St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition

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Gore Charles. St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians: A Practical Exposition

PREFACE

THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS

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THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS

CHAPTER I. 1-2

DIVISION I. CHAPTERS I. 3-IV. 17

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DIVISION I. § 2. CHAPTER I. 15-23

DIVISION I. § 3. CHAPTER II. 1-10

DIVISION I. § 4. CHAPTER II. 11-22

DIVISION I. § 5. CHAPTER III

DIVISION I. § 6. CHAPTER IV. 1-16

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DIVISION II. CHAPTERS IV. 17-VI. 24

DIVISION II. § 1. CHAPTER IV. 17-24

DIVISION II. § 2. CHAPTER IV. 25-32

DIVISION II. § 3. CHAPTER V. 1-14

DIVISION II. § 4. CHAPTER V. 15-21

DIVISION II. § 5. CHAPTERS V. 22-VI. 9

A. HUSBANDS AND WIVES. (V. 22-33.)

B. PARENTS AND CHILDREN. VI. 1-4

C. MASTERS AND SLAVES. VI. 5-9

DIVISION II. § 6. CHAPTER VI. 10-20

CONCLUSION. CHAPTER VI. 21-24

APPENDED NOTES

NOTE A. See p. 26

NOTE B. See p. 29

NOTE C. See p. 74

NOTE D. See p. 120

NOTE E. See pp. 164, 166

NOTE F. See p. 188

NOTE G. See p. 190

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There are two great rivers of Europe which, in their course, offer a not uninstructive analogy to the Church of God. The Rhine and the Rhone both take their rise from mountain glaciers, and for the first hundred or hundred and fifty miles from their sources they run turbid as glacier streams always are, and for the most part turbulent as mountain torrents. Then they enter the great lakes of Constance and Geneva. There, as in vast settling-vats, they deposit all the discolouring elements which have hitherto defiled their waters, so that when they re-emerge from the western ends of the lakes to run their courses in central and southern Europe their waters have a translucent purity altogether delightful to contemplate. After this the two rivers have very different destinies, but either from fouler affluents or from the commercial activity upon their surfaces or along their banks they lose the purity which characterized their second birth, and become as foul as ever they were among their earlier mountain fastnesses; till after all vicissitudes they lose themselves to north or south in the vast and cleansing sea.

The history of these rivers offers, I say, a remarkable parallel to the history of the Church of God. For that too takes its rude and rough beginnings high up in wild and remote fastnesses of our human history. Such books of the Old Testament as those of Judges and Samuel and Kings represent the turbid and turbulent running of this human nature of ours, divinely directed indeed, but still unpurified and unregenerate. But in the great lake of the humanity of Jesus all its acquired pollution is cut off. In Him, virgin-born, our manhood is seen as indeed the pure mirror of the divine glory; and when at Pentecost the Church of God issues anew, by a second birth of that glorified manhood, for its second course in this world, it issues unmixed with alien influences, substantially pure and unsullied. After a time its history gains in complexity but its character loses in purity, so that there are epochs of the history of the Church when its moral level is possibly not higher than that which is represented in the roughest books of the Old Testament: and through the whole of its later history the Church is strangely fused with the world again, until they issue both together into eternity.

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And there is no doubt that all this tendency to use the empire as the ally and instrument of the Church began with St. Paul. The closer St. Paul's evangelistic travels are examined the more apparent does it become that he, the apostle who was also the Roman citizen, was by the very force of circumstances, but also probably deliberately, working the Church on the lines of the empire. 'The classification adopted in Paul's own letters of the churches which he founded, is according to provinces – Achaia, Macedonia, Asia, and Galatia; the same fact is clearly visible in the narrative of Acts. It guides and inspires the expressions from the time when the apostle landed at Perga. At every step any one who knows the country recognizes that the Roman division is implied[20].' Nor can we fail to be struck with the regularity with which St. Paul, wherever he mentions the Empire, takes it on its best side and represents it as a divine institution whose officers are God's ministers for justice and order and peace[21]. It is from this point of view alone that he will have Christians think of it and pray for it[22]. There is the confidence of the true son of the empire in his 'I appeal unto Caesar[23].'

Further than this, when St. Paul is addressing himself to Gentiles who had received no leavening of Jewish monotheism, it is most striking how he throws himself back on those common philosophical and religious ideas which were permeating the thought of the Empire. 'The popular philosophy inclined towards pantheism, the popular religion was polytheistic, but Paul starts from the simplest platform common to both. There exists something in the way of a divine nature which the religious try to please and the philosophers try to understand[24].' Close parallels to St. Paul's language in his two recorded speeches at Lystra and at Athens, can be found in the writings of the contemporary Stoic philosopher Seneca[25], and in the so-called 'Letters of Heracleitus' written by some philosophic student nearly contemporary with St. Paul at Ephesus[26]. In exposing the folly of idolaters he was only doing what a contemporary philosopher was doing also, and repeating ideas which he might have learnt almost as readily in the schools of his native city Tarsus – which Strabo speaks of as the most philosophical place in the world, and the place where philosophy was most of all an indigenous plant[27] – as at the feet of Gamaliel in Jerusalem. Certainly Paul the apostle to the Gentiles was also Saul of Tarsus and the citizen of the Roman Empire in whose mind the idea and sentiment of the empire lay already side by side with the idea of the catholic church.

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