The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. Findlay George Gillanders
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#n75" type="note">75 Without distinction of birth or formal religious standing, “all” who thus live and walk are dead while they live. Their trespasses and sins have killed them. From first to last Scripture testifies: “Your sins have separated between you and your God.” We find a hundred excuses for our irreligion: there is the cause. There is nothing in the universe to separate any one of us from the love and fellowship of his Maker but his own unforsaken sin.
It is true, there are other hindrances to faith, intellectual difficulties of great weight and seriousness, that press upon many minds. For such men Christ has all possible sympathy and patience. There is a real, though hidden faith that “lives in honest doubt.” Some men have more faith than they suppose, while others certainly have much less. One has a name to live, and yet is dead; another, perchance, has a name to die, and yet is alive to God through Jesus Christ. There are endless complications, self-contradictions, and misunderstandings in human nature. “Many are first” in the ranks of religious profession and notoriety, “which shall be last, and the last first.” We make the largest allowance for this element of uncertainty in the line that bounds faith from unfaith; “The Lord knoweth them that are His.” No intellectual difficulty, no mere misunderstanding, will ultimately or for long separate between God and the soul that He has made.
It is antipathy that separates. “They did not like to retain God in their knowledge”; that is Paul’s explanation of the ungodliness and vice of the ancient world. And it holds good still in countless instances. “Numbers in this bad world talk loudly against religion in order to encourage each other in sin, because they need encouragement. They know that they ought to be other than they are; but are glad to avail themselves of anything that looks like argument, to overcome their consciences withal” (Newman). The fashionable scepticism of the day too often conceals an inner revolt against the moral demands of the Christian life; it is the pretext of a carnal mind, which is “enmity against God, because it is not subject to His law.” Christ’s sentence upon unbelief as He knew it was this: “Light is come into the world; and men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil.” So said the keenest and the kindest judge of men. If we are refusing Him our faith, let us be very sure that this condemnation does not touch ourselves. Is there no passion that bribes and suborns the intellect? no desire in the soul that dreads His entrance? no evil deeds that shelter themselves from His accusing light?
When the apostle says of his Gentile readers that they “once walked in the way of the age, according to the course of this world,76 according to the prince of the power of the air,” the former part of his statement is clear enough. The age in which he lived was godless to the last degree; the stream of the world’s life ran in turbid course toward moral ruin. But the second clause is obscure. The “prince” (or “ruler”) who guides the world along its career of rebellion is manifestly Satan, the spirit of darkness and hate whom St Paul entitles “the god of this world” (2 Cor. iv. 4), and in whom Jesus recognized, under the name of “the prince of the world,” His great antagonist (John xiv. 30).
But what has this spirit of evil to do with “the air”? The Jewish rabbis supposed that the terrestrial atmosphere was Satan’s abode, that it was peopled by demons flitting about invisibly in the encompassing element. But this is a notion foreign to Scripture – certainly not contained in chapter vi. 12 – and, in its bare physical sense, without point or relevance to this passage. There follows in immediate apposition to “the domain of the air, the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedience.” Surely, the air here partakes (if it be only here) of the figurative significance of spirit (i.e. breath). St Paul refines the Jewish idea of evil spirits dwelling in the surrounding atmosphere into an ethical conception of the atmosphere of the world, as that from which the sons of disobedience draw their breath and receive the spirit that inspires them. Here lies, in truth, the dominion of Satan. In other words, Satan constituted the Zeitgeist.
As Beck profoundly remarks upon this text:77 “The Power of the air is a fitting designation for the prevailing spirit of the times, whose influence spreads itself like a miasma through the whole atmosphere of the world. It manifests itself as a contagious nature-power; and a spiritus rector works within it, which takes possession of the world of men, alike in individuals and in society, and assumes the direction of it. The form of expression here employed is based on the conception of evil peculiar to Scripture. In Scripture, evil and the principle of evil are not conceived in a purely spiritual way; nor could this be the case in a world of fleshly constitution, where the spiritual has the sensuous for its basis and its vehicle. Spiritual evil exists as a power immanent in cosmical nature.”78 Concerning great tracts of the earth, and large sections even of Christianized communities, we must still confess with St John: “The world lieth in the Evil One.” The air is impregnated with the infection of sin;79 its germs float about us constantly, and wherever they find lodgement they set up their deadly fever. Sin is the malarial poison native to our soil; it is an epidemic that runs its course through the entire “age of this world.”
Above this feverous, sin-laden atmosphere the apostle sees God’s anger brooding in threatening clouds. For our trespasses and sins are, after all, not forced on us by our environment. Those offences by which we provoke God, lie in our nature; they are no mere casual acts, they belong to our bias and disposition. Sin is a constitutional malady. There exists a bad element in our human nature, which corresponds but too truly to the course and current of the world around us. This the apostle acknowledges for himself and his law-honouring Jewish kindred: “We were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.” So he wrote in the sad confession of Romans vii. 14–23: “I see a different law in my members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.”
It is upon this “other law,” the contradiction of His own, upon the sinfulness beneath the sin, that God’s displeasure rests. Human law notes the overt act: “the Lord looketh upon the heart.” There is nothing more bitter and humiliating to a conscientious man than the conviction of this penetrating Divine insight, this detection to himself of his incurable sin and the hollowness of his righteousness before God. How it confounds the proud Pharisee to learn that he is as other men are, – and even as this publican!
“The sons of disobedience” must needs be “children of wrath.” All sin, whether in nature or practice, is the object of God’s fixed displeasure. It cannot be matter of indifference to our Father in heaven that His human children are disobedient toward Himself. Children of His favour or anger we are each one of us, and at every moment. We “keep His commandments, and abide in His love”; or we do not keep them, and are excluded. It is His smile or frown that makes the sunshine or the gloom of our inner life. How strange that men should argue that God’s love forbids His wrath! It is, in truth, the cause of it. I could neither love nor fear a God who did not care enough about me to be angry with me when I sin. If my child does wilful wrong, if by some act of greed or passion he imperils his moral future and destroys the peace and well-being of the house, shall I not be grieved with him, with an anger proportioned to the love I bear him? How much more shall your heavenly Father – how much more justly and wisely and mercifully!
St Paul feels no contradiction between the words of verse 3 and those that follow. The same God whose wrath burns against the sons of disobedience while they so continue, is “rich in mercy” and “loved us even when we were dead in our trespasses!” He pities evil men, and to save them spared not His Son from death; but Almighty God, the Father of glory, hates and loathes the evil that is in them, and has determined that if they will not let it go they shall perish with it.
II. Such was the death in which Paul and his readers once had lain. But God in His “great love” has “made them to live along with the Christ.”
How wonderful to have witnessed a resurrection: to see the pale cheek of the little maid, Jairus’ daughter, flush again with the tints of life, and the still frame begin to stir, and the eyes softly open – and she looks upon the face of Jesus! or to watch Lazarus, four days dead, coming out of his tomb,
Perhaps this double rendering may bring out the force of κατὰ τὸν αἰῶνα τοῦ κόσμου τούτου.
In the posthumous
The φύσει of verse 3 thus corresponds to the ἐξουσία τοῦ ἀέρος of verse 2. “Sin entered into
I John iii. 8; comp. John viii. 41–44.