that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of his calling, and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might which he worked in Christ, when he raised him from the dead and made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule, authority, power, dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come. He put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things for the assembly,
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Ephesians 1:17-22 sits inside this longer paragraph.
For this cause I also, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which is among you, and the love which you have toward all the saints, don’t cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of his calling, and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might which he worked in Christ, when he raised him from the dead and made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule, authority, power, dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come. He put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things for the assembly, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
Parallel Translations
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that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him,
having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of his calling, and what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints,
and what is the exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might
which he worked in Christ, when he raised him from the dead and made him to sit at his right hand in the heavenly places,
far above all rule, authority, power, dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come.
He put all things in subjection under his feet, and gave him to be head over all things for the assembly,
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that the God of oure lorde Iesus Christ and the father of glory myght geve vnto you the sprete of wisdome and open to you the knowledge of him silfe
and lighten the eyes of youre myndes that ye myght knowe what that hope is where vnto he hath called you and what the riches of his glorious inheritaunce is apon the sainctes
and what is the excedynge greatnes of his power to vs warde which beleve accordynge to the workynge of that his mighty power
which he wrought in Christ when he raysed him from deeth and set him on his right honde in hevenly thynges
above all rule power and myght and dominacion and above all names that are named not in this worlde only but also in the worlde to come:
and hath put all thynges vnder his fete and hath made him aboue all thynges ye heed of the congregacion
Show all 3 translations
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That the God of our Lord Iesus Christ, that Father of glory, might giue vnto you the Spirit of wisedome, and reuelation through the acknowledging of him,
That the eyes of your vnderstanding may be lightened, that ye may knowe what the hope is of his calling, and what the riches of his glorious inheritance is in the Saints,
And what is the exceeding greatnesse of his power toward vs, which beleeue, according to the working of his mightie power,
Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his right hand in the heauenly places,
Farre aboue al principalitie, and power, and might, and domination, and euery Name, that is named, not in this world only, but also in that that is to come,
And hath made all things subiect vnder his feete, and hath giuen him ouer all things to be the head to the Church,
Cross-references (173)
- Isaiah 11:2 (v17) Yahweh’s Spirit will rest on him: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of…
- James 3:17-18 (v17) But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceful, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and…
- Acts 26:18 (vv18–19) to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive remission of sins…
- Colossians 1:9-10 (v17) For this cause, we also, since the day we heard this, don’t cease praying and making requests for you, that you may be filled with the…
- Proverbs 2:5 (v17) then you will understand the fear of Yahweh, and find the knowledge of God.
Show all 100 cross-references
- 2 Corinthians 4:6 (v18) seeing it is God who said, “Light will shine out of darkness,” who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory…
- 2 Peter 1:3 (v17) seeing that his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us by…
- Ephesians 3:18-19 (v17) may be strengthened to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know Christ’s love which…
- Luke 24:45 (v18) Then he opened their minds, that they might understand the Scriptures.
- Philippians 2:13 (v19) For it is God who works in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.
- 2 Peter 3:18 (v17) But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory both now and forever. Amen.
- John 17:3 (v17) This is eternal life, that they should know you, the only true God, and him whom you sent, Jesus Christ.
- Ephesians 1:3 (vv17, 20) Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ,
- 1 John 3:1-3 (v18) See how great a love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God! For this cause the world doesn’t know us,…
- Psalms 119:18 (v18) Open my eyes, that I may see wondrous things out of your law.
- Ephesians 1:7 (v18) in whom we have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,
- Ephesians 3:16 (v18) that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that you may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner…
- Matthew 11:27 (v17) All things have been delivered to me by my Father. No one knows the Son, except the Father; neither does anyone know the Father, except the…
- 1 Corinthians 2:10 (v17) But to us, God revealed them through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.
- Ephesians 5:8 (v18) For you were once darkness, but are now light in the Lord. Walk as children of light,
- Ephesians 4:4 (v18) There is one body and one Spirit, even as you also were called in one hope of your calling,
- Matthew 6:13 (v17) Bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.’
- Philippians 2:9-11 (v21) Therefore God also highly exalted him, and gave to him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,…
- Ephesians 3:20 (v19) Now to him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,
- Colossians 2:10 (vv21–22) and in him you are made full, who is the head of all principality and power.
- John 17:25-26 (v17) Righteous Father, the world hasn’t known you, but I knew you; and these knew that you sent me. I made known to them your name, and will…
- Colossians 2:12 (v19) having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the…
- Colossians 1:18 (v22) He is the head of the body, the assembly, who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all things he might have the…
- 2 Thessalonians 1:11 (vv18–19) To this end we also pray always for you, that our God may count you worthy of your calling, and fulfill every desire of goodness and work…
- Jeremiah 24:7 (v17) I will give them a heart to know me, that I am Yahweh. They will be my people, and I will be their God; for they will return to me with…
- John 20:17 (v17) Jesus said to her, “Don’t hold me, for I haven’t yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my…
- Ephesians 3:5 (v17) which in other generations was not made known to the children of men, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets in the…
- Colossians 2:2-3 (v17) that their hearts may be comforted, they being knit together in love, and gaining all riches of the full assurance of understanding, that…
- Titus 3:7 (v18) that being justified by his grace, we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
- Isaiah 42:7 (v18) to open the blind eyes, to bring the prisoners out of the dungeon, and those who sit in darkness out of the prison.
- John 14:26 (v17) But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things, and will remind you of all that I said…
- Acts 6:10 (v17) They weren’t able to withstand the wisdom and the Spirit by which he spoke.
- 2 Corinthians 4:7 (v19) But we have this treasure in clay vessels, that the exceeding greatness of the power may be of God, and not from ourselves.
- Ephesians 4:1 (v18) I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to walk worthily of the calling with which you were called,
- Ephesians 6:10 (v19) Finally, be strong in the Lord, and in the strength of his might.
- Colossians 1:15-16 (v21) He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were created in the heavens and on the earth,…
- Colossians 1:29 (v19) for which I also labor, striving according to his working, which works in me mightily.
- 1 Timothy 6:12 (v18) Fight the good fight of faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you confessed the good confession in the sight…
- 1 Peter 3:22 (v21) who is at the right hand of God, having gone into heaven, angels and authorities and powers being made subject to him.
- Ephesians 1:11 (v18) We were also assigned an inheritance in him, having been foreordained according to the purpose of him who does all things after the counsel…
- Ephesians 3:7 (v19) of which I was made a servant according to the gift of that grace of God which was given me according to the working of his power.
- Hebrews 1:4 (v21) having become as much better than the angels as the more excellent name he has inherited is better than theirs.
- Hebrews 10:32 (v18) But remember the former days, in which, after you were enlightened, you endured a great struggle with sufferings;
- Psalms 24:7 (v17) Lift up your heads, you gates! Be lifted up, you everlasting doors, and the King of glory will come in.
- Isaiah 6:10 (v18) Make the heart of this people fat. Make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, hear with their ears,…
- Isaiah 29:10 (v18) For Yahweh has poured out on you a spirit of deep sleep, and has closed your eyes, the prophets; and he has covered your heads, the seers.
- Isaiah 32:3 (v18) The eyes of those who see will not be dim, and the ears of those who hear will listen.
- Daniel 2:28-30 (v17) but there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets, and he has made known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what will be in the latter days. Your…
- Luke 21:15 (v17) for I will give you a mouth and wisdom which all your adversaries will not be able to withstand or to contradict.
- 1 Corinthians 15:25-27 (v22) For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death. For, “He put all things…
- 1 Thessalonians 2:12 (v18) to the end that you should walk worthily of God, who calls you into his own Kingdom and glory.
- Jeremiah 31:34 (v17) They will no longer each teach his neighbor, and every man teach his brother, saying, ‘Know Yahweh;’ for they will all know me, from their…
- Daniel 7:27 (v21) The kingdom and the dominion, and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole sky, will be given to the people of the saints of the Most…
- Daniel 10:1 (v17) In the third year of Cyrus king of Persia a thing was revealed to Daniel, whose name was called Belteshazzar; and the thing was true, even…
- John 8:54-55 (v17) Jesus answered, “If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, of whom you say that he is our God. You have…
- John 16:3 (v17) They will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me.
- 1 Corinthians 2:8 (v17) which none of the rulers of this world has known. For had they known it, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory.
- 1 Corinthians 12:8 (v17) For to one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, and to another the word of knowledge, according to the same Spirit;
- 2 Corinthians 4:4 (v18) in whom the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that the light of the Good News of the glory of Christ, who is the…
- 2 Corinthians 12:1 (v17) It is doubtless not profitable for me to boast. For I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord.
- 1 Peter 5:10 (v18) But may the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a little while, perfect,…
- Genesis 41:38-39 (v17) Pharaoh said to his servants, “Can we find such a one as this, a man in whom is the Spirit of God?” Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Because God…
- Psalms 24:10 (v17) Who is this King of glory? Yahweh of Armies is the King of glory!
- Jeremiah 2:11 (v17) Has a nation changed its gods, which really are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which doesn’t profit.
- Jeremiah 9:24 (v17) But let him who glories glory in this, that he has understanding, and knows me, that I am Yahweh who exercises loving kindness, justice,…
- Matthew 11:25 (v17) At that time, Jesus answered, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you hid these things from the wise and understanding,…
- Matthew 13:15 (v18) for this people’s heart has grown callous, their ears are dull of hearing, they have closed their eyes; or else perhaps they might perceive…
- Matthew 16:17 (v17) Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.
- John 14:17 (v17) the Spirit of truth, whom the world can’t receive; for it doesn’t see him and doesn’t know him. You know him, for he lives with you, and…
- Romans 8:24-25 (v18) For we were saved in hope, but hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for that which he sees? But if we hope for that which we don’t…
- 2 Thessalonians 2:16 (v18) Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace,
- 1 Chronicles 29:11 (v17) Yours, Yahweh, is the greatness, the power, the glory, the victory, and the majesty! For all that is in the heavens and in the earth is…
- Psalms 8:6-8 (v22) You make him ruler over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet: All sheep and cattle, yes, and the animals of the…
- Daniel 5:11 (v17) There is a man in your kingdom, in whom is the spirit of the holy gods; and in the days of your father light and understanding and wisdom,…
- Romans 1:16 (v19) For I am not ashamed of the Good News of Christ, because it is the power of God for salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first,…
- Romans 15:6 (v17) that with one accord you may with one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
- Ephesians 2:10 (v19) For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them.
- 1 Thessalonians 5:8 (v18) But since we belong to the day, let’s be sober, putting on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet, the hope of salvation.
- Titus 1:1 (v17) Paul, a servant of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God’s chosen ones, and the knowledge of the truth which…
- Revelation 7:12 (v17) saying, “Amen! Blessing, glory, wisdom, thanksgiving, honor, power, and might, be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
- Isaiah 29:18 (v18) In that day, the deaf will hear the words of the book, and the eyes of the blind will see out of obscurity and out of darkness.
- Luke 2:14 (v17) “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will toward men.”
- Luke 12:12 (v17) for the Holy Spirit will teach you in that same hour what you must say.”
- Acts 4:12 (v21) There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven that is given among men, by which we must be saved!”
- 1 Corinthians 14:6 (v17) But now, brothers, if I come to you speaking with other languages, what would I profit you, unless I speak to you either by way of…
- Galatians 5:5 (v18) For we, through the Spirit, by faith wait for the hope of righteousness.
- Ephesians 2:12 (v18) that you were at that time separate from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of the…
- Ephesians 3:8 (v18) To me, the very least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,
- Colossians 1:5 (v18) because of the hope which is laid up for you in the heavens, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the Good News
- Colossians 1:23 (v18) if it is so that you continue in the faith, grounded and steadfast, and not moved away from the hope of the Good News which you heard,…
- Hebrews 10:12 (v20) but he, when he had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down on the right hand of God,
- James 2:1 (v17) My brothers, don’t hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ of glory with partiality.
- 1 Peter 1:3 (vv18, 20) Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy caused us to be born again to a living hope…
- Psalms 29:3 (v17) Yahweh’s voice is on the waters. The God of glory thunders, even Yahweh on many waters.
- Psalms 110:2-3 (v19) Yahweh will send out the rod of your strength out of Zion. Rule among your enemies. Your people offer themselves willingly in the day of…
100 distinct cross-references across this passage (173 total citations).
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this passage (24 sources)
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John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv17–22 17. That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ.…
17. That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ. But what does Paul wish for the Ephesians? The spirit of wisdom, and the eyes of their understanding being enlightened. And did they not possess these? Yes; but at the same time they needed increase, that, being endowed with a larger measure of the Spirit, and being more and more enlightened, they might more clearly and fully hold their present views. The knowledge of the godly is never so pure, but that some dimness or obscurity hangs over their spiritual vision. But let us examine the words in detail.
The God of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Son of God became man in such a manner, that God was his God as well as ours.
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“I ascend,” says he, “to my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.” (John 20:17)
And the reason why he is our God, is, that he is the God of Christ, whose members we are. Let us remember, however, that this relates to his human nature; so that his subjection takes nothing away from his eternal godhead.
The Father of glory. This title springs from the former; for God’s glory, as a Father, consists in subjecting his Son to our condition, that, through him, he might be our God. The Father of glory is a well-known Hebrew idiom for The glorious Father. There is a mode of pointing and reading this passage, which I do not disapprove, and which connects the two clauses in this manner: That God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, may give to you.
The Spirit of wisdom and revelation is here put, by a figure of speech, (metonymy,) for the grace which the Lord bestows upon us by his own Spirit. But let it be observed, that the gifts of the Spirit are not the gifts of nature. Till the Lord opens them, the eyes of our heart are blind. Till the Spirit has become our instructor, all that we know is folly and ignorance. Till the Spirit of God has made it known to us by a secret revelation, the knowledge of our Divine calling exceeds the capacity of our own minds.
In the knowledge of him. This might also be read, In the knowledge of himself. Both renderings agree well with the context, for he that knows the Son knows also the Father; but I prefer the former as more natively suggested by the Greek pronoun, ἐν ἐπιγνώσει αὐτοῦ
John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.
Geneva Bible translators 1599 · Public Domain On vv17–22 For it is not enough for us to have…
For it is not enough for us to have known God once, but we must know him every day more and more.
The causes of faith are God the Father lightening our minds with his holy spirit, that we may embrace Christ opened unto us in the Gospel, to the obtaining of everlasting life, and the setting forth of God’s glory.
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Full of majesty.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv17–21 17 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,…
17 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him:
Ver. 17. The Father of glory] That is, the glorious Father, Act 7:2. Chrysostom expounds it the Father of Christ, as Eph 1:3.
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The Spirit of wisdom and revelation] So called, because he revealeth unto us God’s depths, and reads us his riddles, 1Co 2:9-16. He enlightens both the organ and object; he anoints the eyes with eyesalve, and gives both sight and light. (Saint’s Progress, by Dr Taylor.)
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Poole 1685 · Public Domain On vv17–22 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ; he…
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ; he is the God of Christ not according to Christ’s Divine nature, but his human, and as Mediator, in which respect he was subject to the Father.
The Father of glory; the most glorious Father, and the Author of all glory and glorious things, and to whom all glory is due.
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May give unto you the spirit of wisdom; a greater measure (for some they already had) of faith, {as Eph 1:8, where it is called wisdom} or of the knowledge of the things of God, whereof the Spirit is the Author. God is said to give or send the Spirit, where the Spirit works effectually; and, so to give the Spirit of wisdom, where the Spirit effectually works that wisdom.
And revelation: by revelation he means not extraordinary, such as the prophets had, but ordinary, such as was common to believers, and expresseth the manner of the Spirit’s working this wisdom, that he doth it by removing the covering or veil of natural ignorance, {Psa 119:18; Luk 24:45} shining into the mind, and making it see what before it saw not; sometimes new objects, sometimes new excellencies in objects before known. Thus the Spirit works not only in the beginning of faith and spiritual knowledge, but in its further progress he lets in new light into the mind, and removes some remaining degree of natural darkness.
In the knowledge, or acknowledgment, which may imply an ownng, approving, and embracing things before known.
Of him; i.e. God or Christ, or God in Christ: and so either he declares here wherein the wisdom he mentioned consists, viz. the knowledge of God and Christ, in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge: or rather, the end of that wisdom and revelation, viz. the acknowledgment of God or Christ, when we so know him, as to own him as ours, to embrace, and love, and wholly subject ourselves to him, Col 1:9,10.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
William Burkitt 1703 · Public Domain On vv17–22 These words give us a short, but very comprehensive,…
These words give us a short, but very comprehensive, account of that affectionate prayer which St. Paul put up to God on the behalf of these Ephesians, newly converted to Christianity; in which observe,
1. The person whom he prays unto, God, under a very endearing title, for the strengthening of his faith; he styles him, not as the Old-Testament saints, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but in the language of the New Testament, The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory. The God of our Lord Jesus Christ, as he is Man and Mediator, commissioned of him, and sent by him; and the Father of Glory, as being in himself infinitely glorious; to whom all glory is and ought to be ascribed, and from whom alone it is communicated.
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Learn hence, That as all our prayers and requests are and ought to be directed unto God only, so in order to our having access to God with assurance in prayer, it is our duty to apply to him as a Father, as a Father in Christ, as a Father in Christ to us, and under this notion and apprehension to strengthen our faith for the obtaining of what we ask in prayer; May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give unto you, &c.
Observe, 2. The great and comprehensive blessing prayed for; namely, divine illumination and spiritual knowledge; that is, a farther increase of that wisdom and saving knowledge of divine mysteries, whereof the Spirit of God is the author.
Learn hence, That as spiritual wisdom, or the saving knowledge of divine mysteries, is necessary to a Christian; so those who have a good measure of this grace already received, ought not to sit down satisfied with it, but aspire after farther measures and degrees of it; spiritual knowledge is as necessary for increasing grace, as it is for working grace in the soul.
Observe, 3. The title here given to the Holy Spirit of God; he is styled the Spirit of wisdom and revelation; he being the author of all that knowledge in the mysteries of religion which we attain unto, and it being his proper work and office to reveal unto us the will of God for our salvation.
Learn hence, 1. That believers themselves, who are divinely enlightened by the Holy Spirit of God, have yet need of farther measures, and fuller degrees, of spiritual wisdom.
Learn 2.That the way to obtain this fuller measure of divine wisdom and spiritual illumination, is to be earnest with God in prayer for his Holy Spirit. So the apostle here.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv17–22 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,.... In…
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,.... In what sense God the Father is the God of Christ; see Gill on Eph 1:3.
The Father of glory; or the glorious Father; who is glorious in himself, in the perfections of his nature, and in the works of his hands; and as a father, he is a glorious father to Christ, and is a father to him, as he is to none else; and has been honoured and glorified by Christ, and from whom Christ as man has received much honour and glory: and he is a glorious father to the saints, to whom he has shown inexpressible love, by adopting them into his family; and pities them, as a father does his children; takes care of them, and protects them, and makes a glorious provision for them; not only of good things now, but of an eternal inheritance hereafter: and he may be so called, because he is the author and giver of eternal glory and happiness; and because all glory is due unto him: the Arabic version reads, "God, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory", making all these epithets to belong to Christ:
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may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation, in the knowledge of him; this was one part of the apostle's prayers for the saints at Ephesus, that they might increase in divine knowledge; either in the knowledge of God, as the God of Christ, and the Father of glory, and as their God and Father in Christ; or of God, as considered in Christ the Mediator; or else of Christ himself: and designs not a notional and speculative knowledge of Christ, but what is practical and experimental; and which is joined with love of him, faith in him, and obedience to him; and which is not only approbative, but fiducial and appropriating; and though it is but imperfect, yet is progressive; and for the progression of it, the apostle prays; for it is certain, that these saints had a knowledge of Christ, but this was not perfect; and a larger measure of it was desirable: and in order to this, he prays for the Spirit, as a "spirit of wisdom"; who implants spiritual wisdom in the hearts of men, and instructs them in the Gospel, the hidden wisdom of God, leads them into all truths, and opens to them the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, which are hid in Christ, the wisdom of God; and as a spirit of "revelation"; who reveals Christ and the things of Christ, at first conversion; and afterwards reveals him and his righteousness, and other benefits of his more largely, even from faith to faith; and gives a clearer view of interest in them: hence it appears, that the Spirit is the gift of God; and that all spiritual light and knowledge, and the increase of it, are owing to him.
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Wesley 1765 · Public Domain On vv17–22 That the Father of that infinite glory which shines…
That the Father of that infinite glory which shines in the face of Christ, from whom also we receive the glorious inheritance, ver. 18, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and Revelation - The same who is the Spirit of promise is also, in the progress of the faithful, the Spirit of wisdom and Revelation; making them wise unto salvation, and revealing to them the deep things of God. He is here speaking of that wisdom and Revelation which are common to all real Christians.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv17–22 Verse 17. That the God of our Lord Jesus]…
Verse 17. That the God of our Lord Jesus] Jesus Christ, as man and mediator, has the Father for his God and Father: and it is in reference to this that he himself says: I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God; Joh 20:17.
The Father of glory] The author and giver of that glory which you expect at the end of your Christian race. This may be a Hebraism for glorious Father, but the former appears to be the best sense.
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The Spirit of wisdom and revelation] I pray that God may give you his Holy Spirit, by whom his will is revealed to men, that he may teach and make you wise unto salvation, that you may continue to acknowledge him, Christ Jesus, as your only Lord and Saviour.
Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Joseph Benson 1811 · Public Domain On vv18, 22 Eph 1:18-21. The eyes of your understanding being enlightened…
Eph 1:18-21. The eyes of your understanding being enlightened — That is, I pray that God would do this for you by the discoveries of his gospel, and the operation of his grace. Observe, reader, it is by the eyes of the understanding alone that we discern the things of God; and in order hereto these eyes must first be opened, and then enlightened, by the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, spoken of in the former verse. That ye may know what is the hope of his calling — That ye may know, experimentally and delightfully, what are the blessings which God, by his word and Spirit, has called you to hope for. For hope seems to be put here chiefly for the objects of hope, as it is likewise Col 1:5; Tit 2:13. The apostle, however, may also include the grounds of this hope; with which, in order to their further establishment, the apostle wished them to be more fully acquainted. And what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in his saints — How great the blessings of his grace are, conferred on his saints here, and what an immense treasure of blessedness and glory he hath provided for them hereafter. And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward, who cordially believe — Both in raising our souls from the death of sin, and preserving them in spiritual life; influencing our hearts in such a manner as effectually to conquer all our prejudices against Christianity, and against true religion in every form, and so as to make us new creatures in Christ Jesus; according to the working of his mighty power — Greek, κατα την ενεργειαν του κρατους της ισχους αυτου, expressions, the strong emphasis and admirable force of which, as Bishop Pearson has observed, are scarcely to be paralleled in any author, and are superior to what our language can reach. Doddridge renders them, according to the energy of the power of his might, a translation which, however, falls very short of the original. See also Blackwall’s Sacred Classics, vol. 1. p. 307. Which he wrought in Christ — By the same almighty power whereby he raised Christ from the dead, for no less would suffice; and set him at his own right hand — That is, he hath exalted him in his human nature, as a recompense for his sufferings, to the quiet, everlasting possession of all possible blessedness, majesty, and glory. Far above all principality and power, and might and dominion — That is, God hath invested him with uncontrollable authority over all demons in hell, and angels in heaven, and all the princes and potentates on earth; and every name that is named — Name is here, by a usual figure, put for the person who possesses the authority signified by that name. We know the king is above all, though we cannot name all the officers of his court: so we know that Christ is above all, though we are not able to name all his subjects; not only in this world, but also in that which is to come — The invisible world, in which the potentates mentioned in the former part of the verse rule, is called the world to come, not because it does not yet exist, but because it is to come to us, not being yet visible. We may observe here, that of the four different names given to good angels in this verse, the two first αρχαι, principalities, and εξουσιαι, powers, are given to evil angels, (Eph 6:12,) and to men, Luk 12:11. From this we learn, that there are different orders and degrees of government and subordination among good and bad angels in the invisible world, as among men in the visible world. It is observed by Chandler, that αρχη, the first word, signifies empire of the largest extent, being used by Greek writers to denote the empire of Alexander, after he had conquered the East, and the empire of the Romans; and that κυριοτης, the last word in the verse, signifies the lowest degree of power, power of the smallest extent. So that although we do not know precisely what kind or degree of power is marked by these different names, when applied to good and bad angels, yet we perceive the meaning in general to be, that to our Lord, in his human nature, are subjected the highest, the intermediate, and the lowest orders of beings in the universe; having power, whether among angels or men. According to this view of Christ’s dominion, he is placed above every created nature, however excellent it may be. See Macknight, and Col 1:16.
Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Albert Barnes 1834 · Public Domain On vv17–22 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ -…
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ - The God who has sent the Lord Jesus into the world, and appointed him as the Mediator between himself and man. The particular reason why Paul here speaks of him as “the God of the Lord Jesus” is, that he prays that they might be further acquainted with the Redeemer, and be enlightened in regard to the great work which he came to do.
The Father of glory - The glorious Father, that is, the Father who is worthy to be praised and honored.
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May give unto you the Spirit of wisdom - May make you wise to understand the great doctrines of the religion of the Redeemer.
And revelation - That is, revealing to you more and more of the character of the Redeemer, and of the nature and results of his work. It is probable here that by the word “Spirit” the apostle refers to the Holy Spirit as the Author of all wisdom, and the Revealer of all truth. His prayer is, that God would grant to them the Holy Spirit to make them wise, and to reveal his will to them.
In the knowledge of him - Margin, “for the acknowledgment.” That is, in order that you may more fully acknowledge him, or know him more intimately and thoroughly. They had already made high attainments Eph 1:15, but Paul felt that they might make still higher; and the idea here is, that however far Christians may have advanced in knowledge and in love, there is an unfathomed depth of knowledge which they may still explore, and which they should be exhorted still to attempt to fathom. How far was Paul from supposing that the Ephesians had attained to perfection!
Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Haydock's Catholic Bible Commentary 1859 · Public Domain On vv19, 21, 22 His power. The greatest exertion of the power of…
His power. The greatest exertion of the power of God, or that action by which he shewed his power most, is the resurrection from the dead, which he exercised in Christ, when he raised him from the tomb, and placed him over all the Angels of heaven; and which shall likewise be exercised over us all, when we too shall be raised from the dead, and constituted members fo the triumphant Church, and rewarded with a share of glory proportioned to our merits. These are the hopes to which we are called.
George Leo Haydock (1774–1849), Haydock's Catholic Family Bible and Commentary, 1859 edition — public domain. Excludes Psalms (Douay-Rheims chapter numbering differs from Protestant) and Deuterocanonical books (Catholic canon only).
Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset & David Brown 1871 · Public Domain On vv17–22 A fit prayer for all Christians.
A fit prayer for all Christians.
the God of our Lord Jesus--appropriate title here; as in Eph 1:20-22 he treats of God's raising Jesus to be Head over all things to the Church. Jesus Himself called the Father "My God" (Mat 27:46).
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the Father of glory--(Compare Act 7:2). The Father of that infinite glory which shines in the face of Christ, who is "the glory" (the true Shekinah); through whom also "the glory of the inheritance" (Eph 1:18) shall be ours (Joh 17:24; 2Co. 3:7-4:6).
the spirit of wisdom--whose attribute is infinite wisdom and who works wisdom in believers (Isa 11:2).
and revelation--whose function it is to reveal to believers spiritual mysteries (Joh 16:14-15; Co1 2:10).
in the knowledge--rather, as Greek (see on Co1 13:12), "in the full knowledge of Him," namely, God.
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Daniel D. Whedon 1874 · Public Domain On vv17–22 17. The particular object for which Paul incessantly prayed…
17. The particular object for which Paul incessantly prayed in their behalf, namely, their elevation of view to take in this grandeur of the redeeming Christ, of which he gives a picture in Eph_1:20-23.
God of… Christ—In the entire passage, 20-23, St. Paul describes Christ rather in his manhood raised by process to a divine exaltation, just as in Php_2:6-8 he describes his divinity as gradually humanized and humiliated. The reason for the former view here is to furnish basis for the parallelism in Eph_2:4-7, identifying our exaltation with Christ’s, produced by our divine identification with him. This exaltation of both Christ and his elect finds its glorious cause in him who is God of both. For, as Meyer says, “God hath sent Christ, given him to death, raised and exalted him.”
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Father of glory— See note on Act_7:2. The glory, sometimes made visible to human eyes in the old dispensation, represented the divine splendour which our thoughts necessarily attribute to God, like the light we attribute to the sun. And such visible glory also represents that moral glory we attribute to the divine actions and character. From such glory in both kinds, the Trinity, or the Father primarily, is called from his power, God of glory, Psa_29:3; and from his supremacy, King of glory, Psa_24:7. As origin and generator of all this gloriousness he is now here called Father of glory, as he is called “Father of lights,” Jas_1:17. So, Father of mercies, 2Co_1:3. Christ is Lord of glory, 1Co_2:8; and so there are cherubim of glory, Heb_9:5. It is of the moral glory made visible in our redemption to the eyes of your understanding, when enlightened by this Father of glory, that St. Paul specially here speaks; the glory, glory, glory, of Eph_1:6; Eph_1:12; Eph_1:14. This glory can break upon their view through the mists of earthliness only by the double process of verbal revelation to them and of quickening their inner powers to behold and realize it. For this they need wisdom, revelation, enlightened eyes.
Spirit—A divinely communicated spirit, by which revelation is made.
Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges 1878 · Public Domain On vv17, 18, 19, 20, 22 17. the God of our Lord Jesus Christ] Cp.…
17. the God of our Lord Jesus Christ] Cp. the Saviour’s own words on the Cross, “Eli, Eli” (Mat_27:46); and after Resurrection (Joh_20:17), “I ascend unto … my God.” See also Joh_4:22.—The Father is the God of the Son Incarnate, in a sense which, however partially, we may be said to understand. Hence in the two passages just quoted, where the Death and the Resurrection of the Incarnate One Who could not “taste death” except as Incarnate (Heb_2:9), are respectively in view, the thought is specially in point; and so also in a passage like this, where the Saviour’s exaltation after death is before us. There may also lie in the phrase here the thought that He is “the God of our Lord” in the sense of being the God revealed and known through our Lord.
the Father of glory] Not merely “the glorious Father,” but the Father who is the Origin and King of all that is meant by eternal “glory.” Cp. the words “the Lord of glory” (Jas_2:1), used of the Son. Alford suggests that the “glory” here involves the thought of Christ as the true Shechinah, in whom the true glory of Godhead shines forth; who is thus the true “Glory of God.” But the suggestion, beautiful and true in itself, appears far-fetched here. Cp. the phrase “Father of mercies,” 2Co_1:3, to illustrate the interpretation above.
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may give] Lit., might give. The writer records his object as it was when he last prayed.
the spirit] R. V., “a spirit.” The Gr. has no article, but this does not settle the question, for (not to speak of other grammatical reasons) the article is often omitted with well-known words, such as God, and Christ. And in passages where certainly “the Holy Spirit” is meant, we have the same omission; see esp. the LXX. of Isa_11:2, where lit., “A spirit of God shall rest upon Him, a spirit of wisdom and intelligence, &c.;” a close verbal parallel to this passage.—The Scripture use of the word “spirit” seems to us to favour the reference here to the Holy Spirit. The word is rarely if ever in Scripture used in the loose modern sense of “sentiment,” “tendency,” or the like, but far rather of personal spirits—the spirit of man, in or out of the body; spirits, good or evil, not human; and The Spirit of God. And the idea of Gift is deeply connected with this last, very usually betokening the impartation to man, in whatever mode, of the Holy Spirit in His presence and power, whether for lower effects and purposes (as e.g. Exo_28:3), or for the highest.—Rom_11:8 is an exception; “God hath given them the (or a) spirit of slumber.” But even there the reference is probably to a personal spiritual agent.
It may be asked, was not the Holy Spirit already “given” to these saints? Yes, undoubtedly. But where spirit is concerned we must be cautious how we insist too much on logical inferences from forms of expression. We are not to think of the “coming” of the Spirit as a literal passage through space to a locality, but a manifestation of His power in human subjects in a new way. Similarly we are not to think of the “giving” of the Spirit as of an isolated deposit of what, once given, is now locally in possession. The first “gift” is, as it were, the first point in a series of actions of which each one may be expressed also as a gift. Not infrequently in Scripture spiritual processes are viewed as beginning at what is more precisely a point of new development.
Practically, the bearing of this passage is not greatly affected by the question of “a” or “the”. The work would in any case be immediately done by the Holy Spirit, and would take the form of a developed experience in the spirit of the Christian.
in the knowledge of him] Precisely, in full, or thorough, knowledge; epignôsis, more than gnôsis. The same word is used, e.g. Rom_3:20; Rom_10:2; Col_2:2; and the cognate verb, e. g. 1Co_13:12.—The tendency of the word in N. T. usage is to denote knowledge which is not merely intellectual, but of the nature of spiritual experience.—“Of Him”:—of the Father, to Whom similar pronouns throughout the passage plainly refer. To know Him (in and with the Son) is the inmost secret of “life eternal”(Joh_17:3; cp. Mat_11:27). “Philosophy, taking, as it must, man for its centre, says to him, Know thyself. But the inspired Word, which alone can originate with God, is alone able to say to man, Know God” (Monod, after Pascal).
This Divine knowledge is the region, so to speak, “in” which the “wisdom and unveiling” just spoken of are to grow and work.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers 1878 · Public Domain On vv17–22 (17) The God of our Lord Jesus Christ.—See Joh_20:17,…
(17) The God of our Lord Jesus Christ.—See Joh_20:17, “I ascend unto My Father and your Father; and to My God and your God.” It has been noted that, while on the cross, our Lord, in the cry, “My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” adopted the common human language of the Psalmist, He here, after His resurrection, distinguished emphatically between His peculiar relation to God the Father and that relation in which we His members call God “our Father.” St. Paul’s usual phrase (see above, Eph_1:3) is “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ;” the phrase here used is unique, probably substituted for the other on account of the use of the word “Father” in the next clause. It refers, of course, entirely to our Lord’s nature as the true Son of Man. In that respect God is in the full sense (which in us is interrupted by sin) His God, in whom He lived and had His being. In proportion as we are conformed to His likeness, “God is our God for ever and ever.”
The Father of glory.—Better, of the glory. This phrase is again unique. We have, indeed, such phrases as “Father of Mercies” (2Co_1:3), “Father of Lights” (Jas_1:17); and, on the other hand, “the King of Glory” (Psa_28:5), “the God of Glory” (Act_7:2), “the Lord of Glory” (1Co_2:8; Jas_2:1). In all these last instances “the glory” seems certainly to be the Shechinah of God’s manifested presence, and in all cases but one is ascribed to our Lord. But “the Father of the glory,” seems a phrase different from all these. I cannot help connecting it with the missing element in the preceding clause, and believing (with some old interpreters), in spite of the strangeness of expression, that God is here called “the Father of the glory” of the incarnate Deity in Jesus Christ (see Joh_1:14), called in 2Co_4:6, “the glory of God in the face (or person) of Jesus Christ.” (See Excursus A to St. John’s Gospel: On the Doctrine of the Word; dealing with the identification of “the Word” with the Shechinah by the Jewish interpreters). The prayer which follows connects the knowledge of the glory of our inheritance with the exaltation of our Lord in glory.
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The knowledge of him.—The word here rendered “knowledge” signifies “perfect and thorough knowledge;” and the verb corresponding to it is used distinctively in this sense in Luk_1:4; 1Co_13:12. It is employed by St. Paul more especially in his later Epistles (Eph_4:13; Php_1:9; Col_1:9-10; Col_2:2; Col_3:10), dealing as they do with the deeper things of God, and assuming more of a contemplative tone. It is represented here as coming from distinct “revelation.”
A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Pulpit Commentary 1880 · Public Domain On vv17–22 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the…
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory. The invocations of Paul the terms by which he calls on God are always significant, involving a plea for the blessings sought. God, as "the God of our Lord Jesus Christ," gave to him the Holy Spirit without measure, and might well, therefore, be asked and expected to give the gifts of the same Spirit to those who were in him one with him as members of his body. Being also the Father of glory," and having glorified Jesus, even after his suffering, with the glory which he had with him before the world began, he might well be asked and expected to glorify his people too. May give to you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the full knowledge of him. "Spirit" here is neither exclusively the Holy Spirit nor the spirit of man, but the complex idea of the spirit of man dwelt in and moved by the Spirit of God (Alford). Wisdom seems to denote the general gift of spiritual illumination; revelation, capacity of apprehending the revealed of perceiving the drift and meaning of what God makes known, so that it may be a real revelation to us. (comp. Mat_13:11) jEpignwsei is something more than mere gnwsei full knowledge of Christ, implying that it is in becoming better acquainted with Christ that we get the spirit of wisdom and revelation. In seeking to know Christ more, we are in the true way to get more insight into all that is Divine. (comp. Joh_14:9) The importance of seeking more knowledge, even after we have believed and been settled by the Holy Spirit, is here apparent; a growing knowledge is a most healthful feature of Christian life. "Grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (2Pe_3:18)
Ver. 17.
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Prayer for the Holy Spirit.
The Ephesian saints had already received the Spirit, for they had been sealed by him; but the apostle wishes the Spirit to become a spirit of wisdom and revelation, for further enlargement in a spiritual sense can only be realized in the direction of new knowledge. Some persons say it is wrong to pray for the Holy Spirit, as it seems to imply that he has not already come. The apostle here expressly prays for the Spirit. Our prayers always acknowledge the Spirit as already come, and already operating with power in the Church, and what we desire from time to time is the individual application of his blessings to our hearts. Similarly, the apostle wishes grace and peace to Churches which already rejoiced in the experience of both blessings. "Ye have received an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things." Jesus is the Holy One; his Spirit is the unction; the knowledge of all things the result. This unction imparts the germ and substance of all knowledge. T.C.
Prayer for the knowledge of God.
The apostle prays that the spirit of wisdom and revelation may be given, so that the Ephesian saints may have a fuller knowledge of God. Knowledge is an essential factor for promoting growth in grace. He does not pray for holiness, but for knowledge, because he knows it is only through the fuller knowledge of God, imparted by the Divine Spirit, that holiness can be promoted. Thus he prays for the Colossians that they may be "filled with the knowledge of God"s will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding"; (Col_1:9) that they may walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing." He prays for the Philippians that "their love may abound in knowledge and all judgment"; (Php_1:9) the knowledge and judgment being indispensable both for the regulation and for the increase of love. Similarly, Peter prays for the Christians of the dispersion, that grace and peace may be multiplied through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord". (2Pe_1:2) "The knowledge of God is thus the first and best of all the sciences. T.C.
Vers. 17-19.
Spiritual knowledge.
After thankfully recognizing the faith and love of the Christians he is addressing, St. Paul describes his prayers for their further endowment with Divine graces, and shows that he is especially anxious that they should receive a Spirit of wisdom. Possibly the Christians of Ephesus and its neighborhood were backward on the intellectual side of the spiritual life; but more probably wisdom was desirable for them just because they were exceptionally capable of high thinking, and would therefore profit above others by enjoying the light of heavenly revelation. In any case, it is to be observed that faith and love are the more essential graces; that they must precede wisdom and knowledge, which are not, as is often assumed, to be expected as the first and fundamental grounds of religion; but that, nevertheless, the intellectual side of religion is important as an addition to the moral.
I THE SOURCE OF SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE.
1. This knowledge comes from God. St. Paul makes it a matter of prayer. It is not to be attained, then, merely by intellectual culture, nor even by our own spiritual experience alone.
2. It is given as a revelation. In revelation God makes known what was naturally and previously hidden. While the curtain is drawn no guesses can tell what lies behind it. Speculation, unaided by revelation, is as much at sea in discussing the unseen universe today as it was at the dawn of Greek philosophy.
3. It results from an inspiration of the Spirit of God. We receive a Spirit of wisdom." The Holy Spirit is a Spirit of knowledge, leading us into all truth, at once purging us of the sin that blinds our vision, quickening the life within to a more keen sensitiveness, and bringing us into that sympathetic state in regard to spiritual things which makes us feel their presence and understand their character.
II THE ORGAN OF SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE. The eyes of our heart have to be enlightened that we may know spiritual things.
1. The heart has its eyes. There is an inner sight. This is not merely speculative. It is alive with feeling; it is in the heart. Thus the poet will see what the naturalist overlooks; the mother will know her children as the schoolmaster cannot know them; the saint will have visions of Divine truth to which the philosopher is blind.
2. All that the heart needs in order to see the highest truths is light. What is wanted is no new declaration, but an enlightening of our eyes. The landscape is as present when invisible at night as when seen in clear daylight. Divine truth lies open before us. We require no new voices from heaven. All that is wanted is a change in ourselves the unstopping of our deaf ears and the opening of our blind eyes.
III THE SUBJECTS OF SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE.
1. Christ. It is "the knowledge of him" for which St. Paul first prays. We must begin with knowing Christ. In knowing him we know all; for all the treasures of the gospel dwell in him.
2. The future inheritance. How vainly we speculate about this! We can know it only by spiritual illumination. Not that the formal nature of it can be discerned, but the true character and worth of it will be appreciated. There are riches in this inheritance of which we little dream. In our coldness of heart they look dim and faint. We have yet to learn how infinitely glorious they are. Such a discovery will gladden, cheer, and encourage us in the dark battle of the present.
3. The Divine power. By heaping up expressions, the apostle makes us realize the importance of this subject. God gives us the inheritance. It is vast and glorious. But terrible difficulties stand between us and it. Till we understand somewhat of the power of God, the hope will seem to be unattainable. But this we may understand in so far as we are enlightened rightly to appreciate the manifestation of it in the resurrection and triumph of Christ the pledges and grounds of our future blessedness. W.F.A.
The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Biblical Illustrator 1887 · Public Domain On vv17, 19, 20, 22 Eph_1:17; Eph_1:19
Eph_1:17; Eph_1:19
That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the rather of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him.
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What young believers require to receive
I. Increase of spiritual perception. Not so much new objects to contemplate, as clearer and deeper knowledge of objects already discerned. This is attained--
1. Through exercise of faith already possessed. It grows with the using.
2. Through the influence of the Holy Spirit. It assimilates the perceiving power to its own nature, and imparts new knowledge of Divine things. The powers of the spirit in general are heightened and extended--a spirit of wisdom. Truth not discernible by ordinary human faculties is made known--revelation.
II. Closer acquaintance with their Lord. In the knowledge of Him. He is the life book we are to study.
III. Access of Divine knowledge.
IV. Growth in experience. Amid the vague, new elements that crowd into their knowledge, certain great, central objects are to be realized most intensely.
1. The hope of their calling. Glory, complete salvation, eternal life, etc., are various aspects of this hope, which it is the great object of Christians to attain.
2. The riches of the glory of the Divine inheritance. The Kingdom of God grows in vastness, glory, and privilege, the more it is contemplated and sought.
3. The Divine resurrection power within themselves. The same power which raised Christ from the dead, and set Him at the right hand of God, works in the believer, evokes spiritual life, and sustains and develops it, from grace to grace, and glory to glory. As they compare their spiritual experience with His in resurrection and ascension, they will have grander realizations of the nature of the resurrection power that is working in themselves, and will trust it more intelligently and absolutely. There is no limit to this experience. (A. F. Muir, M. A.)
The presence of the Holy Ghost in the soul
I. The two mysteries which exist in the manhood of Christ, and in His mystic body, exist also in the ransomed soul; the presence of the Spirit, and union with the Son of God. You may conceive of the indwelling of the Spirit in Christs human nature. It was spotless: original sin found no place there. In the foundations of Christs created nature, there was no intermingling of the taint of the Fall. In His birth no sin, in His temptations no inward response. His soul was the mirror of unsullied holiness, and therefore a fit dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. But we are conceived in sin, born in sin, may have lived in sin, bear still the remains of a corrupt nature, the flesh lusteth against the Spirit. Who would dare then to speak of the indwelling of Almighty God the Comforter in our souls, had He not unmistakably affirmed it? The New Testament points to it as the characteristic glory of Christian life. The Spirit, who first dwelt in Jesus in His fulness, extends His presence to all in union with that manhood. As the little cloud about the size of a mans hand, when it rose up into the heavens, spread itself out over the whole sky, and there was an abundance of rain, so the Ascended Lord gathers His Saints around Him, and pours down upon the parched earth streams of Divine Life. Each soul in grace is a partaker of the Divine Nature. The pure nature of Christ is the instrument of the Spirit in the soul. There is in every baptized soul, not only the indwelling of the Comforter, but a jet of the Life of Jesus, through which the transformation of our nature is being accomplished, and His character gradually impressed.
II. Again, the expansion of the Church into the world finds its counterpart in the progressive development of the Kingdom of God within the soul. The same vital principles in both, if permitted to put themselves forth, will overcome all opposing forces. Of the Kingdom of God, it is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. This may be true, too, of the reign of Christ in the soul. The Kingdom of God within has its persecutions to pass through. At its secret beginning, the whole of nature is in revolt; but if we are steadfast, grace will finally gain the ascendency, and sit in calm possession of the throne. The command of the Church, to disciple all nations, is only by degrees accomplished; so the leaven of grace in the soul will only gradually penetrate into our whole being, and in the end produce the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. The treasure of Divine truth, which the Spirit unfolds in the understanding, we will now consider. The understanding, through the Fall, is in a state of darkness as to supernatural things. Reason and conscience are two lights which rule the night. They are the only guides by which we find our path. The understanding being thus overclouded, much of the sin that is committed may be traced up to some error in this faculty. The Holy Spirit, as the Illuminator, dispels the darkness, and amplifies the view, correcting and ennobling the natural faculty with the grace of faith, and the gifts of wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and counsel. Faith is the dawn upon the soul of a supernatural world. It is the first fissure through the cloud. It may be only like the breaking of the day, an imperfect view, like the glimpse of the blind man, the sight of men as trees, walking; yet it is a revelation of the Invisible. The Invisible becomes a reality. Hence the gift of faith is the one the Spirit employs against the adversary. It is with the shield of faith we are to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked, whom we must resist steadfast in the faith. Why is faith the chosen engine against the Evil One, the shield of our spiritual armour? It is because through it a new set of motives is brought to bear upon our conduct. For instance: a temptation awaits us; the flesh is weak, and some powerful influence is required to prevent a fall. Faith supplies it. In the early stage of the spiritual life, the thought comes, There is heaven; if I commit this sin, I may lose it; or fear is excited; Here is hell; if I commit sin, I may fall into it. If there is a deeper life the thought of the Cross of Jesus and His constraining love will be felt; If I commit this sin, I shall be crucifying Him afresh. The light of faith furnishing motives which act either upon our fears or hopes, or rekindle our love, fulfils the office of a shield in the day of battle. Besides this grace, the Holy Spirit provides certain gifts which complete His work in the understanding, and are auxiliary to Divine faith. When the apostle used the words of the text, he was praying not simply for general enlightenment, but that his converts might possess and develop certain specific forms of spiritual knowledge. The gift of wisdom is the chief of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. St. Paul prays that the Ephesians may be endued with the spirit of wisdom; and Isaiah places it first, when he enumerates the gifts as they dwelt in our Lord. It is the highest quality which the Spirit bestows. The apostle links with the spirit of wisdom that of revelation. This may correspond with the gift of understanding, for it is a spiritual insight into the mysteries of the kingdom of grace. The gift of knowledge is another form of light, having for its object not God and His perfections, nor the mysteries of grace, but God as He is seen in created things. It discloses His designs in them, what they are in themselves, what purposes they are intended to fulfil, what portions of His being they reflect, how they may be enlisted in His service, and brought through our instrumentality to minister to His glory, how they may be rightfully used or enjoyed. This gift, too, is important as it relates to our inner life. Self-knowledge is obtained through it. The gift of counsel completes our intellectual equipment. Its name describes its nature. It guides the soul in the choice of the best means to be used for arriving at the desired end. It seeks advice from all past occurrences; teaching us how to use our falls, the various remedies to which we have been directed to resort, those which have best suited our disposition, what have been the occasions of sin, what the results,--in short, the gift of counsel treasures up all the complex experiences of the spiritual life, and puts them to account. There are two thoughts which suggest appropriate lessons on this part of our subject. If it be true, that the Holy Ghost dwells within us; that each one is a temple of His presence, and a member of Christ; that our understanding is now replete with such wonderful powers, supplied with Divine lights for the removal of the darkness which sin has occasioned; that the same gifts which the mind of Christ possesses, are in their measure communicated to all His brethren: then, surely, sin committed in such a state, will have a special heinousness about it. Hence there is a more minute inspection of sin in the new dispensation. The inward presence brings up to light inward sin. What a thought to influence our conduct, I am the temple of God! The rebuke of the apostle is not now unnecessary, or out of date--know ye not that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? Another practical conclusion is to be drawn from what has been said. Life is manifested by action. A Divine life will be manifested by actions which exceed the power of nature. If I possess this life, I am thereby rendered capable of doing works which shall be pleasing to God. Grace, as a new principle of action, enables me to do works, which, by nature, I could not do. A supernatural life bestows on my actions a new value, so that they partake of the Eternity of God. The presence of the Holy Spirit imparts to them, when they are wrought in grace, and with a pure intention for Gods glory, an imperishable character. They are wrought in God. (W. H. Hutchings, M. A.)
Growth in spiritual knowledge
I. The means whereby this knowledge is attained. The spirit of wisdom and revelation. Here are two things--the spirit of wisdom and the spirit of revelation. This spirit of revelation I understand to mean inspiration. The prayer for its bestowment upon the Ephesian Church was in effect a prayer for the multiplication of its prophets, the then accredited guides and instructors of the Church, in the absence of the apostle, in all that related to spiritual matters. The spirit of revelation, however, is not a need of the Church now since it has the revelation of the spirit, for where the revelation of the spirit is, there can be no need for the spirit of revelation. But the spirit of wisdom is still a need of the Church, and will ever form one of its first necessities.
1. To secure an attitude of firm, unflinching faith in this revelation. Just as the force by which the earth is hurled along in its ceaseless course through space has never succeeded in overcoming the force by which it is kept in its orbit, so the spirit of wisdom in the Church will ever prevent the centrifugal force of free thought and free criticism from overcoming the centripetal force of faith in the Divine revelation, humanitys moral sun, the source of its spiritual life and glory.
2. It is not alone in relation to the attitude we are to assume towards Gods Word, in view of the modern spirit of unsparing, not to say reckless, criticism, that the spirit of wisdom is needed. It is needed also as the power by which alone we shall be able to unlock the spiritual secrets of that Word, to explore its hidden treasures, to take in fully and sympathetically its deepest teachings.
II. We come now to consider the second division of the subject of the text, namely, the object to whom this spiritual enlightenment relates--God. It is the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, Him as described in the preceding part of the verse. The full purport of this expression in reference to the Ephesians will be better understood if we remember that they had until very recently been heathens. It is thus reasonable to suppose that their conceptions of God were very defective. They had not as yet succeeded in entirely divesting their minds of the low, degrading notions of God with which their heathen training had impressed them. They had still much to learn concerning His nature and character. They had constant need of instruction whereby their notions of Him might be purified and elevated. Hence the prayer that they might have the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him. Further, the apostle indicates the particular aspect of the Divine character upon which they were to seek further enlightenment--the God of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Father of glory. It is a description of God that covers the whole ground of His redemptive relation to men. And it is God in this inexpressibly glorious aspect of His character that the text represents as the great object of Christian knowledge. It is that the Ephesian believers might have a more abundant entrance into the transcendent glories and the ineffable joy of this truth, that the apostle prays that they might have the spirit of wisdom and revelation.
III. We now come to the consideration of the third truth indicated by the text, namely, the further experiences of spiritual things to which this knowledge of God conduces. The apostle specifies in the text and the next verse three things, to the right and full apprehension of which we come through the knowledge of Him. These are--the hope of His calling, the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and the exceeding greatness of His power to usward and Christward. The first includes Gods purpose in relation to men--to call them into glory. The second refers to the glory that shall accrue to Himself through men thus glorified. The third refers to the transcendent character of the means adopted to secure these glorious ends. Here are three matters of knowledge arrived at by the enlightenment of the understanding through the knowledge of Him. They are matters of transcendent glory, and sweep the whole horizon of our salvation. Yes, we are to come into the full meaning of these superlative truths through our knowledge of God, as the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory. The Divine Being, thus apprehended, is the higher plane from which alone the full glory of our salvation can be viewed and comprehended. It forms our coign of vantage for the attainment of an adequate conception of at least three things respecting this salvation.
1. The grandeur of its aim both as regards the individual and the race.
2. It is as viewed from this higher plane of spiritual knowledge that the infinite reasonableness of this munificent gift of grace and love will reveal itself to the mind.
3. Again, we notice that the knowledge of God is our vantage ground for understanding the infallible certainty of the accomplishment of these great ends. From this standpoint we enter into the full apprehension of the exceeding greatness of His power. Whatever fear or doubt may perplex the mind regarding the realization of the redemptive scheme, on the score of the grandeur of its aim and comprehensiveness of its scope, and the vastness of the difficulties in its way, will vanish in the light of this apprehension of the exceeding greatness of His power. This power covers every difficulty, is, in fact, illimitable and absolute in relation to the Divine purposes. He whose eyes have been enlightened knows this, and in this knowledge rests in unshaken tranquility. (A. J. Parry.)
The spirit of wisdom
1. We must so consider God, when we come to Him in prayer, as to see Him in what we desire. St. Paul when about to pray for these Ephesians who had believed on Christ, and to seek the glorious gifts of the Spirit which might help them to know the glory reserved for them, sets God before him as the God of that Christ whom they had now received by faith into their hearts, and the Father of all glory: both of which considerations strengthened his faith; for he could not think that God, the God of Christ, would be wanting to those who were Christs, or that the Father of all glory would deny those glorious gifts which he was about to ask Him to increase. So here is a lesson for all. Wouldst thou have remission of sin? Consider of God as a God with whom there is plenty of redemption or forgiveness. Wouldst thou have ease in any misery and grief? Consider of Him as a Father of all mercy and consolation, when thou comest to Him; this strengthens faith, and inflames affection. We seek things more securely, when we know them to be where we are looking for them; and we follow them more affectionately, when (so to speak) we see them before us.
2. Even true believers have great want of heavenly wisdom. They have it in a certain measure; but fall far short of what may be attained.
(1) Let us labour to find this want in ourselves, and to see our folly, that we may be made wise.
(2) Let us not be dismayed by our lack of wisdom. Things are not begun and perfected at once. Wisdom must rise from one degree to another in us.
3. We need light as well as wisdom. To have inward faculty of seeing is one thing: to have outward light, by means of which to see, is another. Light must come to light before we can see; the light in the eye must meet with the outward light of the sun, or a candle, or some other lightsome body, or nothing is perceived: so the light of wisdom which is in the soul must have shining to it this light of revelation, which makes manifest things spiritual; or else, be our sight never so quick, we shall be environed with darkness. The Spirit, therefore, is fitly compared with fire, which has not only heat resolving numbness and making stiff joints active, but also has light grateful to the eye of the body: so the Spirit has both love which warms our frozen hearts and affections, and also this light of revelation which delights the eye of the understanding and manifests heavenly things to its view.
4. It is God, by the Spirit of Christ, who works in us all true wisdom. It is not pregnancy of natural wit that can make us wise unto salvation, nor ripeness of years: but the inspiration of the Almighty giveth understanding. Yet we do attain ripeness of wisdom, under God, by the due use of means.
(1) One day teacheth another. As a man grows older, he ought to grow wiser.
(2) He tastes, as we say, many waters; finding by experience the good in some things, the evils in others.
(3) He becomes gradually weaned from his youthful lusts which, like a back bias, drew after themselves the understanding. We see, then, to whom we must give all thanks for whatever wisdom we have received, and to whom we must fly for the increase of it--even to God, who gives it plentifully, and upbraideth not. (Paul Bayne.)
Worldly wisdom worthless
What does the philosophy of the Agnostic for the despairs of the sinking human soul? Hear the sad summing up of one of the votaries of the cold wisdom of the world, which knows not God. It is that of Professor Clifford, dying early, with this sad word on his lips, My researches have revealed to me a soulless universe, looked down upon by a godless heaven. (Author of The Harvest of a Quiet Eye.)
We are nothing without Gods wisdom in us
See how much they think of me! said a lantern to some dips that were hanging, on a nail close by. The master says he doesnt know what he should do without me these dark nights. No doubt, said the candle; but hed sing a different song if it werent for one of us inside of you. Did it never occur to you, friend, that you wouldnt be of the least use to anybody if our light didnt shine through you? (Mrs. Prosser.)
The eyes of your understanding being enlightened.
Spiritual eye salve; or, the benefit of illumination
The special grace here prayed for is illumination.
I. The eye is the most excellent organ of sense. In a clear eye, the looker sees his own image; so God, in a sanctified understanding, sees a limited resemblance of His infinite Self. God has set two lids to defend the corporal eye from annoyance; and, in like manner, He has given faith and hope, to shelter the understanding.
1. The situation of this spiritual eye is in the soul. God, framing mans soul, planted in it two faculties: the superior, that is the understanding, which perceiveth and judgeth; the inferior, that is the will, which being informed of the other, accordingly follows or flies, chooseth or refuseth. The Scripture, favouring the simplest capacity, compares these two powers of the soul to two known parts of the body: the understanding to the eye, the affections to the foot--the eye directing, the foot walking. Every man is naturally born blind and lame: as Zedekiah, captivated to the king of Babylon; first they put out his eyes (2Ki_25:7), and then they lamed his feet with fetters of brass. So is every man by nature, and therefore easily made a slave to the king of infernal Babylon, if the mercy of Christ should not redeem him. This consideration reacheth forth to us two uses; the one of instruction, the other of reprehension:--
(1) This teacheth us to desire in the first place the enlightening of our eyes; and then after, the strengthening of our feet.
(2) This reprehends a common fashion of many auditors. When the preacher begins to analyse his text, and to open the points of doctrine, to inform the understanding, they lend him very cold attention. Your affections are stirred in vain without a precedent illumination of your souls. You must know to do before you can do what you know. And indeed he that attends only to exhortation, and not to instruction, seems to build more upon mans zeal than Gods Word.
2. I come from the situation to the qualification of this spiritual eye: enlightened. For this blessing the apostle prays to the Father of lights, from whom comes every good and perfect gift (Jam_1:17): from Him, and from Him only, comes this grace of illumination. I cannot leave this excellent organ, the eye, till I have showed you two things:
(1) The danger of spiritual blindness;
(2) The means to cure it.
Spiritual blindness shall appear the more perilous, if we compare it with natural. The bodys eye may be better spared than the souls; as to want the eyes of angels is far worse than to want the eyes of beasts. The want of corporal sight is often good, not evil: evil in the sense, and good in the consequence. He may the better intend heavenly things, that sees no earthly to draw him away. Many a mans eye hath done him hurt (Gen_6:4). Besides, the bodily blind feels and acknowledgeth his want of sight; but the spiritually blind thinks that none have clearer eyes than himself. He that wants corporal eyes blesseth them that see; this man derides and despiseth them (Joh_9:41). The blind in body is commonly led either by his servant, or his wife, or his dog: there may be yet some respect in these guides. But the blind in soul is led by the world, which should be his servant, is his traitor. Now the means to clear this eye is to get it a knowledge of God, of ourselves. That the eye may be cured, this knowledge must be procured. Now God must be known by His works, His word, and His Spirit.
II. We have now done with the organ of seeing, the understanding, or souls eye: let us come to the object to be seen, the hope of His calling, and the riches of the glory of Gods inheritance in the saints. The object is clear and transparent to a sanctified eye. The philosophers propound six necessary occurrences to our perfect seeing; and you shall see them all here met:--
1. Firmness or good disposition of the organ that seeth. A rolling eye beholds nothing perfectly. A Dinahs eye is the prologue to a ravished soul.
2. The spectacle must be objected to the sight: the eye cannot pierce into penetralia terrae, or sublimia caeli; nor can the understanding see into these supernatural joys, unless the Lord object them to it. Hence it is that many neglectfully pass by (sine lumine lumen) the light, for want of eyes to regard it.
3. That there be a proportional distance betwixt the organ and the object: neither too near, nor too far off. A bright thing held too near the sight confounds it: be it never so bright, if too far off, it cannot discern it. God hath sweetly ordered and compounded this difference. Those everlasting joys are not close by our eyes, lest the glory should swallow us up; for mortal eyes cannot behold immortal things, nor our corruptible sight see steadfastly that eternal splendour.
4. It is required that the objected matter be substantial; not altogether diaphanous and transparent, but massy, and of a solid being. But this object here proposed is no empty chimera, or imaginary, translucent, airy shadow, but substantial: the hope of Gods calling, and a glorious inheritance; which though natures dull eye cannot reach, faiths eye sees perfectly.
5. Clearness of space betwixt the organ and the object; for the interposition of some thick and gross body prevents the faculty of the eye. The quickest eye cannot see through hills; and a crass cloud is able to hide the sun from us at noonday.
6. Lastly, the object must be stable and firm, for if it move too swiftly, it dazzleth the eye, and cannot be truly (according to the perfect form of it) beholden. (T. Manton, D. D.)
The eyes of the understanding
Already, as believers in Christ, we are entitled in Him to all the spiritual blessing and Divine fulness laid up in Him; but for a fuller revelation of Him and of them the apostle prays. If we may use an illustration, it is as if a man were taken during the night to some lofty eminence shrouded in darkness and mystery. Suppose him surrounded on every side by a landscape of surpassing beauty and glory as yet unseen. But presently the morning dawns, the sun arises, the shadows flee away, the mists disperse in all directions, rolling up the mountain side in curling wreaths, and disclosing to the mans delighted vision the glories of the inheritance that unfolds itself. Such is the case before the apostles mind. (M. Rainsford. B. A.)
The eye open to spiritual things
To grow up in the acknowledging of Christ is the way to attain fuller measure of the Spirit in every kind. Everything which respects life or godliness is said to begiven us through the knowledge or acknowledging of Christ. When we first come to know Him as the truth is in Him, we partake according to our measure in His Spirit; when we grow to behold Him as in a mirror or glass, more clearly, we are turned into the same glorious image by the Spirit of the Lord more and more; when we shall see Him and know Him evidently and fully, we shall be as He is. The more we know Him, the more fully He dwells in us, the more we enjoy the influence of His Spirit; even as this bodily sun, the nearer it approaches to us, the more we have the light and heat of it.
1. They whose spiritual sight is restored, have need still to depend upon God, that their eyes may be more and more enlightened by Him. As it is with bodily sicknesses, when we recover from them, health comes not all at once, but by ounces (as we say): so in spiritual. When God raises us up from our death, we neither are fully sanctified, nor yet fully enlightened; it is with us as with the blind man (Mar_8:24); we see, but confusedly and indistinctly. Now this enlightening comprehends these four things, which we have still need to ask God for.
(1) The removal of those things which impede our sight. Mists of ignorance. Clouds of lust. Veils of hardness of heart.
(2) The inward light of knowledge augmented in us.
(3) The light of revelation.
(4) A direction and application of the minds eye, to behold spiritual things. If the natural man and all his faculties move in God, much more the spiritual. God is said to make the eye seeing, and the ear hearing; i.e., not only to create them, but govern and apply them to what they do; otherwise we might be like Hagar, not seeing that which was before our eyes. Even as it is not so much the eye that sees, as the soul in and by the eye, whence it is that if the mind be abstracted in serious thought, men see not that which is before them; so it is not so much the eye of our understanding, as the Spirit of Christ, which is the soul of all the Body Mystical, which causes sight in us.
2. Even true believers know not at first, in any measure, those hopes which are kept in heaven for them.
(1) The reason why these hopes are not fully known is partly because of their excellence, and the abundant light which is in them.
(2) The weak sight of younglings in Christianity, is not proportioned and fitted as yet to so high an object as this. Bring the light of a candle near to the natural babe, and it cannot endure to look up against it.
(3) Even as children are so taken up with their childish affairs, that they cannot bring themselves to the serious consideration of more important matters; so believers are long so carnally affected that they cannot set themselves steadily to this contemplation.
(4) As those possessed of valuable earthly goods are surrounded by crafty companions who will keep them from knowing the value of things belonging to them; so the devil tries hard to keep us hoodwinked this way.
3. There is no grounded hope, but of such things as God has called us to obtain.
(1) This calling is such a revealing of His grace within our heart, as makes us come to Him and follow Him for the obtaining of life through Christ.
(2) To those called, God reveals His will. We may know that we are called if our hearts answer God, and our wills respond to the indications of His will.
4. The inheritance kept for us is abundantly glorious. We are passing through this vale of misery to an excellent eternal weight of glory. Let this draw up our hearts. Riches and glory, what do they not with mortal men? But, alas, these worldly riches and glorious dignities are but pictures, not having the substance of what they show for. Men will sue upon their knees to recover small inheritances on earth. While time lasts, seek this inheritance. Let us think what a heart break it is to a man when he finds that by some default he has forfeited some earthly matters which he might have held had he been wary; but what a grief and confusion will this cause, when men shall see that through carelessness they have lost an everlasting inheritance of glory which they might have attained. There is but one life between us and possession; why should we be so negligent as we are?
5. It is to the saints that this inheritance belongs--those who are not only cleansed from the guilt of dead works, but by the Spirit of Christ renewed to true holiness.
(1) See how those deceive themselves who expect to be saved, but love not holiness; who love to live after their ignorance and lusts, and mock at men who will not run to the same excess of riot that they do. Know this, that just as wise men will not leave their substance to the children of an adulteress, so God will never give thee the inheritance of glory while thou continuest a child of this world, loving nothing so much as its pleasures, pomps, and profits.
(2) Labour for holiness. True holiness is not a good nature, nor moral justice, nor external profession of religion so far as fits in with our own will. No; where we first renounce our will, there we first begin to be holy. We must strike at the root, by getting purged of sin, and seeking all things from God. (Paul Bayne.)
The seat of the spiritual eye
I see there is a rendering of the text which runs thus, The eyes of your heart being enlightened, and it strikes me that this version has about it the appearance of being the correct one, because Divine things are usually better seen by the heart than by the understanding. There are a thousand things which God has revealed which we shall never understand, and yet we can know them by a loving, trustful experience. Our Saviour says, Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. The purifying of the heart is the enlightening of the spiritual eye. Strange as it may seem, the true eye of the renewed man is seated rather in the heart than in the head: holy affections enable us to see, and as far as possible to understand Divine things. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Universal need of enlightenment
This prayer was offered for Christians. He who sees most needs to have his eyes enlightened to see more, for how little as yet of the glory of God have any of us beheld! Even that favoured pilgrim who has been led by the shepherds to the top of Mount Clear, to stand there with telescopic glass and gaze into the glories of Immanuels land, has yet only commenced to perceive the things which God has prepared for them that love Him. I pray God that if we do already see, we may see more, until our eye shall be so strengthened that the light of the New Jerusalem shall not be too strong for us, but amid the splendour of God which outshines the sun we shall find ourselves at home. But if believers need to have their eyes enlightened, how much more must those who are unconverted. They are altogether blinded, and consequently their need of enlightenment is far greater. They were born blind, and the god of this world takes care yet further to darken their minds. Around them there broods a sevenfold midnight, the gloom of spiritual death. They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night. O blind eye, may Jesus touch thee! (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The eyes of understanding
Myra used to be entertained by her grandfather, who likened her to a fresh bud, that would soon burst into a flower, and himself to a faded leaf, which was almost ready to fall from the tree. One day, after Myra had taken a pleasant walk with her grandfather, she sat down with her mother, and then they talked together in the following manner: I wish I had grandfathers eyes, mother! What can you possibly want with the eyes of your grandfather, Myra? Oh, if I had his eyes I should see all that he sees when we are walking together; but now I cannot see half as much as he does.--How is that, when you are young and he is old. He often says that his sight is not what it used to be; and though the Bible is in large print, he is obliged to use spectacles. Yes, mother, but for all that he can see more than I can. Tell me what you mean, my child, for I do not understand you. Why, when we walk out in the fields and lanes, let us look at what we will, he says he sees the goodness of God in everything. Ah, Myra! its not grandfathers eyes, but grandfathers faith that you want. Pray to God to open the eyes of your understanding, to give you a heart to love and trust Him, and you will then see Him, not only in all the works of His hand, but in all the events of life.
Spiritual enlightenment
I remember once being present, says Captain Basil Hall, at a meeting of the Geological Society, when a bottle was produced which was said to contain certain zoophytes (delicate water animals, having the form of plants). It was handed round in the first instance among the initiated on the foremost benches, who commented freely with one another on the forms of the animals in the fluid: but when it came to our hands, we could discover nothing in the bottle but the most limpid fluid, without any trace, so far as our eyes could make out, of animals dead or alive, the whole appearing absolutely transparent. The surprise of the ignorant at seeing nothing was only equal to that of the learned, who saw so much to admire. Nor was it till we were specifically instructed what it was we were to look for, and the shape, size, and general aspect of the zoophytes pointed out, that our understandings began to cooperate with our eyesight in peopling the fluid, which, up to that moment, had seemed perfectly uninhabited. The wonder then was, how we could possibly have omitted seeing objects now so palpable. How many are the things which appear to the illuminated Christian to be palpably revealed, which the unconverted cannot discover to have any place at all in the Scriptures of Truth; and how very much surprised does he feel, that he could ever have at any former time overlooked them! (F. F. Trench.)
What is the hope of His calling.--
The hope of His calling
Dwell for a moment on--
1. The ground of this hope. His calling! May He not do as He will with His own?
2. The grace of this hope. The God of all grace has called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus (1Pe_5:10). When the Lord Jesus Christ called blind Bartimeus (Mat_20:32), He also commanded him to be called (Mar_10:29); and He further commanded him to be brought unto Him (Luk_18:40). And thus it was with our apostle himself. It pleased God, who separated me from my mothers womb, and called me by His grace, to reveal His Son in me (Gal_1:15).
3. The objects of this hope. Whom He did foreknow, them He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first born among many brethren. Moreover, whom He did predestinate, them He also called: and whom He called, them He also justified: and whom He justified, them He also glorified (Rom_8:29-30).
4. The subject of this hope. Christ in you, the hope of glory: whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom; that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus (Col_1:27-28). (M. Rainsford, B. A.)
The hope of His calling
This may be taken either in the sense of the hope which God inspires into the hearts of His people, by the Spirit; or it may be taken for the object of hope. In either case it is scriptural, and might be suitable in this passage; the first includes the second, for when that hope which the Spirit inspires is given to the heart, the hope laid up for it in heaven is the object of its anticipation. I therefore take this as being the fullest sense: as the hope to which He calls His people, that is the hope which those who are called by the Lord are privileged to possess and enjoy. God works in the mind, through the medium of its natural feelings. Hope is the great, animating principle of all human conduct. Hope is the expectation of a good to be attained, founded on a belief that we can attain it.
I. The nature of Gods calling.
1. It is a calling to peace (Col_3:15).
2. Through peace to hope. Called to inherit a blessing, and so to hope for the inheritance (1Pe_3:9).
3. It is a sure calling. Those who are called by the Spirit of God are never left to perish.
II. What is the hope founded upon this?
1. It is a hope that springs from faith. Founded on the belief of the truth--the only sure foundation.
2. A sober hope, drawn from the source of Gods truth. The hope of the gospel. (R. J. McGhee, M. A.)
The three whats
I. What is to seen and known according to the text? Three whats.
1. What is the hope of His calling? Brethren, let me describe the hope of those of us who have come out to walk by faith in Christ Jesus. We have already obtained enough abundantly to reward us for obedience to the call, and even if nothing were shut up in the closed hand of Hope, her open hand has greatly enriched us. Christian man, you have in possession already the forgiveness of your sin, acceptance in Christ, adoption into the Divine family, and the nature, rank, and rights of a child of God. Still our main possession lies in hope. We carry a bag of spending money in our hands, but the bulk of our wealth is deposited in the Bank of Hope. What then is the Christians hope?
(1) He hopes and believes that he shall be under Divine protection forever and ever, that he shall be the object of Divine love time out of mind, and when time shall be no more. He expects a stormy voyage, but because Christ is at the helm he hopes to come to the fair havens at the last. Sustained by this hope he dreads no labours and fears no difficulties.
(2) We hope also, and have good ground for it, that after death at the day of judgment we shall have, as we believe we have now, a perfect justification.
(3) We hope also for absolute perfection. The God who has changed our hearts will continue the good work of sanctification till He has taken every sin out of us, every desire for sin, every possibility of sin.
(4) We hope also that this body of ours will be perfected. Raised--changed, but still the same as to identity. Perpetual youth.
(5) We hope that being thus cleared in judgment and made thus absolutely perfect, we shall forever enjoy infinite happiness. We do not know what form the joys of eternity will take, but they will take such form as shall make us the most happy.
(6) Nor even now have we come to an end, for something more yet remains. You say, Can more be? Yes, we expect forever to be in a condition of power, and honour, and relationship to God. This is the hope of our calling.
2. What are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints?
(1) He has spent riches of love upon them, for He loves them, poor as they are, and sick and sorry as they often are.
(2) Moreover, the Lord has spent a wealth of wisdom on His saints. This enhances their value in His eyes.
(3) He has expended a life of suffering upon them.
(4) There comes great glory to God from the workmanship which He puts into His people. An artisan can put into a small piece of iron, of no worth at all, so much labour that it shall be valued at scores of pounds, and the Triune God can expend so much workmanship upon our poor nature that a man shall be more precious than the gold of Ophir. Valued thus, the Lord may well speak of the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.
3. What is the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who believe? Now, learn ye this and know it--that in the conversion, preservation, and salvation of any one person God exhibits as great power as He manifested when He raised Jesus Christ from the dead and set Him at His own right hand in the heavenly places. The salvation of no man in the world is by his own strength. It is by the power of God, for we are His workmanship.
II. Why we wish you to see and know all this.
1. That you may not neglect it, nor set anything in competition with it.
2. That you may see where your hope lies. Not in being your own any more, but in being the Lords. If you are His, He will take care of you.
3. That you may not doubt, or despond, or despair, but cast yourselves before the incarnate God, and let Him save you. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Spiritual enlightenment
1. The source of spiritual enlightenment is God.
2. The agency is that of the Holy Spirit.
3. The end sought is the owning of the glory of God. For the marginal reading seems preferable here. For the acknowledgment of God, that in this whole matter He may be known, owned, glorified, is this prayer for the enlightenment of His people offered. But now, what is it that in terms of this apostolic prayer we are thus to know? Three things are specified, embracing three aspects of the religious life.
I. What is the hope of His calling. The hopefulness of Gods calling; what hope there is in it; how full of hope it is.
1. Consider who it is who calls, and in what character. God, in the character of the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory; the God who gives grace and glory.
2. Consider who are called. Men; all men, such as they are.
3. Consider the nature of this calling.
(1) The calling of God is hopeful; there is hope in it for sinners, because it is on the one hand absolutely free, and on the other hand peremptorily sovereign and commanding.
(2) The calling of God is hopeful, because it is on the one hand earnest, in the way of persuasion; and on the other hand effectual, as implying a Divine work of renewal in the will within,
(3) The calling of God is hopeful, because it is, on the one hand righteous, and on the other hand holy: righteous, as proceeding upon provision made for the righteousness of God, the righteousness of His character and government being maintained without compromise; holy, as making provision for our becoming personally righteous--upright, pure, holy.
4. There is hope in this calling of God; as being on the one hand sure on His part, and on the other hand capable of being made sure on our part.
II. What are the riches of the glory of His inheritance is the saints; its rich glory; its glorious richness. God takes us to be His inheritance.
III. And what is the exceeding greatness of His power to usward who believe. That is the third thing to be known. And here the apostle gives us a measure. It is according to the working, etc. It is a measure of amazing compass. It is nothing short of this, that you who believe may rely and reckon upon the power of God as available on your behalf, to the full extent of its exercise on behalf of Christ; in His victory over death, His resurrection to life, His ascension to the right hand of God, and His investiture with dominion over all. Application:
1. The knowledge for which Paul prays is altogether Divine; coming from a Divine source, through a Divine agency, for a Divine end. It is meant to be a knowledge both assured and assuring. But it cannot be so unless these conditions of it are duly observed.
2. The highest point in this threefold knowledge of God is the centre, and that implies your being His saints, His holy ones. It must be as His holy ones that you reach and realize the knowledge of the riches of the glory of His inheritance in you. Let no false humility come in here.
3. The exceeding greatness of Gods power is put forth in your exercising faith: it is to usward who believe. (R. S. Candlish, D. D.)
What the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.--
Gods inheritance in His saints
Among men there is possession and inheritance, in beings as in things. The husband has a portion in his wife, and parents have a portion in their children. Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord. And, according to the text, God has His inheritance in the saints. He who is the first cause of all things owns all things, and all things are His inheritance, and as part of this vast possession, living beings are Gods peculiar treasure. That God has an inheritance in the things which He has made, is a fact asserted sometimes by Himself (Psa_50:10-12; Psa_127:3; Exo_19:5; Hag_2:8; Job_41:11, etc.) The redeemed of mankind--men, women, children--are Gods estate, His riches, His wealth.
1. Gods inheritance in the saints is possession of the highest kind. That which lives is superior to that which is inanimate. That which is moral and religious in its constitution is superior to that which is without moral sensibility. And the highest and best beings are they which are most like to God, possessing His image and wearing His likeness. Gods inheritance in the worlds upon worlds which He has made is inferior to His inheritance in the saints.
2. Gods inheritance in the saints is His own original possession. It is underived from any ancestor. He never was heir to it; He holds it in no succession. The saints are His from the beginning, and His alone.
3. While the saints are Gods inheritance naturally, He has a second or double title to the possession (Exo_15:16; Psa_74:2; Eph_1:14; 1Co_6:19-20, etc.). The sick child lifted up from the gates of death is a special inheritance to the mother who has fondly nursed it. The prodigal son restored to his father is a special inheritance to the parent, whose life was a blank until the lost one was found. A forgiven transgressor, an ungodly man justified, a bad man regenerated, a man in a second sense Gods child, is His peculiar treasure.
4. This inheritance, looked at from the God side and from the heaven side, is a rich and glorious inheritance. Considered from the human and earthly side, the possession is very poor. What can we see in ourselves that can make God rich? But God considers Himself rich and exalted and renowned, in being able to say of His saints, They are mine. The state of Gods heart toward His inheritance makes it appear to Himself as rich and glorious. We have seen that God has a rich and glorious inheritance in the saints.
Upon this fact we proceed to make a few practical observations.
1. If God have a rich and glorious inheritance in the saints, He will claim it. He will not leave it alone, as though it did not belong to Him, or as though it were worthless. And God does claim it. He claims it by the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking in the hearts of the saints. He claims it by the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God. He claims His inheritance by His work upon it. He claims it by His providence over it. He claims it by His conduct, when this inheritance is defiled or given to another. He claims it by frequently reminding His saints that they are not their own.
2. If God have a rich and glorious inheritance in His saints, He will take care of His possession. All the looking to and attention and regard and oversight, which it requires for its safety and prosperity, cannot but be bestowed. And this care will partake of all the qualities of His own nature. It will be independent care, almighty care, righteous care, loving care, sufficient care, perfect care.
3. If God have a rich and glorious inheritance in His saints, He will make use of that inheritance. The little in Gods hand shall produce more, and the more much, and the much a greater abundance. Christians are not senseless ornaments in Gods house, but servants.
4. If God have a rich and glorious inheritance in His saints, He must take pleasure in it. Although this delight may be disturbed by sin and by sorrow, without doubt it exists with no variableness or the shadow of turning.
5. If God have a rich and glorious inheritance in His saints, He will not forsake it. His natural and His special title to it, His having claimed it, His use of it, and care for it, and delight in it, are all so many reasons for retaining it. And He has the capacity and ability to retain it. The inheritance which husbands and wives have in each other, is an inheritance which by reason of death fades away. The inheritance which parents have in children, is one which by reason of death in some cases, of removal from home in other cases, and of other circumstances, either partially or entirely fades away. But in this case the heritor lives, and the inheritance itself is everlasting. And while He lives He changes not.
6. If God have a rich and glorious inheritance in His saints, and if He claim His inheritance, care for it, make use of it, and take pleasure in it, and if He will not forsake it, the saints themselves should think and feel and speak and act and live in harmony with this position. They who come suddenly into a fortune, or rise unexpectedly to a high social position, do not at first see and understand all that is required of them. And thus the appreciation of their position by the saints is a gradual experience.
7. If God have His inheritance in the saints, we ought to esteem it highly, and to cherish a living and loving care for it. Christians should care for themselves, because they are not their own, and should care for themselves for Gods sake. To defile or degrade or debase themselves, or to waste their energies, is to defile and debase and waste the inheritance of God. What motives are here to the cherishing of purity and righteousness and Christ-likeness! And how careful should saints be of each other! (S. Martin, D. D.)
Gods inheritance
Our inheritance in God is Christ, life, righteousness, peace, fulness, acceptance, Fatherhood, grace, and glory! But what can we say of His inheritance in us? Only this. That it is by His saints God intends to make known to principalities and powers in heavenly places His manifold wisdom, tenderness, long suffering, patience, and the boundless and inexhaustible abundance of His mercies and pardoning love. For even as this dark world needs the sun, so doth the sun need a world such as ours to shine upon, else his fulness of light and quickening, gladdening power would be unrevealed. And as the fulness of the earth sets forth the beauty and resources of the sun, so shall His vessels of mercy and His monuments of grace set forth the glory of our God. You may remember God speaks of His people as His garden. The figure is very instructive and very beautiful. What our gardens are to the sun, Gods children are to Him. As each flower attracts and absorbs the suns rays, receiving and reflecting his light and heat, and giving forth fragrance and fruit according to its nature, absorbing some rays and reflecting others, but all together setting forth in a variety of tints and shades, and fragrance and fruit, the infinite fulness and beauty of the light in which they dwell,--even so it shall be by and by when the Sun of Righteousness arises on us with healing in His wings. Each saint shall reflect some blessed aspect of His fulness of grace and glory. One shall set forth His patience, another His tenderness, another His faithfulness, another His strength, another His fulness, another His fruitfulness, another His loving kindness and tender mercies, but all together shall show forth the praises of Him who called them out of darkness into His marvellous light. (M. Rainsford, B. A.)
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Expositor's Bible 1887 · Public Domain On v20 Chapter 6
Chapter 6
THE DOCTRINE. WHAT GOD WROUGHT IN THE CHRIST
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Eph_1:20-23
The division that we make at Eph_1:20, marking off at this point the commencement of the Doctrine of the epistle, may appear somewhat forced. The great doxology of the first half of the chapter is intensely theological; and the prayer which follows it, like that of the letter to the Colossians, melts into doctrine imperceptibly. The apostle teaches upon his knees. The things he has to tell his readers, and the things he has asked on their behalf from God, are to a great extent the same. Still the writers attitude in the second chapter is manifestly that of teaching; and his doctrine there is so directly based upon the concluding sentences of his prayer that it is necessary, for logical arrangement, to place these verses within the doctrinal section of the epistle.
The resurrection of Christ made men sensible that a new force of life had come into the world, of incalculable potency. This power was in existence before. In prelusive ways, it has wrought in the world from its foundation, and since the fall of man. By the incarnation of the Son of God it took possession of human flesh; by His sacrificial death is won its decisive triumph. But the virtue of these acts of Divine grace lay in their hiding of power, in the self-abnegation of the Son of God who emptied Himself and took a servants form, and became obedient unto death.
With what a rebound did the "energy of the might of Gods strength" put forth itself in Him, when once this sacrifice was accomplished! Even His disciples who had seen Jesus still the tempest and feed the multitude from a handful of bread and call back the spirit to its mortal frame, had not dreamed of the might of Godhead latent in Him, until they beheld Him risen from the dead. He had promised this in words; but they understood His words only when they saw the fact, when He actually stood before them "alive after His passion." The scene of Calvary-the cruel sufferings of their Master, His helpless ignominy and abandonment by God, the malignant triumph of His enemies-gave to this revelation an effect beyond measure astonishing and profound in its impression. From the stupor of grief and despair they were raised to a boundless hope, as Jesus rose from the death of the cross to glorious life and Godhead.
Of the same nature was the effect produced by His manifestation to Paul himself. The Nazarene prophet known to Saul by report as an attractive teacher and worker of miracles, had made enormous pretensions, blasphemous if they were not true. He put Himself forward as the Messiah and the very Son of God! But when brought to the test, His power utterly failed. God disowned and forsook Him; and "He was crucified of weakness." His followers declared, indeed, that He had returned from the grave. But who could believe them, a handful of Galilean enthusiasts, desperately clinging to the name of their disgraced leader! If He has risen, why does He not show Himself to others? Who can accept a crucified Messiah? The new faith is a madness, and an insult to our common Judaism! Such were Sauls former thoughts of the Christ. But when his challenge was met and the Risen One confronted him in the way to Damascus, when from that Form of insufferable glory there came a voice saying, "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest!" it was enough. Instantly the conviction penetrated his soul, "He liveth by the power of God." Sauls previous reasonings against the Messiahship of Jesus by the same rigorous logic were now turned into arguments for Him.
It is "the Christ," let us observe, in whom God "wrought raising Him from the dead": the Christ of Jewish hope (Eph_1:12), the centre and sum of the Divine counsel for the world (Eph_1:10), the Christ whom in that moment never to be forgotten the humbled Saul recognised in the crucified Nazarene.
The demonstration of the power of Christianity Paul had found in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The power which raised Him from the dead is the working energy of our faith. Let us see what this mysterious power wrought in the Redeemer Himself; and then we will consider how it bears upon us. There are two steps indicated in Christs exaltation: He was raised from the death of the cross to new life amongst men; and again from the world of men He was raised to the throne of God in heaven. In the enthronement of Jesus Christ at the Fathers right hand, Eph_1:22-23 further distinguish two separate acts: there was conferred on Him a universal Lordship; and He was made specifically Head of the Church, being given to her for her Lord and Life, and he who contains the fulness of the Godhead. Such is the line of thought marked out for us.
I. God raised the Christ from the dead.
This assertion is the cornerstone of St. Pauls life and doctrine, and of the existence of Christendom. Did the event really take place? There were Christians at Corinth who affirmed, "There is no resurrection of the dead." And there are followers of Jesus now who with deep sadness confess, like the author of "Obermann Once more":
"Now He is dead! Far hence He lies
In the lorn Syrian town;
And on His grave, with shining eyes,
The Syrian stars look down."
If we are driven to this surrender, compelled to think that it was an apparition, a creation of their own passionate longing and heated fancy that the disciples saw and conversed with during those forty days, an apparition sprung from his fevered remorse that arrested Saul on the Damascus road - if we no longer believe in Jesus and the resurrection, it is in vain that we still call ourselves Christians. The foundation of the Christian creed is struck away from under our feet. Its spell is broken; its energy is gone.
Individual men may and do continue to believe in Christ, with no faith in the supernatural, men who are sceptics in regard to His resurrection and miracles. They believe in Himself, they say, not in His legendary wonders; in His character and teaching, in His beneficent influence-in the spiritual Christ, whom no physical marvel can exalt above His intrinsic greatness. And such trust in Him, where it is sincere, He accepts for all that it is worth, from the believers heart. But this is not the faith that saved Paul, and built the Church. It is not the faith which will save the world. It is the faith of compromise and transition, the faith of those whose conscience and heart cling to Christ while their reason gives its verdict against Him. Such belief may hold good for the individuals who profess it; but it must die with them. No skill of reasoning or grace of sentiment will for long conceal its inconsistency. The plain blunt sense of mankind will decide again, as it has done already, that Jesus Christ was either a blasphemer, or He was the Son of the Eternal God; either He rose from the dead in very truth, or His religion is a fable. Christianity is not bound up with the infallibility of the Church, whether in Pope or Councils, nor with the inerrancy of the letter of Scripture: it stands or falls with the reality of the facts of the gospel, with the risen life of Christ and His presence in the Spirit amongst men.
The fact of Christs resurrection is one upon-which modern science has nothing new to say. The law of death is not a recent discovery. Men were as well aware of its universality in the first century as they are in the nineteenth, and as little disposed as we are ourselves to believe in the return of the dead to bodily life. The stark reality of death makes us all sceptics. Nothing is clearer from the narratives than the utter surprise of the friends of Jesus at His reappearance, and their complete unpreparedness for the event. They were not eager, but "slow of heart to believe." Their very love to the Master, as in the case of Thomas, made them fearful of self-deception. It is a shallow and an unjust criticism that dismisses the disciples as interested witnesses and predisposed to faith in the resurrection of their dead Master. Should we be thus credulous in the case of our best-beloved dead? The instinctive feeling that meets any thought of the kind, after the fact of death is once certain, is rather that of deprecation and aversion, such as Martha expressed when Jesus went to call her brother from his grave. In all the long record of human imposture and illusion, no resurrection story has ever found general credence outside of the Biblical revelation. No system of faith except our own has ever been built on the allegation that a dead man rose from the grave.
Christs was not the only resurrection; but it is the only final resurrection. Lazarus of Bethany left his tomb at the word of Jesus, a living man; but he was still a mortal man, doomed to see corruption. He returned from the grave on this side, as he had entered it, "bound hand and foot with grave-clothes." Not so with the Christ, He passed through the region of death and issued on the immortal side, escaped from the bondage of corruption. Therefore He is called the "firstfruits" and "the firstborn out of the dead." Hence the alteration manifest in the risen form of Jesus. He was "changed," as St. Paul conceives those will be who await on earth their Lords return. (1Co_15:51) The mortal in Him was swallowed up of life. The corpse that was laid in Josephs tomb was there no longer. From it another body has issued, recognised for the same person by look and voice and movement, but indescribably transfigured. Visible and tangible as the body of the Risen One was-"Handle Me, and see," He said-it was superior to material limitations; it belonged to a state whose laws transcend the range of our experience, in which the body is the pliant instrument of the animating spirit. From the Person of the risen Saviour the apostle formed his conception of the "spiritual body," the "house from heaven" with which, as he teaches, each of the saints will be clothed-the wasted form that we lay down in the grave being transformed into the semblance of His "body of glory, according to the mighty working whereby He is able to subdue all things to Himself". (Php_3:20-21)
The resurrection of the Christ inaugurated a new order of things. It was like the appearance of the first living organism amidst dead matter, or of the first rational consciousness in the unconscious world. He "is," says the apostle, the "beginning, first-begotten out of the dead". (Col_1:18) With the harvest filling our granaries, we cease to wonder at the firstfruits; and in the new heavens and earth Christs resurrection will seem an entirely natural thing. Immortality will then be the normal condition of human existence.
That resurrection, nevertheless, did homage to the fundamental law of science and of reason, that every occurrence, ordinary or extraordinary, shall have an adequate cause. The event was not more singular and unique than the nature of Him whom it befell. Looking back over the Divine life and deeds of Jesus, St. Peter said: "It was not possible that He should be holden of death." How unfitting and repugnant to thought, that the common death of all men should come upon Jesus Christ! There was that in His Person, in its absolute purity and godlikeness, which repelled the touch of corruption. He was "marked out," writes our apostle, "as Son of God," according to His spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the Rom_1:4. These two signs of Godhead agree in Jesus; and the second is no more superhuman than the first. For Him the supernatural was natural. There was a mighty working of the being of God latent in Him, which transcended and subdued to itself the laws of our physical frame, even more completely than they do the laws and conditions of the lower realms of nature.
II. The power which raised Jesus our Lord from the dead could not leave Him in the world of sin and death. Lifting Him from hades to earth, by another step it exalted the risen Saviour above the clouds, and seated Him at Gods right hand in the heavens.
The forty days were a halt by the way, a condescending pause in the operation of the almighty power that raised Him. "I ascend," He said to the first that saw Him, -"I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." He must see His own in the world again; He must "show Himself alive after His passion by infallible proofs," that their hearts may be comforted and knit together in the assurance of faith, that they may be prepared to receive His Spirit and to bear their witness to the world. Then He will ascend up where He was before, returning to the Fathers bosom. It was impossible that a spiritual body should tarry in a mortal dwelling; impossible that the familiar relations of discipleship should be resumed. No new follower can now ask of Him, "Rabbi, where dwellest Thou," under what roof amid the homes of men? For He dwells with those that love Him always and everywhere, like the Father. (Joh_14:23) From this time Christ will not be known after the flesh, but as the "Lord of the Spirit." (2Co_3:18)
"In the heavenlies" now abides the Risen One. This expression, so frequent in the epistle as to be characteristic of it, denotes not locality so much as condition and sphere. It speaks of the bright and deathless world of God and the angels, of which the sky has always been to men the symbol. Thither Christ ascended in the eyes of His apostles on the fortieth day from His rising. Once before His death its brightness for a moment had irradiated His form upon the Mount of Transfiguration. Clad in the like celestial splendour He showed Himself to His future apostle Paul, as to one born out of due time, to make him His minister and witness. Since then, of all the multitudes that have loved His appearing, no other has looked upon Him with bodily eyes. He dwells with the Father in light unapproachable.
But rest and felicity are not enough for Him. Christ sits at the right hand of power, that He may rule. In those heavenly places, it seems, there are thrones higher and lower, names more or less eminent, but His stands clear above them all. In the realms of space, in the epochs of eternity there is none to rival our Lord Jesus, no power that does not owe Him tribute. God "hath put all things under His feet." The Christ, who died on the cross, who rose in human form from the grave, is exalted to share the Fathers glory and dominion, is filled with Gods own fulness, and made without limitation or exception "Head over all things."
In his enumeration of the angelic orders in Eph_1:21, the apostle follows the phraseology current at the time, without giving any precise dogmatic sanction to it. The epistle to the Colossians furnishes a somewhat different Col_1:16; and in 1Co_15:24 we find the "principality, dominion, and power" without the "lordship." As Lightfoot says, St. Paul "brushes away all these speculations" about the ranks and titles of the angels, "without inquiring how much or how little truth there may be in them His language shows a spirit of impatience with this elaborate angelology." There is, perhaps, a passing reproof conveyed by this sentence to the "worshipping of the angels" inculcated at the present time in Colossae, to which other Asian Churches may have been drawn. "Pauls faith saw the Risen and Rising One passing through and beyond and above successive ranks of angelic powers, until there was in heaven no granaeur which he had not left behind. Then, after naming heavenly powers known to him, he uses a universal phrase covering not only those known by men living on earth in the present age, but also those names which will be needed and used to describe men and angels throughout the eternal future" (Beet).
The apostle appropriates here two sentences of Messianic prophecy, from Psalms110 and 8. The former was addressed to the Lords Anointed, the King-Priest enthroned in Zion: "Sit thou on my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool!" The latter text describes man in his pristine glory, as God formed him after His likeness and set him in command over His creation. This saying St. Paul applies with an unbounded scope, to the God-man raised from the dead, Founder of the new creation: "Thou madest Him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands; Thou hast put all things under His feet." To the former of these passages St. Paul repeatedly alludes; indeed, since our Lord quoted it in this sense, it became the standing designation of His heavenly dignity. The words of Psalms 8. are brought in evidence again in Heb_2:5-10, and expounded from a somewhat different standpoint. As the writer of the other epistle shows, this coronation belongs to the human race, and it falls to the Son of man to win it. St. Paul in quoting the same Psalm is not insensible of its human reference. It was a prophecy for Jesus and His brethren, for Christ and the Church. So it forms a natural transition from the thought of Christs dominion over the universe (Eph_1:21) to that of His union with the Church (Eph_1:22 b).
III. The second clause of Eph_1:22 begins with an emphasis upon the object which the English Version fails to recognise: "and Him He gave"-the Christ exalted to universal authority "Him God gave, Head over all things [as He is], to the Church which is His body, -the fulness of Him who fills all things in all."
At the topmost height of His glory, with thrones and princedoms beneath His feet, Christ is given to the Church! The Head over all things, the Lord of the created universe, He-and none less or lower-is the Head of redeemed humanity. For the Church "is His body" (this clause is interjected by way of explanation): she is the vessel of His Spirit, the organic instrument of His Divine-human life. As the spirit belongs to its body, by the like fitness the Christ in His surpassing glory is the possession of believing men. The body claims its head, the wife her husband. No matter where Christ is, however high in heaven, He belongs to us. Though the Bride is lowly and of poor estate, He is hers! and she knows it, and holds fast His heart. She recks little of the peoples ignorance and scorn, if their Master is her affianced Lord, and she the bestbeloved in His eyes.
How rich is this gift of the Father to the Church in the Son of His love, the concluding words of the paragraph declare: "Him He gave to the Church [gave] the fulness of Him that fills all in all." In the risen and enthroned Christ God bestowed on man a gift in which the Divine plenitude that fills creation is embraced. For this last clause, it is clear to us, does not qualify "the Church which is His body," and expositors have needlessly taxed their ingenuity with the incongruous apposition of "body" and "fulness"; it belongs to the grand Object of the foregoing description, to "the Christ" whom God raised from the dead and invested with His own prerogatives. The two separate designations, "Head over all things" and "Fulness of the All-filler," are parallel, and alike point back to Him who stands with a weight of gathered emphasis-heaped up from Eph_1:19 onwards-at the front of this last sentence (Eph_1:22 b). There has been nothing to prepare the reader to ascribe the august title of the pleroma, the Divine fulness, to the Church-enough for her, surely, if she is His body and He Gods gift to her-but there has been everything to prepare us to crown the Lord Jesus with this glory. To that which God had wrought in Him and bestowed on Him, as previously related, Eph_1:23 adds something more and greater still; for it shows what God makes the Christ to be, not to the creatures, to the angels, to the Church, but to God Himself! Our text is in strict agreement with the sayings about "the fulness" in Col_1:15-20 and Col_2:9-10; as well as with the later references of this epistle, in Eph_3:19, Eph_4:13; and with Joh_1:16. This title belongs to Christ as God is in Him and communicates to Him all Divine powers. It was, in the apostles view, a new and distinct act by which the father bestowed on the incarnate Son, raised by His power from the dead, the functions of Deity. Of this glory Christ had of His own accord "emptied Himself" in becoming man for our salvation. (Php_2:6-7) Therefore when the sacrifice was effected and the time of humiliation passed, it "was the Fathers pleasure that all the fulness should make its dwelling in Him". (Col_1:19) At no point did Christ exalt Himself, or arrogate the glory once renounced. He prayed, when the hour was come: "Now, Father, glorify Thou me with Thine own self, with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was." It was for the Father. to say, as He raised and enthroned Him: "Thou art my Son; I to-day have begotten Thee!". (Act_13:33)
Again there was poured into the empty, humbled, and impoverished form of the Son of God the brightness of the Fathers glory and the infinitude of the Fathers authority and power. The majesty that He had foregone was restored to Him in undiminished measure. But how great a change meanwhile in Him who received it! This plenitude devolves not now on the eternal Son in His pure Godhead, but on the Christ, the Head and Redeemer of mankind. God who fills the universe with His presence, with His cherishing love and sustaining power, has conferred the fulness of all that He is upon our Christ. He has given Him, so replenished and perfected, to the body of His saints, that He may dwell and work in them forever.
William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv17–22 17–19. That. This introduces the things for which he…
17–19. That. This introduces the things for which he prayed God in their behalf. The Father of glory. The source of all spiritual glory. Give unto you the Spirit of wisdom. A gift of the Spirit. See notes on 1 Cor. 12:8. Divine wisdom works wisdom in believers. And revelation. The Spirit that reveals a knowledge of God and spiritual mysteries. This Spirit would enable them to better comprehend the “mystery” of God, the divine plans for human redemption in a better knowledge of him.
B. W. Johnson's The People's New Testament with Notes (1889–1891) — public domain. Electronic text from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL) ThML edition.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary 1892 · Public Domain On v19 Eph_1:18-19. The eyes of your understanding being enlightened ……
CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES
Eph_1:18-19. The eyes of your understanding being enlightened … to us-ward who believe.—Three pictures for heaven-illumined eyes:
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1. The hope of His calling.—Meyer says “the hope” is not here (nor anywhere) the res sperata, “the object on which hope fastens, but the great and glorious hope which God gives”—a statement too sweeping for other scholars, though here they agree that it is the faculty of hope “which encourages and animates.”
2. The riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.—“What a copious and grand accumulation, mirroring, as it were, the weightiness of the thing itself!” (Meyer). “Riches of the glory” must not be watered down into “glorious riches.”
3. The exceeding greatness of His power to us-ward.—The amazing and wholly unexpected working of the same Hand that wrought our first deliverance: the Power that smites the oppressor with dismay opens the path through the sea (see Isa_40:10-11). According to the working of His mighty power.—This may be regarded as a specimen of the divine power, the norm or standard by which we may gain an idea of the “exceeding greatness” of it—that from the tomb of His humiliation Christ was raised by that power to an unrivalled dignity in God’s throne. The R.V. gives “working of the strength of His might”: “working”—“the active exertion of power” (Meyer); “strength”—might expressing itself in overcoming resistance, ruling, etc.; “might”—strength in itself as inward power.
Eph_1:20. Set Him at His own right hand.—“Dexter Dei ubique est.” We cannot dogmatise about the relations to space which a glorified body holds. The transcendent glory of God in that body links God to man, the humanity in the glory gives man his claim in God. “The true commentary on the phrase is Mar_16:19, ‘He was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God’ ” (Meyer).
Eph_1:21. Far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion.—R.V. “Rule, and authority, and power, and dominion.” “To be understood of the good angels, since the apostle is not speaking of the victory of Christ over opposing powers, but of His exaltation above the existing powers of heaven” (Meyer). “Powers and dominions, deities of heaven,” as Milton calls them, ranged here, perhaps, in a descending order. And every name that is named.—“God hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which is above every name.” “Let any name be uttered, whatever it is, Christ is above it, is more exalted than that which the name affirms” (Meyer). Not only in this world.—“This age.” “No other name under heaven given among men.” But also in that which is to come.—There Zechariah’s word will have its fullest application. “The Lord shall be King over all the earth; there shall be one Lord, and His name one.”
Eph_1:22. And hath put all things under His feet.—Compare 1Co_15:27.
“Strong Son of God, immortal Love, …
Thou madest Death; and lo Thy foot
Is on the skull which Thou hast made.”
In Memoriam.
Eph_1:23. The fulness of Him that filleth all in all.—“The Church, viz., is the Christ-filled, i.e. that which is filled by Him in so far as Christ penetrates the whole body and produces Christian life” (Meyer). “The brimmed receptacle of Him who filleth all things with all things” (Farrar). “Among the Gnostics the supersensible world is called the Pleroma, the fulness or filled, in opposition to ‘the empty,’ the world of the senses” (Meyer).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Eph_1:19-23
The Church Complete in Christ.
I. The Church is the creation of divine power (Eph_1:19).—The Church does not consist in massive architecture or ornate decorations, not in ecclesiastical organisations and councils. It is not the offspring of the most elaborately constructed creed. It is not confined within the limits of the most expansive ecclesiastical epithet. It is a divine, spiritual creation. It consists of souls redeemed by the sacrifice of Jesus, clinging to Him for pardon, peace, and righteousness, and created in Him, by “the working of the mighty power” of the divine Spirit, for good works, and therefore continually striving to disseminate the good they have themselves received. The apostolic idea of the Church was coloured by the leading characteristic of the man. To St. Peter it was the Church as influenced by law—the confessing Church; to St. Paul it was the Church influenced by the freedom of faith—the witnessing Church; to St. John it was the Church as filled with the ideality of faith—working and keeping joyful holiday, the adorned Bride (Rev_19:7-8). The Church is a constant revelation of “the exceeding greatness of His power” who first originated it and sustains its ever-widening growth.
II. The divine power that creates the Church instals Christ as the supreme authority.—
1. This power raised Christ from the deepest humiliation to the highest dignity (Eph_1:20-21). It raised Him from the cross to the throne, from the domain of the dead to the life and everlasting glory of the heavenly world. “God ascended with jubilation, and the Lord with the sound of the trumpet. Certainly, if when He brought His only begotten Son into the world He said, ‘Let all the angels worship Him’; much more, now that He ascends on high and hath led captivity captive, hath He given Him a name above all names, that at the name of Jesus all knees should bow. And if the holy angels did so carol at His birth in the very entrance into that estate of humiliation and infirmity, with what triumph they receive Him now returning from the perfect achievement of man’s redemption! And if, when His type had vanquished Goliath and carried the head into Jerusalem, the damsels came forth to meet him with dances and timbrels, how shall we think those angelic spirits triumph in meeting the great Conqueror of hell and death! How did they sing, ‘Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in’!”
2. This power invests Christ with supreme rule and authority (Eph_1:22). On the night when Christ was born what a difference was there in all outward marks of distinction between the child of the Hebrew mother as He lay in His lowly cradle, and the Augustus Cæsar, whose edict brought Mary to Bethlehem, as he reposed in his imperial palace. And throughout the lifetime of the two there was but little to lessen that distinction. The name of the one was known and honoured over the whole civilised globe, the name of the Other scarce heard of beyond the narrow bounds of Judea. How stands it now? The throne of the Cæsars, the throne of mere human authority and power, has perished. But the empire of Jesus, the empire of pure, undying, self-sacrificing love, will never perish; its sway over the consciences and hearts of men, as the world grows older, becomes ever wider and stronger (Hanna). The rule of Christ will last till all enemies are subdued, and obedience to Him becomes a reverential and joyous experience.
III. The Church is complete as it is endowed with the divine fulness of Christ (Eph_1:23).—The Church to-day seems broken into fragments, torn by divisions and strife; but by-and-by it will blend in a glorious unity. Take a mass of quicksilver, let it fall on the floor, and it will split into a vast number of distinct globules; gather them up, and put them together again, and they will coalesce into one body as before. Thus God’s people below are sometimes divided into various parties, though they are all in fact members of one and the same mystic body. But when taken up from the world and put together in heaven they will constitute one glorious, undivided Church for ever and ever. The completeness of the Church is not the aggregation of all the virtues of the saints blended in beauteous and harmonious unity, but the glory of the divine fulness that pervades every part.
Lessons.—
1. The Church as a divine creation is a revelation of Christ.
2. The Church is composed of those who are created anew in Christ Jesus.
3. Christ is everything to His Church.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Eph_1:19-23. The Dignity and Dominion of Christ.
I. The first step in Christ’s exaltation was the resurrection from the dead.—This miracle is an incontestable evidence of the truth of the Christian religion, and an evidence of the great doctrine of the resurrection of the body and a future life, and of the efficacy of Christ’s blood to expiate the guilt of our sins. If we believe that Jesus died and rose again, we must believe that the same mighty power which wrought in Him can also work in us to raise us from the dead.
II. The next step is His ascension to heaven and session at God’s right hand (Eph_1:20). The right hand is the place of honour and respect, and denotes superior dignity. Christ sitting at God’s right hand signifies He has ceased from His labours and sufferings and entered into a state of repose and joy, and imports authority and power. He is exalted not only as Ruler, but also as Intercessor.
III. The exaltation of Christ is supreme.—His kingdom extends to all creatures in heaven, earth, and under the earth. The government of the natural world is in His hands, as well as the government of the Church. He has dominion over devils. His last and most glorious act is the judgment of the world.
IV. The end for which Christ exercises His high and extensive dominion (Eph_1:22-23).—All His government is managed in reference to the good of the Church. See how criminal and dangerous it is to oppose the interest of the Church. If the Church is Christ’s body, let us honour it, study to preserve unity in it, labour for its edification and comfort. Let us honour and reverence our Head, and never presumptuously lift up ourselves against the Church.—Lathrop.
Eph_1:19. The Power of God in Conversion.—
1. The power God exercises in converting and carrying on the work of grace to glory is not only great, but exceeds all power that might impede that work, so that there is no power in the devil, the world, sin, or death which this power does not overcome, nor any impotency in believers which this greatness of power will not help and strengthen. There is no more pregnant proof of God’s omnipotent power than in converting sinners from sin to holiness.
2. This mighty power of God extends to all times. It works in the first conversion of believers, preserves them in a state of grace, actuating their graces that they may grow, and continues till their graces are perfected.
3. The experimental knowledge of God’s way of working is to be carefully sought after, to make us thankful for His gracious working in us, in order that our knowledge of God may be increased and our faith and hope in Him strengthened.—Fergusson.
Eph_1:20. The Future Life.
I. Our virtuous friends at death go to Jesus Christ.—Here is one great fact in regard to futurity. The good on leaving us here meet their Saviour, and this view alone assures us of their unutterable happiness. The joys of centuries will be crowded into that meeting. This is not fiction. It is truth founded on the essential laws of the mind. Their intercourse with Jesus Christ will be of the most affectionate and ennobling character. They are brought to a new comprehension of His mind and to a new reception of His Spirit. They will become joint workers—active, efficient ministers—in accomplishing His great work of spreading virtue and happiness. They retain the deepest interest in this world. They love human nature as never before, and human friends are prized as above all price.
II. Our virtuous friends go not to Jesus only, but to the great and blessed society which is gathered round Him.—The redeemed from all regions of earth. They meet peculiar congratulations from friends who had gone before them to that better world, and especially from all who had in any way given aids to their virtue. If we have ever known the enjoyments of friendship, of entire confidence, of co-operation in honourable and successful labours with those we love, we can comprehend something of the felicity of a world where souls, refined from selfishness, open as the day, thirsting for new truth and virtue, endowed with new power of enjoying the beauty and grandeur of the universe, allied in the noblest works of benevolence, and continually discovering new mysteries of the Creator’s power and goodness, communicate themselves to one another with the freedom of perfect love. They enter on a state of action, life, and effort. Still more, they go to God. They see Him with a new light in all His works. They see Him face to face, by immediate communion. These new relations of the ascended spirit to the universal Father, how near, how tender, how strong, how exalting! Heaven is a glorious reality. Its attraction should be felt perpetually. They who are safely gathered there say to us, Come and join us in our everlasting blessedness!—Channing.
Eph_1:21-22. The Supremacy of Jesus—
I. Acquired by His resurrection power.
II. Places Him above the highest created intelligences and potentates.
III. Is expressed in a name that surpasses in dignity and greatness that which has ever been or can be celebrated in earth or heaven.
IV. Gives Him absolute control over all worlds.—“And hath put all things under His feet” (Eph_1:22).
Eph_1:22-23. Christ the Head of the Church.
I. The Church depends on Him for life, guidance, activity, and development.—“Which is His body” (Eph_1:23).
II. He governs all things in the interest of His Church.—“And gave Him to be the Head over all things to the Church” (Eph_1:22).
III. The Church is a revelation of the greatness and glory of Christ.—“The fulness of Him that filleth all in all” (Eph_1:23).
Eph_1:22. The Headship of Christ.
I. The extent of His headship.—
1. Over all worlds.
2. Over the whole human race.
3. Over the Church.
II. The subserviency of its administration to the interests of His Church.—
1. For the edification of His Church. 2. For its defence.
3. For its increase.
III. Its grounds.—
1. His merit.
2. His qualifications. Whom do ye serve?—G. Brooks.
The Headship of Christ.—The verse consists of two statements:—
I. That Christ is Head over all things. The Father hath given Christ to be Head over all things.
1. Originally involved in a covenant or agreement between the Father and the Song of Solomon 2. Now a matter of history.
3. The path of Christ to the mediatorial throne capable of being traced.
4. He there laid deep the foundations.
5. The whole universe is under His sway—heaven, earth, hell, all worlds, all elements.
6. He is qualified for such dominion—divine attributes, angelic spirits, believers, the devil and wicked men, the Holy Spirit.
II. That Christ is Head over all things to the Church.—Christ sits upon the throne in the same character in which He trod the earth and hung upon the cross.
1. It is as Mediator
2. The same ends which He contemplated. It was for the Church He clothed Himself in human form.
3. He gives a peculiar character to the entire divine government. He Christianises it.
4. He employs all His attributes, resources, creatures.
Lessons.—
1. Redemption is a wide and extended plan, not so easily accomplished, not so limited.
2. All creatures and dominions should do Christ homage.
3. The Church is secure from real danger.
4. Believers may well glory in Christ as their Head.—Stewart.
The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.
William B. Godbey 1900 · Public Domain On vv18, 22 18. “The eyes of your heart having been enlightened.”…
18. “The eyes of your heart having been enlightened.” Man is a Trinity, consisting of spirit, soul, or heart, all of which are synonymous, and used interchangeably in common parlance. The rank and file of the preachers at the present day are dichotomists; i.e., advocates of the two natures in humanity, confounding and identifying spirit and mind, and consequently preaching mentalities for spiritualities, and utterly heretical so far as gospel truth is concerned. The Bible everywhere teaches trichotomy; i.e., the three natures of humanity, spirit, mind, and body. The spirit is the man himself, consisting of the conscience, the will, and the affections. The conscience survived the fall, and still rings out the voice of God in the soul. The will is the king of humanity, adroitly manipulated by Satan for the damnation of the sinner, but completely wrested out of his hands, and turned over to God by the Holy Ghost in regeneration. Still, a world survives in the profound regions of the affections till utterly eradicated and expurgated by the cleansing blood, applied through the Holy Ghost in the second work of grace; i.e., entire sanctification.
The heart has all the senses; i.e., sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, like the body. But though a dead man have all these organs, he is utterly destitute of sensation. So it is with the heart of the sinner till quickened into life by the Holy Spirit. The human soul in the fall was utterly bereft of life. Hence total depravity applies only to the spiritual nature; the mental and physical suffering only partial depravity. Hence the wholesale delusion of the dualistic theology, which winks at the pure spirituality of humanity, substituting intellectualism, thus building up pompous Churches on the mental and physical elements, intermitting the spiritual, and thus letting the souls of their people slip through their fingers into hell. The Christian religion is not materialism nor intellectualism, but pure spirituality, inwrought by the Holy Ghost.
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19,20,21. “Placing Him on his right hand in the heavenlies above all the government, authority, power, and lordship, and every name named not only in this age, but in that which is to come.” The Greek aion, erroneously translated “world,” means age. Hence, we see that this is not the last age of this world, but it is to be followed by the glorious millennium, and afterward by the illimitable heavenly ages, sweeping on through all eternity.
William B. Godbey, Commentary on the New Testament (1896–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On vv18–19
EPHESIANS
THE HOPE OF THE CALLING
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Eph 1:18
A man’s prayers for others are a very fair thermometer of his own religious condition. What he asks for them will largely indicate what he thinks best for himself; and how he asks it will show the firmness of his own faith and the fervour of his own feeling. There is nothing colder than the intercession of a cold Christian; and, on the other hand, in no part of the fervid Apostle Paul’s writings do his words come more winged and fast, or his spirit glow with greater fervour of affection and holy desire than in his petitions for his friends.
In that great prayer, of which my text forms a part, we have his response to the good news that had reached him of the steadfastness in faith and abundance in love of these Ephesian Christians. As the best expression of his glad love he asks for them the knowledge of three things, of which my text is the first, and the other two are the ‘riches of the glory of the inheritance’ and ‘the exceeding greatness of God’s power.’
Now if we take the ‘hope’ in my text, as is often done, as meaning the thing hoped for, there seems to be but a shadowy difference between the first and the second of these subjects of the apostolic petition. Whereas, if we take it as meaning, not the object on which the emotion is fixed, but the emotion itself, then all the three stand in a natural gradation and connection. We have, first, the Christian emotion; then the object upon which it is fixed; ‘the glory of the inheritance’; then the power by which the latter is brought and the former is realised. We shall consider the second and third of these petitions in following sermons. For the present I confine myself to this first, the Apostle’s great desire for Christians who had already made considerable progress in the Christian life, ‘that they may know,’ by experiencing it, ‘what is the hope of His calling.’
I. Now the first thought that these words suggest to me is this, that the Christian hope is based upon the facts of Christian experience.
What does the Apostle mean by naming it ‘the hope of his calling’? He means this, that the great act of the divine mercy revealed to us in the Gospel, by which God summons and invites men to Himself, will naturally produce in those who have yielded to it a hope of immortal and perfect life. Because God has called men, therefore the man who has yielded to the call may legitimately, and must, if he is to do his duty, cherish such a hope. It is clear enough that this is so, inasmuch as, unless there be a heaven of completeness for us who have yielded to the summons and obeyed the invitation of God in His Gospel, His whole procedure is enigmatical and bewildering. The fact of the call is inexplicable; the cost of it is no less so. It was not worth while for God to make the world unless with respect to another which was to follow. It is still less worth His while to redeem the world if the results of that redemption, as they are exhibited here and now, and as they are capable of being exhibited in this present condition of things, are all that are to flow from it. It was not worth Christ’s while to die, it was not worth God’s while to send His Son, there was no sense or consistency in that great voice that echoes from heaven, calling us to love and serve Him, unless, beyond the jangling contradictions, and imperfect attainments, and foiled aspirations, and fragmentary faith, and broken services of earth, there be a region of completeness where all that was tendency here shall have become effect; and all that was but in germ here, and sorely frostbitten by the ungenial climate, and shrivelled by the foul vapours in the atmosphere, shall blossom and burgeon into eternal life. The Christian life, as it is to-day, in its attainments and imperfections, is at once the witness of the reality of the power that has produced it, and clamantly calls for a sphere and environment in which that power shall be able to produce the effects which it is capable of producing.
God is ‘not a man that He should lie, nor the son of man that He should repent.’ Men begin grand designs which never get further than the paper that they are drawn on; or they build a porch, and then they are bankrupt, or change their minds, or die, and the palace remains unrealised, and all that pass by mock and say, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ But God’s designs are certain of accomplishment. Unless we are to be reduced to a state of utter intellectual bewilderment and confusion, and forgo our belief in His veracity and resources to execute His designs, the design that lies in the calling must needs lead on to the realm of perfectness. If we consider the agent by which it is effected, even the risen Christ; if we consider the cost at which it was accomplished, even the death on the Cross, the mission of His Son, and His assumption of the limitations of an incarnate life; if we consider the manifest potencies of the power that He has brought into operation in the present Christian life; and if we consider, side by side with these, the stark, staring contradictions and as manifest inevitable limitations of the effects of that power, His calling carries in its depths the assurance that what He means shall be done, that Jesus Christ has not died in vain, that He has not ascended to fill a solitary throne, but is the Firstfruits of a great harvest; and that we shall one day be all that it is in the gospel of our salvation to make us, unhindered by the limitations and unthwarted by the antagonisms of this poor human life of ours. Unless there be a heaven in which all desires shall be satisfied, all evils removed, all good perfected, all ragged trees made symmetrical and full-grown, and all souls that love Him radiant with His own perfect image, then the light that seemed a light from heaven is the most delusive of all the marsh-fires of earth, and nothing in the illusions of sense or of men’s cunning is so cruel or so tragic as the calling that seemed to be the voice of God, and summoned us to a heaven which was only a dream.
II. And so, secondly, notice how this hope of our text is in some sense the very topstone of the Christian life.
Paul has heard, concerning these people in Ephesus, of their faith and love. And because he has heard of these, therefore he brings this prayer. These two-the faith which apprehends the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ, and the love which that faith produces in the heart that accepts the revelation of the infinite love-are crowned by, and are imperfect without, and naturally lead on to the brightness of this great hope, Faith-the reliance of the spirit upon the veracity of the revealing God-gives hope its contents; for the Christian hope is not spun out of your own imaginations, nor is it the mere making objective in a future life of the unfulfilled desires of this disappointing present, but it is the recognition by the trusting spirit of the great and starry truths that are flashed upon it by the Word of God. Faith draws back the curtain, and Hope gazes into the supernal abysses. My hope, if it be anything else than the veriest will-o’-the-wisp and delusion, is the answer of my heart to the revealed truth of God.
Similarly the love which flows from faith not only necessarily leads on to the expectation of union being perfected with the object of its warm affection, but also so works upon the heart and character as that the false and seducing loves which draw away, like some sluice upon a river, the current of life from its true channel, are all sanctified and no more hinder hope. Loving, we hope for that which, unless we loved, would not draw desires nor yield foretastes of sweetness which, like perfumed oil, feed the pure flame of hope.
The triad of Christian graces is completed by Hope. Without her fair presence something is wanting to the completeness of her elder sisters. The great Campanile at Florence, though it be inlaid with glowing marbles, and fair sculptures, and perfect in its beauty, wants the gilded, skyward-pointing pinnacle of its topmost pyramid; and so it stands incomplete. And thus faith and love need for their crowning and completion the topmost grace that looks up to the sky, and is sure of a mansion there.
Brethren, our Christianity is wofully imperfect unless faith and love find their acme, their outstretching completion, in this Christian hope. Do you seek to complete your faith and love by a living hope full of immortality?
III. Thirdly, notice how this hope is an all-important element in the Christian life.
The Apostle asks for it as the best thing that can befall these Ephesian Christians, as the one thing that they need to make them strong and good and blessed. There are many other aspects of desire for them which appear in other parts of this letter. But here all Christian progress is regarded as being held in solution and included in vigorous hope.
Why is the activity of hope thus important for Christian life? Because it stimulates effort, calms sorrows, takes the fascination out of temptations, supplies a new aim for life and a new measure for the things of time and sense.
If we lived, as we ought to live, in the habitual apprehension of the great future awaiting all real Christians, would it not change the whole aspect of life? The world is very big when it is looked at from any point upon its surface; but suppose it could be looked at from the central sun, how large would it appear then? We can shift our station in like fashion, and then we get the true measure at once of the insignificance and of the greatness of life. This world means nothing worthy, except as an introduction to another. Not that thereby there will follow in any wise man contempt for the present, for the very same reference to the future which dwarfs the greatnesses and dwindles the sorrows, and almost extinguishes the dazzling lights of this present, does also lift it to its true significance and importance. It is the vestibule of that future, and that future is conditioned throughout by the results of the few years that we live here. An apprenticeship may be a very poor matter, looked at in itself; and the boy may say What is the use of my working at all these trivial things? but, since it is apprenticeship, it is worth while to attend to every trifle in its course, for attention to them will affect the standing of the man all his days.
Here and now we are getting ready for the great workshop yonder; learning the trick of the tools, and how to use our fingers and our powers, and, when the schooling is done, we shall be set to nobler work, and receive ample wages for the years here. Because that great ‘to-morrow will be as this day’ of earthly life, ‘and much more abundant,’ therefore it is no trifle to work amongst the trifles; and nothing is small which may tell on our condition yonder. The least deflection from the straight line, however acute may be the angle which the divergent lines enclose at the starting, and however small may seem to be the deviation from parallelism, will, if prolonged to infinity, have room between the two for all the stars, and the distance between them will be that the one is in heaven and the other is in hell. And so it is a great thing to live amongst the little things, and life gains its true significance when we dwarf and magnify it by linking it with the world to come.
If we only kept that hope bright before us, how little discomforts and sorrows and troubles would matter! Life would become ‘a solemn scorn of ills.’ It does not matter much what kind of cabin accommodation we have if we are only going a short voyage; the main thing is to make the port. If we, as Christian people, cherish, as we ought to do, this great hope, then we shall be able to control, and not to despise but to exalt this fleeting and transient scene, because it is linked inseparably with the life that is to come.
IV. Lastly, this hope needs enlightened eyes.
The Apostle prays that God may give to these Ephesians ‘the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him,’ and then he adds, as the result of that gift, the desire that the Ephesian believers may have ‘the eyes of their hearts enlightened.’ That is a remarkable expression. It does not mean, as an English reader might suppose it to mean, that the affections are the agents by which this knowledge reaches us; but ‘heart’ is here used, as it often is in Scripture, as a general expression for the whole inward life, and all that the Apostle means is that, by the gift of the Divine Spirit of wisdom, a man’s inner nature may be so touched as to be capable of perceiving and grasping the ‘hope of the calling.’
Observe, too, the language, ‘that ye may know the hope.’ How can you know a hope? How do you know any kind of feeling? By having it. The only way of knowing what is the hope is to hope, and this is only possible by dint of these eyes of the understanding being enlightened. For our inward nature, as we have it, and as we use it, without the touch of that Divine Spirit, is so engrossed with this present that the far-off blessedness to which my text refers has no chance of entering there. No man can look at something beside him with one eye, and at something half a mile off with the other. You have to focus the eye according to the object; and he who is gazing upon the near is thereby made blind to that which is afar off. If we go crawling along the low levels with our eyes upon the dust, then of course we cannot see the crown above.
We need more than the historical revelation of the light in order to enlighten the inward nature. There is many a man here now who knows all about the immortality that is brought to light by Jesus Christ just as well as the Christian man whose soul is full of the hope of it, and who yet, for all his knowledge, does not know the hope, because he has not felt it. You have to get further than to the acceptance intellectually of the historical facts of a risen and ascended Saviour before there can be, in your heart, any vital hope of immortality. The inward eye must be cleared and strengthened, cross lights must be shut out so that we may direct the single eye of our hearts towards the great objects which alone are worthy of its fixed contemplation. And we cannot do that without a divine help, that Spirit of wisdom which will fill our hearts if we ask for it, which will fix our affections, which will clear our eyesight, which will withdraw it from seeing vanity as well as give it reality to see.
But we must observe the conditions. Since this clearness of hope comes not merely from the acceptance as a truth of the fact of Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension, but comes through the gift of that Divine Spirit, then to have it you must ask for it. Christian people, do you ask for it? Do you ever pray-I do not mean in words, but in real desire-that God would help you to keep steadily before you that great future to which we are all going so fast? If you do you will get the answer. Seek for that Spirit; use it, and do not resist its touches. Do not fix your gaze on the world when God is trying to draw you to fix it upon Himself. Think more about Jesus Christ, more about God’s high calling, live nearer to Him, and try more honestly, more earnestly, more prayerfully, more habitually, even amidst all the troubles and difficulties and trivialities of each day, to cultivate that great faculty of joyful and assured hope.
Surely God did not endue us with the power of hoping that we might fling it all away on trivial, transient things. We are all far too short-sighted; our fault is not that we do not hope, but that we hope for such near things, for such small things, like the old mariners who had no compass nor sextant, and were obliged to creep timidly along the coasts, and steer from headland to headland. But we ought to launch boldly out into mid-ocean, knowing that we have before us that star that cannot guide us amiss. Do not set your hopes on the things that perish, for if you do, hopes fulfilled and hopes disappointed will be equally bitter in your mouths. And you older people who, like myself, are drawing near the end of your days, and have little else left to hope for in this world, do you see to it that your anticipations extend ‘above the ruinable skies.’ There is an object beyond experience, above imagination, without example, for which the creation wants a comparison, we an apprehension, and the Word of God itself a sufficient revelation. ‘It doth not yet appear what we shall be.’ God hath called us to His eternal kingdom and glory; let us seek to walk in the light of the ‘hope of His calling.’
EPHESIANS
GOD’S INHERITANCE IN THE SAINTS
Eph 1:18
The misery of Hope is that it so often owes its materials to the strength of our desires or to the activity of our imagination. But when mere wishes or fancies spin the thread, Hope cannot weave a lasting fabric. And so one of the old prophets, in speaking of the delusive hopes of man, says that they are like ‘spiders’ webs,’ and ‘shall not become garments.’ Paul, then, having been asking for these Ephesian Christians that they might have hopes lofty and worthy, and such as God’s summons to them would inspire, passes on to ask that they might have the material out of which they could weave such hope, namely, a sure and clear knowledge of the future blessings. The language in which he describes that future is remarkable-’the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.’ He calls it God’s inheritance, not as meaning that God is the Inheritor, but the Giver. He speaks of it as ‘in the saints,’ meaning that, just as the land of Canaan was distributed amongst tribes and families, and each man got his own little plot, so that broad land is parted out amongst those who are ‘partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light.’
And so my text suggests to me three points to which I seek to call your attention. First, the inheritance; second, the heirs; and third, the heirs’ present knowledge of their future possession.
I. First, then, note the inheritance.
Now we must discharge from the word some of its ordinary associations. There is no reference to the thought of succession in it, as the mere English reader is accustomed to think-to whom inheritance means possession by the death of another. The idea is simply that of possession. The figure which underlies the word is, of course, that of the ancient partition of the land of Canaan amongst the tribes, but we must go a great deal deeper than that in order to understand its whole sweep and fulness of meaning.
What is the portion for a soul? God. God is Heaven, and Heaven is God. No interpretation of ‘the inheritance,’ however it may run into cheap and vulgar sensuous descriptions of a future glory, has come within sight of the meaning of the word, unless it has grasped this as the central thought: ‘Whom have I in heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee.’ Only God can be the portion of a human spirit. And none else can fill the narrowest and the smallest of man’s needs.
So, then, if there were realised all the accumulated changes of progress in blessedness, and the withdrawal of all external causes of disquiet and weariness and weeping, still the heart would hunger and be empty of its true possession unless God Himself had flowed into it. It were but a poor advancement and the gain of a loss, if yearnings were made immortal, and the aching vacuity, which haunts every soul that is parted from God, were cursed with immortality. It would be so, if it be not true that the inheritance is nothing less than the fuller possession of God Himself.
And how do men possess God? How do we possess one another, here and now? By precisely the same way, only indefinitely expanded and exalted, do we possess Him here, and shall we possess Him hereafter. Heart to heart is joined by love which is mutual and interpenetrating possession; where ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ become blended, like the several portions of the one ray of white light, in the blessed word ‘ours.’ Contemplation makes us possessors of God. Assimilation to His character makes us own and have Him. They who love and gaze, and are being changed by still degrees into His likeness, possess Him. This is the central idea of man’s future destiny and highest blessedness, a union with God closer and more intimate in degree, but yet essentially the same in kind, as is here possible amidst the shows and vanities and wearinesses of this mortal life. ‘His servants shall serve Him, and see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads.’ Obedience, contemplation, transformation, these are the hands by which we here lay hold on God; and they in the heavens grasp Him just as we here on earth may do. The ‘inheritance’ is God Himself.
Surely that is in accordance with the whole teaching of Scripture, and is but the expansion of plain words which tell us that we ‘are heirs of God.’ If that be so, then all the other subsidiary blessings which have been, to the sore detriment of Christian anticipation and of Christian life in a hundred ways, elevated into disproportionate importance, fall into their right places, and are more when they are looked upon as secondary than when they are looked upon as primary.
Ah, brethren! neither the sensuous metaphors which, in accommodation to our weakness, Scripture has used to paint that future so that we may, in some measure, comprehend it, nor the translation of these, in so far as they refer to circumstances and externals, are enough for us. It is blessed to know that ‘there shall be no night there’-blessed to grasp all those sweet negatives which contradict the miseries of the world, and to think of no sin, no curse, no tears, no sighing nor sorrow, neither any more pain, ‘because the former things have passed away.’ It is sweet and ennobling to think that, when we are discharged of the load of this cumbrous flesh, we shall be much more ourselves, and able to see where now is but darkness, and to feel where now is but vacancy. It is blessed to think of the recognising of lost and loved ones. But all these blessednesses, heaped together, as it seems to me, would become sickeningly the same if prolonged through eternity, unless we had God for our very own. Eternal is an awful word, even when the noun that goes with it is blessedness. And I know not how even the redeemed could be saved, as the long ages rolled on, from the oppression of monotony, and the feeling, ‘I would not live always,’ unless God was ‘the strength of their hearts, and their portion for ever.’ We must rise above everything that merely applies to changes in our own natures and in our relations to the external universe, and to other orders of creatures; and grasp, as the hidden sweetness that lies in the calyx of the gorgeous flower, the possession of God Himself as the rapture of our joy and the heaven of our heaven.
And if that be so, then these accumulated words with which the Apostle, in his fiery, impetuous way, tries to set forth the greatness of what he is speaking about, receive a loftier meaning than they otherwise would have.
‘The riches of the glory of His inheritance’-now that word ‘riches,’ or ‘wealth,’ is a favourite of Paul’s; and in this single letter occurs, if I count rightly, five times. In addition to our text, it is used twice in connection with God’s grace, ‘the riches of His grace’ once in connection with Jesus, ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ’; and once in a similar connection to, though with a different application from, our text, ‘the riches of His glory.’ Always, you see, it is applied to something that is special and properly divine. And here, therefore, it applies, not to the abundance of any creatural good, however exuberant and inexhaustible the store of it may be, but simply and solely to that unwearying energy, that self-feeding and ever-burning and never-decaying light, which is God. Of Him alone it can be said that work does not exhaust, nor Being tend to its own extinction, nor expenditure of resources to their diminution. The guarantee for eternal blessedness is the ‘riches’ of the eternal God, and so we may be sure that no time can exhaust, nor any expenditure empty, either His storehouse or our wealth.
And again, the ‘glory’ is not the lustrous light, however dazzling to our feeble eyes that may be, of any creature that reflects the light of God, but it is the far-flashing and never-dying radiance of His own manifestation of Himself to the hearts and souls of them that love Him. And so the ‘inheritance is incorruptible and undefiled, and fadeth not away’; not merely by reason of the communicated will of God operating upon creatures whom He preserves untarnished by corruption, and ungnawed by decay, but because He Himself is the ‘inheritance,’ and on Him time hath no power. On His wealth all His creatures may hang for ever; and it shall be as it was in the sweet parable of the miracle of old, the fragments that remain will be more than when the meal began. ‘The riches of the glory of His inheritance.’
II. Now notice, secondly, the heirs.
The words of my text receive, perhaps, their best commentary and explanation in those words which the writer of them heard, on the Damascus road, when the voice from heaven spoke to him about men ‘obtaining an inheritance among them that are sanctified.’ It almost sounds like an echo of that long past, but never-to-be-forgotten voice, when our Apostle writes as he does in our text.
Now what does he mean by ‘saints’? Who are these amongst whom the broad acres of that infinite prairie are to be parted out? The word has attracted to itself contemptuous meanings and ascetical meanings, and meanings which really deny the true democracy of Christianity and the equality of all believers in the sight of God. But its scriptural use has none of these narrowing and confusing associations adhering to it, nor does it even directly and at first mean, as we generally take it to mean, pure men, holy in the sense of clean and righteous. But something goes before that phase of meaning, and it is this-a saint is a man separated and set apart for God, as His property. That is the true meaning of the word. It is its meaning as it is applied to the vessels of the Temple, the priests, the services, and the altar. It is its meaning, only with the necessary substitution of spirit for body, as it is applied in the New Testament as a designation co-extensive with that of believers.
How does a man belong to God?
We asked a minute or two ago how God belonged to men. The answer to the converse question is almost identical. A man belongs to God by the affection of his heart, by the submission of his will, by the reference of his actions to Him; and he who thus belongs to God, in the same act in which he gives himself to God, receives God as his possession. The thing must be reciprocal. ‘All mine is Thine’; and God answers, ‘And all Mine is thine.’ He ever meets our ‘O Lord, I yield myself to Thee,’ with His ‘And My child, I give Myself to thee.’ It is so in regard of our earthly loves. It is so in regard of our relations to Him. And that being the case, purity, which is generally taken by careless readers as being the main idea of sanctity, will follow this self-surrender, which is the basis of all goodness, everywhere and always.
If that be true, and I do not think it can be effectively denied, then the next step is a very plain one, and that is that for the perfect possession of God, which is heaven, the same thing is needed in its perfection which is required for the partial possession of Him that makes the Christian life of earth. And just as here we get Him for ours in proportion as we give up ourselves to be His, so yonder the inheritance belongs, and can only belong to, ‘the saints.’ So, then, one can see that there is nothing arbitrary in this limitation of a possession, which in its very nature cannot go beyond the bounds which are thus marked out for it. If heaven were the vulgar thing that some of you think it, if that future life were desirable simply because you escaped from some external punishment and got all sorts of outward blessings and joys, felicities and advantages, hung round the neck, or pinned upon the breast, as they do to successful fighters, why then, of course, there might be partiality in the distribution of the decorations. But if that possession hinges upon our yielding ourselves to Him, then there is not an arbitrary link in the whole chain. Faith is set forth as the condition of heaven, because faith is the means of union with Christ, by and from whom alone we draw the motives for self-surrender and the power for sanctity. You cannot have heaven unless you have God. That is step number one. You cannot have God unless you have ‘holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.’ That is step number two. You cannot have holiness without faith. That is step number three. ‘An inheritance among them that are sanctified’; and then there is added, ‘by faith which is in Me.’
It is clear, too, what a fatal delusion some of us are under who think that we shall, and fancy that we should like to, as we say, ‘go to heaven when we die.’ Why, heaven is here, round about you, a present heaven in the imitation of God, in the practice of righteousness, in the cultivation of dependence upon Him, in the yielding of yourselves up to Him. Heaven is here, and by your own choice you stop outside of it. There must be a correspondence between environment and nature for blessedness. ‘The mind is its own place,’ as the great Puritan poet taught us, ‘and makes a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ Fishes die on the shore, and the man that drew them out dies in the water. Gills cannot breathe where lungs are useful, and lungs cannot, where gills come into play. If you have not here and now the holiness which knits you to God, and gives you possession of Him, you would not like ‘heaven,’ if it were possible to carry you to that place, in so far as it is a place. It is rather strange, if you hope to go to heaven when you die, that you should be very unwilling to spend a little time in it whilst you are alive, and that you should expect blessedness then from that presence of God which brings you no blessedness now.
III. Lastly, we have here the heirs’ present knowledge of their future blessedness.
The Apostle asks that these men may know a thing that clearly seems unknowable. It is an impossible petition, we might be ready to say, because it is clear enough that there can be no true knowledge of the conditions and details of that future life. The dark mountains that lie between us and it hide their secret well, and few or no stray beams have reached us. An unborn babe, or a chrysalis in a hole in the ground or in a chink of a tree, might think as wisely about its future condition as we can do about that life beyond. There can be no knowledge until there is experience.
What, then, does Paul mean by framing such a petition as this? The answer is found in noticing that the knowledge which he is imploring here is a consequence of a previous knowledge. For, in a former verse, he prays that these men may have ‘the spirit of wisdom in the knowledge of God’; and when they have got the knowledge of God he thinks that they will have got the knowledge of ‘the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints.’ Now, turn that into other words, and it is just this, that the knowledge of God, which comes by faith and love here, is in kind so identical with the fullest and loftiest riches of the knowledge of Him hereafter, that, if we have the one, we are not without the other. The one is in germ, the other, no doubt, full blown; the one is the twinkling of the rushlight, as it were, the other is the blaze of the sunshine. The two states of being are so correspondent that from the one we draw our clearest knowledge of the other. There are telescopes, in using which you do not look up when you want to see the stars, but down on to a reflecting mirror, and there you see them. Such a reflecting mirror, though it be sometimes muddied and dimmed and always very small, are the experiences of the Christian soul here.
So, dear friends, if we want to know as much as may be known of the blessedness of heaven, let us seek to possess as much as may be possessed of the knowledge and love of God on earth. Then we shall know the centre, at any rate; and that is light, though the circumference may be very dark. Much will remain obscure. That is of very small consequence to Hope, which does not need information half so much as it needs assurance. Like some flower in the cranny of the rock, it can spread a broad bright blossom on little soil, if only it be firmly rooted.
The path for us all is plain. Come to Jesus Christ as sinful men, and take what He has given, who has given Himself for us. Touched by His love, let us love Him back again, and yield ourselves to Him, and He will give Himself to us. They who can say, ‘O Lord! I am Thine,’ are sure to hear from heaven, ‘I am thine.’ And they who possess, in being possessed by, God Himself, do not need to die in order to go to heaven, but are at least doorkeepers in the house of the Lord now, and stand where they can see into the inner sanctuary which they will one day tread. A life of faith brings Heaven to us, and thereby gives us the surest and the clearest knowledge of what we shall be, and have, when we are brought to heaven.
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv17, 19, 22 a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge…
a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him
"spiritual wisdom to understand his revelation"
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that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened
Here "heart" is a metonym for a person's mind. The phrase "eyes of your heart" is a metaphor for one's ability to gain understanding. AT: "that you may gain understanding and be enlightened" (See: Metonymy and Metaphor)
that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened
This may be stated in the active tense. AT: that God may enlighten your heart" or "that God may enlighten your understanding" (See: Active or Passive)
enlightened
"made to see"
inheritance
Receiving what God has promised believers, is spoken of as if one were inheriting property and wealth from a family member. (See: Metaphor)
all God's holy people
"all those whom he has set apart for himself" or "all those who belong completely to him"
translationWords
God
lord
Jesus
God the Father
glory
wise
reveal
heart
call
glory
inherit
unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.
Tyndale Open Study Notes 2022 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On vv17, 18, 19, 21, 22 1:17 spiritual wisdom (or the Spirit of wisdom): The…
1:17 spiritual wisdom (or the Spirit of wisdom): The word spirit can refer either to the Holy Spirit or to the human spirit. • Knowledge of God is to know God personally and experientially, not just to know about him intellectually (see John 17:3).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.