'But ye have not so learned Christ; if so be that ye have heard
Him, and have been taught in Him.'--Eph. iv. 20, 21.
The Apostle has been describing in very severe terms the godlessness and
corruption of heathenism. He reckons on the assent of the Ephesian
Christians when he paints the society in which they lived as alienated
from God, insensible to the restraints of conscience, and foul with all
uncleanness. That was a picture of heathenism drawn from the life and
submitted to the judgment of those who knew the original only too well.
It has been reserved for modern eulogists to regard such statements as
exaggerations. Those who knew heathenism from the inside knew that they
were sober truth. The colonnades of the stately temple of Ephesus stank
with proofs of their correctness.
Out of that mass of moral putridity these Ephesian Christians had been
dragged. But its effects still lingered in them, and it was all about
them with its pestilential miasma. So the first thing that they needed
was to be guarded against it. The Apostle, in the subsequent context,
with great earnestness gives a series of moral injunctions of the most
elementary kind. Their very simplicity is eloquent. What sort of people
must they have formerly been who needed to be bade not to steal and not
to lie?
But before he comes to the specific duties, he lays down the broad
general principle of which all these are to be but manifestations--viz.
that they and we need, as the foundation of all noble conduct and of
all theoretical ethics, the suppression and crucifixion of the old self
and the investiture with a new self. And this double necessity, says the
Apostle in my text, is the plain teaching of Jesus Christ to all His
disciples.
Now the words which I have selected as my text are but a fragment of a
closely concatenated whole, but I may deal with them separately at this
time. They are very remarkable. They lay, as it seems to me, the basis
for all Christian conduct; and they teach us how there is no real
knowledge of Jesus Christ which does not effloresce into the practice of
these virtues and graces which the Apostle goes on to describe.