CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES
Ephesians 5:1. Followers of God.—R.V. imitators. St. Paul gathers up all duties into one expression, “imitation of God,” and urges them on his readers by a reminder of their high birth laying them under obligation, and rendering their copying easier.
Ephesians 5:2. Walk in love.—“Love must fulfil all righteousness; it must suffer law to mark out its path of obedience, or it remains an effusive, ineffectual sentiment, helpless to bless and save.”
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Ephesians 5:1-2
The Life of Love—
I. Is an imitating of the divine life.—“Be followers of God: … walk in love” (Ephesians 5:1-2). Though God is infinitely beyond us, and lifted above all heights, we are to aspire towards Him. When we contemplate His glorious perfections we are more deeply conscious of our limitations and sins, bend before Him in lowly awe, and seem to despair of ever being able to approach to anything within ourselves that can be like Him. Nevertheless God is the pattern of all excellence, and we can attain excellence ourselves only by imitating Him. The ideal character is ever above and beyond the seeker, growing more beautiful, but seeming as distant as ever. The life of God is the life of love—love is the essence of His nature and the crowning glory of all His perfections. The chief way in which He is imitable by us is in that direction: to love God is to be like Him. Our life, in all its impulses, outgoings, and accomplishments, must be suffused and penetrated with love. As the soul opens to the inflow of God’s love and is filled with it, it becomes like God. Loving God is allowing God to love us. The love of God is the most transcendent revelation of the gospel. In Paris a little girl seven years old was observed to read the New Testament continually. Being asked what pleasure she found in doing so, she said, “It makes me wise, and teaches how to love God.” She had been reading the history of Martha and Mary. “What is the one thing needful?” asked her friend. “It is the love of God,” she earnestly replied.
II. Is befitting the relation in which the believer is divinely regarded.—“Followers of God, as dear children” (Ephesians 5:1). God is our Father, and He loves us. That is enough; but how much is implied in that, who can tell? To realise the divine Fatherhood is to become acquainted with the love of God. When we discover we are dear to Him our hearts melt, our rebellion is conquered, we seek His forgiveness, we revel in His favour, we exult in His service. When we discover He has always loved us we are overwhelmed. A mother, whose daughter had behaved badly and at length ran away from home, thought of a singular plan to find the wanderer and bring her back. She had her own portrait fixed on a large handbill and posted on the walls of the town where she supposed her daughter was concealed. The portrait, without name, had these words printed underneath: “I love thee always.” Crowds stopped before the strange handbill, trying to guess its meaning. Days elapsed, when a young girl at last passed by, and lifted her eyes to the singular placard. She understood: this was a message for her. Her mother loved her—pardoned her. Those words transformed her. Never had she felt her sin and ingratitude so deeply. She was unworthy of such love. She set out for home, and crossing the threshold was soon in her mother’s arms. “My child!” cried the mother, as she pressed her repentant daughter to her heart, “I have never ceased to love thee!”
III. Is a love of Christ-like sacrifice.—“As Christ also hath loved us, and hath given Himself for us” (Ephesians 5:2). The offering of Christ as a sacrifice for the sins of men was acceptable to God, and came up before Him as a sweet-smelling savour, because it was the offering and sacrifice of love. The life of love is the life of obedience; it is eager to serve, and it shrinks not from suffering. Nothing can be love to God which does not shape itself into obedience. We remember the anecdote of the Roman commander who forbade an engagement with the enemy, and the first transgressor against whose prohibition was his own son. He accepted the challenge of the leader of the other host, met, slew, spoiled him, and then with triumphant feeling carried the spoils to his father’s tent. But the Roman father refused to recognise the instinct which prompted this as deserving of the name of love. Disobedience contradicted it and deserved death. Weak sentiment—what was it worth? It was the dictate of ambition and self-will overriding obedience and discipline; it was not love. A self-sacrificing life is prompted, sustained, and ennobled by love. The trials which love cheerfully undergoes in its ministry of love to others and in obedience to the will of God are often transformed into blessings. There is a legend that Nimrod took Abraham and cast him into a furnace of fire because he would not worship idols; but God changed the coals into a bed of roses. So it will ever be. The obedience that leads to the furnace of fire will find in the end that it is a bed of roses. The life of loving sacrifice will issue in eternal blessedness.
Lessons.—The life of love is—
1. The highest life.
2. The happiest life.
3. The life most fruitful in usefulness to others.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Ephesians 5:1-2. St. Paul’s Doctrine of Christian Ethics.
I. The fundamental truth of the Fatherhood of God.—Man’s life has its law, for it has its source in the nature of the Eternal. Behind our race instincts and the laws imposed on us in the long struggle for existence, behind those imperatives of practical reason involved in the structure of our intelligence, is the presence and active will of Almighty God our heavenly Father. Intuitional morals bear witness to the God of creation, experimental morals to the God of providence and history. The divine Fatherhood is the keystone of the arch in which they meet. The command to be imitators of God makes personality the sovereign element in life. If consciousness is a finite and passing phenomenon, if God be but a name for the sum of the impersonal laws that regulate the universe, for the “stream of tendency” in the worlds, Father and love are meaningless terms applied to the Supreme, and religion dissolves into an impalpable mist. Love, thought, will in us raise our being above the realm of the impersonal; and these faculties point us upward to Him from whom they came, the Father of the spirits of all flesh. It is not the loss of strength for human service nor the dying out of joy which unbelief entails that is its chief calamity. The sun in the soul’s heaven is put out. The personal relationship to the Supreme which gave dignity and worth to our individual being, which imparted sacredness and enduring power to all other ties, is destroyed. The heart is orphaned, the temple of the Spirit desolate. The mainspring of life is broken.
II. The solidarity of mankind in Christ furnishes the apostle with a powerful lever for raising the ethical standard of his readers. The thought that we are “members one of another” forbids deceit. Self is so merged in the community that in dealing censure or forgiveness to an offending brother the Christian man feels as though he were dealing with himself—as though it were the hand that forgave the foot for tripping, or the ear that pardoned some blunder of the eye. The Christ loved and gave; for love that does not give, that prompts to no effort and puts itself to no sacrifice, is but a luxury of the heart—useless and even selfish. The Church is the centre of humanity. The love born and nourished in the household of faith goes out into the world with a universal mission. The solidarity of moral interests that is realised there embraces all the kindreds of the earth. The incarnation of Christ knits all flesh into one redeemed family. The continents and races of mankind are members one of another, with Jesus Christ for Head.
III. Another ruling idea lying at the basis of Christian ethics is St. Paul’s conception of man’s future destiny.—There is disclosed a world beyond the world, a life growing out of life, an eternal and invisible kingdom of whose possession the Spirit that lives in Christian men is the earnest and first-fruits. Human reason had guessed and hope had dreamed of the soul’s immortality. Christianity gives this hope certainty, and adds to it the assurance of the resurrection of the body. Man’s entire nature is thus redeemed. Our bodily dress is one with the spirit that it unfolds. We shall lay it aside only to resume it—transfigured, but with a form and impress continuous with its present being.
IV. The atonement of the cross stamps its own character and spirit on the entire ethics of Christianity.—The Fatherhood of God, the unity and solidarity of mankind, the issues of eternal life or death awaiting us in the unseen world—all the great factors and fundamentals of revealed religion gather about the cross of Christ; they lend to it their august significance, and gain from it new import and impressiveness. The fact that Christ “gave Himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God” throws an awful light upon the nature of human transgression. All that inspired men had taught, that good men had believed and felt, and penitent men confessed in regard to the evil of human sin, is more than verified by the sacrifice which the Holy One of God has undergone in order to put it away. What tears of contrition, what cleansing fires of hate against our own sins, what scorn of their baseness, what stern resolves against them, are awakened by the sight of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ! The sacrifice of Christ demands from us devotion to Christ Himself. Our first duty as Christians is to love Christ, to serve and follow Christ. There is no conflict between the claims of Christ and those of philanthropy, between the needs of His worship and the needs of the destitute and suffering in our streets. Every new subject won to the kingdom of Christ is another helper won for His poor. Every act of love rendered to Him deepens the channel of sympathy by which relief and blessing come to sorrowful humanity.—Findlay.
Christ’s Sacrifice of Himself explained, and Man’s Duty to offer Spiritual Sacrifice inferred and recommended.
I. Our Lord’s unexampled sacrifice.—
1. The priest. As a prophet or an apostle properly is an ambassador from God to treat with men, so a priest is an agent or solicitor in behalf of men to treat with God.
2. The sacrifice.—Our Lord was both offering and sacrifice. Every sacrifice is an offering to God, but every offering to God is not a sacrifice. Perfect innocence and consummate virtue, both in doing and suffering, were not only the flower and perfection but the very form and essence of our Lord’s sacrifice. These were the sacrifice of sweet odour, acceptable to Him who alone could judge perfectly of the infinite worth and merit of it.
3. The altar.—From the third century to this time the cross whereon our Lord suffered has been called the altar. There is another altar, a spiritual altar—the eternal Spirit, the divine nature of our Lord. The sacrifice of our Lord is an undoubted Scripture truth; but as to a proper altar for that sacrifice, it is a more disputable point, about which wise and good men may be allowed to judge as they see cause.
4. The divine Lawgiver.—To whom the sacrifice was made, and by whom it was graciously accepted. God the Father is Lawgiver-in-chief, and to Him our Lord paid the price of our redemption. Thus the glory of God and the felicity of man are both served in this dispensation.
II. Our own sacrifice of ourselves.—As Christ gave Himself for us, so we ought to give up ourselves to God in all holy obedience, and particularly in the offices of love towards our brethren, as these are the most acceptable sacrifices we can offer to God. We cannot do greater honour to our Lord’s sacrifice than by thus copying it in the best manner we are able—a sacrifice of love to God and love to our neighbours.—Waterland.
The Imitation of God.—No argument is so frequently urged as the example of Christ to persuade us to mutual love, because none is so well adapted to influence the mind of a Christian. God’s approbation of Christian charity is expressed in the same terms as His acceptance of the sacrifice of Christ; for charity to our fellow-Christians, flowing from a sense of Christ’s dying love, is a virtue of distinguished excellence. As the death of Christ is called “a sacrifice for a sweet-smelling savour,” so Christian charity is called “an odour of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well-pleasing to God.” Let it be our care to follow Christ in His goodness and love, and to learn of Him humility, condescension, mercy, and forgiveness. Religion is an imitation of the moral character of God, brought down to human view and familiarised to human apprehension in the life of Christ. The sacrifice of Christ is of great use, not only as an atonement for guilt, but also as an example of love.—Lathrop.
Ephesians 5:1. The Duty and Object of a Christian’s Imitation.
I. The duty enjoined.—
1. Remove the hindrances to imitation.
(1) Spiritual pride and self-conceit.
(2) This self-conceit works in us a prejudiced opinion, and makes us undervalue and detract from the worth of our brother.
(3) Spiritual drowsiness.
2. Observe the rules of imitation.
(1) We must not take our pattern upon trust; no, not St. Paul himself. He brings it in indeed as a duty—“Be ye followers of me”; but he adds this direction, “as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1). “For in imitation, besides the persons, there is also to be considered,” saith Quintilian, “what it is we must imitate in the persons. We must no further follow them than they follow the rules of art.” “Some there were,” said Seneca, “who imitated nothing but that which was bad in the best.” It is so in our Christian profession: we must view, and try, and understand what we are to imitate. We must not make use of all eyes, but of those only which look upon the Lord.
(2) That we strive to imitate the best. Saith Pliny: “It is great folly not to propose always the best pattern”; and saith Seneca, “Choose a Cato,” a prime, eminent man, by whose authority thy secret thoughts may be more holy, the very memory of whom may compose thy manners; whom not only to see, but to think of, will be a help to the reformation of thy life. Dost thou live with any in whom the good gifts and graces of God are shining and resplendent, who are strict and exact, and so retain the precepts of God in memory that they forget them not in their works? Give me the instructive examples of these good men; let them always be before my eyes; let them be a second rule by which I may correct my life and manners; let me not lose this help, which God hath granted me, of imitation.
II. The object of imitation.—We must make God the rule of goodness in all our actions: we must be just, to observe the law; valiant, to keep down our passions; temperate, to conform our wills to the rule of reason; and wise, to our salvation. But there is no virtue which makes us more resemble God than this which the apostle here exhorts the Ephesians to; and that is mercy. For although all virtues are in the highest degree, nay, above all degrees, most perfect in Him; yet, in respect of His creatures, none is so resplendent as mercy. Mercy is the queen and empress of God’s virtues; it is the bond and knot which unites heaven and earth, that by which we hold all our titles—our title to be men, our title to the name of Christian, our title to the profession of Christianity, our title to earth, our title to heaven.
1. As God forgiveth us, so we must forgive our enemies.
2. As we must forgive, so God’s mercy must be the motive: we must do it “out of a desire to imitate God.”
3. We must conform our imitation to the Pattern. He with one act of mercy wipes out all scores; so must we. When He forgives our sins, He is said to cast them behind Him, never to think of them, so to forget them as if they never had been; so must we. He doth it too without respect of persons; and so we ought to do. We must forgive all, for ever; and so far must we be from respect of persons that we must acknowledge no title but that of Christian.—Farindon.
Likeness to God.
I. Likeness to God belongs to man’s higher or spiritual nature.—It has its foundation in the original and essential capacities of the mind. In proportion as these are unfolded by right and vigorous exertion, it is extended and brightened. In proportion as these lie dormant it is obscured. Likeness to God is the supreme gift. He can communicate nothing so precious, glorious, blessed as Himself. To hold intellectual and moral affinity with the supreme Being, to partake His Spirit, to be His children by derivations of kindred excellence, to bear a growing conformity to the perfection which we adore—this is a felicity which obscures and annihilates all other good. It is only in proportion to this likeness that we can enjoy either God or the universe. To understand a great and good being we must have the seeds of the same excellence.
II. That man has a kindred nature with God, and may bear most important and ennobling relations to Him, seems to me to be established by a striking proof. Whence do we derive our knowledge of the attributes and perfections which constitute the supreme Being? I answer, We derive them from our own souls. The divine attributes are first developed in ourselves, and thence transferred to our Creator. The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity. It is the resemblance of a parent to a child, the likeness of a kindred nature.
III. God is made known to us as a Father.—And what is it to be a father? It is to communicate one’s own nature, to give life to kindred beings; and the highest function of a father is to educate the mind of the child, and to impart to it what is noblest and happiest in his own mind. God is our Father, not merely because He created us, or because He gives us enjoyment; for He created the flower and the insect, yet we call Him not their Father. This bond is a spiritual one. This name belongs to God, because He frames spirits like Himself, and delights to give them what is most glorious and blessed in His own nature. Accordingly Christianity is said with special propriety to reveal God as the Father, because it reveals Him as sending His Son to cleanse the mind from every stain, and to replenish it for ever with the spirit and moral attributes of its Author.
IV. The promise of the Holy Spirit is among the most precious aids of influences which God imparts. It is a divine assistance adapted to our moral freedom, an aid which silently mingles and conspires with all other helps and means of goodness, and by which we are strengthened to understand and apply the resources derived from our munificent Creator. This aid we cannot prize too much, or pray for too earnestly.—Channing.
Ephesians 5:2. “And walk in love.” The Nature, Properties, and Acts of Charity.
I. The nature of charity.—
1. Loving our neighbour implies we value and esteem him.
2. Implies a sincere and earnest desire for his welfare and good of all kinds in due proportion.
3. A complacence or delightful satisfaction in the good of our neighbour.
4. Condolence and commiseration in the evils befalling him.
II. Properties of charity.—
1. Love appropriates its object in apprehension and affection, embracing it, possessing and enjoying it as its own.
2. It desires reciprocal affection.
3. Disposes to please our neighbour, not only by inoffensive but by an obliging demeanour.
4. Makes a man deny himself—despising all selfish regards—for the benefit of his neighbour.
5. To be condescending and willing to perform the meanest offices needful or useful to his friend.
III. Acts of charity.—
1. To forbear anger on provocation.
2. To remit offences, suppressing revenge.
3. To maintain concord and peace.
4. To be candid in opinion and mild in censure.
5. Abstain from doing anything which may occasion our neighbour to commit sin, or disaffect him towards religion, or discourage him in the practice of duty.—Barrow.
The Sacrifice of Christ.
I. A divine person was absolutely necessary.—
1. He who atones must be in possession of infinite worth. Nothing less than the glory of infinity and eternity can atone for transgression. The individual must also be possessed of humanity for this obvious reason: that man hath transgressed, and man must atone. In the person of the Messiah we behold everything God could possibly desire. A divine person, comprising Deity and humanity in himself, atones for sin.
2. It was absolutely necessary that the individual who atoned should be wholly at his own disposal.—Now, no finite being is at his own disposal; no finite being can say, I will do as I please; but Messiah speaks of Himself in language that finite being could not adopt without insulting God. The doctrine of the Trinity is opposed; but when we peruse Scripture we shall find the absolute necessity of a plurality of persons. A divine person to present a sacrifice; and if so, a divine person to receive that sacrifice.
II. Christ’s love in giving Himself.—And here we behold the love of God in all its glory. Christ hath saved us, and given Himself for us. Here we behold the love of Christ; the love of a divine person embracing God, embracing the law of God, and embracing the sinner in all his shame. Two of the attributes of this love never unfolded their glories before. The intenseness and the holiness of it were never before manifested. Behold God as well as man, a divine person suffering for us. Here for once, and once only, behold the sovereignty of God in all its glory, in all its lowliness, connected with the justice of God in all its terrors. Messiah is punished, that the transgressor may live for ever.
III. God’s pleasure in the sacrifice of His Son.—
1. God is infinitely delighted with His Son, as He is one in essence with Him. The pious Baptist gives his disciples a volume of divinity in a few words. He traces everything to its source. “The Father loveth the Son.” Surely, then, we must anticipate God’s pleasure in everything the Saviour does.
2. The resurrection and ascension of Christ prove God’s acceptance of the sacrifice.
3. The success of the gospel another proof.
Lessons.—
1. See the evil and danger of unbelief.
2. All spiritual good comes from God; all spiritual evil flows from the creature.
3. Learn the work of faith—to accept Christ.—Howels.