Ephesians 2:11 - Joseph Benson’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

Wherefore To increase your sense of God's goodness in saving you, and of the obligation he hath thereby laid on you to do good works; remember that ye being in time past Gentiles Ignorant, vicious, and idolatrous, neither circumcised in body nor in spirit; who were accordingly called Uncircumcision By way of reproach, by that which is called the Circumcision By those who call themselves the circumcised, and think this a proof that they are the people of God; and who, indeed, have that outward circumcision in the flesh made by hands By this description of circumcision, the apostle puts his readers in mind of the inward circumcision, the circumcision of the heart, made by the Spirit of God, of which the outward circumcision was only an emblem, (Romans 2:29,) and intimated that the Jews had no reason to boast of the outward circumcision, unless it was accompanied with the circumcision of the heart. That ye were without Christ Having no faith in him, or knowledge of him, and so were destitute of all those blessings which he bestows on his believing and obedient people; being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel Both as to their temporal privileges and spiritual blessings; and strangers from the covenants of promise Namely, that made with Abraham, and that made with the Israelites at Sinai, which promised and prefigured Christ's coming to procure and bestow those blessings. As the promises contained in these covenants centred in the great promise of the Messiah, and of salvation through him, he therefore speaks of them in the singular number, as only one promise. Having no hope No sure hope, either of present pardon or future felicity, because they had no promise whereon to build their hope. That the heathens had among them the doctrine of a future state,” says Dr. Doddridge, “and that it was popularly taught, and generally believed by the common people, must, I think, appear incontestable, to any who are at all acquainted with antiquity; but it is as apparent that they reasoned very weakly upon the subject, and that they had no well-grounded hope of future happiness, and that they were but very little impressed with it, so that they had no Deity to which they prayed for eternal life, as the fathers often demonstrate. And by far the greater part of their most learned philosophers either expressly denied, in private lectures to their pupils, the doctrine of future rewards and punishments, or taught principles quite inconsistent with it.” And without God Being wholly ignorant of the true God, and so in effect atheists. Such in truth are, more or less, all men, in all ages, till they know God by the teaching of his own Spirit: in the world The wide, vain world, wherein ye wander up and down, unholy and unhappy. “Both the Christians and heathens,” as Dr. Whitby observes, “called each other atheists, though both worshipped some deity, real or imaginary; because each supposed the other to reject that which was the true object of adoration. But it is not to be conceived that the apostle would have given to the heathens the character of atheists, if the worship of the one living and true God had really prevailed among them to that degree which some Christian divines have incautiously maintained that it did. The truth of the matter seems to have been, that, though several of them speak of their Jupiter in terms proper to the one self-existent and eternal Deity only, yet they taught and believed other things of him quite inconsistent with such perfections. And those who had some knowledge of the one Supreme Eternal Cause, yet practically disregarded him: and, however they might reconcile it with the dictates of their consciences, worshipped inferior deities; and many of them such as were represented under the most scandalous characters, to the neglect of the Supreme Being, and the destruction of all true religion.”