We also all once lived among them in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, for his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
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You were made alive when you were dead in transgressions and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the children of disobedience. We also all once lived among them in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, for his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him, and made us to sit with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus; for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them.
Parallel Translations
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We also all once lived among them in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.
But God, being rich in mercy, for his great love with which he loved us,
even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
-
amonge which we also had oure conversacion in tyme past in the lustes of oure flesshe and fullfilled the will of the flesshe and of the mynde: and were naturally the children of wrath even as wel as other.
But God which is rich in mercy thorow his greate love wherwith he loved vs
even when we were deed by synne hath quickened vs together in Christ (for by grace are ye saved)
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Among whom we also had our conuersation in time past, in the lustes of our flesh, in fulfilling the will of the flesh, and of the minde, and were by nature the children of wrath, as well as others.
But God which is rich in mercie, through his great loue wherewith he loued vs,
Euen when we were dead by sinnes, hath quickened vs together in Christ, by whose grace ye are saued,
Cross-references (97)
- 1 Peter 1:3 (v4) 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…
- Ephesians 1:7 (v4) in whom we have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,
- Psalms 86:15 (v4) But you, Lord, are a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth.
- Titus 3:4-7 (v4) But when the kindness of God our Savior and his love toward mankind appeared, not by works of righteousness which we did ourselves, but…
- Romans 3:24 (v5) being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus;
Show all 96 cross-references
- Romans 5:8 (vv4–5) But God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
- Ephesians 2:8 (v5) for by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God,
- Ephesians 2:7 (v4) that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus;
- Psalms 145:8 (v4) Yahweh is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and of great loving kindness.
- Romans 5:10 (v5) For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we will be saved by his…
- Titus 3:3 (v3) For we were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful, and hating…
- Acts 15:11 (v5) But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they are.”
- Romans 8:2 (v5) For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and of death.
- Romans 10:12 (v4) For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, and is rich to all who call on him.
- Ephesians 2:1 (v5) You were made alive when you were dead in transgressions and sins,
- Titus 2:11 (v5) For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men,
- John 3:14-17 (v4) As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him should not perish,…
- Romans 4:16 (v5) For this cause it is of faith, that it may be according to grace, to the end that the promise may be sure to all the offspring, not to that…
- Ephesians 5:14 (v5) Therefore he says, “Awake, you who sleep, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”
- 1 Timothy 1:14 (v4) The grace of our Lord abounded exceedingly with faith and love which is in Christ Jesus.
- Titus 3:5 (v5) not by works of righteousness which we did ourselves, but according to his mercy, he saved us through the washing of regeneration and…
- Deuteronomy 7:7-8 (v4) Yahweh didn’t set his love on you nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people; for you were the fewest of all peoples;…
- Psalms 103:8-11 (v4) Yahweh is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness. He will not always accuse; neither will he stay angry…
- Galatians 5:16-24 (v3) But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you won’t fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against…
- Ephesians 4:22 (v3) that you put away, as concerning your former way of life, the old man that grows corrupt after the lusts of deceit,
- Jeremiah 31:3 (v4) Yahweh appeared of old to me, saying, “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore I have drawn you with loving kindness.
- John 5:21 (v5) For as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son also gives life to whom he desires.
- Romans 5:6 (v5) For while we were yet weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
- 2 Corinthians 13:14 (v5) The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s love, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
- Psalms 86:5 (v4) For you, Lord, are good, and ready to forgive, abundant in loving kindness to all those who call on you.
- Romans 16:20 (v5) And the God of peace will quickly crush Satan under your feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
- 1 Peter 1:14 (v3) as children of obedience, not conforming yourselves according to your former lusts as in your ignorance,
- 1 John 4:10-19 (v4) In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, if God loved…
- Exodus 34:6-7 (v4) Yahweh passed by before him, and proclaimed, “Yahweh! Yahweh, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness…
- Nehemiah 9:17 (v4) and refused to obey. They weren’t mindful of your wonders that you did among them, but hardened their neck, and in their rebellion…
- John 6:63 (v5) It is the spirit who gives life. The flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and are life.
- Romans 2:4 (v4) Or do you despise the riches of his goodness, forbearance, and patience, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?
- Romans 9:23 (v4) and that he might make known the riches of his glory on vessels of mercy, which he prepared beforehand for glory,
- Romans 11:5-6 (v5) Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace. And if by grace, then it is no longer of…
- Romans 13:14 (v3) But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, for its lusts.
- Deuteronomy 9:5-6 (v4) Not for your righteousness or for the uprightness of your heart do you go in to possess their land; but for the wickedness of these nations…
- Psalms 51:5 (v3) Behold, I was born in iniquity. My mother conceived me in sin.
- Ezekiel 16:6-8 (v4) “ ‘ “When I passed by you, and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you, ‘Though you are in your blood, live!’ Yes, I said to you,…
- Micah 7:18-20 (v4) Who is a God like you, who pardons iniquity, and passes over the disobedience of the remnant of his heritage? He doesn’t retain his anger…
- Luke 1:78 (v4) because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the dawn from on high will visit us,
- Romans 6:12 (v3) Therefore don’t let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in its lusts.
- 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 (v3) Or don’t you know that the unrighteous will not inherit God’s Kingdom? Don’t be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor…
- Ephesians 3:8 (v4) To me, the very least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ,
- 2 Thessalonians 2:13 (v4) But we are bound to always give thanks to God for you, brothers loved by the Lord, because God chose you from the beginning for salvation…
- 2 Timothy 1:9 (v4) who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given to…
- Psalms 51:1 (v4) Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions.
- Isaiah 55:6-8 (v4) Seek Yahweh while he may be found. Call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts. Let…
- Daniel 9:9 (v4) To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgiveness; for we have rebelled against him.
- Jonah 4:2 (v4) He prayed to Yahweh, and said, “Please, Yahweh, wasn’t this what I said when I was still in my own country? Therefore I hurried to flee to…
- Romans 8:7-8 (v3) because the mind of the flesh is hostile toward God; for it is not subject to God’s law, neither indeed can it be. Those who are in the…
- Romans 9:15-16 (v4) For he said to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it is not of…
- Ephesians 2:2 (v3) in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works…
- Ephesians 4:17-19 (v3) This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their…
- 1 John 2:16 (v3) For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, isn’t the Father’s, but is the world’s.
- Exodus 33:19 (v4) He said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim Yahweh’s name before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be…
- Galatians 2:15-16 (v3) “We, being Jews by nature, and not Gentile sinners, yet knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but through faith in…
- 1 Peter 2:10-11 (v3) In the past, you were not a people, but now are God’s people, who had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy. Beloved, I beg you…
- Revelation 22:21 (v5) The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with all the saints. Amen.
- John 8:44 (v3) You are of your father, the devil, and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning, and doesn’t stand…
- Romans 5:20-21 (v4) The law came in that the trespass might abound; but where sin abounded, grace abounded more exceedingly; that as sin reigned in death, even…
- 1 Peter 4:2-3 (v3) that you no longer should live the rest of your time in the flesh for the lusts of men, but for the will of God. For we have spent enough…
- 1 John 1:8-10 (v3) If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to…
- Genesis 6:5 (v3) Yahweh saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of man’s heart was continually…
- Job 15:14-16 (v3) What is man, that he should be clean? What is he who is born of a woman, that he should be righteous? Behold, he puts no trust in his holy…
- Mark 4:19 (v3) and the cares of this age, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes…
- Acts 17:30-31 (v3) The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked. But now he commands that all people everywhere should repent, because he has appointed a…
- Romans 3:9-19 (v3) What then? Are we better than they? No, in no way. For we previously warned both Jews and Greeks that they are all under sin. As it is…
- Romans 3:22-23 (v3) even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ to all and on all those who believe. For there is no distinction, for all have…
- Romans 7:18 (v3) For I know that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwells no good thing. For desire is present with me, but I don’t find it doing that which is…
- 1 Corinthians 4:7 (v3) For who makes you different? And what do you have that you didn’t receive? But if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not…
- 2 Corinthians 7:1 (v3) Having therefore these promises, beloved, let’s cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear…
- Genesis 8:21 (v3) Yahweh smelled the pleasant aroma. Yahweh said in his heart, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake because the…
- Job 14:4 (v3) Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.
- Job 25:4 (v3) How then can man be just with God? Or how can he who is born of a woman be clean?
- Isaiah 53:6 (v3) All we like sheep have gone astray. Everyone has turned to his own way; and Yahweh has laid on him the iniquity of us all.
- Daniel 9:5-9 (v3) we have sinned, and have dealt perversely, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even turning aside from your precepts and from your…
- Mark 7:21-22 (v3) For from within, out of the hearts of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, sexual sins, murders, thefts, covetings, wickedness, deceit,…
- John 1:13 (v3) who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
- John 3:1-6 (v3) Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. The same came to him by night, and said to him, “Rabbi, we know…
- Romans 9:22 (v3) What if God, willing to show his wrath and to make his power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction,
- Romans 11:30 (v3) For as you in time past were disobedient to God, but now have obtained mercy by their disobedience,
- Jude 1:16-18 (v3) These are murmurers and complainers, walking after their lusts—and their mouth speaks proud things—showing respect of persons to gain…
- Isaiah 64:6-7 (v3) For we have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteousness is like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf; and our…
- Romans 1:24 (v3) Therefore God also gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonored among themselves;
- Romans 5:12-19 (v3) Therefore as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin; so death passed to all men, because all sinned. For until…
- Galatians 3:22 (v3) But the Scripture imprisoned all things under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.
- 1 Timothy 6:9 (v3) But those who are determined to be rich fall into a temptation, a snare, and many foolish and harmful lusts, such as drown men in ruin and…
- James 4:1-3 (v3) Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don’t they come from your pleasures that war in your members? You lust, and don’t have.…
- 2 Peter 2:14 (v3) having eyes full of adultery, and who can’t cease from sin; enticing unsettled souls; having a heart trained in greed; children of cursing;
- 2 Peter 2:18 (v3) For, uttering great swelling words of emptiness, they entice in the lusts of the flesh, by licentiousness, those who are indeed escaping…
- 1 John 2:8 (v3) Again, I write a new commandment to you, which is true in him and in you; because the darkness is passing away and the true light already…
96 distinct cross-references across this passage (97 total citations).
Cross-references from openbible.info (CC BY 4.0)
Explain this passage (25 sources)
Historical commentary, presented as a primary source — not an endorsement.
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John Calvin 1540 · Public Domain On vv3–5 3. Among whom also we all had our conversation.…
3. Among whom also we all had our conversation. Lest it should be supposed that what he had now said was a slanderous reproach against the former character of the Ephesians, or that Jewish pride had led him to treat the Gentiles as an inferior race, he associates himself and his countrymen along with them in the general accusation. This is not done in hypocrisy, but in a sincere ascription of glory to God. It may excite wonder, indeed, that he should speak of himself as having walked “in the lusts of the flesh,” while, on other occasions, he boasts that his life had been throughout irreproachable.
“Touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless.” (Philippians 3:6.)
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And again,
“Ye are witnesses, and God also, how holily, and justly, and unblamably, we behaved ourselves among you that believe.” (1 Thessalonians 2:10)
I reply, the statement applies to all who have not been regenerated by the Spirit of Christ. However praiseworthy, in appearance, the life of some may be, because their lusts do not break out in the sight of men, there is nothing pure or holy which does not proceed from the fountain of all purity.
Fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. To fulfill these desires, is to live according to the guidance of our natural disposition and of our mind. The flesh means here the disposition, or, what is called, the inclination of the nature; and the next expression (τῶν διανοιῶν) means what proceeds from the mind. Now, the mind includes reason, such as it exists in men by nature; so that lusts do not refer exclusively to the lower appetites, or what is called the sensual part of man, but extend to the whole.
And were by nature children of wrath. All men without exception, whether Jews or Gentiles, (Galatians 2:15,16,) are here pronounced to be guilty, until they are redeemed by Christ; so that out of Christ there is no righteousness, no salvation, and, in short, no excellence. Children of wrath are those who are lost, and who deserve eternal death. Wrath means the judgment of God; so that the children of wrath are those who are condemned before God. Such, the apostle tells us, had been the Jews, — such had been all the excellent men that were now in the Church; and they were so by nature, that is, from their very commencement, and from their mother’s womb.
This is a remarkable passage, in opposition to the views of the Pelagians, and of all who deny original sin. What dwells naturally in all is certainly original; but Paul declares that we are all naturally liable to condemnation; therefore sin dwells naturally in us, for God does not condemn the innocent. Pelagians were wont to object, that sin spread from Adam to the whole human race, not by descent, but by imitation. But Paul affirms that we are born with sin, as serpents bring their venom from the womb. Others who think that it is not in reality sin, are not less at variance with Paul’s language; for where condemnation is, there must unquestionably be sin. It is not with blameless men, but with sin, that God is offended. Nor is it wonderful that the depravity which we inherit from our parents is reckoned as sin before God; for the seeds of sin, before they have been openly displayed, are perceived and condemned.
But one question here arises. Why does Paul represent the Jews, equally with others, as subject to wrath and curse, while they were the blessed seed? I answer, they have a common nature. Jews differ from Gentiles in nothing but this, that, through the grace of the promise, God delivers them from destruction; but that is a remedy which came after the disease. Another question is, since God is the Author of nature, how comes it that no blame attaches to God, if we are lost by nature? I answer, there is a twofold nature: the one was produced by God, and the other is the corruption of it. This condemnation therefore which Paul mentions does not proceed from God, but from a depraved nature: for we are not born such as Adam was at first created, we are not
“wholly a right seed, but are turned into the degenerate” (Jeremiah 2:21)
offspring of a degenerate and sinful man.
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 vv3–4 The conclusion: All men are born subject to the…
The conclusion: All men are born subject to the wrath and curse of God.
Profane people which knew not God.
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After that he hath severally condemned the Gentiles, he confesseth that the Jews, amongst whom he numbereth himself, are not a whit better.
By the name of flesh in the first place, he meaneth the whole man, which he divideth into two parts: into the flesh, which is the part that the Philosophers term without reason, and into the thought, which they call reasonable: so that he leaveth nothing in man half dead, but concludeth that the whole man is of nature the son of wrath.
Men are said to be children of wrath passively, that is to say, guilty of everlasting death by the judgment of God, who is angry with them.
Geneva Bible (1599) marginal notes — public domain.
John Trapp 1656 · Public Domain On vv3–5 3 Among whom also we all had our conversation…
3 Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.
Ver. 3. Among whom also we all, &c.] Let the best look back often on what they were before calling, that they may thankfully cry out with Iphicrates, εξ οιων εις οια, from what misery to what dignity are we advanced!
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Fulfilling the desires] Gr. the wills of the flesh. Now therefore we must as diligently fulfil not the will, but the wills of God, as David did, Act 13:22.
The children of wrath] De ires. Gregory the Great said of the English boys that were presented to him, Angli quasi Angeli, English just as Angels. And demanding further what province they were of in this island, it was returned, that they were called De ires; which caused him again to repeat the word, and to say, that it were great pity but that by being taught the gospel, they should be saved de ira Dei, from the wrath of God. (Abbot’s Geog.) Whereunto we are subject, even as in nature a child is to the commands and restraints of his father; being damnati priusquam nati, as Augustine hath it, damned ere born into the world.
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 vv3–5 Among whom also we all; we apostles and believers…
Among whom also we all; we apostles and believers of the Jews. Either Paul by a coenosis reckons himself among them, though not guilty with them; or rather, though he were not an idolater as the Ephesians, yet he had been a blasphemer, and a persecutor, 1Ti 1:13; and though he were blameless as to the righteousness of the law, Phi 3:6, yet that was only as to his outward conversation, and still he might fulfil the desires of a fleshly mind.
Had our conversation; walked in the same way after the course of the world, &c.
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In the lusts of our flesh: flesh is here taken more generally for depraved natures, the whole principle of corruption in man.
Fulfilling the desires of the flesh; the inferior and sensitive faculties of the soul, as appears by the opposition of the flesh to the mind.
And of the mind; the superior and rational powers, to denote the depravation of the whole man even in his best part, and which seems to have rectitude left in it: to the former belongs the filthiness of the flesh, to the latter that of the spirit, 2Co 7:1; see Rom 8:;7 Gal 5:19-21.
And were by nature; not merely by custom or imitation, but by nature as now constituted since the fall.
The children of wrath, by a Hebraism, for obnoxious to wrath; as sons of death, 1Sa 26:16, for worthy of or liable to death.
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 vv3–4 Our apostle in these words is supposed to set…
Our apostle in these words is supposed to set forth the condition of the Jews by nature, as he had done before of the Gentiles; and that he declares, that even they had their conversation amongst the number of disobedient persons, and were no less obstinately rebellious against God than the disobedient Gentiles, following the motions of their corrupt lusts and vile affections; nay, he affirms roundly, concerning himself and all the Jews, without exception, that as to their way and course, whilst unregenerate, they did whatsoever their corrupt minds willed, liked, and inclined to; and as to their state, were by nature children of wrath, as much as others; yea, even as much as the despised Gentiles were.
Here note, 1. The case of all men, Jews and Gentiles, alike described, children of wrath; that is, our estate and course is such by nature as deserves destruction, as tends to and will end in destruction, without the renewing grace of God.
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Note 2. The rise of this case, expressed by nature, which implies,
1. The term from which this commences, namely, from the first receiving of our beings and natures from our immediate parents, and together with the depravation of our natures we received an obnoxiousness to the wrath and curse of God.
2. It implies the ground for which this wrath doth impend and hang over us, namely, for that depravity of nature which since the fall is found with us.
Learn hence, 1. That original corruption is universal to all mankind, both Jew and Gentile.
2. That this original corruption leads to, and will lodge under, eternal wrath, every person in whom regeneration and transplantation into Christ are not found: We were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.
William Burkitt's Expository Notes on the New Testament (1700–1703) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Matthew Henry 1710 · Public Domain On v4 Here the apostle begins his account of the glorious…
Here the apostle begins his account of the glorious change that was wrought in them by converting grace, where observe,
I. By whom, and in what manner, it was brought about and effected. 1. Negatively: Not of yourselves, Eph 2:8. Our faith, our conversion, and our eternal salvation, are not the mere product of any natural abilities, nor of any merit of our own: Not of works, lest any man should boast, Eph 2:9. These things are not brought to pass by any thing done by us, and therefore all boasting is excluded; he who glories must not glory in himself, but in the Lord. There is no room for any man's boasting of his own abilities and power; or as though he had done any thing that might deserve such immense favours from God. 2. Positively: But God, who is rich in mercy, etc., Eph 2:4. God himself is the author of this great and happy change, and his great love is the spring and fontal cause of it; hence he resolved to show mercy. Love is his inclination to do us good considered simply as creatures; mercy respects us as apostate and as miserable creatures. Observe, God's eternal love or good-will towards his creatures is the fountain whence all his mercies vouch-safed to us proceed; and that love of God is great love, and that mercy of his is rich mercy, inexpressibly great and inexhaustibly rich. And then by grace you are saved (Eph 2:5), and by grace are you saved through faith - it is the gift of God, Eph 2:8. Note, Every converted sinner is a saved sinner. Such are delivered from sin and wrath; they are brought into a state of salvation, and have a right given them by grace to eternal happiness. The grace that saves them is the free undeserved goodness and favour of God; and he saves them, not by the works of the law, but through faith in Christ Jesus, by means of which they come to partake of the great blessings of the gospel; and both that faith and that salvation on which it has so great an influence are the gift of God. The great objects of faith are made known by divine revelation, and made credible by the testimony and evidence which God hath given us; and that we believe to salvation and obtain salvation through faith is entirely owing to divine assistance and grace; God has ordered all so that the whole shall appear to be of grace. Observe,
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II. Wherein this change consists, in several particulars, answering to the misery of our natural state, some of which are enumerated in this section, and others are mentioned below. 1. We who were dead are quickened (Eph 2:5), we are saved from the death of sin and have a principle of spiritual life implanted in us. Grace in the soul is a new life in the soul. As death locks up the senses, seals up all the powers and faculties, so does a state of sin, as to any thing that is good. Grace unlocks and opens all, and enlarges the soul. Observe, A regenerate sinner becomes a living soul: he lives a life of sanctification, being born of God; and he lives in the sense of the law, being delivered from the guilt of sin by pardoning and justifying grace. He hath quickened us together with Christ. Our spiritual life results from our union with Christ; it is in him that we live: Because I live, you shall live also. 2. We who were buried are raised up, Eph 2:6. What remains yet to be done is here spoken of as though it were already past, though indeed we are raised up in virtue of our union with him whom God hath raised from the dead. When he raised Christ from the dead, he did in effect raise up all believers together with him, he being their common head; and when he placed him at his right hand in heavenly places, he advanced and glorified them in and with him, their raised and exalted head and forerunner. - And made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. This may be understood in another sense. Sinners roll themselves in the dust; sanctified souls sit in heavenly places, are raised above the world; the world is as nothing to them, compared with what it has been, and compared with what the other world is. Saints are not only Christ's freemen, but they are assessors with him; by the assistance of his grace they have ascended with him above this world to converse with another, and they live in the constant expectation of it. They are not only servants to the best of masters in the best work, but they are exalted to reign with him; they sit upon the throne with Christ, as he has sat down with his Father on his throne.
III. Observe what is the great design and aim of God in producing and effecting this change: And this, 1. With respect to others: That in the ages to come he might show, etc. (Eph 2:7), that he might give a specimen and proof of his great goodness and mercy, for the encouragement of sinners in future time. Observe, The goodness of God in converting and saving sinners heretofore is a proper encouragement to others in after-time to hope in his grace and mercy, and to apply themselves to these. God having this in his design, poor sinners should take great encouragement from it. And what may we not hope for from such grace and kindness, from riches of grace, to which this change is owing? Through Christ Jesus, by and through whom God conveys all his favour and blessings to us. 2. With respect to the regenerated sinners themselves: For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, etc., Eph 2:10. It appears that all is of grace, because all our spiritual advantages are from God. We are his workmanship; he means in respect of the new creation; not only as men, but as saints. The new man is a new creature; and God is its Creator. It is a new birth, and we are born or begotten of his will. In Christ Jesus, that is, on the account of what he has done and suffered, and by the influence and operation of his blessed Spirit. Unto good works, etc. The apostle having before ascribed this change to divine grace in exclusion of works, lest he should seem thereby to discourage good works, he here observes that though the change is to be ascribed to nothing of that nature (for we are the workmanship of God), yet God, in his new creation, has designed and prepared us for good works: Created unto good works, with a design that we should be fruitful in them. Wherever God by his grace implants good principles, they are intended to be for good works. Which God hath before ordained, that is, decreed and appointed. Or, the words may be read, To which God hath before prepared us, that is, by blessing us with the knowledge of his will, and with the assistance of his Holy Spirit; and by producing such a change in us. That we should walk in them, or glorify God by an exemplary conversation and by our perseverance in holiness.
Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
John Gill 1763 · Public Domain On vv3–5 Among whom also we all had our conversation in…
Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past,.... What the apostle says of the Gentile Ephesians before conversion, he says of himself and other Jews; and this he does, partly to show that it was not from ill will, or with a design to upbraid the Gentiles, that he said what he did; and partly to beat down the pride of the Jews, who thought themselves better than the sinners of the Gentiles; as well as to magnify the grace of God in the conversion of them both: the sense is, that the apostle and other Jews in the time of their unregeneracy, had their conversation according to the customs of the world, and to the prince of the air, and among unbelievers, as well as the Gentiles; and that they were equally sinners, and lived a like sinful course of life:
in the lusts of our flesh; by "flesh" is meant, the corruption of nature; so called, because it is propagated by natural generation; and is opposed to the Spirit, or principle of grace; and has for its object fleshly things; and discovers itself mostly in the body, the flesh; and it makes persons carnal or fleshly: and this is called "our", because it belongs to human nature, and is inherent in it, and inseparable from it in this life: and the "lusts" of it, are the inward motions of it, in a contrariety to the law and will of God; and are various, and are sometimes called fleshly and worldly lusts, and the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life: and persons may be said to have their conversations in these, when these are the ground of their conversation, when they are solicitous about them, and make provision for the fulfilling of them, and constantly employ themselves in obedience to them, as follows:
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fulfilling the desires of the flesh, and of the mind: or the wills of them; what they incline to, will, and crave after: various are the degrees of sin, and its several motions; and universal is the corruption of human nature; not only the body, and the several members of it, are defiled with sin, and disposed to it, but all the powers and faculties of the soul; even the more noble and governing ones, the mind, understanding, and will, as well as the affections; and great is the power and influence which lust has over them:
and were by nature children of wrath, even as others: by which is meant, not only that they were wrathful persons, living in malice, hateful, and hating one another; but that they were deserving of the wrath of God, which comes upon the children of disobedience, among whom they had their conversation; and which is revealed from heaven against such sins as they were guilty of, though they were not appointed to it: and they were such "by nature"; really, and not in opinion, and by and from their first birth: so a Jewish commentator (s) on these words, "thy first father hath sinned", Isa 43:27 has this note;
"how canst thou say thou hast not sinned? and behold thy first father hath sinned, and he is the first man, for man , "is naturally in sin";''
or by nature a sinner, or sin is naturally impressed in him; and hence being by nature a sinner, he is by nature deserving of the wrath of God, as were the persons spoken of:
even as others; as the rest of the world, Jews as well as Gentiles; and Gentiles are especially designed, in distinction from the Jews, the apostle is speaking of; and who are particularly called in the Jewish dialect "others"; See Gill on Luk 18:11.
(s) Kimchi in loc.
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 vv3–5 Among whom we - Jews. Also, formerly had our…
Among whom we - Jews. Also, formerly had our conversation: doing the will of the flesh - In gross, brutal sins. And of the mind - By spiritual, diabolical wickedness. In the former clause, flesh denotes the whole evil nature; in the latter, the body opposed to the soul. And were by nature - That is, in our natural state. Children of wrath - Having the wrath of God abiding on us, even as the gentiles. This expression, by nature, occurs also, Gal. iv, 8; Rom. ii, 14; and thrice in the eleventh chapter. But in none of these places does it signify, by custom, or practice, or customary practice, as a late writer affirms. Nor can it mean so here For this would make the apostle guilty of gross tautology, their customary sinning having been expressed already, in the former part of the verse. But all these passages agree in expressing what belongs to the nature of the persons spoken of.
John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.
Adam Clarke 1810 · Public Domain On vv3–5 Verse 3. Among whom also we all had our…
Verse 3. Among whom also we all had our conversation] We JEWS, as well as you Gentiles, have lived in transgressions and sins; ανεστραφημεν, this was the course of our life; we lived in sin, walked in sin, it was woven through our whole constitution, it tinged every temper, polluted every faculty, and perverted every transaction of life. The lusts - the evil, irregular, and corrupt affections of the heart, showed themselves in the perversion of the mind as well as in our general conduct. The mind was darkened by the lusts of the flesh, and both conjoined to produce acts of unrighteousness. It was not the will of God that was done by us, but the will of the flesh and of the mind.
And were by nature the children of wrath] For the import of the phrase, by nature, φυσει, See Clarke on Ga 2:15, and See Clarke on Ro 2:14. To what is said on those passages, I may add, from Dr. Macknight: - "Nature often signifies one's birth and education, Ga 2:15: We, who are Jews BY NATURE. Also, men's natural reason and conscience, Ro 2:14: The Gentiles who have not the law, do BY NATURE the things contained in the law, c. Also, the general sense and practice of mankind, 1Co 11:14: Doth not even NATURE itself teach you, that if a man have long hair, c. Also, the original constitution of any thing, Ga 4:8: Who are not gods BY NATURE, Also, a disposition formed by custom and habit thus Demetrius Phalereus said of the Lacedemonians: φυσει εβραχυλογουν λακωνες. The Lacedemonians had naturally a concise mode of speaking. Hence our word laconic a short speech, or much sense conveyed in a few words." The words in the text have often been quoted to prove the doctrine of original sin, but, though that doctrine be an awful truth, it is not, in my opinion, intended here; it is rather found in the preceding words, the lusts of the flesh, and the desires of the flesh and of the mind. The apostle appears to speak of sinful habits; and as we say HABIT is a second nature, and as these persons acted from their originally corrupt nature - from the lusts of the flesh and of the mind, they thus became, by their vicious habits, or second nature, children of wrath - persons exposed to perdition, because of the impurity of their hearts and the wickedness of their lives. Here we see that the fallen, apostate nature produces the fruits of unrighteousness. The bad tree produces bad fruit.
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Children of wrath is the same as son of perdition, son of death, c. i.e. persons exposed to God's displeasure, because of their sins.
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 vv3–4 Eph 2:3. Among whom also we — Jews, as…
Eph 2:3. Among whom also we — Jews, as well as you Gentiles; had our conversation — That is, our course of life; in times past — At least in some degree, whatever our education or religious profession might have been. Here the apostle speaks in the name of the generality of the converted Jews, as his changing the expression from ye Ephesians to we, plainly declares; including himself and all other Christians, whose former character and state he affirms to have been the same with respect to sin and misery, with the character and state of the children of disobedience: and it is so professedly the design of the beginning of his epistle to the Romans, to prove that the Jews had not, in point of justification, any advantage above the Gentiles, (Rom 3:9,) that it is surprising any men of learning and knowledge should contend for the contrary. In the lusts of our flesh — To the base appetites of which we were enslaved, so as to forget the true dignity and happiness of rational and immortal spirits: fulfilling the desires of the flesh — Yielding to, and suffering ourselves to be governed by those corrupt appetites, inclinations, and passions, which had their seat in our fallen body, or in our evil nature; and of the mind — The earthly and devilish mind, that is, the desires, lusts, and passions, which were inherent in our still more corrupted souls. Observe, reader, the desires or lusts of the flesh, lead men to gluttony, drunkenness, fornication, adultery, and other gross, brutal sins: and the inclinations or desires of the mind, or imaginations, (as διανοιων may be rendered,) prompt them to ambition, revenge, covetousness, and whatever other earthly and diabolical wickedness can have place in the fallen spirit of man. And were by nature — That is, in our natural state, or by reason of our natural inclination to all sorts of evil, and this even from our birth; children of wrath — Having the wrath of God abiding on us; even as others — As well as the Gentiles. This expression, by nature, occurs also Gal 4:8; Rom 2:14; and thrice in chap. 11. But in none of those places does it signify by custom, or practice, or customary practice, as some affirm. Nor can it mean so here. For this would make the apostle guilty of gross tautology, their customary sinning having been expressed already in the former part of the verse. But all these passages agree in expressing what belongs to the nature of the persons spoken of.
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 vv3–5 We all had our conversation - see the notes…
We all had our conversation - see the notes at 2Co 1:12; compare 1Pe 4:3.
In the lusts of our flesh - Living to gratify the flesh, or the propensities of a corrupt nature. It is observable here that the apostle changes the form of the address from “ye” to “we,” thus including himself with others, and saying that this was true of “all” before their conversion. He means undoubtedly to say, that whatever might have been the place of their birth, or the differences of religion under which they had been trained, they were substantially alike by nature. It was a characteristic of all that they lived to fulfil the desires of the flesh and of the mind. The “design” of the apostle in thus grouping himself with them was, to show that he did not claim to be any better by nature than they were, and that all which any of them had of value was to be traced to the grace of God. There is much delicacy here on the part of the apostle. His object was to remind them of the former grossness of their life, and their exposure to the wrath of God. Yet he does not do it harshly. He includes himself in their number. He says that what he affirms of them was substantially true of himself - of all - that they were under condemnation, and exposed to the divine wrath.
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Fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind - Margin, as in Greek, “wills.” Complying with the wishes of a depraved nature. The “will of the flesh” is that to which the flesh, or the unrenewed nature of man, prompts; and Paul says that all had been engaged in fulfilling those fleshly propensities. This was clearly true of the pagan, and it was no less true of the unconverted Jew that he lived for himself, and sought to gratify the purposes of a depraved nature, though it might manifest itself in a way different from the pagan. The “will of the mind” referred to here relates to the wicked “thoughts and purposes” of the unrenewed nature - the sins which relate rather to the “intellect” than to the gross passions. Such, for instance, are the sins of pride, envy, ambition, covetousness, etc.; and Paul means to say, that before conversion they lived to gratify these propensities, and to accomplish these desires of the soul.
And were by nature - Φύσει Fusei. By birth, or before we were converted By conversion and adoption they became the children of God; before that, they were all the children of wrath. This is, I think, the fair meaning of this important declaration. It does not affirm “when” they began to be such, or that they were such as soon as they were born, or that they were such before they became moral agents, or that they became such in virtue of their connection with Adam - whatever may be the truth on these points; but it affirms that before they were renewed, they were the children of wrath. So far as This text is concerned, this might have been true at their very birth; but it does not directly and certainly prove that. It proves that at no time before their conversion were they the children of God, but that their whole condition before that was one of exposure to wrath; compare Rom 2:14, Rom 2:27; 1Co 11:14; Gal 2:15. Some people are born Jews, and some pagan; some free, and some slaves; some white, and some black; some are born to poverty, and some to wealth; some are the children of kings, and some of beggars; but, whatever their rank or condition, they are born exposed to wrath, or in a situation which would render them liable to wrath. But why this is, the apostle does not say. Whether for their own sins or for the sins of another; whether by a corrupted soul, or by imputed guilt; whether they act as moral agents as soon as born, or at a certain period of childhood, Paul does not say.
The children of wrath - Exposed to wrath, or liable to wrath. They did not by nature inherit holiness; they inherited that which would subject; them to wrath. The meaning has been well expressed by Doddridge, who refers it “to the original apostasy and corruption, in consequence of which people do, according to the course of nature, fall early into personal guilt, and so become obnoxious to the divine displeasure.” Many modern expositors have supposed that this has no reference to any original tendency of our fallen nature to sin, or to native corruption, but that it refers to the “habit” of sin, or to the fact of their having been the slaves of appetite and passion. I admit that the direct and immediate sense of the passage is that they were, when without the gospel, and before they were renewed, the children of wrath; but still the fair interpretation is, that they were born to that state, and that that condition was the regular result of their native depravity; and I do not know a more strong or positive declaration that can be made to show that people are by nature destitute of holiness, and exposed to perdition.
Even as others - That is, “do not suppose that you stand alone, or that you are the worst of the species. You are indeed, by nature, the children of wrath; but not you alone. All others were the same. You have a common inheritance with them. I do not mean to charge you with being the worst of sinners, or as being alone transgressors. It is the common lot of man - the sad, gloomy inheritance to which we all are born.” The Greek is, οἱ λοιποί hoi loipoi “the remainder, or the others,” - including all; compare the notes at Rom 5:19. This doctrine that people without the gospel are the children of wrath, Paul had fully defended in Rom. 1–3. Perhaps no truth is more frequently stated in the Bible; none is more fearful and awful in its character. What a declaration, that we “are by nature the children of wrath!” Who should not inquire what it means? Who should not make an effort to escape from the wrath to come, and become a child of glory and an heir of life?
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 vv3–5 Among whom, &c. St. Jerome (p. 3) refers it…
Among whom, &c. St. Jerome (p. 3) refers it to trespasses or sins. --- Were by nature; not by nature according to the state of man’s first creation in paradise, but by nature infected with original sin by the fall of our first parents. --- Even as the rest; that is, all mankind. (Witham)
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 vv3–5 also we--that is, we also. Paul here joins himself…
also we--that is, we also. Paul here joins himself in the same category with them, passing from the second person (Eph 2:1-2) to the first person here.
all--Jews and Gentiles.
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our conversation--"our way of life" (Co2 1:12; Pe1 1:18). This expression implies an outwardly more decorous course, than the open "walk" in gross sins on the part of the majority of Ephesians in times past, the Gentile portion of whom may be specially referred to in Eph 2:2. Paul and his Jewish countrymen, though outwardly more seemly than the Gentiles (Act 26:4-5, Act 26:18), had been essentially like them in living to the unrenewed flesh, without the Spirit of God.
fulfilling--Greek, doing.
mind--Greek, "our thoughts." Mental suggestions and purposes (independent of God), as distinguished from the blind impulses of "the flesh."
and were by nature--He intentionally breaks off the construction, substituting "and we were" for "and being," to mark emphatically his and their past state by nature, as contrasted with their present state by grace. Not merely is it, we had our way of life fulfilling our fleshly desires, and so being children of wrath; but we were by nature originally "children of wrath," and so consequently had our way of life fulfilling our fleshly desires. "Nature," in Greek, implies that which has grown in us as the peculiarity of our being, growing with our growth, and strengthening with our strength, as distinguished from that which has been wrought on us by mere external influences: what is inherent, not acquired (Job 14:4; Psa 51:5). An incidental proof of the doctrine of original sin.
children of wrath--not merely "sons," as in the Greek, "sons of disobedience" (Eph 2:2), but "children" by generation; not merely by adoption, as "sons" might be. The Greek order more emphatically marks this innate corruption: "Those who in their (very) nature are children of wrath"; Eph 2:5, "grace" is opposed to "nature" here; and salvation (implied in Eph 2:5, Eph 2:8, "saved") to "wrath." Compare Article IX, Church of England Common Prayer Book. "Original sin (birth-sin), standeth not in the following of Adam, but is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man, naturally engendered of Adam [Christ was supernaturally conceived by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin], whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil; and therefore, in every person born into this world, it deserveth God's wrath and damnation." Paul shows that even the Jews, who boasted of their birth from Abraham, were by natural birth equally children of wrath as the Gentiles, whom the Jews despised on account of their birth from idolaters (Rom 3:9; Rom 5:12-14). "Wrath abideth" on all who disobey the Gospel in faith and practice (Joh 3:36). The phrase, "children of wrath," is a Hebraism, that is, objects of God's wrath from childhood, in our natural state, as being born in the sin which God hates. So "son of death" (Sa2 12:5, Margin); "son of perdition" (Joh 17:12; Th2 2:3).
as others--Greek, "as the rest" of mankind are (Th1 4:13).
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 vv3–5 3. Among whom—Namely, the children of disobedience.
3. Among whom—Namely, the children of disobedience.
Conversation—Daily intercourse and conduct.
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Flesh—Animal appetites and mind governed by them.
Desires—Wills or volitions.
Flesh and… mind—The lower and the higher depraved tendencies.
Were—This verb corresponds with had and walked. Contemporaneously with our evil courses, and underlying them, was a nature by which we were children of wrath. The divine wrath condemned not only our guilty persons, but it reached more deeply—to our very nature. On the phrase children of wrath, consult what we have said on the phrase children of disobedience, in Eph_2:2. But the Greek in Eph_2:2 is, properly, sons; here, children. Robinson’s New Testament Lexicon says: “By Hebrew genitive case, the child of any thing is one connected with, partaking of, or exposed to, any thing; often put instead of an adjective.” Mat_11:19 and Luk_7:35, “Wisdom is justified of her children.” Eph_5:8, “Children of light,” that is, enlightened. 1Pe_1:14, “Obedient children.” 2Pe_2:14, “Cursed children.” So Septuagint, “Children of perdition.” A survey of these cases will show:—1. The absurdity of understanding that the expression children of wrath, has the least shadow of implying that men are born of the wrath of God. 2. A survey of such phrases as “child of hell,” “son of perdition,” shows that it will not do to affirm, with Eadie, that the phrase means more than exposed to the matter of which one is child. The “child of hell” was yet untouched by hell, though exposed to it.
So the child of wrath may be not touched by the wrath of God, yet liable to become so.
A thing is said to be thus or so by nature when it is so by birth or origin, or by growth, in distinction from being made so. A free agent is so by nature when he grows so in regular and normal conditions. See our work on “The Will,” p. 249. Now the question here is, (overlooked by commentators like Eadie and Hodge,) Does the phrase by nature children of wrath mean that the wrath lies upon the child at birth, or not? We affirm the negative, and believe it can be overwhelmingly proved. It is essentially the question of “infant damnation.” Josephus says, that David was “just and pious by nature;” certainly not in his infancy, but as he developed into manhood. Herodian says, that “barbarians are property-loving by nature;” not, certainly, in infancy, but in their adult development. AElian says, “The Cean is silver-loving by nature;” that is, when he has grown old enough to contract that love. AElian says, “The Athenians were envious by nature;” not so at birth, certainly, but by the character into which they grew. So AElian again, “warlike by nature;” and Philo, “peaceful by nature.” All the examples (most of which we take from Wetstein) imply, to be sure, a natural tendency at birth to the condition or character into which they grow; but not the condition itself. That is, they prove that the infant possesses the tendency apart from grace, to come into a subjection to the wrath of God, and so prove innate depravity; but do not prove that it is born under the wrath of God. The words do not decide that the infant is responsible for its inborn tendency, and so deserving of damnation at birth. The doctrine that the child is born under damnation lies in the very centre of the standard predestinarian system. That system assumes that any and every infant might be sent to hell forever, justly, and without a Saviour. On that assumption it bases its views of the mercy of God in redemption. Arbitrary reprobation is claimed to be just because all might be justly so doomed for original sin alone, without the commission of a single sin.
We hold, on the contrary, that though sinward tendencies exist in germ in the infant, yet there is no responsibility, and no damnability, until these tendencies are deliberately and knowingly acted in real life, and by that action appropriated and sanctioned. Then the man is condemned both for the guilt of the act and the pravity of his nature, now responsibly assumed and ready to be acted out, as described in Eph_2:1-2. See note, Rom_5:18.
But if the infant is irresponsible, how can Christ be to him a pardoner of sin and a Saviour? We might reply, that it does not make Christ any pardoner of sin to imagine a factitious sin, or a guilt which has no foundation in the nature of things. The pardon will remain just as factitious, just as merely verbal, as the guilt to be pardoned. But Christ still stands a Saviour to the infant, as we hold, in the following respects: 1. We have elsewhere shown that had Christ not been given the race would, in all probability, not have been permitted to be propagated after the fall. Notes on Joh_14:19, and Rom_11:32. So the grace of Christ underlies the very existence of every human being that is born. 2. Between the infant descendant of fallen Adam and God there is a contrariety of moral nature, by which the former is irresponsibly, and in undeveloped condition, averse to the latter, and so displacent to Him. By Christ, the Mediator, that averseness is regeneratively removed, and the divine complacency restored: so that the race is enabled to persist under the divine grace. 3. Christ, in case of infant death, entirely removes the sinward nature, so as to harmonize the being with the holiness of heaven. 4. Christ is the infants’ justifier against every accuser, (note on Rom_8:29,) whether devils, evil men, or mistaken theologians; asserting their claim through his merits, in spite of their fallen lineage, to redemption and heaven. Being thus purified, justified, and glorified by Christ, none are more truly qualified to join in the song of Moses and the Lamb.
If it be said, Yes, the infant sinned in Adam, we reply, (as in our note on Rom_5:12,) that the New Testament nowhere says that he “sinned in Adam.” It is contrary to fact that he did so thousands of years before he had any existence. Still, as there are in law what are called “legal fictions,”
so in theology there may be “theological fictions.” Such fictions are modes of figurative idea by which surrounding or analogous truths may be more vividly realized; as, for instance, where it is said of man and wife, “they twain are one flesh.” But such fictions must be so applied as not to contradict axiomatic truth and good. If from the oneness of man and wife theologians literally infer that the wife must die when the husband does, and so burn her on the funeral pile, they transform the fiction into a direful lie. And yet this would not be a millionth part as bad as the theologians picture God to be, when they make him hold infants to be justly condemnable to hell forever because, forsooth, “they sinned in Adam!”
If, however, we must say that infants “sinned in Adam,” let us be consistent, and add, but they also became justified in Christ. So Fletcher of Madeley beautifully puts it; as the entire race, infants and all, sinned, died, and went to hell before they were born, but only “seminally” and conceptually in Adam, so they are all redeemed and saved conceptually in Christ; and so are born into the world justified heirs of the atonement and heaven. Then fiction meets fiction; and beauty, truth, and reason are the outcome.
But if infants die, and death is the consequent of sin, why do sinless infants die? Because, we reply, in the fall the supernatural Spirit of holiness, by which man was raised above the natural law of death, was withdrawn from Adam and his posterity; and he and they were surrendered over to nature. See notes on Rom_5:12-19; Rom_11:32. And by nature, as an animal being, and by the law of material nature, he disintegrates and dies. So the justified and sanctified adult dies. For such are, under Christ, the laws of our probationary being, established after the fall, that death arising from nature is not repaired by immediate immortality of body, but by a bodily resurrection after the era of mere nature with us has past.
Even as others—Literally, as also the rest. The rest of whom? All the commentators that we have consulted, Alford, Ellicott, Eadie, Meyer, etc., have, obviously, missed the true answer. Some, as Meyer, make it the Gentiles, as in addition to Jews; but nothing has been said of Jews or Gentiles thus far. Others, as Ellicott and Alford, make it signify the rest of mankind; but the words are too slight to cover so wide an extent. The true meaning is, the rest of the children of disobedience, in Eph_2:2. Paul’s train of ideas is: The devil worketh in the children of disobedience, among whom we indulged the same lusts, and were by nature as depraved even as the rest.
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 vv3–5 3. also we all] Better we also all, the…
3. also we all] Better we also all, the “also” emphasizing the “we.”—“We all:”—all present Christians, whether Jews or heathens by origin. St Paul often insists on this one level of fallen nature, wholly unaffected by external privilege. Cp. Rom_3:9; Rom_3:23; Gal_3:22. It is met by the glorious antithesis of equal grace. Cp. just below, and Rom_1:16; Rom_3:29, Rom_10:12, &c.—Observe the emphatic statement that man as (fallen) man, whether within or without the pale of revelation, begins as a “child of disobedience.”—Observe too the change of person, from the second (Eph_2:2) to the first. The Apostle willingly, and truly, identifies his own experience with that of his converts.
had our conversation] Lit., moved up and down; engaged in the activities of life. Conversatio in Latin, like the Gr. word here, means precisely this; the goings in and out of human intercourse; not specially the exchange of speech, to which the word “conversation” is now restricted.—In Php_3:20 the Gr. original is different.
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the lusts of our flesh] Better, the desires. “Lusts” is narrowed in modern usage to a special class of sensual appetites, but the older English knew no such fixed restriction; see e.g. Psa_34:12, in the Prayer Book (Cranmer’s) Version; “what man is he that lusteth to live?” and Gal_5:17, where the Spirit, as well as the flesh, “lusteth.”—Sinful “lusts” are thus all desires, whether gross or fine in themselves, which are against the will of God.
“Our flesh:”—this important word, wherever it occurs in N.T. in connexion with the doctrine of sin, means human nature as conditioned by the Fall, or, to word it otherwise, either the state of the unregenerate being, in which state the sinful principle dominates, or the state of that element of the regenerate being in which the principle, dislodged, as it were, from the centre, still lingers and is felt; not dominant in the being, but present. (For its permanence, till death, in the regenerate, see the implied statements of e.g. Gal_5:16; Php_3:3.) We may account for the use of the word flesh as a symbol for this phenomenon by the fact that sin works so largely under conditions of bodily, fleshly, life in the literal sense of those words. See further, note on Rom_8:4 in this Series.
fulfilling the desires] Lit., doing the wishes. This (see last note) does not mean that “we” were loose livers, in the common sense; we might or might not have been such. But we followed the bent of the unregenerate Ego, whatever on the whole it was.
of the mind] Lit., of the thoughts; in the sense generally of reflection and impression. The word is used (in the singular) e.g. Mat_22:37; “with all thy mind,” representing the Heb. “heart” in Deu_6:5; and 1Jn_5:20; “He hath given us an understanding.” Here probably the distinction is between sin in imagination and sin in positive action (“of the flesh”); one of the many warnings of Scripture that moral evil lies as deep as possible in the texture and motion of the fallen nature. Cp. Mat_15:19; 2Co_7:1, and see Pro_24:9.
by nature the children of wrath] On the phrase “children of wrath” see last note on Eph_2:2. “By nature we were connected with, we essentially were exposed to, wrath, the wrath of God.” It has been suggested that “children of wrath” may mean no more than “beings prone to violent anger,” or even to “ungoverned impulse” generally. But the word “wrath” is frequent with St Paul, and in 13 out of the 20 places it unmistakably means the Divine wrath, even where “of God” is not added, and where the definite article is absent. See for passages specially in point Rom_4:15; Rom_5:9; Rom_9:22; below, ch. Eph_5:6; 1Th_5:9. Add to this that this passage deals with the deepest and most general facts, and it is thus unlikely that any one special phase of sin would be instanced.—N. T. usage gives no support to the suggested explanation “ungoverned impulse” mentioned above. The word must mean “wrath,” whether of man or of God.—Translate, certainly, with A. V. and R. V.—On the truth that the fallen being, as such, lies under Divine “wrath,” see Joh_3:36, where “the wrath of God remaineth against” the soul which does not submit to the Son. Not to “possess eternal life” is to have that “wrath” for certain still impending.
And what is the Divine wrath? No arbitrary or untempered passion in the Eternal, but the antagonism of the eternal Holiness to sin; only—the antagonism of an Eternal Person. Von Gerlach, quoted by Monod on this verse, writes: “The forgetfulness at the present day of the doctrine of the wrath of God has exercised a baneful influence on the various relations in which man holds the place of God, and in particular on the government of the family and the state.” The antithesis to the truth about it is the dictum of the “Absolute Religion,” that “there is nothing in God to fear;” words in complete discord with great lines of revelation.
“By nature:”—i.e., by our unregenerate state in itself, not only by circumstances. For illustration see Gal_2:15, (“Jews by nature”) and Eph_4:8, (“by nature no Gods”). Such was our state antecedent to the new process, ab extra, of regeneration. We have here the doctrine of “Original or Birth Sin,” as given in Art ix. of the Church of England. “That which provokes the wrath of God is not only in the individual, but in the race and in the nature” (Monod). A greater mystery we could not state; but neither could we name a surer fact “Original sin is, fundamentally, simply universal sin. That is the fact which is at once the evidence and the substance of it … Universal sin must receive the same interpretation that any other universal does, namely that it implies a law, in consequence of which it is universal. Nobody supposes that anything takes place universally by chance … we know there must be some law working in the case … What we call the law is a secondary question. The great thing is to see that there is a law. If all the individuals who come under the head of a certain nature have sin in them, then one mode of expressing this law is to say that it belongs to the nature, the nature being the common property and ground in which all meet” (J. B. Mozley, Lectures, ix. pp. 136, &c.). See further, Appendix B.
even as others] Lit, as also the rest; the unregenerate world at large.
C. ORIGINAL SIN. (Ch. Eph_2:3.)
The theological literature, ancient and modern, of this great subject (the title of which we owe to St Augustine), is very extensive. The English reader will find information in Commentaries on the XXXIX Articles, such as those of Bps Beveridge and E. H. Browne. Art. ix deals expressly with the subject, and its statements underlie those of several following Articles, especially x, xi, xiii, xv, xvii. Among English discussions of the subject we specially recommend three of the late Prof. Mozley’s Lectures (one of which is quoted in the notes); “Christ alone without Sin,” “Original Sin,” and “Original Sin asserted by Philosophers and Poets.” To the quotations given in this last Essay we may add the lines of Mr Browning:
“I still, to suppose it” [the Christian faith] “true, for my part,
See reasons and reasons; this, to begin;
’Tis the faith that launched point-blank her dart
At the head of a lie—taught Original Sin,
The Corruption of Man’s Heart.”
Gold Hair; a story of Pornic.
See, for some admirable pages on Original Sin, Prof. Shedd’s Sermons to the Natural Man, especially Sermons v. and xiv. On the Pelagian Controversy, see Hagenbach’s Dogmengeschichte, or English Translation (History of Doctrines), and Period, B., i. 2; Shedd’s Hist. of Christian Doctrine, Book iv. ch. 4; Cunningham’s Historical Theology, Vol. i. ch. 11. A popular but able account of the controversy is given in Milner’s History of the Ch. of Christ, Cent. 5, cch. 3, 4.
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 vv3–5 (3) Among whom also we all . . .—Up…
(3) Among whom also we all . . .—Up to this point St. Paul had addressed himself especially to the Ephesians as Gentiles: now he extends the description of alienation to “all,” Jews and Gentiles alike, as formerly reckoned among the children of disobedience. It is indeed the great object of this chapter to bring out the equality and unity of both Jews and Gentiles in the Church of Christ; and this truth is naturally introduced by a statement of their former equality in alienation and sin.
In the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind.—The parallelism of these two clauses illustrates very clearly the extended sense in which the word “flesh” is used by St. Paul, as may indeed be seen by the catalogue of the works of the flesh in Gal_5:19-20. For here “the flesh,” in the first clause, includes both “the flesh and the mind” (or, more properly, the thoughts) of the second; that is, it includes both the appetites and the passions of our fleshly nature, and also the “thoughts” of the mind itself, so far as it is devoted to this visible world of sense, alienated from God, and therefore under the influence of the powers of evil. In fact, in scriptural use the sins of “the flesh,” “the world,” and “the devil” are not different classes of sins, but different aspects of sin, and any one of the three great enemies is made at times to represent all.
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And were by nature the children of wrath, even as others (or rather, the others—that is, the heathen).—From this passage the phrase “children of wrath” has passed into Christian theology as an almost technical description of the unregenerate state. Hence it needs careful examination. (1) Now the phrase “children of wrath” (corresponding almost exactly to “children of a curse,” in 2Pe_2:14) seems borrowed from the Hebrew use in the Old Testament, by which (as in 1Sa_20:30; 2Sa_12:5) a “son of death” is one under sentence of death, and in Isa_57:4 (the Greek translation) “children of destruction” are those doomed to perish. In this sense we have, in Joh_17:12, “the son of perdition;” and in Mat_23:15, “the son of hell.” It differs, therefore, considerably from the phrase “children of disobedience” (begotten, as it were, of disobedience) above. But it is notable that the word for “children” here used is a term expressing endearment and love, and is accordingly properly, and almost invariably, applied to our relation to God. When, therefore, it is used as in this passage, or, still more strikingly, in 1Jn_3:10, “children of the devil” (comp. Joh_8:44), there is clearly an intention to arrest the attention by a startling and paradoxical expression. “We were children,” not of God, not of His love, but “of wrath”—that is, His wrath against sin; “born (see Gal_3:10-22; Gal_4:4) under the law,” and therefore “shut up under sin,” and “under the curse.” (2) Next, we have the phrase “by nature,” which, in the true reading of the original, is interposed, as a kind of limitation or definition, between “children” and “of wrath.” In the first instance it was probably suggested by the reference to Israel, who were by covenant, not by nature, the chosen people of God. Now the word “nature,” applied to humanity, indicates what is common to all, as opposed to what is individual, or what is inborn, as opposed to what is acquired. But whether it refers to humanity as it was created by God, or to humanity as it has become by “fault and corruption of nature,” must always be determined by the context. Here the reference is clearly to the latter. “Nature” is opposed to “grace”—that is, the nature of man as alienated from God, to the nature of man as restored to his original birthright, the “image of God,” in Jesus Christ. (See Rom_5:12-21.) The existence of an inborn sinfulness needs no revelation to make it evident to those who have eyes to see. It needs a revelation—and such a revelation the gospel gives—to declare to us that it is not man’s true nature, and that what is really original is not sin, but righteousness. (3) The whole passage, therefore, describes the state of men before their call to union with Christ, as naturally “under wrath,” and is well illustrated by the full description, in Rom_1:18; Rom_2:16, of those on whom “the wrath of God is revealed.” There man’s state is depicted as having still some knowledge of God (Rom_1:19-21), as having “the work of the law written on the heart” (Rom_2:14-15), and accordingly as being still under a probation before God (Rom_2:6-11). Elsewhere we learn that Christ, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,” died for all, even “the ungodly” (Rom_5:6-8; Rev_13:1); and that none are wholly excluded from His atonement but those who “tread under foot the Son of God, and count the blood of the covenant an unholy thing” (Heb_10:29). Hence that state is not absolutely lost or hopeless. But yet, when the comparison, as here, is with the salvation of the gospel, they are declared “children of wrath” who are “strangers to the new covenant of promise,” with its two supernatural gifts of justification by faith and sanctification in the Spirit, and their condition is described, comparatively but not absolutely, as “having no hope, and without God in the world.”
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 vv3–5 Among whom we also all once spent our life…
Among whom we also all once spent our life in the lusts of our flesh. The apostle here brings Jews and Gentiles together. "We also," as well as you we were all in the same condemnation, all in a miserable plight, not merely occasionally dipping into sin, but spending our very lives in the lusts or desires of our flesh, living fro" no noble ends, but in an element of carnal desire, as if there were nothing higher than to please the carnal nature. Fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. Desires of the flesh, the grosser and more animal propensities (the flesh, in Scripture, has often a wider sense; see; (Gal_5:19-21) and of the mind or thoughts, dianoiwn, the objects that we thought about, whatever they might be, the waywardness of our thoughts seems to be denoted, the random roaming of the mind hither and thither, towards this pleasure and that, sometimes serious, sometimes frivolous, but all marked by the absence of any controlling regard to the will of God. The life indicated is a life of indulgence in whatever natural feelings may arise in us-be they right or be they wrong. And we were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. This is a substantive clause, standing on its own basis, a separate fact, not merely an inference from the previous statements. The life described would have exposed us to wrath; but beyond and before this we were by nature children of wrath. "By nature" denotes something in our constitution, in our very being; and "even as the rest" denotes that this was universal, not a peculiarity affecting some, but a general feature applicable to all. "Children of wrath" denotes that we belonged to a race which had incurred the wrath of God; our individuality was so far absorbed by the social body that we shared the lot under which it had come. If there be something in this that seems contrary to justice, that seems to condemn men for the sins of others, we remark
(1) that in actual life we constantly find individuals suffering for the sin of the corporation, domestic, social, or national, with which they are identified;
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(2) that apart from this altogether, our individual offenses would expose us to God"s wrath; and
(3) that the moral and legal relations of the individual to the corporation is a subject of difficulty, and in this ease makes a strong demand on our faith. We should accept the teaching of the Word of God upon it, and leave our righteous Judge to vindicate himself. "Wrath," as applied to God, must be regarded as essentially different from the same word when used of man. In the latter case it usually indicates a disorderly, excited, passionate feeling, as of one who has lost self-control; when used of God, it denotes the holy, calm, deep opposition of his nature to sin, compelling him to inflict the appropriate punishment.
The true fountain of spiritual death.
were by nature children of wrath, even as others." The apostle traces the pedigree of all the elements that enter into this spiritual death up to our birth itself. He does not say that it is on account of "nature" or natural depravity that we are children of wrath, but "by nature;" that is, we are simply born in a state of condemnation. There is no express reference here to Adam or to our relation to his sin, though it is certainly implied that we had our probation in Adam, and are therefore born in a state of condemnation. To say that we are condemned on account of our hereditary depravity is to say that we are condemned without a probation. The doctrine of original sin is one of the" deep things of God." Pascal well says, "Original sin is folly in the sight of man, but this folly is wiser than all the wisdom of man. For without it who could have said what man is? His whole condition depends upon this imperceptible point." The recognition of the doctrine is the starting-point of the doctrines of special revelation, of redemption through Christ"s blood, of regeneration through the Holy Spirit. This passage implies
I THAT WE NEED REDEMPTION FROM THE MOMENT OF OUR BIRTH The sacrament of baptism is meaningless on any other theory. "The wicked are estranged from the womb." Why do all men certainly sin from the beginning?
II THAT ALL MEN, JEWS AND GENTILES, ARE BORN IN THIS STATE OF CONDEMNATION. Because "all in Adam die". (1Co_15:22)
III THAT GOD"S WRATH IS A REALITY. It is grounded in his essential holiness, as appears from the fact that God swears in his wrath, (Heb_3:11) and it belongs to the idea of the personal God as he acts in history, who cannot look with equal indifference or equal satisfaction upon virtue and vice, piety and impiety, wisdom and folly. It is not to be regarded as a mere modification of Divine love, as either love-sorrow or the anger of love. It is not Biblical to say that a God who has wrath is not a God of love. The objective reality of Divine wrath on account of sin is an axiom of natural theology (Rom_1:32) as well as of revealed; it is presupposed in the atonement, and must be carried into any conception we may form of future retribution. T.C.
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 vv3–5 Among whom also we all had our conversation in…
Eph_2:3
Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of Our flesh.
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All men by nature alike
1. The chosen of God have, before conversion, nothing differing from other sinners. Even those whom God takes to mercy were sinful as others, before by His grace they are changed. And why?
(1) That the mercy of God may be magnified, and made manifest in the free grace of justification.
(2) That love may be engendered in us who have been justified. Mary, who had many sins forgiven, loved much.
2. Where there is no fear of God, no outward privileges will procure us His favour. When Gods people do not obey Him, their circumcision is made uncircumcision. How can this be, seeing the one profess the true God, while the other does not?
(1) In deeds they deny Him.
(2) In deeds they set up false gods--their lusts, pleasures, riches, etc.
3. We must not be ashamed to confess ourselves sinners with the worst. The most upright are most forward in confession. It is the proper fruit of grace, to freely confess and give glory to God.
4. By nature the state of all is such that Gods wrath abides on them.
(1) We are born separated from God.
(2) We are given up to Satan.
(3) Subject to every curse in this life, whether spiritual or corporal.
(4) To death temporal.
(5) To death eternal.
5. By nature all of us are sinful; not only in regard of Adams sin imputed, but of corruption or concupiscence with which we are conceived (Psa_51:5; Psa_58:3; Gen_8:21; Eze_16:4-6; Isa_53:6; Isa_1:4).
6. Even the children of the godly are by nature children of wrath. (Paul Bayne.)
The misery of mans natural state
A sinful state cannot but be a miserable state. If sin goes before, wrath follows of course. In the text we have four things.
1. The misery of a natural state; it is a state of wrath, as well as a state of sin. The natural man is a malefactor, dead in law, lying in chains of guilt; a criminal, held fast in his fetters, till the day of execution; which will not fail to come, unless a pardon be obtained from his God, who is his judge and his opponent too.
2. Here is the rise of this misery; men have it by nature. They owe it to their nature, not to their substance or essence; for that neither is nor was sin, and therefore cannot make them children of wrath; though, for sin, it may be under wrath: not to their nature, as qualified at mans creation by his Maker; but to their nature, as vitiated and corrupted by the Fall; to the vicious quality, or corruption of their nature, as before noticed, which is their principle of action, and, ceasing from action, the only principle in an unregenerate state.
3. The universality of this misery. All are by nature children of wrath, we, says the apostle, even as others; Jews as well as Gentiles. Those that are now, by grace, the children of God were, by nature, in no better case than those that are still in their natural state.
4. Here is a glorious and happy change intimated. We were children of wrath, but are not so now; grace has brought us out of that state. And thus, it well becomes the people of God to be often standing on the shore, and looking back to the Red Sea, or the state of wrath, which they were once weltering in, even as others. The state of nature is a state of wrath.
I. What the state of wrath is. No one can fully describe it. Enough may be discovered, however, to convince men of the absolute necessity of fleeing to Jesus to escape it.
1. There is wrath in the heart of God against the natural man.
(1) His person is under Gods displeasure (Psa_5:5).
2. There is wrath in the Word of God against him (Rev_2:16).
3. There is wrath in the hand of God against him. He is under heavy strokes of wrath already, and is liable to more.
(1) There is wrath on his body (Gen_2:17).
(2) Wrath, on his soul.
(3) Wrath on his enjoyments.
(4) He is under the power of Satan (Act_24:18).
(5) The natural man hath no security for a moments safety from the wrath of God coming on him to the uttermost.
The curse of the law, denounced against him, has already tied him to the stake: so that the arrows of justice may pierce his soul. Does he lie down to sleep? There is not a promise that he knows of, or can know, to secure him that he shall not be in hell ere he awake. He walks amidst enemies armed against him: his name may be Magor-missabib, that is, terror round about (Jer_20:3). Thus the natural man lives, but he must die too; and death is a dreadful messenger to him. It comes upon him armed with wrath, and puts three sad charges in his hand.
1. Death charges him to bid an eternal farewell to all things in this world; to leave it, and haste away to another world.
2. Death charges soul and body to part, till the great day. His soul is required of him (Luk_12:20). O what a miserable parting must this be to a child of wrath! Care was indeed taken to provide for the body things necessary for this life; but, alas! there is nothing laid up for another life. As for the soul, he was never solicitous to provide for it.
3. Death charges the soul to appear before the tribunal of God, while the body lies to be carried to the grave (Ecc_12:7).
II. I shall confirm the doctrine of the state of wrath. Consider--
1. How peremptory the threatening of the first covenant is: In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die (Gen_2:17).
2. The justice of God requires that a child of sin be a child of wrath; that the law being broken, the sanction thereof should take place.
3. The horrors of a natural conscience prove this. Conscience, in the breasts of men, tells them that they are sinners, and therefore liable to the wrath of God.
4. The pangs of the new birth, the work of the Spirit on elect souls, in order to their conversion, demonstrate this. Hereby their natural sinfulness and misery, as liable to the wrath of God, are plainly taught them, filling their hearts with fear of that wrath. As it is the Spirits work to convince of sin, righteousness, and judgment (Joh_16:8), this testimony must needs be true; for the Spirit of truth cannot witness an untruth.
5. The sufferings of Christ plainly prove this doctrine. Wherefore was the Son of God a son under wrath, but because the children of men were children of wrath?
III. I now proceed to apply this doctrine of the misery of mans natural state. Is our state by nature a state of wrath? Then--
1. Surely we are not born innocent. Those chains of wrath, which by nature are upon us, show us to be born criminals.
2. What desperate madness is it for sinners to go on in their sinful course! What is it but to heap coals of fire on thine own head! to lay more and more fuel to the fire of wrath! (Rom_2:5).
3. Thou hast no reason to complain as long as thou art out of hell. Wherefore doth a living man complain? (Lam_3:39).
If one, who has forfeited his life, be banished from his native country, and exposed to many hardships; he may well bear all patiently, seeing his life is spared.
1. To you that are yet in an unregenerate state, I would sound the alarm, and warn you to see to yourselves, while there is yet hope. O you children of wrath, take no rest in this dismal state; but flee to Christ, the only refuge. The state of wrath is too hot a climate for you to live in. But if any desire to flee from the wrath to come, and for that end to know what course to take, I offer them these few advices.
(1) Retire to some secret place and there meditate on this your misery.
(2) Consider seriously the sin of your nature, heart, and life. A proper sight of wrath flows from a deep sense of sin.
(3) Labour to justify God in this matter. To quarrel with God about it, and to rage like a wild bull in a net, will but fix you the more in it.
(4) Turn your eyes towards the Lord Jesus Christ, and embrace Him as He offers Himself in the gospel.
2. I Shall drop a few words to the saints.
(1) Remember, that in the day our Lord first took you by the hand, you were in no better a condition than others.
(2) Remember there was nothing in you to engage Him to love you, in the day He appeared for your deliverance.
(3) Remember, you were fitter to be loathed than loved in that day.
(4) Remember, you are decked with borrowed feathers. It is His comeliness which as upon you (Eph_2:14).
(5) Remember your faults this day, as Pharaohs butler, who had forgotten Joseph. Mind how you have forgotten, and how unkindly you have treated, Him who remembered you in your low estate.
(6) Pity the children of wrath, the world that lies in wickedness. Can you be unconcerned for them, you who were once in the same condition?
(7) Admire that matchless love, which brought you out of the state of wrath. (T. Boston, D. D.)
Inherited depravity
When, nine years after his marriage, the birth of his son Nero was announced to him, he (Neros father) answered the congratulations of his friend with the remark, that from himself and Agrippina nothing could have been born but what was hateful and for the public ruin. (Archdeacon Farrar.)
The mind sinful
The wall thought it very unfair to influence a childs mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have come to years of discretion and be able to choose for itself. I showed him my garden, and told him it was my botanical garden. How so? said he, it is covered with weeds. Oh, I replied, that is only because it has not yet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and strawberries. (Coleridges Table Talk.)
Fleshly depravity
Conversation does not mean talking. There is no instance where it has this signification in the English Bible. It means, as the Greek original does, deportment, conduct, character, as in the following passages: 2Co_1:12; Gal_1:13; Eph_2:3; Eph_4:22; 1Ti_4:12; Heb_13:5; Heb_13:7; Jam_3:13; 1Pe_1:15; 1Pe_1:18; 1Pe_2:12; 1Pe_3:1-2; 1Pe_3:16; 2Pe_2:7; 2Pe_3:11. In Php_1:27, conversation signifies citizenship; so that to have a good conversation is to act worthy of the New Jerusalem to which grace has called you. But this former conduct or conversation of theirs was in the lusts of the flesh. This refers--
1. To carnal or sensual appetites, in which the heathen world was sunk, and Paul asserts in the text that the Jews were the same (Rom_6:12; Rom_7:8-9; 1Ti_6:9, and many others). This implies and includes luxuries, the pleasures of the table, drunkenness, and all such forbidden pleasures.
2. These fleshly desires are seen most perfectly in the systems of false worship adopted by the heathen world in general. Baalim was the embodiment of lewdness; Buddhism is the embodiment of the dogma of priestly rule; so is Hindooism and other forms of religion. The Greeks and the Romans deified nature and the dead. The flesh is the teeming fountain of vileness from which all these and similar systems flow:--the picture, the image, the idol, the oracle are the four head forms or developments of false worship, and they all come from the flesh.
3. Flesh is always contrasted with spirit, and in general denotes alienation from God. The law of the flesh is sin; the works of the flesh are evil; the carnal mind is enmity against God (Rom_8:6-7); to walk after the flesh is ungodliness; to be in the flesh is not to know or please God. Jesus Christ crucified it, and He gives us the principle and power of doing the same. (W. Graham, D. D.)
Original sin, a fact
Original or birth sin is not merely a doctrine in religion, it is a fact in mans world acknowledged by all, whether religious or not. Let a man be providing for an unborn child; in case of distribution of worldly property, he will take care to bind him by conditions and covenants which shall guard against his fraudulently helping himself to that which he is to hold for or to apportion to another, He never saw that child; he does not know but that child may be the most pure and perfect of men; but he knows it will not be safe to put temptation in his way, because he knows he will be born in sin, and liable to sin, and sure to commit sin. (Dean Alford.)
Man innately bad
Many inquirers find it difficult to believe themselves innately bad, simply because they have been told that such a belief is required of them. No man taught the doctrine of original sin, commonly so called, so impressively as Jesus Christ, and yet He never mentioned it. His whole scheme was founded upon the assumption that men were wrong. Every call to a new point, every frown upon sin, every encouragement of well-doing, meant that society needed regeneration. Men may come upon the doctrine of original depravity in one of two different ways; for example, they may come upon it as a dogma in theology. The first thing that some theologians do is to abuse human nature, to describe it as being, covered with wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, and as deserving nothing but eternal burning. Human nature resists this as a slander: it says, No; I have good impulses, upward desires, generous emotions towards my fellow creatures; I resent your theological calumnies. So much for the first method of approaching the doctrine. The second is totally unlike it. A man, for example, heartily accepts Jesus Christ, studies Him with most passionate devotion, and grows daily more like Him in all purity, gentleness, and self-oblivion. From this attitude he looks back upon his former self; he compares the human nature with which he started with the human nature he has attained, and involuntarily, by the sheer necessity of the contrast, he says, I was born in sin and shapen in iniquity. This conclusion he comes to, not by dogmatic teaching, but by dogmatic experience; what he never could have understood as an opinion he realizes as a fact. Suppose a tree to be conscious, and let it illustrate what is meant by growing into a right understanding of this hard doctrine. Tell the tree in April that it is bare and ungainly in appearance; very barren and naked altogether. The tree says, Nay; I am rooted in the earth; my branches are strong; I live in the light; I drink the dew; and I am beautiful; the winds rock me, and many a bird twitters on my boughs. This is its April creed. Go to the same tree after it has had a summers experience: it has felt the quickening penetration of the solar fire, quenched its thirst in summer showers, felt the sap circulating through its veins; the leaves have come out on branch and twig; the blossoms have blushed and bloomed through long days of light; fruit has been formed, and mellowed into maturity. Now hear the tree! I am not what I was in April; my very identity seems to be changed; when men called me bare and rugged I did not believe them a few months ago; now I see what they meant--their verdict was sound; I thought the April light very beautiful, but it is nothing to the blazing splendour of the later months; I liked the twitter Of the spring birds, but,. it is poor compared with the song of those that came in June. I feel as if I had been born again. The parable is broad enough to cover this bewildering, and at times horrifying, doctrine of hereditary depravity. Men cannot be in April what they will be in September. Each year says to growing hearts, I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. In old age men may accept the rejected doctrines of their youth. Experience brings us round many a rugged hill, and gives us better views of condemned, because misunderstood, opinions. (J. Parker, D. D.)
Universal depravity a proof of original sin
As it is absolutely impossible for a man to believe, when the dice are thrown sixes successively a thousand times, that the dice are not loaded, so is it a thousand times more impossible to believe, when every human being of all nations and generations, without a single exception, begins to sin the instant he enters moral agency, that his will is not biassed by a previous effectual tendency in his nature to sin. (Hodge.)
The state of nature and the state of grace
I. Jews and Gentiles (i.e., all)
are by nature alike prone to and lovers of sin. Before and after the flood. In Asia, Europe, Africa, etc.
II. Believers can happily say that the time of their sinful conversation is past. (See text; Isa_55:13; Rom_6:17; Tit_3:8.)
III. When a man knows himself, he will confess that his nature is sinful as others. Job; David; Isaiah; Jeremiah; Paul.
IV. The corruption of nature is sinful before it appears in thoughts, words, etc. (Mat_15:19; Rom_9:11-13).
V. The sinfulness of every mans nature justly exposes him to the wrath of God.
VI. The Scriptures tell us satisfactorily how the world comes to be so wicked. Improvement: The necessity of regeneration. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, etc. (Joh_3:6-7). The necessity of daily self-denial. The fatal delusion of Pelagians. The fatal delusion of Arminians. Grace must make one to differ from another. (H. Foster, M. A.)
A misinterpreted proof text
It is assumed far too axiomatically that the wrath referred to can mean nothing else than Gods personal wrath against sin, whether original or actual. We are ready to admit that sin in any form must draw down the Divine displeasure. God would be less than God unless sin drew down on it that consuming fire by which at present it is punished, and so held in check, and by which it will ultimately be destroyed forever when He who sits as a refiner shall have purged His silver from the last speck of dross. In this sense Gods wrath against sin--a wrath punitive and a wrath purifying; for they are both, stages of the same process--is an essential conception of His character. But while admitting this, it is going too far to assume that this wrath of God descends on us at the beginning, instead of at the end, of our moral career. If we are children of wrath in this sense, by our descent from Adam, we can easily see how this view tends to efface all moral distinctions of good and evil. The race is a doomed one from the beginning, and we are all overwhelmed alike in the same whirlpool of perdition here and hereafter. Men may shrink from such remorseless logic, and seek to soften it down; but as long as the text, that we are by nature children of wrath, stands unrevised in our so-called Revised Version, is it strange that the English reader appeals to that text as decisive on the extreme or Augustinian doctrine of birth sin and its consequences? But is this the true interpretation of the text? Will the words bear any other rendering? There must be a mistake somewhere. May it not lie in the inattention of learned men to the fact that the Apostle Paul wrote in Greek, but thought in Hebrew, and that consequently Hebraisms crop up in cases where students of classical Greek are not on the lookout for them as they should be. The present is a case in point. In the previous verse the apostle has described mankind as children of disobedience, which is a strong adjectival form in Hebrew for children thoroughly disobedient. In this verse, returning to this thought and emphasizing it, he reminds us that we all once lived in the lusts of the flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath--i.e., children of a wicked, passionate impulse, even as others. The text in this sense not only confirms in this way what goes before, but it also throws a fresh, though lurid, light on human nature, Jew alike and Gentile. It reminds us that these lusts of the flesh and mind all had their root in a principle of passionate impulse (ὀργη) which is congenital to us, and which is so much our nature that we may in a sense be described as the children of this passionate desire, or the slaves of it, as we should say in modern phrase. Surely this is a dark enough description of human nature, without adding that other dark hue of Augustinian theology, that in consequence of this we are born under Gods wrath, and that the curse of God descends on us as a kind of birth, taint. (J. B. Heard, M. A.)
Children of wrath
What is it to be a child of wrath? It is to turn every blessing that this earth can give into aggravated misery. The happier we see a man--the more exalted in station, the more renowned by fame, the more endowed with wealth--the more miserable is his lot when precipitated from them all to everlasting ruin. Belshazzar was more to be commiserated and contemned than the poorest beggar within the city of Babylon, when the hand of fire came forth to write his doom upon the wall; the louder he had laughed--the more triumphantly he had praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone--the deeper draughts of luscious wine that he and all his court had quaffed from the golden vessels of Jehovahs temple--the deadlier was the livid paleness of his face, the loosening of his joints, and the smiting of his knees, when the fatal characters of death and judgment were traced, before his eyes. What profit in the vast domains of wealth, when the trumpet of eternal judgment shall awake their haughty owners from the death of trespasses and sins? When they shall call, but call in vain, upon those lofty mountains, of which, in their pride of heart, they had boasted as their own, to fall on them and cover them, and hide them from the wrath of that God whom they have dishonoured and despised? (R. J. McGhee, M. A.)
Natures testimony to the wrath of God
Wrath and threatening are invariably mingled with love, and in the utmost solitudes of nature the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as of heaven. It is well for us to dwell with thankfulness on the unfolding of the flower, and the falling of the dew, and the sleep of the green fields in the sunshine; but the blasted trunk, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the roar of the black, perilous whirlpools and the mountain streams, the solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the continual fading of all beauty into darkness, of all strength into dust--have these no language for us? We may seek to escape their teachings by reasonings touching the good which is wrought out of evil, but it is vain sophistry. The good succeeds to the evil as the day succeeds to the night, but so also the evil to the good. Ebal and Gerizim, birth and death, light and darkness, heaven and hell, divide the existence of man and his futurity. (Ruskin.)
Discipline of the passions
The passions may be humoured till they become our master, as a horse may be pampered till he gets the better of his rider; but early discipline will prevent mutiny, and keep the helm in the hands of reason. (Cumberland.)
The power of religion
A clergyman, having made several attempts to reform a profligate, was at length met with the decided statement, It is all in vain, sir; you cannot get me to change my religion. I do not want that, replied the good man; I wish religion to change you.
The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
B. W. Johnson 1891 · Public Domain On vv3–5 3. Among whom also we all had our conversation.…
3. Among whom also we all had our conversation. In verses 1 and 2 the second person is used, meaning the Ephesians; here the person is changed to the first. Meyer thinks that “ye” refers to Gentile Christians; “we” to Paul and his Jewish brethren. The Gentile Christians had been dead in trespasses and sins; nor had the Jewish Christians differed in this respect. Fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind. Not only fleshly desires, but the impulses of a sinful mind, such as malice, envy, pride, etc. And were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. This declares that “we,” now Jewish Christians, were once, when in a state of nature, under condemnation, just as the “others,” the rest of the world, or the Gentiles. Some have held that this passage teaches innate, hereditary depravity. I am sure that this was not in the apostle's mind. (1) Two classes are spoken of, “you” and “we,” Gentiles and Jews. (2) Both were equally sinful, the first “dead in trespasses and in sins,” and the second “by nature the children of wrath, even as the others.” (3) The passage then simply affirms that Jews and Gentiles alike, before conversion, were dead in trespasses and sins, and under the divine condemnation. However, “by nature” is supposed to teach that the depravity is innate, and that all are born under the wrath of God. Such an interpretation would put the passage in conflict with Paul's teaching elsewhere, and with that of Christ. For instance, Matt. 18:3 and 19:14 are inconsistent with the view that little children are born “under the wrath of God.” Indeed, it is taught in this passage that both classes have been brought into this state of condemnation by walking in sin, not by their birth. But does not by nature imply that they are born “children of wrath?” The word rendered “by nature,” is found in Rom. 2:14; 1 Cor. 11:14; Gal. 2:15; Gal. 4:8. In only one of these passages can it refer to natural birth at all, and there it refers to race (Gal. 2:15). In not one passage does it describe what is innate. It does describe custom, practice, and unconverted state. No one would say that the Gentiles, who “do by nature the things of the law,” do so because it is innate. It means that they do so without the revelation. In a similar sense it is used here, and means that “we,” as well as others, before we were converted by the gospel, were dwelling in sin like others, and were like them, “the children of wrath.” The state of nature is the unconverted state.
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 v4 Eph_2:4. But God, who is rich in mercy.—“Unto all…
CRITICAL AND EXPLANATORY NOTES
Eph_2:4. But God, who is rich in mercy.—“Unto all that call upon Him” (Rom_10:12). “He hath shut up all into disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all” (Rom_11:32). For His great love wherewith He loved us.—“A combination only used when the notion of the verb is to be extended” (Winer).
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Eph_2:5. Even when we were dead in sins.—The phrase which closes Eph_2:3, difficult as it is, must receive an interpretation in harmony with this statement. It is the very marrow of the gospel that, “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.” That the wrath of God is real we know, but “God is love.” By grace ye are saved.—“Grace” is as truly characteristic of St. Paul’s writing as his autograph signature; it, too, is the token (“sign-manual”) in every epistle (2Th_3:17-18).
Eph_2:6. In heavenly places.—As in Eph_1:3.
Eph_2:7. The exceeding riches of His grace.—The wealth of mercy mentioned in Eph_2:4 more fully stated. Grace is condescension to an inferior or kindness to the undeserving. In kindness toward us.—“Kindness” here represents in the original “a beautiful word, as it is the expression of a beautiful grace” (Trench). It is that “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal_5:22) called “gentleness” in the A.V., but which would be better named “benignity.”
Eph_2:8. For by grace are ye saved through faith.—“ ‘By grace’ expresses the motive, ‘through faith’ the subjective means” (Winer). The emphasis is on “by grace.”
Eph_2:9. Not of works, lest any man should boast.—The more beautiful the works achieved the more natural it is for a man to feel his works to be meritorious. One can understand that a man jealous for the honour of God, like Calvin, should speak of the excellencies of those out of Christ as “splendid vices,” even though we prefer another explanation of them.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.—Eph_2:4-9
Salvation an Act of Divine Grace.
I. Springing from the benevolence of God (Eph_2:4; Eph_2:7).—A good old saint once said, “There is nothing that affects me more profoundly, or more quickly melts my heart, than to reflect on the goodness of God. It is so vast, so deep, so amazing, so unlike and beyond the most perfect human disposition, that my soul is overwhelmed.” The apostle seems to have been similarly affected as he contemplated the divine beneficence, as the phrases he here employs indicate. He calls it “the great love wherewith He loved us.” God is “rich in mercy”—in irrepressible, unmerited compassion (Eph_2:4). Language is too poor to express all he sees and feels, and he takes refuge in the ambiguous yet suggestive expression, “The exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Jesus Christ” (Eph_2:7)—hinting at the sublime benignity of the divine nature longing to express itself through the noblest medium possible. By his rebellion and deliberate sin man had forfeited all claim to the divine favour, and his restoration to that favour, impossible of attainment by any efforts of his own, was an act of sheer divine goodness. Its spontaneity breaks in as a sweet surprise upon the sinning race. The most vicious and abandoned are included in its gracious provisions, and all men are taught that their salvation, if accomplished at all, must be as an act of free and undeserved grace.
II. Salvation has its life and fellowship in Christ (Eph_2:5-6).—God has given us as unquestioned a resurrection from the death of sin as the body of Christ had from the grave, and the same divine power achieved both the one and the other. The spiritual life of both Jew and Gentile has its origin in Christ, and the axe is thus laid to the very root of spiritual pride and all glorying in ourselves. We are raised by His resurrection power to sit in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. This we do already by our spiritual fellowship with Him, and by anticipation we share the blessedness which we shall more fully enjoy by our union with Him in the heavenly world. The spiritual resurrection of the soul must precede, and will be the inviolable guarantee of the future glorious resurrection of the body. As the great Head of the Church is already in the heavenlies, so ultimately all the members that make up the body shall be gathered there. We are already seated there in Him as our Head, which is the ground of our hope; and we shall be hereafter seated there by Him, as the conferring cause, when hope shall be swallowed up in fruition. Our life and fellowship in Christ are susceptible of indefinite expansion and enjoyment in the progressive evolutions of the future.
III. Faith, the instrument of salvation, is the gift of divine grace (Eph_2:8).—The question whether faith or salvation is the gift of God is decided by the majority of critics in favour of the former. This agrees with the obvious argument of the apostle, that salvation is so absolutely an act of divine grace that the power to realise it individually is also a free gift. Grace, without any respect to human worthiness, confers the glorious gift. Faith, with an empty hand and without any pretence to personal desert, receives the heavenly blessing. Without the grace or power to believe, no man ever did or can believe; but with that power the act of faith is a man’s own. God never believes for any man, no more than He repents for him. The penitent, through this grace enabling him, believes for himself; nor does he believe necessarily or impulsively when he has that power. The power to believe may be present long before it is exercised, else why the solemn warnings which we meet everywhere in the word of God and threatenings against those who do not believe? This is the true state of the case: God gives the power, man uses the power thus given, and brings glory to God. Without the power no man can believe; with it any man may.
IV. Salvation, being unmeritorious, excludes all human boasting.—“Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Eph_2:9). Neither salvation nor the faith that brings it is the result of human ingenuity and effort. The grand moral results brought about by saving faith are so extraordinary, and so high above the plane of the loftiest and most gigantic human endeavours, that if man could produce them by his own unaided powers he would have cause indeed for the most extravagant boasting, and he would be in danger of generating a pride which in its uncontrollable excess would work his irretrievable ruin. The least shadow of a ground for pride is however excluded. God protects both Himself and man by the freeness and simplicity of the offer of salvation. It is the complaint of intellectual pride that the reception of the gospel is impossible because it demands a humiliation and self-emptying that degrade and shackle intellectual freedom. Such an objection is a libel on the gospel. It humbles in order to exalt; it binds its claims upon us to lift us to a higher freedom. So completely is salvation a divine act, that the man who refuses to accept it on God’s terms must perish. There is no other way.
V. The glory of divine grace in salvation will be increasingly demonstrated in the future.—“That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace” (Eph_2:7). The most valuable function of history is not that which deals with the rise and fall of empires, the brutal ravages of war, the biographies of kings, statesmen, and philosophers, but that which treats upon the social and moral condition of the people and the influence of religion in the development of individual and national character. The true history of the world is the history of God’s dealings with it. The ages of the past have been a revelation of God; the ages to come will be an enlargement of that revelation, and its most conspicuous feature will be an ever new development of the riches of divine grace in the redemption of the human race. In all successive ages of the world we are authorised to declare that sinners shall be saved only as they repent of their sins and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
Lessons.—Salvation—
1. Is a revelation of what God does for man.
2. Is absolutely necessary for each. 3. Should be earnestly sought by all.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Eph_2:4-7. The Great Change effected in Man by the Gospel.
I. The happy change which the gospel made in the Ephesians.—A change not peculiar to them, but common to all sincere believers.
1. God hath quickened us.—Made us alive with Christ.
(1) True Christians are alive; they have spiritual senses and appetites.
(2) Spiritual motions.
(3) Spiritual pleasures.
(4) Spiritual powers. The spiritual life comes through Christ, and is conformed to Him.
2. God hath raised us up together with Christ (Eph_2:6).—His resurrection is a proof and pattern of that of believers.
3. God hath made us to sit together in heavenly places in Christ.—His entrance into heaven is a proof of the final salvation of believers. He sits there for them, to take care of their interests, and in due time will bring them to sit where He is.
II. Contemplate the mercy of God in this great change.—“God, who is rich in mercy” (Eph_2:4). The mercies of God are rich in extent, in number, in respect of constancy, in variety, in value. “The great love wherewith He loved us.” He first loved us. His love shines brighter when we consider what a being He is. He is infinitely above us. He is self-sufficient. The gospel gives us the most exalted conceptions of God’s character.
III. The general purpose of God’s particular mercy to the Ephesians (Eph_2:7).—God’s mercy in reclaiming one transgressor may operate to the salvation of thousands in ages to come. The gospel dispensation was intended to serve some useful purposes among other intelligences. Not only God’s gracious dispensation to fallen men, but also His righteous severity toward irreclaimable offenders, is designed for extensive beneficial influence.—Lathrop.
Eph_2:4-5. The State of Grace.
1. Salvation originates in the love of God.
2. That it consists in emancipation from evil.—“Quickened us together with Christ;” that is, gave life. The love and mercy of God were shown in this—not that He saved from penalty, but from sin. What we want is life, more life, spiritual life, to know in all things the truth of God and to speak it, to feel in all things the will of God and do it.
3. The next word to explain is grace.—It stands opposed to nature and to law. Whenever nature means the dominion of our lower appetites, then nature stands opposed to grace. Grace stands opposed to law. All that law can do is to manifest sin, just as the dam thrown across the river shows its strength; law can arrest sometimes the commission of sin, but never the inward principle. Therefore God has provided another remedy, “Sin shall not have dominion over you,” because ye are under grace.
4. Paul states salvation here as a fact.—“By grace ye are saved.” There are two systems. The one begins with nature, the other with grace: the one treats all Christians as if they were the children of the devil, and tells them that they may perhaps become the children of God; the other declares that the incarnation of Christ is a fact, a universal fact, proclaiming that all the world are called to be the children of the Most High. Let us believe in grace instead of beginning with nature.—F. W. Robertson.
Eph_2:4-6. The Believer exalted together with Jesus Christ.
I. The believer is assured he is raised up with Christ by the proofs which assure him of the exaltation of Christ.—These proofs, irresistible as they are, do not produce impressions so lively as they ought.
1. From the abuse of a distinction between mathematical evidence and moral evidence.
2. Because the mind is under the influence of a prejudice, unworthy of a real philosopher, that moral evidence changes its nature according to the nature of the things to which it is applied.
3. Because the necessary discrimination has not been employed in the selection of those proofs on which some have pretended to establish it.
4. Because we are too deeply affected by our inability to resolve certain questions which the enemies of religion are accustomed to put on some circumstances relative to that event.
5. Because we suffer ourselves to be intimidated more than we ought by the comparison instituted between them and certain popular rumours which have no better support than the caprice of the persons who propagate them.
6. Because they are not sufficiently known.
II. The means supplied to satisfy the believer that he is fulfilling the conditions under which he may promise himself that he shall become a partaker of Christ’s exaltation.—Though this knowledge be difficult, it is by no means impossible of attainment. He employs two methods principally to arrive at it:
1. He studies his own heart;
2. He shrinks not from the inspection of the eyes of others.
III. The believer is raised up with Christ by the foretastes which he enjoys on earth of his participation in the exaltation of Christ.—This experience is realised by the believer.
1. When shutting the door of his closet and excluding the world from his heart, he is admitted to communion and fellowship with Deity in retirement and silence.
2. When Providence calls him to undergo some severe trial.
3. When he has been enabled to make some noble and generous sacrifice.
4. When celebrating the sacred mysteries of redeeming love.
5. Finally, in the hour of conflict with the king of terrors.—Saurin.
Eph_2:5. Justification by Faith.
I. We hold that we are justified by faith, that is, by believing, and that unless we are justified we cannot be saved. Of all men whoever believed this, those who gave us the Church catechism believed it most strongly. Believing really what they taught, they believed that children were justified. For if a child is not justified in being a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven, what is he justified in being? They knew that the children could only keep in this just, right, and proper state by trusting in God and looking up to Him daily in faith and love and obedience.
II. These old reformers were practical men and took the practical way.—They knew the old proverb, “A man need not be a builder to live in a house.” At least they acted on it; and instead of trying to make the children understand what faith was made up of, they tried to make them live in faith itself. Instead of puzzling and fretting the children’s minds with any of the controversies then going on between Papists and Protestants, or afterwards between Calvinists and Arminians, they taught the children simply about God, who He was, and what He had done for them and all mankind, that so they might learn to love Him, look up to Him in faith, and trust utterly to Him, and so remain justified and right, saved and safe for ever. By doing which they showed that they knew more about faith and about God than if they had written books on books of doctrinal arguments.
III. The Church catechism, where it is really and honestly taught, gives the children an honest, frank, sober, English temper of mind which no other training I have seen gives.—I warn you frankly that, if you expect to make the average of English children good children on any other ground than the Church catechism takes, you will fail. If it be not enough for your children to know all the articles of the Apostles’ Creed, and on the strength thereof to trust God utterly and so be justified and saved, then they must go elsewhere, for I have nothing more to offer them, and trust in God that I never shall have.—C. Kingsley.
Eph_2:8. Salvation by Faith.
I. What faith it is through which we are saved.—
1. It is not barely the faith of a heathen.
2. Nor is it the faith of a devil, though this goes much further than that of a heathen.
3. It is not barely that the apostles had while Christ was yet upon earth.
4. In general it is faith in Christ: Christ and God through Christ are the proper objects of it.
5. It is not only an assent to the whole gospel of Christ, but also a full reliance on the blood of Christ, a trust in the merits of His life, death, and resurrection, a recumbency upon Him as our atonement and our life, as given for us and living in us, and in consequence hereof, a closing with Him and cleaving to Him as our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption, or, in one word, our salvation.
II. What is the salvation which is through faith?—
1. It is a present salvation.
2. A salvation from sin.
3. From the guilt of all past sin.
4. From fear.
5. From the power of sin.
6. A salvation often expressed in the word “justification,” which taken in the largest sense implies a deliverance from guilt and punishment by the atonement of Christ actually applied to the soul of the sinner now believing on Him, and a deliverance from the power of sin, through Christ formed in his heart.
III. The importance of the doctrine.—Never was the maintaining this doctrine more seasonable than it is at this day. Nothing but this can effectually prevent the increase of the Romish delusion among us. It is endless to attack one by one all the errors of that Church. But salvation by faith strikes at the root, and all fall at once where this is established.—Wesley.
Eph_2:8-9. Our Salvation is of Grace.
I. Consider how we are saved through faith.—
1. Without faith we cannot be saved.
2. All who have faith will be saved.
II. What place and influence works have in our salvation.—
1. In what sense our salvation is not of works.
(1) We are not saved by works considered as a fulfilment of the original law of nature.
(2) We are not saved by virtue of any works done before faith in Christ, for none of these are properly good.
2. There is a sense in which good works are of absolute necessity to salvation.
(1) They are necessary as being radically included in that faith by which we are saved.
(2) A temper disposing us to good works is a necessary qualification for heaven.
(3) Works are necessary as evidences of our faith in Christ and of our title to heaven.
(4) Good works essentially belong to religion.
(5) Works are necessary to adorn our professions and honour our religion before men.
(6) By them we are to be judged in the great day of the Lord.
III. The necessity of works does not diminish the grace of God in our salvation nor afford us any pretence for boasting.—
1. Humility essentially belongs to the Christian temper.
2. The mighty preparation God has made for our recovery teaches that the human race is of great importance in the scale of rational beings and in the scheme of God’s universal government.
3. It infinitely concerns us to comply with the proposals of the gospel.
4. Let no man flatter himself that he is in a state of salvation as long as he lives in the neglect of good works.
5. Let us be careful that we mistake not the nature of good works.—Lathrop.
Eph_2:8. True Justifying Faith is not of Ourselves.—It is through grace that we believe in the grace of God. God’s grace and love, the source; faith, the instrument; both His gift. The origin of our coming to Christ is of God. Justifying faith, not human assent, but a powerful, vivifying thing which immediately works a change in the man and makes him a new creature, and leads him to an entirely new and altered mode of life and conduct. Hence justifying faith is a divine work.
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.
Alexander MacLaren 1905 · Public Domain On v4 Eph 2:4-5
EPHESIANS
THE RESURRECTION OF DEAD SOULS
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Eph 2:4-5
Scripture paints man as he is, in darker tints, and man as he may become, in brighter ones, than are elsewhere found. The range of this portrait painter’s palette is from pitchiest black to most dazzling white, as of snow smitten by sunlight. Nowhere else are there such sad, stern words about the actualities of human nature; nowhere else such glowing and wonderful ones about its possibilities. This Physician knows that He can cure the worst cases, if they will take His medicine, and is under no temptation to minimise the severity of the symptoms or the fatality of the disease. We have got both sides in my text; man’s actual condition, ‘dead in trespasses’; man’s possible condition, and the actual condition of thousands of men-made to live again in Jesus Christ, and with Him raised from the dead, and with Him gone up on high, and with Him sitting at God’s right hand. That is what you and I may be if we will; if we will not, then we must be the other.
So there are three things here to look at for a few moments-the dead souls; the pitying love that looks down upon them; and the resurrection of the dead.
I. First, here is a picture, a dogmatic statement if you like, about the actual condition of human nature apart from Jesus Christ-’Dead in trespasses.’
The Apostle looks upon the world-many-coloured, full of activity, full of intellectual stir, full of human emotions, affections, joys, sorrows, fluctuations-as if it were one great cemetery, and on every gravestone there were written the same inscription. They all died of the same disease-’dead through sin,’ as the original more properly means.
Now, I dare say many who are listening to me are saying in their hearts, ‘Oh! Exaggeration! The old gloomy, narrow view of human nature cropping up again.’ Well, I am not at all unwilling to acknowledge that truths like this have very often been preached both with a tone and in a manner that repels, and which is rightly chargeable with exaggeration and undue gloom and narrowness. But let me remind you that it is not the Evangelical preacher nor the Apostle only who have to bear the condemnation of exaggeration, if this representation of my text be not true to facts, but it is Jesus Christ too; for He says, ‘Except ye eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, ye have no life in you.’ And I think that be He divine or not divine, His words about the religious condition of men go so surely to the mark that a man must be tolerably impregnable in his self-conceit who charges Him with narrowness and exaggeration. At all events, I am content to say after Him, and I pray that you and I, when we accept Him as our Teacher, may take not only His gracious, but His stern, words, assured that a deep graciousness lies in these, too, if we rightly understand them.
Let me remind you that the phrase of my text is by no means confined to Christian teachers, but that, in common speech, we hear from all high thinkers about the lower type of humanity being dead to the loftier thoughts in which they live and move and have their being. It has passed into a commonplace of language to speak of men being ‘dead to honour,’ ‘dead to shame,’ ‘dead’ to this, that, and the other good and noble and gracious thing. And the same metaphor, if you like, lies here in my text-that men who have given their wills and inmost natures over to the dominion of self-and that is the definition of sin-that such men are, ipso facto, by reason of that very surrender of themselves to their worst selves, dead on what I may call the top side of their nature, and that all that is there is atrophied and dwindling away.
Unconsciousness is one characteristic of death. And oh! as I look round I know that there are tens, and perhaps hundreds, of men and women who are all but utterly unconscious of a whole universe in which are the only realities, and to which it becomes them to have access. You live, in the physical sense, and move and have your being in God, and yet your inmost life would not be altered one hair’s-breadth if there were no God at all. You pass the most resplendent instances and illustrations of His presence, His work, and you see nothing. You are blind on that side of your natures; or, as my text says, dead to the whole spiritual realm. Just as if there were a brick wall run against some man’s windows so that he could see nothing out of them; so you, by your persistent adherence to the paltry present, the material, the visible, the selfish, have reared up a wall against the windows of your souls that look heavenwards; and of God, and all the lofty starry realities that cluster round Him, you are as unconscious as the corpse upon its bier is of the sunshine that plays upon its pallid features, or of the dew that falls on its stiffened limbs. Dead, because of sin-is that exaggeration? Is it exaggeration which charges all but absolute unconsciousness of spiritual realities upon worldly men like some of you?
And, then, take another illustration. Another of the signatures of death is inactivity. And oh! what faculties in some of my friends listening to me now are shrivelled and all but extinct! They are dormant, at any rate, to use another word, for the death of my text is not so absolute a death but that a resurrection is possible, and so dormant comes to express pretty nearly the same thing. Faculties of service, of enthusiasm, of life for God, of noble obedience to Him-what have you done with them? Left them there until they have stiffened like an unused lock, or rusted like the hinges of an unopened door; and you are as little active in all the noblest activities of spirit, which are activities in submission to and dependence upon Him, as if you were laid in your coffin with your idle hands crossed for evermore upon an unheaving breast.
There is another illustration that I may suggest for a moment. Decay is another characteristic and signature of death. And your best self, in some of you, is rotting to corruption by sin.
Ay! Dear brethren, when we think of these tragedies of suicide that are going on in thousands of men round about us to-day, it seems to me as if the metaphor and the reality were reversed; and instead of saying that my text is a violent metaphor, transferring the facts of material death and corruption to the spiritual realm, I am almost disposed to say it is the other way about, and the real death is the death of the spirit; and the outer dissolution and unconsciousness and inactivity of the material body is only a kind of parable to preach to men what are the awful invisible facts ever associated with the fact of transgression.
There are three lives possible for each of us; two of them involuntary, the third requiring our consent and effort, but all of them sustained by the same cause. The first of them is that which we call life, the activity and the consciousness of the bodily frame; and that continues as long as the power of God keeps the body in life. When He withdraws His hand there comes what the senses call death. Then there is the natural life of thinking, loving, willing, enjoying, sorrowing, and the like, and that continues as long as He who is the life and light of men breathes into them the breath of that life. And these two are lived or died largely without the man’s own consent or choice.
But there is a third life, when all that lower is lifted to God, and thinking and willing and loving and enjoying and aspiring and trusting and obeying, and all these natural faculties find their home and their consecration and their immortality in Him. That life is only lived by our own will and it is the true life, and the others are, as I said, but parables, and envelopes, and vehicles, as it were, in which this life is carried, that is more precious than they. In the physical realm, separate the body from God, and it dies. In the natural conscious life, separate the soul, as we call it, from God, and it dies. And in the higher region, separate the spirit, which is the man grasping God, from God, and he dies; and that is the real death. Both the others are nothing in comparison with it.
It may co-exist with a large amount of intellectual and other forms of activity, as we see all round about us, and that makes it only the more ghastly and the sadder. You are full of energy in regard to all other subjects, but smitten into torpor about the highest; ready to live, to work, to enjoy, to think, to will, in all other directions, and utterly unconscious and unconcerned, or all but utterly unconscious and unconcerned, in regard to God.
Oh! a death which is co-existent with such feverish intensity of life as the most of you are expending all the week at your business and your daily pursuits is among the saddest of all the tragedies that angels are called upon to weep over, and that men are fools enough to enact. Brother! If the representation is a gloomy one, do not you think that it is better to ask the question-Is it a true one? than, Is it a cheerful one? I lay it upon your hearts that he that lives to God and with God is alive to the centre as well as out to the finger tips and circumference of his visible being. He that is dead to God is dead indeed whilst he lives.
II. Now, notice, in the second place, the pitying love that looks down on the cemetery.
‘God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us.’ Thus the great truth that is taught us here, first of all, is that that divine love of the Divine Father bends down over His dead children and cherishes them still. Oh! you can do much in separating yourselves from God through selfishness, selfwill, sensuality, or other forms of sin, but there is one thing you cannot do, you cannot prevent His loving you. If I might venture without seeming irreverent, I would point to that pathetic page in the Old Testament history where the king hears of the death, red-handed in treason, of his darling son, and careless of victory and forgetful of everything else, and oblivious that Absalom was a rebel, and only remembering that he was his boy, burst into that monotonous wail that has come down over all the centuries as the deepest expression of undying fatherly love. ‘Oh! my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Oh! Absalom, my son, my son!’ The name and the relationship will well up out of the Father’s heart, whatever the child’s crime. We are all His Absaloms, and though we are dead in trespasses and in sins, God, who is rich in mercy, bends over us and loves us with His great love.
The Apostle might well expatiate in these two varying forms of speech, both of them intended to express the same thing-’rich in mercy’ and ‘great in love.’ For surely a love which takes account of the sin that cannot repel it, and so shapes itself into mercy, sparing, and departing from the strict line of retribution and justice, is great. And surely a mercy which refuses to be provoked by seventy times seven transgressions in an hour, not to say a day, is rich. That mercy is wider than all humanity, deeper than all sin, was before all rebellion, and will last for ever. And it is open for every soul of man to receive if he will.
But there is another point to be noticed in reference to this wonderful manifestation of the divine love looking down upon the myriads of men dead in sin, and that is that this love shapes the divine action. Mark the language of our text, in which the Apostle attributes a certain line of conduct in the divine dealings with us to the fact of His great love. Because ‘He loved us’ therefore He did so and so. Now about that I have only two remarks to make, and I will make them very briefly. The one is, here is a demonstration, for some of you people who do not believe in the Evangelical doctrine of an Atonement by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, that the true scriptural representation of that doctrine is not that which caricaturists have represented it-viz. that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ changed in any manner the divine heart and disposition. It is not as unfriendly critics {who, perhaps, are not to be so much blamed for their unfriendliness as for their superficiality} would have us to believe, that the doctrine of Atonement says that God loves because Christ died. But the Apostle who preached that doctrine and looked upon it as the very heart and centre of his message to the world here puts as the true sequence-Christ died because God loves. Jesus Christ said the same thing, ‘God so loved the world that He sent His Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should be saved.’
And that brings me to the second of the remarks which I wish briefly to make-viz. this, that the Divine Love, great, patient, wonderful, unrepelled by men’s sin, as it is, has to adopt a process to reach its end. God by His love does not, because He cannot, raise these dead souls into a life of righteousness without Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ comes to be the channel and the medium through which the love of God may attain its end. God’s pitying love, because ‘He is rich in mercy,’ is not turned away by man’s sin; and God’s pitying love, because ‘He is rich in mercy,’ quickens men not by a bare will, but by the mission and work of His dear Son.
III. And so that is the last thing on which I speak a word-viz. the resurrection of the dead souls.
They died of sin. That was the disease that killed them. They cannot be quickened unless the disease be conquered. Dear brethren, I have to preach-not to argue, but to preach-and to press upon each soul the individual acceptance of the Death of Jesus Christ as being for each of us, if we will trust Him, the death of our death, and the death of our sin. By His great sacrifice and sufficient oblation He has borne the sins of the world and has taken away their guilt. And in Him the inmost reality of the spiritual death, and its outermost parable of corporeal dissolution, are equally and simultaneously overcome. If you will take Him for your Lord you will rise from the death of guilt, condemnation, selfishness, and sin into a new life of liberty, sonship, consecration, and righteousness, and will never see death.
And, on the other hand, the life of Jesus Christ is available for all of us. If we will put our trust in Him, His life will pass into our deadness; He Himself will vitalise our being, dormant capacities will be quickened and brought into blessed activity, a new direction will be given to the old faculties, desires, aspirations, emotions of our nature. The will will tower into new power because it obeys. The heart will throb with a better life because it has grasped a love that cannot change and will never die. And the thinking power will be brought into living, personal contact with the personal Truth, so that whatsoever darknesses and problems may still be left, at the centre there will be light and satisfaction and peace. You will live if you trust Christ and let Him be your Life.
And if thus, by simple faith in Him, knowing that the power of His atoning death has destroyed the burden of our guilt and condemnation, and knowing the quickening influences of His constraining love as drawing us to love new things and make us new creatures, we receive into our inmost spirits ‘the law of the spirit of life’ which was in Christ Jesus, and are thereby made ‘free from the law of sin and death,’ then it is only a question of time, when the vitalising force shall flow into all the cracks and crannies of our being and deliver us wholly from the bondage of corruption in the outer as well as in the inner life; for they who have learned that Christ is the life of their lives upon earth can never cease their appropriation of the fulness of His quickening power until He has ‘changed the body of their humiliation into the likeness of the body of His glory, according to the working whereby He is able to subdue even all things unto Himself.’
Brethren! He Himself has said, and His words I beseech you to remember though you forget all mine, ‘He that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and he that liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.’ ‘Believest thou this?’
Alexander MacLaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture (1904–1910) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
C. I. Scofield 1917 · Public Domain On v5 Death (spiritual), Summary: Spiritual death is the state of…
dead
Death (spiritual), Summary: Spiritual death is the state of the natural or unregenerate man as still in his sins. Eph 2:1 alienated from the life of God Eph 4:18; Eph 4:19 and destitute of the Spirit. Prolonged beyond the death of the body, spiritual death is a state of eternal separation from God in conscious suffering. This is called "the second death."; Rev 2:11; Rev 20:6; Rev 20:14; Rev 21:8.
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saved (See Scofield "Rom 1:16").
The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
Paul E. Kretzmann 1924 · Public Domain On v4 God’s grace manifested toward the sinners:
God’s grace manifested toward the sinners:
v. 4. But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love where with he loved us,
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v. 5. even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved,)
v. 6. and hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
v. 7. that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.
v. 8. For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God;
v. 9. not of works, lest any man should boast.
v. 10. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.
Paul now introduces the subject of the sentence begun in v. 1. His thought is: God gave to us, who are now Christians, while we were still dead with reference to our trespasses, spiritual life. The reason for this is given: God, however, being rich in mercy, on account of the great love wherewith He loved us. In the entire passage there is not a word of merit on the part of man, the entire process of regeneration or conversion is ascribed to God alone. Because He was rich, is rich to this day, rich beyond all human understanding, in mercy, in free favor and benevolence toward fallen mankind, and by reason of the great love, a love entirely unmerited on our part, with which He loved us, therefore He showed us mercy. The same God who is angry, who must be angry with sin, is the God of grace, of a mercy that is so rich as to be exhaustless, Joh 3:16.
Now comes the great contrast: Even when we were dead by reason of transgressions, He made us alive with Christ,—by grace you are saved. When we were in that terrible condition of spiritual death, as shown in our transgression of God’s holy Law, when we were without the faintest bit of saving knowledge of God, without fear, love, and trust in Him, when there was in us nothing but a total inability with regard to the things which pertain to our salvation, then God gave us life together with Christ. As Christ, by the life which He received in the grave, did not return to the former mode of living on earth, but entered into a new manner of existence, as He is now in a new, transfigured, spiritual, state and life, so we were made partakers of this life according to our spirit, when God quickened us from our spiritual death. The new life of regeneration is life out of the life of Christ. By this act of God salvation has been given to us, by the free grace in Christ, as Paul is careful to remark by way of parenthesis. Note the sharp and absolute contrast between death and life: one moment a person is dead, without the slightest evidence of life in any form, the next moment he is alive, with at least some show of life, even if that be expressed merely as a desire for salvation. One thing is clear: there is no intermediate stage, no neutral ground; the change from spiritual death to spiritual life is one step, and that step is the work of God alone.
So wonderful is this process that the apostle expatiates upon it: And He has raised us with Him and placed us with Him in the heavenly regions in Christ Jesus. Just as Christ, as true man, was raised from the dead and placed at the right hand of God, where He now leads a heavenly mode of existence, 1Co 15:48, so we, by our conversion, have become partakers of the same essence. Our mind is now set, inclined, toward heavenly things. The exalted Christ has elevated our spirit into the spiritual, divine, heavenly life, all by means of the Gospel of our salvation, chap. 1:13.
God’s purpose in working regeneration in us in this manner is finally stated: That He might show in the ages that are coming the superabundant wealth of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. Our salvation here in time is an advance payment, earnest-money, assuring us of the last and most perfect manifestation of God’s grace, which lies beyond the present age and world. When the ages of this world come to an end and the period of eternity dawns upon us, then we, who were by nature children of wrath, but now partakers of God’s grace in Christ, shall experience the full riches of the grace of God. In Christ Jesus, our Redeemer and Mediator, we shall then receive the full benevolence and kindness of God in all eternity, we shall see the face of our heavenly Father and taste and see the beauty of the Lord, world without end.
All these wonderful blessings are gifts of God’s free grace: For by the grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, God’s is the gift, not of works, that no. one should glory. By and in our regeneration and conversion we have been made partakers of the salvation gained by Christ; by being awakened from spiritual death and given the life in and with Christ, we have become justified before God. All this is a work of God’s free grace, transmitted to us through the hand of faith; we are thus regenerated, justified, by faith. In our heart, which was spiritually dead, God has enkindled the flame of faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. And this flame, just as soon as it sent up the first spark and began to glow, spread life throughout the formerly dead and cold members. Thus faith is the beginning of the new spiritual life. In this work of spiritual regeneration, of quickening to new life, all cooperation on the part of man is expressly and emphatically excluded. God’s free gift and gracious present it is, not a reward for works performed by man by which he might have made himself worthy of being regenerated in the sight of God; no merit in us was considered, even had there been anything to point to in this respect, all boasting on the part of man is cut off absolutely. On our part we have not contributed even the slightest part toward our conversion, neither was it occasioned by any doing or conduct on our part. "That the glory of that salvation belongs wholly to God and in no degree to man, and that it has been so planned and so effected as to take from us all ground for boasting, is enforced on Paul’s hearers again and again, in different connections, with anxious concern and utmost plainness of expression, Rom 3:17; 1Co 1:29; 1Co 4:7; Gal 6:14; Php 3:3."
And another fact is adduced by Paul to show that we Christians have no reason to make the advantages which we enjoy before others a matter of boasting: For His handiwork we are, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we should walk in them. The emphasis again is on the side of God; it is God who gave us the position which we hold as Christians. It is God, also, who performed the work of the new creation in us, so that we are in the fullest sense of the word the work of His hands, fashioned by Him in Christ Jesus, through whose redemption and life we have received the new spiritual life. By virtue of this new life, which is here again, in its totality, ascribed to the creative power of God, we are prepared for good works, we are able and ready to perform such deeds as are pleasing to our heavenly Father. These good works, which are the evidence of the new creature in us, by which our Christianity is tested and approved, have been made ready and set forth by God before we ever thought of performing them. God is the unseen Source from which the good works spring, His creative power is their final explanation. And by and through our fellowship with Christ these good works are performed in us; Christ, in whom we live and move and have our being, makes us partakers of His gifts and virtues, is expressed in our life and conduct; Christ’s holiness, purity, humility, meekness, benevolence, and kindness appear in the lives of the Christians. And so all glorying on the part of the believers is excluded, as a matter of fact is never indulged in. A true Christian does not even boast of the good works which it is his privilege to perform, knowing that it is the power of Christ and God in him that enables him to follow the example of Christ.
Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
unfoldingWord translationNotes 2017 · CC BY-SA 4.0 On v4 God is rich in mercy
God is rich in mercy
"God is abundant in mercy" or "God is very kind to us"
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because of his great love with which he loved us
"because of his great love for us" or "because he loves us very much"
While we were dead in trespasses, he made us alive together in Christ
This shows how a sinful person is unable to obey God until he is given new spiritual life just like a dead person is unable to respond physically unless he is raised from the dead. (See: Metaphor)
he made us alive together in Christ
"In Christ" and similar expressions are metaphors that frequently occur in the New Testament letters. They express the strongest kind of relationship possible between Christ and those who believe in him.
by grace you have been saved
This can be stated in an active form. AT: "God saved us because of his great kindness toward us" (See: Active or Passive)
God raised us up together with Christ
Here to raise up is an idiom for causing someone who has died to become alive again. Possible meanings are 1) because God has caused Christ to come alive again, God has already given Paul and the believers in Ephesus new spiritual life. AT: "God has given us new life because we belong to Christ" or 2) because God has caused Christ to come alive again, the believers in Ephesus can know that after they die they will live with Christ, and Paul can speak of the believers living again as if it has already happened. AT: "We can be sure that God will give us life as he has caused Christ to come alive again" (See: Predictive Past and Idiom)
in the heavenly places
"in the supernatural world." The word "heavenly" refers to the place where God is. See how this is translated in Ephesians 1:3.
in Christ Jesus
"In Christ Jesus" and similar expressions are metaphors that frequently occur in the New Testament letters. They express the strongest kind of relationship possible between Christ and those who believe in him.
in the ages to come
"in the future"
translationWords
God
mercy
love
die
trespass
life
in Christ
grace
save
heaven
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 vv3–5 2:3 Unconverted people are naturally under the control of…
2:3 Unconverted people are naturally under the control of the passionate desires and inclinations of our sinful nature (see Rom 3:9-20, 23). Because of their sin, they are subject to God’s anger, because God hates sin (see Eph 5:6; Rom 1:18; 2:5, 8; 3:5, 19; 4:15; 5:9; 9:22; 12:19; 13:4-5; Col 3:6; 1 Thes 1:10; 2:16; 5:9).
Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.