division; for its first two verses are in close consecution with the
last verse of chapter iv. By kindness and pitifulness of heart, by
readiness to forgive, God's "beloved children" will "show themselves
imitators" of their Father. The apostle echoes the saying of his Master,
in which the law of His kingdom was laid down: "Love your enemies, and
do good, and lend never despairing; and your reward shall be great, and
you shall be called children of the Highest: for He is kind to the
thankless and evil. Be ye therefore pitiful, as your Father is pitiful"
(Luke vi. 35, 36). Before the cross of Jesus was set up, men could not
know how much God loved the world and how far He was ready to go in the
way of forgiveness. Yet Christ Himself saw the same love displayed in
the Father's daily providence. He bids us imitate Him who makes His sun
shine and His rain fall on the just and unjust, on the evil and the
good. To the insight of Jesus, nature's impartial bounties in which
unbelief sees only moral indifference, spoke of God's compassion; they
proceed from the same love that gave His Son to taste death for every
man.
In chapter iv. 32-v. 2 the Father's love and the Son's self-sacrifice
are spoken of in terms precisely parallel. They are altogether one in
quality. Christ does not by His sacrifice persuade an angry Father to
love His children; it is the Divine compassion in Christ that dictates
and carries into effect the sacrifice. At the same time it was "an
_offering_ and a _sacrifice_ to God." God is love; but love is not
everything in God. Justice is also Divine, and absolute in its own
realm. Law can no more forgo its rights than love forget its
compassions. Love must fulfil all righteousness; it must suffer law to
mark out its path of obedience, or it remains an effusive, ineffectual
sentiment, helpless to bless and save. Christ's feet followed the stern
and strait path of self-devotion; "He humbled Himself and became
obedient," He was "born under law." And the law of God imposing death as
the penalty for sin, which shaped Christ's sacrifice, made it acceptable
to God. Thus it was "an odour of a sweet smell."
Hence the love which follows Christ's example, is love wedded with duty.
It finds in an ordered devotion to the good of men the means to fulfil
the all-holy Will and to present in turn its "offering to God." Such
love will be above the mere pleasing of men, above sentimentalism and
indulgence; it will aim higher than secular ideals and temporal
contentment. It regards men in their kinship to God and obligation to
His law, and seeks to make them worthy of their calling. All human
duties, for those who love God, are subordinate to this; all commands
are summed up in one: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." The
apostle pronounced the first and last word of his teaching when he said:
_Walk in love, as the Christ also loved us._
6. Above all others, one sin stamped the Gentile world of that time with
infamy,--its _uncleanness_.
St Paul has stigmatized this already in the burning words of verse 19.
There we saw this vice in its intrinsic loathsomeness; here it is set
in the light of Christ's love on the one hand (ver. 2), and of the final
judgement on the other (vv. 5, 6). Thus it is banished from the
Christian fellowship in every form--even in the lightest, where it
glances from the lips in words of jest: "Fornication and all
uncleanness, let it not even be named among you." Along with
"filthiness, foolish talk and jesting" are to be heard no more. Passing
from verse 2 to verse 3 by the contrastive _But_, one feels how
repugnant are these things to the love of Christ. The perfume of the
sacrifice of Calvary, so pleasing in heaven, sweetens our life on earth;
its grace drives wanton and selfish passions from the heart, and
destroys the pestilence of evil in the social atmosphere. Lust cannot
breathe in the sight of the cross.
The "good-for-nothing speech" of chapter iv. 29 comes up once more for
condemnation in the _foolish speech_ and _jesting_ of this passage. The
former is the idle talk of a stupid, the latter of a clever man. Both,
under the conditions of heathen society, were tainted with foulness.
Loose speech easily becomes low speech. Wit, unchastened by reverence,
finds a tempting field for its exercise in the delicate relations of
life, and displays its skill in veiled indecencies and jests that
desecrate the purer feelings, while they avoid open grossness.
St Paul's word for "jesting" is one of the singular terms of this
epistle. By etymology it denotes a _well-turned_ style of expression,
the versatile speech of one who can touch lightly on many themes and
aptly blend the grave and gay. This social gift was prized amongst the
polished Greeks. But it was a faculty so commonly abused, that the word
describing it fell into bad odour: it came to signify banter and
persiflage; and then, still worse, the kind of talk here indicated,--the
wit whose zest lies in its flavour of impurity. "The very profligate old
man in the _Miles Gloriosus_ of Plautus (iii. I. 42-52), who prides
himself, and not without reason, upon his wit, his elegance and
refinement [_cavillator lepidus_, _facetus_], is exactly the
=eutrapelos=. And keeping in mind that =eutrapelia=, being only once
expressly and by name forbidden in Scripture, is forbidden to Ephesians,
it is not a little notable to find him urging that all this was to be
expected from him, being as he was an Ephesian by birth:--
Post _Ephesi sum natus_; non enim in Apulia, non Animulae."[130]
In place of senseless prating and wanton jests--things unbefitting to a
rational creature, much more to a saint--the Asian Greeks are to find in
_thanksgiving_ employment for their ready tongue. St Paul's rule is not
one of mere prohibition. The versatile tongue that disported itself in
unhallowed and frivolous utterance, may be turned into a precious
instrument for God's service. Let the fire of Divine love touch the
jester's lips, and that mouth will show forth His praise which once
poured out dishonour to its Maker and shame to His image in man.
7. At the end of the Ephesian catalogue of vices, as at the beginning
(iv. 19), uncleanness is joined with _covetousness_, or _greed_.
This, too, is "not even to be named amongst you, as becometh saints."
_Money! property!_ these are the words dearest and most familiar in the
mouths of a large class of men of the world, the only themes on which
they speak with lively interest. But Christian lips are cleansed from
the service both of Belial and of Mammon. When his business follows the
trader from the shop to the fireside and the social circle, and even
into the Church, when it becomes the staple subject of his conversation,
it is clear that he has fallen into the low vice of covetousness. He is
becoming, instead of a man, a money-making machine, an "idolater" of
"Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell
From heaven."
The apostle classes the covetous man with the fornicator and the
unclean, amongst those who by their worship of the shameful idols of the
god of this world exclude themselves from their "inheritance in the
kingdom of Christ and of God."
A serious warning this for all who handle the world's wealth. They have
a perilous war to wage, and an enemy who lurks for them at every step in
their path. Will they prove themselves masters of their business, or its
slaves? Will they escape the golden leprosy,--the passion for
accumulation, the lust of property? None are found more dead to the
claims of humanity and kindred, none further from the kingdom of Christ
and God, none more "closely wrapped" within their "sensual fleece" than
rich men who have prospered by the idolatry of gain. Dives has chosen
and won his kingdom. He "receives in his lifetime his good things";
afterwards he must look for "torments."
FOOTNOTES:
[127] =Dio apothemenoi to pseudos.= Despite the commentators, we must
hold to it that _the lie_, _the falsehood_ is objective and concrete;
not _lying_, or _falsehood_ as a subjective act, habit, or
quality,--which would have been rather =pseudologia= (comp. =môrologia=,
v. 4; and 1 Tim. iv. 2, =pseudologôn=), or =to pseudes=. So in Rom. i.
25, =to pseudos= is "the [one great] lie" which runs through all
idolatry; and in 2 Thess. ii. 11 it denotes "the lie" which Antichrist
imposes on those ready to believe it,--viz., that he himself is God.
Accordingly, we take the participle =apothemenoi= to signify not what
the readers are to do, but what they _had done_ in renouncing
heathenism. The apostle requires consistency: "Since you are now of the
truth, be truth-speaking men."
[128] 2 Cor. i. 18, 19, xi. 10.
[129] See ch. i. 13, 14, and 18 (last clause).
[130] Trench: _N. T. Synonyms_, § xxxiv.
CHAPTER XXII.
_DOCTRINE AND ETHICS._
"We are members one of another....
"Let the thief labour ... that he may have whereof to give to him
that hath need....
"Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the
day of redemption....
"Forgive each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you. Be ye
imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, even as the
Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a
sacrifice to God....
"No fornicator, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, which is an
idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and
God."--EPH. iv. 25-v. 6.
The homily that we have briefly reviewed in the last Chapter demands
further consideration. It affords a striking and instructive example of
St Paul's method as a teacher of morals, and makes an important
contribution to evangelical ethics. The common vices are here prohibited
on specifically Christian grounds. The new nature formed in Christ casts
them off as alien and dead things; they are the sloughed skin of the old
life, the discarded dress of the old man who was slain by the cross of
Christ and lies buried in His grave.
The apostle does not condemn these sins as being contrary to God's law:
that is taken for granted. But the legal condemnation was ineffectual
(Rom. viii. 3). The wrath revealed from heaven against man's
unrighteousness had left that unrighteousness unchastened and defiant.
The revelation of law, approved and echoed by conscience, taught man his
guilt; it could do no more. All this St Paul assumes; he builds on the
ground of law and its acknowledged findings.
Nor does the apostle make use of the principles of philosophical ethics,
which in their general form were familiar to him as to all educated men
of the day. He says nothing of the rule of nature and right reason, of
the intrinsic fitness, the harmony and beauty of virtue; nothing of
expediency as the guide of life, of the inward contentment that comes
from well-doing, of the wise calculation by which happiness is
determined and the lower is subordinated to the higher good. St Paul
nowhere discountenances motives and sanctions of this sort; he
contravenes none of the lines of argument by which reason is brought to
the aid of duty, and conscience vindicates itself against passion and
false self-interest. Indeed, there are maxims in his teaching which
remind us of each of the two great schools of ethics, and that make room
in the Christian theory of life both for the philosophy of experience
and that of intuition. The true theory recognizes, indeed, the
experimental and evolutional as well as the fixed and intrinsic in
morality, and supplies their synthesis.
But it is not the apostle's business to adjust his position to that of
Stoics and Epicureans, or to unfold a new philosophy; but to teach the
way of the new life. His Gentile disciples had been untruthful,
passionate in temper, covetous, licentious: the gospel which he preached
had turned them from these sins to God; from the same gospel he draws
the motives and convictions which are to shape their future life and to
give to the new spirit within them its fit expression. St Paul has no
quarrel with ethical science, much less with the inspired law of his
fathers; but both had proved ineffectual to keep men from iniquity, or
to redeem them fallen into it. Above them both, above all theories and
all external rules he sets the law of the Spirit of life in Christ.
The originality of Christian ethics, we repeat, does not lie in its
detailed precepts. There is not one, it may be, even of the noblest
maxims of Jesus that had not been uttered by some previous moralist.
With the New Testament in our hands, it may be possible to collect from
non-Christian sources--from Greek philosophers, from the Jewish Talmud,
from Egyptian sages and Hindoo poets, from Buddha and Confucius--a moral
anthology which thus sifted out of the refuse of antiquity, like
particles of iron drawn by the magnet, may bear comparison with the
ethics of Christianity. If Christ is indeed the Son of man, we should
expect Him to gather into one all that is highest in the thoughts and
aspirations of mankind. Addressing the Athenians on Mars' Hill, the
apostle could appeal to "certain of your own poets" in support of his
doctrine of the Fatherhood of God. The noblest minds in all ages witness
to Jesus Christ and prove themselves to be, in some sort, of His
kindred.
"They are but broken lights of Thee;
And Thou, O Lord, art more than they!"
It is Christ in us, it is the personal fellowship of the soul with Him
and with the living God through Him, that forms the vital and
constitutive factor of Christianity. Here is the secret of its moral
efficacy. The Christ is the centre root and of the race; He is the
image of God in which we were made. The life-blood of mankind flowed in
Him as in its heart, and poured forth from Him as from its fountain in
sacrifice for the common sin. Jesus gathered into Himself and restored
the virtue of humanity broken into a thousand fragments; but He did much
more than this. While He re-created in His personal character our lost
manhood, by His death and resurrection He has gained for that ideal a
transcendent power that seizes upon men and regenerates and transforms
them. "With unveiled face beholding in the mirror the glory of the Lord,
we are changed into the same image, [receiving the glory that we see] as
from the Lord of the Spirit" (2 Cor. iii. 18).
There is, therefore, an evangelical ethics, a Christian science of life.
"The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" has a system and method
of its own. It has a rational solution and explanation to render for our
moral problems. But its solution is given, as St Paul and as his Master
loved to give it, in practice, not in theory. It teaches the art of
living to multitudes to whom the names of ethics and moral science are
unknown. Those who understand the method of Christ best are commonly too
busy in its practice to theorize about it. They are physicians tending
the sick and the dying, not professors in some school of medicine. Yet
professors have their use, as well as practitioners. The task of
developing a Christian science of life, of exhibiting the truth of
revelation in its theoretical bearings and its relations to the thought
of the age, forms a part of the practical duties of the Church and
touches deeply the welfare of souls. For other times this work has been
nobly accomplished by Christian thinkers. Shall we not pray the Lord of
the harvest that He will thrust forth into this field fit labourers;
that He will raise up men mighty through God to overthrow every high
thing that exalts itself against His knowledge, and wise to build up to
the level of the times the great fabric of Christian ethics and
discipline?
* * * * *
There emerge in this exhortation four distinct principles, which lay at
the basis of St Paul's views of life and conduct.
I. In the first place, the fundamental truth of _the Fatherhood of God_,
"Be imitators of God," he writes, "as beloved children." And in chapter
iv. 24: "Put on the new man, which _was created after God_."
Man's life has its law, for it has its source, in the nature of the
Eternal. Behind our race-instincts and the laws imposed on us in the
long struggle for existence, behind those imperatives of practical
reason involved in the structure of our intelligence, is the presence
and the active will of Almighty God our heavenly Father. His image we
see in the Son of man.
Here is the fountainhead of truth, from which the two great streams of
philosophical thought upon morals have diverged. If man is the child of
a Being absolutely good, then moral goodness belongs to the essence of
his nature; it is discoverable in the instincts of his reason and will.
Were not our nature warped by sin, such reasoning must have commanded
immediate assent and led to consistent and self-evident results. Again,
if man is the _child_ of God, the finite of the Infinite, his moral
character must, presumably, have been in the beginning germinal rather
than complete, needing--even apart from sin and its
malformations--development and education, the discipline of a fatherly
providence, inculcating the lessons and forming the habits which belong
to his ripe manhood and full-grown stature. Intuitional morals bear
witness to the God of creation; experimental morals to the God of
providence and history. The Divine Fatherhood is the keystone of the
arch in which they meet.
The command to "be imitators of God" makes _personality_ the sovereign
element in life. If consciousness is a finite and passing phenomenon, if
God be but a name for the sum of the impersonal laws that regulate the
universe, for the "stream of tendency" in the worlds, _Father_ and
_love_ are meaningless terms applied to the Supreme and religion
dissolves into an impalpable mist. Is the universe governed by personal
will, or by impersonal force? Is reason, or is gravitation the index to
the nature of the Absolute? This is the vital question of modern
thought. The latter is the answer given by a large, if not a
preponderant body of philosophical opinion in our own day,--as it was
given, virtually, by the natural philosophers of Greece in the dawn of
science. Man's triumphs over nature and the splendour of his discoveries
in the physical realm bewilder his reason. The scientists, like other
conquerors, have been intoxicated with victory. The universe, it seemed,
was about to yield to them its last secrets; they were prepared to
analyze the human soul and resolve the conception of God into its
material elements. Religion and conscience, however, prove to be
intractable subjects in the physical laboratory; they are coming out of
the crucible unchanged and refined. We are able by this time to take a
more sober measure of the possibilities of the scientific method, and to
see what inductive logic and natural selection can do for us, and what
they cannot do. We can walk in the light of the new revelation, without
being dazzled by it. Things are less altered than we thought. The old
boundaries reappear. The spirit resumes its place, and rules a wider
realm than before. Reason refuses to be the victim of its own success,
and to immolate itself for the deification of material law. "Forasmuch
as we are God's offspring," we ought not to think, and we will not think
that the Godhead is like to blind forces and reasonless properties of
matter. Love, thought, will in us raise our being above the realm of the
impersonal; and these faculties point us upward to Him from whom they
came, the Father of the spirits of all flesh.
The great tide of joy, the victorious energy which the sense of God's
love brings into the life of a Christian, is evidence of its reality.
The believer is a child walking in the light of his Father's
smile--dependent, ignorant, but the object of an Almighty love. A
thousand tokens speak to him of the Divine care; his tasks and trials
are sweetened by the confidence that they are appointed for wise ends
beyond his present knowledge. To another in that same house there is no
heavenly Father, no unseen hand that guides, no gleam of a brighter and
purer day lighting up its dull chambers. There are human companions,
weak, erring and wearying like oneself. There is work to do, with the
night coming swiftly; and the brave heart girds itself to duty, finding
in the service of man its motive and employment--but, alas, with how
poor success and how faint a hope!
It is not the loss of strength for human service, nor the dying out of
joy which unbelief entails, that is its chief calamity; but the
unbelief itself. The sun in the soul's heaven is put out. The personal
relationship to the Supreme which gave dignity and worth to our
individual being, which imparted sacredness and enduring power to all
other ties, is destroyed. The heart is orphaned; the temple of the
spirit desolate. The mainspring of life is broken.
"Make haste to answer me, O Jehovah; my spirit faileth!
Hide not Thy face from me,
Lest I be like unto them that go down into the pit!"
II. _The solidarity of mankind in Christ_ furnishes the apostle with a
powerful lever for raising the ethical standard of his readers. The
thought that "we are members one of another" forbids deceit. That he may
"have whereof to give to the needy" is the purpose that provokes the
thief to industry. The desire to "give grace" to the hearers and to
"build them up" in truth and goodness imparts seriousness and elevation
to social intercourse. The irritations and injuries we inflict on each
other, with or without purpose, furnish occasion for us to "be kind one
to another, good-hearted, _forgiving yourselves_"--for this is the
expression the apostle uses in chapter iv. 32, and in Colossians iii.
13. Self is so merged in the community, that in dealing censure or
forgiveness to an offending brother the Christian man feels as though he
were dealing with himself--as though it were the hand that forgave the
foot for tripping, or the ear that pardoned some blunder of the eye.
_Showing-grace_ is what the apostle literally says here, speaking both
of human and Divine forgiveness.[131] In this lies the charm and power
of true forgiveness. The forgiver after the order of grace does not
pardon like a judge moved by magnanimity or pity for transgressors, but
in love to his own kind and desire for their amendment. He identifies
himself with the wrong-doer, weighs his temptation and all that drew him
into error. Such forgiveness, while it never ignores the wrong, admits
every qualifying circumstance and just extenuation. This is the kind of
pardon that touches the sinner's heart; for it goes to the heart of the
sin, isolating it from all other feelings and conditions that are not
sin; it takes the wrong upon itself in understanding and perception; it
puts its finger upon the aching, festering spot where the criminality
lies and applies to that its healing balm.
"Even as God in Christ forgave you." And how did God forgive? Not by a
grand imperial decree, as of some monarch too exalted to resent the
injuries of men or to inquire into their futile proceedings. Had such
forgiveness been possible to Divine justice, it could have wrought in us
no real salvation. Our forgiveness is that of God in Christ. The
Forgiver has sat down by the prisoner's side, has felt his misery and
the force of his temptations, and in everything but the actual sin has
made Himself one with the sinner, even to bearing the extreme penalty of
his guilt. In the act of making sacrifice, Jesus prayed for those that
slew Him: "Father, forgive them; they know not what they do!" This
intercession breathed the spirit of the new forgiveness. There is a real
remission of sins, a release granted justly and upon due satisfaction;
but it is the act of justice charged with love, of a justice as tender
and considerate as it is strong, and which eagerly takes account of all
that bespeaks in the offender a possibility of better things. It is a
forgiveness that does justice to the humanity as well as the criminality
in the sinner.
To proclaim by word and deed this forgiveness of God to the sinful world
is the vocation of the Church. And where she does thus declare it, by
whatever means or ministry, Christ's promise to her is verified:
"Whose-soever sins ye remit, they are remitted to them." We may so
reconcile men to ourselves, as to bring them back to God. Has some one
done you a wrong? there is your opportunity of saving a soul from death
and hiding a multitude of sins. Thus Christ used the great wrong we all
did Him. It is your privilege to show the wrong-doer that you and he are
made one by the blood of Christ.
"Walk in love," St Paul says, "as the Christ also loved us and gave up
Himself for us a sacrifice." When the apostle writes _the Christ_, he
points us along the whole line of the revelation of the cross.[132] We
think of the Christhood of Jesus, of the Christliness of such love as
this. Christ's was a representative and exemplary love, with its
forerunners and its followers all walking in one path. "The Christ loved
_and gave_"; for love that does not give, that prompts to no effort and
puts itself to no sacrifice, is but a luxury of the heart,--useless and
even selfish. And He "gave up _Himself_"--the only gift that could
suffice. The rich who bestow many gifts in furtherance of humanitarian
and religious work and still do not bestow themselves, their sympathetic
thought, their presence and personal aid, are withholding the best
thing, the one thing required to make their bounties efficacious. In
what we give and forgive, it is the accent of sympathy, the giving of
the heart with it that adds grace to the act. "Though I dole out all my
goods, though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it
profiteth me nothing." We do a thousand things to serve and benefit our
fellow-men, and yet evade the real sacrifice,--which is simply to love
them.
In studying this epistle, we have felt increasingly that the Church is
the centre of humanity. The love born and nourished in the household of
faith goes out into the world with a universal mission. The solidarity
of moral interests that is realized there, embraces all the kindreds of
the earth. The incarnation of Christ knits all flesh into one redeemed
family. The continents and races of mankind are members one of another,
with Jesus Christ for head. We are brothers and sisters of humanity: He
our elder brother, and God our common Father in heaven,--His Father and
ours.
Auguste Comte writes in his _System of Positive Polity_: "The promises
of supernatural religion appealed exclusively to man's selfish
instincts.... The sympathetic instincts found no place in the
theological synthesis."[133] It would be impossible to affirm anything
more completely at variance with the truth, anything more absolutely
opposed to the doctrine of Christ and the theological synthesis of the
apostles. And yet it was upon this ground that the great French thinker
renounced Christianity, proposing his new religion of humanity as a
substitute for a selfish and effete supernaturalism! Why did he not go
to the New Testament itself to find out what Christianity means? "To
combine permanently concert with independence," Comte excellently says,
"is the capital problem of society, a problem which religion alone can
solve, by love primarily, then by faith on a basis of love."[134]
Precisely so; and this is the solution offered by Jesus Christ. His
self-sacrificing love is the basis on which our faith rests; and that
faith works by love in all those who truly possess it. This is the
evangelical theory. The morale of the Church, it is true, has fallen
shamefully below its doctrine; but this doctrine is, after all, the one
fruitful and progressive moral force in the world; and it is certain to
be carried into effect.
In the darkest hour of Israel's oppression and of international hate,
one of her great prophets thus described the triumph of supernatural
religion: "In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and Assyria,
a blessing in the midst of the earth; for that the LORD of hosts hath
blessed them, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work
of my hands, and Israel my inheritance" (Isai. xix. 24, 25). This is our
programme still.
III. Another of St Paul's ruling ideas lying at the basis of Christian
ethics, is his conception of _man's future destiny_. The apostle warns
his readers that they "grieve not the Holy Spirit, in whom they were
sealed till the day of redemption." He tells them that "the impure and
the covetous have no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God."
There is thus disclosed a world beyond the world, a life growing out of
life, an eternal and invisible kingdom of whose possession the Spirit
that lives in Christian men is the earnest and firstfruits. This kingdom
is the joint inheritance of the sons of God, brethren with Christ and in
Christ, who are conformed to His image and found worthy to "stand before
the Son of man." Those are excluded from the inheritance, who by their
moral nature are alien to it: "Without are dogs, sorcerers,
whoremongers, idolaters, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie."
This revelation has had a most powerful influence on the progress of
ethics. It has given a momentous importance to individual conduct, a new
grandeur to the moral issues of the present life. "Man's life," viewed
in the light of the Christian gospel, "has duties that are alone great,
that go up to Heaven, and down to Hell." The tangled skein is at last to
be unravelled, the mysterious problem of mortal life will have its
solution at the judgement-seat of Jesus Christ.
It is true that the wicked flourish and spread themselves like green
trees in the sunshine; and the covetous boast of their hearts' desire.
To see this was the trial of ancient faith; and the good man had to
charge himself constantly that he should not fret because of evil-doers.
It required an heroic faith to believe in God's kingdom and
righteousness, when the visible course of things made all against them,
and there was no clear light beyond. God's saints had to learn first
that God is Himself the sufficient good, and must be trusted to do
right. But this was the faith of defence rather than of victory,--of
endurance, not enthusiasm. In the knowledge of Christ's victory over
death and entrance on our behalf into the heavenly world, "in hope of
life eternal which God who cannot lie hath promised," men have fought
against their own sins, have struggled for the right and spent
themselves to save their fellows with a vigour and success never
witnessed before, and in numbers far exceeding those that all other
creeds and systems have enlisted in the holy cause of humanity.
Human reason had guessed and hope had dreamed of the soul's
immortality. Christianity gives this hope certainty, and adds to it the
assurance of the resurrection of the body. Man's entire nature is thus
redeemed. Chastity takes its due place amongst the virtues, and becomes
the mark of a Christian as distinguished from a pagan life. "The body is
not for fornication, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. God
who raised up the Lord Jesus, will raise us also through His power. Your
bodies are limbs of Christ, ... a temple of the Holy Spirit which you
have from God.... Glorify God in your body." So St Paul exhorts the
Christians of Corinth (1 Ep. vi.), living in the centre and shrine of
heathen vice. This doctrine of the sanctity of the body has been the
salvation of the family. It has saved civilization from perishing
through sexual corruption, and is still our chief defence against this
fearful evil.
Our bodily dress, we now learn, is one with the spirit that it infolds.
We shall lay it aside only to resume it,--transfigured, but with a form
and impress continuous with its present being. This identical self, the
same both in its outward and inward personality, will appear before the
tribunal of Christ, that it may "receive the things done in the body."
This announcement gives reasonableness and distinctness to the
expectation of future judgement. The judgement assumes, with its solemn
grandeur, a matter-of-fact reality, an immediate bearing on the daily
conduct of life, which lends a powerful reinforcement to the conscience,
while it supplies a fitting and glorious conclusion to our course as
moral beings.
IV. Finally, _the atonement of the cross_ stamps its own character and
spirit on the entire ethics of Christianity. The Fatherhood of God, the
unity and solidarity of mankind, the issues of eternal life or death
awaiting us in the unseen world--all the great factors and fundamentals
of revealed religion gather about the cross of Christ; they lend to it
their august significance, and gain from it new import and
impressiveness.
The fact that Christ "gave Himself up for us an offering and sacrifice
to God"--gave Himself, as it is put elsewhere, "for our sins"--throws an
awful light upon the nature of human transgression. The blood spilt in
the strife with our sin and shed to wash out its stain, reveals its
foulness and malignity. All that inspired men had taught, that good men
had believed and felt and penitent men confessed in regard to the evil
of human sin, is more than verified by the sacrifice which the Holy One
of God has undergone in order to put it away. It was felt that "the
blood of bulls and goats could never take away sins," that the
sacrifices man could offer for himself, or the creatures on his behalf,
were ineffectual; the guilt was too real to be expiated in this fashion,
the wound too deep to be healed by those poor appliances. But who had
suspected that such a remedy as this was needed, and forthcoming? How
deep the resentment of eternal Justice against the transgressions of
men, if the blood of God's own Son alone could make propitiation! How
rank the offence against the Divine holiness, if to purge its
abomination the vessel containing the most sweet fragrance of His
sinless nature must be broken! What tears of contrition, what cleansing
fires of hate against our own sins, what scorn of their baseness, what
stern resolves against them are awakened by the sight of the cross of
our Lord Jesus Christ!
This negative side of the ethical bearing of Christ's sacrifice is
implied in the words of the apostle in the second verse, and in the
contrast indicated between its sweet savour and those unclean things
whose very names it should banish from our midst (ver. 3). On its
positive effects--the love and self-devotion it inspires, the conformity
of our lives to its example--we have dwelt already. Let us add, however,
that the sacrifice of Christ demands from us, above all, _devotion to
Christ Himself_. Our first duty as Christians is to love Christ, to
serve and follow Christ. "He died for all," says the apostle, "that the
living should live no longer to themselves, but to Him that died for
them and rose again." When Mary of Bethany poured on the Saviour's head
her box of precious ointment, the Master accepted the tribute and
approved the act; and the poor have been gainers by it a thousand times
the pence which Judas deemed wasted on the head he was watching to
betray. There is no conflict between the claims of Christ and those of
philanthropy, between the needs of His worship and the needs of the
destitute and suffering in our streets. Every new subject won to the
kingdom of Christ is another helper won for His poor. Every act of love
rendered to Him deepens the channel of sympathy by which relief and
blessing come to sorrowful humanity.
Let the gospel of Christ's kingdom be preached in word and deed to all
nations, let the love of Christ be brought to bear upon the great masses
of mankind, and the time of the world's salvation will be come. Its sin
will be hated, forsaken, forgiven. Its social evils will be banished;
its weapons of war turned to ploughshares and pruning hooks. Its
scattered races and nations will be reunited in the obedience of faith,
and formed into one Christian confederacy and commonwealth of the
peoples, a peaceful kingdom of the Son of God's love.
FOOTNOTES:
[131] =Charizomenoi eautois, kathôs kai ho Theos en Christô echarisato
hymin.= So in Col. ii. 13, iii. 13; Rom. viii. 32; 2 Cor. ii. 7, 10;
Luke vii. 42, 43.
[132] Comp. pp. 47, 83, 169, 189.
[133] Vol. iv., pp. 22, 41 (Eng. Trans.).
[134] Comte, vol. iv., p. 30.
CHAPTER XXIII.
_THE CHILDREN OF THE LIGHT._
"Be not ye therefore partakers with them; for ye were once darkness,
but are now light in the Lord; walk as children of light (for the
fruit of the light is in all goodness and righteousness and truth),
proving what is well-pleasing unto the Lord; and have no fellowship
with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather even reprove them.
For the things which are done by them in secret it is a shame even
to speak of; but all things when they are reproved are made manifest
by the light: for everything that is made manifest is light.
Wherefore He saith:--
'Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead;
And the Christ shall shine upon thee.'"
EPH. v. 7-14.
The contrast between the Christian and heathen way of life is now,
finally, to be set forth under St Paul's familiar figure of _the light
and the darkness_. He bids his Gentile readers not to be
"joint-partakers with them"--with the sons of disobedience upon whom
God's wrath is coming (ver. 6)--for he has hailed them already, in
chapter iii. 6, as "joint-partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus
through the gospel." "Once" indeed they shared in the lot of the
disobedient; but for them the darkness has past, and the true light now
shineth.
In wrath or promise, in hope of life eternal or in the fearful looking
for of judgement they, and we, must partake. This future participation
depends upon present character. "Do not," the apostle entreats, "cast
in your lot again with the unclean and covetous. Their ways you have
renounced, and their doom you have exchanged for the heritage of the
saints. Let no vain words deceive you into supposing that you may keep
your new inheritance, and yet return to your old sins. Show yourselves
worthy of your calling. Walk as children of the light, and you will
possess the eternal kingdom." Each man carries with him into the next
state of being the entail of his past life. That heritage depends on his
own choice; yet not upon his individual will working by itself, but on
the grace and will of God working with him, as that grace is accepted or
rejected. He has light: he must walk in it; and he will reach the realm
of light. Thus the apostle, in verses 7 and 8, concludes his warning
against relapse into heathen sin.
* * * * *
Verses 9 and 10 delineate _the character of the children of the light_:
verses 11-14 set forth _their influence upon the surrounding darkness_.
Into these two divisions the exposition of this paragraph naturally
falls.
I. "The fruit _of the light_" (not _of the Spirit_) is the true text of
verse 9, as it stands in the older Greek copies, Versions, and Fathers.
Calvin showed his judgement and independence in preferring this reading
to that of the received Greek text. Similarly Bengel,[135] and most of
the later critics. The sentence is parenthetical, and contains a
singular and instructive figure. It is one of those sparks from the
anvil, in which great writers not unfrequently give us their finest
utterances,--sentences that get a peculiar point from the eagerness with
which they are struck off in the heat and clash of thought, as the mind
reaches forward to some thought lying beyond. The clause is an epitome,
in five words, of Christian virtue, whose qualities, origin and method
are all defined. It sums up exquisitely the moral teaching of the
epistle. Galatians v. 22, 23 (_the fruit of the Spirit_) and Philippians
iv. 8 (_Whatsoever things are true_, etc.) are parallel to this passage,
as Pauline definitions, equally perfect, of the virtues of a Christian
man. This has the advantage of the others in brevity and epigrammatic
point.
"You are light in the Lord," the apostle said; "walk as children of the
light." But his readers might ask: "What does this mean? It is poetry:
let us have it translated into plain prose. How shall we walk as
children of the light? Show us the path."--"I will tell you," the
apostle answers: "the fruit of the light is in all goodness and
righteousness and truth. Walk in these ways; let your life bear this
fruit; and you will be true children of the light of God. So living, you
will find out what it is that pleases God, and how joyful a thing it is
to please Him (ver. 10). Your life will then be free from all complicity
with the works of darkness. It will shine with a brightness clear and
penetrating, that will put to shame the works of darkness and transform
the darkness itself. It will speak with a voice that all must hear,
bidding them awake from the sleep of sin to see in Christ their light of
life." Such is the setting in which this delightful definition stands.
But it is more than a definition. While this sentence declares what
Christian virtue is, it signifies also whence it comes, how it is
generated and maintained. It asserts the connexion that exists between
Christian character and Christian faith. The fruit cannot be grown
without the tree, any more than the tree can grow soundly without
yielding its proper fruit. _Right is the fruit of light._
The principle that religion is the basis of moral virtue, is one that
many moralists disputed in St Paul's time; and it has fallen into some
discredit in our own. In philosophical theory, and to a large extent in
popular maxim and belief, it is assumed that faith and morals, character
and creed, are not only distinct but independent things and that there
is no necessary connexion between the two. Christians are themselves to
blame for this fallacy, through the discrepancy not seldom visible
between their creed and life. Our narrowness of view and the harshness
of our ethical judgements have helped to foster this grave error.
Great Christian teachers have spoken of the virtues of the heathen as
"splendid sins." But Christ and His apostles never said so. He said:
"Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold." And they said: "In
every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness, is accepted
of Him." The Christian creed has no jealousy in regard to human
excellence. "Whatsoever things are true and honourable and just and
pure," wherever and in whomsoever they are found, our faith honours and
delights in them, and accepts them to the utmost of their worth. But
then it claims them all for its own,--as the fruit of the one "true
light which lighteth every man." Wherever this fruit appears, we know
that that light has been, though its ways are past finding out. Through
secret crevices, by subtle refractions and multiplied reflections, the
true light reaches many a life lying far outside its visible course.
All goodness has one source; for, said Jesus, "there is none good but
one, that is God." The channels may be tortuous, obstructed and obscure:
the stream is always one. There is nothing more touching, and nothing
more encouraging to our faith in God's universal love and His will that
all men should be saved, than to see, as we do sometimes under
conditions most adverse and in spots the most unlikely, features of
moral beauty and Christlike goodness appearing like springs in the
desert or flowers blooming in Alpine snows,--signs of the universal
light,
"Which yet in the absolutest drench of dark
Ne'er wants its witness, some stray beauty-beam
To the despair of hell!"
The action of God's grace in Christ is by no means limited to the sphere
of its recognized working. All the more earnestly on this account do we
vindicate this grace against those who deny its necessity or the
permanence of its moral influence. The fruit, in the main, they approve.
But they would cut down the plant from which it came; they seek to
quench the light under which it grew. They are like men who should take
you to some lofty tree that has flourished for ages rooted in the rock,
and who should say: "See how wide its branches and how stout its stem,
how firmly it stands upon its native soil! Let us cut it loose from
those dark and ugly roots--that mysterious theology, those superstitions
of the past. The human mind has outgrown them. Virtue can support itself
on its own proper basis. It is time to assert the dignity of man, and to
proclaim the independence of morality." If these men have their way, and
if European society renounces the authority of God, how quickly will
that tree of the Lord's planting, the vast growth of Christian virtue
and beneficence, wither to its topmost bough; and the next storm will
bring it to the ground, with all its stately strength and summer beauty.
Unbelief in God lays the axe at the root of human society. Our life--the
life of individuals, of families and nations--is rooted in the unseen
and hid with Christ in God. Thence it draws its vitality and virtue,
through those spiritual fibres by which we are linked to God and lay
hold on eternal life. Since Christ Jesus our forerunner entered the
heavenly places, the anchor of human hopes has been cast within the
veil; if that anchor drags, there is no other that will hold. The rocks
are plain to see on which our richly freighted ship of life will
founder. Without the religion of Jesus Christ, our civilization is not
worth a hundred years' purchase.
Moral effects do not follow upon their causes as rapidly as physical
effects: they follow as certainly. We live largely upon the accumulated
ethical capital of our forefathers. When that is spent, we are left to
our intrinsic poverty of soul, to our faithlessness and feebleness. The
scepticism of one generation bears fruit in the immorality of the next,
or the next after that; the unbelief and cynicism of the teacher in the
vice of his disciple. Such fruit of blasting and mildew the decay of
faith has never failed to bear.
The corresponding truth will be at once acknowledged. There is no real
religion without virtue. If the godly man is not a good man, if he is
not a sincere and pure-hearted man, "that man's religion is vain": no
matter what his professions or his emotions, no matter what his
services to the Church. He is one of those to whom Jesus Christ will
say: "I know you not; depart from me, all ye that work iniquity." There
is a flaw in him somewhere, a rift within the lute that spoils all its
music. "A good tree cannot bring forth corrupt fruit."
In Christ's garden there forms in clustered beauty and perfectness the
ripe growth of virtue, which in the sunshine of His love and under the
freshening breath of His Spirit sends forth its spices and "yieldeth its
fruit every month." In it there abide _goodness_, _righteousness_,
_truth_--these three; and who shall say which of them is greatest?
I. _Goodness_ stands first, as the most visible and obvious form of
Christian excellence,--that which every one looks for in a religious
man, and which every one admires when it is to be seen. Righteousness,
regarded by itself, is not so readily appreciated. There is something
austere and forbidding in it. "For a righteous man scarcely would one
die"--you respect, even revere him; but you do not love him: "but for
the good man peradventure, one would even dare to die."
Christian goodness is the sanctification of the heart and its
affections, renewed and governed by the love of God in Christ. It is,
notwithstanding, but seldom inculcated in the New Testament;[136]
because it is referred to its spring and principle in _love_. Goodness
is love embodied. Now love, as the Christian knows it, is of God. "We
love," says the apostle John, "because He first loved us.... He loved
us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." This is the
faith that makes good men,--the best the world has ever known, the best
that it holds now. Vanity, selfishness, evil temper and desire are
shamed and burnt out of the soul by the holy fire of the love of God in
Jesus Christ our Lord. In the warm, tender light of the cross the heart
is softened and cleansed, and expanded to the widest charity. It becomes
the home of all generous instincts and pure affections. So "the fruit of
the light is in all goodness."
2. And _righteousness_.
This second and central definition applies a searching test to all
spurious forms of goodness, superficial or sentimental,--to the goodness
of mere good manners, or good nature. The principle of righteousness,
fully understood, includes everything in moral worth, and is often used
to denote in one word the entire fruit of God's grace in man. For
righteousness is the sanctification of the conscience. It is loyalty to
God's holy and perfect law. It is no mere outward keeping of formal
rules, such as the legal righteousness of Judaism, no submission to
necessity or calculation of advantages: it is a love of the law in a
man's inmost spirit; it is the quality of a heart one with that law,
reconciled to it as it is reconciled to God Himself in Jesus Christ.
At the bottom, therefore, righteousness and goodness are one. Each is
the counterface and complement of the other. Righteousness is to
goodness as the strong backbone of principle, the firm hand and the
vigorous grasp of duty, the steadfast foot that plants itself on the
eternal ground of the right and true and stands against a world's
assault. Goodness without righteousness is a weak and fitful sentiment:
righteousness without goodness is a dead formality. He cannot love God
or his neighbour truly, who does not love God's law; and he knows
nothing aright of that law, who does not know that it is the law of
love.
This also, this above all is "the fruit of the light." Two watchwords we
have from the lips of Jesus, two mottoes of His own life and
mission,--the one given at the end, the other at the beginning of His
course: "Greater _love_ hath none than this, that one lay down his life
for his friends"; and, "Thus it becometh us to fulfil all
_righteousness_." By a double flame was He consumed a sacrifice upon the
cross,--by the passion of His zeal for God's righteousness, and by the
passion of His pity for mankind. In that twofold light we see light, and
become "light in the Lord." Therefore the fruit of the light, the moral
product of a true faith in the gospel, is in all _goodness and
righteousness_.
There is a danger of merging the latter in the former of these
attributes. Evangelical piety is credited with an excess of the
sentimental and emotional disposition, cultivated at the expense of the
more sterling elements of character. High principle, scrupulous honour,
stern fidelity to duty are no less essential to the image of Christ in
the soul than are warm feeling and zealous devotion to His service.
_Jesus Christ the righteous_, as His apostles loved to call Him, is the
pattern of a manly faith, up to which we must grow in all things. "_He_
is the propitiation for our sins." Never was there an act of such
unswerving integrity and absolute loyalty to the law of right as the
sacrifice of Calvary. God forbid that we should magnify love at the
expense of law, or make good feeling a substitute for duty.
3. _Truth_ comes last in this enumeration, for it signifies the inward
reality and depth of the other two.
Truth does not mean veracity alone, the mere truth of the lips. Heathen
honesty goes as far as this. Men of the world expect as much from each
other, and brand the liar with their contempt. Truth of words requires a
reality behind itself. The acted falsehood is excluded, the hinted and
intended lie no less than that expressly uttered. Beyond all this, it is
the truth of the man that God requires--speech, action, thought, all
consistent, harmonious and transparent, with the light of God's truth
shining through them. Truth is the harmony of the inward and the
outward, the correspondence of what the man is in himself with that
which he appears and wishes to appear to be.
Now, it is only children of the light, only men thoroughly good and
upright who can, in this strict sense, be men of truth. So long as any
malice or iniquity is left in our nature, we have something to conceal.
We cannot afford to be sincere. We are compelled to pay, by very shame,
the degrading tribute which vice renders to virtue, the homage of
hypocrisy. But find a man whose intellect, whose heart and will, tried
at whatever point, ring sound and true, in whom there is no affectation,
no make-believe, no pretence or exaggeration, no discrepancy, no discord
in the music of his life and thought, "an Israelite indeed, in whom is
no guile"--there is a saint for you, and a man of God; there is one whom
you may "grapple to your soul with hoops of steel."
Truth is the hall-mark of entire sanctification; it is the highest and
rarest attainment of the Christian life. It is equally the charm of an
innocent, unspoilt childhood, and of a ripe and purified old age. The
apostle John, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," is the most perfect
embodiment, after his Master, of this consummating grace. In him
righteousness and love were blended in the translucence of an utter
simplicity and truth.
We must beware of giving a subjective and merely personal aspect to this
divine quality. While truth is the unity of the outward and inward, of
heart and act and word in the man, it is at the same time the agreement
of the man with the reality of things as they exist in God. The former
kind of truth rests upon the latter; the subjective upon the objective
order. The truth of God makes us true. We magnify our own sincerity,
until it becomes vitiated and pretentious. In our eagerness to realize
and express our own convictions, we give too little pains to form them
upon a sound basis; we make a great virtue of _speaking out_ what is in
our hearts, but take small heed of what _comes in_ to the heart, and
speak out of a loose self-confidence and idolatry of our own opinions.
So the Pharisees were true, who called Christ an impostor. So every
careless slanderer, and scandalmonger credulous of evil, who believes
the lies he propagates. "Imagination has pictured to itself a domain in
which every one who enters should be compelled to speak only what he
thought, and pleased itself by calling such domain the Palace of Truth.
A palace of veracity, if you will; but no temple of the truth. A place
where each one would be at liberty to utter his own crude unrealities,
to bring forth his delusions, mistakes, half-formed, hasty judgements;
where the depraved ear would reckon discord harmony, and the depraved
eye mistake colour; the depraved moral taste take Herod or Tiberius for
a king, and shout beneath the Redeemer's cross, 'Himself He cannot
save!' A temple of the truth? Nay, only a palace echoing with veracious
falsehoods, a Babel of confused sounds, in which egotism would rival
egotism, and truth would be each man's own lie."[137] In the pride of
our veracity, we miss the verity of things; we are true only to our
blind self, false to the light of God. "Every one that is of the truth
heareth my voice:" so said He who was Truth incarnate, making His word a
law for all true men.
"In _all_ goodness and righteousness and truth," says the apostle. Let
us seek them all. We are apt to become specialists in virtue, as in
other departments of life. Men will endeavour even to compensate by
extreme efforts in one direction for deficiencies in some other
direction, which they scarcely desire to make good. So they grow out of
shape, into oddities and moral malformations. There is a want of balance
and of finish about a multitude of Christian lives, even of those who
have long and steadily pursued the way of faith. We have sweetness
without strength, and strength without gentleness, and truth spoken
without love, and words of passionate zeal without accuracy and
heedfulness.
All this is infinitely sad, and infinitely damaging to the cause of our
religion.
"It is the little rift within the lute
That by-and-by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all;
The little rift within the lover's lute,
Or little pitted speck in garnered fruit,
That rotting inward slowly moulders all."
Let us judge ourselves, that we be not judged by the Lord. Let us count
no wrong a trifle. Let us never imagine that our defects in one kind
will be atoned for by excellencies in another. Our friends may say
this, in charity, for us; it is a fatal thing when a man begins to say
so to himself. "May the God of peace sanctify you fully. May your whole
spirit, soul, and body in blameless integrity be preserved to the coming
of the Lord Jesus Christ" (1 Thess. v. 23).
II. The _effect_ upon surrounding darkness of the light of God in
Christian lives is described in verses 11-14, in words which it remains
for us briefly to examine.
Verse 12 distinguishes "the things secretly done" by the Gentiles, "of
which it is a shame even to speak," from the open and manifest forms of
evil in which they invite their Christian neighbours to join (ver. 11).
Instead of doing this and "having fellowship with the unfruitful works
of darkness," they must "rather reprove them." Silent absence, or
abstinence is not enough. Where sin is open to rebuke, it should at all
hazards be rebuked. On the other hand, St Paul does not warrant
Christians in prying into the hidden sins of the world around them and
playing the moral detective. Publicity is not a remedy for all evils,
but a great aggravation of some, and the surest means of disseminating
them. "It is a shame"--a disgrace to our common nature, and a grievous
peril to the young and innocent--to fill the public prints with the
nauseous details of crime and to taint the air with its putridities.
"But all things," the apostle says--whether it be those open works of
darkness, profitless of good, which expose themselves to direct
conviction, or the depths of Satan that hide their infamy from the light
of day--"all things being reproved by the light, are made manifest"
(ver. 13). The fruit of the light convicts the unfruitful works of
darkness. The daily life of a Christian man amongst men of the world is
a perpetual reproof, that tells against secret sins of which no word is
spoken, of which the reprover never guesses, as well as against open and
unblushing vices.
"This is the condemnation," said Jesus, "that light is come into the
world." And this condemnation every one who walks in Christ's steps, and
breathes His Spirit amid the corruptions of the world, is carrying on,
more frequently in silence than by spoken argument. Our unconscious and
spontaneous influence is the most real and effective part of it. Life is
the light of men--words only as the index of the life from which they
spring. Just so far as our lives touch the conscience of others and
reveal the difference between darkness and light, so far do we hold
forth the word of life and carry on the Holy Spirit's work in convincing
the world of sin. "Let your light so shine."
This manifestation leads to a transformation: "For everything that is
made manifest _is light_" (ver. 13). "You are light in the Lord," St
Paul says to his converted Gentile readers,--you who were "once
darkness," once wandering in the lusts and pleasures of the heathen
around you, without hope and without God. The light of the gospel
disclosed, and then dispelled the darkness of that former time; and so
it may be with your still heathen kindred, through the light you bring
to them. So it will be with the night of sin that is spread over the
world. The light which shines upon sin-laden and sorrowful hearts,
shines on them to change them into its own nature. _The manifested is
light_: in other words, if men can be made to see the true nature of
their sin, they will forsake it. If the light can but penetrate their
conscience, it will save them. "Wherefore He saith:--
Awake, O sleeper; and arise from out of the dead!
And the Christ shall dawn upon thee!"
The speaker of this verse can be no other than God, or the Spirit of God
in Scripture. The sentence is no mere quotation. It re-utters, in the
style of Mary's or Zechariah's song, the promise of the Old Covenant
from the lips of the New. It gathers up the import of the prophecies
concerning the salvation of Christ, as they sounded in the apostle's
ears and as he conveyed them to the world. Isaiah lx. 1-3 supplies the
basis of our passage, where the prophet awakens Zion from the sleep of
the Exile and bids her shine once more in the glory of her God and show
forth His light to the nations: "Arise," he cries, "shine, for thy light
is come!" There are echoes in the verse, besides, of Isaiah li. 17,
xxvi. 19; perhaps even of Jonah i. 6: "What meanest thou, O sleeper?
arise, and call upon thy God!" We seem to have here, as in chapter iv.
4-6, a snatch of the earliest Christian hymns. The lines are a free
paraphrase from the Old Testament, formed by weaving together Messianic
passages--belonging to such a hymn as might be sung at baptisms in the
Pauline Churches. Certainly those Churches did not wait until the second
century to compose their hymns and spiritual songs (comp. ver. 19). Our
Lord's sublime announcement (John v. 25), already verified, that "the
hour had come when the dead should hear the voice of the Son of God, and
they that heard should live," gave the key to the prophetic sayings
which promised through Israel the light of life to all nations.
With this song on her lips the Church went forth, clad in the armour of
light, strong in the joy of salvation; and darkness and the works of
darkness fled before her.
FOOTNOTES:
[135] Mr. Wesley adopted this and other emendations from Bengel, "that
great light of the Christian world," in the translation accompanying his
_Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament_. He there supplied the
Methodist preachers with many of the most valuable improvements made in
the Revised Version, a hundred years before the time.
[136] The word belongs to Paul's vocabulary; it is found besides in 2
Thess. i. 11; Rom. xv. 14; and Gal. v. 22. See the Commentary on this
last epistle in the _Expositor's Bible_, pp. 384, 385.
[137] F. W. Robertson: _Sermons_ (First Series), xix., on "The Kingdom
of the Truth."
CHAPTER XXIV.
_THE NEW WINE OF THE SPIRIT._
"Look therefore carefully how ye walk, not as unwise, but as wise;
redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not
foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
"And be not drunken with wine, wherein is riot, but be filled with
the Spirit; speaking one to another in psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the
Lord; giving thanks always for all things in the name of our Lord
Jesus Christ to God, even the Father; subjecting yourselves one to
another in the fear of Christ."--EPH. v. 15-21.
Very solemnly did the moral homily to the Asian Christians begin in
chapter iv. 17: "This therefore I say and testify in the Lord, that you
must no longer walk as the Gentiles walk." So much has now been said and
testified in the intervening paragraphs, by way both of dehortation and
exhortation. Here the apostle pauses; and casting his eye over the whole
pathway of life he has marked out in this discourse, he bids his
readers: "Look then carefully how you walk. Show that you are not fools,
but wise to observe your steps and to seize your opportunities in these
evil times,--days so perilous that you need your best wisdom and
knowledge of God's will to save you from fatal stumbling."
So far St Paul's renewed exhortation, in verses 15-17, inculcates care
and wary discretion,--the skill that in the strategy of life finds its
vantage in unequal ground, that makes opposing winds help forward the
seafarer. In this sober wisdom it is likely the Asian Christians were
deficient. In many ways, both directly and indirectly, the need of
increased thoughtfulness on the readers' part has been indicated. But
there is another side to the Christian nature: it has its moods of
exhilaration, as well as of caution and reflection; ardent emotion,
eager speech and exultant song are things proper to a high religious
life. For these the apostle makes room in verses 18-20, while the three
foregoing verses enjoin the circumspection and vigilance that become the
good soldier of Christ Jesus.
A striking contrast thus arises between the _sobriety_ and the
_excitement_ that mark the life of grace. We see with what strictness we
must watch over ourselves, and guard the character and interests of the
Church; and with what joyousness and holy freedom we may take our part
in its communion. Temperament and constitution modify these injunctions
in their personal application. The Holy Spirit does not enable us all to
speak with equal fervour and freedom, nor to sing with the same
tunefulness. His power operates in the limbs of Christ's body "according
to the measure of each single part." But the self-same Spirit works in
both these contrasted ways,--in the sanguine and the melancholic
disposition, in the demonstrative and in the reserved, in the quick play
of fancy and the brightness and impulsiveness of youth no less than in
the sober gait and solid sense of riper age. Let us see how the two
opposite aspects of Christian experience are set out in the apostle's
words.
I. First of all, upon the one side, _heedfulness_ is enjoined. The
children of light must use the light to see their way. To "stumble at
noonday" is a proof of folly or blindness. So misusing our light, we
shall quickly lose it and return to the paths of darkness.
According to the preferable (Revised) order of the words, the qualifying
adverb "carefully" belongs to the "look," not to the "walk." The
circumspect _look_ precedes the wise step. The spot is marked on which
the foot is to be planted; the eye ranges right and left and takes in
the bearings of the new position, forecasting its possibilities. "Look
before you leap," our sage proverb says. According to the carefulness of
the look, the success of the leap is likely to be.
There is no word in the epistle more apposite than this to
"our day
Of haste, half-work, and disarray."
We are too restless to think, too impatient to learn. Everything is
sacrificed to speed. The telegraph and the daily newspaper symbolize the
age. The public ear loves to be caught quickly and with new sensations:
a premium is set on carelessness and hurry. Earnest men, eager for the
triumph of a good cause, push forward with unsifted statements and
unweighed denunciations, that discredit Christian advocacy and wound the
cause of truth and charity. Time, thus wronged and driven beyond her
pace, has her revenge; she deals hardly with these light judgements of
the hour. They are as the chaff which the wind carrieth away. After all,
it is still truth that lives; thorough work that lasts; accuracy that
hits the mark. And the time-servers are "unwise," both intellectually
and morally. They are most unwise who think to succeed in life's high
calling without self-distrust, and without scrupulous care and pains in
all work they do for the kingdom of God.
In the evil of his own times St Paul sees a special reason for
heedfulness: "Walk not as unwise, but as wise, buying up the
opportunity, _because the days are evil_." In Colossians iv. 5 the
parallel sentence shows that in giving this caution he is thinking of
the relation of Christians to the world outside: "Walk in wisdom toward
those without, buying up the opportunity." Evil days they were, when
Paul lay in Nero's prison; when that wild beast was raging against
everything that resisted his mad will or reproved his monstrous vices.
With supreme power in the hands of such a creature of Satan, who could
tell what fires of persecution were kindling for the people of Christ,
or what terrible revelation of God's anger against the present evil
world might be impending. At Ephesus the spirit of heathenism had shown
itself peculiarly menacing. Here, too, in the rich and cultivated
province of Asia where the currents of Eastern and Western thought met,
heresy and its corruptions made their first decided appearance in the
Churches of the Gentiles. Conflicts are approaching which will try to
the uttermost the strength of the Christian faith and the temper of its
weapons (vi. 10-16).
As wise men, reading thoughtfully the signs of the times, the Asian
Christians will "redeem the [present] season." They will use to the
utmost the light given them. They will employ every means to increase
their knowledge of Christ, to confirm their faith and the habits of
their spiritual life. They are like men expecting a siege, who
strengthen their fortifications and furbish their weapons and practise
their drill and lay up store of supplies, that they may "stand in the
evil day." Such wisdom Ecclesiastes preaches to the young man: "Remember
now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, or ever the evil days come."
Within a year after this epistle was penned, Rome was burnt and the
crime of its burning washed out, at Nero's caprice, in Christian blood.
In four years more St Paul and St Peter had died a martyr's death at
Rome; and Nero had fallen by the assassin's hand. At once the Empire was
convulsed with civil war; and the year 68-69 was known as that of the
Four Emperors. Amid the storms threatening the ruin of the Roman State,
the Jewish war against Rome was carried on, ending in the year 70 with
the capture of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish temple and
nationality. These were the days of tribulation of which our Lord spoke,
"such as had not been since the beginning of the world" (Matt. xxiv. 21,
22). The entire fabric of life was shaken; and in the midst of
earthquake and tempest, blood and fire, Israel met its day of judgement
and the former age passed away. In the year 63, when the apostle wrote,
the sky was everywhere red and lowering with signs of coming storm. None
knew where or how the tempest might break, or what would be its issue.
When men amid evil days and portents of danger must be told not to be
"foolish" nor "drunken with wine," one is disposed to tax them with
levity. It was difficult for these Asian Greeks to take life seriously,
and to realize the gravity of their situation. St Paul appeals to them
by their duty, still more than by their danger: "Be not foolish, but
understand what _the will of the Lord_ is." As he bade the Thessalonians
consider that chastity was not matter of choice and of their own
advantage only, it was "God's will" (1 Ep. iv. 3), so the Ephesians
must understand that Christ is no mere adviser, nor the Christian life
an optional system that men may adopt when and so far as it suits them.
He is our Lord; and it is our business to understand, in order that we
may execute, His designs. For this Christ's servants require a watchful
eye and an alert intelligence. They must be no dullards nor simpletons,
who would enter into the Divine Master's plans; no triflers, no
creatures of sentiment and impulse, who are to be the agents of His
will. He can and does employ every sincere heart that gives itself in
love to Him. But His nobler tasks are for the wise taught by His Spirit,
for those who can "understand," with penetrating sympathy and breadth of
comprehension, "what the will of the Lord is." Hence the distinction of
St Paul himself, and of John the beloved disciple, amongst His ministers
and witnesses,--men great in mind as they were in heart, whose thoughts
about Christ were as grand as their love to Him was fervent.
Nowhere does the apostle say so much of "the will of God" in regard to
the dispensation of grace as he does in this epistle.[138] For he sees
life and salvation here in their largest bearings and proportions. He
prayed at the outset that the Gentile readers might realize the value
that God puts upon them, and the mighty forces He has set at work for
their salvation (i. 18-20); and again, that they might comprehend the
vast dimensions of His plan for the building of the Church (iii. 18).
Now that he has shown the relation of this eternal purpose to the
character and everyday life of the converted Gentiles, "the will of God"
becomes matter of immediate import; it is revealed in its bearing upon
conduct, upon the affairs of business and society. It is not the
purpose, the promises, the doctrine of the Lord alone, but "the _will_
of the Lord" that they have to understand, as it touches their spirit
and behaviour day by day. They must realize the practical demands of
their religion,--how it is to make them truthful, gracious, pure and
wise. They must translate creed into life and act. Such is the wisdom
which their apostle strives to instil into the Asian Christians. Their
first need was spiritual enlightenment; their second need was moral
intelligence. Might they only have sense to understand and loyalty to
obey the will of Christ.--And oh may we!
II. There were converted thieves in the Ephesian Church, who still
needed to be warned against their old propensities (iv. 28); there were
men who had been sorcerers and fortune-tellers (Acts xix. 18, 19). It
appears that there were in this circle converted _drunkards_ also, men
to whom the apostle is obliged to say: "Be not drunk with wine, wherein
is riot."
In view of the following context (vv. 19-21), and remembering how the
Lord's table was defiled by excess at Corinth (1 Cor. xi. 17-34), it
seems to us probable that the warning of verse 18 had special reference
to the Christian assemblies. The institution of the common meal, the
_Agapé_ or Lovefeast accompanying the Lord's Supper, suited the manners
of the early Christians, and was long continued. The cities of Asia
Minor were full of trade-guilds and clubs for various social and
religious purposes, in which the common supper, or club-feast, furnished
usually by each member bringing his contribution to the table, was a
familiar bond of fellowship. This afforded to the Church a natural and
pleasant means of intercourse; but it must be purified from sensual
indulgence. _Wine_ was its chief danger.
The eastern coast of the Aegean is an ancient home of the vine. And the
Greeks of the Asian towns, on those bright shores and under their genial
sky, were a light-hearted, sociable race. They sought the wine-cup not
for animal indulgence, but as a zest to good-fellowship and to give a
freer flow to social joys. This was the influence that ruled their
feasts, that loosened their tongues and inspired their gaiety. Hence
their wit was prone to become ribaldry (ver. 4); and their songs were
the opposite of the "spiritual songs" that gladden the feasts of the
Church (ver. 19). The quick imagination and the social instincts of the
Ionian Greeks, the aptness for speech and song native to the land of
Homer and Sappho, were gifts not to be repressed but sanctified. The
lyre is to be tuned to other strains; and poetry must draw its
inspiration from a higher source. Dionysus and his reeling Fauns give
place to the pure Spirit of Jesus and the Father. "The Aonian mount"
must now pay tribute to "Sion hill"; and the fountain of Castalia yields
its honours to
"Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God."
Our nature craves excitement,--some stimulus that shall set the pulses
dancing and thrill the jaded frame, and lift the spirit above the
taskwork of life and the dreary and hard conditions which make up the
daily lot of multitudes. It is this craving that gives to strong drink
its cruel fascination. Alcohol is a mighty magician. The tired labouring
man, the household drudge shut up in city courts refreshed by no
pleasant sight or cheering voice, by its aid can leave fretted nerves
and aching limbs and dull care behind, and taste, if it be only for a
feverish moment, of the joy of bounding life. Can such cravings be
hindered from seeking their relief? The removal of temptation will
accomplish little, unless higher tastes are formed and springs of purer
pleasure opened to the masses for whom our civilization makes life so
drab and colourless. "One finds traces of the primitive greatness of our
nature even in its most deplorable errors. Just as impurity proceeds at
the bottom from an abuse of the craving for love, so drunkenness betrays
a certain demand for ardour and enthusiasm, which in itself is natural
and even noble.... Man loves to _feel_ himself alive; he would fain live
twice his life at once; and he would rather draw excitement from
horrible things than have no excitement at all" (Monod).
For the drunkards of Ephesus the apostle finds a cure in the joys of the
Holy Ghost. The mightiest and most moving spring of feeling is in the
spirit of man kindred to God. There is a deep excitement and
refreshment, a "joy that human thought transcends," in the love of God
shed abroad in the heart and the communion of true saints, which makes
sensuous delights cheap and poor. Toil and care are forgotten, sickness
and trouble seem as nothing; we can glory in tribulation and laugh in
the face of death, when the strong wine of God's consolations is poured
into the soul.
"Be filled with the Spirit," says the apostle--or more strictly, "filled
_in_ the Spirit"; since the Holy Spirit of God is the element of the
believer's life, surrounding while it penetrates his nature: it is the
atmosphere that he breathes, the ocean in which he is immersed. As a
flood fills up the river-banks, as the drunkard is filled with the wine
that he drains without limit, so the apostle would have his readers
yield themselves to the tide of the Spirit's coming and steep their
nature in His influence. The Greek imperative, moreover, is present, and
"describes this influence as ever going forth from the Spirit" (Beet).
This is to be a continual replenishment. Paul has prayed that we may "be
filled unto all the fulness of God" (iii. 19), and has bidden us grow
"to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (iv. 13) in
whom we "are made full" (Col. ii. 9): in the replenishment of the Spirit
the fulness of God in Christ is sensibly imparted. God's fulness is the
hidden and eternal spring of all that can fill our nature; Christ's
fulness is its revelation and renewed communication to the race; the
Holy Spirit's fulness is its abiding energy within the soul and within
the Church. Thus possessed, the Church is truly the body of Christ (iv.
4), and the habitation of God (ii. 21, 22).
The words of verses 19, 20 show that St Paul is thinking of that
presence of the Spirit in the Christian community, which is the spring
of its affections and activities. The Spirit of Jesus, the Son of man,
is a kindly and gracious Spirit, the guardian of brotherhood and
friendship, the inspirer of pure social joys and genial converse. The
joy in the Holy Ghost that in its warmth and freshness filled the hearts
of the first Christians, soared upward on the wings of song. Their very
talk was music: they "spoke to each other in psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs, singing and making melody with their heart to the
Lord." Love loves to sing. Its joys
"from out our hearts arise,
And speak and sparkle in our eyes,
And vibrate on our tongue."
All exalted sentiment tends to rhythmical expression. There is a
mystical alliance, which is amongst the most significant facts in our
constitution, between emotion and art. The rudest natures, touched by
high feeling, will shape themselves to some sort of beauty, to some
grace and refinement of expression. Each new stirring of the pulse of
man's common life has been marked by a re-birth of poetry and art. The
songs of Mary and Zechariah were the parents and patterns of a multitude
of holy canticles. In the Psalms of Scripture the New Testament Church
found already an instrument of wide compass strung and tuned for her
use. We can imagine the delight with which the Gentile Christians would
take up the Psalter and draw out one and another of its pearls, and
would in turn recite them at their meetings, and adapt them to their
native measures and modes of song. After a while, they began to mix with
the praise-songs of Israel newer strains--"hymns" to the glory of Christ
and the Father, such as that with which this epistle opens, needing but
little change in form to make it a true poem, and such as those which
break in upon the dread visions of the Apocalypse; and added to these,
"spiritual songs" of a more personal and incidental character, like
Simeon's _Nunc dimittis_ or Paul's swan-song in his last letter to
Timothy. In verse 14 above we detected, as we thought, an early Church
paraphrase of the Old Testament. In later epistles addressed to Ephesus,
there are fragments of just such artless chants as the Asian Christians,
exhorted and taught by their apostle, were wont to sing in their
assemblies: see 1 Timothy iii. 16, and 2 Timothy ii. 11-13.
Upon this congenial soil, we trace the beginnings of Christian
psalmody. The parallel text of Colossians (iii. 16) discloses in the
songs of the Pauline Churches a didactic as well as a lyric character.
The apostle bids his readers "_teach and admonish_ one another by
psalms, hymns, spiritual songs." The form of the sentence of chapter iv.
4-6 in this letter, and of 1 Timothy iii. 16, suggests that these
passages were destined for use as a chanted rehearsal of Christian
belief. Thus "the word of Christ dwelling richly" in the heart, poured
itself freely from the lips, and added to its grave discourse the charms
of gladdening and spirit-stirring song.
As in their heathen days they were used to "speak to each other," in
festive or solemn hours, with hymns to Artemis of the Ephesians, or
Dionysus giver of the vine, or to Persephoné sad queen of the dead--in
songs merry and gay, too often loose and wanton; in songs of the dark
underworld and the grim Furies and inexorable Fate, that told how life
fleets fast and we must pluck its pleasures while we may;--so now the
Christians of Ephesus and Colossae, of Pergamum and of Smyrna would sing
of the universal Father whose presence fills earth and sky, of the Son
of His love, His image amongst men, who died in sacrifice for their sins
and asked grace for His murderers, of the joys of forgiveness and the
cleansed heart, of life eternal and the treasure laid up for the just in
the heavenly places, of Christ's return in glory and the judgement of
the nations and the world quickly to dissolve and perish, of a
brotherhood dearer than earthly kindred, of the saints who sleep in
Jesus and in peace await His coming, of the Good Shepherd who feeds His
sheep and leads them to fountains of living water calling each by his
name, of creation redeemed and glorified by His love, of pain and
sorrow sanctified and the trials that make perfect in Christ's
discipline, of the joy that fills the heart in suffering for Him, and
the vision of His face awaiting us beyond the grave. So reciting and
chanting--now in single voice, now in full chorus--singing the Psalms of
David to their Greek music, or hymns composed by their leaders, or
sometimes improvised in the rapture of the moment, the Churches of
Ephesus and of the Asian cities lauded and glorified "the name of our
Lord Jesus Christ" and the counsels of redeeming love. So their worship
and fellowship were filled with gladness. Thus in their great Church
meetings, and in smaller companies, many a joyous hour passed; and all
hearts were cheered and strengthened in the Lord.
"Singing and _playing_," says the apostle. For music aided song; voice
and instrument blended in His praise whose glory claims the tribute of
all creatures. But it was "with the heart," even more than with voice or
tuneful strings, that melody was made. For this inward music the Lord
listens. Where other skill is wanting and neither voice nor hand can
take its part in the concert of praise, He hears the silent gratitude,
the humble joy that wells upward when the lips are still or the full
heart cannot find expression.
But the Spirit who dwelt in the praises of the new Israel, was not
confined to its public assemblings. The people of Christ should be
"_always giving thanks_, for all things, in the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ." It is one of St Paul's commonest injunctions. "In _everything_
give thanks," he wrote to the Thessalonians in his earliest extant
letter (1 Ep. v. 18). "For all things," he says to the
Ephesians,--"though fallen on evil days." Do we not "know that to them
that love God all things work together for good"--evil days as well as
good days? Nothing comes altogether amiss to the child of God. In the
heaviest loss, the severest pain, the sharpest sting of injury--"in
everything" the ingenuity of love and the sweetness of patience will
find some token of mercy. If the evil is to our eyes all evil and we can
see in it no reason for thanksgiving, then faith will give thanks for
that which we "know not now, but shall know hereafter."
_Always_, the apostle says,--_for all things_! No room for a moment's
discontent. In this perfecting of praise he had himself undergone a long
schooling in his four years' imprisonment. Now, he tells us, he "has
learnt the secret of contentment, in whatsoever state" (Phil. iv. 12).
Let us try to learn it from him. These words, which we treat, almost
unconsciously, as the exaggeration of homiletical appeal, state no more
than the sober possibility, the experience attained by many a Christian
in circumstances of the greatest suffering and deprivation. The love of
God in Jesus Christ our Lord suffices for the life and joy of man's
spirit.
The twenty-first verse, which seems to belong to a different line of
thought, in reality completes the foregoing paragraph. In the Corinthian
Church, as we remember, with its affluence of spiritual gifts, there
were so many ready to prophesy, so many to sing and recite, that
confusion arose and the Church meetings fell into disedifying uproar (1
Cor. xiv. 26-34). The apostle would not have such scenes occur again.
Hence when he urges the Asian Christians to seek the full inspiration of
the Spirit and to give free utterance in song to the impulses of their
new life, he adds this word of caution: "being subject to one another in
fear of Christ." He reminds them that "God is not the author of
confusion." His Spirit is a spirit of seemliness and reverence. "In fear
of Christ," the unseen witness and president of its assemblies, the
Church will comport herself with the decorum that befits His bride. The
spirits of the prophets will be subject to the prophets. The voices of
the singers and the hands of them that play upon the strings of the harp
or the keys of the organ, will keep tune with the worship of Christ's
congregation. Each must consider that it is his part to serve and not
rule in the service of God's house.
In our common work and worship, in all the offices of life this is the
Christian law. No man within Christ's Church, however commanding his
powers, may set himself above the duty of submitting his judgement and
will to that of his fellows. In mutual subjection lies our freedom, with
our strength and peace.
FOOTNOTES:
[138] See ch. i. 5-11, ii. 21, iii. 11, v. 10, vi. 6; comp. Col. i. 9,
27, iv. 12; Phil. ii. 13,--epistles of the same group.
_ON FAMILY LIFE._
CHAPTER v. 22-vi. 9.
=Thelô de hymas eidenai hoti pantos andros hê kephalê ho Christos
estin, kephalê de gynaikos ho anêr, kephalê de tou Christou ho
Theos.=--1 COR. xi. 3.
"And pure Religion breathing household laws."
W. WORDSWORTH.
CHAPTER XXV.
_CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE._
"Wives, _be in subjection_ to your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, as the Christ also is the
head of the Church, _being_ Himself the saviour of the body. But as
the Church is subject to the Christ, so let the wives also _be_ to
their husbands in everything.
"Husbands, love your wives, even as the Christ also loved the
Church, and gave Himself up for her; that He might sanctify her,
having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He
might present the Church to Himself a glorious _Church_, not having
spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she should be holy and
without blemish.
"Even so ought husbands also to love their wives as their own
bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself: for no man ever
hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the
Christ also the Church; because we are members of His body. 'For
this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave
to his wife; and the twain shall become one flesh.' This mystery is
great: but I speak in regard of Christ and of the Church.
Nevertheless do ye also severally love each one his own wife even as
himself; and _let_ the wife _see_ that she fear her husband."--EPH.
v. 22-33.
In mutual subjection the Christian spirit has its sharpest trials and
attains its finest temper. "Be subject one to another," was the last
word of the apostle's instructions respecting the "walk" of the Asian
Churches. By its order and subjection the gifts of all the members of
Christ's body are made available for the upbuilding of God's temple. The
inward fellowship of the Spirit becomes a constructive and organizing
force, reconstituting human life and framing the world into the kingdom
of Christ and God. "In fear of Christ" the loyal Christian man submits
himself to the community; not from the dread of human displeasure, but
knowing that he must give account to the Head of the Church and the
Judge of the last day, if his self-will should weaken the Church's
strength and interrupt her holy work. "For the Lord's sake" His freemen
submit to every ordinance of men. This is such a fear as the servant has
of a good master (vi. 5), or the true wife for a loving husband (ver.
33),--not that which "perfect love casts out," but which it deepens and
sanctifies.
* * * * *
Of this subjection to Christ the relationship of marriage furnishes an
example and a mirror. St Paul passes on to the new topic without any
grammatical pause, verse 22 being simply an extension of the participial
clause that forms verse 21: "Being in subjection to one another in fear
of Christ--ye wives to your own husbands, as to the Lord." The relation
of the two verses is not that of the particular to the general, so much
as that of image and object, of type and antitype. Submission to Christ
in the Church suggests by analogy that of the wife to her husband in the
house. Both have their origin in Christ, in whom all things were
created, the Lord of life in its natural as well as in its spiritual and
regenerate sphere (Col. i. 15-17). The bond that links husband and wife,
lying at the basis of collective human existence, has in turn its ground
in the relation of Christ to humanity.
The race springs not from a unit, but from a united pair. The history of
mankind began in wedlock. The family is the first institution of
society, and the mother of all the rest. It is the life-basis, the
primitive cell of the aggregate of cities and bodies politic. In the
health and purity of household life lies the moral wealth, the vigour
and durability of all civil institutions. The mighty upgrowth of nations
and the great achievements of history germinated in the nursery of home
and at the mother's breast. Christian marriage is not an expedient--the
last of many that have been tried--for the satisfaction of desire and
the continuance of the human species. The Institutor of human life laid
down its principle in the first frame of things. Its establishment was a
great prophetic mystery (ver. 32). Its law stands registered in the
eternal statutes. And the Almighty Father watches over its observance
with an awful jealousy. Is it not written: "Fornicators and adulterers
God will judge"; and again, "The Lord is an avenger concerning all these
things"?
St Paul rightly gives to this subject a conspicuous place in this
epistle of Christ and the Church. The corner-stone of the new social
order which the gospel was to establish in the world lies here. The
entire influence of the Church upon society depends upon right views on
the relationship of man and woman and on the ethics of marriage.
In wedlock there are blended most completely the two principles of
association amongst moral beings,--viz., authority and love, submission
and self-surrender.
I. On the one side, _submission to authority_.
"Wives, be in subjection, as to the Lord,"--as is fitting in the Lord
(Col. iii. 18). Again, in 1 Timothy ii. 11, 12, the apostle writes: "I
suffer not a woman to teach, nor to have dominion," or (as the word may
rather signify) "to act independently of the man." Were these directions
temporary and occasional? Were they due, as one hears it suggested, to
the uneducated and undeveloped condition of women in the apostle's time?
Or do they not affirm a law that is deeply seated in nature and in the
feminine constitution? The words of 1 Corinthians xi. 2-15 show that, in
the apostle's view of life, this subordination is fundamental. "The head
of woman is the man," as "the head of every man is the Christ" and "the
head of Christ is God." "The woman," he says, "is of the man," and "was
created because of the man." Whether these sentences square with our
modern conceptions or not, there they stand, and their import is
unmistakable.[139] They teach that in the Divine order of things it is
the man's part to lead and rule, and the woman's part to be ruled. But
the Christian woman will not feel that there is any loss or hardship in
this. For in the Christian order, ambition is sin. To obey is better
than to rule. She remembers who has said: "I am amongst you as he that
serveth." The children of the world strive for place and power; but "it
shall not be so amongst you."
Such subordination implies no inferiority, rather the opposite. A free
and sympathetic obedience--which is the true submission--can only
subsist between equals. The apostle writes: "Children, obey; ...
Servants, obey" (vi. 1, 5); but "Wives, submit yourselves to your own
husbands, as to the Lord." The same word denotes submission within the
Church, and within the house. It is here that Christianity, in contrast
with Paganism, and notably with Mohammedanism, raises the weaker sex to
honour. In soul and destiny it declares the woman to be man, endowed
with all rights and powers inherent in humanity. "In Christ Jesus there
is no male and female," any more than there is "Jew and Greek" or "bond
and free." The same sentence which broke down the barriers of Jewish
caste, and in course of time abolished slavery, condemned the odious
assumptions of masculine pride. It is one of the glories of our faith
that it has enfranchised our sisters, and raises them in spiritual
calling to the full level of their brothers and husbands. Both sexes are
children of God by the same birthright; both receive the same Holy
Spirit, according to the prediction quoted by St Peter on the day of
Pentecost: "Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.... Yea, on my
servants and on my handmaidens in those days will I pour out of my
Spirit, saith the Lord" (Acts ii. 17, 18). This one point of headship,
of public authority and guidance, is reserved. It is the point on which
Christ forbids emulation amongst His people.
Christian courtesy treats the woman as "the glory of the man"; it
surrounds her from girlhood to old age with protection and deference.
This homage, duly rendered, is a full equivalent for the honour of
visible command. When, as it happens not seldom in the partnership of
life, the superior wisdom dwells with the weaker vessel, the golden gift
of persuasion is not wanting, by which the official ruler is guided, to
his own advantage, and his adviser accomplishes more than she could do
by any overt leadership. The chivalry of the Middle Ages, from which the
refinement of European society takes its rise, was a product of
Christianity grafted on the Teutonic nature. Notwithstanding the folly
and excess that was mixed with it, there was a beautiful reverence in
the old knightly service and championship of women. It humanized the
ferocity of barbarous times. It tamed the brute strength of warlike
races and taught them honour and gentleness. Its prevalence marked a
permanent advance in civilization.
Shall we say that this law of St Paul is that laid down specifically for
_Christian_ women? is it not rather a law of nature--the intrinsic
propriety of sex, whose dictates are reinforced by the Christian
revelation? The apostle takes us back to the creation of mankind for the
basis of his principles in dealing with this subject (ver. 31). The new
commandments are the old which were in the world from the beginning,
though concealed and overgrown with corruption. Notwithstanding the
debasement of marriage under the non-Christian systems, the instincts of
natural religion taught the wife her place in the house and gave rise to
many a graceful and appropriate custom expressive of the honour due from
one sex to the other. So the apostle regarded the man's bared and
cropped head and the woman's flowing tresses as symbols of their
relative place in the Divine order (1 Cor. xi. 13-15). These and such
distinctions--between the dignities of strength and of beauty--no
artificial sentiment and no capricious revolt can set aside, while the
world stands. St Paul appeals to the common sense of mankind, to that
which "nature itself teaches," in censuring the forwardness of some
Corinthian women who appeared to think that the liberty of the gospel
released them from the limitations of their nature.
Some earnest promoters of women's rights have fallen into the error that
Christianity, to which they owe all that is best in their present
status, is the obstacle in the way of their further progress. It is an
obstacle to claims that are against nature and against the law of
God,--claims only tolerable so long as they are exceptional. But the
barriers imposed by Christianity, against which these people fret, are
their main protection. "The moment Christianity disappears, the law of
strength revives; and under that law women can have no hope except that
their slavery may be mild and pleasant." To escape from the "bondage of
Christian law" means to go back to the bondage of paganism.
"As unto the Lord" gives the pattern and the principle of the Christian
wife's submission. Not that, as Meyer seems to put it, the husband in
virtue of marriage "represents Christ to the wife." Her relation to the
Lord is as full, direct, and personal as his. Indeed, the clause
inserted at the end of verse 23 seems expressly designed to guard
against this exaggeration. The qualification that Christ is "Himself
Saviour of the body," thrown in between the two sentences comparing the
marital headship to that which Christ holds towards the Church, has the
effect of limiting the former.[140] The subjection of the Christian wife
to her husband reserves for Christ the first place in the heart and the
undiminished rights of Saviourship. St Paul indicates a real, and not
unfrequent danger. The husband may eclipse Christ in the wife's soul,
and be counted as her all in all. Her absorption in him may be too
complete. Hence the brief guarding clause: "He Himself [and no other]
Saviour of the body [to which all believers alike belong]." As the
Saviour of the Church, Christ holds an unrivalled and unqualified
lordship over every member of the same.
"Nevertheless, as the Church is subject to the Christ, so also wives
[should be] to their husbands in everything" (ver. 24). Again, in verse
33: "Let the wife see that she fear her husband"--with the reverent and
confiding fear which love makes sweet. As the Christian wife obeys the
Lord Christ in the spiritual sphere, in the sphere of marriage she is
subject to her husband. The ties that bind her to Christ, bind her more
closely to the duties of home. These duties illustrate for her the
submissive love that Christ's people, and herself as one of them, owe to
their Divine Head. Her service in the Church, in turn, will send her
home with a quickened sense of the sacredness of her domestic calling.
It will lighten the yoke of obedience; it will check the discontent that
masculine exactions provoke; and will teach her to win by patience and
gentleness the power within the house that is her queenly crown.
II. The apostle alludes to submission as the wife's duty; for she might,
possibly, be tempted to think this superseded by the liberty of the
children of God. Love he need not enjoin upon her; but he writes:
"Husbands, _love your wives_, even as the Christ also loved the Church
and gave up Himself for her" (comp. Col. iii. 18, 19).
The danger of selfishness lies on the masculine side. The man's nature
is more exacting; and the self-forgetfulness and solicitous affection of
the woman may blind him to his own want of the truest love. Full of
business and with a hundred cares and attractions lying outside the
domestic circle, he too readily forms habits of self-absorption and
learns to make his wife and home a convenience, from which he takes as
his right the comfort they have to give, imparting little of devotion
and confidence in return. This lack of love denies the higher rights of
marriage; it makes the wife's submission a joyless constraint. Along
with this selfishness and the uneasy conscience attending it, there
supervenes sometimes an irritability of temper that chafes over domestic
troubles and makes a grievance of the most trifling mishap or
inadvertence, ignoring the wife's patient affection and anxiety to
please. Too often in this way husbands grow insensibly into family
tyrants, forgetting the days of youth and the kindness of their
espousals. "There are many," says Bengel (on this point unusually
caustic), "who out of doors are civil and kind to all; when at home,
toward their wives and children, whom they have no need to fear, they
freely practise secret bitterness."
"Love your wives, _even as the Christ loved the Church_." What a glory
this confers upon the husband's part in marriage! His devotion pictures,
as no other love can, the devotion of Christ to His redeemed people. His
love must therefore be a spiritual passion, the love of soul to soul,
that partakes of God and of eternity. Of the three Greek words for
love,--_eros_, familiar in Greek poetry and mythology, denoting the
flame of sexual passion, is not named in the New Testament; _philia_,
the love of friendship, is tolerably frequent, in its verb at least; but
_agapé_ absorbs the former and transcends both. This exquisite word
denotes love in its spiritual purity and depth, the love of God and of
Christ, and of souls to each other in God. This is the specific
Christian affection. It is the attribute of God who "loved the world and
gave His Son the Only-begotten," of "the Christ" who "loved the Church
and gave up Himself for her." Self-devotion, not self-satisfaction, is
its note. Its strength and authority it uses as material for sacrifice
and instruments of service, not as prerogatives of pride or titles to
enjoyment. Let this mind be in you, O husband, toward your wife, which
was also in Christ Jesus, who was meek and lowly in heart, counting it
His honour to serve and His reward to save and bless.
From verse 26 we gather that Christ is the husband's model, not only in
the rule of self-devotion, but in the end toward which that devotion is
directed: "that He might sanctify the Church,--that He might present her
to Himself a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle,--_that she might
be holy and without blemish_." The perfection of the wife's character
will be to the religious husband one of the dearest objects in life. He
will desire for her that which is highest and best, as for himself. He
is put in charge of a soul more precious to him than any other, over
which he has an influence incomparably great. This care he cannot
delegate to any priest or father-confessor. The peril of such delegation
and the grievous mischiefs that arise when there is no spiritual
confidence between husband and wife, when through unbelief or
superstition the head of the house hands over his priesthood to another
man, are painfully shown by the experience of Roman Catholic countries.
The irreligion of laymen, the carelessness and unworthiness of fathers
and husbands are responsible for the baneful influences of the
confessional. The apostle bade the Corinthian wives, who were eager for
religious knowledge, to "ask their husbands at home" (1 Cor. xiv. 35).
Christian husbands should take more account of their office than they
do; they should not be strangers to the spiritual trials and experiences
of the heart so near to them. It might lead them to walk more worthily
and to seek higher religious attainments, if they considered that the
shepherding of at least one soul devolves upon themselves, that they are
unworthy of the name of husband without such care for the welfare of the
soul linked to their own as Christ bears toward His bride the Church.
Those who have no father or husband to look to, or who look in vain to
this quarter for spiritual help, St Paul refers, beside the light and
comfort of Scripture and the public ministry and fellowship of the
Church, to the "aged women" who are the natural guides and exemplars of
the younger in their own sex (Titus ii. 3-5).
The selfishness of the stronger sex, supported by the force of habit and
social usage, was hard to subdue in the Greek Christian Churches.
Through some eight verses St Paul labours this one point. In verse 28 he
adduces another reason, added to the example of Christ, for the love
enjoined. "So ought men indeed to love their wives as their own bodies.
He that loveth his wife loveth himself." The "So" gathers its force from
the previous example. In loving us Christ does not love something
foreign and, as it were, outside of Himself. "We are members of His
body" (ver. 30). It is the love of the Head to the members, of the Son
of man to the sons of men, whose race-life is founded in Him. Jesus
Christ laid it down as the highest law, under that of love to God: "Thou
shalt love thy neighbour _as thyself_." His love to us followed this
rule. His life was wrapped up in ours. By such community of life
self-love is transfigured, and exalted into the purest self-forgetting.
Thus it is with true marriage. The wedding of a human pair makes each
the other's property. They are "one flesh" (ver. 31); and so long as
the flesh endures there remains this consciousness of union, whose
violation is deadly sin. As the Church is not her own, nor Christ His
own since He became man with men, so the husband and wife are no longer
independent and self-complete personalities, but incorporated into a new
existence common to both. Their love must correspond to this fact. If
the man loves himself, if he values his own limbs and tends and guards
from injury his bodily frame (ver. 29), he must do the same equally by
his wife; for her life and limbs are as a part of his own. This the
apostle lays down as an obvious duty. Nature teaches the obligation, by
every manly instinct.
The saying the apostle quotes in verse 31 dates from the origin of the
human family; it is taken from the lips of the first husband and father
of the race, while as yet unstained by sin (Gen. ii. 23, 24). Christ
infers from it the singleness and indelibility of the marriage covenant.
But this doctrine, natural as it is, was not inferred by natural
religion. The cultivated Greek took a wife for the production of
children. Her rights put no restriction upon his appetite. Love was not
in the marriage contract. If she received the maintenance due to her
rank and the mistress-ship of the house, and was the mother of his
lawful children, she had all that a free-born woman could demand. The
slave-woman had no rights. Her body was at her owner's disposal. Nothing
in Christianity appeared more novel and more severe, in comparison with
the dissolute morals of the time, than the Christian view of marriage.
Even Christ's Jewish disciples seemed to think the state of wedlock
intolerable under the condition He imposed. This want of reverence and
constancy between the sexes was a main cause of the degeneracy of the
age. All virtues disappear with this one. Roman manliness and
uprightness, Greek courtesy and courage, filial piety, civic worth,
loyalty in friendship--the qualities that once in a high degree adorned
the classic nations, were now rare amongst men. In the most exalted
ranks infamous vices flourished; and purity of life was a cause for
odium and suspicion.
Amidst this seething mass of corruption the Spirit of life in Christ
Jesus created new hearts and new homes. It kindled a pure fire on the
desecrated hearth. It taught man and woman a chaste love; and their
alliances were formed "in sanctification and honour, not in the passion
of lust as it is with the Gentiles who know not God" (1 Thess. iv. 3-6).
Every Christian house, thus based on an honourable and religious union,
became the centre of a leaven that wrought upon the corrupt society
around. It held forth an example of wedded loyalty and domestic joy
beautiful and strange in that loveless Pagan world. Children grew up
trained in pure and gentle manners. From that hour the hope of a better
day began. The influence of the new ideal, filtrating everywhere into
the surrounding heathenism and assimilating even before it converted the
hostile world, raised society, though gradually and with many relapses,
from the extreme debasement of the age of the Caesars. Never subsequently
have the morals of civilized mankind sunk to a level quite so low. The
Christian conception of love and marriage opened a new era for mankind.
FOOTNOTES:
[139] See Dr. Maclaren's admirable words on this subject in _Colossians
and Philemon_ (Expositor's Bible), pp. 336-40; and Dr. Dale's _Lectures
on Ephesians_, Lect. xix., "Wives and Husbands."
[140] In verse 24 St Paul resumes with =alla=, the _but_ of opposition
and not mere contrast, indicating a case where the claims of husband and
Saviour may, conceivably, be in competition.
CHAPTER XXVI.
CHRIST AND HIS BRIDE.
"The Christ is the head of the Church, _being_ Himself the Saviour
of the body.... The Church is subject to the Christ in
everything....
"The Christ loved the Church, and gave Himself up for her; that He
might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with
the word, that He might present the Church to Himself a glorious
_Church_, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she
should be holy and without blemish....
"The Christ [nourisheth and cherisheth] the Church; because we are
members of His body. 'For this cause shall a man leave his father
and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and the twain shall become
one flesh.' This mystery is great: but I speak in regard of Christ
and of the Church."--EPH. v. 23-32.
We have extracted from the apostle's homily upon marriage the sentences
referring to Christ and His Church, in order to gather up their
collective import. The main topic of the epistle here again asserts
itself; and under the figure of marriage St Paul brings to its
conclusion his doctrine on the subject of the Church. This passage
answers, theologically, a purpose similar to that of the allegory of
Hagar and Sarah in the epistle to the Galatians: it lights up for the
imagination the teaching and argument of the former part of the epistle;
it shows how the doctrine of Christ and the Church has its counterpart
in nature, as the struggle between the legal and evangelical spirit had
its counterpart in the patriarchal history. The three detached
paragraphs present us three considerations, of which we shall treat the
second first in order of exposition: Christ's _love to the Church_; His
_authority over the Church_; and _the mystery of the Church's origin in
Him_.
I. "Husbands, love your wives, even as the Christ also loved the Church,
and gave up Himself for her." This is parallel to the declaration of
Galatians ii. 20: "He loved me; He gave up Himself for me." The
sacrifice of the cross has at once its personal and its collective
purpose. Both are to be kept in mind.
On the one hand, we must value infinitely and joyfully assert our
individual part in the redeeming love of the Son of God; but we must
equally admit the sovereign rights of the Church in the Redeemer's
passion. Our souls bow down before the glory of the love with which He
has from eternity sought her for His own. There is in some Christians an
absorption in the work of grace within their own hearts, an
individualistic salvation-seeking that, like all selfishness, defeats
its end; for it narrows and impoverishes the inner life thus sedulously
cherished. The Church does not exist simply for the benefit of
individual souls; it is an eternal institution, with an affiance to
Christ, a calling and destiny of its own; within that universal sphere
our personal destiny holds its particular place.
It is "the Christ" who stands, throughout this context (vv. 23-29), over
against "the Church" as her Lover and Husband; whereas in the context of
Galatians ii. 20 we read "Christ"--the bare personal name--repeated
again and again without the distinguishing article. _Christ_ is the
Person whom the soul knows and loves, with whom it holds communion in
the Spirit. _The Christ_ is the same regarded in the wide scope of His
nature and office,--the Christ of humanity and of the ages. "The Christ"
of this epistle expands the Saviour's title to its boundless
significance, and gives breadth and length to that which in "Christ" is
gathered up into a single point.[141]
This Christ "gave Himself up for the Church,"--yielded Himself to the
death which the sins of His people merited and brought upon Him. Under
the same verb, the apostle says in Romans iv. 25: He "_was delivered_
because of our trespasses, and raised up because of our
justification"--the sacrifice being there regarded on its passive side.
Here, as in Galatians ii. 20, the act is made His own,--a voluntary
surrender. "No man taketh my life from me," He said (John x. 18). In His
case alone amongst the sons of men, death was neither natural nor
inevitable. His surrender of life was an absolute sacrifice. He "laid
down His life for His friends," as no other friend of man could do--the
One who died for all. The love measured by this sacrifice is
proportionately great.
The sayings of verses 25-27 set the glory of the vicarious death in a
vivid light. Of such worth was the person of the Christ, of such
significance and moral value His sacrificial death, that it weighed
against the trespass, not of a man--Paul or any other--but of a world of
men. He "purchased through His own blood," said Paul to the Ephesian
elders, "the Church of God" (Acts xx. 28)--the whole flock that feeds in
the pastures of the Great Shepherd, that has passed or will pass through
the gates of His fold. Great was the honour and glory with which he was
crowned, when led as victim to the altar of the world's atonement (Heb.
ii. 9). Who will not say, as the meek Son of man treads so willingly
His mournful path to Calvary, "Worthy is the Lamb!" Is not the heavenly
Bridegroom worthy of the bride, that He consents to win by the sacrifice
of Himself!
He is worthy; and _she must be made worthy_. "He gave up Himself, that
He might sanctify her,--that He might Himself present to Himself a
glorious Church, not having spot or wrinkle or anything of the
kind,--that she may be holy and without blemish." The sanctification of
the Church is the grand purpose of redeeming grace. This was the design
of God for His sons in Christ before the world's foundation, "that we
should be holy and unblemished before Him" (i. 4). This, therefore, was
the end of Christ's mission upon earth; this was the intention of His
sacrificial death. "For their sakes," said Jesus concerning His
disciples, "I sanctify myself, that they also may be sanctified in
truth" (John xvii. 19). His purchase of the Church is no selfish act. To
God His Father Christ devotes every spirit of man that is yielded to
Him. As the Priest of mankind it was His office thus to consecrate
humanity, which is already in purpose and in essence "sanctified through
the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all" (Heb. x. 10).
Only in this passage, where the apostle is thinking of the preparation
of the Church for its perfect union with its Head, does he name Christ
as our _Sanctifier_; in 1 Corinthians i. 2 he comes near this
expression, addressing his readers as men "sanctified in Christ Jesus."
In the epistle to the Hebrews this character is largely ascribed to Him,
being the function of His priesthood. One in nature with the sanctified,
Jesus our great Priest "sanctifies us through His own blood," so that
with cleansed consciences we may draw near to the living God.[142] As
Christ the Priest stands towards His people, so Christ the Husband
towards His Church. He devotes her with Himself to God. He cleanses her
that she may dwell with Him for ever, a spotless bride, dead unto sin
and living unto God through Him.
"That He might sanctify her, _having cleansed her_ in the laver of water
by the word." The Church's purification is antecedent in thought to her
sanctification through the sacrifice of Christ; and it is a means
thereto. "Ye were washed, ye were sanctified," writes the apostle in 1
Corinthians vi. 11, putting the two things in the same order. It is the
order of doctrine which he has laid down in the epistle to the Romans,
where sanctification is built on the foundation laid in justification
through the blood of Christ. Through the virtue of the sacrificial death
the Church in all her members was washed from the defilements of sin,
that she might enter upon God's service. Of the same initial
purification of the heart St John writes in his first epistle (i. 7-9):
"The blood of Jesus, God's Son, cleanses us from all sin.... He is
faithful and just, that He should forgive us our sins and cleanse us
from all unrighteousness." This is "the redemption through Christ's
blood," for which St Paul in his first words of praise called upon us to
bless God (i. 7). It is the special distinction of the New Covenant,
which renders possible its other gifts of grace, that "the worshippers
once cleansed" need have "no further consciousness of sins" (Heb. x. 2,
14-18). In the theological use here made of the idea of _cleansing_, St
Paul comes into line with St John and the epistle to the Hebrews. The
purification is nothing else than that which he has elsewhere styled
_justification_. He employs the terms synonymously in the later epistle
to Titus (ii. 14; iii. 7).
"Having cleansed" is a phrase congruous with the figure of _the laver_,
or _bath_ (comp. again Tit. iii. 5-7),--an image suggested, as one would
think, by the bride-bath of the wedding-day in the ancient marriage
customs. To this St Paul sees a counterpart in baptism, "the laver of
water in the word." The cleansing and withal refreshing virtues of water
made it an obvious symbol of regeneration. The emblem is twofold; it
pictures at once the removal of guilt, and the imparting of new
strength. One goes into the bath exhausted, and covered with dust; one
comes out clean and fresh. Hence the baptism of the new believer in
Christ had, in St Paul's view, a double aspect.[143] It looked backward
to the old life of sin abandoned, and forward to the new life of
holiness commenced. Thus it corresponded to the burial of Jesus (Rom.
vi. 4), the point of juncture between death and resurrection. Baptism
served as the visible and formal expression of the soul's passage
through the gate of forgiveness into the sanctified life.
Along with this older teaching, a further and kindred significance is
now given to the baptismal rite. It denotes the soul's affiance to its
Lord. As the maiden's bath on the morning of her marriage betokened the
purity in which she united herself to her betrothed, so the baptismal
laver summons the Church to present herself "a chaste virgin unto
Christ" (2 Cor. xi. 2). It signifies and seals her forgiveness, and
pledges her in all her members to await the Bridegroom in garments
unspotted from the world, with the pure and faithful love which will not
be ashamed before Him at His coming. For this end Christ set up the
baptismal laver.
Upon our construction of the text, the words "that He might sanctify
her" express a purpose complete in itself--viz., that of the Church's
consecration to God. Then follow the means to this sanctification:
"having cleansed her in the water-bath through the word,"--which
washing, at the same time, has its purpose on the part of the Lord who
appointed it--viz., "that He might present her to Himself" a glorious
and spotless Church.
At the end of verse 27 the sentence doubles back upon itself, in Paul's
characteristic fashion. The twofold aim of Christ's sacrifice of love on
the Church's behalf--viz., her consecration to God, and her spotless
purity fitting her for perfect union with her Lord--is restated in the
final clause, by way of contrast with the "spots and wrinkles and
such-like things" that are washed out: "but that she may be holy and
without blemish."
We passed by, for the moment, the concluding phrase of verse 26, with
which the apostle qualifies his reference to the baptismal cleansing; we
are by no means forgetting it. "Having cleansed her," he writes, "by the
laver of water _in_ [_the_] _word_." This adjunct is deeply significant.
It impresses on baptism a spiritual character, and excludes every
theurgic conception of the rite, every doctrine that gives to it in the
least degree a mechanical efficacy. "Without the word the sacrament
could only influence man by magic, outward or inward" (Dorner). The
"word" of which the apostle speaks,[144] is that of chapter vi. 17,
"God's word--the Spirit's sword"; of Romans x. 8, "the word of faith
which we proclaim"; of Luke i. 37, "the word from God which shall not be
powerless"; of John xvii. 8, etc., "the words" that the Father had
given to the Son, and the Son in turn to men. It is the Divine
utterance, spoken and believed. In this accompaniment lies the power of
the laver. The baptismal affusion is the outward seal of an inward
transaction, that takes place in the spirit of believing utterers and
hearers of the gospel word. This saving word receives in baptism its
concrete expression; it becomes the _verbum visibile_.