The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. Findlay George Gillanders
great interpreters, we prefer in this passage the rendering of the English Authorized Version (we obtained an inheritance) to that of the Revised (we were made a heritage).39 “Foreordained” carries us back to verse 5 – to the phrase “foreordained to sonship.” The believer cannot be predestinated to sonship without being predestinated to an inheritance.40 “If children, then heirs” (Rom. viii. 17). But while in the parallel passage we are designated heirs with Christ, we appear in this place, according to the tenor of the context, as heirs in Him. Christ is Himself the believer’s wealth, both in possession and hope: all his desire is to gain Christ (Phil. iii. 8). The apostle gives thanks here in the same strain as in Colossians i. 12–14, “to the Father who qualified us [by making us His sons] to partake of the inheritance of the saints in the light.” In that thanksgiving we observe the same connexion as in this between our forgiveness (ver. 7) and our enfeoffment, or investment with the forfeited rights of sons of God (vv. 5, 11).41
The heritage of the saints in Christ is theirs already, by actual investiture. The liberty of sons of God, access to the Father, the treasures of Christ’s wisdom and knowledge, the sanctifying Spirit and the moral strength and joy that He imparts, these form a rich estate of which ancient saints had but foretastes and promises. In the all-controlling “counsel of His will,” God wrought throughout the course of history to convey this heritage to us. We are children of “the fulness of the times,” heirs of all the past. For us God has been working from eternity. On us the ends of the world have come. Thus from the summit of our exaltation in Christ the apostle looks backward to the beginning of Divine history.
From the same point his gaze sweeps onward to the end. God’s purpose embraces the ages to come with those that are past. His working will not cease till the whole counsel is fulfilled. What we have of our inheritance, though rich and real, holds in it the promise of infinitely more; and the Holy Spirit is the “earnest of our inheritance” (ver. 14). God intends “that we should be to the praise of His glory.” As things are, His glory is but obscurely visible in His saints. “It doth not yet appear what we shall be,” – and it will not appear until the unveiling of the sons of God (Rom. viii. 18–25). One day God’s glory in us will burst forth in its splendour. All beholders in heaven and earth will then sing to the praise of His glory, when it is seen in His redeemed and godlike sons.
Verses 9 and 10 (which He purposed … upon the earth) are, as we have said, a parenthesis or episode in the passage just reviewed. Neither in structure nor in sense would the paragraph be defective, had this clause been wanting. With the “in Him” repeated at the end of verse 10, St Paul resumes the main current of his thanksgiving, arrested for a moment while he dwells on “the mystery of God’s will.”
This last expression (ver. 9), notwithstanding what he has said in verses 4 and 5, still needs elucidation. He will pause for an instant to set forth once more the eternal purpose, to the knowledge of which the Church is now admitted. The communication of this mystery is, he says, “according to God’s good pleasure which He purposed in Christ [comp. ver. 4], for a dispensation of the fulness of the times, intending to gather up again all things in the Christ – the things in the heavens, and the things upon the earth.”
God formed in Christ the purpose, by the dispensation of His grace, in due time to re-unite the universe under the headship of Christ. This mysterious design, hitherto kept secret, He has “made known unto us.” Its manifestation imparts a wisdom that surpasses all the wisdom of former ages.42 Such is the drift of this profound deliverance.
The first clause of verse 10 supplies a datum for its interpretation. The fulness of the times, in St Paul’s dialect, can only be the time of Christ.43 The dispensation which God designed of old is that in which the apostle himself is now engaged;44 it is the dispensation, or administration (economy), of the grace and truth that came by Jesus Christ, whether God be conceived as Himself the Dispenser, or through the stewards of His mysteries. The Messianic end was to Paul’s Jewish thought the dénouement of antecedent history. How long this age would continue, into what epochs it might unfold itself, he knew not; but for him the fulness of the times had arrived. The Son of God was come; the kingdom of God was amongst men. It was the beginning of the end. It is a mistake to relegate this text to the dim and distant future, to some far-off consummation. We are in the midst of the Christian reconstruction of things, and are taking part in it. The decisive epoch fell when “God sent forth His Son.” All that has followed, and will follow, is the result of this mission. Christ is all things, and in all; and we are already complete in Him.
What, then, signifies this gathering-into-one or summing-up of all things in the Christ? Our recapitulate is the nearest equivalent of the Greek verb, in its etymological sense. In Romans xiii. 8, 9 the same word is used, where the several commands of the second table of the Decalogue are said to be “comprehended in this word, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This summing up is not a generalization or compendious statement of the commands of God; it signifies their reduction to a fundamental principle. They are unified by the discovery of a law that underlies them all. And while thus theoretically explained, they are made practically effective: “For love is the fulfilling of the law.”
Similarly, St Paul finds in Christ the fundamental principle of the creation. For those who think with him, God has by the Christian revelation already brought all things to their unity. This summing up – the Christian inventory and recapitulation of the universe – the apostle has formally stated in Colossians i. 15–20: “Christ is God’s image and creation’s firstborn. In Him, through Him, for Him all things were made. He is before them all; and in Him they have their basis and uniting bond. He is equally the Head of the Church and the new creation, the firstborn out of the dead, that He might hold a universal presidence – charged with all the fulness, so that in Him is the ground of the reconciliation no less than of the creation of all things in heaven and earth.” What can we desire more comprehensive than this? It is the theory and programme of the world revealed to God’s holy apostles and prophets.
The “gathering into one” of this text includes the “reconciliation” of Colossians i. 20, and more. It signifies, beside the removal of the enmities which are the effect of sin (ii. 14–16), the subjection of all powers in heaven and earth to the rule of Christ (vv. 21, 22),45 the enlightenment of the angelic magnates as to God’s dealings with men (iii. 9, 10), – in fine, the rectification and adjustment of the several parts of the great whole of things, bringing them into full accord with each other and with their Creator’s will. What St Paul looks forward to is, in a word, the organization of the universe upon a Christian basis. This reconstitution of things is provided for and is being effected “in the Christ.” He is the rallying point of the forces of peace and blessing. The organic principle, the organizing Head, the creative nucleus of the new creation is there. The potent germ of life eternal has been introduced into the world’s chaos; and its victory over the elements of disorder and death is assured.
Observe that the apostle says “in the Christ.”46 He is not speaking of Christ in the abstract, considered in His own Person or as He dwells in heaven, but in His relations to men and to time. The Christ manifest in Jesus (iv. 20, 21), the Christ of prophets and apostles, the Messiah of the ages, the Husband of the Church (v. 23), is the author and finisher of this grand restoration.
Christ’s work is essentially a work of restoration. We must insist, with Meyer, upon the significance of the Greek preposition in Paul’s compound verb (ana-, equal to re-in restore or resume). The Christ is not simply the climax of the past – the Son of man and the recapitulation of humanity, as man is of the creatures below him, summing up human development and lifting it to a higher stage – though He is all that. Christ rehabilitates man and the world. He re-asserts the original ground of our being, as that exists in God. He carries us and the world forward out of sin and death, by
Bishop Ellicott, who advocates the latter rendering, objects to Meyer’s interpretation that it is “doubtful in point of usage.”
See Gal. iii. 22 – iv. 7; and Chapters XV. – XVII. in the
Compare Acts xxvi. 18, which also speaks to this association of ideas in St Paul’s mind, with vers. 4, 5, 7, and 11 in this chapter.
Vv. 8, 9, ch. iii. 4, 5; comp. Col. ii. 2, 3; 1 Cor. ii. 6–9.
“The fulness of the time,” Gal. iv. 4; “in due season,” Rom. v. 6; “in its own times,” 1 Tim. ii. 6. These are all synonymous expressions for the Messianic era. Comp. Heb. i. 2, ix. 26; 1 Pet. i. 20.
Ch. iii. 8, 9; Col. i. 25; 1 Cor. iv. 1; 1 Tim. i. 4, i. 7; 2 Tim. i. 9–11; and especially Rom. xvi. 25, 26.
Comp. ch. v. 5; 1 Cor. xv. 24–28; Phil. ii. 9–12; Heb. ii. 8; Rev. i. 5, xi. 15, xvii. 14; Dan. vii. 13, 14.
One wonders that our Revisers, so attentive to all points of Greek idiom, did not think it worth while to discriminate between