Ephesians 4:14 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters

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Ephesians 4:14

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There will be, Paul says, opposition and hostility towards Christ’s people and to the word. He heaps up the metaphors. He moves from children who have not reached maturity and are susceptible to deception, to small boats, light vessels tossed to and fro on the waves of the sea. The sea is so turbulent and the winds are so strong that the small vessel can no longer hold its own and is tossed on the crest of mounting swell and facing in different directions all the time. That is immaturity.The apostle Paul has in mind some of the other churches as he writes to the Ephesians. How easily they have been swept off their feet by those Judaizers. How did it happen? And he writes to the Galatians – ‘Oh, foolish Galatians. However did it happen to you, of all people?’ In Galatia they were known for their discernment in life, for their shrewdness. ‘You cannot catch out a Galatian,’ they used to say. ‘How is it that you of all people have fallen in to the arms of the Judaising heretics and the early Gnostics with their nonsense about tiers of angels and worshipping through them and so on,’ and sometimes that can be said of Christians today – how were you upended? No basic doctrine.‘Every wind of doctrine,’ false teaching is in mind. ‘By the sleight of men.’ The original Greek uses a term there which is about cubes. It is about dice playing. The sleight of men. But the word translated sleight refers to cubes, in other words, the playing of dice. The men use tricks and they would handle the dice in such a clever way, like a conjuror. Of course, a child or an inexperienced person would not know these tricks and would be fooled and would lose the game because the adults would cheat. The sleight of men is used as an illustration by the apostle.Then the metaphor changes yet again. The apostle Paul changes metaphors mid-sentence and here it is in this verse – ‘Whereby they lie in wait to deceive,’ ‘cunning craftiness’ translated elsewhere ‘the wiles of the devil’. They set up ambushes, false teachers. They know what they are doing. They are very clever with their stories. In those days, they told fables about biblical characters, and people would be fascinated by their skill as story tellers. What wonderful speakers they were, and people would be fooled by their false teaching. But they did it because they were like bandits on the road, ambushing. They wanted the crowd, they wanted their money, they wanted their support. They were people building empires and followings. The devil orchestrates it to hurt and hinder the work of the gospel. So the apostle Paul warns in very powerful pictures that they are not genuine. There may here and there be some genuinely fooled person among their teachers, but most of them know what they are doing and they are deliberately crafty to produce an end.

Application

Why do some remain immature as believers? Because they have not laid a foundation with the truth. They have not understood the clear and constantly repeated basic doctrines of the faith. If they had these things in their heart, they would be held, they would recognise the nonsense and the dreams of the men and the false ideas at once. That is why it is so important early in the Christian life to read a good book on doctrine. Get a copy of Puritan Thomas Watson’s Body of Divinity. You will find the great doctrines of the faith and all the Scriptures that teach them, and how they interlock with one another. We have seen it over the last 50 years or so, movement after movement, phase after phase of a crazy charismatic movement. A new thing comes along every hour, and as though people are swept by the sea, they all take it up. Years ago, a man called John Wimber came along – new methods, new tricks, new ideas, new teachings not in the Bible – and many all swept off in that direction. Then there was another phase of falling down and being slain in the Spirit, and they were all swept off in that direction. Why are people uprooted, even Christians, even many of them who truly love the Lord and want to follow him? But why are they such small boats, susceptible to every ocean gale?

Do not ever think to yourself, ‘Oh yes, but the John Wimbers of this world and all these very wealthy prosperity teachers who are all charismatic, and who pull great crowds and bring them under their spell – perhaps they are genuine people, just misled. No, says Scripture, sleight of hand and trickery. There was a very prominent charismatic prophet and leader who died just recently as a comparatively young man, and he was one of the big men in his country. And another of the big men, one of them, very prosperous, wealthy charismatic trickster, he wrote an obituary for him, and in this obituary he let the cat out the bag. He said, ‘Brother so-and-so was very good with certain tricks. Tricks? He could work certain hoaxes on this kind of thing and that kind of thing better than any of us.’ What an admission! Even they know they are performing tricks.

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Ephesians 4:14 Commentary and Bible Study

The meaning of Ephesians 4:14 explained