EPHESIANS 3

EPHESIANS 3

Text, Exposition, and Notes

EPHESIANS 1

I. PRESCRIPT (1:1-2)

1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus¹ through God’s will, to the saints² who are³ [at Ephesus]⁴, believers in Christ Jesus:

2 grace and peace be yours from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

1 The prescript follows the regular Pauline pattern. As in Romans (and the Pastorals) Paul’s name appears unaccompanied: in his other letters one or more colleagues are associated with him.⁵ As in the prescripts of most of his letters, he identifies himself as Christ’s apostle; as in 1 and 2 Corinthians, Colossians, and 2 Timothy, his apostleship is “through God’s will.” In the receiving and in the discharge of his ministry he is under divine direction; he has received his orders and, as he says in 1 Cor. 9:16-17, it is not for him to choose whether or not he will obey them by preaching the gospel: necessity is laid upon him.

The identity of the addressees involves a well-known textual problem. The weight of documentary evidence indicates that the phrase “at Ephesus” is not part of the original wording.⁶ This is consistent with the internal evidence of the letter: there is nothing in the contents to suggest that it was written to the church in a city where Paul had spent the best part of three years. There are no references to individuals or groups among the people addressed; there are no allusions to features or problems in a local situation. Even the letter to the Colossians, sent to a church with which Paul was not personally acquainted, is more personal from this point of view than Ephesians.

Those manuscripts which omit “at Ephesus” put nothing in its place. In Marcion’s canon the letter was listed as “To the Laodiceans,” but this destination has not found its way into any extant witness for Eph. 1:1. The construction without “at Ephesus” or any similar phrase is awkward: “to the saints who are also believers in Christ Jesus”⁷ is not a natural form of address. For Paul and his circle “saints” and “believers in Christ Jesus” are synonymous. There is no such awkwardness about the construction of “to the saints and faithful brothers in Christ” in Col. 1:2, where the “saints” and “faithful brothers” are self-evidently the same people.⁸ In Eph. 1:1 some indication of place is required by the construction,⁹ and if “at Ephesus” be omitted, the best translation is: “to the saints who are . . . , believers in Christ Jesus.” A space is thus left for the insertion of an indication of place, which would be appropriate in a circular letter, except that such a device, familiar as it is today, is difficult to attest for the first century.¹⁰

The word “believers” might be rendered “faithful” (in the sense of “loyal”) but, in contrast to Col. 1:2 (where it qualifies the substantive “brothers”), “believers” is more probably the sense here. The phrase “in Christ Jesus” is incorporative—that is to say, it does not point to Christ Jesus as the object of belief but implies that the saints and believers are united with him, partakers together of his new life.¹¹

2 The salutation “grace and peace be yours” probably originated in the language of public worship and was taken over by Paul and others as an epistolary greeting.¹² The Christian reference of the grace and peace is emphasized by the added words “from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”¹³ That true grace and true peace come from God Paul would readily have agreed before his conversion. Now the close association of the Lord Jesus Christ with God the Father (under the government of one preposition)¹⁴ bespeaks the place which Paul the Christian accords to his Lord—a place which (he believes) is consistent with the status to which God the Father has exalted him, sharing with him “the name which is above every name” (Phil. 2:9). Divine grace and peace are bestowed supremely in the salvation which the gospel proclaims, and in providing this salvation God and Christ are at one. The grace which lies behind this salvation (cf. Eph. 2:5, 8) is indiscriminately called “the grace of God” (Eph. 3:2) and “the grace of Christ” (Gal. 1:6); the peace which this salvation produces (cf. Eph. 2:14-17; 6:15) is indiscriminately called “the peace of God” (Phil. 4:7) and “the peace of Christ” (Col. 3:15).

II. THE NEW HUMANITY A DIVINE CREATION (1:3-3:21)

1. INTRODUCTORY EULOGIA (1:3-14)

(1) Praise for Election and Adoption (1:3-6)

3 Blessed be the God and Father¹⁵ of our Lord Jesus Christ! He has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realm in Christ,

4 as he chose us in him¹⁶ before the world’s foundation, that we should be holy and blameless before him in love.

5 He foreordained us to be instated as his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will,

6 for the glorious praise of his grace, which¹⁷ he has freely bestowed on us in the Beloved One.¹⁸

3 In most of the Pauline letters the prescript is immediately followed by an introductory thanksgiving (“I thank God” or, less often, “we thank God”). In 2 Corinthians, however, the place of the introductory thanksgiving is taken by a eulogia¹⁹ or expression of praise in the third person: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ . . .” (2 Cor. 1:3). The expression of praise introduced by these words presents a different construction from the introductory thanksgiving (for which see Col. 1:3-8 and Philem. 4-7, with accompanying exposition and notes); it is a form taken over from Jewish synagogue worship, and commonly called the berakhah (the Hebrew word for “blessing”). In Ephesians, however, the berakhah does not replace the introductory thanksgiving; it precedes it.²⁰ The introductory thanksgiving follows in vv. 15-23.

The original single-sentence berakhah form is familiar enough from the OT Psalter: “Blessed be God . . .” (Ps. 66:20); “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel . . .” (Ps. 41:13, etc.). Paul christianizes the wording, identifying the one to whom blessing is ascribed as “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In a typical OT berakhah the name of God is followed by the relative pronoun and an adjective clause, setting forth the reasons for which God is to be blessed: “Blessed be God, who has not rejected my prayer . . .” (Ps. 66:20); “Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things” (Ps. 72:18).²¹ The same construction is reproduced in the NT: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, . . . who comforts us . . .” (2 Cor. 1:3-4); “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who . . . has begotten us anew . . .” (1 Pet. 1:3).²² Here too the reason for blessing God is given in a similar clause: “who has blessed us. . . .”²³ The same verb is used for men and women’s blessing God and for his blessing them, but not in the same sense. In the latter use it denotes God’s conferring of benefits; in the former use it denotes the ascription of praise to God.

God is to be praised, then, because he has bestowed on his people “in Christ”²⁴ every spiritual blessing. Spiritual blessings are to be distinguished, probably, from material blessings, which are also bestowed by God—such blessings as are promised in Deut. 28:1-14, for example, to those who obey his commandments. The nature of the spiritual blessings here referred to is not in doubt: they are detailed in the following words of the berakhah. They include election to holiness, instatement as God’s sons and daughters, redemption and forgiveness, the gift of the Spirit, and the hope of glory.

These blessings are enjoyed “in the heavenly realm.” The adjective translated “heavenly” occurs several times in the NT, but in this letter it occurs five times, without an expressed noun, in a phrase which might be literally rendered “in the heavenlies .”²⁵ Nothing in this form of the adjective indicates whether it is masculine or neuter. If it is masculine, then the phrase means “among the heavenly beings”;²⁶ if it is neuter, the meaning is “in the heavenly places” or “in the heavenly realm.”²⁷ The latter suits the five contexts better. The “heavenly realm” is the realm to which Christ has been raised (v. 20) and to which his people, united to him by faith, have been raised with him (Eph. 2:6). Even if they live on earth in mortal bodies, they can enter into the good of their heavenly inheritance here and now through the ministry of the Spirit (vv. 13-14). Nor is it surprising that these blessings are bestowed and enjoyed “in Christ.” Believers are not isolated entities; they share a common life through faith in Christ, and this common life is nothing other than his resurrection life. Elsewhere in the letter this is expressed in terms of their common membership in the body of Christ, as in v. 23. This is the setting in which God grants his people every spiritual blessing—from eternal election to eternal glory.

4 It was in Christ, then, that God chose his people²⁸ “before the world’s foundation.” This phrase (or a similar one) appears a number of times in the NT, but here only in the Pauline corpus.²⁹ It denotes the divine act of election as taking place in eternity. Time belongs to the created order: believers’ present experience of the blessings bestowed by God is the fulfilment on the temporal plane of his purpose of grace toward them conceived in eternity. As the fulfilment is experienced “in Christ,” so it is in him that the purpose is conceived. If, as Col. 1:16 affirms, it was “in him” that all things were created, so, we are here assured, earlier still it was “in him” that the people of God were chosen. He is the Chosen One of God par excellence;³⁰ it is by union with him, according to the divine purpose realized in time, that others are chosen. Less than justice is done to the present language when it is debated whether Christ is the foundation or origin, or merely the executor of election. He is foundation, origin, and executor: all that is involved in election and its fruits depends on him.³¹

Calvin regards the phrase “in Christ” as a “second confirmation of the freedom of election” (the first being that it took place before the world’s foundation). “For if we are chosen in Christ, it is outside ourselves. It is not from the sight of our deserving, but because our heavenly Father has engrafted us, through the blessing of adoption, into the Body of Christ. In short, the name of Christ excludes all merit, and everything which men have of themselves; for when he says that we are chosen in Christ, it follows that in ourselves we are unworthy.”³²

There is a dominant ethical quality about the divine election, as is inevitable in view of the character of the electing God. In 1 Peter 1:15-16, where the wording of our present text is echoed, this lesson is pointed with a quotation from the OT law of holiness: “as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; since it is written, ’You shall be holy, for I am holy.’ “³³ No other way of life is fitting for those who are “chosen and destined by God the Father and sanctified by the Spirit for obedience to Jesus Christ” (1 Peter. 1:2). So here, the purpose of God’s choosing his people in Christ is that they should be “holy and blameless”³⁴ in his presence, both here and now in earthly life and ultimately when they appear before him. The perspective is the same as in Col. 1:22, where the purpose of Christ’s reconciling work is the presentation of his people “holy, blameless, and irreproachable in his presence.” There they appear in the presence of Christ, while here they appear in the presence of God; but it is one and the same appearance: for Paul the tribunal of Christ (2 Cor. 5:10) and the tribunal of God (Rom. 14:10) are the same tribunal. The “holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14) is progressively wrought within the lives of believers on earth by the Spirit, and will be consummated in glory at the parousia, the time of the “redemption” anticipated in Eph. 1:14; 4:30. If “holiness” expresses the positive quality, “blamelessness” expresses its negative counterpart: freedom from blemish or fault.

If the phrase “in love” is attached to what precedes (as it is in the Greek text followed in this commentary), then it adds a specific quality to holiness and blamelessness: the consummation of holiness is perfect love. The preposition is best understood as having “comitative” force: the purpose of God is that his people should be marked by holiness and blamelessness, coupled with love.³⁵

5 If, on the other hand, the phrase “in love” is attached to what follows (as it is in the RSV and the NIV), it expresses God’s attitude to his people when he foreordained them for adoption into his family. “Those whom he foreknew,” according to Rom. 8:29, “he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.” The fulfilment of this purpose is the “adoption” confidently expected by those “who have the first fruits of the Spirit” (Rom. 8:23). It is that “revealing of the sons of God” for which “the creation waits with eager longing” (Rom. 8:19), their public instatement, investiture, and manifestation as members of that family in which Christ is the firstborn.³⁶ But, thanks to “the first fruits of the Spirit,” the enjoyment of the new relationship as children of God is theirs already. The Spirit is “the Spirit of adoption”; so, “when we cry, ’Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15-16).³⁷

The legal process of adoption was apparently unknown in Hebrew society. The levirate marriage, by which a dead man might acquire by proxy a posthumous son who would perpetuate his name and inheritance in Israel, is nowhere referred to in terms of adoption.³⁸ Adoption may have been practiced in patriarchal times, in a manner similar to that attested in the Nuzu texts—one might compare Eliezer’s potential relation to Abraham (Gen. 15:2-3) or Jacob’s to Laban (Gen. 29:14ff.)³⁹—but it left no trace in post-settlement legislation or custom. Yet something analogous to the NT doctrine of adoption appears in Yahweh’s relation to Israel: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos. 11:1). Commenting on the prophet’s language G. A. Smith wrote: “God’s eyes, passing the princes of the world, fell upon this slave boy, and He loved him and gave him a career.”⁴⁰ D. J. Theron’s conclusion, that “Paul’s metaphor of adoption . . . might even have been derived from Israel’s deliverance out of bondage in Egypt,”⁴¹ is rendered the more probable by Paul’s own reference to “Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption” (Rom. 9:4).

In some of his references to adoption Paul seems to trace an analogy between the divine act and current Roman legal procedure, with its requirement of seven witnesses to the transaction. There is little evidence of this here, unless a relation is discerned between the adoption and the inheritance of v. 14.⁴²

Since incorporation into the family of God comes about “through Christ,” that is, by union with the Son of God, God’s foreordaining his people to adoption is another aspect of his electing them for holiness. To be conformed to the image of Christ is to reflect his character (cf. 2 Cor. 3:18). To be chosen in Christ involves both wearing his image and sharing his holiness.

God’s election and foreordaining of his people are alike “according to the good pleasure of his will.” Since God is God, his purpose and activity have no ultimate cause outside his own being. “God’s will has no ’Why,’” said Luther.⁴³ But since God in his own person is “the love which moves the sun and the other stars,”⁴⁴ his purpose and activity express the divine love. Whatever be the syntactical relation of the phrase “in love” between vv. 4 and 5, it was in love that God chose his people before the world’s foundation and foreordained them to be his sons and daughters through Christ.

6 There is little distinction between God’s love and his grace, except that the word “grace” emphasizes its free and sovereign character.⁴⁵God’s grace is his eternal and unconditioned good will which found decisive expression in time in the saving work of Christ. In this saving work, and in its becoming effective in the lives of believers, God is glorified: his grace is manifested as worthy of “glorious praise.”⁴⁶ In Ps. 66:2 the whole earth is summoned to give God “glorious praise”;⁴⁷ if this was the fitting response to his acts of deliverance in national and personal life which the psalmist celebrates, it is supremely fitting as a response to his delivering act in Christ. This note of glorious praise is repeatedly sounded throughout the eulogia of vv. 3-14.

God’s grace has extended to his people and enfolded them: he has “be-graced” them, says Paul (using a verb derived from the Greek word for “grace”).⁴⁸ But, like every other phase of God’s dealings with them, this “be-gracing” is received by them not in their own right but in Christ: God’s grace is freely bestowed on them “in the Beloved One.” This designation marks Christ out as the supreme object of the Father’s love—“the Son of his love,” as he is called in Col. 1:13.⁴⁹ A slightly different form is used in the report of the heavenly voice which addressed Jesus at his baptism and on the mount of transfiguration (Mark 1:11; 9:7 and parallels), but the sense is the same: God acclaims him as “my Son, the beloved,”⁵⁰ or, as the words are regularly rendered in the Old Syriac version, “my Son and my Beloved” (indicating two distinct titles). J. A. Robinson, surveying the literary usage, concludes that “The Beloved (One)” may have been in use as a messianic title among Jews before it came to be used by Christians with reference to Jesus.⁵¹

(2) Praise for Redemption and Final Reconciliation (1:7-10)

7 In him⁵² we have our redemption, through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the wealth of his grace,⁵³

8 which he has multiplied toward us with all wisdom and understanding.

9 He has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his⁵⁴ good pleasure which he planned in him,⁵⁵

10 to be administered in the fullness of the times—namely, to bring everything together in Christ, the things in⁵⁶ heaven and the things on earth.

7 Those who were chosen in Christ before the world’s foundation have been redeemed in him in the course of time. The mention of redemption and forgiveness is paralleled in Col. 1:14, on which indeed it may depend, except that “sins” in Colossians is replaced by “trespasses” here⁵⁷ and the reference to redemption is amplified by the phrase “through his blood.”⁵⁸ The blood of Christ, that is, his sacrificial death, is the means by which his people’s redemption has been procured. A similar explanatory phrase occurs in Rom. 3:25,⁵⁹ and while there it is more closely attached to “atonement”⁶⁰ than to “redemption”⁶¹ (in v. 24), in sense it is applicable to both.

“Trespasses” and “sins” are used as synonyms by Paul and other NT writers.⁶² In Eph. 2:1 the two words are used together to express one idea. If “sins” is the word used in Col. 1:14, “trespasses” is used in Col. 2:13; in both places they are the object of God’s pardoning act.

“Wealth” is a term found repeatedly in this letter with reference to the divine attributes: “the wealth of his grace”⁶³ is mentioned again in Eph. 2:7, “the wealth of his glory” in Eph. 1:18 and 3:16 (cf. also Eph. 3:8). It is a Pauline usage: cf. “the wealth of his kindness” in Rom. 2:4; “the wealth of his glory” in Rom. 9:23; “the wealth of God’s wisdom and knowledge”⁶⁴ in Rom. 11:33.

8 Grace is a quality which requires personal relationships for its exercise. To speak of the “wealth” of God’s grace implies that he has shown it in abundance toward its recipients; similarly, when he is described as being “rich in mercy” (Eph. 2:4), the implication is that the beneficiaries of his mercy enjoy it in overflowing measure. So here, not only by implication but expressly, he is said to have “multiplied” his grace toward his people. The adjective clause “which he has multiplied”⁶⁵ is parallel to that in v. 6, “which he has freely bestowed”; the antecedent to both relatives is the grace of God. The superabundance of his grace has been emphasized by Paul in Rom. 5:20: “where sin abounded, grace was more exceedingly multiplied.”⁶⁶

The unstinting bestowal of God’s grace is accompanied by other spiritual gifts: wisdom and understanding are mentioned here because of their relevance to what follows.⁶⁷ Wisdom and understanding are gifts of God, but they must be cultivated in order to become effective. Therefore it is not inconsistent for Paul to pray, as he does in the parallel passage in Col. 1:9, that believers may be filled “with all wisdom and spiritual understanding”⁶⁸ (using a different word for “understanding” from that which is used here). Indeed, a few sentences below in this very letter he prays that those who have received wisdom and understanding along with God’s abundant grace may be given the “spirit of wisdom and revelation” (v. 17). At present, however, the “already” aspect of the heavenly gift is emphasized; elsewhere the “not yet” aspect finds expression. The Spirit whom believers have received is “the Spirit of wisdom and understanding” (as he is called in Isa. 11:2), and it is through his ministry that the wisdom and understanding which he imparts are to be increasingly appropriated.

9 The “already” aspect of God’s ways with his people continues to be stressed in the statement that he “has made known to us the mystery of his will.” In v. 18 below the apostle prays that his readers may know by experience (and enjoy by anticipation) things that belong to the mystery of God’s will—the hope to which he has called them and the inexhaustible glory of the inheritance which he has in store for them.

As regularly in the NT, a “mystery” is something which has formerly been kept secret in the purpose of God but has now been disclosed. In Col. 1:27 the aspect of his purpose which has now been manifested to his people relates to their hope of glory, of which the indwelling Christ provides the guarantee here and now.⁶⁹ But elsewhere Paul makes it plain that the coming glory of the people of God is only part of his purpose of grace: all creation is to share in the fruits of Christ’s redemptive work, even in “the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). So here, the universe has its place in God’s secret purpose, now revealed. In Col. 1:20 God’s good pleasure was “to reconcile all things to himself” through Christ. Nothing less than that is contemplated here in his “good pleasure,” his eternal decree, which he “planned” in Christ. (In this context “in Christ” is much more suitable as a rendering than the KJV’s “in himself.”)⁷⁰

10 It was “in Christ” (as we have been told in vv. 4 and 5) that God chose his people and foreordained them to be instated as full members of his family, “according to the good pleasure of his will”; it is equally “in Christ” that he has planned to “gather up”⁷¹ the fragmented and alienated universe. The verb here used as an alternative to “reconcile” occurs in one other place in the Pauline writings, where the whole law is said to be “summed up” in the single commandment of love to one’s neighbor (Rom. 13:9). All things, then, are to be “summed up” in Christ and presented as a coherent totality in him.

The reconciliation celebrated in Colossians is the reconciliation of “all things” to God (and more particularly the reconciliation of human beings to him).⁷² The reconciliation celebrated in Ephesians is the reconciliation of human beings to one another, as a stage in the unification of a divided universe.⁷³ It is this unification that is presented here as the goal of God’s determinant counsel. The “administering” of God’s good pleasure is “the manner in which the purpose of God is being worked out in human history.”⁷⁴ So says J. A. Robinson, adding that in the phrase “in the fullness of the times” (lit., “of the fullness of the times”)⁷⁵ “fullness” is a genitive of further definition. As, according to Gal. 4:4, God sent his Son into the world “when the fullness of the time had come,”⁷⁶ that is, when the time was ripe for his coming, so, when the time is ripe for the consummation of his purpose, in his providential overruling of the course of the world, that consummation will be realized.

The “administering” of God’s good pleasure here has much the same force as the “administering” of the long-hidden mystery in Eph. 3:9.⁷⁷ In Eph. 3:9, however, the thought is closely related to Paul’s apostolic commission, there stated to be the bringing together into one body of Gentile believers on the same basis as Jewish believers. This uniting of Jews and Gentiles in Christ was, in Paul’s eyes, God’s masterpiece of reconciliation, and gave promise of a time when not Jews and Gentiles only, but all the mutually hostile elements in creation,⁷⁸ would be united in that same Christ. Paul was thus an instrument in God’s hand for the accomplishment of his eternal purpose.⁷⁹

(3) Praise for the Assurance of the Believers’ Heritage (1:11-14)

11 It was in Christ, too, that we were claimed by God as his portion,⁸⁰ having been foreordained according to the purpose⁸¹ of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will,

12 in order that we, who first placed our hope in Christ, should be for his glorious praise.

13 In Christ you⁸² also were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed—

14 (the Holy Spirit of promise, I say, for) he⁸³ is the guarantee of our inheritance, until the redemption of God’s possession, for his glorious praise.

11 The verb translated “we were claimed . . . as his portion”⁸⁴ has been rendered more freely in a number of recent versions. In the RSV it is taken together with the following participle⁸⁵ and rendered comprehensively “we . . . have been destined and appointed.” The NEB, less freely, renders it “we have been given our share in the heritage.” The NIV renders it “we were . . . chosen.” But we are dealing with a passive form of the verb which means “appoint by lot,” “allot,” “assign,” and the passive sense should be brought out unless there is good reason to the contrary. The reason for the rendering “we were claimed by God as his portion” (rather than “we were assigned our portion”) is that it is in keeping with OT precedent.⁸⁶ In the Song of Moses (Deut. 32:8-9) the nations of the world are assigned to various angelic beings (”the sons of God”),⁸⁷ but Yahweh retains Israel as his personal possession:

”for the LORD’S portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.”

So here, believers in Christ are God’s chosen people, claimed by him as his portion or heritage. That this is the sense is confirmed by the reference in v. 18 to “the glorious wealth of his inheritance in the saints.”

The idea of the divine foreordination is repeated from v. 5. There God is said to have foreordained his people “according to the good pleasure of his will”; here this is said to be part of his eternal governance of the universe, for he “works all things according to the counsel of his will.” His will may be disobeyed, but his ultimate purpose cannot be frustrated, for he overrules the disobedience of his creatures in such a way that it subserves his purpose. So in Acts 4:27-28 the apostles in their praise and prayer acknowledge before God that Herod and Pontius Pilate and the other enemies of Jesus conspired together, all unwittingly, “to do whatever thy hand and thy plan had predestined to take place.”⁸⁸

12 In v. 5 the instatement of believers as sons and daughters of God, the purpose of their foreordination, redounds to “the glorious praise of his grace”; here again “his glorious praise” is the object of their being foreordained. God is honored in the presence of human beings and angelic powers when men and women, redeemed from sin, live in accordance with his will and display the family likeness which stamps them as his children. “We who first placed our hope in Christ”⁸⁹ are Jewish believers, foundation members of the new community, the first fruits of the people of God in the age which Christ has inaugurated by his death and resurrection.

13 But God’s portion is not confined to Jewish believers. “We who first placed our hope in Christ” have now been joined by “you also”⁹⁰—that is to say, by Gentile believers. It is to Gentile believers that this letter is specifically addressed, assuring them that their share in God’s heritage is as full and firm as that of their brothers and sisters of Jewish birth. Gentiles also heard the gospel, and realized that the salvation of which it spoke was for them as well as for Jews. The gospel is “the message of truth”—“the true message of the gospel,” as it is called in Col. 1:5—because it has God for its author; it is “the gospel of God” (Rom. 1:1). The communication of the gospel to Gentiles was undertaken reluctantly by the first believers, who could scarcely entertain the thought that the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel should embrace outsiders within its saving scope. Apart from Peter, who required a special revelation from heaven before he could bring himself to accept Cornelius’s invitation to visit him and tell him and his household the way of salvation,⁹¹ Gentile evangelization began as the result of private enterprise, when unnamed Hellenists of Cyprus and Cyrene came to Antioch and told the story of Jesus to Gentiles as well as Jews.⁹² From then on, throughout the provinces of the eastern Roman Empire, many more Gentiles than Jews believed the gospel, and the terms on which they might be admitted became a matter of serious concern in the mother church at Jerusalem. When, as Luke records, “the apostles and the elders” at Jerusalem “were gathered together to consider this matter,” Peter argued that it would be wise to follow the example of God, who gave proof of his acceptance of Gentile believers by “giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith” (Acts 15:6-9).

There is a remarkable similarity between Peter’s argument at the Council of Jerusalem and what is said here. The Gentiles, on believing the gospel, were “sealed⁹³ with the Holy Spirit of promise.” The figure of sealing is used by Paul in relation to the Spirit in 2 Cor. 1:22 where, associating his Corinthian converts closely with himself and his colleagues, he says, “it is God who establishes us with you in Christ and has anointed us; he has also sealed us and given us the guarantee of the Spirit in our hearts.” Of the three figures used there—the anointing, the seal, and the guarantee—two reappear here: the seal and the guarantee.

The seal of the Spirit was received by the Gentiles here addressed as it had been received earlier by Jewish Christians—when they believed. The verbal form used here is identical with that found in Acts 19:2, where Paul at Ephesus asks a group of “disciples” if they received the Holy Spirit when they believed; it is a participial form meaning “having believed” or “on believing.”⁹⁴ By giving believers the Spirit, God “seals” or stamps them as his own possession. The Spirit is variously called “the Spirit of God” or “the Spirit of Christ”; “if anyone has not the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him” (Rom. 8:9). Here he is called “the Holy Spirit of promise.”⁹⁵ This might mean “the promised Holy Spirit” (cf. Acts 2:33, “the promise of the Holy Spirit”);⁹⁶ but more probably it indicates that the Holy Spirit brings with him when he is received the promise of glory yet to come. So, in Eph. 4:30, believers are said to have been sealed with the Spirit “for the day of redemption”—a statement which summarizes the words that follow in our present context.

14 The word rendered “guarantee”⁹⁷ is of Semitic origin; it was probably borrowed by the Greeks in the early days of trade with the Phoenicians. It was a commercial word denoting a pledge—some object handed over by a buyer to a seller until the purchase price was paid in full. The Hebrew word (identical with the Phoenician) is used in Gen. 38:17-18 of items of Judah’s personal property which he handed over to Tamar for the time being, until he had opportunity to send her the agreed price.⁹⁸ In the NT it is used only in the Pauline writings, and only with reference to the Spirit. In 2 Cor. 5:5, where Paul looks forward to the “heavenly dwelling” which is to replace the present mortal tenement, he says, “he who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.” The gift of the Spirit, then, is the guarantee of coming immortality. This is Paul’s distinctive contribution to the NT doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Another term which he uses to express the same thought is “first fruits”:⁹⁹ in Rom. 8:23 the Spirit is the “first fruits” of the eagerly awaited “adoption,¹⁰⁰ the redemption of our bodies,” where the resurrection of the people of Christ at his parousia is meant. The same word for “redemption” is used there as here,¹⁰¹ and the same future hope is in view.

The Spirit consciously received is “the guarantee of our inheritance,”¹⁰² the pledge given to believers by God to assure them that the glory of the life to come, promised in the gospel, is a well-founded hope, a reality and not an illusion. The word “inheritance”¹⁰³ is used in this chapter both of God’s portion in his people (vv. 11, 18) and of the everlasting portion which he has reserved for them. They can enter into the enjoyment of this everlasting portion here and now by the ministry of the Spirit. Redemption is already theirs through the sacrifice and death of Christ (v. 7), but one aspect of that redemption remains to be realized. On the day of resurrection God will “redeem” his own possession, and the evidence of his commitment to do so is given in his “sealing” that possession with the Spirit.

The word translated “possession”¹⁰⁴ occurs in the same sense in 1 Peter 2:9, where believers (again, as it happens, Gentile believers) are called “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for [God’s] possession.” Language is there deliberately applied to Gentile believers which in the OT is used of God’s people Israel—notably in Exod. 19:5, where Yahweh calls Israel “my own possession¹⁰⁵ among all peoples.” The verb corresponding to the noun “possession” is used in a similar sense in Acts 20:28, where Paul directs the elders of the church of Ephesus to “feed the church of God, of which he obtained possession¹⁰⁶ through the blood of his own [Son].” These words also echo an OT passage—Ps. 74:2, where God is entreated: “Remember thy congregation, of which thou hast obtained possession long since.”¹⁰⁷ That such language should now be applied to Gentile believers is a token of the security of their new standing within the community of God’s own people, fully sharing present blessing and future hope with their fellow-believers of Jewish stock.

As those who first placed their hope in Christ are designed “for his glorious praise,” so it is with “you also”—believers of Gentile origin. Here too there is perhaps an echo of OT language—more particularly of Isa. 43:20-21, where God speaks of “my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praise.”¹⁰⁸

The liturgical note on which this eulogia opened in v. 3 has been sustained throughout, not least by means of the recurring refrain of glorious praise. Such a liturgical passage does not lend itself well to comparative analysis in terms of epistolary usage, whether Paul’s or anyone else’s. But it strikes the keynote for the rest of the letter, with its emphasis on the inclusion of Gentiles together with Jews within the new society of the people of God.

2. INTRODUCTORY THANKSGIVING AND INTERCESSORY PRAYER (1:15-23)

(1) Thanks for the Readers’ Faith and Love and Prayer for Their Increase in Knowledge (1:15-19)

15 Therefore, having heard of your faith¹⁰⁹ in the Lord Jesus and your love¹¹⁰ toward all the saints, I for my part

16 do not cease giving thanks for you as I mention you¹¹¹ in my prayers.

17 May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father all-glorious, give you¹¹² a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him!

18 May your spiritual eyesight be enlightened,¹¹³ so that you may know what is the hope of your calling,¹¹⁴ what is the glorious wealth of his inheritance in the saints,

19 and what is the surpassing greatness of his power in us¹¹⁵ who believe, according to the operation of his mighty strength!

15-16 The introductory thanksgiving which (contrary to custom) follows the eulogia is cast in the characteristic Pauline style.¹¹⁶ Paul assures his readers of his unceasing gratitude to God for the good news he has received about them, and assures them of his constant intercession. Whereas the eulogia praises God for blessings received by the writer and his fellow-Christians, the thanksgiving is concerned rather with the work of God in the lives of those addressed.¹¹⁷ The parallelism of this thanksgiving with that in Col. 1:3-4 in particular is unmistakable. In both places the readers’ faith and love are tokens of the grace of God which they have received—unless indeed “your love” should be omitted here as an editorial addition to the text made under the influence of Col. 1:4 (”your faith in Christ Jesus and the love which you have for all the saints”).¹¹⁸ If “your love” is indeed to be omitted, then their “faith” (including the sense of fidelity) is exercised within the Christian fellowship (“in the Lord Jesus”)¹¹⁹ and thus shown toward all their fellow-believers.

With the emphatic “I for my part” may be compared the emphatic “we for our part” with which the intercessory prayer is introduced in Col. 1:9.¹²⁰ Here the introductory thanksgiving is quite brief, with a rapid transition to the intercessory prayer—or, more strictly, prayer-report.¹²¹

17 As in Col. 1:9 the object of the intercessory prayer is that the readers “may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will together with all wisdom and spiritual understanding,” so here prayer is offered that the readers may be given “a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him” (i.e., of God). More particularly, prayer is offered that the ideal set forth in the eulogia may be realized in their experience—perfectly in the resurrection age but in measure at present through the ministry of the Spirit.¹²²

Verses 17-19 state the substance of Paul’s unremitting intercession on the readers’ behalf, although the very fact of his reporting the intercession implies its repetition as he does so. His common designation of the Almighty, “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (cf. v. 3), is here amplified to “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father all-glorious”—literally, “the Father of glory.” This is the only place where he speaks of “the Father of glory.” He frequently speaks of the glory of God, and once of “the glory of the Father” (Rom. 6:4). Since God is the source of all true glory, he may well be called “the Father of glory” or, as he is called in Ps. 29:3 (LXX Ps. 28:3) and Acts 7:2, “the God of glory.” In 1 Cor. 2:8 Jesus is called “the Lord of glory.” In this verse, as above (in vv. 6, 12, 14), the phrase “of glory” is treated as an adjectival genitive.

A “spirit of wisdom and revelation”¹²³ can be imparted only through him who is the personal Spirit of wisdom and revelation. God’s abundant grace has already been described in v. 8 as bestowed by him “with all wisdom and understanding.” Understanding in the sense of “spiritual understanding” (Col. 1:9) is the correlative of revelation; only as God reveals by his Spirit can his people understand by that same Spirit. The goal of this gift of wisdom and revelation is the personal knowledge of God. So, in Col. 1:10, Paul and Timothy pray that the Colossian Christians, bearing fruit in every good work, may “increase in the knowledge of God.”¹²⁴ This is much more than the bare knowledge of God from his works which was available to the pagan world (Rom. 1:21); it is that personal knowledge of him in experience which involves a two-way relation, entered into by those who “have come to know God, or rather to be known by God” (Gal. 4:9), for “if one loves God, one is known by him” (1 Cor. 8:3).

18 Paul goes on to pray that they may be given enlightened eyes—“the eyes of your heart” or, less literally, “spiritual eyesight.” He has used similar language in 2 Cor. 4:6, where the light-creating God is said to have shone in his people’s hearts so as to give “the illumination¹²⁵ of the knowledge of the glory of God (the glorious knowledge of God) in the face of Christ.” Here, as a corollary to the knowledge of God himself, prayer is made that they may understand his ways and his purpose, with special reference to his dealings with his people: the hope to which he has called them, the rich inheritance which he possesses in them, and the mighty power with which he energizes them.¹²⁶

The hope to which he has called them¹²⁷ is the hope of glory, confirmed to them here and now by the indwelling Christ (Col. 1:27) and the seal of the Spirit—“the first instalment which promises future payment in full.”¹²⁸ The “hope of the glory of God” in which believers rejoice (Rom. 5:2) is the hope of sharing that glory—the hope of being manifested in glory with Christ at his appearing (Col. 3:4; cf. Rom. 8:17-30). This hope is expressed in different language later in the letter, where Christ at his parousia will “present to himself the church invested with glory, free from spot, wrinkle, or anything of the sort, but . . . holy and faultless” (Eph. 5:27).

“The glorious wealth of his inheritance¹²⁹ in the saints” has been alluded to in v. 11, according to which believers have been “claimed by God as his portion” in Christ, and v. 14, where God will redeem his possession on the day of consummation. That God should set such high value on a community of sinners, rescued from perdition and still bearing too many traces of their former state, might well seem incredible were it not made clear that he sees them in Christ,¹³⁰ as from the beginning he chose them in Christ. The supreme place in the love and purpose of God which Christ occupies is attested in Colossians and in this letter alike, as indeed in all the Pauline correspondence:¹³¹ God’s estimate of the people of Christ, united to him by faith and partakers of his resurrection life, is inevitably consistent with his estimate of Christ. Paul prays here that his readers may appreciate the value which God places on them, his plan to accomplish his eternal purpose through them as the first fruits of the reconciled universe of the future, in order that their lives may be in keeping with this high calling¹³² and that they may accept in grateful humility the grace and glory thus lavished on them.

19 Four synonyms are piled up in genitival phrases when Paul prays further that his readers may come to know in experience “the surpassing greatness of the power of God in the lives of believers, according to the operation of the strength of his might.”¹³³ If the death of Christ is the supreme demonstration of the love of God, as Paul wholeheartedly believed (Rom. 5:8), the resurrection of Christ is the supreme demonstration of his power. “Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father” (Rom. 6:4)—that is to say, by “the power of God gloriously exercised.”¹³⁴ And glorious power, in its “surpassing greatness,” is at work in the people of Christ: it is “the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead” that dwells in them (Rom. 8:11), energizing the new life within their mortal bodies and so making the hope of resurrection real for them.

Although the words that follow are closely linked with these in grammatical construction, these words effectively conclude the present prayer of intercession.¹³⁵ The prayer is, however, resumed in Eph. 3:1 and then (after a long parenthesis) completed in Eph. 3:14-19.

(2) God’s Mighty Strength Shown in the Raising of Christ (1:20-23)

20 (This was the mighty strength) that he exerted¹³⁶ in Christ, when he raised him from the dead and seated¹³⁷ him at his right hand in the heavenly realm,¹³⁸

21 high above every principality and power, might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this present age but also in the coming one.

22 He “subjected all things beneath his feet” ¹³⁹ and gave him as head supreme¹⁴⁰ to the church,

23 which is his body, (even him who is) the fullness of that which is being constantly and totally filled.¹⁴¹

20 This paragraph is syntactically attached to what precedes: it begins as an adjective clause qualifying the antecedent “operation” in v. 19. In the RSV v. 20 follows on in the same sentence as v. 19, without even a comma between them.¹⁴² But while the adjective clause provides the transition, the new paragraph quickly becomes an independent statement of the raising and enthronement of Christ, by way of preparation for the following statement (Eph. 2:4-7) of the raising and enthronement along with Christ of “the church, which is his body.”

That Christ was raised from the dead and enthroned at the right hand of God (in accordance with the oracle of Ps. 110:1)¹⁴³ was affirmed in the church’s primitive confession and preaching (cf. Rom. 8:34; Acts 2:32-35, etc.). With his insistence on believers’ union by faith with the living Christ, Paul applied the substance of this confession and proclamation to the practical business of Christian faith and life. Not only was the resurrection of Christ the first fruits of his people’s future resurrection (1 Cor. 15:20, 23); it provided the reason for their here and now walking “in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). The indwelling Spirit, who supplied the hope of their future resurrection (Rom. 8:11), also supplied the power to live day by day as those who had died with Christ and been raised to new life with him (Rom. 6:6-11; 8:12-14). We have seen the moral driven home in Colossians: “if you died with Christ . . .” (2:20); “if you were raised with Christ . . .” (3:1). It is driven home again, and further elaborated, in Eph. 1:20-2:10.

The power, then, with which God works in the lives of believers is the power by which he raised Christ from death to share his throne. The throne of God is set in “the heavenly realm”—in that realm in which, as has been said above, the people of Christ are endowed with “every spiritual blessing” in him.¹⁴⁴

21 There is evidently a succession of planes in the heavenly realm.¹⁴⁵ It is, as we are told later, the residence of “principalities and powers” (Eph. 3:10; 6:12). But the throne of God, to which Christ has been exalted, is “high above” all these: Christ has “ascended high above all the heavens” (Eph. 4:10).¹⁴⁶ The language of spatial elevation is used to symbolize transcendence.

Various designations of authority are piled up to emphasize the supremacy of Christ. Whatever grades of authority there may be in the universe, they are all inferior to him. The authorities here listed (not in any technical sense)—“principality and power, might and dominion”¹⁴⁷—correspond for the most part to those of Col. 1:16—“thrones or dominions, principalities or powers”—although the order is different (“might” in the present list takes the place of “thrones” in Colossians). As for “every name that is named,”¹⁴⁸ it may be recalled that in the Christ-hymn of Phil. 2:6-11 God, in exalting the humiliated Jesus, gives him “the name which is above every name,”¹⁴⁹ ordaining that at Jesus’ name universal homage shall be paid. The present passage echoes that affirmation; “every name” here implies not so much the conventional label of personal identity as the designation of rank or honor. Whether the rank or honor be borne by human or superhuman beings, whether it be borne “in this present age” or “in the coming one,”¹⁵⁰ it disappears from view in comparison with the glory which Christ has received from the Father. The mention of the coming age prepares the reader for what is said below in Eph. 2:7 about the ages to come. And the emphasis on the supremacy of Christ in this age and in that is reminiscent of the emphasis placed in Col. 1:15-18 on his preeminence in the old creation and in the new alike: the firstborn of all creation is also the firstborn from the dead.

22 “He subjected all things beneath his feet” is a quotation from Ps. 8:6.¹⁵¹ In the psalm, which repeats the language used of the creation of man in Gen. 1:26-28, wondering adoration is expressed at the contemplation of the honor which the Creator has bestowed on man, giving him dominion over the works of his hands. In the NT the words of the psalm are applied to Christ as the last Adam, notably by Paul in 1 Cor. 15:27 and by the writer to the Hebrews in Heb. 2:6-9. In 1 Cor. 15:24-28 the words of Ps. 8:6 are linked with those of Ps. 110:1, “Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies your footstool,”¹⁵² the “enemies” being identified as “every principality and every power and might.”¹⁵³ Here there is no express reference to the subjection of enemies beneath the feet of Christ; even so, the mention in v. 20 of his session at the right hand of God makes it probable that the clause immediately following “Sit at my right hand” was not remote from the writer’s mind.

Christ, then, exercises universal lordship,¹⁵⁴ and in particular God has given him as “head over all things”—that is, “supreme head”—to the church. If “head” be understood in the sense of origin, then Christ is divinely appointed as source of the church’s life, and with the insistence on his universal lordship goes the implication that he is also the church’s lord.¹⁵⁵ In Colossians the statements that Christ is “the head of the body, the church” (1:18) and “head of every principality and power” (2:10)¹⁵⁶ appear in separate contexts; here they are brought together.¹⁵⁷ Here indeed the word “head” is not explicitly used (as it is in Col. 2:10) to denote his supremacy over principalities and powers or the rest of creation. Moreover, there is a difference in character between his supremacy over the latter and his headship over the church. The principalities and powers, insofar at least as they are hostile, “are subjected, put down by force, and are placed under Christ’s feet by victory. On the other hand, the Church is one with him, even if she is subjected to him. Over her he exercises a supremacy only of sanctification and love, and force does not come into it at all.”¹⁵⁸

23 A further sense of the word “head” enters in as soon as the church is said to be “his body.”¹⁵⁹ The organic relation between head and body suggests the vital union between Christ and the church, sharers of a common life, which is his own risen life communicated to his people. The church is here the complete or universal church—manifested visibly, no doubt, in local congregations (although local congregations scarcely come into the picture in Ephesians, as they do in all the other Pauline writings). It is going farther than the argument of Ephesians warrants to say, with Heinrich Schlier, that “body” plus “head” equals “Christ.”¹⁶⁰ The only Pauline text from which such an inference might be drawn is 1 Cor. 12:12 (”As the body is one and has many members, ... so also is Christ”).

For further comment on “the church, which is his body,” reference may be made to what has been said above on Col. 1:18. For the present, attention is demanded by the additional phrase, translated above as “the fullness of that which is being constantly and totally filled.” There is no reason for taking “fullness” (Gk. plērōma) in a gnostic or other technical sense. It is clearly in apposition to one of the foregoing nouns or else to the total idea of the foregoing phrase. Along with this question of the relation of “fullness” goes a further question about the verb in the following adjective clause: should it be translated “fills” (the Greek form being understood as in the middle voice) or “is filled” (the form being understood as passive)?

It is perhaps most natural to think of “fullness” as in apposition to the immediately preceding noun “body.” If the head-body analogy be maintained, the body may be thought of as the complement of the head, and this is a perfectly acceptable interpretation of plērōma.¹⁶¹ But plērōma may mean either “that which fills” or “that which is filled,” and in the latter sense the church may be viewed as that which is filled by Christ with his life, attributes, and powers. This is the interpretation preferred by Ernest Best, who points out that what is here stated as a fact becomes part of a prayer in Eph. 3:19: “that you may be filled up to (the measure of) God’s own fullness.”¹⁶²

On the other hand, plērōma may stand in apposition with “him” in the expression “gave him as head supreme to the church” (in the Greek “him” occupies the position of emphasis at the beginning of the clause, before the verb “gave”).¹⁶³ This view, for which A. E. N. Hitchcock argued in 1910, ¹⁶⁴ has, in C. F. D. Moule’s words, “received less than justice.”¹⁶⁵ If Christ is the plērōma, then he is the plērōma of God, in the sense indicated in Col. 1:19; 2:9: God, that is to say, is the one “who fills the universe in all its parts” (NEB margin).

But perhaps the most satisfactory account of the construction is that given by Bengel in his Gnomon: plērōma, he says, “is neither predicated of the church, as most think; nor, as others have decided, is it construed with ’gave’; but it is put absolutely in the accusative case (like ’testimony’ in 1 Tim. 2:6). It is a finishing touch or summary (epiphōnēma) of what has been said from verse 20 onwards.”¹⁶⁶ To the same effect H. Chadwick more recently expresses preference for the interpretation which “takes plērōma to be in apposition to the whole idea of the preceding phrase, i.e. as Christ transcendent over and immanent within the Church.”¹⁶⁷

As for the participle, which may be understood either as middle voice (“the one who fills”) or as passive (“the one that is being filled”), it must be conceded that parallels to its use as middle voice are hard to find. But if God were the subject of the verb of filling—if, as Bengel concludes, “the apostle indicates that in Christ is the ’fullness’ of the Father who fills all in all”—then the middle voice would clearly be more appropriate: God, it might be said, fills the universe for his own glory.¹⁶⁸ If Christ were the subject, then too, in spite of J. A. Robinson’s arguments for the “somewhat startling thought” (as he calls it)¹⁶⁹ that he is described as the one “who all in all is being fulfilled” (passive voice), it would be necessary to translate the participle as “the one who fills,”¹⁷⁰ in much the same sense as Eph. 4:10, where he is said to have “ascended high above all the heavens, in order to fill all things” (where the verb is in the active voice).¹⁷¹

But if we follow current usage and treat the participle as a passive in sense as well as in form, it is not necessary to take the subject as being either Christ or God, but rather as being the church. If plērōma is in apposition to the general sense of what precedes, the sense may well be that Christ, who is transcendent over the church, his body, is also immanent within it and fills it “as it attains to the maximum of its perfect plenitude”¹⁷²—that is, as it is being totally filled. The fullness of deity resides in him, and out of that fullness his church is being constantly supplied.¹⁷³

EPHESIANS 2

3. THE SAVING GRACE OF GOD (2:1-10)

(1) New Life in Christ (2:1-7)

1 You too (were raised to life), when you were dead through your trespasses and sins,¹

2 in which you once led your lives according to the “aeon” of this world, according to the ruler of the domain of the air, (the domain) of the spirit which now operates in the disobedient.

3 Among them we also,² all of us, led our lives at one time, in our fleshly desires, doing the will of the flesh, the will of our minds; by nature, in fact, we were as liable to divine wrath as the rest of mankind.

4 But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his³ great love with which he loved⁴ us,

5 brought us to life together with Christ⁵ even when we were dead through our trespasses⁶—it is by grace⁷ that you have been saved—

6 and he raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly realm, in Christ Jesus.

7 This was to show in the ages to come the surpassing wealth⁸ of his grace, in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

1 “You” at the beginning of v. 1 probably means “you Gentiles,” over against “we also”—that is to say, we Jews—in v. 3. “You” stands in the accusative case, but there is no expressed verb to which it forms the object. The verb implied is either “raised” as in Eph. 1:20 (God not only raised Christ from the dead; he raised “you also”)⁹ or (more probably) “brought to life”¹⁰ in v. 5 below. In the latter case the construction begun in v. 1 is broken off after the succession of adjective clauses, and the sense is resumed with the new sentence “But God . . .” in vv. 4 and 5.

It was necessary that the readers should be raised to life, because they were spiritually dead, severed and alienated from God, the source of true life. Their spiritual death was the result of their “trespasses and sins”¹¹—two words which, as we have seen already,¹² are used as synonyms in the Pauline writings. Etymologically they may mean respectively “falling aside” and “missing the mark,” but in practice they are interchangeable (in the plural, at least).¹³ NT parallels to the use of “dead” in a spiritual sense here and in v. 5 are found in Rom. 11:15; Eph. 5:14; Col. 2:13.

2 In these things¹⁴ (trespasses and sins) you formerly led your lives—lit., “you walked”¹⁵—these were the things that characterized you. This is a clear echo of Col. 3:7. The two following phrases, “according to the aiōn of this world” and “according to the archōn of the domain of the air,”¹⁶ are naturally taken as parallel to each other. Since, then, archōn unquestionably means “ruler,” it is natural to conclude that aiōn, which normally means “age,” is personified here. It is certainly difficult to take it in its usual sense: what would “the age of this world” mean?¹⁷ The traditional rendering, “the course of this world,” makes good sense, but it assigns an unnatural meaning to aiōn. Paul sometimes uses “this world (kosmos)” as a synonym for “this age (aiōn),”¹⁸ the present age dominated by the force of evil (cf. “the present evil age” in Gal. 1:4). This force is personified in 2 Cor. 4:4, where the minds of unbelievers are said to be blinded by “the god of this age.”¹⁹ (Compare 1 Cor. 2:6-8, where the “rulers [archontes] of this age” are said, through their ignorance of the divine wisdom, to have “crucified the Lord of glory.”) The suggestion that “the aiōn of this world” in our present text is identical with “the god of this age” is attractive, but if so, this is by far the earliest certain Christian instance of aiōn in a personal sense.²⁰ The plural use of the noun in Eph. 3:9 and Col. 1:26, where mention is made of “the mystery hidden from the aiōnes,” should not be adduced as a parallel,²¹ for there the ordinary meaning “ages” makes perfectly good sense (and indeed in Col. 1:26 this sense is demanded by the following words, “and from the generations”).²² The suggestion may be made that the term is here borrowed from the pagan vocabulary formerly familiar to those addressed: there was indeed a mystery cult in honor of a god Aiōn (of Iranian origin) at Alexandria around 200 B.C.²³ (attested at Eleusis in the 1st cent. B.C.).²⁴ But it is quite improbable that anything so specific as this lies behind the use of aiōn here. Markus Barth, who translates the phrase “this world-age,” suggests the possibility that “Paul thinks of a personified world-age, ... a personal antagonist of God’s good creation and of God himself,” and considers that it might be capitalized and written “World-Age,” as one of the titles of the devil.²⁵

There is little doubt that the devil is the being described as “the ruler of the domain of the air.” The question that arises here relates to the word “air.” The Greek word (aēr) is used of the air which mortals breathe in contrast to the aithēr, the sky. But it is unlikely that such a contrast is intended here; for one thing, the noun aithēr does not appear in the NT. The domain or dominion (exousia, “authority”) of the air differs little in meaning from “the dominion of darkness” in Col. 1:13, but it would be hazardous to suppose that we are dealing with a revival of the Homeric and Hesiodic use of aēr in the sense of “mist” or “haze.” Nor can we think of our own figurative use of the word “air” as when we speak of an idea in the air or of the atmosphere of opinion. The word is used here as it is by Philo, who explains Jacob’s ladder as a figure of speech for the air (aēr), which extends upward from the earth’s surface to the sphere of the moon (the lowest of the heavenly zones). The air, he says, “is the home of incorporeal souls . . ., called ’demons’ by the other philosophers but customarily ’angels’ by the sacred record.”²⁶ The “domain of the air,” in fact, is another way of indicating the “heavenly realm” which, according to Eph. 6:12, is the abode of those principalities and powers, “world-rulers of this darkness” and “spiritual forces of wickedness” against which the people of Christ wage war.²⁷

As for “the spirit which now operates in the disobedient,” the noun “spirit” (pneuma) is in the genitive case, and is therefore naturally taken as governed by one of the two preceding nouns—“ruler” or “domain.” To speak of “the ruler of the spirit which now operates” would be strange; if we translate the clause as “the domain of the spirit which now operates,” then either this spirit is identical with the “ruler of the domain of the air,” the malign power that blinds the minds of unbelievers, or else “spirit” is in apposition with “air”²⁸ and could denote (as “air” would not) the atmosphere or climate of thought which influences people’s minds against God.²⁹ The “disobedient” (lit., “sons of disobedience,”³⁰ as in Eph. 5:6) are rebels against the authority of God, responsive to the prompting of the arch-rebel. The verb rendered “operate” (energeō) is the same as is used in Eph. 3:20 of “the power which operates in us”³¹ (i.e., in believers); the distinction between the two opposed indwelling powers is pointed in 1 Cor. 2:12, “we have received not the spirit of the world but the Spirit that comes from God.”

3 The readers have been reminded of their former pagan existence, before they received new life in Christ, but it is freely conceded that Jews were in no better case: “we also” were included among the disobedient. So, after the detailed exposure of the moral bankruptcy of the pagan world in Rom. 1:18-32, it is shown that Jews are no better off in this respect: “all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin” (Rom. 3:9) and equally in need of the justifying grace of God if there is to be any hope for them.³²

“Among them”—that is, most probably, among the disobedient³³—we Jews also followed our course of life,³⁴ in conformity with “the desires of our flesh.” While the term “flesh” has a variety of meanings in the Pauline writings, its distinctive Pauline usage denotes that self-regarding element in human nature which has been corrupted at the source, characterized by appetites and propensities which, if unchecked, produce “the works of the flesh” listed in Gal. 5:19-20.³⁵ These include not only various forms of bodily impurity and excess but also such things as quarrelsomeness, envy, enmity, uncontrolled rage, and selfish ambition. The “desire of the flesh”³⁶ which, according to Gal. 5:16, can be countered only by leading one’s life in the power of the Spirit embraces everything that is in opposition to the will of God. The “mind of the flesh”³⁷—the unregenerate outlook—is in a state of war with God and is incapable of submitting to his law (Rom. 8:7). So, says Paul, our conduct was once in keeping with the desires of this unregenerate outlook; we carried out the dictates of our flesh, of our minds.³⁸ He adds “of our minds” probably in order to emphasize that the dictates of the flesh are not merely physical urges but include such qualities as pride and self-seeking, qualities which presented a greater temptation to Paul in his younger days, when he strove to outstrip his contemporaries in zeal for the ancestral traditions (Gal. 1:14), than the vices of the pagan world could ever have done.³⁹

Paul speaks elsewhere of Peter and himself as Jews “by nature,”⁴⁰ which can only mean “by birth” (Gal. 2:15 RSV); here he says that he and his fellow-Jews were “by nature children of wrath” (i.e., worthy to receive divine judgment) as much as the Gentiles were. This common plight of humanity, Jews and Gentiles alike, has been inherited, according to Paul, from that one man through whom “sin came into the world . . . , and so death spread to all human beings inasmuch as all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). If that “one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all human beings,” as Paul puts it in Rom. 5:18 (because all humanity was encapsulated in that one man), this is tantamount to saying that all human beings are inherently (”by nature”) subject to condemnation. With this use of the Hebrew idiom “children of wrath”⁴¹ may be compared King David’s denunciation of the rich man who seized his poor neighbor’s ewe-lamb: “the man who has done this is a ’son of death,’ “⁴² that is, he “deserves to die” (2 Sam. 12:5 RSV).

4 When Paul speaks of the results of one man’s disobedience, he also tells how humanity can be delivered from the damnosa hereditas incurred thereby through the obedience of another man, which brings righteousness and life to those who are united to him (Rom. 5:18-21). Essentially the same thought is expressed here, but in different language. There is a way of release from the hopelessness of existence in alienation from God—an existence which is no better than death—and it is provided by God, because he is “rich in mercy.” This characterization of God is frequent in the OT: he “abounds in mercy” (Exod. 34:6; Ps. 103:8; Jon. 4:2, etc.);⁴³ indeed, he “delights in mercy” (Mic. 7:18). With his mercy is conjoined his love: “the great love with which he loved us”⁴⁴—Gentiles and Jews together. The pronoun “us” here is comprehensive, not exclusive—not “us in distinction from you” but “us together with you,” “all of us alike.” Men and women owe their salvation to the mercy and love of God. “God shows his love for us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

5 We were dead through our trespasses, says Paul (Jews and Gentiles alike), but from that state of death God brought us to life with Christ.⁴⁵ Paul does teach elsewhere that believers in Christ “have been brought from death to life” with him (e.g., in Rom. 6:13), but there the death from which they have been brought to life is their death with Christ. Through faith-union with him they have died with him to their old existence and come alive with him to a new existence. “If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him” (Rom. 6:8). Similarly in Colossians, “you were raised with Christ” (3:1) is the sequel to “you died with Christ” (2:20). But in Ephesians to be raised with Christ is the sequel to being spiritually dead—to death through trespasses rather than to death with Christ.⁴⁶ This, of course, is in line with general NT language: “this my son was dead, and is alive again” (Luke 15:24); “he who hears my word and believes him who sent me . . . has passed from death to life” (John 5:24). But it departs from distinctively Pauline usage.

The affirmation that salvation is entirely dependent on divine grace is, however, totally in agreement with Paul’s thought. Men and women who have no hope or possibility of winning God’s approval by effort or merit of their own “are justified freely by his grace, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:24). Paul prefers to speak of being justified; salvation is a more general term, denoting more particularly deliverance from the adverse judgment of God to be meted out at the end-time. If believers are here and now justified by the blood of Christ, “much more shall we be saved from the (coming) wrath through him” (Rom. 5:9).⁴⁷ In Paul’s thought, salvation for the most part belongs to the future: it is “nearer to us now than when we first believed” (Rom. 13:11). In one place, indeed, it is spoken of in the past tense, but even there its collocation with hope gives it a future reference: “by hope we were saved”⁴⁸ (Rom. 8:24). Here, however, salvation is something accomplished and experienced; it has much the same force as justification has in the capital epistles: “it is by grace that you have been saved”⁴⁹ (perfect tense). The statement is parenthetical here: it anticipates the fuller assertion of v. 8. But that people who were dead in sin should be granted a share in Christ’s resurrection life is such a demonstration of divine grace that it calls for an immediate tribute to that grace.

6 In Paul’s exposition of believers’ dying and rising with Christ in Rom. 6:3-11, their rising with Christ is a future experience which (by the Spirit’s power) is effectively anticipated in the present. “If we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his” (Rom. 6:5), but the purpose and effect of our being united by faith to a risen Christ is that here and now “we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:3). In Colossians and Ephesians, however, the emphasis is placed on the “realized” aspect of believers’ being raised with Christ: “you were raised with Christ,” the Colossians are reminded (Col. 3:1); God “raised us up with him,” the readers of Ephesians are told. Indeed, not only has God raised believers up with Christ in the sense of raising them from death to life; he has raised them to his throne and seated them there with Christ “in the heavenly realm.”⁵⁰ This goes farther than Colossians, where believers, raised to new life with Christ, remain on earth at present, but know that their life is secure with Christ, already enthroned at God’s right hand, and that they will share his glory on the coming day of his manifestation (3:1-4). Here, however, they are already enthroned with him. Taken by itself, this might express a totally realized eschatology.⁵¹ It is balanced, however, by the thoroughly Pauline doctrine of the Spirit found elsewhere in this epistle: the Spirit is the present guarantee of the future inheritance, sealing the people of God against the coming day of redemption (Eph. 1:13-14; 4:30). That God has already seated his people with Christ in the heavenly realm is an idea unparalleled elsewhere in the Pauline corpus. It can best be understood as a statement of God’s purpose for his people—a purpose which is so sure of fulfilment that it can be spoken of as having already taken place: “whom he justified, them he also glorified” (Rom. 8:30).⁵²

The added phrase “in Christ Jesus” clarifies the meaning. Enthronement with Christ in the heavenly realm is not yet part of the experience of believers,⁵³ but that is their proper location because they are incorporated in him. Their true home is where Christ is; their citizenship is in heaven (Phil. 3:20). The community to which they now belong, though “militant here in earth,” is heavenly in origin, character, and destiny. H. Schlier, who posits a baptismal setting for Ephesians, quotes Origen: “Those who are regenerated through divine baptism are placed in paradise—that is, in the church.”⁵⁴

7 In thus lavishing his mercy on sinners, giving them a share in Christ’s risen life and in his exaltation, God has a further purpose—namely, that they should serve as a demonstration of his grace to all succeeding ages.⁵⁵ “The ages to come” is a more general conception than “the coming age” of Eph. 1:21, which reflects the traditional division of time into two ages (the present age and the resurrection age). It implies one age supervening on another like successive waves of the sea, as far into the future as thought can reach. Throughout time and in eternity the church, this society of pardoned rebels, is designed by God to be the masterpiece of his goodness. When he brings into being the reconciled universe of the future,⁵⁶ the church will provide the pattern after which it will be modeled. He is “rich in mercy”—”his compassion is over all that he has made” (Ps. 145:9)—but “the surpassing wealth of his grace”⁵⁷ is displayed in “his kindness⁵⁸ toward us in Christ Jesus.” The “surpassing greatness of his power” exerted in the raising of Christ (Eph. 1:19-20)⁵⁹ is matched by the “surpassing wealth of his grace” in his dealings with those who belong to Christ. Because they are “in Christ Jesus,” he deals with them as he has dealt with him.⁶⁰ The vindication and exaltation that Christ has received are his by right; the share in that vindication and exaltation bestowed on believers in Christ is theirs by divine mercy, grace, and kindness.⁶¹

(2) God’s New Creation (2:8-10)

8 It is by this grace that you have been saved, through faith,⁶² and this does not proceed from yourselves; it is God’s gift.

9 It is not based on works, so that no one has room for boasting.

10 We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared in advance, so that we might lead our lives in them.

8 It is by this surpassingly rich grace of God, then, that salvation is secured for men and women.⁶³ As in v. 5, “you have been saved” is equivalent to “you have been justified.” What Paul says here about salvation he says elsewhere about justification, which is freely bestowed by God’s grace (Rom. 3:24) and received “not on the ground of legal works but through faith in Jesus Christ” (Gal. 2:16). “Through faith” here implies Jesus Christ as the object of that faith, as he is explicitly its object in Gal. 2:16 and Rom. 3:22, 26.⁶⁴

The words “and this does not proceed from yourselves; it is God’s gift” are probably to be taken as parenthetical, inserted into the statement that salvation is received “through faith, . . . not on the basis of works.” Interpreters have differed on the precise reference of “this.” If the Greek pronoun were feminine, agreeing in gender with “faith,” then the reference to faith would be plain. The sense would be: even the faith through which you have been saved is not your own doing; you could not have exercised it unless God had given it to you. But the pronoun is neuter,⁶⁵ and does not necessarily refer to faith. Even so, it may refer generally to faith: “the difference of gender is not fatal to such a view” (J. A. Robinson).⁶⁶ That faith is referred to has been the view of many exegetes,⁶⁷ including Augustine,⁶⁸ C. Hodge (who argues that the passage is tautological on any other understanding),⁶⁹ and E. K. Simpson (“Nor is this very faith a product of the soil, but a gift of God imparted from on high conjointly with a change of heart”).⁷⁰ Among those who take the reference to be to salvation itself (imparted by grace and accepted by faith) is Calvin, in whose view “not of yourselves” is parallel to “not on the basis of works” (v. 9) and “it is God’s gift” is parallel to “by (God’s) grace.”⁷¹ This particular word for “gift” (dōron), common as it is, does not appear elsewhere in the Pauline corpus; other words with much the same meaning are used to denote God’s gift of righteousness and life in Christ (Rom. 5:15-17; 6:23).⁷² It is probably best to understand “and this” as referring to salvation as a whole, not excluding the faith by which it is received.

9 “It is not based on works”—of course not, for “if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace” (Rom. 11:6). If it were based on works, those who received it could claim some credit for it. “If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about”⁷³ (Rom. 4:2), but it was Abraham’s faith that was “reckoned to him as righteousness” (Gen. 15:6, quoted in Rom. 4:3; Gal. 3:6). “For this reason it is based on faith, that it might be according to grace” (Rom. 4:16). And where divine grace operates, human merit is excluded, and human boasting too (Rom. 3:27).⁷⁴ There is no room for such boasting in God’s presence; “therefore, as it is written, ’Let anyone who boasts, boast in the Lord’” (1 Cor. 1:29, 31, quoting Jer. 9:24).

10 The work of grace which has transformed those who were spiritually and morally dead into new men and women, alive with the resurrection life of Christ, is God’s work from first to last: “we are his workmanship.” The word so translated⁷⁵ is used in one other place in the Pauline writings—in Rom. 1:20, where it refers (in the plural) to God’s created works.⁷⁶ Here, however, it refers to the new creation of which Paul speaks more than once. This new creation (as is emphasized below in v. 15) transcends natural distinctions of the old order: in it “neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation” (Gal. 6:15); “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). The new heaven and earth of which an OT prophet spoke (Isa. 65:17; 66:22) have come into existence already in this new order, “created in Christ Jesus.” If those who belonged to the old order were dead through their trespasses and sins, those who belong to the new creation are characterized by “good works,”⁷⁷ works performed not to secure salvation but as the fruit of salvation. God, we are told, “prepared” these good works “in advance,” that they might mark his people’s way of life.⁷⁸ They are the good works which reflect the character and action of God himself. God gave his people the law that they might be like him: “I am the LORD your God; . . . you shall therefore be holy, for I am holy” (Lev. 11:44-45). Jesus similarly taught his disciples to behave in a manner befitting God’s children, to be merciful as their Father is merciful (Luke 6:35-36). ⁷⁹ But to live like this, to accomplish the good works prepared for his children by God, the empowering gift of his Spirit is necessary. The good works were promulgated long ago, but thanks to the saving act of God “the righteous requirement of the law” is fulfilled in those who “walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:4).⁸⁰ His new creation “in Christ Jesus” is brought into being by the agency of the Spirit, and by the Spirit’s agency the promise of the new covenant is realized when men and women are found “doing the will of God from the heart” (Eph. 6:6).⁸¹

4. THE INCORPORATION OF THE GENTILES (2:11-22)

(1) Their Former Plight (2:11-12)

11 Therefore, remember that you were formerly Gentiles by natural descent,⁸² called “uncircumcision” by the so-called man-made external⁸³ circumcision—

12 (remember, I say,) that at that time you were without Christ, aliens⁸⁴ from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants (which embodied) the promise;⁸⁵ you were bereft of hope and existed in the world without God.⁸⁶

11 The privileges now enjoyed by Gentile believers in Christ would be appreciated all the more gratefully if they bore in mind the state of life from which they had been delivered. The pious Jew was ever conscious of the privileges which he had inherited: daily he thanked God that he had not been made a Gentile. To him and to his people the true God had revealed himself in a unique manner: he had “not dealt thus with any other nation”; no other nation “knew his ordinances” (Ps. 147:20). The external sign of the Jews’ special relationship with God was circumcision, the seal of the covenant which he had made with their ancestor Abraham (Gen. 17:9-14). Although they were not the only nation to practice circumcision,⁸⁷ the Jews’ practice of it was sufficiently distinctive in the Graeco-Roman world for them to be called comprehensively the “circumcision,” while they could refer to non-Jews comprehensively as the “uncircumcision.”⁸⁸ The Jews’ circumcision might be a matter of reproach against them on the lips of their Gentile neighbors,⁸⁹ but in the eyes of Jews the uncircumcision of Gentiles was a token of their estrangement from God. It was a religious handicap which could be overcome only if a Gentile became a proselyte to the Jewish faith, accepting circumcision and the attendant obligation to keep the law of Moses. (That only males bore the covenant seal in their bodies gave them greater religious prerogatives than women enjoyed: the man who thanked God daily that he had not been made a Gentile thanked him at the same time that he had not been made a woman.)⁹⁰Paul, who before his conversion had taken pride in the fact that he was “circumcised on the eighth day” (Phil. 3:5) and may well have been an ardent proselytizer, inviting Gentiles to submit to circumcision and thus be incorporated in the covenant people (cf. Gal. 5:11), had now learned that circumcision in the flesh was religiously irrelevant.⁹¹ This “man-made external circumcision” he now depreciated; in one place he dismisses it as no better than mutilation (Phil. 3:2).⁹² What mattered in the sight of God was the circumcision or cleansing of the heart of which Moses and the prophets spoke (Deut. 10:16; 30:6; Jer. 4:4), the “circumcision not made with hands” or “circumcision of Christ,” as it is called in Col. 2:11.⁹³ This spiritual “circumcision” is equally available to Jews and Gentiles, to men and women. In the new order which the gospel has inaugurated there is no room for mutual disparagement between the circumcised and the uncircumcised.

12 The religious privileges inherited by the Jews were substantial: not only were they “entrusted with the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2), but, as Paul emphasizes in Rom. 9:4-5, “to them belong the sonship,⁹⁴ the glory,⁹⁵ the covenants,⁹⁶ the giving of the law, the worship,⁹⁷ and the promises;⁹⁸ to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.” From all those privileges the Gentiles had been cut off. They were foreigners, not members of the chosen people. The covenants with the patriarchs, which held out the promise of great blessing for them and their posterity, did indeed make mention of “all the nations of the earth” as somehow involved in that blessing;⁹⁹ but not until the coming of Christ and the free proclamation of the gospel could believing Gentiles, without first becoming Jews, “be blessed with believing Abraham” (Gal. 3:9). Gentiles did not share the hope of Israel,¹⁰⁰ they did not know the God of Israel, nor did it seem possible that the Messiah of Israel should have any significance for them.

There is another place in the Pauline correspondence where those “who do not know God” are described as having “no hope” (1 Thess. 4:5, 13). There the hope which pagans lack is not simply the hope of Israel but the hope of resurrection in the new light given to it for those who “believe that Jesus died and rose again.” The absence of hope in the face of death is amply attested in the literature and epigraphy of the Graeco-Roman world of that day.¹⁰¹ But here the reference is more general: God is “the God of hope” (Rom. 15:13) and to be without him is to be without real hope even in this world, not to speak of that which is to come.

(2) Their Present Access (2:13-18)

13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.

14 For he is himself our peace: he has made us both one, and has broken down the intervening wall which formed a barrier between us.

15 In his flesh he has abolished the hostility, the law of commandments, ordinances and all,¹⁰² in order to create of the two in himself¹⁰³ one new¹⁰⁴ human being, (thus) making peace,

16 and to reconcile both to God in one body through the cross, having by its means¹⁰⁵ put the hostility to death.

17 Then he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off as well as peace¹⁰⁶ to those who were near.

18 It is through him that we both have our access in one Spirit to the Father.

13 The new order “in Christ Jesus” has now changed the whole situation. Gentiles, who formerly were “far off” from God (in contrast to the Israelites, who had been accepted into his covenant), have now been “brought near.” The designation of Gentiles as “far off” may derive from OT usage (compare the quotation from Isa. 57:19 in v. 17 below);¹⁰⁷ it is found elsewhere in the NT—by implication, for example, in the apostolic message of Acts 2:39 (“the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are far off”) and expressly in the Lord’s commission to Paul recorded in Acts 22:21 (“I will send you far off to the Gentiles”).

The means by which Gentile believers have been “brought near” is stated: it is “by the blood of Christ.” The blood of Christ, his sacrificial death, mentioned already as the means of their redemption (Eph. 1:7), is also the means of their reconciliation to God (cf. Col. 1:20-22; Rom. 5:10). There is a noteworthy parallel between the language used here and that of Heb. 10:19-22, where believers are encouraged to “have confidence to enter the [heavenly] sanctuary by the blood of Jesus” and thus “draw near” to God. It may be that in Hebrews Jewish Christians are addressed, whereas in the present context Gentile believers are more directly in view; but “in Christ Jesus” the ground of approach for both groups is the same.

14 “For he is himself our peace”¹⁰⁸ in a twofold sense—not only has he reconciled his people to God through his death but he has reconciled them to each another; in particular, he has reconciled those of Jewish birth to those of Gentile birth. To say that he is our peace sets forth the truth more emphatically than to say that he has “made peace” (v. 15) or “proclaimed peace” (v. 17). It is in him, as fellow-members of his body, that his people enjoy their twofold peace. It is he who has brought the formerly hostile groups into a new unity, in which the old distinction between Jew and Gentile has been transcended.¹⁰⁹ Whereas Jews formerly tended to speak of the division of humanity into Jews and Gentiles, Paul makes a threefold classification into Jews, Greeks (Gentiles), and church of God (1 Cor. 10:32), the last embracing former Jews and former Gentiles. No wonder that Christians spoke of themselves as a “third race” or “new race,” no longer Jewish, no longer Gentile.¹¹⁰

The barrier which formerly separated Jews and Gentiles has been demolished by Christ. This traditional barrier was both religious and sociological: as the following words make plain, it consisted of the Jewish law, more particularly of those features of it which marked Jews off from Gentiles—circumcision and the food restrictions, for example.¹¹¹ In the gospel order such features were superseded. No longer did circumcision or uncircumcision have any religious relevance: such matters as the observance of special days or abstention from certain kinds of food belonged henceforth to the realm of personal conscience; with regard to them everyone should be “fully convinced in his own mind,” without being condemned or despised by anyone else for his decision (Rom. 14:5-12).

Several commentators have suggested, however, that some actual barrier provided the analogy for this description of the Jewish law. One view, maintained by Heinrich Schlier and others, is that the analogy was provided by the barrier which, in some gnostic and other schemes of thought, separated the world below from the upper world of the plērōma.¹¹² The gnostic form of this concept is not attested early enough for one to accept with any confidence the idea that it has influenced the language of our present passage.¹¹³ A nongnostic instance comes in the pseudonymous “Acts of Thaddaeus,” preserved by Eusebius, according to which the apostle Thaddaeus preached the gospel to Abgar, ruler of Edessa, and told how Jesus, having been crucified, “descended into Hades and rent asunder the barrier which had not been rent from eternity, and raised up the dead: he descended alone, but ascended to his Father with a great multitude.”¹¹⁴ The concept of this horizontal barrier might be relevant to the passage about Christ’s descending and ascending in Eph. 4:8-10, but the barrier between Jews and Gentiles was not a horizontal barrier, separating those above from those below, but rather a vertical barrier.

Such a vertical barrier stood in the temple precincts in Jerusalem, preventing Gentiles from proceeding from the outer court (”the court of the Gentiles”) into any of the inner courts. Josephus describes how this barrier encircled the higher ground which contained the inner courts and had attached to it at intervals notices in Greek and Latin warning Gentiles not to proceed farther on pain of death.¹¹⁵ This was indeed a material barrier keeping Jews and Gentiles apart. It cannot be said with certainty that it provided the analogy for the wording of our text, but it would have been a more appropriate analogy than any horizontal barrier. It might indeed be asked if the readers of this epistle would have recognized such an allusion.¹¹⁶ Perhaps not; but they would have had greater difficulty in recognizing an allusion to the barrier separating the upper from the lower world. Whatever the readers may or may not have recognized, however, it should be remembered that the temple barrier in Jerusalem played an important part in the chain of events which led to Paul’s becoming the “prisoner of Christ Jesus for the sake of you Gentiles” (as he is called in Eph. 3:1). For, according to Acts 21:27-36, Paul’s arrest came about because he was charged with aiding and abetting illegal entry by a Gentile Christian through the temple barrier. The charge could not be sustained when it came to court, as no witnesses were forthcoming, but Paul was not released but kept in custody, first in Caesarea and then in Rome. That literal “middle wall of partition,” the outward and visible sign of the ancient cleavage between Jew and Gentile, could have come very readily to mind in this situation.¹¹⁷

15 The question arises whether “hostility” should be construed as a second object after “has broken down,” in apposition with “wall,” or as the first object of “has abolished,” in apposition with “law.” Since “wall,” “hostility,” and “law” are so closely associated, the sense is not materially affected by the construction, but the balance of the clauses is better maintained if the second construction is preferred.¹¹⁸ The barrier between Jews and Gentiles was largely a psychological barrier, the antipathy aroused by the separateness of the Jews, accompanied as it often was by a sense of superiority on their part. But this antipathy, it is affirmed, has been abolished by Christ “in his flesh”—that is, by his death (compare the fuller wording of Col. 1:22, “in the body of his flesh, through death”). How? Because by his death he has done away with that which separated the Jew from the Gentile, “the law of commandments, ordinances and all.”¹¹⁹

It is not the law as a revelation of the character and will of God that has been done away with in Christ. In that sense of the term the question and answer of Rom. 3:31 remain valid: “Do we then overthrow the law¹²⁰ by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.” The righteousness required by the law of God is realized more fully by the inward enabling of the Spirit—in Jew and Gentile alike—than was possible under the old covenant. But the law as a written code, threatening death instead of imparting life, is done away with in Christ, as Paul argues in 2 Cor. 3:6-15.¹²¹ And when the law in that sense is done away with, the barrier between Jews and Gentiles is removed; Jewish particularism and Gentile exclusion are things of the past. In another place Paul describes how even one commandment of the law, brought to the conscious attention of a man or woman, can constitute an instrument by which sin gains a foothold, so that the result attained is the opposite of what the commandment enjoins (Rom. 7:7-11). In speaking here of the law, “it is as a code of manifold precepts, expressed in definite ordinances, that he declares it to have been annulled” (J. A. Robinson).¹²²

The phrase rendered “ordinances and all” might be otherwise translated “consisting of ordinances” or “contained in ordinances”; the rendering given above follows the analogy of Col. 2:14 (although the Greek phrase there is not exactly the same as here).¹²³

Now that the barrier has been removed, there is no further need for the communities which it kept apart to remain separate. The purpose of the work of Christ is that they should be brought together into a new unity. In place of the former hostility, he has now made peace. Where two opposed groups once stood over against each other, he has “in himself”— “in Christ Jesus” (v. 13)—created a new humanity, indeed, a new human being.¹²⁴

Since this human being—the people of Christ united in him as fellow-members of his body—is a new creation, it is unnecessary to seek previously existing analogies for it. One such analogy has been found in the heavenly anthrōpos of Mandaism and other forms of gnosticism.¹²⁵ This has been traced back, at least in part, to the Avestan figure of Gayōmart, the primal man.¹²⁶ But the new anthrōpos of this passage and Eph. 4:24 is a corporate entity, the counterpart in the gospel order of the “old anthrōpos” which, according to Rom. 6:6, was “crucified with” Christ. If that old entity died in Christ’s death, the new entity has come to life in his resurrection. A more adequate background to this idea than one drawn from any extraneous source is provided by Paul himself when he tells his Galatian converts how he endures birth pangs over them until (as he says) “Christ be formed in you” (Gal. 4:19).

16 The reconciliation of former Jews and Gentiles “in one body” is the result of their reconciliation to God. The instrument of this twofold reconciliation is the cross of Christ. In Col. 1:20 Christ is said to have “made peace through the blood of his cross” in the sense of reconciling an estranged creation to God; here it is through that same cross that those who have by its means been reconciled to God are reconciled one to another. Human hostility to God has to be overcome—”while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son” (Rom. 5:10)—and hostility within the human family (and within creation as a whole) must similarly be overcome. Both forms of hostility have been “put to death” by Christ through his own death on the cross.¹²⁷ This is no doubt an ideal not yet fully realized in experience; but the insistence of this epistle is that the ideal will one day be seen as a worldwide reality, thanks to the completeness of Christ’s reconciling sacrifice.

17 “The word which God sent to Israel, preaching good news of peace by Jesus Christ (he is Lord of all),” began to be made available to the Gentile world also when Peter spoke those words in the house of Cornelius (Acts 10:36). Here Christ himself is the preacher (acting by his Spirit in his messengers): “he came and proclaimed peace.” The language is borrowed from Isa. 57:19, “Peace, peace to the far and to the near, says the LORD,”¹²⁸ as he promises healing and restoration to his people, those in distant exile as well as those close at hand. The welcome sound of the Lord’s messenger has been celebrated in Isa. 52:7, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings, who publishes peace”—words echoed already by Paul in Rom. 10:15 and later in Eph. 6:15. But for Paul and his fellow-preachers those who are “far off” are no longer, or at least not only, Jews of the distant dispersion: they are Gentiles, who “once were far off” but have now “been brought near by the blood of Christ” (v. 13), “brought near” to God himself, and assured of an equal welcome from him with their fellow-believers of Jewish birth, whose ground of approach to him is no different from theirs.

18 For it is through Christ that Jewish and Gentile believers alike have their access to the Father.¹²⁹ In Christ they have become members of his family, and when they address him by the family name “Abba! Father!” (the name by which Jesus addressed him), they give evidence of being indwelt by one and the same Spirit,¹³⁰ the Spirit of God’s Son (Gal. 4:6). Within his family the Father makes no distinction between those children who are Jewish by birth and those who are Gentile. To us the abolition of the barrier separating Jews and Gentiles may not be so revolutionary as it was for Paul and his associates; but there are other divisions within the human family which are equally irrelevant in the sight of God and ought to be irrelevant in his children’s sight.

Mention has been made earlier of the parallel between this teaching about free access to God and the teaching of Heb. 10:19-22. Another parallel is found in Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman about the nature of true worship: “The hour is coming when neither on this mountain [Gerizim] nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. . . . God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:21-24).¹³¹

(3) Their Membership in the House of God (2:19-22)

19 So then,¹³² you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are¹³³ fellow-citizens of the saints and members of the house of God;

20 you have been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone,¹³⁴

21 for it is in him that the whole structure¹³⁵ is bonded together and grows into a holy sanctuary in the Lord;

22 it is in him that you too are being built together for God’s¹³⁶ dwelling-place in the Spirit.

19 The first Gentile believers who were admitted to a church comprising Jewish Christians could well have felt ill at ease; it was desirable that they should be made to feel completely at home. The church had a Jewish base; its members had Jewish presuppositions, and it would have been too easy for Gentile Christians to do or say something which was felt to be out of place. What indeed was their status in such a community? Were they there on sufferance, as visitors, like the God-fearing Gentiles who attended synagogue in cities of the dispersion? Was their position like that of resident aliens in a Greek city, or that of peregrini in Rome?¹³⁷ In a crisis like that which arose in Antioch when Peter and others abandoned the practice of table-fellowship with Gentile Christians, the latter must have got the impression that they were at best second-rate citizens. Against this apparent demotion of Gentile Christians Paul protested vigorously at Antioch (Gal. 2:11-14), and it is Paul’s attitude that finds uncompromising expression here. Gentile Christians are not adherents or visitors or second-rate citizens in the believing community; they are full members. If the community is viewed as a city, they are citizens, not resident aliens. The “saints” with whom they are fellow-citizens are the original “saints”— “we who first placed our hope in Christ,” as they are called in Eph. 1:12. Gentile believers are now included among the “saints”—not only among the followers of Jesus but among the people of God of all ages. Once the Gentiles had no place among the people of God, but now a new situation has come about—a situation to which Paul has already applied words from the book of Hosea:

“Those who were not my people I will call ’my people,’

and her who was not beloved I will call ’my beloved.’

And in the very place where it was said to

them, ’You are not my people,’

they will be called ’sons of the living God’ “ (Rom. 9:25-26).¹³⁸

If the community is viewed as a house or household, the Gentile believers are full members of the family—not household servants but sons and daughters, with all the rights of inheritance that sons and daughters enjoy. The Father to whom they have access is the same Father as he to whom their brothers and sisters of Jewish origin have access—it is by the same Spirit that his Gentile and Jewish children alike acknowledge him as their Father.

In writing to the Christians of Rome, Paul implies that some of the Gentiles among them were inclined to look down on their Jewish fellow-Christians as poor relations, mercifully rescued from an apostate nation, and he warns them against such an attitude: “remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you” (Rom. 11:18). They had been cut out of the wild olive, the fruitless shoot to which they originally belonged, and grafted into the good olive tree, to share the nutriment and fertility of the true people of God. The credit was not theirs; they were entirely indebted to God’s mercy. In our present epistle there is no suggestion that its Gentile recipients stood in need of such a warning; what they are given is full encouragement to magnify the grace of God which has rescued them from their former place as rank outsiders and instated them among his children.

20 If the community is viewed as a building, the Gentile believers are integral parts of the structure. This is one of the figures employed by Paul in writing to the Corinthian church: “you are God’s field,” he says, and then, changing the metaphor, “you are God’s building” (1 Cor. 3:9). There he speaks of himself as the “skilled master builder” who laid the foundation—the foundation being Jesus Christ himself (1 Cor. 3:10-11). Here the figure of the building is retained, but the figures for certain parts of it are changed: the foundation now consists of the apostles and prophets, and Christ is the cornerstone. These changes in metaphor are no argument in themselves for diversity of authorship: metaphors may be altered to emphasize this or that lesson.

It is possible indeed, with the NEB, to understand “the foundation laid by the apostles and prophets”;¹³⁹ but it is more natural to understand the foundation as consisting of the apostles and prophets. These prophets, as elsewhere in this epistle where they are conjoined with apostles (Eph. 3:5; 4:11), are Christian prophets. (The fact that the definite article is not repeated before “prophets” does not imply that the prophets and apostles are identical.)¹⁴⁰ Apostles and prophets¹⁴¹ constitute the foundation ministries in the church, not only in Ephesians but in 1 Corinthians: “God has appointed in the church first apostles, second prophets . . .” (1 Cor. 12:28). Apostles and prophets, then, might well be viewed as the first stones to be laid in the new building.¹⁴² (The probability of Paul’s using such language, in the light of his own special apostleship, will be variously assessed.)

But what is meant by the cornerstone? The wording (like that in 1 Pet. 2:6) is drawn from Isa. 28:16. The word translated “cornerstone” (akrogōniaios) appears in the Septuagint version of that text; it is unknown in classical Greek literature. In the context of Isa. 28:16 the prophet utters a warning about the impending deluge of an Assyrian invasion which will sweep away the “refuge of lies” in which the king and people of Judah have put their trust. While the existing structure of the Judaean nation has become useless for the accomplishment of the divine purpose, there remains a small minority of faithful souls which will form the basis of a new community and ensure the fulfilment of that purpose. The foundation of this community is announced in the oracle:

“Behold, I am laying in Zion for a foundation

a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation:

’He who believes will not be in haste.’ “

The Hebrew wording leaves no doubt that the stone being laid is a foundation stone: “Behold, I am founding ... a founded foundation.”¹⁴³ Yet this foundation stone is in some sense a cornerstone,¹⁴⁴ bonding the structure together. Not only so: it is a “stone of testing,”¹⁴⁵ which might mean one that is tested and found true but means more probably here one that tests the work to show if it has been carried out to the architect’s specifications.

The NT application of the oracle to Christ finds some support in the Septuagint wording;¹⁴⁶ a similar interpretation appears later in the Targum of Jonathan: “Behold, I am setting in Zion a king, a mighty king . . .” (that is, the Messiah). At Qumran the stone, in line with the original intention, was interpreted of the initial nucleus of the covenanted community:¹⁴⁷ “This is the tested wall, the precious cornerstone; its foundations shall not tremble nor be moved from their place.”¹⁴⁸

The Septuagint translator saw that a foundation stone was in view and made this doubly explicit: “Behold, I lay for the foundations of Zion a stone . . . even for its foundations.”¹⁴⁹ But, having done this, he used the word akrogōniaios, which is an unsuitable designation for a foundation stone. For akrogōniaios, so far as can be determined, does not mean a cornerstone, but a stone which crowns the building, like the “top stone” of Zerubbabel’s temple, the last stone to be placed in position—placed in position by Zerubbabel himself, who had begun the work by laying the foundation stone (Zech. 4:7, 9).¹⁵⁰ While the Septuagint uses akrogōniaios only in Isa. 28:16, the later Greek version of Symmachus uses it in 2 Kings (4 Kingdoms) 25:17¹⁵¹ and again in Ps. 118 (LXX 117):22, where it denotes the stone which has become “head of the corner”¹⁵²—in other words, top of the pediment.

Elsewhere in the NT the cornerstone of Isa. 28:16 is combined with the once rejected stone of Ps. 118 (117):22 (and also with the stone of stumbling of Isa. 8:14-15) to form a composite testimonium (cf. 1 Pet. 2:6-8).¹⁵³ But here there is no conflation and no risk of confusing the foundation with the cornerstone: the apostles and prophets constitute the foundation, and Christ is the cornerstone.

21 It is in relation to the cornerstone that every other part of the building is allotted its proper place. In the margin of the NEB Christ is here called the “keystone,” which holds the entire structure together.¹⁵⁴ Under his direction the whole building “grows up” to form a sanctuary. With the importation of biological language into the architectural figure may be compared the importation of architectural language into the biological figure of Eph. 4:16. ¹⁵⁵ This passage does not mean that “every building” grows together to form one grand complex edifice, as though the reference were to a multiplicity of local churches making up the church universal.¹⁵⁶ The church universal is viewed as a structure complete in itself, just as in 1 Cor. 3:9-17 the local church is similarly viewed. Moreover, as the local church is God’s sanctuary, a dwelling-place for his Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16-17), so is the church universal.

An important background to the conception of the community as a sanctuary is provided at Qumran, where the community constituted “a most holy dwelling for Aaron . . . and a house of perfection and truth in Israel.”¹⁵⁷ (”Aaron” denotes the priestly members of the community and “Israel” the lay members: the community, in other words, was regarded as a living sanctuary in which the laity constituted the holy place and the priesthood the holy of holies. Any such distinction between laity and priesthood is foreign to the conception of the church in the NT.)

22 If the apostles and prophets were the foundation members of this living sanctuary and other Jewish believers were among the earliest “stones” built into its fabric, the situation now was that Gentile believers (”you too”) were being added to the structure, in constantly increasing numbers.¹⁵⁸ The new community, God’s fellowship of reconciliation, transcends all distinctions of race, status, and sex. Properly oriented to the one cornerstone, based on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Gentile Christians, along with their fellow-believers of Jewish birth, belonged equally to God’s holy house. As the God of Israel had once taken up residence in the wilderness tabernacle and later in the Jerusalem temple by his name¹⁵⁹ and his glory,¹⁶⁰ so now by his Spirit he makes the fellowship of believers, Jewish and Gentile alike, his chosen dwelling-place. No privilege is bestowed on the people of God in which Gentiles do not enjoy an equal share.

EPHESIANS 3

5. INTERCESSORY PRAYER RESUMED (3:1)

1 For this reason I Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus¹ for the sake of you Gentiles, [bend my knees in prayer].²

1 The intercessory prayer of Eph. 1:15-19, which passes into a statement of the exaltation of Christ and of his people with him, followed by the celebration of God’s grace to the Gentiles, is now resumed. Almost immediately, however, it is broken off to make way for an account of Paul’s distinctive ministry. The subject “I Paul” is left without a verb, which is not supplied until the prayer is taken up again in v. 14: “For this reason I bend my knees. ...”

The locution “I Paul” denotes some special emphasis. In 1 Thess. 2:18 (in a letter of multiple authorship) it introduces a personal statement in a context where Paul and his associates speak in the first person plural; in 2 Cor. 10:1 and Gal. 5:2 it introduces a solemn entreaty or warning; in Philem. 19 it introduces a formal undertaking to pay a debt; in Col. 1:23 it stresses Paul’s special call to the gospel ministry,³ and something of the same emphasis is expressed here. It is Paul, preacher to the Gentiles par excellence, who prays for the Gentile believers.

As in Philem. 1, 9, he calls himself the “prisoner of Christ Jesus”;⁴ here, however, he adds that his imprisonment is “for the sake of you Gentiles.” The situation which led to Paul’s arrest and subsequent detention in Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Rome arose directly out of his Gentile ministry. It was while he was in Jerusalem with representatives of his Gentile churches who were taking their churches’ respective gifts to the mother-church that he was charged with violating the sanctity of the temple by taking one of those representatives within forbidden bounds. This charge, and others associated with it, still hung over him as he waited in Rome for his appeal to come up for hearing in the supreme court. If the record of Acts 21:17-36 be read against the background of Rom. 15:14-32, where some of Paul’s thoughts about his mission are disclosed, it can scarcely be doubted that he was indeed a prisoner for the sake of Gentiles. And, if Phil. 1:12-18 refers to the same imprisonment as Eph. 3:1, that imprisonment was being actively overruled for the furtherance of the gospel at the heart of the Gentile world.

Luke tells how Paul, shortly after his arrival in Rome, invited the leaders of the local Jews to visit him, “since,” as he said, “it is because of the hope of Israel that I am bound with this chain” (Acts 28:20). It was natural that he should adapt his language to the people addressed, but there is no contradiction between the two representations of the reason for his being bound: in his eyes “the hope of Israel” looked forward to the coming of the Messiah and the resurrection of the dead, which had been fulfilled in the risen Lord whom he proclaimed. But, since he was called specifically to proclaim this risen Lord to the Gentiles, it was directly in consequence of his Gentile mission that he was bound.

6. THE MYSTERY OF CHRIST (3:2-13)

(1) Paul’s Stewardship (3:2-7)

2 You have heard—have you not?⁵—of the stewardship of God’s grace which was given to me for you:

3 that by revelation the mystery was made known to me,⁶ as I wrote before in brief.

4 (By reference to what I wrote⁷ you can discern, as you read, my insight into the mystery of Christ.)

5 In other generations this mystery was not made known to the children of men as it has now been revealed in the Spirit to God’s holy apostles⁸ and prophets—

6 namely, that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, members of the same body, joint-partakers of the promise⁹ (fulfilled) in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

7 Of this gospel I have been made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace given¹⁰ to me according to the operation of his power.

2 The parenthesis with which the opening sentence of the renewed intercession is broken off develops into a substantial digression. The words with which the digression begins—”If indeed you have heard . . .” or “On the assumption that you have heard . . .”—imply that the people addressed at least include some who were personally unacquainted with the apostle. To his friends in Ephesus he would more probably have said “You know. . . .”

The digression is designed to explain more fully Paul’s description as the Lord’s prisoner “for the sake of you Gentiles” (it is immediately after the word “Gentiles” that the construction is broken off). Paul has received, by divine appointment, a special responsibility with regard to the evangelization of the Gentile world. “I have been entrusted with a stewardship,”¹¹ he says to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 9:17); he speaks to the Gentile believers of Colossae of “the stewardship of God given to me with reference to you” (Col. 1:25). There, as here, the stewardship involves the impartation and disclosure of a “mystery”; similarly, in 1 Cor. 4:1 he refers to himself and other preachers of the gospel as “stewards of the mysteries of God.”

In calling his stewardship “the stewardship of God’s grace,” he is thinking not so much of the grace of apostleship (mentioned below in v. 7) as of the grace of God embodied and proclaimed in the gospel (”the good news of God’s grace,” as it is called in Acts 20:24). To make this gospel, revealed to him on the Damascus road, known among the Gentiles is Paul’s distinctive commission.

3 The “revelation” by which the divine mystery was made known to Paul cannot be divorced from the “revelation of Jesus Christ” granted to him on the Damascus road—on the occasion when, as he says, “God . . . was pleased to reveal his Son in me” (Gal. 1:12, 15-16).¹² He did not fully apprehend all that was involved in the revelation there and then: a lifetime of apostolic service was scarcely sufficient for him to plumb its depths. But one thing he appreciated on the spot: henceforth it was his calling to proclaim among the Gentiles the Son of God who had been newly revealed to him. What this calling entailed could be learned only through experience, but the call itself was conveyed in the revelation.

Where did Paul “write before in brief”¹³ about the revelation of the mystery? Presumably in some document to which the present readers had access, whether this letter or another. In this letter one might think of the mention of the mystery of the divine purpose in Eph. 1:9-10, or of the creation in Christ of “one new man” described in Eph. 2:14-16.¹⁴ Or, on the view (probable on other grounds) that Ephesians was addressed (inter alios) to the Christians of the Lycus valley, one might think of Col. 1:25-27, where Paul’s stewardship involves the unfolding to the Gentiles of the contents of that rich mystery “concealed for ages and generations.”¹⁵ The statement of Col. 1:25-27 is indeed “in brief” compared with the more ample statement of Eph. 3:2-13. Certainty is unattainable, and no single interpretation of the words “I wrote before in brief” is free from difficulties.

4 Whatever be the precise relevance of the previous brief written account, reference to it will enable the readers to discern Paul’s “insight into the mystery of Christ.” The phrase “as you read”¹⁶ has been explained by E. J. Goodspeed in terms of his own view of the character and purpose of this letter. If Ephesians was written after the other letters in the Pauline collection, to serve as an introduction to that collection, then everything else in the collection had been written before. Paul had made repeated references in his letters to the revelation he had received and his commission to make it known, but each of those references was “in brief” in comparison with the exposition of the subject in Ephesians. “The readers of Ephesians are expected to read Paul’s letters, and find in them, as the writer of Ephesians has done, the proof of his deep understanding of the Christian faith.”¹⁷

The “mystery of Christ” into which Paul has received such exceptional insight is the content of the “revelation of Jesus Christ” of which he speaks in Gal. 1:12.¹⁸ Christ is himself “the mystery of God” (Col. 2:2; cf. Col. 1:26-27) in the sense that in him the unseen God is fully revealed; “the mystery of Christ” may best be understood as the mystery which consists in Christ, the mystery which is disclosed in him.¹⁹ This mystery is proclaimed in the gospel, which may indeed be called “the mystery of God” in 1 Cor. 2:1.²⁰ Paul sometimes uses the term “mystery” of one particular element in his message—the transformation of believers into spiritual bodies at the last trumpet (1 Cor. 15:51) or Israel’s final restoration as the goal of its temporary relegation in favor of the Gentiles (Rom. 11:25). But his use of the term in Ephesians to denote the gospel in its fullness is in keeping with his general practice.²¹ The gospel which he received on the Damascus road by “revelation of Jesus Christ” was the law-free gospel which he proceeded to preach throughout the rest of his life; and precisely because it was law-free it was as applicable to Gentiles as to Jews (the law being the barrier that had formerly kept them apart). The incorporation of Gentiles along with Jews in the new people of God—incorporation by grace through faith—was implicit in that gospel. This incorporation is the aspect of the “mystery of Christ” which is now emphasized.

5 This is a mystery in the sense that it was not made known to human beings in other generations. Similar language is used in the doxology at the end of the letter to the Romans, where Paul’s gospel, “the preaching of Jesus Christ,” is said to be “the revelation of the mystery which was kept secret for long ages” (Rom. 16:25),²² and in Col. 1:25-27, where “the word of God” which Paul is commissioned to make known is called “the mystery which has been concealed for ages and generations.”²³ In Col. 1:27 this mystery is summed up in Christ, dwelling in the hearts of Gentile believers as their hope of glory.

Elsewhere Paul insists that his gospel is no innovation. It was promised in advance through the prophets in the holy scriptures (Rom. 1:2); it was preached beforehand to Abraham (Gal. 3:8). That faith was the principle by which God would justify men and women, Gentiles as well as Jews, was not a truth concealed in earlier generations. It is a truth attested, according to Paul, in the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings.²⁴ He adduces evidence from the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings²⁵ to establish that Christ came not only “to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs” regarding their descendants but also “in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy” (Rom. 15:8-12), and in this evidence he finds the scriptural basis for his own Gentile mission.

That God would bless the Gentiles, then, was not a new revelation. What then was the new revelation, the mystery hitherto concealed? It was this: that God’s blessing of the Gentiles would involve the obliteration of the old line of demarcation which separated them from Jews and the incorporation of Gentile believers together with Jewish believers, without any discrimination, in the new, comprehensive community of God’s chosen people.

This had not been foreseen; this was now “revealed in the Spirit to God’s holy apostles and prophets.” In Rom. 16:26 what had long been kept secret was “now disclosed and through prophetic writings . . . made known to all the nations.” In Col. 1:26 the previously hidden mystery was “now made manifest to his saints.” It was made known now to all the nations in the worldwide preaching of the gospel; it was made known to God’s holy people because they were the natural recipients of his revelation; it was made known to the apostles and prophets because they were the ministers through whom the truth of God was communicated to their fellow-believers. It emerges almost immediately that among those ministers it is Paul himself who holds the primacy.

But the form of the words—God’s “holy apostles and prophets”²⁶— gives the reader pause. There is a note of detachment about it which suggests another hand than Paul’s. If Paul himself had used the plural here, he would probably have said “to us apostles” (cf. 1 Cor. 4:9); as it is, the form of words, and especially the reverential adjective “holy,”²⁷ would have come more naturally from one who was not himself an apostle or prophet—not necessarily a later writer, but conceivably a colleague of Paul. “The Church is built upon the twofold foundation of apostles and prophets ... , the apostles representing the authority of primary witness to the Gospel facts, while prophets represent the living guidance of the Spirit by which the facts were apprehended in ever fuller meaning and scope.”²⁸ Through these two ministries—the apostles empowered by the Spirit of Christ and the prophets inspired by the same Spirit²⁹—effect was now being given to the divine purpose which had for so long remained unrevealed.

6 What has now been revealed is the plan of God that human beings without distinction—Gentiles as well as Jews—should on the common ground of faith be his sons and daughters in Christ. “If children, then heirs” (Rom. 8:17). To Abraham God had pledged a noble heritage of blessing, and of that heritage Abraham’s descendants were the heirs. Addressing Jews in Jerusalem in the earliest days of the church, Peter had said, “You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant which God gave to your fathers, saying to Abraham, ’And in your posterity shall all the families of the earth be blessed’” (Acts 3:25).³⁰ But now the divine plan has been revealed—that “all the families of the earth” should through the gospel not only be blessed in Abraham’s posterity but should be reckoned among his posterity, children of Abraham because they share the faith of Abraham, who “is the father of us all” (Rom. 4:16). Gentile believers are therefore with Jewish believers “fellow-heirs” of all the blessings pledged to Abraham and his descendants—”heirs of God,” in fact, “and fellow-heirs³¹ with Christ,” as Paul puts it elsewhere (Rom. 8:17). For, as the readers of this letter have already been told, it is in Christ that believers receive their inheritance and have been sealed with the Spirit as the guarantee of their eventual entry upon it (Eph. 1:13-14).

Gentile believers, moreover, have been incorporated into the same body as Jewish believers; they are fellow-members of the body of Christ. This is the first (and only NT) occurrence of the compound adjective meaning “belonging to the same body”;³² it seems to be used only by Christian writers. It might be regarded as appropriate that a new word should be coined to express so revolutionary a concept as the inclusion of Gentiles in the people of God on the same footing as Jews. Even proselytes from paganism to the Jewish faith were debarred from a few minor privileges which were reserved for Israelites by birth.³³ In the new community there were no such restrictions (indeed, the necessity arose at times of reminding Gentile members that their Jewish fellow-Christians had equal rights with them).

In adding that Gentiles were “joint-partakers³⁴ of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel,” Paul emphasizes a truth which he had already expounded at some length in Gal. 3:6-29. The promise was made to Abraham; it was fulfilled in Christ, Abraham’s offspring par excellence,”that what was promised to faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe” (Gal. 3:22). “If you are Christ’s,” Paul continues, it makes no difference whether you are Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female: “you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Gal. 3:29).³⁵ Through the gospel, preached beforehand to Abraham and now accomplished in Christ, barriers between separated portions of the human family have been removed.

7 “Of this gospel,” says Paul, repeating what he had recently written to the Colossians (Col. 1:23), “I have been made a minister”³⁶—and to be commissioned to proclaim such a gospel was in his eyes the highest imaginable honor (all the higher in view of his former record as an opponent of that gospel). If there was a note of detachment about the reference to God’s “holy apostles and prophets,” the note now is one of full personal commitment.

In calling his commission to preach the gospel “the gift of God’s grace,”³⁷ Paul sees in it one facet of that grace which transformed him from a persecutor into a grateful recipient of “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe” (Rom. 3:22). Repeatedly he speaks of his apostolic ministry as “the grace of God given to me” (1 Cor. 3:10, etc.).³⁸ Both in God’s initial call and in the subsequent enablement which he received throughout his career he experienced “the operation of his power”³⁹—”his power which operates mightily within me,” as he had said to the Colossians (Col. 1:29).

Paul was both an apostle and a prophet, but it was in the exercise of his apostleship that he gave practical effect to the divine plan made known to him by revelation.

(2) The Eternal Purpose (3:8-13)

8 To me, the lessermost⁴⁰ of all saints,⁴¹ this grace was given, to bring to the Gentiles the good news⁴² of Christ’s unfathomable wealth,

9 and to make everyone understand⁴³ what is the stewardship of the mystery which was hidden from eternity in God, the Creator of all things,⁴⁴

10 in order that God’s manifold wisdom might now⁴⁵ be made known through the church to the principalities and the powers in the heavenly realm.

11 Such was the eternal purpose⁴⁶ which he formed⁴⁷ in Christ Jesus our Lord,

12 in whom we have our freedom of access⁴⁸ with confidence⁴⁹ through faith in him.

13 Therefore I beg you not to lose heart⁵⁰ at my afflictions on your behalf; they are indeed your glory.⁵¹

8 As he contemplates his commission to be Christ’s apostle to the Gentiles and the instrument of their incorporation into the “one body,” Paul is filled with wondering humility at the honor thus conferred on him of all people. In an earlier letter, considering the risen Lord’s appearance to him, he said, “I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them [the other apostles], though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me” (1 Cor. 15:9-10).

Some have said that the present phrase “the lessermost of all saints” (to translate a coinage by a coinage) is too exaggerated and indeed artificial a self-denigration to be authentic. This is inevitably a subjective judgment. Even more self-denigrating is Paul’s description as “first and foremost of sinners” in 1 Tim. 1:15, regarded by some as the mark of a later hand,⁵² while others look on it as a sure token of authenticity (not least in the use of the present tense “I am” rather than “I was”).⁵³ If it be asked if a Paulinist would have used such denigrating language of the apostle, the question cannot be answered with certainty. The authentic Paul did at any rate see a great contrast between his former career as a persecutor and his commissioning to be the herald of the one whom he had persecuted (in the person of his followers), and in this contrast he recognized the amazing grace of God. The special “grace” which was given to him for the discharge of his apostleship was all of a piece with the more comprehensive grace which had made him what he was.⁵⁴

When his commission is said to be “to bring the Gentiles the good news of Christ’s unfathomable wealth,” this is a more rhetorical wording of his statement in Gal. 1:16, that the purpose of the Damascus-road revelation of the Son of God was “that I might preach him among the Gentiles.” But the language of this rhetorical expansion is not un-Pauline. In Rom. 11:32-33 Paul sees in God’s consigning all (Jews and Gentiles alike) to disobedience, “that he may have mercy upon all” (Jews and Gentiles alike), evidence of the deep wealth of his wisdom and knowledge.⁵⁵ And in the same context the adjective here translated “unfathomable” is used of God’s “inscrutable” ways.⁵⁶ The wealth of divine grace and glory unfolded in the gospel is summed up in Christ. The proclamation of such a Savior to the world was a service which Paul might well “glorify,” as he puts it in Rom. 11:13.⁵⁷

9 Paul’s commission also involved the public demonstration of his stewardship—not only the stewardship of God’s grace (v. 2) but the stewardship of the long-hidden mystery.⁵⁸ Not that these are two distinct stewardships, for the mystery of God is the revelation of his grace. As Paul fulfilled his commission by preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, as through his preaching Gentiles were brought to faith in Christ and found themselves united in church fellowship with fellow-believers of Jewish birth, the long-hidden mystery was being revealed before the eyes of men and women. For the church fellowship in which Gentile and Jewish believers were united was no mere enrollment on a register of membership; it involved their union with Christ by faith and therefore their union with each other as fellow-members of his body. The “third race”⁵⁹ was coming visibly to life: something that had not been seen or imagined before was now a matter of experience. Before all ages God’s undisclosed purpose had existed in his own mind; now its accomplishment was evident not only to human beings on earth but also “to the principalities and powers in the heavenly realm.”

The designation of God in this context as “the Creator of all things” might be designed to refute gnosticizing modes of thought which made a distinction between the Creator and the Redeemer.⁶⁰ The gospel tells how God has procured redemption for his people and reconciled them through the sacrifice of Christ both to himself and to one another.⁶¹ But the God who has acted thus in grace is the God who created all things. Before the world’s foundation he chose his people in Christ and destined them in love to be his sons and daughters;⁶² before the world’s foundation, too, he cherished this plan, to go into effect at the proper time, of bringing into being a community which would bear practical witness on earth to his reconciling work. Creation does not militate against redemption and reconciliation: it subserves their accomplishment, since all alike take place “according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (Eph. 1:11).

When he sets his own life and ministry in the setting of the divine purpose and its fulfilment, Paul shows his awareness of his eschatological significance. This awareness finds particular expression in Rom. 11:13-21, where Johannes Munck does not exaggerate in saying that “Paul, as the apostle to the Gentiles, becomes the central figure in the story of salvation.”⁶³ This central significance was not of Paul’s seeking: as he realized the unique role which he filled in God’s giving effect to his saving plan, he could only marvel at the grace which had selected him for such a ministry.

10 This new, comprehensive community is to serve throughout the universe as an object-lesson of the wisdom of God—his “much-variegated” wisdom. The compound adjective here used is poetic in origin: its first occurrence is in Attic tragedy.⁶⁴ The variety of divine wisdom is spelled out (without the use of this particular adjective) in Wisdom 7:22-23: “For in her there is a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, and penetrating through all spirits that are intelligent and pure and most subtle.”⁶⁵ “The being of God,” says Schlier, “... reveals itself in the economy of grace as the one divine wisdom in various forms and modes, one after another—as the predestined wisdom, as the wisdom shown in creation, in Christ, the personal Wisdom, and lastly in the church as the wisdom which is multiformi specie and yet one, in Christ.”⁶⁶ The “hidden wisdom” of God, decreed before the ages for his people’s glory, to which Paul makes brief reference in 1 Cor. 2:6-10, is expounded here for the readers of Ephesians.⁶⁷

There is no need to limit the “principalities and powers” in such a context as this to hostile forces.⁶⁸ All created intelligences are in view here. When the foretelling and accomplishment of the Christian salvation are said in 1 Pet. 1:12 to be “things into which angels long to look,” something of the same sort is intended as we find here. The wisdom of God revealed in the cross of Christ and in its saving efficacy in the lives of believers upsets all conventional notions of wisdom and demands their reappraisal in the minds of the spiritually mature (1 Cor. 1:18-2:6).

The “principalities and powers” learn from the church that they too have a place in the plan of God. The reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles in this new creation is a token of the reconciliation in which they in their turn are to be embraced. In Col. 1:19-22 the cosmic reconciliation which God has planned is anticipated in the experience of believers in Christ, whom “he has now reconciled”—and the means of reconciliation in the one case as in the other is the saving work of Christ, who has “made peace through the blood of his cross.” The church thus appears to be God’s pilot scheme for the reconciled universe of the future, the mystery of God’s will “to be administered in the fullness of the times,” when “the things in heaven and the things on earth” are to be brought together in Christ (Eph. 1:9-10).⁶⁹ There is probably the further implication that the church, the product of God’s reconciling work thus far, is designed by him to be his agency (existing as it does “in Christ”) for the bringing about of the ultimate reconciliation. If so, then Paul, who is the direct instrument of God in creating the present fellowship of reconciliation, is indirectly his instrument for the universal reconciliation of the future.

11 The divine purpose, to be consummated in Christ, was originally conceived in him. Jewish and Gentile believers who have now been reconciled in him were already chosen in him “before the world’s foundation” (Eph. 1:4), and what is true of the church is true of the universe: its final reconciliation in Christ was decreed in Christ according to God’s “eternal purpose.” And in the outworking of this “purpose of the ages” the people of Christ are given an essential part to play.

12 It is through Christ, the readers have already been assured, that Jewish and Gentile believers alike have their access “in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:18). This assurance is now repeated. Through faith in Christ⁷⁰ they are united with him, and in him they therefore enjoy “freedom of access with confidence.” As his place in the presence of God is unchallengable, so is theirs, because they are “in him.”

The word translated “freedom” (parrhēsia) is used later, in Eph. 6:19, of the freedom of utterance which Paul desires for himself in the proclamation of the gospel—especially, perhaps, at his forthcoming hearing before the imperial tribunal. The attempt has been made to find the same kind of reference here,⁷¹ but the context indicates freedom of another kind—the freedom which is twice expressed by means of the same word in the letter to the Hebrews, where Christians are encouraged to draw near with “confidence” (parrhēsia) to the throne of grace (Heb. 4:16) and to enter the heavenly sanctuary with “confidence” (parrhēsia) by the blood of Jesus (Heb. 10:19).

13 As the prisoner of Christ Jesus on behalf of the Gentiles, then, Paul sets before them the eternal purpose of God, their place in that purpose, and also his own place in that purpose. To be Christ’s prisoner is for him an honorable status.⁷² Ever since his call on the Damascus road, he had been Christ’s apostle, responsive to his guidance, unreservedly at his disposal. Whether he discharged his commission along the highways of the empire and in its main centers of communication, or (as now) under house arrest in Rome, was not something which he could choose: if he was at present in custody, he was where Christ wanted him to be, obedient to his commander’s orders, posted there “for the defense of the gospel” (Phil. 1:16). Therefore he was content.

But many of his friends might not see his imprisonment in that light. Gentile Christians, who recognized him as their apostle, the champion of their liberty, might well be dismayed at the thought of his being in chains, deprived of his freedom to move around for the advancement of the gospel and the strengthening of the churches. But let them not lose heart: he was as completely engaged in their interests under his present restraint as he had been when he was at liberty. Indeed, if they could only see the significance of his arrest and imprisonment, they would understand that, in the providence of God, their interests were promoted and not endangered thereby. Instead of being bewildered and discouraged, they would rejoice. If it was an honor for Paul to be Christ’s prisoner on the Gentiles’ behalf, it was an honor for the Gentiles themselves. Paul accepted his “afflictions” as a “filling up” of the afflictions of Christ which had yet to be endured, “for the sake of his body, which is the church” (Col. 1:24-25).⁷³ The members of Christ’s body should take encouragement from that. Moreover, Paul knew that his present endurance of affliction was preparing for him “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17): that glory, which was a participation in the glory of Christ (Rom. 8:17), would be shared by those on whose behalf the present affliction was endured. Paul’s afflictions should therefore call forth from his friends as wholehearted a doxology as they called forth from himself.

7. INTERCESSORY PRAYER CONCLUDED (3:14-19)

14 For this reason I bend my knees to the Father,⁷⁴

15 from whom all fatherhood in heaven⁷⁵and on earth takes its name,

16 (praying) him to grant that you, according to the wealth of his glory, may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being,

17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, while you, being rooted and well founded in love,

18 may prevail to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,⁷⁶

19 and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.⁷⁷

14 The prayer of intercession, already begun, is now resumed and this time carried to its conclusion. It is a prayer that knowledge may be granted to the readers—not the kind of knowledge that was cultivated in many gnosticizing schools of thought, but knowledge that finds its consummation in knowing the love of Christ. To know the love of Christ involves the personal knowledge of Christ himself, that personal knowledge whose attainment was Paul’s own high ambition (Phil. 3:8, 10). Paul prays that his readers may be endowed with all the resources of spiritual strength necessary to attain this knowledge, and he addresses his prayer to the Father. The people of Christ, he has said already, have access through him “in one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:18); and Paul avails himself of this access to make intercession for his friends.

15 The Father to whom Jesus directed his prayers, and in whom he taught his disciples to trust with the implicit confidence of children, is presented as the archetypal Father: all other fatherhood in the universe is derived from his. In its two other NT occurrences, the noun here translated “fatherhood” is rendered “family”—a group sharing a common father (Luke 2:4; Acts 3:25).⁷⁸ Here too the word is commonly rendered “family”— “every family in heaven and on earth” (RSV)—but in what sense, the English reader might ask, is every family “named” from him? The Greek noun (patria) is self-evidently related to the word meaning “father” (patēr), and it makes immediate sense to say that every patria is named after the heavenly patēr. Likewise it makes immediate sense to say that every fatherhood is named after the heavenly Father.⁷⁹ True, if the rendering “family” is used, it can be said that “family” implies “fatherhood”; but the relation between the two Greek words is best preserved if “Father” and “fatherhood” are used in English.⁸⁰

In rabbinical thought the angels constitute the “family above,” and men and women on earth—whether the people of Israel particularly or the human race as such—constitute the “family below.”⁸¹ As in the reference to God as “the Creator of all things” in v. 9, so here every gnosticizing idea of an inferior deity or demiurge who has to do with the earth as opposed to the heavenly realm is excluded.

To this Father, then, Paul directs his prayer on behalf of those who have become members of his family in Christ—those whose reception of “the Spirit of his Son” is made evident by their calling him “Abba! Father!” (Gal. 4:6).

16 He prays that they may receive an inward endowment of spiritual strength, and that in no niggardly measure, but “according to the wealth of God’s glory,” or perhaps “according to his glorious wealth.”⁸² In the intercessory prayer which accompanied the introductory thanksgiving of this letter, God was asked so to enlighten the readers’ spiritual eyesight that they might know “the glorious wealth of his inheritance in the saints” (Eph. 1:18).⁸³ That was one aspect of his “glorious wealth” (or “the wealth of his glory”). The glory of God may be viewed as the sum-total of all his attibutes. Because God himself is infinite and eternal, his glory is inexhaustible, and provides the measure of his generosity when he bestows his gifts. Because his resources are inexhaustible, he cannot be impoverished by sharing them with his children.

To try to comprehend the being of God is a mind-stretching exercise; an endowment of special spiritual power⁸⁴ is necessary even to make the attempt. Paul prays that through the Spirit, the vehicle of the impartation of divine power to human beings, this endowment may be theirs. The “inner being”⁸⁵ is the new creation inwardly begotten by the Spirit in those who are united by faith to Christ. It is in tune with the mind of God and delights in his law (Rom. 7:22); it is renewed from day to day even when the “outer,” mortal nature wastes away (2 Cor. 4:16).⁸⁶ It is the immortal personality which constitutes here and now the seed of that fuller immortality to be manifested in the resurrection age. Gnostic speculation about the “inner man” does not help us to understand Paul’s use of the phrase;⁸⁷ Paul is his own best interpreter.

17 The “inner being” may be viewed as the locus of the indwelling Spirit. But the ministry of the Spirit is devoted to making the presence and power of the risen Christ real to those whom he indwells: hence the experience of the indwelling Spirit and of the indwelling Christ is the same experience. The prayer that Christ may dwell in their hearts through faith is parallel to the prayer that they may be inwardly strengthened by the Spirit of God. The aorist tense of the verb might suggest the rendering: “that Christ may take up residence in your hearts.”⁸⁸ This would be appropriate in an exhortation addressed to new Christians, whose faith was of recent origin. But the initial act of faith, by which the believer is united to Christ, is followed by the life of faith, in which that union is maintained, or in which, to change the form of words, Christ continues to dwell in his people’s hearts,⁸⁹ supplying spiritual strength for the present and the hope of glory hereafter. “If Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness” and “he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom. 8:10-11). If this note of hope does not find expression in the present intercessory prayer (as it does in the prayer-report of Eph. 1:18), it is implicit in the thought of the indwelling Christ.⁹⁰

Those in whose hearts Christ has made his abode are “rooted and well founded in love.”⁹¹ Here we have a further instance of the combining of biological and architectural figures, comparable to the admonition in Col. 2:7 to be “rooted and built up” in Christ.⁹² To be “rooted and built up” in Christ is to be “rooted and well founded in love.” This love is the love of God revealed in Christ and poured into his people’s hearts by the Spirit,⁹³ so that they in turn may show it to one another and to all.⁹⁴

18 The outcome of the spiritual strengthening for which the apostle prays, together with the experience of the indwelling Christ, will be their prevailing to grasp God’s revelation in its totality—its “breadth and length and height and depth.” The exact reference of this dimensional language has been a subject of diverse and unending debate;⁹⁵ it would be pointless to examine all the interpretations that have been offered.⁹⁶ The best analogy is found in passages of the wisdom literature where the infinite scope of divine wisdom is emphasized. Of this wisdom (equated with “the deep things of God”) Zophar the Naamathite said (Job 11:8-9):

”It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than Sheol—what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.”⁹⁷

The divine “wisdom in a mystery”⁹⁸ which is unfathomable to mortal intelligence has been made incarnate in Christ and revealed to his servants—not least to Paul, whose mission is to make known to all “the mystery which was hidden from eternity in God” (v. 9). To grasp this revelation in its totality is not the achievement of a moment—Paul himself, toward the end of his apostolic career, did not suppose that he had fully comprehended it—but to grasp it was his personal ambition, and he prayed that his Christian friends might share and attain that ambition.⁹⁹ Here was a spiritual exercise that would make demands on them all their lives.

Nor is it only the immediate circle of his own converts and friends that he has in view: he prays that his readers may have strength to grasp the eternal mystery in common with “all the saints.”¹⁰⁰ The disclosure of this mystery is the heritage of all the people of God: it is fitting that they should have an intelligent appreciation of it.¹⁰¹ There may be the further thought that the deep things of God are more likely to be apprehended by his children in fellowship one with another than in isolation. The idea that spiritual illumination is most likely to be received by followers of the solitary life has been widely held: Paul does not appear to have favored it either for himself or for his Christian friends.¹⁰²

19 The NEB rendering of v. 18b—”what is the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ”—represents a popular interpretation, attested as early as Origen,¹⁰³ but it is not precisely what the text says. Yet it is not a misrepresentation of the general sense, for it is impossible to grasp the divine purpose in all its dimensions without knowing the love of Christ—and this cannot be other than an experimental knowledge. The disclosure of the eternal mystery is no object of merely intellectual comprehension, although it calls for all the intellectual power at one’s command; it requires personal acquaintance with the revealer, whose nature is perfect love. “If one loves God, one is known by him” (1 Cor. 8:3)—and to be known by him is the antecedent to knowing him. If Paul was prepared to sacrifice everything for “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:8), the one to whom he thus refers is the one whom he describes elsewhere as “the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20). Both the knowledge and the love are mutual, and in both it is God in Christ who takes the initiative. To know¹⁰⁴ the love of Christ is to know Christ himself, in ever widening experience, and to have his outgoing and self-denying love reproduced in oneself. It could not be otherwise, if he dwells in his people and they in him.

To speak of knowing something that “surpasses knowledge” is to be deliberately paradoxical; but however much one comes to know of the love of Christ, there is always more to know: it is inexhaustible.

By knowing the love of Christ, and only so, is it possible to be filled up to the measure of God’s own fullness.¹⁰⁵ This, one may say, is the language of hyperbole: how can the finite reach the infinite? But the Christ whose love is to be known is the Christ in whom “all the fullness of deity resides” and in whom his people have found their fullness (Col. 2:9-10).¹⁰⁶ By the knowledge of his love, and only so, m they hope to attain to the divine fullness—insofar as that attainment is possible for created beings. In “the summit of this flight . . . Paul has accumulated everything that is strongest, most intense and most ’cosmic’ in his vocabulary,” says P. Benoit. God, who is the source and goal of all things, is the source and goal of the work of Christ; it is in God, “in his total Fullness, that salvation is achieved: this is the final term to which the saved come, loaded with a fullness which integrates them into the whole Fullness of God.”¹⁰⁷ Could apostolic intercession reach farther than this?

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