Ephesians 5:6-10

Will Clark

Ephesians • Sermon • Submitted 2 years ago

Ephesians 5:6–10

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Ephesians 5:6–7 NASB 2020

See that no one deceives you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them;

Two weeks ago we took on these verses 5 & 6. And as I told you then - it is never my intention to read anything more or anything less into the scripture than what is actually there. My honest and sincere desire is to preach the word without any bias or opinion of my own. Because at the end of the day, you don’t need the opinion or spin of a man on what God says - you need ONLY what God says. Having said that - there is a task assigned to the preacher to exposit the Word and draw the meaning out in the same way that the cow chews the cud and gets all the nutrients out of the grass.

So - disclaimer here. It’s not my place to judge anyone. Not my job and I don’t want it. But it is my task to say what God says and not to water it down. More on the “watering down” in a little while.

What is Paul trying to do in these verses? Well - if you’ll remember - these letter is to the church in Ephesus and not to the culture at large. Paul is giving the church a warning.

“See that no one deceives YOU” “Therefore do not become partners with THEM”

First I think we need to define who the “YOU” is and who the “THEM” are. Because clearly we have 2 different categories of people here.

When we look at this I think it is pretty clear that the “YOU” is referring to the true Christians in the church, and the “THEM” are a section of people within the church who are not real Christians. We will call them the deceivers.

So, what is the warning?

Ephesians 5:6 “6 See that no one deceives you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.”

What are “these things”? Refer back to verse 3-5. Remember, Paul has already said that in verse 5 that these people who are living in this sinful lifestyle and pattern their lives after these sinful lifestyles have no inheritance in the Kingdom and are not believers.

So verse 6 is a natural warning that these people needed to pay close attention to!

The Bible Exposition Commentary Chapter Ten: Imitating Our Father (Ephesians 5:1–17)

In Paul’s day, there were false Christians who argued that believers could live in sin and get away with it. These deceivers had many arguments to convince ignorant Christians that they could sin repeatedly and still enter God’s kingdom. “You were saved by grace!” they argued. “Therefore go ahead and sin that God’s grace might abound!” Paul answered that foolish argument in Romans 6. “Sin in the life of a believer is different from sin in the life of an unsaved person!” Yes—it’s worse! God judges sin no matter where He finds it, and He does not want to find it in the life of one of His own children. I personally believe that no true Christian can ever be lost, but he will prove the reality of his faith by an obedient life.

Think we have any of this today?

Cults that call themselves churches.

Lexham Survey of Theology God’s Wrath

God’s wrath is his revulsion against evil, his settled displeasure with sin and sinners.

The wrath of God is not a popular concept in the liberal West. It is widely ignored, denied, or radically reinterpreted. Yet it is a prominent doctrine in the Bible. In the Old Testament there are over 580 references, using more than twenty different words. In many instances God’s wrath is portrayed in dramatically personal terms, as in Nahum 1:2–11. In the New Testament it is again frequently mentioned, though generally in less personal terms, with few passages stating explicitly that God is angry.

It is widely recognized that talk of God’s wrath is anthropomorphic or, to be more precise, anthropopathic. God is portrayed in human terms. It is important not to equate God’s anger with often-sinful human anger: God does not have mood swings and does not “fly off the handle.” God’s love is also anthropopathic; we must not fall into the error of equating the divine love with human love in all its imperfection and distortion. So what is God’s wrath? It is his indignation at sin, his revulsion to evil and all that opposes him, his displeasure at it and the venting of that displeasure. It is his passionate resistance to every will that is set against him.

C. H. Dodd proposed viewing God’s wrath as an impersonal process, as the “inevitable process of cause and effect in a moral universe.” He argues that in the New Testament, “anger as an attitude of God to men disappears, and His love and mercy become all-embracing.” Like Marcion in the second century, Dodd rejected the teaching of the Old Testament on the basis of a selective reading of the New Testament, and in so doing reduced God purely to love. The latter argued not just that “God is love” but also that “God is light.” But there is no shortage of teaching in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels, about God’s active judgement of sin. P. T. Forsyth wrote perceptively of the “holy love of God.”

Dodd’s aim in talking about impersonal wrath appears to be to dissociate God from wrath and punishment, to portray wrath as a mere byproduct of sin, not actually willed by God. Such a position is not free of deistic implications: it removes a significant aspect of human life from the active rule of God. It is also profoundly disturbing. Can God really view the sexual molestation and murder of a child without any sense of displeasure or indignation?

Wrath is not an eternal attribute of God in the manner of love and holiness. It is his reaction in time to the phenomenon of sin. Also, wrath is not natural to God in the way that mercy is. Isaiah 28:21 calls it his “strange work” his “alien task.” God is “slow to anger,” as the Old Testament repeatedly states, while he delights in showing mercy (Ps 103:8). Parents who have to discipline their children understand this.

God’s wrath should be seen not as opposed to his love but as an outworking of that love. The opposite to wrath is not love but indifference. Paul’s injunction in Romans 12:9 that love be “sincere” is followed by the command to hate what is evil. A husband who loved his wife would feel jealous anger at her infidelity. Failure to hate evil implies a deficiency in love. A “God” who did not detest evil would not be worthy of our worship, and indeed would not be loving in the sense that the Bible portrays his love.

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