2. Then God is dealing with living realities in His Word. If doctrines tell me that God is dealing with me, precepts tell me that it is with me God is dealing. God is not revealing an indefinite light that may sparkle before me. He addresses Himself to me, a corrupt creature, and says, “Let him that stole steal no more.”
3. There is this beauty in precepts. They do greatly honor the doctrine; they are the expression of the hidden moral virtue that lies in the doctrine. For instance, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God.” The doctrine had already taught me that I had received the Spirit as the seal of salvation. The precept tells me, that the Spirit I have received is sensitive of the least touch of unholiness. So the doctrine is glorified by the precept.
4. I will tell you further what precepts do. They show you that your holiness must be dispensational. You will say, Are not God’s demands always the same? No; I boldly say they are not. We can only judge of this in the dispensed light of God. Is it unholiness now for the Jew to traffic with the Gentile? No; it is not. Yet under the law they dare not eat with them. So holiness may vary its form.
Now suppose I were to keep a good conscience, just because my conscience resented evil; and were moral, because morality is comely, would that be Christian morality? No holiness is Christian holiness but such as derives itself from the truth. When you come to apply that to yourself, you will find you have something to do. You will have to associate the Lord Jesus with every bit of your life. How did the elders obtain a good report? Was it a precept that worked Abraham’s separation from his kindred and his father’s house, and Moses’s abdication of Egypt? It was God making Himself known to them. Precepts never will make a Christian man. The soul must come in contact with the revelation of God. “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us.” Now, let me ask you, supposing I was a good neighbor, just to keep my conscience a little easy, would that be meeting the demands of this passage? “Walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us;” that makes kindness Christian kindness. I take the Lord Jesus as my great prototype. Does not this take morals out of the hand of Moses? This puts my morals on a new ground altogether. I am to walk in love, because Christ has loved me, and given Himself for me an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savor. The Lord has not only presented you in all the value of His blood, but in the sweet savor of His sacrifice. Is it accepted in the righteous one you are? No; but “accepted in the Beloved.” The high priest, when he took the blood into the holiest, went in enveloped in a balmy, savory cloud of incense, was it a grudging acceptance that waited on the sacrifice of Christ? No; it was a delighted acceptance; and you are in all the value of that acceptance. Well, then, could I give the atmosphere, in which I am set before God, one glance of faith, and come back to indulge my enmities?
You know your renewed conscience would never be satisfied by merely doing what is right. You must have the springs of action purified. It is what Christ has done that asks it from you. These uncleannesses, as I read in verse 3, do not become saints. Am I to lay aside uncleanness, because it is uncleanness? No; but because it does not become saints. So it goes on. “For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord.” I refuse participation in uncleanness, because I was darkness; but now I am transformed. I am a new creature, a child of light. And I pause here again to ask you, Would you qualify this beautiful intensity? Do you want to leave Christ when you come to the practical details of life? We never leave Christ. So when we come to meditate on conflict, we are just as much in His company as in the details of life, or as up in heaven in the early part of the epistle. There is something sublime in this. If a doctrine comes to unfold God to me, a precept comes to show me the moral virtue that lies hid in it. The fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness as in the benevolent virtues—righteousness, as in integrity and honesty, and all connected with truth. We find goodness and righteousness in the world; but we shall not find them connected with truth, save in the household of faith. These things are given to make us practically Christ. As an old writer says, “Christ Himself is the ground of all laws to a Christian;” one loathes cultivation of soul by anything short of Christ. Christ would have us sober, truthful, honest. Now are ye light; and what quality of light. Light “in the Lord.” You have not kindled the spark that is in you from Moses, but from the Lord of Light. You have borrowed a ray from Him, and you are to walk in it, proving what is acceptable to Jesus. I am sure, after this, we shall not ask why the precepts of the New Testament, when we see the blessed Lord connected with each bit of the details, the Spirit bringing down my Lord Jesus to be the sanction of my ways.
You will often find here that the Spirit is not satisfied with mere abnegation of evil. He insists on the cultivation of good. “Let him that stole, steal no more; but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good.” There is the negative in company with the positive. The evil is denied, and the good is brought in. So here, “Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.” Because you have put off the old man; but are you merely an emptied, stript thing? No; you have put on the new man. As the old man would have made plunder of what belonged to another, so now you are to work for him whom before you would have plundered. Moses never set me to that work. Will Christ measure Himself by Moses? Will He measure Himself by anything but Himself? There is such dignity in this. We should keep morals up in their own elevation. Man would drag them down; I do not say this, when we get Moses passed through the filter of Christ, as in the sermon on the mount. Would Moses have required you to lay down your life for another? Christ does, because Christ has done it. “Wherefore it saith,” I would rather have it in verse 14. It is the voice and language of light. The light that is now shining is the light of Christ. So “Christ shall give thee light;” a peculiar moral light has risen now.
“See then that ye walk circumspectly... redeeming the time.” Now, how is understanding to exercise itself? In the philosophy of the schools? I am to have an understanding of the will of the Lord. He keeps you, again I say, as a heavenly creature in company with Christ; as a man walking across the face of the earth, He keeps you equally with Christ. When He sends you into the field of battle, He arrays you in Christ, He puts Christ upon you.
Who but the Spirit could come down into the traffic of such a world, and keep Christ in your company through it all? So the old man gets drunk with wine. The new man has the Spirit to fill himself with. If that is to be mortified, this is to be cultivated. And how will this filling with the Spirit express itself? “In psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs.” There is a vessel filled with the Spirit. It is the very same vessel, only transmuted. It was once filled with wine; now, in a spirit of thanksgiving, it is bubbling up with melody to the Lord. We have been in a fervent heated atmosphere, heated by the Holy Ghost; and now we are suddenly let down, with a beautiful calmness, into the ordinary virtue of taking a low place. There is a beauty in the very style of this. How can we be sufficiently charmed with it! We do not know which to admire most, the doctrinal or the practical part.
Having come down to that, He details it, and addresses husbands and wives. There, I need not say, how deeply we are in company with Christ. Do not a wife and husband get their sanctions from Christ? Many a good wife never thinks of the Lord Jesus. Is that a Christian wife Here let me turn aside to note a title that occurs three times in this epistle. Christ is called, “The Head” in chapters 1, 4, and 5; but in each place the Headship has a different aspect.
In the first chapter it is as the Head of the Body. He is Head over all things to the church; the principal feature of the mystic man.
In chapter 4, it is as being Head of influence, dispensing virtue to the members. “From whom the whole body, fitly joined together... maketh increase of the body.”
Here, in chapter 5, we see Him in another aspect, as the Head of authority, “The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the Head of the church.” In verse 30, it ought to be, “This is the great mystery.” Then, having addressed wives by the common duties that belong to them, in chapter 6, it is the same thing with children. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” Even in the time of Moses, this was an honorable duty. But here, it is because it is right in the view of the Lord. This takes it out from the legal promise, and the Lord becomes the new sanction.
So with fathers. A father ought to be his child’s Christian servant. I mean that he should every hour be watching that the nurture and admonition of the Lord be ministered to his child. He should minister Christ to him.
As to servants—beautiful this is! —they are to be obedient. It matters not the character of their master. They are to be doing service “as unto the Lord.” Did you ever get up to that verse in James 1:9, when you see people maintaining station in this life, that you ought positively to rejoice in anticipation of these distinctions passing away? Not touching the thing in passing along. 1 Timothy 6 would tell me that; but it ought to be the hidden joy of the heart that, by-and-by, station will have passed away with the fashion of this world.
Then, as to masters. Do not be guilty of threatening. The lordly ways of masters and mistresses are hateful. How does your Master in heaven treat you’?
Here the practical part ends; but I ask, does it not dignify you? As George Herbert says, “Who sweeps a room, if for Thy laws, makes that and the action fine.” It is the same thing to Christ, if you are up there in His company. It is the same Jesus who is enfolding, embracing, enriching you in every step of the journey, and that for His own eternity.
Chapter 6
We have observed that this epistle naturally distributes itself into three parts—doctrinal and practical; and here, from verse 10 to the end, we get a scene of conflict. Teaching, Walk, and Conflict.
The teaching, we remember, was the education of the church, the body of Christ; and we were observing that there was heavenly calling before there was church calling. We have constant proof all along the line of Old Testament days, of heavenly calling; but we have only distant shadowy intimations of the body of Christ, as has been said by another, “It would have sounded absurd in the ears of a Jew, to talk in divine mysterious language, of giving Messiah a body, completing Him, filling Him out.” It is not said of Abraham, that he was blessed in heavenly places in Christ, incorporated in Christ. This is the grand teaching of this highest of all the epistles. Then, leaving the doctrinal part, we enter on the practical part, which goes on to verse 9 of this chapter 6; and I should like to repeat what we were observing. When we come to the practical part of the epistle, we get the doctrinal part gloriously honored. Precepts become, in the hands of the Spirit, the expression of the moral virtue that lies in the doctrine. If I had my heart open to God, I should be guided by the intrinsic virtue of my calling; and, oh, if we have common spiritual taste, we must enjoy that! Is it not beautiful, to see the doctrine and precepts thus in company!
In the same way, Peter stands before the doctrine, and wonders that we should not prove the moral virtue of it; and so do I. Then, in the next place, it gives precepts a dispensational character. God is not dwelling in the same light now, as when He was sitting on the throne in Jerusalem. That was an earthly light; a light that shone on earth. The light in which God now dwells is the awful, yet most precious mystery, that He has been rejected here in His dear Son, and that that Son is now glorified in heaven. And you must be in the light where God dwells. You must make God’s dispensational truth the rule of your ways. I speak not, of course, of the light in which God dwells, as in His own proper glory, as we read in 1 Timothy 6:16.
Now, the difference between chapters 5 and 6 is this.
In chapter 5 we see the saint taking his walk in the midst of the circumstances of human life. Here we see the saint in the field of battle. Do you believe your conflict is as constant as your walk? Are you to be in conflict today, and in conflict again tomorrow? There is plenty of work for us to do; our hands will be full enough if we are practical living saints of God.
Now, in opening this third view, he tells us to be strong in the Lord, and in the power of His might, taking to us the whole armor of God, that we may withstand in the evil day; and having done all, to stand. The Spirit contemplates that it is a war from beginning to end. There may be certain battles; but, having done with the specific fight, you must still stand as in a war. Are you prepared for finding human life a war? That is what this passage is pregnant with. Whether the specific fighting be present or not, your whole soul is to rest in the conclusion that it is incessant war, till you have done with this world, this flesh, and the devil. If two nations are at war, they may not be fighting every day; a battle may be a rare thing, but war has been proclaimed. The Lord forbid that you and I should not know that as long as we are in the body we are in a field of battle. “The evil day” is a specific battle. If we have won the victory, why are we still to stand? Because war has been proclaimed. Have you proclaimed war with the lusts that are in your members, and the spirit of the world around you? Your soul is to recognize, that while you are in the body you are a fighting man. That being your position, you are to put on the whole armor of God; “for we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Now, how do you understand this? Do you rest, in the thought that wicked spirits are in heavenly places? It is abundantly taught us. In 2 Chronicles 18 the Lord says, “Who shall entice Ahab king of, Israel?” “I will entice him,” says a spirit; “I will go out, and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” This is a fruitful, lively expression of the thing that is taken up in Ephesians 6. It is beautiful to see the Spirit so at home in His own Scriptures. He takes it up as a settled thing that Satan is in heaven. He does not make a difficulty or a question about it. He assumes it as a thing sealed and accredited, and so takes it up. What does the Lord say? “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” This was not a mere honorary expression. Then, in Revelation 12, Satan is cast down from heaven. Satan and the principalities and powers are now in heavenly places.
But what do these wicked spirits do? They come down with all their wiles, and lies, and deceivings, to practice them in your heart and mine; as in Micaiah’s vision, the lying spirit came down with a wile to Ahab; and again, as Satan tempts David to number the people. The Old and New Testaments are pregnant with all this. Paul says, “We are not ignorant of his devices;” and again, “Oh, full of all subtlety and all mischief, thou child of the devil.” All these prove that he acts by wiles. He acts by violence, and by persecution also; but that is not contemplated here. If we go over the story of Satan in Scripture, we shall find him an accuser. Was he not an accuser of the brethren in the book of Job? And is not the very same character attached to him in the book of the Apocalypse? Thus we now find ourselves put in the presence of the enemy. I am in the war, and I can never get out of it, though I may get out of the evil day. What then am I to do? I am to take the whole armor of God.
And now I just ask you to inspect each part of this armor. Is there one single piece of that which is declared to be the armor of God fitted to send you out into a field of battle with flesh and blood? Is that the way He armed Joshua and David? They were to meet flesh and blood, and they were carnal weapons which He put into their hands. Now, there is not a touch of that here. There are no slings, and stones, and jaw-bones of asses; but that is declared to be the whole armor of God. If this is not the armor I have on me, I am not fighting for Christ. Saints may take carnal weapons; but if I do—if, for instance, I go into a court of justice to assert my rights, do not let me talk of being in the light of God. That is where dispensational truth is so important. I find here that the Spirit sends me into a field of battle, and I find that my security depends on truth, righteousness, faith, peace, and the sword of the Spirit.
Now, supposing we were to describe a few of these wiles. Infidel heresies, superstitious vanities, evil doctrines, false expectations about the history of the world. We are not here in company with our lusts, but in conflict with direct attempts of the enemy. We must withstand the temptations of our hearts in walking through the world, as in chapter 5. Here we are set face to face with Satan, the deceivableness of unrighteousness, doctrinal heresies. These are the things we are to withstand. And is it not perfectly right, that being delivered by the Seed of the woman, we should make our war with him who was our captor? How could you attach yourself to Jesus, and not turn round in the face of the enemy, and let him know that you are at war with him? Having passed this fervent scene, we find that, having this armor on us, if a quickened condition of soul be not maintained in communion, the armor will be cumbrous. “Praying always... and for me... that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds.” Did you ever hear of such a thing as the ambassador of one nation being put in bonds by the nation to which he was sent? Why, Christ has fared worse in this world than any nation in it would. And, pray, what message did this ambassador bring? A message of boundless grace. And that is the way He has been treated. The law of nations would not allow it for an instant. Yet that is the way God, for 1800 years, in the person of His servants and witnesses, has consented to be treated.
Then he tells them that he sends Tychicus “that he may comfort your hearts.” Oh, if we could be in that way —in prison, yet able to comfort others! As dear Saunders, a clergyman in the Bishop of London’s coal-hole, sent to his wife, “Be merry, dear wife, be merry; we ‘re all merry here. We weep with Him now; but we shall laugh with Him forever.” That is like Paul, sending from a prison in Rome a cheering word to his brethren at Ephesus. What cannot the Spirit of God work?
The Lord grant that we may be taught by the doctrine, instructed in morals, and put in something of strength for the battle by this closing scene. Amen