _Christless_, _hopeless_, _godless_. It
had no share in the Divine polity framed for the chosen people; the
outward mark of its uncircumcision was a true symbol of its irreligion
and debasement.

Israel had a _God_. Besides, there were only “those who are called
gods.” This was the first and cardinal distinction. Not their race, not
their secular calling, their political or intellectual gifts, but their
faith formed the Jews into a nation. They were “the people of God,” as
no other people has been--of _the_ God, for theirs was “the true and
living God”--Jehovah, the I AM, the One, the Alone. The monotheistic
belief was, no doubt, wavering and imperfect in the mass of the nation
in early times; but it was held by the ruling minds amongst them, by the
men who have shaped the destiny of Israel and created its Bible, with
increasing clearness and intensity of passion. “All the gods of the
nations are idols--vapours, phantoms, nothings!--but Jehovah made the
heavens.” It was the ancestral faith that glowed in the breast of Paul
at Athens, amidst the fairest shrines of Greece, when he “saw the city
wholly given to idolatry”--man’s highest art and the toil and piety of
ages lavished on things that were no gods; and in the midst of the
splendour of a hollow and decaying Paganism he read the confession that
God was “unknown.”

Ephesus had her famous goddess, worshipped in the most sumptuous pile of
architecture that the ancient world contained. Behold the proud city,
“temple-keeper of the great goddess Artemis,” filled with wrath!
Infuriate Demos flashes fire from his thousand eyes, and his brazen
throat roars hoarse vengeance against the insulters of “her
magnificence, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth”! Without
God--_atheists_, in fact, the apostle calls this devout Asian
population; and Artemis of Ephesus, and Athené, and Cybelé of Smyrna,
and Zeus and Asclepius of Pergamum, though all the world worship them,
are but “creatures of art and man’s device.”

The Pagans retorted this reproach. “Away with _the atheists_!” they
cried, when Christians were led to execution. Ninety years after this
time the martyr Polycarp was brought into the arena before the
magistrates of Asia and the populace gathered in Smyrna at the great
Ionic festival. The Proconsul, wishing to spare the venerable man, said
to him: “Swear by the Fortune of Cæsar; and say, Away with the
atheists!” But Polycarp, as the story continues, “with a grave look
gazing on the crowd of lawless Gentiles in the stadium and shaking his
hand against them, then groaning and looking up to heaven, said, _Away
with the atheists_!” Pagan and Christian were each godless in the eyes
of the other. If visible temples and images, and the local worship of
each tribe or city made a god, then Jews and Christians had none: if God
was a Spirit--One, Holy, Almighty, Omnipresent--then polytheists were in
truth atheists; their many gods, being many, were no gods; they were
idols,--_eidola_, illusive shows of the Godhead.

The more thoughtful and pious among the heathen felt this already. When
the apostle denounced the idols and their pompous worship as “these
vanities,” his words found an echo in the Gentile conscience. The
classical Paganism held the multitude by the force of habit and local
pride, and by its sensuous and artistic charms; but such religious power
as it once had was gone. In all directions it was undermined by mystic
Oriental and Egyptian rites, to which men resorted in search of a
religion and sick of the old fables, ever growing more debased, that had
pleased their fathers. The majesty of Rome in the person of the Emperor,
the one visible supreme power, was seized upon by the popular instinct,
even more than it was imposed by state policy, and made to fill the
vacuum; and temples to Augustus had already risen in Asia, side by side
with those of the ancient gods.

In this despair of their ancestral religions many piously disposed
Gentiles turned to Judaism for spiritual help; and the synagogue was
surrounded in the Greek cities by a circle of earnest proselytes. From
their ranks St Paul drew a large proportion of his hearers and converts.
When he writes, “Remember that you were at that time _without God_,” he
is within the recollection of his readers; and they will bear him out in
testifying that their heathen creed was dead and empty to the soul. Nor
did philosophy construct a creed more satisfying. Its gods were the
Epicurean deities who dwell aloof and careless of men; or the supreme
Reason and Necessity of the Stoics, the _anima mundi_, of which human
souls are fleeting and fragmentary images. “Deism finds God only in
heaven; Pantheism, only on earth; Christianity alone finds Him both in
heaven and on earth” (Harless). The Word made flesh reveals _God in the
world_.

When the apostle says “without God _in the world_,” this qualification
is both reproachful and sorrowful. To be without God in the world that
He has made, where His “eternal power and Godhead” have been visible
from creation, argues a darkened and perverted heart.[86] To be without
God in the world is to be in the wilderness, without a guide; on a
stormy ocean, without harbour or pilot; in sickness of spirit, without
medicine or physician; to be hungry without bread, and weary without
rest, and dying with no light of life. It is to be an orphaned child,
wandering in an empty, ruined house.

In these words we have an echo of Paul’s preaching to the Gentiles, and
an indication of the line of his appeals to the conscience of the
enlightened pagans of his time. The despair of the age was darker than
the human mind has known before or since. Matthew Arnold has painted it
all in one verse of those lines, entitled _Obermann once more_, in which
he so perfectly expresses the better spirit of modern scepticism.

    “On that hard Pagan world disgust
      And secret loathing fell;
    Deep weariness and sated lust
      Made human life a hell.”

The saying by which St Paul reproved the Corinthians, “Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die,” is the common sentiment of pagan epitaphs
of the time. Here is an extant specimen of the kind: “Let us drink and
be merry; for we shall have no more kissing and dancing in the kingdom
of Proserpine. Soon shall we fall asleep, to wake no more.” Such were
the thoughts with which men came back from the grave-side. It is
needless to say how depraving was the effect of this hopelessness. At
Athens, in the more religious times of Socrates, it was even considered
a decent and kindly thing to allow a criminal condemned to death to
spend his last hours in gross sensual indulgence. There is no reason to
suppose that the extinction of the Christian hope of immortality would
prove less demoralizing. We are “saved by hope,” said St Paul: we are
ruined by despair. Pessimism of creed for most men means pessimism of
conduct.

Our modern speech and literature and our habits of feeling have been for
so many generations steeped in the influence of Christ’s teaching, and
it has thrown so many tender and hallowed thoughts around the state of
our beloved dead, that it is impossible even for those who are
personally without hope in Christ to realize what its general decay and
disappearance would mean. To have possessed such a treasure, and then to
lose it! to have cherished anticipations so exalted and so dear,--and to
find them turn out a mockery! The age upon which this calamity fell
would be of all ages the most miserable.

The hope of Israel which Paul preached to the Gentiles was a hope for
the world and for the nations, as well as for the individual soul. “The
commonwealth [or _polity_] of Israel” and “the covenants of promise”
guaranteed the establishment of the Messianic kingdom upon earth. This
expectation took amongst the mass of the Jews a materialistic and even a
revengeful shape; but in one form or other it belonged, and still
belongs to every man of Israel. Those noble lines of Virgil in his
fourth Eclogue[87]--like the words of Caiaphas, an unintended Christian
prophecy--which predicted the return of justice and the spread of a
golden age through the whole world under the rule of the coming heir of
Cæsar, had been signally belied by the imperial house in the century
that had elapsed. Never were human prospects darker than when the
apostle wrote as Nero’s prisoner in Rome. It was an age of crime and
horror. The political world and the system of pagan society seemed to be
in the throes of dissolution. Only in “the commonwealth of Israel” was
there a light of hope and a foundation for the future of mankind; and of
this in its wisdom the world knew nothing.

The Gentiles were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,”--that is
to say, treated as aliens and made such by their exclusion. By the very
fact of Israel’s election, the rest of mankind were shut out of the
visible kingdom of God. They became mere _Gentiles_, or _nations_,--a
herd of men bound together only by natural affinity, with no “covenant
of promise,” no religious constitution or destiny, no definite
relationship to God, Israel being alone the acknowledged and organized
“_people_ of Jehovah.”

These distinctions were summed up in one word, expressing all the pride
of the Jewish nature, when the Israelites styled themselves “the
Circumcision.” The rest of the world--Philistines or Egyptians, Greeks,
Romans, or Barbarians, it mattered not--were “the Uncircumcision.” How
superficial this distinction was in point of fact, and how false the
assumption of moral superiority it implied in the existing condition of
Judaism, St Paul indicates by saying, “those who are _called_
Uncircumcision by that which is _called_ Circumcision, in flesh, wrought
by human hands.” In the second and third chapters of his epistle to the
Romans he exposed the hollowness of Jewish sanctity, and brought his
fellow-countrymen down to the level of those “sinners of the Gentiles”
whom they so bitterly despised.

The destitution of the Gentile world is put into a single word, when the
apostle says: “You were at that time _separate from Christ_”--without a
Christ, either come or coming. They were deprived of the world’s one
treasure,--shut out, as it appeared, for ever[88] from any part in Him
who is to mankind all things and in all.--_Once far off!_

“But now in Christ Jesus ye were _made nigh_.” What is it that has
bridged the distance, that has transported these Gentiles from the
wilderness of heathenism into the midst of the city of God? It is “the
blood of Christ.” The sacrificial death of Jesus Christ transformed the
relations of God to mankind, and of Israel to the Gentiles. In Him God
reconciled not a nation, but “a world” to Himself (2 Cor. v. 19). The
death of the Son of man could not have reference to the sons of Abraham
alone. If sin is universal and death is not a Jewish but a human
experience, and if one blood flows in the veins of all our race, then
the death of Jesus Christ was a universal sacrifice; it appeals to every
man’s conscience and heart, and puts away for each the guilt which comes
between his soul and God.

When the Greeks in Passion week desired to see Him, He exclaimed: “I, if
I be lifted up from the earth, will draw _all_ unto me.” The cross of
Jesus was to draw humanity around it, by its infinite love and sorrow,
by the perfect apprehension there was in it of the world’s guilt and
need, and the perfect submission to the sentence of God’s law against
man’s sin. So wherever the gospel was preached by St Paul, it won
Gentile hearts for Christ. Greek and Jew found themselves weeping
together at the foot of the cross, sharing one forgiveness and baptized
into one Spirit.

The union of Caiaphas and Pilate in the condemnation of Jesus and the
mingling of the Jewish crowd with the Roman soldiers at His execution
were a tragic symbol of the new age that was coming. Israel and the
Gentiles were accomplices in the death of the Messiah--the former of the
two the more guilty partner in the counsel and deed. If this Jesus whom
they slew and hanged on a tree was indeed the Christ, God’s chosen, then
what availed their Abrahamic sonship, their covenants and law-keeping,
their proud religious eminence? They had killed their Christ; they had
forfeited their calling. His blood was on them and on their children.

Those who seemed nigh to God, at the cross of Christ were found far
off,--that both together, the far and the near, might be reconciled and
brought back to God. “He shut up all unto disobedience, that He might
have mercy upon all.”

FOOTNOTES:

[86] Rom. i. 19-23; comp. John i. 10: “He [the true Light] was _in the
world_, and the world knew Him not.”

[87]

    Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.
    Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;
    Jam nova progenies cœlo demittitur alto.
    Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum
    Desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,
    Casta, fave, Lucina.

[88] Observe the perfect participle ἀπηλλοτριωμένοι, which signifies an
abiding fact or fixed condition. Similar is the turn of expression in
ch. iii. 9, and in Col. i. 26, Rom. xvi. 25, Matt. xiii. 35.

CHAPTER X.

_THE DOUBLE RECONCILIATION._

    “For He is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle
    wall of partition, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, _even_
    the law of commandments _contained_ in ordinances, that He might
    create in Himself of the twain one new man, _so_ making peace; and
    might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross,
    having slain the enmity thereby: and He came and preached good
    tidings of peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that
    were nigh: for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit
    unto the Father.”--EPH. ii. 14-18.

_Peace, peace--to the far off, and to the near!_ Such was God’s promise
to His scattered people in the times of the exile (Isai. lvii. 19). St
Paul sees that peace of God extending over a yet wider field, and
terminating a longer and sadder banishment than the prophet had
foreseen. Christ is “our peace”--not for the divided members of Israel
alone, but for all the tribes of men. He brings about a universal
pacification.

There were two distinct, but kindred enmities to be overcome by Christ,
in preaching to the world His good tidings of peace (ver. 17). There was
the hostility of Jew and Gentile, which was removed in its cause and
principle when Christ “in His flesh” (by His incarnate life and death)
“abolished the law of commandments in decrees”--_i.e._, the law of Moses
as it constituted a body of external precepts determining the way of
righteousness and life. This abolition of the law by the evangelical
principle “dissolved the middle wall of partition.” The occasion of
quarrel between Israel and the world was destroyed; the barrier
disappeared that had for so long fenced off the privileged ground of the
sons of Abraham (vv. 14, 15). But behind this human enmity, underneath
the feud and rancour existing between the Jews and the nations, there
lay the deeper quarrel of mankind with God. Both enmities centred in the
law; both were slain by one stroke, in the reconciliation of the cross
(ver. 16).

The Jewish and Gentile peoples formed two distinct types of humanity.
Politically, the Jews were insignificant and had scarcely counted
amongst the great powers of the world. Their religion alone gave them
influence and importance. Bearing his inspired Scriptures and his
Messianic hope, the wandering Israelite confronted the vast masses of
heathenism and the splendid and fascinating classical civilization with
the proudest sense of his superiority. To his God he knew well that one
day every knee would bow and every tongue confess. The circumstances of
the time deepened his isolation and aggravated to internecine hate his
spite against his fellow-men, the _adversus omnes alios hostile odium_
stigmatized by the incisive pen of Tacitus. Within three years of the
writing of this letter the Jewish war against Rome broke out, when the
enmity culminated in the most appalling and fateful overthrow recorded
in the pages of history. Now, it is this enmity at its height--the most
inveterate and desperate one can conceive--that the apostle proposes to
reconcile; nay, that he sees already slain by the sacrifice of the
cross, and within the brotherhood of the Christian Church. It was slain
in the heart of Saul of Tarsus, the proudest that beat in Jewish
breast.

In his earlier writings the apostle has been concerned chiefly to guard
the position and rights of the two parties within the Church. He has
abundantly maintained, especially in the epistle to the Galatians, the
claims of Gentile believers in Christ against Judaic assumptions and
impositions. He has defended the just prerogative of the Jew and his
hereditary sentiments from the contempt to which they were sometimes
exposed on the part of the Gentile majority.[89] But now that this has
been done, and that Gentile liberties and Jewish dignity have been
vindicated and safeguarded on both sides, St Paul advances a step
further: he seeks to amalgamate the Jewish and Gentile section of the
Church, and to “make of the twain one new man, so making peace.” This,
he declares, was the end of Christ’s mission; this a chief purpose of
His atoning death. Only by such union, only through the burying of the
old enmity slain on the cross, could His Church be built up to its
completeness. St Paul would have Gentile and Jewish believers everywhere
forget their differences, efface their party lines, and merge their
independence in the oneness of the all-embracing and all-perfecting
Church of Jesus Christ, God’s habitation in the Spirit. Instead of
saying that a catholic ideal like this belongs to a later and
post-apostolic age, we maintain, on the contrary, that a catholic mind
like St Paul’s, under the conditions of his time, could not fail to
arrive at this conception.

It was his confidence in the victory of the cross over all strife and
sin that sustained St Paul through these years of captivity. As he
looks out from his Roman prison, under the shadow of Nero’s palace, the
future is invested with a radiance of hope that makes the heart of the
chained apostle exult within him. The world is lost, to all outward
seeming: he knows it is saved! Jew and Gentile are about to close in
mortal conflict: he proclaims peace between them, assured of their
reconcilement, and knowing that in their reunion the salvation of human
society is assured.

The enmity of Jew and Gentile was representative of all that divides
mankind. In it were concentrated most of the causes by which society is
rent asunder. Along with religion, race, habits, tastes and culture,
moral tendencies, political aspirations, interests of trade, all helped
to widen the breach. The cleavage ran deep into the foundations of life;
the enmity was the growth of two thousand years. It was not a case of
local friction, nor a quarrel arising from temporary causes. The Jew was
ubiquitous, and everywhere was an alien and an irritant to Gentile
society. No antipathy was so hard to subdue. The grace that conquers it,
can and will conquer all enmities.

St Paul’s view embraced, in fact, a world-wide reconcilement. He
contemplates, as the Hebrew prophets themselves did, the fraternization
of mankind under the rule of the Christ. After this scale he laid down
the foundation of the Church, “wise master-builder” that he was. It was
destined to bear the weight of an edifice in which all the races of men
should dwell together, and every order of human faculty should find its
place. His thoughts were not confined within the Judaic antithesis.
“There is no Jew and Greek,” he says in another place; yes, and “no
barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, male or female. Ye are all one in
Christ Jesus.”[90] Birth, rank, office in the Church, culture, even sex
are minor and subordinate distinctions, merged in the unity of redeemed
souls in Christ. That which He “creates in Himself of the twain” is _one
new man_--one incorporate humanity, neither Jew nor Gentile, Englishman
nor Hindu, priest nor layman, male nor female; but simply _man_, and
_Christian_.

At the present time we are better able to enter into these views of the
apostle than at any intervening period of history. In his day almost the
whole visible world, lying round the Mediterranean shores, was brought
under the government and laws of Rome. This fact made the establishment
of one religious polity a thing quite conceivable. The Roman empire did
not, as it proved, allow Christianity to conquer it soon enough and to
leaven it sufficiently to save it. That huge construction, the mightiest
fabric of human polity, fell and covered the earth with its ruins. In
its fall it reacted disastrously upon the Church, and has bequeathed to
it the corrupt and despotic unity of Papal Rome. Now, in these last
days, the whole world is opened to the Church, a world stretching far
beyond the horizon of the first century. Science and Commerce, those two
strong-winged angels and giant ministers of God, are swiftly binding the
continents together in material ties. The peoples are beginning to
realize their brotherhood, and are feeling their way in many directions
towards international union; while in the Churches a new, federal
catholicity is taking shape, that must displace the false catholicism of
external uniformity and the disastrous absolutism inherited from Rome.
The spread of European empire and the marvellous expansion of our
English race are carrying forward the world’s unification with enormous
strides,--towards some end or other. What end is this to be? Is the
kingdom of the world about to become the kingdom of our Lord and His
Christ? and are the nations preparing to be “reconciled in one body unto
God”?

If Christendom were worthy of her Master and her name, this question
would be answered with no doubtful affirmative. The Church is well able,
if she were prepared, to go up and possess the whole earth for her Lord.
The way is open; the means are in her hand. Nor is she ignorant, nor
wholly negligent of her opportunity and of the claims that the times
impose upon her. She is putting forth new strength and striving to
overtake her work, notwithstanding the weight of ignorance and sloth
that burdens her. Soon the reconciling cross will be planted on every
shore, and the praises of the Crucified sung in every human language.

But there are dark as well as bright auguries for the future. The
advance of commerce and emigration has been a curse and not a blessing
to many heathen peoples. Who can read without shame and horror the story
of European conquest in America? And it is a chapter not yet closed.
Greed and injustice still mark the dealings of the powerful and
civilized with the weaker races. England set a noble example in the
abolition of negro slavery; but she has since inflicted, for purposes of
gain, the opium curse on China, putting poison to the lips of its vast
population. Under our Christian flags fire-arms are imported, and
alcohol, amongst tribes of men less able than children to resist their
evils. Is this “preaching peace to those far off”? It is likely that
the commercial profits made in the destruction of savage races as yet
exceed all that our missionary societies have spent in saving them. One
of these days Almighty God may have a stern reckoning with modern Europe
about these things. “When He maketh inquisition for blood, He will
remember.”

And what shall we say of ourselves at home, in our relation to this
great principle of the apostle? The old “middle wall of partition,” the
temple-barrier that sundered Jew and Gentile, is “broken down,”--visibly
levelled by the hand of God when Jerusalem fell, as it had been
virtually and in its principle destroyed by the work of Christ. But are
there no other middle walls, no barriers raised within the fold of
Christ? The rich man’s purse, and the poor man’s penury; aristocratic
pride, democratic bitterness and jealousy; knowledge and refinement on
the one hand, ignorance and rudeness on the other--how thick the veil of
estrangement which these influences weave, how high the party walls
which they build in our various Church communions!

It is the duty of the Church, as she values her existence, with gentle
but firm hands to pull down and to keep down all such partitions. She
cannot abolish the natural distinctions of life. She cannot turn the Jew
into a Gentile, nor the Gentile into a Jew. She will never make the poor
man rich in this world, nor the rich man altogether poor. Like her
Master, she declines to be “judge or divider” of our secular
inheritance. But she can see to it that these outward distinctions make
no difference in her treatment of the men as men. She can combine in her
fellowship all grades and orders, and teach them to understand and
respect each other. She can soften the asperities and relieve many of
the hardships which social differences create. She can diffuse a
healing and purifying influence upon the contentions of society around
her.

Let us labour unweariedly for this, and let our meeting at the Lord’s
table be a symbol of the unreserved communion of men of all classes and
conditions in the brotherhood of the redeemed sons of God. “_He_ is our
peace”; and if He is in our hearts, we must needs be sons of peace.
“Behold the secret of all true union! It is not by others coming to us,
nor by our going over to them; but it is by both them and ourselves
coming to Christ” that peace is made (Monod).

Thus within and without the Church the work of atonement will advance,
with Christ ever for its preacher (ver. 17). He speaks through the words
and the lives of His ten thousand messengers,--men of every order, in
every age and country of the earth. The leaven of Christ’s peace will
spread till the lump is leavened. God will accomplish His purpose of the
ages, whether in our time, or in another worthier of His calling. His
Church is destined to be the home of the human family, the universal
liberator and instructor and reconciler of the nations. And Christ shall
sit enthroned in the loyal worship of the federated peoples of the
earth.

But the question remains: What is the foundation, what the warrant of
this grand idealism of the apostle Paul? Many a great thinker, many an
ardent reformer before and since has dreamed of some such millennium as
this. And their enthusiastic plans have ended too often in conflict and
destruction. What surer ground of confidence have we in Paul’s
undertaking than in those of so many gifted visionaries and
philosophers? The difference lies here: his expectation rests on the
word and character of God; his instrument of reform is the cross of
Jesus Christ.

God is the centre of His own universe. Any reconciliation that is to
stand, must include Him first of all. Christ reconciled Jew and Gentile
“both in one body _to God_.” There is the meeting point, the true focus
of the orbit of human life, that can alone control its movements and
correct its wild aberrations. Under the shadow of His throne of justice,
in the arms of His fatherly love, the kindreds of the earth will at last
find reconciliation and peace. Humanitarian and secularist systems make
the simple mistake of ignoring the supreme Factor in the scheme of
things; they leave out the All in all.

“Be ye _reconciled to God_,” cries the apostle. For Almighty God has had
a great quarrel with this world of ours. The hatred of men towards each
other is rooted in the “carnal mind which is enmity against God.” The
“law of commandments contained in ordinances,” in whose possession the
Jew boasted over the lawless and profane Gentile, in reality branded
both as culprits.

The secret disquiet and dread lurking in man’s conscience, the pangs
endured in his body of humiliation, the groaning frame of nature declare
the world unhinged and out of course. Things have gone amiss, somehow,
between man and his Creator. The face of the earth and the field of
human history are scarred with the thunderbolts of His displeasure. God,
the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the King of the ages, is not the
amiable, almighty Sentimentalist that some pious people would make Him
out to be. The men of the Bible felt and realized, if we do not, the
grave and tremendous import of the Lord’s controversy with all flesh. He
is unceasingly at war with the sins of men. “God is _love_”--oh yes;
but then He is also “a consuming fire”! There is no anger so crushing as
the anger of love, for there is none so just; no wrath to be feared like
“the wrath of the Lamb.” God is not a man, weak and passionate, whom a
spark of anger might set all on fire, burning out His justice and
compassion. “In His wrath He remembers mercy.” Within that infinite
nature there is room for an absolute loathing and resentment towards
sin, in consistence with an immeasurable pity and yearning towards His
sinful children. Hence the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Look at it from what side you will (and it has many sides), propound it
in what terms you may (and it translates itself anew into the dialect of
every age), you must not explain the cross of Christ away nor cause its
offence to cease. “The atonement has always been a scandal and a folly
to those who did not receive it; it has always contained something which
to formal logic is false and to individualistic ethics immoral; yet in
that very element which has been branded as immoral and false, has
always lain the seal of its power and the secret of its truth.” The Holy
One of God, the Lamb without spot and blemish, He died by His own
consent a sinner’s death. That sacrifice, undergone by the Son of God
and Son of man dying as man for men, in love to His race and in
obedience to the Divine will and law, gave an infinite satisfaction to
God in His relation to the world, and there went up to the Divine throne
from the anguish of Calvary a “savour of sweet smell.” The moral glory
of the act of Jesus Christ in dying for His guilty brethren outshone its
horror and disgrace; and it redeemed man’s lost condition, and clothed
human nature with a new character and aspect in the eyes of God
Himself. “Now therefore there is no more condemnation to them that are
in Christ Jesus.” The mercy of God, if we may so say, is set free to act
in forgiveness and restoration, without any compromise of justice and
inflexible law. No peace without this: no peace that did not _satisfy
God_, and satisfy that law, deep as the deepest in God, that binds
suffering to wrong-doing and death to sin.

Perhaps you say: This is immoral, surely, that the just should suffer
for the unjust; that one commits the offence, and another bears the
penalty.--Stay a moment: that is only half the truth. We are more than
individuals; we are members of a race; and vicarious suffering runs
through life. Our sufferings and wrong-doings bind the human family
together in an inextricable web. We are _communists in sin and death_.
It is the law and lot of our existence. And Christ, the Lord and centre
of the race, has come within its scope. He bound Himself to our sinking
fortunes. He became co-partner in our lost estate, and has redeemed it
to God by His blood. If He was true and perfect man, if He was the
creative Head and Mediator of the race, the eternal Firstborn of many
brethren, He could do no other. He who alone had the right and the
power,--“_One_ died for all.” He took upon His Divine heart the sin and
curse of the world, He fastened it to His shoulders with the cross; and
He bore it away from Caiaphas’ hall and Pilate’s judgement-seat, away
from guilty Jerusalem; He took away the sin of the world, and expiated
it once for all. He quenched in His blood the fires of wrath and hate it
kindled. He slew _the enmity_ thereby.

Still, we are individuals, as you said, not lost after all in the
world’s solidarity. Here your personal right and will must come in. What
Christ has done for you is yours, so far as you accept it. He has died
your death beforehand, trusting that you would not repudiate His act,
that you would not let His blood be spilt in vain. But He will never
force His mediation upon you. He respects your freedom and your manhood.
Do you now endorse what Jesus Christ did on your behalf? Do you renounce
the sin, and accept the sacrifice? Then it is yours, from this moment,
before the tribunal of God and of conscience. By the witness of His
Spirit you are proclaimed a forgiven and reconciled man. Christ
crucified is yours--if you will have Him, if you will identify your
sinful self with the sinless Mediator, if as you see Him lifted up on
the cross you will let your heart cry out, “Oh my God, He dies for
_me_!”

Coming “in one Spirit to the Father,” the reconciled children join hands
again with each other. Social barriers, caste feelings, family feuds,
personal quarrels, national antipathies, alike go down before the virtue
of the blood of Jesus.

            “Neither passion nor pride
              His cross can abide,
    But melt in the fountain that streams from His side!”

“Beloved,” you will say to the man that hates or has wronged you
most,--“Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”
In these simple words of the apostle John lies the secret of universal
peace, the hope of the fraternization of mankind. Nations will have to
say this one day, as well as men.

FOOTNOTES:

[89] See to this effect such passages as Rom. i. 16 (_to the Jew
first_), ix. 4, 5; and especially xi. 13-32.

[90] Gal. iii. 28; Col. iii. 11. Comp. John x. 16, xi. 52. See _The
Epistle to the Galatians_ (Expositor’s Bible), Chapter XV.

CHAPTER XI.

_GOD’S TEMPLE IN HUMANITY._

    “So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are
    fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God, being
    built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus
    Himself being the chief corner stone; in whom each several building,
    fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in
    whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the
    Spirit.”--EPH. ii. 19-22.

Not unfrequently it is the last word or phrase of the paragraph that
gives us the clue to St Paul’s meaning and discloses the point at which
he has aimed all along. So in this instance. “For a habitation of God in
the Spirit”: behold the goal of God’s ways with mankind! For this end
the Divine grace has wrought through countless ages and has made its
great sacrifice. For this end Jew and Gentile are being gathered into
one and compacted into a new humanity.

I. The Church is a house built for an _Occupant_. Its quality and size,
and the mode of its construction are determined by its destination. It
is built to suit the great Inhabitant, who says concerning the new Zion
as He said of the old in figure: “This is my rest for ever! Here will I
dwell, for I have desired it.” God, who is spirit, cannot be satisfied
with the fabric of material nature for His temple, nor does “the Most
High dwell in houses made by men’s hands.” He seeks our spirit for His
abode, and

                            “Doth prefer
    Before all temples the upright heart and pure.”

In the collective life and spirit of humanity God claims to reside, that
He may fill it with His glory and His love. “Know you not,” cries the
apostle to the once debased Corinthians, “that you are God’s temple, and
that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”

Nothing that is bestowed upon man terminates in himself. The deliverance
of Jewish and Gentile believers from their personal sins, their
re-instatement into the broken unity of mankind and the destruction in
them of their old enmities, of the antipathies generated by their common
rebellion against God--these great results of Christ’s sacrifice were
means to a further end. “Hallowed be Thy name” is our first petition to
the Father in heaven; “Glory to God in the highest” is the key-note of
the angels’ song, that runs through all the harmonies of “peace on
earth,” through every strain of the melody of life. Religion is the
mistress, not the handmaid in human affairs. She will never consent to
become a mere ethical discipline, an instrument and subordinate stage in
social evolution, a ladder held for men to climb up into their
self-sufficiency.

The old temptation of the Garden, “Ye shall be as gods,” has come upon
our age in a new and fascinating form, “You shall be as gods,” it is
whispered: “nay, you _are_ God, and there is no other. The supernatural
is a dream. The Christian story is a fable. There is none to fear or
adore above yourselves!” Man is to worship his collective self, his own
humanity. “I am the Lord thy God,” the great idol says, “that brought
thee up out of animalism and savagery, and me only shalt thou
serve!--Love and faithful service to one’s kind, a holy passion for the
welfare of the race, for the relief of human ignorance and poverty and
pain, this is the true religion; and you need no other. Its obligation
is instinctive, its benefits immediate and palpable; and it gives a
consecration to individual life that dignifies and chastens, while it
calls into exercise all our faculties.”

Yes, we willingly admit, such human service is “religion pure and
undefiled, _before our God and Father_.” If service is rendered to our
kind as worship to the Father of men; if we reverence in each man the
image of God and the shrine of His Spirit; if we are seeking to cleanse
and adorn in men the temple where the Most High shall dwell, the
humblest work done for our fellows’ good is done for Him. The best human
charity is rendered for the love of God. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, mind, soul, and strength. This,” said Jesus, “is
the first and great commandment. And the second is _like unto it_: Thou
shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all
the law and the prophets.” On these two hangs the welfare of men and
nations.

But the first commandment must come first. The second law of Jesus never
has been or will be kept to purpose without the first. Humanitarian
sentiments, dreams of universal brotherhood, projects of social reform,
may seem for the moment to gain by their independence of religion a
certain zest and emphasis; but they are without root and vitality. Their
energy fails, or spends itself in revolt; their glow declines, their
purity is stained. The leaders and first enthusiasts trained in the
school of Christ, whose spirit, in vain repudiated, lives on in them,
find themselves betrayed and alone. The coarse selfishness and
materialism of the human heart win an easy triumph over a visionary
altruism. “Without me,” says Jesus Christ, “ye can do nothing.”

In the light of God’s glory man learns to reverence his nature and
understand the vocation of his race. The love of God touches the deep
and enduring springs of human action. The kingdom of Christ and of God
commands an absolute devotion; its service inspires unfaltering courage
and invincible patience. There is a grandeur and a certainty, of which
the noblest secular aims fall short, in the hopes of those who are
striving together for the faith of the gospel, and who work to build
human life into a dwelling-place for God.

II. God’s temple in the Church of Jesus Christ, while it is one, is also
manifold. “In whom _each several building_ [or _every part of the
building_[91]], while it is compacted together, grows into a holy temple
in the Lord.”

The image is that of an extensive pile of buildings, such as the ancient
temples commonly were, in process of construction at different points
over a wide area. The builders work in concert, upon a common plan. The
several parts of the work are adjusted to each other; and the various
operations in process are so harmonized, that the entire construction
preserves the unity of the architect’s design. Such an edifice was the
apostolic Church--one, but of many parts--in its diverse gifts and
multiplied activities animated by one Spirit and directed towards one
Divine purpose.

Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome--what a various scene of
activity these centres of Christian life presented! The Churches
founded in these great cities must have differed in many features. Even
in the communities of his own province the apostle did not, so far as we
can judge, impose a uniform administration. St Peter and St Paul carried
out their plans independently, only maintaining a general understanding
with each other. The apostolic founders, inspired by one and the
self-same Spirit, could labour at a distance, upon material and by
methods extremely various, with entire confidence in each other and with
an assurance of the unity of result which their teaching and
administration would exhibit. The many buildings rested on the one
foundation of the apostles. “Whether it were I or they,” says our
apostle, “so we preach, and so you believed.” Where there is the same
Spirit and the same Lord, men do not need to be scrupulous about visible
conformity. Elasticity and individual initiative admit of entire harmony
of principle. The hand may do its work without irritating and
obstructing the eye; and the foot run on its errands without mistrusting
the ear.

Such was the catholicism of the apostolic age. The true reading of verse
21, as it is restored by the Revisers, is an incidental witness to the
date of the epistle. A churchman of the second century, writing under
Paul’s name in the interests of catholic unity as it was then
understood, would scarcely have penned such a sentence without attaching
to the subject the definite article: he must have written “all the
building,” as the copyists from whom the received text proceeds very
naturally have done. From that time onwards, as the system of the
ecclesiastical hierarchy was developed, external unity was more and more
strictly imposed. The original “diversity of operations” became a rigid
uniformity. The Church swallowed up the Churches. Finally, the spiritual
bureaucracy of Rome gathered all ecclesiastical power into one centre,
and placed the direction of Western Christendom in the hands of a single
priest, whom it declared to be the Vicar of Jesus Christ and endowed
with the Divine attribute of infallibility.

Had not Jerusalem been overthrown and its Church destroyed, the
hierarchical movement would probably have made that city, rather than
Rome, its centre. This was in fact the tendency, if not the express
purpose of the Judaistic party in the Church. St Paul had vindicated in
his earlier epistles the freedom of the Gentile Christian communities,
and their right of non-conformity to Jewish usage. In the words “each
several building, fitly framed together,” there is an echo of this
controversy. The Churches of his mission claim a standing side by side
with those founded by other apostles. For himself and his Gentile
brethren he seems to say, in the presence of the primitive Church and
its leaders: “As they are Christ’s, so also are we.”

The co-operation of the different parts of the body of Christ is
essential to their collective growth. Let all Churches beware of
crushing dissent. Blows aimed at our Christian neighbours recoil upon