The Walk of the Gentiles.
I. As to the nature of this walk, one leading feature or characteristic of it is vanity of mind. The life of men walking in the vanity of their minds is either all but wholly aimless, or else its aims are mean and frivolous, or at the best disappointing, tantalising, and unsatisfying. The character of vanity is stamped on all its pursuits and pleasures, on its worship, such as it is, and on all its works and ways.
II. Now the cause of this dismal and disastrous state of things is indicated in ver. 19. On the one hand, men are darkened in respect of their understanding; they are spiritually blind: on the other hand, they are alienated from the life of God. By the life of God we are to understand the life which consists in glorifying and enjoying God; the life for which man was made; life in God, with God, to God; God's own life in the soul of man; life of which He is the source, the centre, and the end. Thus the root of the disease is double. It is in the mind and in the heart. The mind is wilfully ignorant; the heart is wilfully hardened. Therefore there is neither light in the mind, nor love in the heart, and therefore there is vain walking.
III. The natural result or issue in the case of other Gentiles or worldly men is explained in ver. 19. A terrible course of possible declension is pointed out. There are several stages in it. First, there is your walking like others in the vanity of your minds; secondly, there is your being darkened in your understandings; thirdly, there is your alienation from the life of God; and fourthly, there is a giving of yourselves over to a life of mere and thorough self-seeking and self-indulgence, in some form or other. Surely, then, the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles.
R. S. Candlish, Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians,p. 107.
The Immorality of the Heathen.
There is a startling contrast between the earlier and the later Chapter s of this Epistle. In the earlier Chapter s Paul describes the Christians at Ephesus as saints, as the faithful in Christ Jesus, etc.; and now to the persons whom he has described by these sacred titles, and to whom he has spoken of these Divine mysteries, he gives a succession of precepts relating to the most elementary moral duties. He thinks it necessary to warn them against the basest and the coarsest vices: against lying and thieving; against foul speech; against drunkenness; against gross sensual sins.
I. The access of the Divine life does not at once and in a moment change the man's moral temper and habits. Moral distinctions which were faint will not at once become vivid; moral distinctions which were not recognised at all will not at once become apparent. The Christians at Ephesus had been breathing from their childhood the foul atmosphere of a most corrupt form of heathenism; they were breathing it still. In the community which surrounded them the grossest vices were unrebuked by public sentiment. Christian righteousness is achieved slowly. A Divine life is given to us, but the life has to grow. There will, however, be real ethical progress wherever there is genuine loyalty to Christ.
II. The description of the heathen both here and in the Epistle to the Romans is to be taken as representing their general condition. Speaking broadly and generally, heathen men had lost the knowledge of God, and had lost the knowledge of the steadfast and eternal laws of righteousness, and this is what Paul means when he says that they were walking in the vanity of their minds. We are environed by an invisible, Divine, and eternal world. When once that world has been revealed to us, our whole conception of human duty and human destiny is changed; we discover that it is only the larger world that has been revealed to us by Christ which is real and enduring; we see that the true life of man is the eternal and Divine life by which he is related to what is eternal and Divine, that the true honour, the true wealth, the true wisdom, the true happiness, of man are found in that eternal and Divine kingdom.
R. W. Dale, Lectures on the Ephesians,p. 294.
References: Ephesians 4:17-20. Church of England Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 380. Ephesians 4:18. Homilist,vol. i., p. 313; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. i., p. 20; Preacher's Monthly,vol. i., p. 218.