CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES
Ephesians 2:11. Wherefore remember, that ye, etc.—All that follows in the verse serves to define the “ye,” the verb following in Ephesians 2:12 after the repeated “ye”—“ye were without Christ.” “Called Uncircumcision … called the Circumcision.” As much rancour lies in these words as generally is carried by terms of arrogance on the part of those only nominally religious, and the scornful epithets flung in return. They can be matched by our modern use of “The world” and “Other-worldliness.”
Ephesians 2:12. Without Christ.—Not so much “not in possession of Christ” as “outside Christ,” or, as R.V., “separate from Christ.” The true commentary is John 15:4-5. The branch “severed from” the trunk by knife or storm bears no fruit thenceforth; disciples “apart from Christ can do nothing.” Being aliens from the commonwealth.—What memories might start at this word! Did St. Paul think of the separation from the Jewish synagogue in Ephesus or of the fanatical outburst created in Jerusalem when “the Jews from Asia” saw Trophimus the Ephesian in company with the apostle? To such Jews the Gentiles were nothing but massa perditionis. Like Ephesians 2:2-3, this is a reminder of the dark past, the misery of which did not consist in a Jewish taunt so much as in a life of heathenish vices. Having no hope, and without God in the world.—To be godless—not sure that there is any God—this is to take the “master-light of all our seeing” from us; to live regardless of Him, or wishing there were no God—“that way madness lies.” To be “God-forsaken” with a house full of idols—that is the irony of idolatrous heathenism.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Ephesians 2:11-12
The Forlorn State of the Gentile World.
I. Outcast.—“Gentiles, … called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision” (Ephesians 2:11). The circumcised Jew regarded himself as a special favourite of Heaven, and superior to all other men. He hardly felt himself a member of the human family. He was accustomed to speak of himself as chosen of God, and as holy and clean; whilst the Gentiles were treated as sinners, dogs, polluted, unclean, outcast, and God-abandoned. Between Jew and Gentile there was constant hatred and antagonism, as there is now between the Church and the world. On the one hand, the old religion, with its time-honoured teachings, its ancient traditions, the Church of the Fathers, the guardian of revelation, the depositary of the faith, the staunchness that tends to degenerate into bigotry—here is the Jew. On the other hand, the intellectual searchings, the political aspirations and mechanical contrivings—science, art, literature, commerce, sociology, the liberty which threatens to luxuriate into licence—here is the Gentile. Ever and again the old feud breaks out. Ever and again there is a crack and a rent. The gulf widens, and disruption is threatened. The majority is outside the circle of the Church.
II. Christless.—“That at that time ye were without Christ.” The promises of a coming Deliverer were made to the Jews, and they were slow to see that any other people had any right to the blessings of the Messiah, or that it was their duty to instruct the world concerning Him. They drew a hard line between the sons of Abraham and the dogs of Greeks. They erected a middle wall of partition, thrusting out the Gentiles into the outer court. Christ has broken down the barrier. On the area thus cleared He has erected a larger, loftier, holier temple, a universal brotherhood which acknowledges no preferences and knows no distinctions. In Christ Jesus now there is neither Jew nor Greek, but Christ is all and in all—a vivid contrast to the Christlessness of a former age.
III. Hopeless.—“Being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope” (Ephesians 2:12). Where there is no promise there is no hope. Cut off from any knowledge of the promises revealed to the Jews, the Gentiles were sinking into despair.
IV. Godless.—“Without God in the world.” With numberless deities the Gentiles had no God. They had everything else, but this one thing they lacked—knowledge of God their Father; and without this all their magnificent gifts could not satisfy, could not save, them. Culture and civilisation, arts and commerce, institutions and laws, no nation can afford to undervalue these; but not only do all these things soon fade, but the people themselves fall into corruption and decay, if the Breath of Life is wanting. As with nations, so is it with individuals. Man cannot with impunity ignore or deny the Father of earth and heaven.
Lessons.—
1. Man left to himself inevitably degenerates.
2. When man abandons God his case is desperate.
3. The rescue of man from utter ruin is an act of divine mercy.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Ephesians 2:11-12. The Condition of the Ephesians before their Conversion descriptive of the State of Sinners under the Gospel.
I. They were in time past Gentiles in the flesh.—He admonishes them not to forget the dismal state of heathenism out of which they had been called, and often to reflect upon it, that they might ever maintain a sense of their unworthiness and awaken thankful and admiring apprehensions of that grace which had wrought in them so glorious a change.
II. Reminds them of the contempt with which they had been treated by the Jews.—The Jews, instead of improving the distinction of their circumcision to gratitude and obedience, perverted it to pride, self-confidence, and contempt of mankind. They not only excluded other nations from the benefit of religious communion, but even denied them the common offices of humanity. One of their greatest objections to the gospel was that it offered salvation to the Gentiles.
III. They were without Christ.—To the Jews were chiefly confined the discoveries which God made of a Saviour to come. From them in their captivities and dispersions the Gentiles obtained the knowledge they had of this glorious Person. This knowledge was imperfect, mixed with error and uncertainty, and at best extended only to a few. The Gentiles, contemplating the Messiah as a temporal prince, regarded His appearance as a calamity rather than a blessing.
IV. They were aliens from the commonwealth of Israel.—To the forms of worship instituted in the Mosaic law none was admitted but Jews and such as were proselyted to the Jewish religion. All uncircumcised heathens were excluded as aliens.
V. They were strangers from the covenants of promise.—The discovery of the covenants of promise until the Saviour came was almost wholly confined to the Jews. How unhappy was the condition of the Gentile world in the dark, benighted ages which preceded the gospel!
VI. They had no clear hope of a future existence.—Many of them scarcely believed or thought of a life beyond this. They had no apprehension, hardly the idea of a restoration of the body. Those who believed in a future state had but obscure and some of them very absurd conceptions of it. Still more ignorant were they of the qualifications necessary for happiness after death.
VII. They were atheists in a world in which God was manifest.—The heathens generally had some apprehension of a Deity; but they were without a knowledge of the one true God and without a just idea of His character. There are more atheists in the world than profess themselves such. Many who profess to know God in works deny Him.—Lathrop.
Ephesians 2:12. Hopeless and Godless.—The soul that has no God has no hope. The character of the God we love and worship will determine the character of our hope.
1. The heathen religion was the seeking religion. Their search arose out of a deeply felt want. They felt the need of something they did not possess; and the finest intellects the world has ever known bravely and anxiously devoted all their colossal powers to the task of fathoming the mysteries of life. The hope of discovery buoyed them up and urged them onwards; but their united endeavours brought them only to the borderland of the unseen and the unknown, where they caught but glimmerings of a truth that ever receded into the great beyond. “The world by wisdom knew not God,” and therefore had no hope.
2. The Hebrew religion was the hoping religion. Favoured with a revelation of the only true God, their hope expanded with every advancing step of the progressive revelation. Their hope was based on faith, as all true hope must be—faith in the promises of God. They had the promise of a Deliverer whose wisdom should excel that of Moses and Solomon, and whose power should surpass that of Joshua and of his heroic successors in the most brilliant period of their military career; and, through the centuries of prosperity and decline, of scattering and captivity, and amid unparalleled sufferings which would have extinguished any other nation, hope fastened and fed upon the promises till the true Messiah came, whom St. Paul justly described as “the Hope of Israel, the Hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers.”
3. The Christian religion is the complement and perfection of all previously existing systems; it is the grand realisation of what the heathen sought and the Hebrew hoped for. It is in Jesus we have the clearest, fullest, and most authoritative revelation of God, and it is in Him, and in Him alone, that the loftiest hope of man finds its restful and all-sufficient realisation. The apostle Paul refers to Jesus specifically as our Hope—“Our Lord Jesus Christ, which is our Hope” (1 Timothy 1:1).
4. In the light of this great and indubitable truth the words of our text may be clearly and unmistakably interpreted, and they assume a terrible significance. To be without Christ is to be without God and without hope.
(1) Hope is not simply expectation. We expect many things we do not hope for. In the natural course of things we expect difficulties, we expect opposition and misrepresentation—“black wounding calumny the whitest virtue strikes”—we expect affliction and suffering, we expect the infirmities and disabilities of age; but we are none of us so fond of trouble for trouble’s sake as to hope for any of these things.
(2) Hope is not simply desire. Our desires are as thick and plentiful as apple blossoms, few of which ever ripen into the fruit they promise. We desire uninterrupted health, we desire wealth—the most dangerous and disappointing of all human wishes—we desire pleasure, success in life, and the realisation of the most ambitious dreams; but we have no reasonable ground for hoping that all our desires will ever be attained.
(3) Hope is the expectation of the desirable, and it must have a foundation on which the expectation rests and an object to which the desire can rise. The foundation of hope is Christ, and the object of hope is to live with Him in eternal glory. To be without hope and without God does not mean that hope and God do not exist. The world is full of both; they are among you, they surround you, the very air vibrates with the ever-active presence of these grand realities; but they are as though they did not exist for you unless you know and feel they do exist within you.
(4) Hope presupposes faith; they cannot exist apart. Faith discovers “the only foundation which is laid, which is Christ Jesus,” fastens the soul to and settles it on this foundation, and faith and hope rouse all the activities of the soul to build on this foundation a superstructure which shall grow in solidity, in symmetry, and in beauty, until it becomes a perfect marvel of moral architecture, richly ornamented with the most delicate tracery and shimmering and flashing with the resplendent glory of God.
(5) Hope is the balloon of the soul, soaring majestically into the heavens, scanning scenes of beauty and grandeur never beheld by our earth-bound senses, and faithfully reporting to the soul the state of affairs in the skies; but it is a captive balloon, and the connecting cords are firmly held in the hand of faith. The loftiest flights and the swing of what might seem the most eccentric gyrations of hope are held in check by the friendly, the sympathetic, but unswerving grasp of faith. “My dear Hope,” Faith says, “it is very nice for you to be up there, basking in the cloudless sunshine and drinking in the melody of the ascending lark as it ripples up the heights; and I like you to be there. I could never get there myself; and you tell me of things I should never otherwise know, and they do me good. But, remember, I cannot let you go. We are linked together in the sacred bonds of a holy wedlock. We are necessary to each other, and cannot do without each other. If you were to break away from me, you would vanish like vapour into space, and I should be left forlorn and powerless” And Hope replies: “I know it, my dear Faith. Divorce would be fatal to us both, and our union is too sweet and precious ever to dream of separation. I live in these upper regions purely for your sake. You know I have cheered you up many a time and will do so again. My joy is to brighten your life of toil and conflict down there. When the soul has done with you it will have done with me, and when my work is finished I shall be content to die.” Thus faith and hope are essentially united, and both are wedded together by the soul’s living union with Christ.
(6) A false hope is really no hope. It rests on no solid foundation; it is not justified by sound reason. It is but the blue light of a frantic conjecture generated amid the restless tumults of a soul in the last stages of despair. At the best a false hope is but a beautiful dream spun from the gossamer threads of a busy and excited fancy, a dream of what we wish might be, and, like all other dreams having no substantial basis, it dissolves into space under the first touch of reality. A false hope lures its victims on to destruction, as the flickering lights of the marsh gases seduce the belated traveller into the dismal swamps from which there is no release.
A State of Sin a State of Ungodliness.—
1. Men do not recognise the existence of God.
2. They do not acknowledge His moral government.
3. They do not seek His favour as their chief good.
4. They do not delight in His communion.
5. They do not anticipate their final reckoning with Him.
6. They do not accept His own disclosures concerning the attributes of His nature and the principles of His administration.—G. Brooks.
Man without God.—He is like a ship tossed about on a stormy sea without chart or compass. The ship drifts as the waves carry it. The night is dark. The pilot knows not which way to steer. He may be close to rocks and quicksands. Perhaps a flash of lightning falls on a rock, or he hears the waves breaking over it. But how shall he escape, or how prepare to meet the danger? Shall he trust in providence? What providence has he to trust in? Poor man! He is without God. Shall he throw out an anchor? But he has no anchor. He wants the best and only safe anchor, hope—the anchor of the soul. Such is the state of man when he is far off, without a God to trust in, without hope to comfort and support him. But give the man a true and lively faith in Christ, tell him of a merciful and loving Father who careth for us and would have us cast all our care upon Him, show him that hope which is firm to the end, and straightway you make a happy man of him. You give him a course to steer, a chart and compass to guide him, an anchor which will enable him to withstand the buffeting of every storm. You insure him against shipwreck, and you assure him of a blessed haven where at length he will arrive and be at rest.—A. W. Hare.
Practical Atheism.—If it had been without friends, without shelter, without food, that would have made a gloomy sound; but without God! That there should be men who can survey the creation with a scientific enlargement of intelligence and then say there is no God is one of the most hideous phenomena in the world.
I. The text is applicable to those who have no solemn recognition of God’s all-disposing government and providence—who have no thought of the course of things but just as going on, going on some way or other, just as it can be; to whom it appears abandoned to a strife and competition of various mortal powers, or surrendered to something they call general laws, and these blended with chance.
II. Is a description of all those who are forming or pursuing their scheme of life and happiness independent of Him.—They do not consult His counsel or will as to what that scheme should be in its ends or means. His favour, His blessing are not absolutely indispensable. We can be happy leaving Him out of the account.
III. Is a description of those who have but a slight sense of universal accountableness to God as the supreme authority—who have not a conscience constantly looking and listening to Him and testifying for Him. This insensibility of accountableness exists almost entire—a stupefaction of conscience—in very many minds. In others there is a disturbed yet inefficacious feeling. To be thus with God is in the most emphatical sense to be without Him—without Him as a friend, approver, and patron. Each thought of Him tells the soul who it is that it is without, and who it is that in a very fearful sense it never can be without.
IV. The description belongs to that state of mind in which there is no communion with Him maintained or even sought with cordial aspiration. How lamentable to be thus without God! Consider it in one single view only, that of the loneliness of a human soul in this destitution.
V. A description of the state of mind in which there is no habitual anticipation of the great event of going at length into the presence of God; in which there is an absence of the thought of being with Him in another world, of being with Him in judgment, and whether to be with Him for ever.
VI. A description of those who, professing to retain God in their thoughts, frame the religion in which they are to acknowledge Him according to their own speculation and fancy.—Will the Almighty acknowledge your feigned God for Himself, and admit your religion as equivalent to that which He has declared and defined? If He should not, you are without God in the world. Let us implore Him not to permit our spirits to be detached from Him, abandoned, exposed, and lost; not to let them be trying to feed their immortal fires on transitory sustenance, but to attract them, exalt them, and hold them in His communion for ever.—John Foster.