Ephesians Chapter 5 verse 6 Holy Bible

Ephesians 5 : 6 Bible Verse Songs

• Empty Words by Lindy Cofer

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 6. - Let no man deceive you with empty words. No man, whether pagan or nominal Christian: the pagan defending a life of pleasure as the only thing to be had with even a smack of good in it; the Christian mitigating pleasant sins, saying that the young must have an outlet for their warm feelings, that men in business must put all their soul into it, and that life must be brightened by a little mirth and jollity. As opposed to what the apostle has laid down (ver. 5), such words are empty, destitute of all solidity or truth. For on account of these things the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience. The sophistry is swept away by an awful fact - the wrath cometh, is coming, and will come too in the future life. It comes in the form of natural punishment, Nature avenging her broken laws by deadly diseases; in the form, too, of disappointment, remorse, desolation of soul; and in the form of judgments, like that which befell Sodom and Gomorrah, or the sword which never departed from David's house.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(6) Let no man deceive you with vain words.--It seems likely that St. Paul has in view, not mere worldly condonation of evil or low heathen morality, but some anticipation of that Antinomian form of Gnosticism which held that the things done in the body, being evil only by the irresistible, inevitable gravitation of matter to evil, could not touch the soul. We know that in the Colossian Church there was an anticipation of the more ascetic Gnosticism (Colossians 2:21; comp. also 1Timothy 4:1-5). As the earlier Judaistic rigour had assumed this later form, so the earlier Antinomianism (of Romans 6:1) may probably have passed into the more systematic and speculative Antinomianism of the Gnostic type. (Comp. Philippians 3:18-19.) In this same spirit St. John, himself familiar with the life of Ephesus, writes earnestly: "Let no man deceive you; he that doeth righteousness is righteous" (1John 3:7). Hero the Apostle warns them that it is for these sins that "the wrath of God is coming on the children of disobedience," i.e. (see Ephesians 2:2), on the heathen; and urges the Christians not to fall back, by being "partakers with them" both of their sin and their punishment, into the gross heathen darkness out of which they had been saved. . . .