The Immorality of the Heathen
R. W. Dale, LL. D. Ephesians 4:18 Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them… We are environed by an invisible, Divine, and eternal world. It does not lie far away from us in the remote future, but surrounds us now as the starry heavens surround the common earth, There is a faculty in us which, when inspired and illuminated by the Spirit of God, enables us to see it. When once that world is revealed to us our whole conception of human duty and of human destiny is changed. We discover that the pleasures and pains of this brief and transitory life, its poverty and its wealth, its honours and its shame, are of secondary importance, that there is a kind of unreality in them all, that they are external to us, that they are rapidly passing away. In this life indeed it is impossible for us not to be affected by them; and they have their place in the discipline of our righteousness. But our horizon has widened, and we see beyond them. We discover that it is only the larger world which has been revealed to us by Christ that is real and enduring; and that compared with its august and glorious realities "things seen and temporal," are but passing shadows. We see that the true life of man is the eternal and Divine life by which he is related to what is eternal and Divine; that the true honour, the true wealth, the true wisdom, the true happiness of man are found in that eternal and Divine kingdom. But Paul says that heathen races are living among things seen and temporal, not among things unseen and eternal. The faculty by which they should be brought into contact with what is real and enduring, is impaired, so that it mistakes shadows for substances, dreams for realities: they "walk in the vanity of their mind." And as no light reaches them from the infinite and eternal world, they are "darkened in their understanding." Darkness and death go together. Man was so created that the root of his perfection is in God. But where the knowledge of God is lost the life of God is lost. Heathen men are living in regions of moral darkness, in which the life of God cannot be theirs. They are separated, estranged, "alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them." But the ignorance is not a mere intellectual defect involving no moral fault; they are "alienated from the life of God...because of the hardening of their heart." Their increasing moral insensibility was the real cause of their ignorance; and their ignorance and moral insensibility were the causes of their alienation from the life of God. What kind of men they had become through this hardening of their heart Paul describes in words which it is not possible to read without a sense of horror. They were "past feeling." They had ceased to he sensitive to the obligations of truth, of honesty, of kindness, of purity; and to the guilt of falsehood, of injustice, of cruelty, of sensual sin. They committed the grossest vices, and were conscious of no shame. Their imagination was no longer fascinated by the beauty and nobleness of virtue. No sentiment of personal dignity checked the indulgence of the foulest and most disgraceful passions. They had no reverence for the purer and loftier traditions of better times. They were untouched by the censure and scorn of the wiser and nobler of their contemporaries. All the inducements that draw men to virtue and all the restraints that hold them back from vice were destroyed. They were "past feeling." Their sin was therefore gross and habitual. They were not betrayed into sin, against their better purposes; they were not merely overcome now and then by the violence of their passions; they were not mastered by some malignant power, against which they struggled in vain; nor were their worst excesses followed by any remorse. They sinned deliberately and without any protest from their reason or their conscience, or any purer and more generous affections in their moral life. "They gave themselves up" — it was their own act, done with set purpose and with the consent of their whole nature — "they gave themselves up to lasciviousness" — to a life in which there was a wilful, reckless, wanton defiance of all moral restraints. Vice, by their own choice and intention, was not to be an occasional incident in their life, it was to be their main business, the employment at which they were to "work"; and as some men have an insatiable desire for money, these men had an insatiable desire for every kind of impurity, "they gave themselves up to lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness." It is a horrible picture. But Paul was describing the men among whom he had lived and among whom the Christians at Ephesus were living still. The morality of the Greek cities of Asia Minor was so base and so foul that we wonder that the fires of God did not descend to destroy them. Is it surprising that with such a moral environment the Christians at Ephesus, who a few years before had been heathen men themselves, required the ethical teaching contained in the later chapters of this Epistle? (R. W. Dale, LL. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: WEB: being darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardening of their hearts;