IV. 'l'HEY WERE STRANGERS TO THE COVENANTS OF PROMISE. 1. The plural reference is to the successive renewals of the covenant with the patriarchs. It was but the one covenant of promise-" the promise made to the fathers " which God fulfilled in "raising up Jesus" (Acts xiii. 32). The word "covenant" occurs two hundred and thirty-six times in our English Bible, and in more than two hundred instances it is e. Divine covenant. The covenant with Abraham was the Magna Cbarta of Israel; the covenant with David rests upon this earlier covenant, marking out more clearly the line in which the Divine purpose of blessing would be fulfilled to Jews and eventually to all ne.,:ons. The new covenant of the New Testament, which has in Christ a Media.tor greater than Moses and is "established upon better promisea," is no other than the ancient zovenant made with Abraham (Gal. iii. 14). 2. Thus we can see how the Gentiles w.ire strangers to the covenant in all its historic developments. They had no national covenant with God, and no land of promise in the present world. As Gentiles, the covenant had ~ever been revealed to them, and, except so far as they may have been included in the Israelitisb commonwealth, it could bring them no blessing. V. 'fHEY WERE WITHOUT HOPE. They bad no covenanted hope-no hope of the Messiah and of salvation by him, vi' q, future state of eternal life. "Such as arc Christless must be hopeless; such as are >l'ithout faith must needs be without hope; and such as are without the promise must nec.issarily be without faith; for the promise is the ground of faith, and faith is the ground of .1-lope." It is a miserable state to be without hope. "If in this lire only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable." The future to the heathen was a night without a star. In the Roman catacombs hope is the commonest inscription. There is no 1<uch word on thtl torn bs of the heathen dead. VI. THEY WERE WITHOUT Goo IN THE WORLD. This rna~ks the climax of their misery. They were without God, though they were not ath.ilsts, for they had a thousand gods that were no 11:ods. And they were not bold deniers of God, for many of them were "feeling after the Lord." But (1) they were without ttle knowledge of the true God; (2) they had no faith in him; (3) they lived without relation to him; and (4) they had no consciousness of his presence to bless and guide and comfort them. They were without God "in the world "-in contrast with the position of th.e Jews entrenched within their commonwealth privileges-and were thus homeless and forsaken in that world which had S11.tan for its prince. '!'his is the picture of ~he heathen world given by the apostle-without Christ, without Ghurch, without coven11.nt, withont hope, without God. At the period to which he refers, religion had outlived itself, unbelief mocked at the superstitions of the vulgar, and scepticism gradually became the sole wisdom of the cultured classes. Along with the power of truth the power of morality was irrecoverably lost; and yet there was o. deep yearning at t '.le heart of paganism for the God unknown whom it was the high destiny of Christianity to make known to the Gentiles. 'l.'hey were without God, yet were not outcast from his favour, for these Ephesian Gentiles were in due time called by his grace.-T. C.
Ver. 13.-Nearness to God in the blood of Christ. 'l'his chapter speaks of a double alienation and of a double reconciliation : on the one hand, a deep alienation of man- kind from God, dating from birth, subsisting along with a moral separation between Jews and Gentiles; on the other hand, it points to the historic fact of Christ's atone- ment ns the divinely instituted method by which both alienations were to be extinguished, a.ud man united to God and to man in a higher unity, so that the two separated elements should henceforth become ono new man, one city of God, one temple or habitation of God. I. THE GENTILES REMOTE FROM Goo. "You that were afar off." They were in a geographical sense far off from Palestine, the centre of the true religion. 'l'his laud was, with o. truly providential design, selected as the home of God's chosen people, because it held a central place between Europe, Asia, and Africa. But the nations were still more apart from Palestine, so as to have no share in its theocratic life. In this case, the expression "far from God," or "far off," was a phrase in common use to designate the Gentiles (Isa. xlix. l; Acts ii. 39). Bnt there was e. moral distance-an alienation of the Gentile heart from God-which was more serious than any geographical remoteness from the seat of theocratic iustitut.ions. It is both tho sinfulness ancl the misery of sin that men a.re at a distance from God. Unbelief is a" dcpartnre from the 80 THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS. [OR, II, 1-22,