I have previously mentioned that Paul’s letters did not have our modern chapter and verse divisions. Thus, when the Christians in Ephesus heard this letter read, they did not think in terms of the thought divisions that naturally occur to us when we read modern translations. When they read, “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord,” in Ephesians 4:17, their minds immediately connected it to what Paul had just written regarding leadership gifts in the church and what it meant to be mature in Christ, to what he was introducing in verse 17. They also had in mind all that Paul had previously written in the letter as well as their memories of his teaching while with them for two years. Given the lines of thought in Paul’s letter, it is likely the letter was read aloud numerous times to the church and individual leaders read the letter.
I mention this because it relates to the title I have given to this portion of Ephesians 4:17 through the remainder of this chapter. Modern commentators are mixed on how they treat Ephesians 4:17-24 considering the remainder of the chapter. For instance, Noel Brooks and John Stott, whose comments we have referenced in this study of Ephesians, both connect Ephesians 4:17 with Paul’s comments through all or part of Ephesians 5.[1] On the other hand, N.T. Wright treats Ephesians 4:17-24 as primarily related to the Paul’s arguments that began in Ephesians 1:1 and runs through 4:24.[2]
Admittedly you may be wondering, “so what?” The title of this essay attempts to view Ephesians 4:17 following as something clearly built upon all that Paul has previously written. It should be clear that the writers referenced in footnote one completely agrees with that. The question is where does the emphasis of 4:17-24 fall: primarily upon the previous comments or is it an introduction to holy living? The reality is that it is probably both. I cannot imagine Paul’s Ephesian audience making a sharp distinction as they read/heard the letter. I am treating Ephesians 4:17-24 as an introduction to holy living as a “preface” section reminding his Gentile and Jewish readers of the contrast between their old way of living prior to Jesus as the Messiah, and the new way of life to which they are called.
In my reading of Rev. Paul Evans yet unpublished work, Hope for Holiness, which focuses on Ephesians 4:21 and its larger context, he takes a similar view, writing, “(The Apostle Paul) …. Views the saints as those who are sealed with the Spirit of promise, the anticipation of which (are) final and mature godliness (Eph. 1:13-14; 4:22-24), and he views their bodies as temples of the Spirit, a sanctified dwelling place for God, out of which concrete expressions of practical righteousness must and should arise in the present age – ‘glorify God in your bodies’ (2 Cor. 6:14-18).”
So, why is Ephesians 4:17-24 a “preface” to the question of holy living? First, from Ephesians 4:17 through 5:21 there are four English uses of “therefore,” using three different Greek words (4:17, 25; 5:1, 17).[3] The main impact of these conjunctions and prepositions is to describe a series of implications or results based on previous comments or actions. Markus Barth translates Ephesians 4:17, “Now in the Lord[’s name] I say and insist upon the following:” Barth adds, “Paul speaks with an unmistakable tone of authority.”[4] Paul’s insisted that he had heard from the Lord regarding what constitutes the ground for holy living since the Messiah had come. Paul’s view was not that of one opinion about holy living. His view was an insistence that He had received just as much Holy Spirit revelation about how we live as he had received concerning the meaning of the Messiah’s earthly and heavenly ministry described in the previous chapters.
These verses provide the foundation, or ground, upon which Paul expects followers of Jesus to source their lives. The metaphor of foundation was used by Jesus in a parable found in Luke 6:48 and used by Paul in Ephesians 1:4; 2:20.[5] The idea of the ground, soil, also reflects the teachings of Jesus and metaphors from agriculture that Paul knew.[6] Thus, in verses 17-24 Paul clearly contrasts the two primary sources that influence, perhaps even we can say, dictate, how we live.
The first source is the walk of Gentiles (4:17-19). Paul had earlier described this way of life, “(you) were dead in trespasses 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 sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:1-3). Later in 2:12 he further elaborated that Gentiles “were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.”
Now in 4:17-19 Paul added to what he had already addressed as characteristic of the Gentile walk, way of life: futile minds, darkened understanding, alienated from the life of God. All of this is “because of the ignorance in them and because of the blindness of their hearts” (verse 18). Furthermore, this ignorance and blindness cause them to be “past feeling, given over to lewdness,” all of which causes “all uncleanness with (or in) greediness” (verse 19).
Reading these descriptions of the Gentile walk is like watching contemporary news channels, social media, and the entertainment industry! Today we are as much under the influence of these dark spiritual forces as were Paul’s contemporaries in Ephesus.
Let us explore some of Paul’s words and phrases a little more in 4:17-19. To have a “futile mind” is to live with an empty, idle, foolish mind. The mind is our thought world. It is like a computer, what you put in is what comes out! Jesus said this in Matthew 15:18, 19, “Those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart (a metaphor for the mind), and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” The Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich Lexicon refers to this futility as “purposelessness, transitoriness.”[7]
“Having their understanding darkened” (verse 18) is a direct assault on the modern Western way of thinking. Across almost every spectrum of thought and education, the notion of God and His light as present and essential is absent. Regardless of political alliances, so much of what we see and receive is by nature darkened because it does not even acknowledge that “the beginning of wisdom/knowledge is the fear of the Lord” (Proverbs 1:7, 29; 8:13; 9:10). In many circles of our modern world, to argue a Biblical worldview is to be mocked, marginalized, and often rejected as a thoughtful person.
The third condition is alienation from the “life of God.” Sinful humanity cannot on its own “discover” God’s life-giving presence and power. Human effort to do so is called “religion.” Only divine grace revealed in the gospel, which is revealed in the Word of God, can open our minds and hearts to discern that it is the Creator and Redeemer knocking at the door of our understanding and heart. We are by nature estranged from God because of sin. In the gospel God has taken the initiative in Jesus the Messiah to bridge the gap of this estrangement. The reality is that we do not discover God. God seeks and saves us. It is that discovery on our part, conviction by the Holy Spirit, which brings to our spiritual and conscious awareness of our lost condition and God’s amazing grace to bring us home.
These three conditions occur because of “ignorance” and “blindness of heart.” Notice that “ignorance” refers to “futility of mind.” “Blindness of heart” refers to “understanding darkened.” The word translated “blindness” in the NKJV is porosis (πώρωσις). It refers to hardening, dullness, obstinacy, insensibility.[8] Thielman described the condition of unbelieving Gentiles as “people who do not understand God or the world as it truly is.”[9]
Paul continued in Ephesians 4:20 to describe the condition of lost people. No doubt from his lengthy time in Greek and Roman cities he saw the moral, spiritual, intellectual, and relational fruit of the spirit of lawlessness and death in the daily lives of people. I cannot help but think of the title of Philip Rieff’s analysis of the condition of humanity outside of moral constraints, My Life Among the Deathworks.” That title describes how Paul and other Christians viewed living in a world without the truth of God. It accurately describes how we live today in our present world.
In this verse Paul names three aspects of life among the deathworks. First, it is a world where people are “past feeling.” Theilman translates the Greek word apelgekotes as despondent. This is the only use of this word in the New Testament and means “that one has abandoned, or nearly abandoned, hope.”[10] Callous is another word that be used to describe those who are hardened in heart. Their conscience is seared by sin, and they are under the dominion of demonic spirits of the world. Secondly, such people have lost any sense of shame and decorum in life. Pleasure and self-aggrandizement are the goal of life. Sexual licentiousness characterizes such a life. We see this in widespread sex trafficking, in widespread pornography, in the entertainment industry that promotes and celebrates all forms of sexual deviant behavior. Third, this spirit manifests itself in “all uncleanness with greediness.” In other words, we treat others as objects of our own satisfaction. The spirit of greed is far more than about money. It is about the control and dominion of others for our own gain.
In Greek and English, seven words in Ephesians 4:20 mark the difference between people born again and those still living in the spirit of the world: “But you have not so learned Christ.” Those seven words are a line in the sand for everyone who has acknowledged Christ in saving faith. These seven words draw the line between the fallacy of “accepting Christ but continuing in sin.” Ephesians 4:21 indicates that the early Christians knew the teachings of Jesus. Early missionaries, like Paul and Peter, knew what Jesus had said and done and shared those accounts as part of their preaching and teaching when they established local communities of faith. To “have heard Him and have been taught by Him” meant that the life of Jesus was clearly part of early preaching. When preachers recounted words and deeds of Jesus, it was as if the listeners were really hearing Jesus and being taught by Jesus!
Such direct and anointed communication meant a clear demarcation between life among the deathworks and life in the kingdom of God. In Ephesians 4:22-24 Paul described three specific actions that characterize what it means to be delivered from the power of darkness and conveyed into the kingdom of the Son of God (Colossians 1:13). Using day to day language, Paul referred to the change in our lives in Christ as equivalent to “putting off” old clothes and “putting on” new clothes. We “put off . . . the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts,” and we “put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness” (4:22, 24). This is called sanctification, the recognition that after we are born again there remains our fallen nature, our “old man,” that must consciously apply the redeeming, sanctifying power of the blood of Jesus and Word of God to our lives.
N.T. Wright expressed like this in attempting to express what should be occurring in baptism, or when we confess Christ as Savior, “You have to make it your own. As in the dramatic event of an early Christian baptism, you must take off those shabby old clothes, the old humanity with its mental and physical habits, and put on the new clothes, the new humanity, by being renewed in the spirit of your mind. The place where the pagan world goes wrong is the place where the Jesus-followers must get it right. The renewal of the mind, as in Romans 12:1-2, is at the centre of it all. Learning to think Christianity is near the heart of what it means to be living as the new humanity.”[11]
I close this “Preface to Holy Living” with Rev. Paul Evans commentary on Ephesians 4:22-24, “Paul taught in his theology of what we now call sanctification, that it consists in both decisive, choice, faith-based, and surrender to the God and a progressive, developmental aspect leading to the goal of full moral and spiritual maturity.” Further elaborating, Evans addressed the Apostle Paul’s view of salvation “as involving an exchange of ruling principles, the ruling principles of the flesh or old life that is connected to sin, for the new, morally transformed life operating under the direction and influence of the Holy Spirit (cf. Rom. 8: 1-4; Gal. 5: 16-25).”[12]
[1] Brooks, Ephesians: Outlined and Unfolded, connects it through 5:21 (page 172), a view also held by Hendriksen. John Stott, The Message of Ephesians, connects 4:17 through 5:4 (page 133). Markus Barth in Volume II of his Anchor Bible Commentary on Ephesians, treats 4:17-32 as its own structure. Thielman in his Ephesians commentary treats Ephesians 4:17 to 5:2 (page 290).
[2] Wright, The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2025) page 80ff. Wright takes a minority position that Paul was imprisoned in Ephesus, an imprisonment not mentioned in Acts or elsewhere.
[3] οὖν in 4:17; 5:1; δίο in 4:25; δία in 5:17. The first two are usually inferential conjunctions that indicate what follows is the result of or inference from the preceding (Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 597). The last is a preposition.
[4] Barth, Ephesians 4-6, Volume II, 498, 499. The structure of “Lord’s” in the citation is Barth’s,
[5] Paul would have heard teachings of Jesus through the oral tradition as well as the work of Luke in preparing his Gospel account. In his letters, Paul referred to a “foundation” in Romans 15:20; 1 Corinthians 3:10, 11, 12; 1 Timothy 6:19; 2 Timothy 2:19.
[6] Matthew 13:8; Luke 8:8, 15; 1 Corinthians 3:6; 1 Timothy 3:15.
[7] Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, 496.
[8] Bauer, Arndt, Gingrich, 739
[9] Thielman, p. 298
[10] Ibid., p. 299
[11] Wright, op. cit., page 93.
[12] Paul Evans, The Hope for Holiness: The Divine End-Game, A Fresh Consideration of Ephesians 4:12-14. This book is yet unpublished and these quotes are used by permission.
