time imagining himself to be wise and capable of arriving at the heights and depths of

truth through his own intellectual capacity. Having rejected the true light, how great

must be that darkness! And this is not a whit less true today than in century one. We see

all around us a world that for the most part has rejected Christ and the Truth, and a

Christendom that is largely impotent, having merely a form of godliness without its

essential power (II Tim. 3: 5), an evil age that is hastening to its tragic end as foretold in

the Scriptures. The Apostle tells us that the darkened Gentiles are "alienated from the life

of God". This shows very clearly that, apart from Christ, man has nothing immortal; he

is a stranger to God's endless life, and furthermore his ignorance leads to hardness of

heart or mind and so initiates his thinking.

Ignorance can be of two kinds, blameworthy or excusable, and the remoter context of

Romans makes it clear that this ignorance is the former, for "they refused to have God in

their knowledge" (Rom. 1: 28 R.V.) and the result, a callousness and utter indifference to

the things of God.  Such is the sure result of persistent rejection of God's claims.

Verse 19 further describes their condition as being "past feeling". The word literally

means "to have lost the sense of pain". When men deliberately choose darkness rather

than light, God's judgment allows them to go the way they prefer, with its awful

consequences. We read three times that "God gave them up" in Rom. 1: 24, 26, 28, as a

consequence of their deliberate giving up God.

This was the state that redemption had rescued some of the Ephesian believers from,

and now Paul reminds them that their daily Christian walk must be free from such an

outlook and practice. He wrote:

We note that the Apostle did not say "you did not so learn the truth, or learn the

gospel", but "you did not so learn Christ", for He alone is the embodiment of truth and

every good thing that the human heart needs. Moreover, Paul does not bring himself or

the other apostles forward as the teachers of the Ephesian saints, but Christ Himself--"if

so be that ye heard Him and were taught in (or by) Him". It was most improbable that

anyone living at Ephesus at that time had ever actually heard Christ in His earthly

ministry, yet the Apostle asserts that the Lord Himself had been their Teacher! This only

goes to show that Paul was only the means that the Lord Jesus was using to instruct His

people. How foolish then to separate the teaching of Christ from the teaching of Paul as

some do, and to imagine that the record of the Gospels is more important than the

The Apostle goes on to use a phrase which is often misquoted as though it reads: "the

truth as it is in Jesus". This suggests there can be truth apart from Christ, but Paul never

suggests such a thing, for it would be completely untrue. "Even as truth is in Jesus" is

what he wrote, and this but confirms John 14: 6: "I am the Way, the Truth and the

Life". The use of the name Jesus by itself is unusual in Paul's epistles. Practically

always, the N.T. apostle give Him a title of respect. For them He is not just "Jesus", an

outstanding man which is the way most professing Christians of today regard Him and