I’ve been reading Ephesians again, and also the Ephesians commentary from The New International Commentary on the New Testament (older version). The author is E. K. Simpson, someone unfamiliar to me, and someone whose writing must be read with dictionary in hand—and least by me. It might not make a list of top commentaries on Ephesians, but I’m enjoying it, mostly for the language used.
Here’s Ephesians 2:1-3:
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Quoting Simpson’s commentary on verse 3, describing humanity’s natural depravity:
[T]he apostle is far too ingenuous to exempt himself from the black list of those whom the old serpent has … outwitted. We all carry about with us the tinder of corruption and our crafty adversary knows how to apply a match to the combustibles at hand. A powder-magazine can be commendably quiet so long as it keeps cool; but let a spark alight upon it and you may look for an explosion. The lusts of the flesh and of the mind only need provocatives to flare up in a baleful conflagration. Even apostles have no ground for boasting here; for they have not made themselves to differ from what they were aforetime. Paul can never forget his quondam career as a persecutor, nor does he shrink from a place in the ranks of the natural “children of wrath”, liable to seduction both by sensuous and mental appentecies. All alike, Jew and Gentile, are by natal proclivity inchoate children of wrath. We swerve from the very outset… .
This bill of indictment cannot but grate harshly on the ears of shallow religionists of effeminate sensibilities and an extenuating temper; and manifold are the attempts they make to elude it’s impact by the help of evolutionary or philosophical presuppositions. Fond of patting human nature on the back and of glossing over its vicious propensities, they persuade themselves to regard it as innocent in the main, or, if somewhat of a scapegrace, “more sinned against than sinning”. Its obliquities are frequently attributed to the development of the passions in advance of the judgment. But that complacent theory does not tally with the facts of the case. For, as the history of humanity abundantly proves, all mankind without exception turns aside to its own way. We are sinners in grain; every mother’s son learns to be naughty without book.
I see it already in the toddlers I know. Yes they are adorable, but no one has to give them lessons in naughtiness. It’s a natural talent.
I’ve done some vocabulary work for you.
- ingenuous: candid
- baleful: menacing
- conflagration: extensive and destructive fire.
- quondam: former
- appetencies: natural tendencies
- inchoate: nascent; not fully formed
- scapegrace: rascal
- obliquities: moral deviations
- in grain: by nature
Bonus link: What’s the purpose of Ephesians?, a video by Tom Ascol.