What Does Ephesians 4:2 Mean?

(2) **With all lowliness and meekness, with longsuffering.**—See Colossians 3:12, where the same three qualities are dwelt upon, but there introduced by “compassion and kindness.” They seem to correspond almost exactly to the first, third, and fifth beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, in which the principle of love is wrought out in various forms (as in the other beatitudes the principle of righteousness): “Blessed are the poor in spirit;” “Blessed are the meek;” “Blessed are the merciful.” The word “lowliness of mind” is used by St. Paul only in the Epistles of the Captivity (Philippians 2:3; Colossians 2:18; Colossians 2:23; Colossians 3:12) and in the address to the Ephesian presbyters (Acts 20:19). It is, indeed, a word new coined in Christian terminology, and even the root from which it comes is mostly used by the heathen moralists in a bad sense (of meanness and slavishness), of which there is still a trace in Colossians 2:18. “Meekness” is mostly “gentleness”—“the meek and quiet spirit” (1Peter 3:4)—the natural, though not the invariable, fruit of humility, winning souls by its very absence of bitter self-assertion, and so “inheriting the earth.” “Longsuffering” is the manifestation of such meekness, with something of especial effort and struggle, in the bearing of injury. (2, 3) **Forbearing one another in love** **. . .**—The word rendered “endeavouring” is, in the original, a word expressing “earnestness” of thought and exertion to secure a thing not lightly obtained. (See 2Timothy 4:9-21; Hebrews 4:11; 2Peter 1:10.) It shows that St. Paul here passes from the negative aspects of love, summed up in forbearance, to the more positive and energetic enthusiasm for unity and peace. Love is in both aspects, the “uniting bond” of peace. In the parallel passage of Colossians 3:14, it is “put on over” all else, and is the uniting “bond of perfectness.” In the celebrated thirteenth chapter of the First Epistle to Corinthians (Ephesians 4:4-7) it is made to include “long-suffering” and “kindness,” and all forms of humility and gentleness. But, if it be real, it must necessarily pass into active energy; if it is to win the final beatitude of “blessing to the peacemakers,” it must “labour for peace,” and “follow after the things which make for peace” (Psalm 120:7; Romans 14:19). **The unity of the Spirit** is certainly the unity given by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. This we cannot create, for it is the gift of God; but we can “keep” it: that is, cherish it, guard it, and make it effectual by love; and all experience proves that, if we would so keep it, we need the positive earnestness of exertion against evils without and within. -2Ephesians 4:7-11 pass from the unity of the Church to the diversity of graces and offices in its members, all being gifts of the ascended Lord, and results of that universal mediation which fills all things. (2) From this general description of the regeneration of the soul out of the death of sin, in the Lord Jesus Christ, St. Paul now passes on to deal with special moral duties (Ephesians 4:25-30)—the casting out of falsehood, wrath, dishonesty, and impurity, which are the four typical sins forbidden in the four general Commandments of the Second Table—the Ninth, the Sixth, the Eighth, and the Seventh. But he treats all with a marked and striking peculiarity of treatment—in relation to the great principle of unity in Christ, rather than in relation to a man’s own nature or his individual responsibility to God. In this treatment he shows the vivid practical application of the characteristic doctrine of this Epistle.