The Expositor's Bible: The Epistle to the Ephesians. Findlay George Gillanders

his adopter… This metaphor was St Paul’s translation into the language of Gentile thought of Christ’s great doctrine of the New Birth. He exchanges the physical metaphor of regeneration for the legal metaphor of adoption. The adopted becomes in the eye of the law a new creature. He was born again into a new family. By the aid of this figure the Gentile convert was enabled to realize in a vivid manner the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of the faithful, the obliteration of past penalties, the right to the mystic inheritance. He was enabled to realize that upon this spiritual act ‘Old things passed away and all things became new.’”31

      This exalted status belonged to men in the purpose of God from eternity; but as a matter of fact it was instituted “through Jesus Christ,” the historical Redeemer. Whether previously (Jewish) servants in God’s house or (Gentile) aliens excluded from it (ii. 12), those who believed in Jesus as the Christ received a spirit of adoption and dared to call God Father! This unspeakable privilege had been preparing for them through the ages past in God’s hidden wisdom. Throughout the wild course of human apostasy the Father looked forward to the time when He might again through Jesus Christ make men His sons; and His promises and preparations were directed to this one end. The predestination having such an end, how fitly it is said: “in love having foreordained us.”

      Four times, in these three verses, with exulting emphasis, the apostle claims this distinction for “us.” Who, then, are the objects of the primordial election of grace? Does St Paul use the pronoun distributively, thinking of individuals – you and me and so many others, the personal recipients of saving grace? or does he mean the Church, as that is collectively the family of God and the object of His loving ordination? In this epistle, the latter is surely the thought in the apostle’s mind.32 As Hofmann says: “The body of Christians is the object of this choice, not as composed of a certain number of individuals – a sum of ‘the elect’ opposed to a sum of the non-elect – but as the Church taken out of and separated from the world.”

      On the other hand, we may not widen the pronoun further; we cannot allow that the sonship here signified is man’s natural relation to God, that to which he was born by creation. This robs the word “adoption” of its distinctive force. The sonship in question, while grounded “in Christ” from eternity, is conferred “through” the incarnate and crucified “Jesus Christ”; it redounds “to the praise of the glory of His grace.” Now, grace is God’s redeeming love toward sinners. God’s purpose of grace toward mankind, embedded, as one may say, in creation, is realized in the body of redeemed men. But this community, we rejoice to believe, is vastly larger than the visible aggregate of Churches; for how many who knew not His name, have yet walked in the true light which lighteth every man.

      There lies in the words “in Christ” a principle of exclusion, as well as of wide inclusion. Men cannot be in Christ against their will, who persistently put Him, His gospel and His laws, away from them. When we close with Christ by faith, we begin to enter into the purpose of our being. We find the place prepared for us before the foundation of the world in the kingdom of Divine love. We live henceforth “to the praise of the glory of His grace!”

      CHAPTER III.

       THE BESTOWMENT OF GRACE

      “Which grace He bestowed on us, in the Beloved One:

      In whom we have the redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses,

      According to the riches of His grace:

      Which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, making known to us the mystery of His will,

      According to His good pleasure:

      Which He purposed in Him, for dispensation in the fulness of the times,

      Purposing to gather into one body all things in the Christ —

      The things belonging to the heavens, and the things upon the earth – yea, in Him,

      In whom also we received our heritage, as we had been foreordained,

      According to purpose of Him who worketh all things

      According to the counsel of His will, —

      That we might be to the praise of His glory.”33

Eph. i. 6b– 12a.

      The blessedness of men in Christ is not matter of purpose only, but of reality and experience. With the word grace in the middle of the sixth verse the apostle’s thought begins a new movement. We have seen Grace hidden in the depths of eternity in the form of sovereign and fatherly election, lodging its purpose in the foundation of the world. From those mysterious depths we turn to the living world in our own breast. There, too, Grace dwells and reigns: “which grace He imparted to us, in the Beloved, – in whom we have redemption through His blood.”

      The leading word of this clause we can only paraphrase; it has no English equivalent. St Paul perforce turns grace into a verb; this verb occurs in the New Testament but once besides, – in Luke i. 28, the angel’s salutation to Mary: “Hail thou that art highly favoured (made-an-object-of-grace).”34 If we could employ our verb to grace in a sense corresponding to that of the noun grace in the apostle’s dialect and nearly the opposite of to disgrace, then graced would signify what he means here, viz., treated with grace, made its recipients.

      God “showed us grace in the Beloved” – or, to render the phrase with full emphasis, “in that Beloved One” – even as He “chose us in Him before the world’s foundation” and “in love predestined us for adoption.” The grace is conveyed upon the basis of our relationship to Christ: on that ground it was conceived in the counsels of eternity. The Voice from heaven which said at the baptism of Jesus and again at the transfiguration, “This is my Son, the Beloved,” uttered God’s eternal thought regarding Christ. And that regard of God toward the Son of His love is the fountain of His love and grace to men.

      Christ is the Beloved not of the Father alone, but of the created universe. All that know the Lord Jesus must needs love and adore Him – unless their hearts are eaten out by sin. Not to love Him is to be anathema. “If any man love me,” said Jesus, “my Father will love him.” Nothing so much pleases God and brings us into fellowship with God so direct and joyous, as our love to Jesus Christ. About this at least heaven and earth may agree, that He is the altogether lovely and love-worthy. Agreement in this will bring about agreement in everything. The love of Christ will tune the jarring universe into harmony.

      1. Of grace bestowed, the first manifestation, in the experience of Paul and his readers, was the forgiveness of their trespasses (comp. ii. 13–18). This is “the redemption” that “we have.” And it comes “through His blood.” The epistles to the Galatians and Romans35 expound at length the apostle’s doctrine touching the remission of sin and the relation of Christ’s death to human transgression. To redemption we shall return in considering verse 14, where the word is used, as again in chapter iv. 30, in its further application.

      In Romans iii. 22–26 “the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” is declared to be the means by which we are acquitted in the judgement of God from the guilt of past transgressions. And this redemption consists in the “propitiatory sacrifice” which Christ offered in shedding His blood – a sacrifice wherein we participate “through faith.” The language of this verse contains by implication all that is affirmed there. In this connexion, and according to the full intent of the word, redemption is release by ransom. The life-blood of Jesus Christ was the price that He paid in order to secure our lawful release from the penalties entailed by our trespasses.36 This Jesus Christ implied beforehand, when He spoke of “giving His life a ransom for many”; and when He said, in handing to His disciples the cup of the Last Supper: “This is my blood, the blood of the covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” Using another synonymous term, St

31

From a valuable and suggestive paper by W. E. Ball, LL.D., on “St Paul and the Roman Law,” in the Contemporary Review, August 1891.

32

See vv. 12, 13, where Jews and Gentiles, collectively, are distinguished; and ch. ii. 11, 12, iii. 2–6, 21, iv. 4, 5, v. 25–27.

33

The arrangement above made of the lines of this intricate passage is designed to guide the eye to its elucidation. Our disposition of the verses has not been determined by any preconceived interpretation, but by the parallelism of expression and cadences of phrase. The rhythmical structure of the piece, it seems to us, supplies the key to its explanation, and reduces to order its long-drawn and heaped-up relative and prepositional clauses, which are grammatically so unmanageable.

34

Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη. It is impossible to reproduce in English the beautiful assonance – the play of sound and sense – in Gabriel’s greeting, as St Luke renders it.

35

See Rom. i. 16–18, iii. 19–v. 21, vi. 7, vii. 1–6, viii. 1–4, 31–34, x. 6–9; 1 Cor. xv. 3, 4, 17, 56, 57; 2 Cor. v. 18–21; Gal. ii. 14–iii. 14, vi. 12–14. The latter passages the writer has endeavoured to expound in Chapters X. to XII. and XXVIII. of his Commentary on Galatians in this series.

36

It is an error to suppose, as one sometimes hears it said, that trespasses or transgressions are a light and comparatively trivial form of sin. Both words denote, in the language of Scripture, definite offences against known law, departures from known duty. Adam’s sin was the typical “transgression” and “trespass” (Rom. v. 14, 15, etc.; comp. ii. 23; Gal. iii. 19).