3. The conclusion of his prayer (verses 20–21)
II. New society
(Ephesians 2:11–3:21)
4. A single new humanity (2:11–22)
‘Alienation’ is a popular word in contemporary society. There are many people, especially young people in the so-called ‘developed’ world, who are disillusioned with ‘the system’, critical of ‘the technocracy’ and hostile to ‘the establishment’, who describe themselves as ‘alienated’. Some work for reform, others plot revolution, others drop out. In no case can they accommodate themselves to the status quo.
It was Karl Marx who popularized the word, having himself taken it from the German theologian, Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx understood the plight of the proletariat in terms of economic alienation. Every worker puts into his craftsmanship a part of himself. When his employer then sells his product, he is guilty, at least in part, of alienating the worker from himself. This according to Marx was the basis of the class struggle.
Nowadays the word is used more generally of the working man’s alienation not only from his achievement and its due reward, but also from the exercise of power, especially in decision-making. In other words, the term has become more political than economic. ‘Alienation’ is partly a sense of disaffection with what is, and partly a sense of powerlessness to change it. This is a widespread feeling in the democratic countries of the West, and Christians would be foolish to ignore it.
But long before Feuerbach and Marx the Bible spoke of human alienation. It describes two other and even more radical alienations than the economic and the political. One is alienation from God our Creator, and the other alienation from one another, our fellow creatures. Nothing is more dehumanizing than this breakdown of fundamental human relationships. It is then that we become strangers in a world in which we should feel at home, and aliens instead of citizens.
The letter to the Ephesians alludes to both these forms of alienation. Indeed, Paul uses the word in relation to both conditions. The Greek verb is apallotrioō and means to estrange, exclude or alienate. In the New Testament it occurs only in these two Ephesians verses, together with the Colossians parallel to one of them:
4:18
cf
2:12
‘alienated from the commonwealth of Israel’
Now this double alienation, or rather its replacement by reconciliation, is the theme of Ephesians 2. In the first half of the chapter (verses 1–10) human beings are depicted as alienated from God. The verb is not actually used there, as it is in 4:18, but this is without doubt what is meant when they are portrayed as ‘dead through … trespasses and sins’ and ‘by nature children of wrath’ (verses 1, 3). We considered in the last chapter the meaning of these phrases.
In the second half of Ephesians 2 (verses 11–22), which is our text in this chapter, human beings are depicted as alienated also from each other. In particular, Gentiles are described as ‘alienated from the commonwealth of Israel’ (verse 12). It is almost impossible for us towards the close of the twentieth century AD to think ourselves back to those days when humanity was deeply divided between Jews and Gentiles. The Bible opens with a clear declaration of the unity of mankind. But after the fall and then the flood it traces the origins of human division and separation. It may seem that God himself contributed to the process by choosing Israel out of all the nations to be his ‘holy’ or ‘distinct’ people. But we need to remember that in calling Abraham he promised through his posterity to bless all the earth’s families and that in choosing Israel he intended her to become a light to the nations. The tragedy is that Israel forgot her vocation, twisted her privilege into favouritism and ended by heartily despising—even detesting—the heathen as ‘dogs’. William Barclay helps us feel the alienation between the two communities, and the deepseated hostility between them, especially on the Jewish side. He writes:
The Jew had an immense contempt for the Gentile. The Gentiles, said the Jews, were created by God to be fuel for the fires of hell. God, they said, loves only Israel of all the nations that he had made … It was not even lawful to render help to a Gentile mother in her hour of sorest need, for that would simply be to bring another Gentile into the world. Until Christ came, the Gentiles were an object of contempt to the Jews. The barrier between them was absolute. If a Jewish boy married a Gentile girl, or if a Jewish girl married a Gentile boy, the funeral of that Jewish boy or girl was carried out. Such contact with a Gentile was the equivalent of death.
Of this double Gentile alienation—from God and from God’s people Israel—the so-called ‘middle wall of partition’ (verse 14, AV) or ‘dividing wall of hostility’ (RSV) was the standing symbol. It was a notable feature of the magnificent temple built in Jerusalem by Herod the Great. The temple building itself was constructed on an elevated platform. Round it was the Court of the Priests. East of this was the Court of Israel, and further east the Court of the Women. These three courts—for the priests, the lay men and the lay women of Israel respectively—were all on the same elevation as the temple itself. From this level one descended five steps to a walled platform, and then on the other side of the wall fourteen more steps to another wall, beyond which was the outer court or Court of the Gentiles. This was a spacious court running right round the temple and its inner courts. From any part of it the Gentiles could look up and view the temple, but were not allowed to approach it. They were cut off from it by the surrounding wall, which was a one-and-a-half metre stone barricade, on which were displayed at intervals warning notices in Greek and Latin. They read, in effect, not ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ but ‘Trespassers will be executed.’
The famous Jewish historian Josephus describes this barricade in both his books. In his Antiquities he writes that the temple was ‘encompassed by a stone wall for a partition, with an inscription which forbade any foreigner to go in under pain of death’. In his Wars of the Jews he is a little more explicit. There was, he writes, ‘a partition made of stone all round, whose height was three cubits. Its construction was very elegant; upon it stood pillars at equal distance from one another, declaring the law of purity, some in Greek and some in Roman letters, that “no foreigner should go within that sanctuary”.’
During the last hundred years or so two of the Greek notices have been discovered, one in 1871 and the other in 1935. The former, exhibited in the museum at Istanbul, is a white limestone slab measuring nearly a metre across. Its exact wording is as follows: ‘No foreigner may enter within the barrier and enclosure round the temple. Anyone who is caught doing so will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.’ Paul knew all about it from personal experience. Only about three years previously he had nearly been lynched himself by an angry Jewish mob who thought he had taken a Gentile with him into the temple, interestingly enough an Ephesian named Trophimus.
This, then, is the historical, social and religious background to Ephesians 2. Although all human beings are alienated from God because of sin, the Gentiles were also alienated from the people of God. And worse even than this double alienation (of which the temple wall was a symbol) was the active ‘enmity’ or ‘hostility’ (echthra) into which it continuously erupted—enmity between man and God, and enmity between Gentiles and Jews.
The grand theme of Ephesians 2 is that Jesus Christ has destroyed both enmities. Both are mentioned in the second half of the chapter, although in the opposite order:
verse 14
echthra
verse 16
echthra
Alongside his destruction of these two enmities Jesus has succeeded in creating a new society, in fact a new humanity, in which alienation has given way to reconciliation, and hostility to peace. And this new human unity in Christ is the pledge and foretaste of that final unity under Christ’s headship to which Paul has already looked forward in 1:10.
After this introduction relating to its background and theme, we are now ready to study the text itself:
Therefore remember that at one time you Gentiles in the flesh, called the uncircumcision by what is called the circumcision, which is made in the flesh by hands— 12 remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. 13 But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ. 14 For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. 17 And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; 18 for through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. 19 So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, 20 built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, 21 in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; 22 in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
It may be helpful if, before immersing ourselves in a more detailed exposition, we grasp the structure of the passage as a whole. Paul traces his Gentile readers’ spiritual biography in three stages. Here is the gist of his message to them: ‘(1) At one time you were alienated from God and from his people Israel. (2) By his death on the cross Christ Jesus has reconciled Jews and Gentiles both to each other and to God, creating “a single new humanity” (verse 15, NEB). (3) You are no longer alienated but full members with Israel of God’s people and family.’ The three stages are marked by the expressions ‘at one time’ (verse 11), ‘but now’ (verse 13) and ‘so then’ (verse 19). And the sequence runs: Remember that at one time you … were alienated … but now in Christ Jesus you … have been brought near … for he is our peace … So then you are no longer strangers … but … fellow citizens with the saints … I shall entitle the three unfolding stages of God’s plan as follows:
1. The portrait of an alienated humanity, or what we once were (verses 11–12)
In verses 1–3 Paul has portrayed all mankind (Jews and Gentiles alike) in sin and death. Here in verses 11 and 12 he refers particularly to the Gentile or heathen world before Christ, to those whom the Jews (the circumcision) scornfully called the uncircumcision. Circumcision had of course been given by God to Abraham as the outward sign of membership of his covenant people. But both the physical rite and the word had come to assume an exaggerated importance. Gentiles and Jews regularly called each other by derogatory names. Paul emphasizes this here. Gentiles were called ‘the uncircumcision’ by what is called ‘the circumcision which is made in the flesh by hands’. It is as if Paul is declaring the unimportance of names and labels, in comparison with the reality behind them, and hinting that behind ‘what is called the circumcision which is made in the flesh by hands’ there is another kind, a circumcision of the heart, spiritual not physical, which was needed by and available to both Jews and Gentiles alike.
In verse 12 he drops the business of what Jews and Gentiles called each other, and comes on to the serious reality of Gentile alienation. In Romans he had listed Jewish privileges (9:3–5); here he lists Gentile disabilities. First, they were separated from Christ. The expression is the more tragic because in chapter 1 he has unfolded the great spiritual blessings of being ‘in Christ’, and in the earlier part of chapter 2 he has explained how God has quickened, raised and seated us ‘with Christ’. But at one time, that is throughout the whole period BC, the Gentiles were neither ‘in Christ’ nor ‘with Christ’ but ‘separated from Christ’; they even had no expectation of a coming Messiah.
The Gentiles’ second and third disabilities were similar to one another. They were both alienated from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise (literally ‘of the promise’, referring probably to the foundation promise made by God to Abraham). Israel was a ‘commonwealth’ or nation under God, a theocracy, and a ‘covenant people’ to whom he had committed himself by a solemn pledge. Thus he had bound himself to them and ruled over them. But the Gentiles were excluded from this covenant and kingdom.
The fourth and fifth Gentile disabilities are starkly stated: having no hope and without God in the world. They were ‘hopeless’ because, although God had planned and promised to include them one day, they did not know it, and therefore had no hope to sustain them. And they were ‘godless’ (atheoi) because, although God had revealed himself to all mankind in nature and therefore had not left himself without witness, yet they suppressed the truth they knew and turned instead to idolatry. It was no exaggeration, therefore, to describe the ancient non-Jewish world as ‘hopeless’ and ‘godless’. The golden age of the Greeks was past; they had no promised future to look forward to. Moreover, the gods of Greece and Rome entirely failed to satisfy the hunger of human hearts. The people were atheoi not in the sense that they disbelieved (on the contrary, they had a plethora of gods), but in the sense that they had no true knowledge of God such as he had given to Israel, and (because of their rejection of the knowledge they had) no personal fellowship with him.
This, then, was the terrible fivefold deprivation of the ancient Gentile world before Christ. They were cut off from the Messiah, from the theocracy and the covenants, from hope, and from God himself. In William Hendriksen’s summary they were ‘Christless, stateless, friendless, hopeless and Godless’. In Paul’s single phrase they were ‘far off’ (13), alienated from God and from the people of God.
And we ourselves in our pre-Christian days, it is necessary to add, were in exactly the same plight. We were alienated from God and from his people. Worse, there was in our hearts the ‘enmity’ to which Paul refers later, so that we rebelled against the authority of God and knew little or nothing of true human community. Is it not the same in today’s world without Christ? Men still build walls of partition and division like the terrible Berlin wall, or erect invisible curtains of iron or bamboo, or construct barriers of race, colour, caste, tribe or class. Divisiveness is a constant characteristic of every community without Christ. We ourselves experienced it. Now the apostle says Therefore remember (verse 11), and again remember (verse 12). There are some things which Scripture tells us to forget (like the injuries which others do to us). But there is one thing in particular which we are commanded to remember and never to forget. This is what we were before God’s love reached down and found us. For only if we remember our former alienation (distasteful as some of it may be to us), shall we be able to remember the greatness of the grace which forgave and is transforming us.
2. The portrait of the peacemaking Christ or what Jesus Christ has done (verses 13–18)
The parallel between the two halves of Ephesians 2 is obvious. First comes in both cases a description of life without Christ: ‘dead’ (verses 1–3) and ‘alienated’ (verses 11–12). Then follows, again in both cases, the great adversative: ‘But God’ (verse 4) and ‘But now’ (verse 13). The main distinction is that in the second half Paul is stressing the Gentile experience. Twice he uses the emphatic pronoun you (hymeis): ‘Remember that once you were alienated … But now in Christ Jesus you … have been brought near.’
This, then, in its essence is the difference which Christ has made: you who once were far off have been brought near. Such spatial language (‘far’ and ‘near’) was not uncommon in the Old Testament. God and Israel were known to be ‘near’ one another, since God had promised to be their God and to make them his people. Hence Moses could say: ‘What great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us?’ Their uniqueness in this respect is repeated in Psalm 148:14, where they are called ‘the people of Israel who are near to him’. By contrast, the Gentile nations were ‘far off’, peoples who had to be summoned ‘from afar’. But God promised that one day he would speak ‘Peace, peace, to the far and to the near’, a promise which was fulfilled in Jesus Christ and which is quoted here by Paul with reference to him. And this ‘nearness to God’ which all Christians enjoy through Christ is a privilege we take too frequently for granted. Our God does not keep his distance or stand on his dignity, like some oriental potentate, nor does he insist on any complicated ritual or protocol. On the contrary, through Jesus Christ and by the Holy Spirit we have immediate ‘access’ to him as our Father (verse 18). We need to exhort one another to avail ourselves of this privilege.
Verse 13 is more than a statement that we who were ‘far off’ have now been ‘brought near’; it contains in addition two important references to Christ. For it states that our new nearness to God is both in Christ Jesus and in (or by) the blood of Christ. It is essential, if we are to be faithful to the apostle’s teaching, to hold onto these two expressions, and not to emphasize one at the expense of the other. For ‘the blood of Christ’ (as in 1:7) signifies his sacrificial death for our sins on the cross, by which he reconciled us to God and to each other, whereas ‘in Christ Jesus’ signifies the personal union with Christ today through which the reconciliation he achieved is received and enjoyed. Thus the two expressions witness to the two stages by which those ‘far off’ are ‘brought near’. The first is the historical event of the cross, and the second Christian conversion, or the contemporary experience of union with Christ. What Jesus Christ accomplished by his cross Paul will explain in the next verses. Meanwhile, it will be wise for us to observe well the phrase ‘in Christ Jesus’ with which he introduces his whole exposition of Christ’s reconciling work. It is not a universal reconciliation that Christ achieved or that Paul proclaimed: it is rather a nearness to God and to each other gratefully experienced by those who are near Christ, indeed ‘in’ him in a vital, personal union. This means, as John Mackay expresses it, when commenting on these verses, that God’s integrating principle for uniting human beings is neither intellectual (philosophy) as in Roman Catholicism, nor political (conquest) as in Islam or Marxism, but spiritual (redemption by Christ, involving union between Jews and Gentiles, man and God and ultimately heaven and earth). These are three alternative ‘imperialisms’, the first of mind, the second of force, the third of the kingdom of God.
The apostle goes on to elaborate the work of Christ, in terms both of what he did and of how he did it. What he did is plain: For he is our peace, who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility (verse 14). ‘He’ (autos) is strongly emphatic. It is he, Christ Jesus, who shed his blood on the cross and who offers himself to his people today to be united to them, it is he who by what he did once and now offers is our peace, that is to say, is the peacemaker between us and with God. The ‘both’ whom he has made … one seems clearly to mean Jews and Gentiles, but the reconciliation was broader than that, for, as we saw earlier, the dividing wall of hostility which he has broken down symbolized Gentile alienation from God as well as from Israel.
This announcement which Paul makes of the breaking down of the wall by Jesus Christ is extremely remarkable. For literally and historically speaking, the wall was not broken down until the Roman legions entered Jerusalem in AD 70. So it was still standing, still surrounding the temple, and still excluding the Gentiles, while Paul was writing this letter. But though materially it remained, spiritually it had already been destroyed in AD 30 or so, when Jesus died on the cross. As Armitage Robinson put it, ‘It still stood: but it was already antiquated, obsolete, out of date, so far as its spiritual meaning went. The sign still stood: but the thing signified was broken down.’
We turn now to the question how Christ did it. What did he do when he died on the cross to get rid of the divisive enmity between Jew and Gentile, between man and God? The answer is given in verses 15 and 16. They are packed tight with theology, and need to be unpacked. Perhaps the best way to clarify the apostle’s sequence of thought is to isolate the three successive main verbs which he uses, viz. by abolishing … that he might create … and might reconcile … We are told that he abolished the law of commandments in order to create a single new humanity and to reconcile both parts of it to God.
a. The abolition of the law of commandments (verse 15a)
The first assertion Paul makes is that Christ broke down the wall, the hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law of commandments and ordinances. At first sight this is a surprising, not to say a startling statement. How can the apostle declare that Christ abolished the law when Christ himself in the Sermon on the Mount specifically declared the opposite, that he had not come to abolish it but to fulfil it? We shall see that the discrepancy is only verbal; in substance they were referring to the law in two different senses.
In the Sermon on the Mount the context shows that Jesus was referring to the moral law. He was teaching the difference between Pharisaic righteousness and Christian righteousness, and urging that Christian righteousness involves a deep and radical obedience to the law. Paul’s primary reference here, however, seems to be to the ceremonial law and to what NEB calls ‘its rules and regulations’, that is, to circumcision (the main physical distinction between Jews and Gentiles, verse 11), the material sacrifices, the dietary regulations and the rules about ritual ‘cleanness’ and ‘uncleanness’ which governed social relationships. The parallel passage in Colossians alludes to circumcision, and also to ‘questions of food and drink’, and regulations regarding ‘a festival or a new moon or a sabbath’ (2:11, 16–21); so it seems probable that these were the commandments and ordinances which Paul has in mind here. They erected a serious barrier between Jews and Gentiles, but Jesus set this whole ceremonial aside. And he did it in his flesh (surely a reference to his physical death) because in the cross he fulfilled all the types and shadows of the Old Testament ceremonial system.
It seems probable, however, that Paul is making another though secondary reference, this time to the moral, not the ceremonial law. Jesus certainly did not abolish the moral law as a standard of behaviour (it is still in force and binding on his followers); but he did abolish it as a way of salvation. Whenever the law is viewed in this light it is divisive. For we cannot obey it, however hard we try. Therefore it separates us from God and from each other. But Jesus himself perfectly obeyed the law in his life, and in his death bore the consequences of our disobedience. He took upon himself ‘the curse of the law’ (the judgment it threatens to those who disobey it) in order to free us from it. Or, according to the Colossians parallel, God is able to forgive us all our trespasses because he ‘cancelled the bond which stood against us with its legal demands; this he set aside, nailing it to the cross’ (2:13–14). Acceptance with God is now through faith in Christ crucified alone, whether for Jews or for Gentiles. The law was a barrier between us, but faith unites us, since all of us have to come to God through Christ in the same way. This had been one of Paul’s major emphases in Galatians, namely that we are all brought to the same level at the foot of Christ’s cross.
To sum up, Jesus abolished both the regulations of the ceremonial law and the condemnation of the moral law. Both were divisive. Both were put aside by the cross.
b. The creation of a single new humanity (verse 15b)
It is impossible to miss the way in which Paul moves on from the negative to the positive, from the abolition of something old (the divisiveness of the law) to the creation of something new (a single, undivided humanity). In both senses which we have been considering the law had made a deep rift in humanity. Jews and Gentiles were alienated from one another and at enmity with one another. But once the divisive law had been set aside, there was nothing to keep the two parts of humanity apart. Instead Christ brought them together by a sovereign act of creation. Literally, he ‘created the two into one new man, so making peace’. ‘The new man here’, writes F. F. Bruce, ‘like the “full-grown man” of Ephesians 4:13, is the Christian community viewed corporately.’ What Paul is referring to, in fact, is not a ‘new man’ but a ‘new human race’, united by Jesus Christ in himself. For although potentially the single new humanity was created when Jesus abolished the divisive law on the cross, actually it comes into existence and grows only by personal union with himself.
This new unity through and in Christ does more than span the Jew-Gentile divide. In other passages Paul says that it also does away with sexual and social distinctions. ‘Here there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all.’ Again, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ Not that the facts of human differentiation are removed. Men remain men and women women, Jews remain Jews and Gentiles Gentiles. But inequality before God is abolished. There is a new unity in Christ.
c. The reconciliation of Jew and Gentile to God (verse 16)
After the abolition of the divisive law and the creation of the undivided humanity came the reconciliation of both parts of the old humanity to God, thereby bringing the hostility to an end. Here the ‘hostility’ is clearly between God and men, just as in verse 14 it was chiefly between Jew and Gentile. And just as there the ‘hostility’ was mutual, I think we need to see a certain mutuality also in the hostility between men and God. It is not just that our attitude to him has been one of rebellion; it is also that his ‘wrath’ has been upon us for our sin (verse 3). And only through the cross have both ‘hostilities’ been brought to an end, for when Christ bore our sin and judgment on the cross God turned away his own wrath, and we, seeing his great love, turned away ours also. Thus Christ (literally) ‘killed’ or ‘slew’ the hostility. ‘Christ in his death was slain’, comments Armitage Robinson, ‘but the slain was a slayer too.’ And the hostility in both directions having been decisively dealt with, the result is reconciliation.
This, then, was the achievement of Christ’s cross. First, he abolished the law (its ceremonial regulations and moral condemnation) as a divisive instrument separating men from God and Jews from Gentiles. Secondly he created a single new humanity out of its two former deep divisions, making peace between them. Thirdly, he reconciled this new united humanity to God, having killed through the cross all the hostility between us. Christ crucified has thus brought into being nothing less than a new, united human race, united in itself and united to its creator.
This does not mean that the whole human race is now united and reconciled. We know from observation and experience that it is not. But then Paul does not claim this either. There is a further stage in the work of Christ which he goes on to mention. It is that Christ came and preached peace (verse 17). Already we have been told that he is our peace (verse 14) and that he created a new humanity, so making peace (verse 15). But now he preached peace, publishing abroad the good news of the peace he had made through the cross. First he achieved it; then he announced it. And since the achievement was at the cross, and logically the announcement must follow the achievement, this preaching cannot refer to his public ministry. It must refer rather to his post-resurrection appearances, in which the very first word he spoke to the apostles was ‘Peace be with you’, and to his proclamation of the gospel of peace to the world through the apostles and through subsequent generations of Christians. Jesus Christ is still preaching peace in the world today, through the lips of his followers. For it is truly a wonderful fact that whenever we proclaim peace, it is Christ who proclaims it through us.
Moreover this good news was addressed from the start to the ‘far’ and ‘near’, that is, to Gentiles and Jews equally: peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. And many of each community embraced it, and thereby found themselves united to God and to each other. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father (verse 18). Although ‘reconciliation’ is an event; ‘access’ is the continuing relationship to which it leads. ‘Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access …’ Prosagōgē (access) conjures up the scene in an oriental court, when subjects are granted an audience with the king or emperor, and are presented to him. The flavour of the word remains, but the emphasis changes because our access is not to a king but to a Father, before whom we have ‘boldness and confidence of access’ (3:12). And in the enjoyment of this ready access to God, we find we have no practical difficulty with the mystery of the eternal Trinity. For our access is to the Father, through him (the Son who made peace and preached it), and in or by one Spirit, the Spirit who regenerates, seals and indwells his people, who witnesses with our spirits that we are God’s children, who helps us in our weaknesses and teaches us to pray, and who unites us as we pray. For it is we both, Jews and Gentiles, who as members of God’s new society now approach our Father together. Thus the highest and fullest achievement of the peacemaking Christ is this trinitarian access of the people of God, as through him and by one Spirit we come boldly to our Father.
3. The portrait of God’s new society or what we have now become (verses 19–22)
So then, Paul begins his summing up. He has explained step by step what Christ has done to ‘bring near’, to God and to his people those in the Gentile world who were previously ‘far off’. Christ has abolished the law of commandments, created a single new humanity in place of the two, reconciled both to God, and preached peace to those near and far. So then, what is the result of Christ’s achievement and announcement of peace? It is this: you (Gentiles) are no longer what you used to be, strangers and sojourners, ‘aliens in a foreign land’ (NEB), visitors without legal rights. On the contrary, your status has dramatically changed. Now you ‘belong’ in a way you never did before. You used to be refugees; at least now you have a home.
In order to indicate the richness of their changed position and their new privileges in Christ, Paul resorts to three familiar models of the church, which are developed in many other passages of Scripture. He pictures the new Jew-Gentile community as God’s kingdom, God’s family and God’s temple.
a. God’s kingdom (verse 19a)
According to verse 12 the Gentiles used to be stateless and disenfranchised outsiders, ‘alienated from the commonwealth (politeia) of Israel’. But now, he says to them, you are fellow citizens (sumpolitai) with the saints, which seems here to mean the Jewish people, the saints or ‘holy nation’. Only a few years previously the word politeia had been used of Roman citizenship in Paul’s conversation with the tribune in Jerusalem. Now he writes of another citizenship. Although he does not develop the metaphor, he appears to be alluding to citizenship of God’s kingdom. The kingdom of God is neither a territorial jurisdiction nor even a spiritual structure. God’s kingdom is God himself ruling his people, and bestowing upon them all the privileges and responsibilities which his rule implies. To this new international God-ruled community, which had replaced the Old Testament national theocracy, Gentiles and Jews belonged on equal terms. Paul is writing while the Roman Empire is at the zenith of its splendour; no signs had yet appeared of its coming decline, let alone of its fall. Yet he sees this other kingdom, neither Jewish nor Roman but international and interracial, as something more splendid and more enduring than any earthly empire. And he rejoices in its citizenship more even than in his Roman citizenship. Its citizens are free and secure. The words no longer strangers and sojourners but … citizens emphasize the contrast between the rootlessness of a life outside Christ and the stability of being a part of God’s new society. ‘We no longer live on a passport, but … we really have our birth certificates, … we really do belong.’
b. God’s family (verse 19b)
The metaphor changes and becomes more intimate: you are … members of the household of God. A kingdom is one thing; a household or family is another. And in Christ Jews and Gentiles find themselves more than fellow citizens under his rule; they are together children in his family. Paul has just written in the previous verse of the new and privileged access ‘to the Father’ which Jews and Gentiles enjoy through Christ (verse 18), and earlier in the letter he has enlarged on the blessings of ‘adoption’ into his family (1:5). Soon he will have more to say about God’s archetypal fatherhood (3:14–15) and about the ‘one God and Father of us all’ (4:6). But here his emphasis seems to be less on God’s fatherhood than on the brotherhood into which, across racial barriers, the Father’s children are brought. ‘Brethren’ (meaning ‘brothers and sisters’) is the commonest word for Christians in the New Testament. It expresses a close relationship of affection, care and support. Philadelphia, ‘brotherly love’, should always be a special characteristic of God’s new society.
c. God’s temple (verses 20–22)
Paul comes now to his third picture. Essentially the church is a community of people. Nevertheless, it may be likened in a number of respects to a building, and especially to the temple. The temple in Jerusalem—first Solomon’s, then Zerubbabel’s, then Herod’s—had for nearly a thousand years been the focal point of Israel’s identity as the people of God. Now there was a new people; would there be a new temple, as Jesus had hinted? The new people was not a new nation but a new humanity, international and worldwide. A geographically localized centre would therefore not be appropriate for it. What then could be its temple, its focus of unity? Here in verses 20–22 Paul elaborates his vision of the new temple in greater detail than elsewhere; it will repay careful study. As he develops his image, he refers to the foundation and cornerstone of the building, the structure as a whole and its individual stones, its cohesion and growth, its present function and (at least implicitly) its future destiny.
First, the foundation. Nothing is more important to any edifice than a solid, stable foundation. And Jesus’ wellknown parable of the two house builders, with which he concluded his sermon on the mount, taught the need for rock. On what rock, then, is the church built? Paul replies: it is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone (verse 20).
Since apostles and prophets were both groups with a teaching role, it seems clear that what constitutes the church’s foundation is neither their person nor their office but their instruction. Moreover, we are to think of them as inspired teachers, organs of divine revelation, bearers of divine authority. The word ‘apostles’ here cannot therefore be a generic term for missionaries or church planters or bishops or other church leaders; instead it must denote that small and special group whom Jesus chose, called and authorized to teach in his name, and who were eyewitnesses of his resurrection, consisting of the Twelve plus Paul and James and perhaps one or two others. What they taught they expected the church to believe and preserve, what they commanded they expected the church to obey. The word ‘prophets’ also indicates inspired teachers to whom the word of God came and who conveyed that word to others faithfully. The couplet ‘apostles and prophets’ may bring together the Old Testament (prophets) and New Testament (apostles) as the basis of the church’s teaching. But the inverted order of the words (not ‘prophets and apostles’ but ‘apostles and prophets’) suggests that probably New Testament prophets are meant. If so, their bracketing with the apostles as the church’s foundation is significant. The reference must again be to a small group of inspired teachers, associated with the apostles, who together bore witness to Christ and whose teaching was derived from revelation (3:5) and was foundational.
In practical terms this means that the church is built on the New Testament Scriptures. They are the church’s foundation documents. And just as a foundation cannot be tampered with once it has been laid and the superstructure is being built upon it, so the New Testament foundation of the church is inviolable and cannot be changed by any additions, subtractions or modifications offered by teachers who claim to be apostles or prophets today. The church stands or falls by its loyal dependence on the foundation truths which God revealed to his apostles and prophets, and which are now preserved in the New Testament Scriptures.
The cornerstone is also of crucial importance to a building. It is itself part of and essential to the foundation; it helps to hold the building steady, and it also sets it and keeps it in line. The temple in Jerusalem had massive cornerstones. Armitage Robinson mentions one ancient monolith excavated from the southern wall of the temple which measured 38 feet 9 inches (about 12 metres) in length. The chief cornerstone of the new temple is Christ Jesus himself. Elsewhere he is also the foundation stone. But here Paul has particularly in mind the function of Jesus Christ in holding the growing temple together as a unity. For he is the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows … The unity and growth of the church are coupled, and Jesus Christ is the secret of both. Since the ‘in Christ’ concept is of an organic union, the most natural metaphors to illustrate it are organic metaphors such as the branches ‘in’ the vine and the members ‘in’ the body. Here the concept is transferred to construction work. As a building depends for both its cohesion and its development on being tied securely to its cornerstone, so Christ the cornerstone is indispensable to the church’s unity and growth. Unless it is constantly and securely related to Christ, the church’s unity will disintegrate and its growth either stop or run wild.
Paul moves on from the whole structure of the temple to its individual stones. In both cases union with Christ is indispensable: Christ … the chief cornerstone in whom the whole structure is joined together … in whom you also are built into it … The apostle Peter, who also develops the picture of the church as a building, describes individual church members as ‘living stones’ needing to ‘come to him (Jesus) … and be … built into a spiritual house’. Here in Paul’s picture the extra stones being built into the structure are you also, by which he means his Gentile readers. The Jerusalem temple was an exclusively Jewish edifice, as we have seen, which all Gentiles were forbidden to enter. But now Gentiles are not only admitted; they are themselves constituent parts of the temple of God. And since one of the cornerstone’s functions was to bind two walls together, it may be that Paul is using this imagery to set Christ forth as the key to Jewish-Gentile solidarity.
What is the purpose of the new temple? In principle, it is the same as the purpose of the old, namely to be a dwelling place of God (verse 22). Of course spiritually-minded Israelites knew that God did not dwell in man-made temples and that the whole universe could not contain his infinite being. Nevertheless, he promised to manifest his glory (the shekinah) in the temple’s inner sanctuary, in order to symbolize the truth that he dwelt among his people. The new temple, however, is neither a material building, nor a national shrine, nor has it a localized site. It is a spiritual building (God’s household) and an international community (embracing Gentiles as well as Jews), and it has a worldwide spread (wherever God’s people are to be found). This is where God dwells. He is not tied to holy buildings but to holy people, to his own new society. To them he has pledged himself by a solemn covenant. He lives in them, individually and as a community. What, then, has replaced the shekinah glory in the temple, as the symbol of God’s presence and the means of its manifestation? Paul answers the question here. The church is both a holy temple in the Lord (meaning, as always in the New Testament when not otherwise stated, ‘the Lord Jesus’) and a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. Once more the Holy Trinity claims our attention. For God dwells in his people as his temple ‘in the Lord’ and ‘in the Spirit’, or through his Son and by his Spirit.
As Paul was dictating his letter, there stood in Ephesus the magnificent marble temple of Artemis (‘great is Diana of the Ephesians’), one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, and in whose inner shrine there was a statue of the goddess. At the same time in Jerusalem there stood the Jewish temple built by Herod the Great, barricading itself against the Gentiles, and now also against God, whose shekinah glory it had housed in its inner sanctuary for centuries, but whose glory as revealed in its Messiah it had sought to extinguish. Two temples, one pagan and the other Jewish, each designed by its devotees as a divine residence, but both empty of the living God. For now there is a new temple, a dwelling place of God in the Spirit. It is his new society, his redeemed people scattered throughout the inhabited world. They are his home on earth. They will also be his home in heaven. For the building is not yet complete. It grows into a holy temple in the Lord. Only after the creation of the new heaven and the new earth will the voice from the throne declare with emphatic finality: ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with men.’
Conclusion
It is marvellous to look back and trace the sequence of the apostle’s teaching. He paints on a large canvas with bold brush strokes. Once, he reminds his Gentile readers, you were alienated from God and from his people. But Christ died to reconcile you to both. So now you are no longer the aliens you were, but the kingdom over which God rules, the family which he loves and the temple in which he dwells. More simply still: you were alienated, you have been reconciled, and Christ has brought you home.
It would be hard to exaggerate the grandeur of this vision. The new society God has brought into being is nothing short of a new creation, a new human race, whose characteristic is no longer alienation but reconciliation, no longer division and hostility but unity and peace. This new society God rules and loves and lives in.
That is the vision. But when we turn from the ideal portrayed in Scripture to the concrete realities experienced in the church today, it is a very different and a very tragic story. For even in the church there is often alienation, disunity and discord. And Christians erect new barriers in place of the old which Christ has demolished, now a colour bar, now racism, nationalism or tribalism, now personal animosities engendered by pride, prejudice, jealousy and the unforgiving spirit, now a divisive system of caste or class, now a clericalism which sunders clergy from laity as if they were separate breeds of human being, and now a denominationalism which turns churches into sects and contradicts the unity and universality of Christ’s church.
These things are doubly offensive. First, they are an offence to Jesus Christ. How dare we build walls of partition in the one and only human community in which he has destroyed them? Of course there are barriers of language and culture in the world outside, and of course new converts feel more comfortable among their own kind, who speak and dress and eat and drink and behave in the same way that they do and have always done. But deliberately to perpetuate these barriers in the church, and even to tolerate them without taking any active steps to overcome them in order to demonstrate the trans-cultural unity of God’s new society, is to set ourselves against the reconciling work of Christ and even to try to undo it.
What is offensive to Christ is offensive also, though in a different way, to the world. It hinders the world from believing in Jesus. God intends his people to be a visual model of the gospel, to demonstrate before people’s eyes the good news of reconciliation. But what is the good of gospel campaigns if they do not produce gospel churches? It is simply impossible, with any shred of Christian integrity, to go on proclaiming that Jesus by his cross has abolished the old divisions and created a single new humanity of love, while at the same time we are contradicting our message by tolerating racial or social or other barriers within our church fellowship. I am not saying that a church must be perfect before it can preach the gospel, but I am saying that it cannot preach the gospel while acquiescing in its imperfections.
We need to get the failures of the church on our conscience, to feel the offence to Christ and the world which these failures are, to weep over the credibility gap between the church’s talk and the church’s walk, to repent of our readiness to excuse and even condone our failures, and to determine to do something about it. I wonder if anything is more urgent today, for the honour of Christ and for the spread of the gospel, than that the church should be, and should be seen to be, what by God’s purpose and Christ’s achievement it already is—a single new humanity, a model of human community, a family of reconciled brothers and sisters who love their Father and love each other, the evident dwelling place of God by his Spirit. Only then will the world believe in Christ as Peacemaker. Only then will God receive the glory due to his name.
5. Paul’s unique privilege (3:1–13)
At this stage in his argument Paul introduces himself, and explains his unique personal role in God’s purpose for the Gentiles. It is not for nothing that he has come to be known as ‘the apostle to the Gentiles’.
In the second half of Ephesians 2, as we saw in the last chapter, he painted a vivid contrast between the double alienation the Gentiles endured before Christ (from God and from Israel) and their double reconciliation through Christ. For by his death Christ demolished the Jew-Gentile and God-man barriers, and is now creating in relation to himself a single, new multi-cultural human society, which is both the family God loves and the temple he lives in. Paul’s Gentile readers must have read with joyful amazement this exposition of the gospel of peace.
Now, abruptly, he turns their attention away from themselves to himself. In doing so, he styles himself I, Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus on behalf of you Gentiles (verse 1). Humanly speaking, he was not Christ’s prisoner but Nero’s. He had appealed to the Emperor, and so to the Emperor he had been committed for trial. But Paul never did think or speak in purely human terms. He believed in the sovereignty of God over the affairs of men. Therefore he called himself (literally) a ‘prisoner of Christ Jesus’ (verse 1) or a ‘prisoner for the Lord’, so convinced was he that the whole of his life, including his wearisome imprisonment, was under the lordship of Jesus. He may also have thought of himself as ‘Christ’s prisoner’ much as he thought of himself as ‘Christ’s slave’, in which case his self-description expressed a ‘combination of external and internal captivity’.
He then adds a second descriptive phrase, to indicate the nature and purpose of his imprisonment. He was Jesus Christ’s prisoner on behalf of you Gentiles. This was a matter of fact. What had led to his arrest in Jerusalem, his imprisonment there and in Caesarea, his successive trials and his subsequent appeal to Caesar which had brought him to Rome, was fanatical Jewish opposition to his mission to the Gentiles. Luke, his friend, doctor and travelling companion, was with him at the time and faithfully recorded the details in his Acts record. He explains that what prompted the Jews to stir up the crowd against Paul was his reputation for ‘teaching men everywhere against the people and the law and this place’ (viz. the temple). How can he have acquired such a reputation? Doubtless by teaching exactly what he has just taught in Ephesians 2, namely that by abolishing the divisive elements of the law Jesus was creating a new people and building a new temple. So he was arrested. And when the tribune allowed him to make his public defence to the Jewish people, they listened to him quietly until he got to the point in his story where Jesus had said to him: ‘Depart; for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’ At this they shouted, ‘Away with such a fellow from the earth!’
So what led to Jewish opposition to Paul was his bold, uncompromising espousal of the Gentile cause. He not only preached his vision of the new and undivided humanity and wrote about it; he was at that moment suffering for the very truths he was expounding.
It seems likely that the apostle was intending to go on to pray for his Gentile readers. He began his sentence: For this reason I Paul … But he interrupted himself, and did not begin his prayer until verse 14. Meanwhile, he elaborated his self-description in order to emphasize the unique privileges God had given him in the outworking of his purpose for the Gentiles.
Twice in these verses he uses the same expression, indeed an identical combination of Greek words, which are translated God’s grace that was given to me (verses 2 and 7). He is referring to two privileges which God in unmerited favour had given to him.
The first was a certain revelation, as a result of which he had come to know something. Verses 2–3: You have heard of … God’s grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation.
The second was a certain commission, as a result of which he had a responsibility to make something known to others. Verses 7–8: Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace which was given me by the working of his power.
It is clear that these two gifts of divine grace, the revelation and the commission, the ‘mystery’ revealed to him and the ‘ministry’ entrusted to him, were closely related to each other. For once he had received his special revelation from God, he knew that he was under obligation to make known to others what had been made known to him.
1. The divine revelation to Paul, or the mystery made known to him (verses 1–6)
Three times in this short paragraph Paul uses the word ‘mystery’: how the mystery was made known to me by revelation (verse 3) … you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ (verse 4) … to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery (verse 9). It is a key word for our understanding of the apostle Paul. We need to realize that the English and Greek words do not have the same meaning. In English a ‘mystery’ is something dark, obscure, secret, puzzling. What is ‘mysterious’ is inexplicable, even incomprehensible. The Greek word mystērion is different, however. Although still a ‘secret’, it is no longer closely guarded but open. Originally, the Greek word referred to a truth into which someone had been initiated. Indeed it came to be used of the secret teachings of the heathen mystery religions, teachings which were restricted to initiates. But in Christianity there are no esoteric ‘mysteries’ reserved for a spiritual élite. On the contrary, the Christian ‘mysteries’ are truths which, although beyond human discovery, have been revealed by God and so now belong openly to the whole church. More simply, mystērion is a truth hitherto hidden from human knowledge or understanding but now disclosed by the revelation of God.
If that is the general meaning of ‘mystery’ in the New Testament, what is the particular open secret or revealed truth, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations but has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit (verse 5) and uniquely, Paul adds, made known to me by revelation (verse 3)? He calls it in verse 4, as in Colossians 4:3, the mystery of Christ. So evidently it is a specially revealed truth ‘of which Christ is both the source and the substance’. Its exact nature Paul spells out with force and clarity in verse 6. It is how the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel. Thus the mystery concerns Christ and his one Jewish-Gentile people. In order to define it more precisely, Paul assembles (and in one case invents) three parallel, composite expressions. Each has the same prefix syn, ‘together with’, and indicates what Gentile believers now have and are in partnership with Jewish believers. What is this? Gentiles are ‘co-heirs’ (synklēronoma), ‘concorporate’ (syssōma) and ‘co-sharers’ (symmetocha) of the promise. But these three unusual Greek words need to be spelled out a little. What Paul is declaring is that Gentile and Jewish Christians together are now fellow heirs of the same blessing, fellow-members of the same body and fellow-partakers of the same promise. And this shared privilege is both in Jesus Christ (because it is enjoyed equally by all believers, whether Jews or Gentiles, provided that they are in union with Christ) and through the gospel (because the gospel proclamation includes this unity and so makes it available to those who believe).
To sum up, we may say that ‘the mystery of Christ’ is the complete union of Jews and Gentiles with each other through the union of both with Christ. It is this double union, with Christ and with each other, which was the substance of the ‘mystery’. God had revealed it specially to Paul, as he had written briefly (verse 3) in the previous chapter. But it had also been made known to God’s holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit (verse 5), and through them ‘to his saints’ (Col. 1:26). It was now therefore the common possession of the universal church.
It was a new revelation. For it was not made known … in other generations (verse 5) but was hidden for ages (verse 9). These statements have puzzled Bible readers because the Old Testament did reveal that God had a purpose for the Gentiles. It promised, for example, that all the families of the earth would be blessed through Abraham’s posterity; that the Messiah would receive the nations as his inheritance; that Israel would be given as a light to the nations; and that one day the nations would make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and even ‘flow to it’ like a mighty river. Jesus also spoke of the inclusion of the Gentiles and commissioned his followers to go and make them his disciples. But what neither the Old Testament nor Jesus revealed was the radical nature of God’s plan, which was that the theocracy (the Jewish nation under God’s rule) would be terminated, and replaced by a new international community, the church; that this church would be ‘the body of Christ’, organically united to him; and that Jews and Gentiles would be incorporated into Christ and his church on equal terms without any distinction. It was this complete union of Jews, Gentiles and Christ which was radically new, and which God revealed to Paul, overcoming his entrenched Jewish prejudice.
2. The divine commission to Paul or the ministry entrusted to him (verses 7–13)
At the end of verse 6 Paul has virtually equated ‘the mystery’ with ‘the gospel’. At least he writes that it is ‘through the gospel’ that Jewish and Gentile Christians become united to Christ. This can be so only because the gospel announces the mystery, so that people come to hear it, to believe it and to experience it.
Now this equation of ‘mystery’ and ‘gospel’ is significant, because the mystery was essentially truth revealed to Paul, while the gospel was essentially truth proclaimed by Paul. Paul himself made the connection, because he was convinced that the good news had been revealed to him only in order to be communicated. He says so plainly: Of this gospel I was made a minister according to the gift of God’s grace which was given me (verse 7). Thus if the first gift of God’s grace to him was ‘the mystery’ itself which had been revealed to him (verses 2–3), the second was the ministry which had been entrusted to him and by which he would share it with others. He had received it by God’s grace, and would exercise it by the working of his power.
This commission or ministry Paul regards as an enormous privilege. For what he calls this grace, which we might call ‘this privileged gift of God’, had been given to him, in spite of the fact that he was the very least of all the saints (verse 8), or ‘the meanest member of the holy people’. It is a very striking expression. He takes the superlative (elachistos, ‘least’ or ‘smallest’) and does what is impossible linguistically but possible theologically; he turns it into a comparative (elachistoteros, ‘leaster’ or ‘less than the least’). Perhaps he was deliberately playing on the meaning of his name. For his Roman surname ‘Paulus’ is Latin for ‘little’ or ‘small’, and tradition says he was a little man. ‘I am little,’ he may be saying, ‘little by name, little in stature, and morally and spiritually littler than the littlest of all Christians.’ In affirming this he is neither indulging in hypocrisy nor grovelling in self-depreciation. He means it. He is deeply conscious both of his own unworthiness because he ‘formerly blasphemed and persecuted and insulted’ Jesus Christ and of Christ’s overflowing mercy towards him. A good indication that his modesty was neither sham nor morbid is that it did not hinder him from taking responsibility as an apostle. On the contrary, in this very passage he twice uses the self-conscious apostolic egō ‘I’ (3:1; 4:1). Thus, he combined personal humility with apostolic authority. Indeed, while ‘minimizing himself he magnified his office’.
The privileged ministry of spreading the gospel, entrusted to him by the grace of God, he now elaborates in three stages:
a. Making known Christ’s riches to the Gentiles (verse 8)
Since the mystery revealed to him concerned God’s plan to incorporate the Gentiles in Christ, it was only logical that the ministry entrusted to him should be directed first and foremost to them. He was commissioned to preach to the Gentiles. ‘Preach’ here is euangelizō, to ‘announce good news’, for he was well aware that his gospel was a message of great good news for the Gentiles. It consisted of the unsearchable riches of Christ, the riches which he possesses in himself and which he bestows on those who come to him. What these riches are we may judge from Paul’s exposition in Ephesians 1 and 2. They are riches freely available because of the cross. They include resurrection from the death of sin, victorious enthronement with Christ in the heavenlies, reconciliation with God, incorporation with Jewish believers in his new society, the end of hostility and the beginning of peace, access to the Father through Christ and by the Spirit, membership of his kingdom and household, being an integral part of his dwelling place among men, and all this only a foretaste of yet more riches to come, namely the riches of the glory of the inheritance which God will give to all his people on the last day.
No wonder Paul terms Christ’s riches unsearchable. The word anexichniastos means literally ‘not to be tracked out’. In the Greek version of Job 5:9 and 9:10 it was applied to the wonders of God’s creation and providence, which are beyond our understanding, and Paul himself has already used it in Romans 11:33 of the deep mysteries of God’s plan of salvation. The riches of Christ are similar. Like the earth they are too vast to explore, like the sea too deep to fathom. Translators and commentators compete with one another in their attempt to find a dynamic equivalent in English. The riches of Christ, they say, are ‘unsearchable’, ‘inexplorable’, ‘untraceable’, ‘unfathomable’, ‘inexhaustible’, ‘illimitable’, ‘inscrutable’ and ‘incalculable’. Perhaps GNB’s ‘infinite’ is the simplest, for what is certain about the wealth Christ has and gives is that we shall never come to an end of it.
Indirectly in these past verses the apostle has indicated two of the strongest incentives to evangelism. He began by emphasizing that the revelation and the commission which had been given to him belong indissolubly together, for what had been made known to him he must without fail make known to others. All revealed truth is held in stewardship. It is given to be shared, not monopolized. If men cannot keep their scientific discoveries to themselves, how much less should we keep to ourselves the divine disclosures? Paul then went on to emphasize the valuable content of the message itself. He was convinced, as we must be, that Christ never impoverishes those who put their trust in him, but always immeasurably enriches them. Here then was the double obligation Paul felt, first to share God’s truth and secondly to share Christ’s riches. So what is needed today for a recovery of evangelistic zeal in the church is the same apostolic conviction about the gospel. Once we are sure that the gospel is both truth from God and riches for mankind, nobody will be able to silence us.
b. Making known the mystery to all men (verse 9)
The second part or stage of Paul’s privileged ministry he expresses in these terms: to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things. Verse 9 does not simply repeat verse 8. There are three significant differences.
First, the preaching of the gospel is now defined not as euangelizō (to ‘announce good news’) but as phōtizō (to ‘enlighten’). Paul has already used the verb in his prayer in 1:18. So the thought shifts from the content of the message (good news) to the condition of those to whom it is proclaimed (in the darkness of ignorance). Jesus himself had characterized Paul’s commission in these terms, since he told him he was sending him to the Gentiles ‘to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God’. Paul never forgot this. His own conversion on the road to Damascus had resulted from the bright shining of a light from heaven, not just externally but internally. As he put it later: ‘It is the God who said “Let light shine out of darkness” who has shone in our hearts.’ Indeed, phōtismos is the word he uses there to describe his ‘enlightenment’ involved in his conversion. We ourselves must always remember in our evangelism that ‘the prince of darkness’ holds men and women in darkness, and that only by a divine enlightenment will their eyes be opened to see. Our responsibility is to be faithful in spreading the gospel, since this is the means which God has ordained by which to bring light to those in darkness.
A second difference between verse 8 and verse 9 lies in Paul’s description of his message. In verse 8 he calls it the unsearchable riches of Christ, in verse 9 the plan of the mystery. These are not just divergent expressions for the same thing; again they indicate a shift of emphasis. One may say that Christ’s ‘unsearchable riches’ is the broader of the two concepts. It embraces Christ’s remedy for the two Gentile alienations (from God and from Israel) and therefore the totality of his salvation. The ‘mystery’ concentrates on only one of the two reconciliations. True, the mystery is ‘the mystery of Christ’; it centres on Christ. But what it declares about Christ is that through him and in him Jews and Gentiles are incorporated on equal terms in the same single community. Let me point the difference more sharply in this way: according to verse 8 Paul’s message was Christ, according to verse 9 it was the church.
The third difference between verses 8 and 9 is that Paul directs his ministry in the former verse to the Gentiles, and in the latter to all men. This was necessary because the mystery concerned both Jews and Gentiles. It was a message of mutual reconciliation and of joint membership in God’s new society, which was also the new humanity he was creating. Perhaps this is the reason why in verse 9 Paul describes God as the One who created all things. He who created the universe has now begun a new creation and will one day finish it. Indeed, the ‘mystery’ includes the great promise that finally God will unite all things in and under Christ. So in verse 9 Paul brings creation and redemption together in his mind. The God who created all things in the beginning will recreate all things in the end.
c. Making known God’s wisdom to the cosmic powers (verse 10)
The apostle’s perspective broadens further. He tells us that, although the gospel is addressed primarily and directly to humans, it brings a message indirectly to angels also, to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. What does he mean?
The first result to be expected from the preaching of ‘Christ’s unsearchable riches’ and ‘the mystery’ would be the birth and growth of the church. Gentiles and Jews would embrace the gospel, be converted, and find themselves joint members of the family of God and the body of Christ. Indeed, this had already happened, as Paul was writing. He was not theorizing. ‘The mystery’ was not an abstraction. It was taking concrete shape before people’s eyes. And in this new phenomenon, this new multi-racial humanity, the wisdom of God was being displayed. Indeed, the coming into existence of the church, as a community of saved and reconciled people, is at one and the same time a public demonstration of God’s power, grace and wisdom: first of God’s mighty resurrection power, next of his immeasurable grace and kindness, and now thirdly of his manifold wisdom. The word for ‘manifold’ (polupoikilos) means ‘many-coloured’, and was used to describe flowers, crowns, embroidered cloth and woven carpets. The simpler word poikilos was used in the LXX of the ‘coat of many colours’ (AV) or ‘richly ornamented robe’ (NIV) which Jacob gave to his youngest son Joseph (Gn. 37:3, 23, 32). The church as a multi-racial, multi-cultural community is like a beautiful tapestry. Its members come from a wide range of colourful backgrounds. No other human community resembles it. Its diversity and harmony are unique. It is God’s new society. And the many-coloured fellowship of the church is a reflection of the many-coloured (or ‘many-splendoured’, to use Francis Thompson’s word) wisdom of God.
So then, as the gospel spreads throughout the world, this new and variegated Christian community develops. It is as if a great drama is being enacted. History is the theatre, the world is the stage, and church members in every land are the actors. God himself has written the play, and he directs and produces it. Act by act, scene by scene, the story continues to unfold. But who are the audience? They are the cosmic intelligences, the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. We are to think of them as spectators of the drama of salvation. Thus ‘the history of the Christian church becomes a graduate school for angels’.
Our knowledge of these spiritual beings is limited, and we must be careful not to go beyond what Scripture teaches into idle speculation. It is clear, however, that they are not omniscient. The apostle Peter tells us that they did not fully understand the teaching of either the Old Testament prophets or the New Testament apostles regarding the good news of salvation in Christ, for these are ‘things into which angels long to look’. Similarly, we may infer from verse 10 here that God had not revealed to them directly his master plan for the church, but intended rather to make it known to them through the church itself, as it came into being and grew. It is through the old creation (the universe) that God reveals his glory to humans; it is through the new creation (the church) that he reveals his wisdom to angels. It seems legitimate to say that though we cannot see them, they can see us. They watch fascinated as they see Gentiles and Jews being incorporated into the new society as equals. Indeed, they learn from the composition of the church not only the manifold wisdom of God (verse 10) but also his eternal purpose (verse 11). This purpose he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in the arena of history, through his death and resurrection, the gift of his Spirit, the preaching of the gospel and the emergence of the church. For in him (Christ) and through our faith in him all of us, whether Jews or Gentiles, have boldness and confidence of access (verse 12). This universal access of all Christian people to God through Christ is what the sixteenth-century reformers termed ‘the priesthood of all believers’; it is a foundation privilege of all who are in Christ, in fact of ‘the church’, the universal Jew-Gentile community, of which Paul has just been writing.
I do not think I can leave these verses, especially verse 10, without at least mentioning a quite different interpretation which is gaining popularity. It rests on an understanding of ‘the principalities and powers’ as being not cosmic intelligences (i.e. angels and demons) but rather the politico-economic structures of human society. I shall reserve a full exposition and critique of this view until we reach the warfare with the ‘principalities and powers’ in 6:12, but I cannot altogether ignore it here. Its importance may be gauged by G. B. Caird’s statement about verse 10: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that any interpretation of Ephesians stands or falls by this verse.’ He believes that God’s purpose is to use the church not only to inform ‘the powers’ but actually to redeem them, since ‘even such structures of power and authority as the secular state are capable of being brought into harmony with the love of God’. Markus Barth elaborates this concept of the far flung, ‘cosmic’ influence of the church: ‘Political and social, cultural and religious forces, also all other institutions, traditions, majorities and minorities are exposed to her testimony.’ Dictatorships and democracies, organizations promoting racism and civil rights, etc., etc. ‘all these and other powers are given a unique chance by God: they are entitled to see in their midst the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth’. He is referring to the church’s role as indicated in verse 10. Naturally, I feel very diffident about disagreeing with scholars of this calibre but, having weighed the matter carefully, I feel bound to declare myself on it: I do not believe either that Paul was referring to social structures on earth when he wrote of principalities and powers in the heavenlies, or that, whatever their identity, he intended the making known to them of God’s manifold wisdom to be understood as a redemptive (as opposed to an informative) activity. But I will say no more on this topic here.
Looking back over Paul’s exposition of the peculiar privilege which had been given him by God’s grace to be the apostle to the Gentiles, it is instructive to note the different media and phases of God’s communication. First, he made known the mystery of his plan to Paul himself (and the other apostles and prophets, verse 5) by revelation. Secondly, he commissioned Paul (and others) to preach the gospel to everybody throughout the world. Thirdly, his manifold wisdom and eternal purpose were made known to the principalities and powers through the fact of the church as they watched it grow. This is the circle of divine communication, for the good news was passed from God to Paul, from Paul and others to all mankind, and from the church on earth back to heaven again, to the cosmic powers. At each stage the medium changes. It is by direct revelation that God disclosed his plan to Paul, by the verbal proclamation of the gospel that the message spreads today, and by a visual model (the multi-cultural Christian community) that it finally reaches the unseen angelic spectators. Nothing is more honouring to the gospel, or more indicative of its surpassing importance, than this programme for its universal communication.
Conclusion
The major lesson taught by this first half of Ephesians 3 is the biblical centrality of the church. Some people construct a Christianity which consists entirely of a personal relationship to Jesus Christ and has virtually nothing to do with the church. Others make a grudging concession to the need for church membership, but add that they have given up the ecclesiastical institution as hopeless. Now it is understandable, even inevitable, that we are critical of many of the church’s inherited structures and traditions. Every church in every place at every time is in need of reform and renewal. But we need to beware lest we despise the church of God, and are blind to his work in history. We may safely say that God has not abandoned his church, however displeased with it he may be. He is still building and refining it. And if God has not abandoned it, how can we? It has a central place in his plan. What then does this passage teach about the biblical centrality of the church?
a. The church is central to history
Verse 11, as we saw, alludes to the eternal purpose of God. It is also called his ‘plan’ or ‘the plan of the mystery’ (verse 9). What we are told is that this plan or purpose of God, which was conceived in eternity, kept ‘hidden for ages’ (verse 9) and ‘not made known to the sons of men in other generations’ (verse 5), he has now realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, first through his historical work of salvation and then through its subsequent proclamation in the world. What is this eternal purpose which is now being worked out in history, this divine plan which thus belongs to both history and eternity? It concerns the church, the creating of a new and reconciled humanity in union with Jesus Christ. This is the ‘mystery’, hidden for ages but now revealed.
Is this our view of history? We have all studied history at school and may have found it (as I did) abominably dull. Perhaps we had to memorize lists of dates or of the kings and queens who ruled our country. But what is the point of history? Was Henry Ford right when in 1919, during his libel suit with the Chicago Tribune, he said, ‘History is bunk’? Is history just the random succession of events, each effect having its cause and each cause its effect, yet the whole betraying no overall pattern but appearing rather as the meaningless development of the human story? Was Marx right in his dialectical understanding of the historical process? Or has history some other clue?
Christians affirm, in contrast to all other views, that history is ‘his story’, God’s story. For God is at work, moving from a plan conceived in eternity, through a historical outworking and disclosure, to a climax within history, and then on beyond it to another eternity of the future. The Bible has this linear understanding of time. And it tells us that the centre of God’s eternal-historical plan is Jesus Christ, together with his redeemed and reconciled people. In order to grasp this, it may be helpful to contrast the perspective of secular historians with that of the Bible.
Secular history concentrates its attention on kings, queens and presidents, on politicians and generals, in fact on ‘VIPs’. The Bible concentrates rather on a group it calls ‘the saints’, often little people, insignificant people, unimportant people, who are however at the same time God’s people—and for that reason are both ‘unknown (to the world) and yet well-known (to God)’.
Secular history concentrates on wars, battles and peace-treaties, followed by yet more wars, battles and peace-treaties. The Bible concentrates rather on the war between good and evil, on the decisive victory won by Jesus Christ over the powers of darkness, on the peace-treaty ratified by his blood, and on the sovereign proclamation of an amnesty for all rebels who will repent and believe.
Again, secular history concentrates on the changing map of the world, as one nation defeats another and annexes its territory, and on the rise and fall of empires. The Bible concentrates rather on a multi-national community called ‘the church’, which has no territorial frontiers, which claims nothing less than the whole world for Christ, and whose empire will never come to an end.
No doubt I have painted the contrast between the secular and the biblical views of history too starkly. For the Bible does not ignore the great empires of Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome; and a true secular history cannot ignore the fact of the church. Yet it is a question of perspective, of priorities. The living God is the God of all the nations of the world, yet within the universal human community there exists a ‘covenant community’, his own new society, the beginning of his new creation. It is to this people only that he has pledged himself with the everlasting promise: ‘I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’
b. The church is central to the gospel
The gospel which some of us proclaim is much too individualistic. ‘Christ died for me,’ we say, and then sing of heaven: ‘Oh, that will be glory for me.’ Both affirmations are true. As for the first, the apostle Paul himself could write, ‘The Son of God … loved me and gave himself for me.’ As for the so-called ‘glory song’, the gospel does promise ‘glory’ for believers in heaven. But this is far from being the full gospel. For it is evident from Ephesians 3 that the full gospel concerns both Christ and the ‘mystery’ of Christ. The good news of the unsearchable riches of Christ which Paul preached is that he died and rose again not only to save sinners like me (though he did), but also to create a single new humanity; not only to redeem us from sin but also to adopt us into God’s family; not only to reconcile us to God but also to reconcile us to one another. Thus the church is an integral part of the gospel. The gospel is good news of a new society as well as of a new life.
c. The church is central to Christian living
It is noteworthy that Paul concludes this section as he began it (verse 1), namely with a reference to his own sufferings in the Gentile cause. He addresses to them the following exhortation: So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory (verse 13). Now ‘suffering’ and ‘glory’ are constantly coupled in the New Testament. Jesus said that he would enter his glory through suffering, and that his followers would have to tread the same path. Here, however, Paul writes something different, namely that his sufferings will bring them (his Gentile readers) glory. He is suffering in prison on their behalf, as their champion, standing firm for their inclusion in God’s new society. So convinced is he of the divine origin of his vision that he is prepared to pay any price to see it become a reality. That is the measure of Paul’s concern for the church.
Now of course it may be argued that Paul was exceptional. He was after all the apostle to the Gentiles. He had received a special revelation and a special commission. So one would expect him to have to suffer for the church. Nevertheless, the principle is applicable to all Christians. If the church is central to God’s purpose, as seen in both history and the gospel, it must surely also be central to our lives. How can we take lightly what God takes so seriously? How dare we push to the circumference what God has placed at the centre? No, we shall seek to become responsible church members, active in some local manifestation of the universal church. We shall not be able to acquiesce in low standards which fall far short of the New Testament ideals for God’s new society, whether mechanical, meaningless worship services, or fellowship which is icy cold and even spoiled by rivalries which make the Lord’s Supper a farce, or such inward-looking isolationism as to turn the church into a ghetto which is indifferent to the outside world and its pain. If instead (like Paul) we keep before us the vision of God’s new society as his family, his dwelling place and his instrument in the world, then we shall constantly be seeking to make our church’s worship more authentic, its fellowship more caring and its outreach more compassionate. In other words (like Paul again), we shall be ready to pray, to work and if necessary to suffer in order to turn the vision into a reality.
6. Confidence in God’s power (3:14–21)
One of the best ways to discover a Christian’s chief anxieties and ambitions is to study the content of his prayers and the intensity with which he prays them. We all pray about what concerns us, and are evidently not concerned about matters we do not include in our prayers. Prayer expresses desire. For example, when Paul prayed for the salvation of his Israelite kinsfolk, he wrote of his ‘heart’s desire and prayer to God for them’. As the hymn puts it, ‘Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed.’
This is certainly true of this second prayer of Paul’s in Ephesians in which he pours out his soul to God. He has been explaining both Christ’s peace-making work, which resulted in the creation of the new society, and his personal involvement in this because of the special revelation and commission he had received. Now he turns from exposition to intercession. He prays that God’s wonderful plan which he has been elaborating may be even more completely fulfilled in his readers’ experience. Prayer and preaching should always go together. As Jesus watered with prayer the good seeds of instruction he had sown in the Upper Room, so Paul follows up his teaching with earnest prayer, and by recording it enables us to overhear him. As Bishop Handley Moule put it: ‘Who has not read and re-read the closing verses of the third chapter of the Ephesians with the feeling of one permitted to look through parted curtains into the Holiest Place of the Christian life?’
1. The introduction to his prayer (verses 14–16a)
The apostle begins For this reason …, resuming his train of thought where he had left it in verse 1. What ‘reason’ is in his mind? What is it that moves him to pray? Surely it is both the reconciling work of Christ and his own understanding of it by special revelation? These are the convictions which undergird his prayer. This being so, an important principle of prayer emerges. The basis of Paul’s prayer was his knowledge of God’s purpose. It was because of what God had done in Christ and revealed to Paul that he had the necessary warrant to pray. For the indispensable prelude to all petition is the revelation of God’s will. We have no authority to pray for anything which God has not revealed to be his will. That is why Bible reading and prayer should always go together. For it is in Scripture that God has disclosed his will, and it is in prayer that we ask him to do it.
Paul goes on: I bow my knees. The normal posture for prayer among the Jews was standing. In Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the Publican both men stood to pray (Lk. 18:11, 13). So kneeling was unusual. It indicated an exceptional degree of earnestness, as when Ezra confessed Israel’s sins of penitence, Jesus fell on his face to the ground in the Garden of Gethsemane, and Stephen faced the ordeal of martyrdom. Scripture lays down no rule about the posture we should adopt when we pray. It is possible to pray kneeling, standing, sitting, walking and even lying, although we may feel inclined to agree with William Hendriksen that ‘the slouching position of the body while one is supposed to be praying is an abomination to the Lord’.
I bow my knees before the Father. Already the apostle has called God ‘the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ and therefore because we are in Christ ‘our Father’, from whom all blessings flow. He has also declared that Jews and Gentiles are fellow members of the Father’s family, who enjoy equal access to their Father in prayer. Here he goes on to affirm that from this Father, before whom he kneels in reverent humility, every family in heaven and on earth is named. At least, this is the RSV and NEB translation, and pasa patria may quite properly be rendered ‘every family’. Yet there is something inherently inappropriate about this reference to a multiplicity of families, since the dominant theme of these chapters is that through Christ the ‘one God and Father of us all’ (4:6) has only one family or household to which Jewish and Gentile believers equally belong. It seems better, therefore, to translate pasa patria ‘the whole family’ (AV), ‘his whole family’ (NEB margin) or ‘the whole family of believers’ (NIV). Then the addition of the words in heaven and on earth will indicate that the church militant on earth and the church triumphant in heaven, though separated by death, are nevertheless only two parts of the one great family of God.
At the same time, there is a deliberate play on words in the Greek sentence, since ‘father’ is patēr and ‘family’ is patria. In consequence, some translators have tried to preserve the verbal assonance in English, and have rendered the phrase ‘the Father from whom all fatherhood … derives its name’ (JBP, NIV margin). Commentators point out that the word patria does not normally mean ‘fatherhood’, but rather ‘family’. Nevertheless, it is a family descended from the same father, and so the concept of fatherhood is implied and ‘the abstract idea of paternity seems uppermost here’. It may be, then, that Paul is saying not only that the whole Christian family is named from the Father, but that the very notion of fatherhood is derived from the Fatherhood of God. In this case, the true relation between human fatherhood and the divine fatherhood is neither one of analogy (‘God is a father like human fathers’), nor one of projection (Freud’s theory that we have invented God because we needed a heavenly father figure), but rather one of derivation (God’s fatherhood being the archetypal reality, ‘the source of all conceivable fatherhood’).
To this Father Paul prays that he will give his readers certain gifts according to the riches of his glory. Both ‘riches’ and ‘glory’ are characteristic words of this letter, and here as in 1:18 are in combination. Paul has no doubt either that God has inexhaustible resources at his disposal or that out of them he will be able to answer his prayer.
2. The substance of his prayer (verses 16b–19)
I like to think of the apostle’s petition as a staircase by which he climbs higher and higher in his aspiration for his readers. His prayer-staircase has four steps, whose key words are ‘strength’, ‘love’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘fullness’. More precisely, he prays first that they may be strengthened by the indwelling of Christ through his Spirit; secondly that they may be rooted and grounded in love; thirdly that they may know Christ’s love in all its dimensions, although it is beyond knowledge; and fourthly that they may be filled right up to the very fullness of God.
a. Strengthened with might
The prayer opens: that … he may grant you to be strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith (verses 16–17a). These two petitions clearly belong together. Both refer to the Christian’s innermost being, his ‘inner man’ on the one hand and his ‘heart’ on the other. Then, although one specifies the strength of the Spirit and the other the indwelling of Christ, both surely refer to the same experience. For Paul never separates the second and third persons of the Trinity. To have Christ dwelling in us and to have the Spirit dwelling in us are the same thing. Indeed, it is precisely by the Spirit that Christ dwells in our hearts, and it is strength which he gives us when he dwells there. Moreover, the experience of ‘Christ in you’ was a part of the ‘mystery’ and so of the privilege of Gentile believers.
Some are puzzled by this first petition when they remember that Paul is praying for Christians. ‘Surely’, they say, ‘Christ dwells by his Spirit within every believer? So how can Paul ask here that Christ may dwell in their hearts? Was Christ not already within them?’. To these questions we begin by replying that indeed every Christian is indwelt by Christ and is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Nevertheless as Charles Hodge rightly comments, ‘The indwelling of Christ is a thing of degrees’. So also is the inward strengthening of the Holy Spirit. What Paul asks for his readers is that they may be ‘fortified, braced, invigorated’, that they may ‘know the strength of the Spirit’s inner reinforcement’ (JBP), and may lay hold ever more firmly ‘by faith’ of this divine strength, this divine indwelling.
That this is Paul’s meaning is further confirmed by his choice of word for the ‘dwelling’ of Christ in the heart. There are two similar Greek verbs, paroikō and katoikeō. The former is the weaker. It means to ‘inhabit (a place) as a stranger’ (AG), to live in fact as a paroikos, the very word Paul has used in 2:19 for an alien who is living away from his home. Katoikeō, on the other hand, means to settle down somewhere. It refers to a permanent as opposed to a temporary abode, and is used metaphorically both for the fullness of the Godhead abiding in Christ and for Christ’s abiding in the believer’s heart (here in verse 17). Bishop Handley Moule draws out the implications: ‘The word selected (katoikein) … is a word made expressly to denote residence as against lodging, the abode of a master within his own home as against the turning aside for a night of the wayfarer who will be gone tomorrow.’ Again, it is ‘the residence always in the heart of its Master and Lord, who where he dwells must rule; who enters not to cheer and soothe alone but before all things else to reign’. Thus Paul prays to the Father that Christ by his Spirit will be allowed to settle down in their hearts, and from his throne there both control and strengthen them. For the fourth time in the letter one is struck by the natural trinitarian structure of the apostle’s thought.
b. Rooted and grounded in love
If we had the opportunity to ask Paul for what purpose he prayed that Christ would control and strengthen his readers, I think he would reply that he wanted them to be strengthened to love. For in the new and reconciled humanity which Christ is creating love is the pre-eminent virtue. The new humanity is God’s family, whose members are brothers and sisters, who love their Father and love each other. Or should do. They need the power of the Spirit’s might and of Christ’s indwelling to enable them to love each other, especially across the deep racial and cultural divide which previously had separated them.
To express how fundamental Paul longs for their love to be, he joins two metaphors (one botanical, the other architectural), both of which emphasize depth as opposed to superficiality. These Christians are to be rooted and grounded, or to have ‘deep roots and firm foundations’ (NEB). Thus Paul likens them first to a well-rooted tree, and then to a well-built house. In both cases the unseen cause of their stability will be the same: love. Love is to be the soil in which their life is to be rooted; love is to be the foundation on which their life is built. One might say that their love is to be of both a ‘radical’ and a ‘fundamental’ nature in their experience, for these English words refer to our roots and our foundations.
c. Knowing Christ’s love
We observe that the apostle now passes from our love (in which we are to be rooted and grounded) to Christ’s love (which he prays we may know). Indeed, he acknowledges that we need strength or power for both, strength to love and power to comprehend Christ’s love. Certainly the two cannot be separated, and it is partly by loving that we learn the meaning of his love.
Paul prays that we may have power to comprehend the love of Christ in its full dimensions—its breadth and length and height and depth. Modern commentators warn us not to be too literal in our interpretation of these, since the apostle may only have been indulging in a little rhetoric or poetic hyperbole. Yet it seems to me legitimate to say that the love of Christ is ‘broad’ enough to encompass all mankind (especially Jews and Gentiles, the theme of these chapters), ‘long’ enough to last for eternity, ‘deep’ enough to reach the most degraded sinner, and ‘high’ enough to exalt him to heaven. Or, as Leslie Mitton expresses it, finding a parallel to Romans 8:37–39: ‘Whether you go forward or backward, up to the heights or down to the depths, nothing will separate us from the love of Christ.’ Ancient commentators went further. They saw these dimensions illustrated on the cross. For its upright pole reached down into the earth and pointed up to heaven, while its crossbar carried the arms of Jesus, stretched out as if to invite and welcome the whole world. Armitage Robinson calls this a ‘pretty fancy’. Perhaps he is right and it is fanciful, yet what it affirms about the love of Christ is true.
We shall have power to comprehend these dimensions of Christ’s love, Paul adds, only with all the saints. The isolated Christian can indeed know something of the love of Jesus. But his grasp of it is bound to be limited by his limited experience. It needs the whole people of God to understand the whole love of God, all the saints together, Jews and Gentiles, men and women, young and old, black and white, with all their varied backgrounds and experiences.
Yet even then, although we may ‘comprehend’ its dimensions to some extent with our minds, we cannot ‘know’ it in our experience. It is too broad, long, deep and high even for all the saints together to grasp. It surpasses knowledge. Paul has already used this ‘surpassing’ word of God’s power and grace; now he uses it of his love. Christ’s love is as unknowable as his riches are unsearchable (verse 8). Doubtless we shall spend eternity exploring his inexhaustible riches of grace and love.
d. Filled up to God’s fullness
‘Fullness’ is a characteristic word of Ephesians, as it is of Colossians. In Colossians Paul tells us not only that God’s fullness dwells in Christ, but also that in Christ we ourselves have come to fullness. At the same time, he makes it plain in Ephesians that we still have room for growth. As individuals we are to go on being filled with the Spirit, and the church, although already the fullness of Christ, is still to ‘grow up into him’ till it reaches his fullness. ‘Growth into fullness’ is therefore the theme of Paul’s fourth and last petition for his Asian readers. He prays that they may be filled with all the fullness of God. It is uncertain how this genitive should be understood. If it is objective, then God’s fullness is the abundance of grace which he bestows. If it is subjective, it is the fullness which fills God himself, in other words his perfection. Staggering as the thought may be, the latter seems the more probable because the Greek preposition is eis, which indicates that we are to be filled not ‘with’ so much as ‘unto’ the fullness of God. God’s fullness or perfection becomes the standard or level up to which we pray to be filled. The aspiration is the same in principle as that implied by the commands to be holy as God is holy, and to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect.
Such a prayer must surely look on to our final state of perfection in heaven when together we enter the completeness of God’s purpose for us, and are filled to capacity, filled up to that fullness of God which human beings are capable of receiving without ceasing to be human. Another way of expressing the prospect is that we shall become like Christ, which is God’s purpose and promise, for Christ is himself the fullness of God. Yet another way of putting it is to say that we shall attain the fullness of love, of which Paul has just spoken in his prayer. Then Jesus’ own prayer will be fulfilled: ‘That the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.’
In saying that Paul’s last petition points to heavenly perfection, we have no liberty to try to evade its contemporary challenge. For God expects us to be growing daily towards that final fullness, as we are being transformed by the Holy Spirit into Christ’s image from one degree of glory to another.
As we now look back down the staircase which we have been climbing with Paul, we cannot fail to be struck by his audacity. He prays that his readers may be given the strength of the Spirit and the ruling presence of Christ, the rooting of their lives in love, the knowledge of Christ’s love in all its dimensions, and the fullness of God himself. These are bold petitions. Climbers of this staircase become short of breath, even a little giddy. But Paul does not leave us in suspense.
3. The conclusion of his prayer (verses 20–21)
We notice now that the apostle’s four petitions are sandwiched between two references to God. In verses 14–16 he is the Father of the whole family and possesses infinite riches in glory; in verses 20 and 21 he is the one who works powerfully within us. Such a God can answer prayer.
God’s ability to answer prayer is forcefully stated by the apostle in a composite expression of seven stages. (1) He is able to do or to work (poiēsai), for he is neither idle, nor inactive, nor dead. (2) He is able to do what we ask, for he hears and answers prayer. (3) He is able to do what we ask or think, for he reads our thoughts, and sometimes we imagine things for which we dare not and therefore do not ask. (4) He is able to do all that we ask or think, for he knows it all and can perform it all. (5) He is able to do more … than (hyper, ‘beyond’) all that we ask or think, for his expectations are higher than ours. (6) He is able to do much more, or more abundantly (perissōs), than all that we ask or think, for he does not give his grace by calculated measure. (7) He is able to do very much more, far more abundantly, than all that we ask or think, for he is a God of super-abundance. This adverb hyperekperissou is one of Paul’s coined ‘super-superlatives’. English equivalents which have been proposed are ‘immeasurably more’ (NIV) or ‘vastly more than more’, but perhaps the feel of it is best conveyed by ‘infinitely more’ (AG, JBP). It states simply that there are no limits to what God can do.
The infinite ability of God to work beyond our prayers, thoughts and dreams is by the power at work within us, within us individually (Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith) and within us as a people (who are the dwelling place of God by his Spirit). It is the power of the resurrection, the power which raised Christ from the dead, enthroned him in the heavenlies, and then raised and enthroned us there with him. That is the power which is at work within the Christian and the church.
Paul’s prayer relates to the fulfilment of his vision for God’s new society of love. He asks that its members may be strengthened to love and to know the love of Christ, though this surpasses knowledge. But then he turns from the love of God past knowing to the power of God past imagining, from limitless love to limitless power. For he is convinced, as we must be, that only divine power can generate divine love in the divine society.
To add anything more would be inappropriate, except the doxology. To him be glory, Paul exclaims, to this God of resurrection power who alone can make the dream come true. The power comes from him; the glory must go to him. To him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus together, in the body and in the Head, in the bride and in the Bridegroom, in the community of peace and in the Peacemaker, to all generations (in history), for ever and ever (in eternity), Amen.