The Old You Preparation

Introduction:

Remember the tattered, soiled rags of sin you wore before you came to Christ? Maybe you were saved a little later in life, and those memories haven’t faded as quickly as you had hoped. But chances are that all of us keep a set of old clothes in the closet so we can slip back into familiar, comfortable patterns of sin every now and then. That’s why Paul told us to make a clean break with the past, to throw out all of our filthy rags for good.

The Bigger Picture: This subsection also divides neatly into two parts. First is a general exhortation to walk unlike their Gentile neighbours (vv. 17–24). The call of Christ means a transformation of life and its goals, the way of doing things. It means wearing the new man, displaying the presence of Christ like one wears clothing. This is the new way of life that is life in Christ. There follows a series of specific exhortations about different aspects of life, a listing of the kinds of things Paul means: lying, anger, stealing, speech and a call to kindness (vv. 25–32). The giftedness just discussed is supposed to take people into such a way of living.

4:17–32 Continuing his emphasis on unity, Paul urges believers to abandon former ways of living that have nothing to do with Christ. He reminds them of their previous life apart from God (Eph 4:17–19) and exhorts them to discard the old self, since they have been made new in Christ (vv. 20–24). As members of Christ’s body, believers are called to show integrity, kindness, and grace. They must overcome bitterness and anger and learn to forgive (vv. 25–32).

Appeals to abandon the life of the old humanity and live according to the new-creation humanity revealed in Jesus

defines the boundaries that separate insiders from outsiders, with “Gentiles” here clearly referring to pagans, not Christian Gentiles.

Having told us in preceding verses of the world-transforming and heaven-glorifying mission of the body of Christ, in which members with very different backgrounds and gifts are accepted as each does his or her part, the apostle now begins to discuss how each person will function. This section of his letter is a study in contrasts of what we are to put off and what to put on in order to do our part for the church to fulfill her purposes. The contrasts will be readily seen in the portions of the letter that we will cover in the future: we are to replace falsehood with truth, sinful anger with righteous anger, stealing with sharing, corrupt speech with edifying words. But before he describes all of these contrasts, Paul tells us why we must know them—the difference is really that of life and death. He warns us here that those who live according to the world’s ways are the walking dead—they will move about the earth without the joy and power that is true life.

The behavior of a believer is to be radically different from that of the unconverted. Paul reminded his readers of the blindness of lost people. Certainly no enlightened Christian should let such ignorant people influence what he believes or how he behaves.

Context:

I have divided this section into 3, verse 17-19 tells us of who we were before Christ, the old you, the unregenerate man, the state of all people who are not in Christ right now.

Next month, we will continue in verse 20-24, which will tell us what we are now in Christ. And in verse 25-32 we will see what we must become dahil na kay Christ tayo.

The verses that we will be studying is very heavy in exhortation, kung paano ba natin maipapamuhay yung pananampalataya natin kay Kristo, full of commands kung paano ba tayo maglakad bilang Kristiano. That’s why we need to be reminded kung ano yung mag fu fuel satin in order to walk worthy sa pagkakatawag satin ng Lord, and the power not to walk anymore sa mga kasalanan kung saan tayo iniligtas ng Diyos.

Because we can fall into two trap, the first one is legalism, when we read the passage of verse 17 onwards, we might have the thinking na kailangan natin ‘tong gawin to have a right standing before God, para maging pleasing and acceptable tayo sa Kanya, we need to do this para maging pleasing earn yung love N’ya. Ayun yung first trap na tinatawag nating legalism, that by doing good works we believe ma e earn natin yung salvation.

Another trap is antinomianism, eto naman yung paniniwala na since ligtas na tayo, we can live a life that pleases us rather than it pleases God. This believe disregard the exhortation and the commands in the scripture. This believe that you can be saved and continue living in your sin.

With that in mind, all the more we need to be reminded yung whole picture ng Ephesians, Paul tells us sa chapter 1-3 kung ano yung ginawa ng Diyos, He blesses us in Christ, He loved us, he is merciful to us, kind to us, gracious to us and He reconcile us to Himself, and make us part of His kingdom, His family, His body which is the church. And we received all of that and all of His promises in the Gospel of Christ. This removes the first trap, the legalistic mindset, we don’t do the commandment of God in order na mahalin nya tayo, o iligtas N’ya tayo. We do His commandment as a response and gratitude natin sa ginawa N’ya satin. We love Him because He first love us, we serve Him, because He first served us and lay down His life for us.

That’s why also in chapter 4, Paul calls us to live a life worthy of our calling, we are not called to live lawlessly as if there’s no law, but we are to live worthy of our calling, we are not to continue in sinning but to walk worthy, to walk holy before our God as a response to what He has done and what he continues to do in us and through us. This removes the antinomianism mindset na pwede ka mabuhay kung ano yung gusto mo. That you will continue to sin so that grace may abound.

Because God has spiritually blessed us, resurrected us, saved us, reconciled us to himself, we received all the promises in the Gospel and He is growing us in Gospel unity and maturing us sa Gospel. What is the proper response to all that God has done for us? How can we show our gratitude to our Lord who provides for us what we cannot provide for ourselves? In what way we can thank Him?

With that in mind, our hearts must be prepared to read our passage today, again, we will be reading from verse 17-24, but we will just focus sa verses 17-19.

So church, i invite everyone to stand as we read the Word of the Lord this morning. Ephesians 4:17–24 “Therefore this I say, and testify in the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their mind, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart. And they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. But you did not learn Christ in this way— if indeed you heard Him and were taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, to lay aside, in reference to your former conduct, the old man, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and to be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and to put on the new man, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth.”

Let us pray:

Main Point:

The gospel calls every member of the church to no longer walk as they once did before you were a Christian—in the corruption of your darkened mind, hardened heart, and depraved life.

Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians & Colossians C. The Calling to Holiness (vv. 17–24)

before

Darkened Mind/Madilim na pag-iisip ( in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their mind, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, vv.17-18a)

Hardened Heart/Matigas na Puso (because of the hardness of their heart. And they, having become callous, vv.18b-19a)

Depraved Life/ Makasalanang pamumuhay (have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. vv.19b)

Christians are called to live their daily lives in a way that is sharply differentiated from the world around them and from the lifestyle that characterized their pre-Christian past.

Because these believers have a new identity and are part of a new community that has been deeply touched by the grace of the one holy God, Paul implores them to separate themselves from the lifestyle they once lived.

Once they were pagans and so lived like pagans; now they were Christians and must live like Christians. They had become different people; they must behave differently. Their new status as God’s new society involved new standards, and their new life in Christ a new lifestyle.

Beloved, as disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we teach by example, whether we intend to or not! Because we are His ambassadors, we as Christians are to be very careful how we live. Our appearance, our appetites, our articulations should bring honor to the Lord Jesus Christ. Men, we are not to behave and talk like drunken, immoral sailors. Christian women are not to be dressing or behaving like prostitutes that advertise their bodies on street corners or jump from one bed to another with any guy or girl that comes their way. We are not to be the ones who are shooting drugs into our veins, popping pills of hallucinogenic drugs, getting high as a kite or getting smashed on wine, whisky, or beer.

Beloved, the way you lived in the past before you were saved should not be in your present! The born again Christian is a new person in Jesus Christ. If you are surrendered and obedient to the Lord, you are going to make good changes in your life with the help of the Holy Spirit. You will start living the way the Lord wants you to live. The way you lived in the past before salvation will fade from the present.

In this portion, Paul presents a picture of a person who does not know Jesus Christ as Savior. He describes the characteristics of an unbeliever. The behavior he describes should NOT characterize the life of a Christian. The way you behaved in the past before you were saved should not describe the way you live in the present. The example of the unbeliever is one that should not be followed by the Christian. Notice verse seventeen.

There is always a tendency for people to think they can profess faith in Christ and live the way they did before. But you cannot. To be a Christian is to leave the old life behind and live a new life. We leave darkness for light, hatred for love, selfishness for servanthood, worldliness for holiness, and sin for obedience to God’s will.

How would you describe the general tone that the apostle Paul uses throughout this passage? What specific language and wording do you see that hint at the intensity and seriousness underlying his warnings and commands?

What makes it clear that 4:17 begins a section of warning for the Ephesian Christians? What is significant about the fact that Paul is issuing this warning to believers in Jesus—and what must we conclude from that?

What clear effects does sin have on the lives of those who turn to it instead of to Christ (4:18–19)? How can each of these effects lead to the next—and how does this comprehensive picture of the darkness and hopelessness of sin give weight to Paul’s warning?

Read Romans 1:28–32. To what, according to these verses, does the dark progression of sin and rebellion lead? How do the descriptions of sin that these verses contain illustrate how darkened and futile sinners’ minds are, as we see Paul mentioning in Ephesians 4:17–18?

Therefore

This serves as a reminder that he is still building on what he had already written in Ephesians 1–3. He insists on a connection between doctrine and life. What a believer does on any given day should be that person’s reflection on who God is, what He has done for the person, and what the person understands His purposes to be. As Paul teaches repeatedly, the Christian life flows out of salvation and forms its character from it at every turn. When people truly begin to comprehend what God has done, they also see more clearly what they must do in response.

The Bible was written to be obeyed, and not simply studied, and this is why the words “therefore” and “wherefore” are repeated so often in the second half of Ephesians (4:1, 17, 25; 5:1, 7, 14, 17, 24). Paul was saying, “Here is what Christ has done for you. Now, in the light of this, here is what we ought to do for Christ.” We are to be doers of the Word, and not hearers only (James 1:22). The fact that we have been called in Christ (Eph. 1:18) ought to motivate us to walk in unity (Eph. 4:1–16). And the fact that we have been raised from the dead (Eph. 2:1–10) should motivate us to walk in purity (Eph. 4:17–5:17), or, as Paul told the Romans, “walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:4). We are alive in Christ, not dead in sins; therefore “put off the old man … and put on the new man (Eph. 4:22, 24). Take off the graveclothes and put on the grace-clothes!

The therefore refers back to what Paul has been saying about our high calling in Jesus Christ. Because we are called to salvation, unified in the Body of Christ, gifted by the Holy Spirit, and built up by the gifted men (vv. 1–16), we should therefore … walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk. We cannot accomplish the glorious work of Christ by continuing to live the way the world lives.

this I say, and testify/insist/implore/pinatotohanan (with the Lord’s authority NLT)

As Steven Runge notes, “these expressions are used to introduce significant propositions, ones to which the writer or speaker wants to attract extra attention.” Pausing to say, “I say this and testify in the Lord” is a literary device intended to add emphasis to the following statement—“you no longer walk as the gentiles do.”

Constantine R. Campbell, The Letter to the Ephesians, ed. D. A. Carson, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023), 190.

Paul affirms most solemnly in the Lord that his Gentile readers, as part of the new creation, should no longer live as the Gentiles do (vv. 22–24; Col. 3:9–10).

To make this clear the apostle not only “tells” the Ephesians to live differently (Eph. 4:17a), he “insists” on it (Eph. 4:17b). The “insist” word is from the Greek word martyreō (from which we get our English word martyr). The use of the term reminds us of the importance of our testimony. Paul may well lose the regard and respect of others when he testifies of the need for revering God in all the areas that he is about to consider. But instead of shying away from the command, he adds even greater weight to it by saying that his insistence is “in the Lord.” The command to walk a different path is not merely Paul’s suggestion or opinion; it comes with God’s authority as the apostle speaks from the context of his apostolic union with his Lord.

What is said here may seem harsh, but this is reality! Paul’s opening line on the subject in verse 17, “So I tell you this, and insist on it in the Lord,” means that these are not Paul’s ideas, but Christ’s. This is how the risen Lord sees the world. It is so important that we Christians embrace this assessment of the world without Christ because we then see that it is radically lost. We then comprehend why man cannot save himself and why Jesus came. A loss of the Biblical vision of the world is behind the erosion of orthodox Christianity in many places, because if you imagine the world is better than it is, the necessity of Christ and his cross is lessened and the potential of unregenerate man is elevated.

This word “testify” is a strong word in the Greek. It is from the word marturomai {mar-tooʹ-rom-ahee} which means “to call to witness; to protest; to insist; to solemnly declare something.” So what is Paul insisting or solemnly declaring to us? Here it is, “That you and I do not walk or live as other Gentiles live.” As we will see in a moment, he is talking about the lifestyles of those who do not know Christ as their Savior.

Paul strongly insisted on the importance of Christians living godly lives, especially in the city of Ephesus because it was such a vile, wicked city. It was a cesspool of carnality and corruption. The pagan Greek philosopher Heraclitus, referred to Ephesus as “the darkness of vileness.” The main magnet for the corruption was the Temple of Diana that was located in the city. It was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world at that time.

Diana was a sex goddess and the worship of this goddess involved many vices.

* Prostitutes and Perversion: Worshipers were involved with thousands of temple prostitutes that were available for engagement in homosexuality, orgies, and other sexual perversions.

* Priests and Priestesses: They led the people astray with lies and the worship of the idol of Diana which could be found everywhere in the city. The people greatly feared this goddess and her wrath. Because of this fear, her temple was used as a bank because they were too scared to steal inside the walls of the temple. This fear enabled the display and safe-keeping of the greatest art collections in the world at the time.

* Protection for Criminals: Ephesus was a haven for criminals who were given protection if they stayed within a quarter of a mile perimeter of Diana’s temple. They could not be arrested or punished if they stayed within these boundaries.

Paul insisted that we not live like those who are unsaved. He proceeded in verses 17–19 to give specific characteristics of the unbeliever.

in the Lord(In the presence of the Lord, I am speaking for the Lord as I warn you NIRV, sa pangalan ng Panginoon ASD, ) (The Lordship of Christ),

The warning Paul gives did not originate from his own personal tastes or preferences. This I say … and affirm together with the Lord. The matter of forsaking sin and following righteousness is not the whim of isolated, narrow-minded preachers and teachers. It is God’s own standard and His only standard for those who belong to Him. It is the very essence of the gospel and is set in bold contrast to the standards of the unredeemed.

He intensifies it by saying, “in the Lord.” Paul is pointing to his source of authority: the Lord Jesus.

By attaching the phrase “in the Lord” to his appeal, Paul admonishes his readers on the basis of the authority of the Lord Jesus himself (see also 1 Thess 4:1)

that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk (to conduct oneself in daily living.)

Just as believers are to walk in a manner worthy of Christ (v. 1), they are not to walk in the ways of their former life. The believer’s new life in Christ involves a change in direction and conduct.

The Christian is not to imitate the life of the unsaved people around him. They are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), while he has been raised from the dead and been given eternal life in Christ.

The Greek wording actually indicates that the believers must “walk” differently, indicating that Christians must be on a different path than the rest of the world if we are to be faithful to God

The word “walk” is not merely a synonym for “live.” Rather, it highlights the deliberate, step-by-step character of our lifestyle choices.

just as the Gentiles also walk

In his first letter to the Thessalonians Paul uses the term in its pagan meaning when he refers to “the Gentiles who do not know God” (1 Thess. 4:5), and that is the sense in which he uses it in our present text. Gentiles here represent all ungodly, unregenerate, pagan persons

Like the church in our own day, the churches at Ephesus and in almost every non-Palestinian area in New Testament times were surrounded by rank paganism and its attendant immorality. Ephesus was a leading commercial and cultural city of the Roman empire. It boasted the great pagan temple of Artemis, or Diana, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But it was also a leading city in debauchery and sexual immorality. Some historians rank it as the most lascivious (malaswa/mahalay) city of Asia Minor.

The temple of Artemis was the center of much of the wickedness. Like those in most pagan religions, its rituals and practices were but extensions of man’s vilest and most perverted sins. Male and female roles were interchanged, and orgiastic sex, homosexuality, and every other sexual perversion were common. Artemis was herself a sex goddess, represented by an ugly, repulsive black female idol that looked something like a cross between a cow and a wolf. She was served by thousands of temple prostitutes, eunuchs, singers, dancers, and priests and priestesses. Idols of Artemis and other deities were to be seen everywhere, in every size and made out of many different materials. Of special popularity were silver idols and religious artifacts. It was because Paul’s preaching cut deeply into that trade that the Ephesian silversmiths rallied the populace against him and his fellow believers (Acts 19:24–28).

The temple of Artemis contained one of the richest art collections then in existence. It was also used as a bank, because most people feared stealing from within its walls lest they incur the wrath of the goddess or other deities. Greek philosopher Heraclitus, himself a pagan, referred to Ephesus as “the darkness of vileness. The morals were lower than animals and the inhabitants of Ephesus were fit only to be drowned.” There is no reason to believe that the situation had changed much by Paul’s day. If anything, it may have been worse.

The church at Ephesus was a small island of despised people in a giant cesspool of wickedness. Most of the believers had themselves once been a part of that paganism. They frequently passed by places where they once caroused and ran into friends with whom they once indulged in debauchery. They faced continual temptations to revert to the old ways, and the apostle therefore admonished them to resist.

1 Peter 4:3–4 “For the time already past is sufficient for you to have worked out the desire of the Gentiles, having pursued a course of sensuality, lusts, drunkenness, carousing, drinking parties, and abominable idolatries. In all this, they are surprised that you do not run with them into the same excesses of dissipation, maligning you,”

the Greek word “walk” (περιπατέω; see 2:2, 10; 4:1), which comes from Paul’s Jewish background, to characterize the features of their daily lifestyle. In the following lines, Paul will challenge them much more deeply than simply seeking a modification of their behavior.

How the unredeemed man walk? (Paul proceeds to give four specific characteristics of the ungodly, pagan life-style that believers are to forsake. The worldly life is intellectually futile, ignorant of God’s truth, spiritually and morally calloused, and depraved in mind.)

in the futility of their mind(thinking NIV, thoughts CSB, and in the foolishness and emptiness of their souls AMP, Their thoughts don’t have any purpose, hopelessly confused NLT, their thoughts are worth nothing NCV, walang-saysay ang kanilang pag-iisip ABTAG01),

The church is to have a different kind of life from the world. The exhortation is a present imperative, meaning that it is a continuing call to live in a distinct way. It starts with one’s thinking. Paul says there is an emptiness, a futility, in the way the world thinks. It approaches life without engaging with life’s substance. That kind of life is not for the believer. This is a shortened form of three other texts: Romans 1:18–32; Colossians 3:5–10; and Ephesians 2:1–3. Futility is the way Jews often describe connections to idols (Wis. 13–14), the exchange of the worship of the Creator for the worship of the creature (Lev. 20:23; Deut. 18:9; Eccl. 1:2 LXX; Jer. 2:5; Acts 14:15; 1 Pet. 1:18; 4:3–4; 2 Pet. 2:17–19).

When they lived apart from God, the Gentiles’ entire way of thinking was ineffectual, distorted by the powers of sin (2:1–3).

What is wrong with the mind of the unsaved person? For one thing, his thinking is “vain” (futile). It leads to no substantial purpose. Since he does not know God, he cannot truly understand the world around him, nor can he understand himself.

Paul’s phrase mataiotēti tou noos autōn as a reference to the Gentiles’ inability to think rightly: “It refers to the capacity to think, plan, and make moral judgments and lifestyle choices” (2010, 281). Though nuanced differently, he is in basic agreement with Best (see below). However, he sees a link to Paul’s argument in Rom 1:21: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their reasoning, and their senseless hearts were darkened.” Their worldview failed to incorporate God’s revealed will.

Best understands Paul’s statement as a reference to the Gentiles’ overall mindset, not their ability to reason: “[The author of Ephesians] is not then describing a defect in the ability of his readers to reason but their ‘mind-set,’ the total person viewed under the aspect of thinking” (1998, 417). In light of this, Best does not see a direct correlation between Eph 4:17 and Rom 1:21; the Romans passage, he asserts, focuses on the unbeliever’s inability to reason.

Bruce ties the discussion to the association of mataiotēs (“futility”) with idolatry (he appeals to Acts 14:15; Rom 8:20; 1 Thess 1:9–10; 1 Pet 1:18). He acknowledges that “futility” in this context cannot be limited to idolatry but concludes that the idolatrous conditioning of the pagan mind has rendered it powerless to live rightly.

Hoehner points out that the term mataiotēs (“futility”) only occurs three times in the NT. In Romans 8:20 and 2 Pet 2:18 it refers to being unable to achieve one’s goals. In Ephesians 4:17, however, it refers to “a moral attitude or disposition whereby the mind cannot achieve its goal of receiving the revelation of God and thus cannot make proper moral decisions necessary for life” (2008, 92). He views the description of the Gentiles in Eph 4:17–19 as parallel to the one found in Rom 1:18–32.

he examines the issue of human depravity, noting that Ephesians gives a grim picture of humanity. However, he argues that this picture is not a “total depravity” but rather a “pervasive depravity that affects all our being and results from a skewered thinking that ignores God”

Thielman claims that Paul is referring to an inability to know how to live one’s life. He includes some interesting background on Hellenistic Judaism’s concept of “futile.” Additionally, he cites 3 Macc 6:11, which shows that Jews considered Gentiles “empty minded” because they worshiped idols. Thielman concludes by saying, “The worshipful acknowledgment of the one God is foundational to all useful knowledge. Without this foundation, Gentile knowledge about how to live one’s life is deeply flawed” (2010, 297).

It is significant that the basic issue of life-style centers in the mind. Paul continues to speak of understanding and ignorance (v. 18), learning and teaching (vv. 20–21), and the mind and truth (vv. 23–24)—all of which are related to the intellect. Because unbelievers and Christians think differently they are therefore to act differently. As far as spiritual and moral issues are concerned, an unbeliever cannot think straight. His rational processes in those areas are warped and inadequate (cf. Rom. 1:28; 8:7; 1 Cor. 2:14; Col. 2:18; Titus 1:15).

Because man’s sinfulness flows out of his reprobate mind, the transformation must begin with the mind (v. 23). Christianity is cognitive before it is experiential. It is our thinking that makes us consider the gospel and our thinking that causes us to believe the historic facts and spiritual truths of the gospel and to receive Christ as Lord and Savior. That is why the first step in repentance is a change of mind about oneself, about one’s spiritual condition, and about God.

To the Greeks the mind was all-important. They prided themselves in their great literature, art, philosophy, politics, and science. They were so advanced in their learning that Greek slaves were prized by the Romans and other conquerors as tutors for their children and as managers of their households and businesses. Greeks believed that almost any problem could be reasoned to a solution.

Yet Paul says that spiritually the operation of the natural mind is futile and unproductive. Mataiotēs (futility) refers to that which fails to produce the desired result, that which never succeeds. It was therefore used as a synonym for empty, because it amounts to nothing. The spiritual thinking and resulting life-style of the Gentiles—here representing all the ungodly—is inevitably empty, vain, and void of substance. The life of an unbeliever is bound up in thinking and acting in an arena of ultimate trivia. He consumes himself in the pursuit of goals that are purely selfish, in the accumulation of that which is temporary, and in looking for satisfaction in that which is intrinsically deceptive and disappointing.

The unregenerate person plans and resolves everything on the basis of his own thinking. He becomes his own ultimate authority and he follows his own thinking to its ultimate outcome of futility, aimlessness, and meaninglessness—to the self-centered emptiness that characterizes our age (cf. Ps. 94:8–11; Acts 14:15; Rom. 1:21–22).

After a life of experiencing every worldly advantage and pleasure, the wisest, wealthiest, and most favored man of the ancient world concluded that the worldly life is “vanity and striving after wind” (Eccles. 2:26; cf. 1:2; 14; 2:11; etc.). Yet century after century, millennia after millennia, men go on seeking the same futile goals in the same futile ways.

What a description of meaninglessness: a foolish method aiming at a foolish goal.

Paul’s primary concern is not with a list of specific sins, but with a distortion and disorientation of the mind’

The parallels with Romans 1:21–32 deserve careful attention. Both texts view sin as a malfunction of the mind. In Romans, a split in the knowing process causes alienation. Although Gentiles “knew God,” they did not acknowledge him (Rom. 1:21). This refusal to “know what they know” is expressed in Ephesians as hardness of heart (contrast Paul’s prayer in 3:19, that his readers will know what they cannot know, the love of Christ). Both Ephesians 4:17–19 and Romans 1:21–32 focus on willful futility, darkness, distorted reasoning leading to alienation from God, and resulting passions and desires that lead to uncleanness and sins. Sins are not the cause of the problem, but the result; the problem lies in the mind and in choices made against God. In Romans God gave people over to the desires of their hearts, whereas Paul uses the same word here to say they give themselves over.

The word translated “futility” (mataiotes) expresses meaninglessness, uselessness, worthlessness, or emptiness. The majority of the occurrences of this word in the LXX are in Ecclesiastes to express the meaninglessness of life. In the New Testament the word occurs elsewhere only in Romans 8:20 (NIV, “frustration”) and 2 Peter 2:18 (“empty”). As M. Barth expressed dramatically, “With one single word Paul describes the majority of the inhabitants of the Greco-Roman empire … as aiming with silly methods at a meaningless goal.”

“How you think determines how you behave. What you think inevitably shapes how you live.” One of the slogans of our time is, “You are what you eat.” The much deeper truth is that you are what you think. When Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden, their first thought was to hide from God (Gen. 3:8). Sin mangled their minds and caused them to think that the good and gracious God was someone to hide from. Their thinking became futile. Paul defines the essential character of this futility in verse 18: “having their understanding darkened.” Sin darkens our understanding in every way. God is an enigma to us, and He becomes someone to hide from. God’s world is a closed book to us; we don’t know why it is there and what it is for. We cannot understand ourselves. We don’t know that God has put eternity into our hearts (Eccl. 3:11) and that nothing “under the sun” can satisfy the relentless quest of our hearts for life.

The term translated here as “meaninglessness” (ματαιότης) is used extensively in the LXX of Ecclesiastes to characterize life that is not lived on the basis of the fear of God (see, e.g., Eccl 1:2, 14; 2:1, 11, 15, 17, 19). Life is vain, futile, and without purpose unless it is ordered around God and his purposes

Paul attaches the genitive of the word “mind” (νοῦς) to express the idea that it is their way of thinking that is devoid of real meaning. Here the word “mind” refers to more than just the ability to reason. It refers to the capacity to think, plan, and make moral judgments and lifestyle choices (see also Rom 1:28; 12:2). This could also be described as the set of worldview assumptions that guide non-Christian Gentiles in their thoughts about life and how they live in light of these convictions.

If this letter were to have got into the hands of non-Christian Gentiles in Ephesus (or elsewhere), it could very well have been the cause of great offense. Most Gentiles would not have viewed themselves in these terms. Many, such as the Stoics, believed that they had a coherent way of viewing the world and a moral lifestyle that displayed many virtues and repudiated numerous vices. Paul’s problem is that their orientation and lifestyles were not ordered around the revealed will of the one true God. Life apart from the one God and his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is ultimately meaningless

If you wanted to describe something that never succeeds, that fails to reach a goal or desired result, or something that amounts to nothing and a waste, then you would use this word mataiotes. That pretty well describes the efforts of a person without God, especially when he wants to earn his way to Heaven.

The spiritual thinking of unbelievers is empty and void of substance. Many times, their selfish pursuits and priorities are empty and wasteful because they are totally focused upon themselves. They will not listen to anyone else because they are their own authority. Understand, that living for now and for yourself is only temporary compared to eternity. Living for Christ has eternal value.

This word for “vanity” also shows up in two other places. This is the same word that the Apostle Paul used to describe the subjection of the creatures of this world after Adam sinned and the earth was cursed. Creation unwillingly subjected to the curse of God and depravity that followed, yet with hope the curse would be removed one day. Notice Romans 8:20—For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, In describing the empty promises of false preachers, Peter used the word mataiotes. 2 Peter 2:17–18.… These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever. [18] For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean escaped from them who live in error.

The main goals of people who grow up without Christ are in the pursuits of pleasure and prosperity. They live for money, sex, alcohol, or drugs. Multitudes look to these things to satisfy themselves, only to find they are still miserable when they get what they want or reach their selfish goals.

It is not always fun getting your own way. When people have the philosophy “Live for Yourself” or “Live for Now,” after a while, some of them don’t want to live anymore. Their lives are empty, meaningless, and without purpose because they are full of themselves. That is an empty way to live. The Psalmist said in Psalm 94:11, “The LORD knoweth the thoughts of man, that they are vanity.”

Toward the end of his life, King Solomon, who got away from God and lived for himself, cried out in the book of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). Empty thinking leads to an empty life.

The Apostle Paul, who lived his life for the Lord, had a totally different attitude about life before his death, “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: [8] Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing” (2 Timothy 4:7–8).

Beloved, the sinful and selfish philosophy of living in your past before you were saved should not be in your present.

wrong lines of conduct follow from wrong ideas about God

In the present passage the concept of disposition or moral attitude fits best. The original purpose of the mind was to be able to comprehend God’s revelation, but due to the fall a person’s mind is unable to accomplish this goal (μάταιος). Hence, the “futility of their minds” conveys the idea of not being able to perceive the revelation of God for which it was designed. Thus, its moral attitude or disposition prevents it from achieving its goal of proper moral decisions which are necessary for life (Rom 1:18–32). The believer is not to walk in this kind of moral purposelessness displayed by the Gentiles.

Our society usually ignores the age-old question of the meaning of life. We busy ourselves and entertain ourselves so we do not have to think. Diversions such as drugs, alcohol, entertainment, and work keep us from reflecting on life. But as wonderful as it is, life is short, painful, and—viewed from a human perspective—without much significance. If we are merely the accidental result of a “big bang,” human existence is a cruel, cosmic joke, and no reason exists for ethical behavior. As one person put it, “You get sick and you die, so you have to keep busy.” What would it matter if we did not exist? Humans are like grass in the desert, here today and gone tomorrow (Isa. 40:6–8). The writer of Ecclesiastes is right; life is meaningless. Without God in the picture, nothing on this earth can comfort us if we analyze it seriously.

Klyne Snodgrass, Ephesians, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), 237.

being darkened in their mind (understanding ESV, they can’t understand the truth NIRV, their minds are full of darkness NLT, for their moral understanding is darkened and their reasoning is clouded AMP, they are stubborn and ignorant CEV, dahil nadiliman ang isipan nila sa pag-unawa ng mga espiritual na bagay ASD, nasa kadiliman ang kanilang pagiisip ABTAG)

Paul is applying the common metaphorical distinction between light and dark to the life of the mind. Just as light symbolizes illumination and clarity, so darkness symbolizes the lack thereof. A darkened understanding means that the gentiles are not able to perceive reality clearly or accurately.

The gentiles’ darkened understanding results from their exclusion from the life of God, which results from their ignorance and hardness of heart.

Spiritual darkness is a theme in the New Testament (Rom. 1:21; 11:10; Eph. 5:8, 11; 6:12). The remark looks back to 2:3. The reason for futility of thinking is that the mind has been darkened. The perfect participle denotes a state that characterizes Gentiles.

The unsaved man’s thinking is futile because it is darkened. He thinks he is enlightened because he rejects the Bible and believes the latest philosophies, when in reality he is in the dark. “Professing themselves to be wise, they become fools” (Rom. 1:22). But they think they are wise. Satan has blinded the minds of the unsaved (2 Cor. 4:3–6) because he does not want them to see the truth in Jesus Christ. It is not simply that their eyes are blinded so they cannot see, but that their minds are darkened so that they cannot think straight about spiritual matters.

General education and higher learning are more widespread today than ever in history. College graduates number in the tens of millions, and our society, like ancient Greece, prides itself in its science, technology, literature, art, and other achievements of the mind. For many people, to be called ignorant is a greater offense than to be called sinful. Yet Paul’s point in this passage is that ignorance and sin are inseparable. The ungodly may be “always learning,” but they are “never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:7). Fallen mankind has a built-in inability to know and comprehend the things of God—the only things that ultimately are worth knowing. When men rejected God, “they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened” (Rom. 1:21). Intellectual futility and foolishness combine as part of sin’s penalty.

The Greek word behind being darkened is a perfect participle, indicating a continuing condition of spiritual darkness. This darkness implies both ignorance and immorality. And darkness of understanding is coupled with exclusion from the life of God (cf. John 1:5).

The terminology of living with a darkened mind will be contrasted to words about learning the truth that is in Jesus (Eph. 4:21).

a man or a woman who is alive but without any sense of what is eternal, what is truly beautiful, or what gives life meaning or hope.

We had no light; we were blacked out. Sin produces a malfunction of the mind

This doesn’t mean that an unsaved person lacks intelligence or reason, but that he or she has no spiritual perception. Unbelievers are simply incapable of accepting the things of God, which are “spiritually appraised” (1 Cor. 2:14). This begins to explain how a greatly intelligent, sophisticated, and well-educated person can be totally lost with regard to God, Christ, and spiritual things.

This is, of course, an absence of spiritual understanding, because the intellects of the unsaved are active and capable. Paul says the same thing in Romans: “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened” (1:21); “Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools” (1:22). The more they suppressed the truth, the less capable they became of discerning spiritual reality.

The understanding of the lost is “darkened.” Paul told the Corinthians, “The god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them” (2 Corinthians 4:4). This word “understanding” is from the word dianoia {dee-anʹ-oy-ah} which means “mind, spirit, thoughts, perception, or the way of thinking and feeling.”

A dark cloud hovers over the mind of the person without Jesus Christ. The person is spiritually blind. Why? Both sin and Satan darken the mind and heart. If Christ is not in your heart, then you are blinded by Satan.

Lawmakers and educators claim to love our children, yet they pass laws that allow the murder of children in abortion clinics. They teach them immorality in sex education classes that leads to pregnancy and venereal diseases, even though they claim they are trying to prevent these things. Why not just tell them to wait until they are married?

Now they want to protect our kids some more. They want to give boys or young men, who think they are women, access to girl’s restrooms, locker rooms, and showers. Do you think teenage girls and guys, showering together is going to keep your daughters and granddaughters safe? That’s what our politicians and educators believe.

* Educators are also very afraid of the Bible, so now they are removing it from the shelves of school libraries. Books like the Koran or Mormon Books, those are considered to be okay, but not the Bible.

With their genius mentality, they teach our children in public schools that we came from amoebas or apes and not God. Then they are surprised when the kids behave like animals, fighting and killing one another in school or rebelling and attacking school teachers and principles. Teach them they are beasts and they will behave like them.

Listen, when you start saying that which is good is bad, and that which is bad is good, you have a prime example of darkened minds. King Solomon said in Proverbs 17:13, “Whoso rewardeth evil for good, evil shall not depart from his house."

The human mind is twisted by an idolatrous self-interest.

alienated (separated NIV, they wander far NLT, excluded CSB, nahiwalay ABTAG01, nawalay ASD, wala silang bahagi MBB05, self-banished AMP, they have missed out on the life that comes CEV,) from the life of God

Another effect is alienation from God (Eph. 2:12; Col. 1:21). The perfect participle again points to a state of living.

Gentiles were not only excluded from Israel (2:12); they were cut off from the very life of God. Their ignorance of God and His ways led to enmity with God (2:12–13), resulting in the need for reconciliation.

Man’s thinking, alienated from God, is vanity. He thinks up all kinds of false religions and philosophies, and boasts of how right he is. Yet his notions are empty and dangerous.

The nonsense some men believe shows how darkened their understanding is. Christian Scientists, for instance, believe that death is not real and that pain is an error of the mortal mind. Mormons believe that they can become gods. Hindus believe that, depending on how we behave in this life, we might come back as a cow, a cockroach. The scientific community embraces the theory of evolution. The humanist thinks that man is essentially good and quite able to cope with moral problems. In practice, humanism licenses lawlessness and lust.

Lost people proclaim lies as truth, immorality as morality, high-sounding nonsense as science, and philosophical speculations as religion. Their lack of understanding results from “being alienated from the life of God.” The opposite of life is death. Men without God are spiritually dead. No wonder they are unable to think straight in matters of faith and morals.

Man was created to be inhabited by God. God intended for the human spirit to be inhabited by the Holy Spirit. The indwelling Holy Spirit was to enlighten the intellect, ennoble the emotions, and energize the will. Thus the life of man would express, in human terms, the life of God. The fall ruined all that. Sin entered and the Holy Spirit left. Without the life of the indwelling Holy Spirit, the natural man is spiritually dead, “alienated from the life of God.”

No wonder Christians should not walk as “Gentiles walk.” We must never copy the beliefs, thought patterns, convictions, and codes of conduct of unsaved people. Even the most brilliant of them are blind leaders of the blind. Einstein never wanted to believe in God. Marx was an atheist. Darwin jettisoned the faith of his youth. Freud hated Christianity. Nietzsche hated God. Nearly all the well-known philosophers leave God out of their reckoning.

The word “alienated” is derived from the Greek word apallotrioo {ap-al-lot-ree-oʹ-o} which means “to be shut out from one’s fellowship and intimacy; to be excluded, separated, cut off, detached, or estranged.” This word carries the idea of being a foreigner or an outsider. When a person does not know the Lord as Savior, he or she is not a child of God, but a child of the Devil according to what Jesus said (John 8:44). He or she is a foreigner to Heaven. Why, what is the actual problem? The answer is our sinfulness.

we see that gentile ignorance and hardness of heart excludes them from the new God-infused life that he produces in his people.

it simply means that they have never had it and continue without it.

Life without God is meaningless, for true life is from God.

The text implies that we need life from God. Human beings were never intended to live merely as individuals; we were created for relation with God. We are diminished when separated from what is greater than us—God. Without him, we lose our dignity. Lasting happiness does not exist apart from relation to him. We are restless until we rest in God. What we need is not self-expression and self-satisfaction, but self-surrender and self-attachment to God, with whom all things are ours to enjoy (see 1 Cor. 3:21–22; 1 Tim. 6:17).

Klyne Snodgrass, Ephesians, The NIV Application Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1996), 239.

because of the ignorance (kamangmangan ABTAG01, willful ignorance and spiritual blindness AMP, they don’t know Him NIRV), that is in them(they have closed their minds NLT)

A third impact is a life lived in ignorance. Paul is very full and direct in his critique of the Gentile state. Without discernment and solid reasoning of the mind, the Gentiles live in a world full of lack of judgment. The ignorance here does not leave them without excuse (Rom. 2:1). The term agōnia is used of an ignorance of which people are unaware (Lev. 5:18; 22:14; Eccl. 3:11; Acts 3:17; 17:30), yet they are still responsible for the choices made. It is suppression of the presence of God (Rom. 1:21–25). They just do not see the error of the choices they are making.

Their ignorance here is not lack of general education; some are brilliant in their own way, but such brilliance is all wasted and futile in the end when combined with hardness of heart toward the truth of the gospel in Christ (cf. Matt. 13:14–15; John 12:40; Acts 28:26–27; Rom. 11:8)

Paul seems to be discussing a willful process here, not merely an ignorance of God caused by never hearing or knowing but a willful ignoring of God, as Romans 1 also describes. Clearly enough Paul believes that bad theology or thinking leads to bad practices, that theologies or schools of thought always have ethical consequences. Here Paul discusses debauchery, impurity, and everything done to excess.

the unsaved man is dead because of this spiritual ignorance. The truth and the life go together. If you believe God’s truth, then you receive God’s life. But you would think that the unbeliever would do his utmost to get out of his terrible spiritual plight. Alas, the hardness of his heart enslaves him. He is “past feeling” because he has so given himself over to sin that sin controls him. Read Romans 1:18–32 for a vivid expansion of these three brief verses.

Lives separated from God’s holiness are ignorant lives. This is hard for the sophisticated, educated people of Ephesus to accept. How dare someone call them ignorant. Paul did not contend they had no knowledge. He contended the knowledge did no good in leading them to a lifestyle that pleased God. Without such a lifestyle, their minds did not function properly.

Ignorance of God is not because of lack of education or opportunity; it is the willful choice of men and women determined never to relinquish their imagined autonomy.

they are ignorant of God in the sense that they have rejected him and do not know him personally

In his book Hell’s Best Kept Secret, Ray Comfort tells of a woman who was walking along a riverbank with her child. Suddenly the child slipped into the river. The mother screamed in terror. She couldn’t swim, and besides, she was in the latter stages of pregnancy.

Finally, somebody heard her screaming and rushed down to the riverbank. The utter tragedy was, when they stepped into those murky waters to retrieve that now dead child, they found that the water was only waist deep! That mother could have easily saved her child but didn’t because of a lack of knowledge.

Beloved, there are many tragedies that we could avoid in our lives if we knew what God’s Word said about certain issues. I cannot begin to count the times of people who have said to me, “I didn’t know that was in the Bible” or “I wish I knew what the Bible said about this issue when I was young. I could have avoided a lot of heartache.” Beloved, don’t be ignorant of God’s truths.

because (due NIV, ESV) of the hardness of their heart/katigasan ng kanilang puso ASD (they no longer have feelings about what is right CEV, their hearts are stubborn NIRV)

The responsibility for this ignorance is seen in their hardness of heart. There is no openness to considering another way; God is pushed away, to their own detriment.

The Gentiles’ exclusion from the life of God resulted not only from their ignorance, but from their willful and stubborn rejection of Him.

Rather, it is a hardness of heart and unwillingness to repent that prevents their salvation, which in turn makes the things of God seem strange and wearisome to them.

OT hardness of heart is associated with or manifested in disobedience (cf. Ps. 95:8; Isa. 6:10; 63:17; Jer. 7:26; 17:23). “Every surrender to temptation encrusts the heart and narrows the range of its future choice.”

Because of the hardness of their heart, the ungodly are unresponsive to truth (cf. Isa. 44:18–20; 1 Thess. 4:5). Just as a corpse cannot hear a conversation in the mortuary, the person who is spiritually “dead in [his] trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) cannot hear or understand the things of God, no matter how loudly or clearly they may be declared or evidenced in his presence. Pōrōsis (hardness) carries the idea of being rock-hard. It was used by physicians to describe the calcification that forms around broken bones and becomes harder than the bone itself. It was also used of the hard formations that sometimes occur in joints and cause them to become immobile. It could therefore connote the idea of paralysis as well as of hardness. Sin has a petrifying effect, and the heart of the person who continually chooses to sin becomes hardened and paralyzed to spiritual truth, utterly insensitive to the things of God.

Satan plays a part in the blindness of those who refuse to believe, because “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4). They refuse to see Christ because they refuse to see God, and their refusal is readily confirmed and reinforced by the god of this world.

And when men continually persist in following their own way, they will also eventually be confirmed in their choice by the God of heaven. The Jews who heard Jesus teach and preach had the great advantage of having had God’s Word given to them through Moses, the prophets, and other Old Testament writers. They had the even greater advantage of seeing and hearing God’s own incarnate Son. But “though He had performed so many signs before them,” John tells us, “yet they were not believing in Him.… For this cause they could not believe, for Isaiah said again, ‘He has blinded their eyes, and He hardened their heart; lest they see with their eyes, and perceive with their heart, and be converted, and I heal them’ ” (John 12:37, 39–40). Because they would not believe, they could not believe. God one day says, “Let the one who does wrong, still do wrong; and let the one who is filthy, still be filthy” (Rev. 22:11).

When men choose to petrify their hearts by constant rejection of the light (John 12:35–36), they became darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart. That is the unspeakable tragedy of unbelief, the tragedy of the person who makes himself his own god.

Paul does not speak of merely a “hard” heart, but a “hardened” heart. The word in Greek implies a certain stubbornness and reflects the consequences of opportunities being resisted. Repeatedly making wrong choices causes the heart to become callous, making it ever more insensitive to God’s will and ways. This sclerosis of the heart is the result of deliberate choices repeatedly made against the life ordained by God, and it is possible for such disease to enter the Christian life.

A popular novel aptly reminds us that “when the time of choosing comes, all the choices have already been made.” “Almost innocent” choices have been allowed to rub against the heart so often that they have calloused it and then, almost as a natural biological consequence of a hardened heart, the mind grows dark. With a hardened heart no longer pumping life-giving blood, the mind itself grows dull and dark to the things of God. And there are consequences of a hardened heart and numbed mind that also are indicative of a man’s life.

The Greek word for “hardening” is porosis, which comes from the word poros, which originally meant “a stone harder than marble.” In our own terms we might call this “a heart of stone.” This word is used elsewhere in Scripture to refer to the hearts of those in the synagogue who decided to kill Jesus as they witnessed his healing the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath (Mark 3:5, 6). In our text here “the hardening of their hearts” describes inability and unwillingness to respond to God’s truth. The parallel text in Romans 1:18 describes “men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” They hold down the truth much like the little boy who smuggled his dog into his room to spend the night. When he heard his parents approaching, he put the dog in his toy box, sat on the lid, and talked with his parents, ignoring the repeated thumps of the poor pet. Paul is talking about aggressive suppression of the truth.

The Gentiles are ignorant because of their hardness of heart. The heart is the source of all loyalties. In this case, hardness of heart has prevented all loyalty to God. In sum, hearts made insensitive to God have set off a chain reaction that turned out the light and led to meaninglessness.

The world needs to see and to hear from a renewed Christian church, a church freshly invaded by the power, grace, glory, and truth of the gospel. The world is the way it is not because of a lack of education or a failure in social manners but because people harden their hearts against God. The fundamental problem in every society is theological and spiritual. The Bible has a radical diagnosis of the ills that afflict our world. Humanity lives in active, willful rebellion against God. This is why the world’s greatest need is the heart- and life-renewing power of the gospel of Christ. The heart of the human problem truly is the problem of the human heart.

The motif of “hardening” is common in the OT. There is a well-known interplay of texts in Exodus that speak both of Pharaoh hardening his own heart (Exod 8:32; 13:15) and God hardening his heart (e.g., Exod 4:21; 7:3; 9:12; 10:1). Yet Paul makes the proper understanding of the sequence clear in Rom 1:21–31. Douglas Moo points out a pattern that Paul develops in which he explains that people “exchange” (ἀλλάσσω/μεταλλάσσω) the truth of God for idols, lies, and unnatural sexual practices. Consequently, God “hands them over” (παρέδωκεν; Rom 1:24, 26, 28). This sequence reflects a hardening of the heart before God, which precedes his handing them over to their own devices; as a result, the Gentiles are responsible and culpable before God.

The word poros was also used to describe the nerve endings in a person who had lost all power of sensation. For example, if something had become so petrified or hardened that it had no power to feel anything at all, such as a frozen hand or a person who had become mentally and emotionally numb and unfeeling, this word poros was used to describe them.

A person without Christ has a heart that is hard, calloused, or paralyzed by sin. Our wickedness does not draw us closer to the Lord, it tends to make us wander further away from Him and make us more stubborn.

The hardness of their hearts toward God caused their ignorance. Their ignorance concerning God and his will caused them to be alienated from the life of God. Their alienation caused their minds to be darkened, and their darkened minds caused them to walk in the futility of mind.

The cause of their darkness, ignorance, and separation from God is the hardness of their heart, their willful determination to remain in sin. Because men determine to reject Him, God judicially and sovereignly determines to blind their minds, exclude them from His presence, and confirm them in their spiritual ignorance. “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks,” Paul explains of fallen mankind. “Professing to be wise, they became fools.… Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity” (Rom. 1:21–22, 24).

And they, having become callous (lost all sensitivity NIV, no sense of shame NLT, naging manhid AMTAG01, nawalan na sila ng kahihiyan ASD, wala na silang kahihiyan MBB05, they have lost all their feeling for what is right, unfeeling AMP, lost all feeling of shame NCV, do not feel ashamed EASY)

The picture in the word pōrōsis here is of a callous response that exists because the heart is impenetrable (Mark 3:5; Rom. 11:25). The verb in John 12:40 speaks of eyes blinded as a result, while 1 Timothy 4:2 speaks of a seared conscience. The opposite of this, enlightened eyes, appears in Ephesians 1:18. It is desires that are corrupted by a mind not operating as it should. The only reversal possible is to pay attention to the Spirit of God.

In Scripture this latter phrase means sheer rebelliousness, not emotional insensitivity (cf. the promise in Ezk. 36:26–27). This leads to further darkened understanding as God is displaced from the central position he should occupy. This in turn leads to failure of the human conscience and the downward spiral in sin (19). All is summed up in one of the key words of the letter: ‘alienated’ (18). (NIV separated; cf. 2:12 and Col. 1:21.)

a reference to the moral dullness or insensitivity that marks unbelievers as they ignore God and their consciences

When people continue in sin and turn themselves away from the life of God, they become apathetic and insensitive about moral and spiritual things. They reject all standards of righteousness and do not care about the consequences of their unrighteous thoughts and actions. Even conscience becomes scarred with tissue that is not sensitive to wrong (1 Tim. 4:2; Titus 1:15).

Hardened hearts lead to a deadening of the senses, that is, to a loss of “all sensitivity”

They have had opportunities to respond to the good news, but they refused repeatedly.

How does sin harden a person? At first, shameful, sinful behavior may leave a person feeling sick, guilty, convicted, and full of remorse. If the sinner, however, does not turn from his way, but persists in his wickedness, he or she tends to excuse or justify his behavior, which in turn hardens his heart.

As a person rejects Jesus Christ, his heart gets harder, more insensitive, more indifferent, and more defiant to spiritual truth. A person can become so numb that he feels no shame for what he has done or for rejecting Christ. He does not care at all. His conscience is seared or numb. Paul said in verse 4:19 that he is “past feeling.” His problem is he is spiritually dead.

After the preacher Dr. Donald Barnhouse shared a message about the repercussions of sin, a young man approached him and said, “I sin, but it doesn’t seem to matter at all. I’m not haunted by it. I don’t get depressed about it. It doesn’t bother me a bit.”

Dr. Barnhouse looked at him and said, “Tell me, son, what would happen if I dropped an eight-hundred-pound weight on the body of a dead man? Would he feel it? Would he be in pain? Would it bother him?”

The young man replied, “Of course not!” “That’s the point,” said Dr. Barnhouse. “If you don’t feel the weight of sin, if it’s not heavy upon you, if it’s not having an impact on you, it’s because you’re spiritually dead.”

Beloved, some folks can become so hardened that they go as far as to boast or publicly declare their wickedness without any embarrassment or shame at all. They are proud of what they have done. We are now reading of women who are bragging they had an abortion or sexual video online. They glory in their shame.

Beloved, the hard heart of our past should not be in our present. If you are not careful and cautious, sinful habits can creep into your life and you can become hard-hearted

have given themselves over to sensuality (evil pleasure NIRV, they live for lustful pleasure NLT, indecency NET, promiscuity CSB, unbridled sensuality AMP, , they use their lives for doing evil NCV, they do all kinds of disgusting things EASY, nawili sila sa kahalayan ASD, sila’y naging alipin ng kahalayan MBBTAG12), for the practice (so as to indulge NIV, they take part NIRV, eagerly practice NLT, eagerly craving the practice AMP, laging sabik na sabik ASD) of every kind of impurity (unclean act NIRV, Sakim sa paggawa ng bawat uri ng karumihan ABTAG0, kalaswaan MBB05).

They “gave themselves over to promiscuity for the practice of every kind of impurity.” While Rom 1:24 states that “God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts” (NIV), indicating God’s agency in unbelieving gentiles being “given over” to impure desires, Eph 4:19 views such people giving themselves over to such things. These differences in agencies should not be regarded as contradictory, however, as they are two sides of the same coin. Gentiles who reject the truth to pursue their misguided desires are simply allowed by God to do so. God hands them over to what they want, but this not a “push”; it is the absence of restraint. Unbelievers are free to give themselves over to what they want.

a seared conscience leads to them giving themselves over to these desires. Aselgeia refers to a lack of restraint, abandonment into licentiousness (Gal. 5:19; 1 Pet. 4:3; 2 Pet. 2:2, 13–14). The term is often sexual, but in this general context it refers to an array of choices for the self. Akatharsia refers to uncleanness, that which is vile or dirty (Gal. 5:19; Eph. 5:3; Col. 3:5).

Refers to rejecting God and His ways (compare Rom 1:24–32).

The phrase “given themselves over” is from the word paradidomi {par-ad-idʹ-o-mee} which means “to give or turn over into the hands or the power of another; to betray; to be surrendered or delivered to the use of another.” For example, when Judas betrayed Jesus, this is the word that was used. The unbelieving heathen is betrayed, given over, and surrendered to lasciviousness. What’s that?

aselgeia {as-elgʹ-i-a} which means “uncontrolled, unbridled lust.” It is outrageous, shameless, excessive wicked behavior. The person is out of control and without restraint in his or her drunkenness or sexual behavior. Alcohol, drugs, and nudity accelerate the sensual behavior and immorality.

Aselgeia (sensuality) refers to total licentiousness, the absence of all moral restraint, especially in the area of sexual sins. One commentator says the term relates to “a disposition of the soul incapable of bearing the pain of discipline.” The idea is that of unbridled self-indulgence and undisciplined obscenity. 2 Peter 2:10–12 “and especially those who go after the flesh in its corrupt lust and despise authority. Daring, self-willed, they do not tremble when they blaspheme glorious ones, whereas angels who are greater in strength and power do not bring a reviling judgment against them before the Lord. But these, like unreasoning animals, born as creatures of instinct to be captured and killed, blaspheming where they have no knowledge, will in the destruction of those creatures also be destroyed,”

All people initially recognize at least some standard of right and wrong and have a certain sense of shame when they act against that standard. Consequently, they usually try to hide their wrongdoing. They may continually fall back into it but still recognize it as wrong, as something they should not be doing; and conscience will not let them remain comfortable. But as they continue to overrule conscience and train themselves to do evil and to ignore guilt, they eventually reject those standards and determine to live solely by their own desires, thereby revealing an already seared conscience. Having rejected all divine guidelines and protection, they become depraved in mind and give themselves over to sensuality. Such a person cares nothing about what other people think—not to mention about what God thinks—but only about what gratifies the cravings of his own warped mind.

Ungodliness and its attendant immorality destroy the mind as well as the conscience and the spirit. Rejection of God and of His truth and righteousness finally results in what Paul refers to in Romans as a “depraved mind” (1:28)—a mind that is no mind, that cannot reason, that cannot think clearly, that cannot recognize or understand God’s truth, and that loses contact with spiritual reality. In its extreme, the depraved mind loses contact with all reality. That is the mindlessness of the self-indulgent, profligate celebrity who loses his career, his sanity, and often his life because of wanton sensuality. When indecency becomes a way of life, every aspect of life is corrupted, distorted, and eventually destroyed.

The rapid increase in mental illness today can be laid in large measure at the feet of increased sensuality of every sort. Man is made for God and designed according to His standards. When he rejects God and His standards he destroys himself in the process. The corruptions of our present society are not the result of psychological or sociological circumstances but the result of personal choices based on principles that are specifically and purposely against God and His way. Homosexuality, sexual perversion, abortion, lying, cheating, stealing, murder, and every other type of moral degeneration have become unabashed and calloused ways of life through the conscious choices of those who indulge in them.

Sensuality outside the path of God promises to satisfy, but it only destroys the heart, darkens the mind, and deadens the senses.

Jesus revealed that the real problem lies in the hearts of individuals and that what comes out of the heart is what defiles people (Matt 12:34; Mark 7:20). Thus, Paul speaks of the lusts of the heart as leading to impurity (Rom 1:24). Impurity is also one of the fruits of the evil inclination, that is, the flesh (Gal 5:19; see also Col 3:5). Impurity is the opposite of the holiness that God seeks in the lives of people (1 Thess 4:7)

Ergasia (practice) can refer to a business enterprise, and that idea could apply here. The ungodly person often makes business out of every kind of impurity. People who embrace wicked philosophies soon lose their sensitivity to evil and put their precepts into practice. (The word translated “work” in Ephesians 4:19, ergasia, describes a regular, gainful occupation. This word is used to describe how the slave owners used the demon-possessed girl they had in their power (Acts 16:16, 19). Ergasia is also used in the passage about Demetrius and the silversmiths of Ephesus who “brought no small gain” to themselves by making shrines of the pagan goddess Diana; their wealth was threatened by the conversion of many Ephesians to Christ (Acts 19:24–27). (Incidentally, these confrontations with the slave owners and the silversmiths are the only two occasions recorded in the book of Acts when Gentiles instigated persecution against Paul.) The word is also found in Luke 12:58 where the Lord denounces the blind leaders of Israel: “When thou goest with thine adversary to the magistrate, as thou art in the way, give diligence that thou mayest be delivered from him” (Luke 12:58, italics added). Here ergasia means “work hard, take pains, do your best.")

The opening phrase, “having lost all sensitivity,” literally means they were beyond feeling — like callused skin. Bishop Moule renders this, “having got beyond the pain.” Nothing hurt.

a life without concern for the consequences of their actions. Their desire for sensual pleasure overrode every other regard.

that is, they have ceased to feel pain or become dead to feeling

Understand that the ecstacy that you may feel at first when you delve into a sinful lifestyle is fleeting later in time. To get those feelings of pleasure or satisfaction you had in the beginning, you will repeat the sin again and again. Eventually, the satisfaction or thrill is lost, so more desperate or dangerous measures are attempted to get a bigger thrill.

A person falls deeper and deeper into a destructive spiral of wickedness. As the pursuit of sinful pleasure becomes predominant in a person’s mind, then perversion warps wisdom and sensibility. The mind sinks further into corruption and depraved darkness. Truth and wisdom are rejected and replaced by foolishness and perversity.

Understand this truth also, that unbridled, lustful living will end up betraying you. Sin may promise you thrills that in the end will make you ill or kill you. It will destroy you eventually. This is what happens when you are “given over” to lasciviousness.

By implication this text is about idolatry. We turn from God to the idol of self. We give ourselves to self and end up controlled by desires—desires that deceive by promising happiness, but never provide either satisfaction or fulfillment. Instead, they destroy. As Tom Wright points out, “idols demand sacrifices.” The cost is high to wholeness and to relations with people. The judgment of sin—at least in part—is that people are given over to their sins. Sin is its own punishment. Human beings need a higher calling than following passions.

Sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay.

Beloved, the past life of sensuality and unbridled lust should not characterize your present if you are a Christian. God says that you are to live a holy life, not a hellish one. 1 Thessalonians 4:7 “For God did not call us to impurity, but in sanctification.” 1 Peter 1:15 “but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your conduct;”

Every kind of impurity - a general defilement of the whole personality, tainting every sphere of life

with greediness (they are full of greed NIV, with a desire for more and more CSB, they do more and more bad things just to please themselves EASY)

Pleonexia is ‘greediness’, so it is self-focused desire (5:3; Col. 3:5). Jesus warned against making such a choice (Mark 7:22; Luke 12:15).

That vividly describes our contemporary Christless culture—unhindered lust, unbridled promiscuity, and uncontrolled self-indulgence. Author Kent Hughes describes it well: “Our culture is hell-bent in its cavalier, reckless pursuit of sin, and it makes psychopaths its martyrs and drag queens its models.”

Paul was saying that those who are past feeling work hard at their vileness. They hope to gain from it and many do. People who run prostitution rings, sell drugs, and enslave people in hellish lusts are so greedy for gain that they disregard the effect their work has on others. Likewise, those who write, print, and sell pornography and glorify sodomy and other kinds of perverted sex are greedy beyond description.

It promises pleasure, but it delivers pain; it promises satisfaction, but it delivers sorrow; it promises a bright future, but it delivers a blighted future. Stolen bread is sweet, but while it is in your mouth, it turns to gravel (see Prov. 20:17).

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “When we are tempted, we do not say, ‘I hate God, and God hates me.’ Rather, we simply forget about God and act as though He didn’t exist, or we had never known him.”

What wrong or inappropriate thing are you tempted to do, thinking you will win? You won’t. Is it financial? Is it moral? Is it interpersonal? You won’t win. You may win in the short run, but you always lose in the long run. Sin is like cocaine. It feels good on the front end, but on the back end it destroys.

No matter what they did, such desire was never satisfied. They always wanted more. Lust not love dominated their lives. Such Gentiles certainly did not serve as models for the church. They were not mature. They did not bring unity.

indicates that such people are never satisfied with what they have. Jesus warned against this unrestrained appetite to acquire: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed (πλεονεξίας); a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions” (Luke 12:15). He taught that greed is one of the evils that comes out of the heart (Mark 7:22). Paul told the Colossians that it is one of the characteristics of the earthly nature and is something Christians need to fight against (Col 3:5

When God’s truth, authority, and His boundaries are spurned and rejected, the person proceeds to pursue behavior that damages, dishonors, and destroys his mind and his body. There is an expensive price tag to thumbing your nose at God. The darkened thoughts and behavior of our past are not to be in our present.

The word “greediness” is derived from the word pleonexia {pleh-on-ex-eeʹ-ah}. It describes a person who has an unquestionable lust and passion for whatever he or she desires. It involves an unlawful desire for things that belong to other people and have no right to possess. The person has a love of possessing things to the point that he is willing to take advantage or sacrifice family or friends for his own desires. Why? The answer is because this person of greed looks at life in material terms. Understand folks that material things are temporary. Spiritual things are eternal.

Thomas Costain’s history, The Three Edwards, described the life of Raynald III, a fourteenth-century duke in what is now Belgium. Grossly overweight, Raynald was commonly called by his Latin nickname, Crassus, which means “fat.”

After a violent quarrel, Raynald’s younger brother Edward led a successful revolt against him. Edward captured Raynald but did not kill him. Instead, he built a room around Raynald in the Nieuwkerk castle and promised him he could regain his title and property as soon as he was able to leave the room.

This would not have been difficult for most people since the room had several windows and a door of near-normal size, and none was locked or barred. The problem was Raynald’s size. To regain his freedom, he needed to lose weight. But Edward knew his older brother, and each day he sent a variety of delicious foods.

Instead of dieting his way out of prison, Raynald grew fatter. When Duke Edward was accused of cruelty, he had a ready answer: “My brother is not a prisoner. He may leave when he so wills.” Raynald stayed in that room for ten years and wasn’t released until after Edward died in battle. By then his health was so ruined he died within a year … a prisoner of his own appetite.

Beloved, we are not to be prisoners of our appetites and greed. Paul reminds us here that the greediness of impurity in our past is not to be in our present. Christ has given us power to say “No” to temptations and live a victorious life.

Not only is every kind of impurity pursued, but they are pursued relentlessly. There is a breadth and depth to this pursuit of impurity. As such, the giving of oneself over to every kind of impurity is like a bottomless pit. There is no end to the pursuit of impure desires, as it is never satisfied, never quenched, and never concludes.

Challenge: Though Paul’s words refer primarily to unbelievers, the fact that he urges his readers to “walk no longer” as the Gentiles do (4:17) indicates that even Christians can backslide into these conditions. Having returned to their old wardrobe of sin, they will find their minds shrouded in moral haze, their hearts increasingly hardened to the work of the Spirit, and their lives careening into a tangled jungle of immorality from which it is difficult to escape. Filth is filth, regardless of who wears the dirty garments.

Conclusion: When a person determines to think his own way, do things his own way, and pursue his own destiny, he cuts himself off from God. When that happens, he cuts himself off from truth and becomes spiritually blind and without standards of morality. Without standards of morality, immorality becomes a shameless and calloused way of life. When that is continued it destroys the mind’s ability to distinguish good from evil, truth from falsehood, and reality from unreality. The godless life becomes the mindless life.

That process characterizes every unbeliever. It is the direction that every ungodly person is headed, although some are further along than others. “Evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Tim. 3:13). That some people may not reach the extremes Paul mentions in Ephesians 4:17–19 is due only to the protective shield of God’s common grace that He showers both on the righteous and the unrighteous (see Matt. 5:45) and to the preserving influence of the Holy Spirit (Job 34:14–15) and of the church (Matt. 5:13).

What is hopeful about this passage, even in the midst of its stern warnings? How does the truth of the gospel of grace shape everything that Paul commands and teaches throughout it?

Contextualization: Why do Christians need these kinds of warnings? The answer comes when we consider why temptations such as the sinful allures of the Internet are so great. Whether the temptation is of gambling, pornography, or time waste, these, too, can seem “almost innocent.” “Nobody gets hurt,” “nobody need know” (employer or spouse), and “we can stop at any time,” we think. But what happens follows the biblical pathology of sin. The sin in which we indulge for a while hardens our hearts, darkens our minds to the evil of what we are doing, and ultimately makes us less sensitive to and less fulfilled by the profound satisfaction God provides by his blessings in our lives.

Application:

Mind:

To begin with, Christians think differently from unsaved people. Note the emphasis here on thinking: mind (Eph. 4:17, 23), understanding (Eph. 4:18), ignorance (Eph. 4:18), “learned Christ” (Eph. 4:20). Salvation begins with repentance, which is a change of mind. The whole outlook of a person changes when he trusts Christ, including his values, goals, and interpretation of life.

The centrality of the mind in determining how we live is an idea that is found throughout the New Testament. In Romans 12:2, Paul recognizes that the life pleasing and acceptable to God requires believers to be “transformed by the renewing of [their] mind[s].” He strikes the same note in Colossians 3:2: “Set your minds on things above, not on things on the earth.” Christians face a lifelong battle for control of their minds. What you think will shape how you live. The psalmist understood this: “Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You” (119:11). God’s living Word, filled with truth, is the Christian’s great weapon in guarding the mind against the lies and seductions of the world, the flesh, and the devil. A Scripture-saturated mind helps us to see through the wiles of the devil (2 Cor. 2:11; Eph. 6:11) and keeps our minds fixed on God.

Heart:

Life:

Reflection:

A heart that’s been transformed by the Gospel hates the sins that he used to love.

Our belief is the very root behavior.

It’s scary to see when you see a professing believer thinking the same way and acting the same way as the unbeliever.

To return to such a life of sin would bring darkened minds, hardened hearts, and deadened senses to these Ephesian Christians. Paul’s warning is clear: Christians must not turn back to a life of sin—as enticing as it often seems! The apostle then explains the Christian calling they have received, which involves a life of putting sin to death.

The Christian cannot pattern himself after the unsaved person, because the Christian has experienced a miracle of being raised from the dead. His life is not futile, but purposeful. His mind is filled with the light of God’s Word, and his heart with the fullness of God’s life. He gives his body to God as an instrument of righteousness (Rom. 6:13), and not to sin for the satisfaction of his own selfish lusts. In every way, the believer is different from the unbeliever, and therefore the admonition: “Walk not.”

Is the description too negative? Are these verses too absolute? How is it possible to think the human mind is futile—worthless—when humans have accomplished so much? And surely not all Gentiles were as bad as Paul says.

This passage does not reject value in humanity, and it must be read in keeping with its purpose. This is not a discussion about human worth, ability, or accomplishment, nor was Paul unaware that some Gentile philosophers wrestled with ethical questions and sought high morals. The passage is a rejection of the Gentile way of life, not a rejection of the Gentiles as persons (which would be strange for one who saw himself as the apostle to the Gentiles, cf. 3:1). Paul’s statements here are both a rejection of the dominant lifestyle of the society in which the readers lived and a call for them to reject it. Furthermore, these are generalizing statements that describe the conduct of those who cut themselves off from life with God.

Granted the intent of the text, it is not too negative. It is precisely on target. Christianity is a religion that emphasizes on the one hand the futility and distortion of humanity without God and on the other hand the value of humanity in God’s eyes and with God. Christianity invites us to recognize we are vile, but it also invites us to desire to be like God. It knows that human beings need a redemption they do not deserve, but also that God thinks they are worth redeeming. Only in facing the painful truth about ourselves is there hope for healing.

1. Why are bad habits—and especially those that are developed over a long period of time—so difficult to break? And even after they are broken, what kinds of discipline must one practice in order to maintain victory over them and freedom from them?

2. Describe some of the warnings you have received in your life from leaders or mentors whom you respect. What was your initial response to these warnings? How did you ultimately benefit from them?

Reflection Question: Even if you have been a Christian for quite some time, the warnings within Scripture are still meant to offer you spiritual exhortation—and to make you vigilant and disciplined regarding your walk with God. How can you best respond to the warnings of Ephesians 4:17–19?

Gospel connection:

1 Corinthians 6:9–11 “Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.”

For some of us, that might have been our background before tayong maging Christian, that’s why Paul is calling us na hindi na dapat tayo mamuhay ng ganyan bilang tugon natin sa kabutihang loob na ibinigay satin ng Diyos sa pamamagitan ni Kristo. Christ shed His blood, died in order to pay the debts of sins we could not pay. How we who redeemed by His blood continue to live in sin knowing that our Lord and Savior died for it? How could you cheapen the grace that Christ provided for us on the Cross of calvary?

2 Corinthians 5:17 “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”

I have said that Christians must respond to this situation with the gospel of Jesus Christ. Where is the gospel in a passage like this? I find it in two words, found in verse 17: ‘no longer.’ Paul writes, ‘Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.’ This is what Jesus Christ offers to you: ‘No longer’ to sin. He says, ‘If you abide in my word … you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 8:32–33). Sin alienates us from the life of God, but through Jesus Christ we receive new life, heavenly life, power from on high for godliness. Jesus says, ‘So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed’ (John 8:36).

If you are a Christian, you need no longer live as you formerly have; indeed, you must not. Turn to the light of God’s Word and ask him to cast out the darkness that was formerly in your mind. Turn to the Lord Jesus and ask him to change and sanctify your desires. It was precisely with this in mind that he promised, ‘Ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened’ (Luke 11:10). Asking must be combined with seeking—which means acting upon your prayer—and with knocking—which means persevering in faith. But Jesus promises the Holy Spirit with power. He said of the polluted streams of sin and of the world, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty forever. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (John 4:13–14).

No longer! That is our gospel. And through Jesus Christ it is the reality to which we are called and empowered by God’s grace.