Ephesians 4:19 Commentary and Bible Study

What does Paul mean by ‘being past feeling’? It refers to spasms of conscience. There was a time when we felt badly about our lies, our selfishness, our cruelty, or our unclean acts and thoughts. But the trouble is, we wanted them, so we suppressed conscience – pangs of shame – and we became past feeling, untouchable. There is wilfulness in this. The conscience of such people can no longer be touched; you cannot make them feel responsible. All created moral sensitivities have been lost and become like calloused and thickened skin so that feeling is impossible. Paul uses the God-given analogy between the sense of touch and the sensitivity of the conscience. A repeatedly induced injury to the body results, as everyone knows, in changes in the body. To protect itself, the skin thickens, dulling the pain but leaving us in an overall disadvantaged state. Sensitivity is highly important in order to detect what is harmful as well as what is pleasant. Something analogous to this happens to the conscience which becomes calloused by frequently repeated abuse. When we first commit a particular sin, we experience the full response of conscience and the deeply unpleasant sensation warns us of the harm that we have done to ourselves. We sense the cost of sin and that there is death attached to it. We suffer guilt which we know we cannot remove, and we tremble at the punishment that we see must follow. We know that God is angry with us and we fear him. But if we ignore this pain and return to the same sin again, in time the conscience becomes hardened and its voice is suppressed. We are able to sin with greater ease and we can then only guess at the damage that we are doing to ourselves and at the punishment that is stored up for us. So they ‘have given themselves over’ to the power of their lusts. It is personal responsibility all the way. As an unconverted person I handed myself over to my sin so that I did not feel badly about it and I could commit it at will.‘Lasciviousness’ is a word which is very difficult to translate from the Greek and these days nobody really knows the meaning of the word, lasciviousness. Its core meaning coming through from the Greek original is something like this – uninhibitedness, freedom to do something unclean. They ‘have given themselves over unto’ – let me try several words – uninhibited abandoned lusting, wanting the sin, without restraint. All that crowds into the word lasciviousness. ‘Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness,’ wantonness, ‘to work,’ to actively perform ‘all uncleanness.’ This includes every possible form of uncleanness – impurity, fornication, filthy pornography, homosexuality, desiring, indulging, performing all uncleanness. ‘With greediness’ – some translate that ‘with covetousness’. In this case, our old translation is correct – with greediness. And wanting even more of it. Blow by blow, that is the unconverted condition before God. Says Isaac Watts: ‘How sad our state by nature is, Our sin how deep it stains.’