Ephesians 5-6
Christianity, this closing sermon insists, is a supernaturalized existence from top to bottom, no natural life with religious accessories added on. Every imperative reviewed across Ephesians 5:21-6:9 depends on that supernatural reality rather than standing as independent moral advice. A proper view of law and imperative, the series’ whole burden, comes down finally to this: obedience is supernatural or it isn’t real obedience at all.
The common claim that Paul is straightforwardly against slavery gets called unbiblical here, a real complication this sermon doesn’t try to smooth over. ‘Manstealing,’ condemned explicitly in 1 Timothy 1, is distinguished carefully from the household slavery Ephesians 6 addresses. Believers, in any case, cannot rightly consider themselves apart from Christ as a slave and God as a master, categories the modern reader resists but Paul assumes.
Christ’s own ministry focuses, at its center, on revealing the heavenly Father, a focus liberal theology has tended to flatten into a vague universal fatherhood available to anyone. Ephesians 6:4’s instruction to fathers assumes something more specific: fathers who actually know God the Father are the ones equipped to correct their own children rightly. What the verse is really asking for is knowing the Father, more than disciplinary technique.
The gospel begins with a gift, grace itself, which is to say it begins with Christ rather than with a demand. God’s mercy is grounded, Ephesians 2:4 insists, in his own eternal love rather than in anything found in the one being shown mercy. Covenant children inherit that same grace, though the sermon is careful to insist grace is never license for sin.
What looks like a simple exhortation to children is actually grand theology rather than a simplified sidebar to the letter’s real content, and the common division of Ephesians into doctrine and application is called superficial here. ‘In the Lord,’ in 6:1, is the phrase that does the real work. Children can obey, finally, because Christ himself already obeyed on their behalf.
Believers’ heavenly life with Christ is a present reality, more than a future hope only, a claim Ephesians 1:3 and 2:5-6 both make explicit. ‘Heavenly places,’ the recurring phrase in 1:20-21 and 6:12, gets defined carefully across both occurrences. Even children, on this reading, are genuinely caught up in the spiritual battle those heavenly places describe; their age shields them from none of it.
Paul’s brief instruction to children in Ephesians 6:1-3 gets real credit here for its own theological brilliance, no afterthought to the household code. Christ’s own drawing of children near himself, even amid the temple’s chaos in Matthew 21, supplies the pattern behind Paul’s instruction. Children are treated throughout as real recipients of gospel address rather than merely objects of adult instruction.
Ephesians 4 through 6 develops one sustained theme, the Christian walk, inside which singlehood gets a real hearing rather than being treated as a lesser, waiting state. There is no marriage in the eternal realm, a fact this sermon takes as genuinely freeing rather than merely a technicality. Marriage and children, in the meantime, point toward heaven; they don’t compete with it.
Ephesians 5:22’s instruction to wives is taken as genuinely offensive to modern ears, an offense this sermon doesn’t try to soften. Genesis 2 supplies the older pattern: women made, in a real sense, for the wedding itself. Depravity on both sides, male and female, is what actually ruins marriage, and both a husband’s love and a wife’s submission are located finally in Christ rather than in raw human capacity.
The claim that Paul and Peter are simply antiquated teachers, their household instructions culturally bound and safely ignored, gets a direct, three-part Reformed response here. Distancing the modern church from what the Bible actually says, this sermon warns, is finally the same move as distancing it from Christ himself. Paul and Peter are not embarrassing relics to be managed but apostolic authority to be received.