The Christian Walk in Love, Light and Wisdom (5:1-21).
‘Therefore you be imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling fragrance.'
The imitation of God looks both back to Ephesians 4:32 and on to Ephesians 5:2. We imitate God in being those who forgive, and we also imitate Him by walking in love, a love that is comparable with Christ's love. And it is because we are His beloved children, those loved by Him, that we are to walk in love.
‘As beloved children.' Christians are regularly described as those who are beloved by God (compare Romans 1:7; Colossians 3:12; 2 Thessalonians 2:13) and this is because they are ‘in the Beloved' (Ephesians 1:7). God's love for His own is a constant theme (Romans 5:8; Romans 8:39; 1 John 4:9-10).
‘And continually walk in love even as Christ also loved you.' You are to continually walk in love because you are imitating God (Ephesians 5:1), because loving your neighbour as yourself fulfils the law (Galatians 5:14; Romans 13:8), because the Father's love is in you (John 17:26), because you are rooted and grounded in love (Ephesians 3:17), and because Christ so loved you. His love is the example of what our love is to be. Christian love is to be something special. It is to be genuine and not feigned (2 Corinthians 6:6) for real love is the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22). Love is to colour everything we do and say.
This Christian walk is often emphasised. We are to walk in love (here and in Romans 14:15), we are to walk in the Spirit (Galatians 5:16), we are to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4), we are to walk in accordance with the Spirit (Romans 8:4), we are to walk honestly as in the day (Romans 13:13; 1 Thessalonians 4:12), we are to walk by faith not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), we are to walk in good works (Ephesians 2:10), we are to walk worthily of our calling (Ephesians 4:1), we are to walk as children of light (Ephesians 5:8), we are to walk carefully (Ephesians 5:15), we are to walk worthily of the Lord (Colossians 1:10; 1 Thessalonians 2:12), we are to walk in the light (1 John 1:7), we are to walk as He walked (1 John 2:6), and we are to walk in the truth (2 John 1:4; 3 John 1:4). Walking in love will accomplish all these.
‘Even as Christ also loved you, and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling fragrance.' We must love as Christ loved, and that was totally sacrificially. He held nothing back but freely gave everything. So Paul's demand is absolute. There should be no limit on our love.
He gave Himself up for us as ‘an offering and a sacrifice to God', a propitiation for sin so that God's wrath against sin was borne by Him on our behalf (compare 1 John 4:9-10), dying on a cross, and bearing our sin in His own body on the tree (1 Peter 2:24), offering Himself as the Lamb of God (John 1:29; 1 Corinthians 5:7), being offered to bear the sins of many (Hebrews 9:28). And His offering was a sweet smelling fragrance (compare Genesis 8:21; Exodus 29:18; Exodus 29:25; Exodus 29:41), and thus acceptable and delightful to God.
But how could such an offering be acceptable and delightful to God? The answer lies in the loving heart that it revealed and in the full satisfaction it gave for sin, meeting all the requirements of justice and holiness. It was acceptable because it fulfilled all that Jesus sought to accomplish.
The ideas behind such sacrifices and offerings were numerous. The sin offering and guilt offering were substitutionary in the sense that because the sacrifice died the sinner was forgiven and his sin was borne in some way by the sacrifice. It was the offering of the shed blood, which represented the life yielded in death, which was of crucial importance (Leviticus 17:11). A life given, a death died. The whole burnt offering was a total offering to God, a complete act of worship which also contained within it the idea of propitiation and atonement resulting in God being able to deal with the sinner without taking account of his sin. And these sacrifices were effective because they looked forward to the one great sacrifice in the death of Jesus (Romans 3:25; Hebrews 9:9-14). Thus they came up to God as a sweet smelling savour.
The suffering Servant in Isaiah 53 was to be such an offering for sin, ‘He was wounded for our transgression, bruised for our inquities' (Isaiah 53:5), He was ‘made an offering for sin' (Isaiah 53:10), through His humiliation (from Ugarit we know that the verb yatha‘ also meant humiliation) He would justify many and He would bear their iniquities (Isaiah 53:11). And from this passage Philip ‘preached to him Jesus' (Acts 8:35). At important moments of His career God declared His Son to be this suffering Servant, ‘the One in Whom I am well pleased' (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22 compare Isaiah 42:1), ‘My elect' (Luke 9:35 with Isaiah 42:1). See also Matthew 12:17-21. He came not to be served but to serve and to give His life ‘a ransom instead of many' (lutron anti pollon).