17 Now this I say and dtestify in the Lord, ethat you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, fin the futility of their minds. 18 They gare darkened in their understanding, halienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to itheir hardness of heart. 19 They jhave become callous and khave given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. 20

that for the time to come you do not live, and behave yourselves, as ignorant and unconverted heathens do, who are wholly guided by an understanding employed about vain things, their idols and their worldly possessions, things which are no way profitable to their souls, and which will deceive their expectations.

They were void of all saving knowledge; yea, ignorant of many things concerning God which the light of nature might have taught them

They sat in darkness, and they loved it rather than light:

It was not because God did not make himself known to them by his works, but because they would not admit the instructive rays of the divine light. They were ignorant because they would be so. Their ignorance proceeded from their obstinacy and the hardness of their hearts, their resisting the light and rejecting all the means of illumination and knowledge.

They had no sense of their sin, nor of the misery and danger of their case by means of it

It is a good argument against sin that we have not so learned Christ. Learn Christ! Is Christ a book, a lesson, a way, a trade? The meaning is, “You have not so learned Christianity—the doctrines of Christ and the rules of life prescribed by him.

That government which Christ has appointed for the edification of his church has now been considered. He next inquires what fruits the doctrine of the gospel ought to yield in the lives of Christians; or, if you prefer it, he begins to explain minutely the nature of that edification by which doctrine ought to be followed.

That those who have been taught in the school of Christ, and enlightened by the doctrine of salvation, should follow vanity, and in no respect differ from those unbelieving and blind nations on whom no light of truth has ever shone, would be singularly foolish. On this ground he very properly calls upon them to demonstrate, by their life, that they had gained some advantage by becoming the disciples of Christ. To

To impart to his exhortation the greater earnestness, he beseeches them by the name of God,—this I say and testify in the Lord,1—reminding them, that, if they despised this instruction, they must one day give an account.

Our ordinary life, as men, is nothing more than an empty image of life, not only because it quickly passes, but also because, while we live, our souls, not keeping close to God, are dead.

But the regeneration of believers is here called, by way of eminence, the life of God, because then does God truly live in us, and we enjoy his life, when he governs us by his Spirit. Of this life all men who are not new creatures in Christ are declared by Paul to be destitute

the knowledge of God is the true life of the soul, so, on the contrary, ignorance is the death of it.

And lest we should adopt the opinion of philosophers, that ignorance, which leads us into mistakes, is only an incidental evil, Paul shews that it has its root in the blindness of their heart, by which he intimates that it dwells in their very nature. The first blindness, therefore, which covers the minds of men, is the punishment of original sin; because Adam, after his revolt, was deprived of the true light of God, in the absence of which there is nothing but fearful darkness.

Unmoved by the approaching judgment of God, whom they offend, they go on at their ease, and fearlessly indulge without restraint in the pleasures of sin. No shame is felt, no regard to character is maintained

This renewal, moreover, implies a complete, basic change, a detachment from the world which they had formerly served, and an attachment to Christ, their newly confessed Lord and Savior.

The apostle introduces this admonition with all the authority he is able to summon.

Note also “in the Lord.” He is speaking and testifying in the sphere of the Lord, with his authority, and in the interest of his cause. Cf. Acts 20:26; Gal. 5:3; 1 Thess. 2:12.

The apostle emphasizes a very important point, namely, that all those endeavors which the Gentiles put forth in order to attain happiness end in disappointment. Their life is one long series of mocked expectations. It is a pursuing and not achieving, a blossoming and not bearing fruit.

the futility that characterizes the Gentile mind is a product of darkened understanding and estrangement from the God-given life, these two, in turn, resulting from a type of ignorance that is by no means excusable but is due to willful hardening and surrender to unbridled license of every description.

Not only is it true that people of this kind dwell in the darkness, but the darkness dwells in them

By constantly saying “No” to God’s voice in conscience and in the lessons which nature and history had provided, they had at last become hard as stone, dead to all responsiveness to that which is good and uplifting; not, however, dead to all feeling and all desire. Now there have been many people throughout the course of history who have taken pride in the stifling of all feeling. They were ashamed of shedding tears and even of revealing any but the most indifferent reaction to any outside influence. Thus, for example, the Stoic’s ideal was release from every emotion (“apatheia”).

Deal earnestly with the conduct of those committed to you, as did the Apostle, and take care that none of your children can say: Father and mother have not told me of it.

We do not understand what the true good is, nor how we can attain to it. If we are to be helped, we must be helped in these respects, else a hardening results, and we become at last “without feeling.”

Mark, man, the stripes of thy conscience, they are a favor from God; despise them not, lest thy heart be gradually led by the deceit of sin into obduracy

A proper character begins in us with the knowledge and confession of the might of sin, how it has clung to us from the time of our birth and extended itself as an old man over all our powers and members.

Daily repentance is needed, if we know the weakness, impurity, inconstancy of our hearts.

There is no more certain sign of an unspiritual mind, than the question: What then is so bad in me? Am I then so entirely unlike the image of God?

Self-abandonment to deeper sin is the Divine judicial penalty of sin