Taking Off Natural Reactions to Put On Spiritual Actions (2)

Continuing our meditations on Ephesians 4:30-32—And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you—Paul first deals with bitterness and then addresses wrath, and anger.

Third, the explosion wrath, and anger will be manifested in one (or both) of two ways. One manifestation is clamour (kraugē), which refers to a crying out against someone or even physical brawling. I have seen such verbal sin in congregational business meetings. I even heard of one church member who “invited the pastor outside” to settle a matter with fists. How disgraceful!

Whether or not this happens, however, at the very least there will be evil speaking. The Greek here is blasphemia (English, “blaspheme”). This refers to slanderous and damaging speech. While in English, “blaspheme” means speaking evil of God, in Greek it means speaking evil of anyone.

Webster defines “slander” as “the utterance of false charges or misrepresentations which defame and damage another’s reputation.” A legal term for this is “defamation,” which is, as one law professor explains, “a tort [i.e., “a wrongful act”] that imposes liability for making false and derogatory statements that injure someone’s reputation.”

This is a serious problem in Christianity today. We see preacher speaking against preacher, church member against pastor, church member against church member and so on. While certainly disagreements will come, and even rebuking of false doctrine will be required, we must never allow slanderous and damaging speech to characterize our dealing with other believers. We must always “[speak] the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15).

Fourth, there is all malice. Back in verse 29, we noted the word “good,” which is agathos, meaning benevolent, profitable, useful, beneficial, excellent, virtuous, and suitable. The Greek here for malice is kakia, which is used to indicate the exact opposite of agathos. When compared, then, to the aforementioned meanings of agathos, kakia means: malevolent, unprofitable, useless, detrimental, poor, vice, and unsuitable. In other words, any and all forms of “bad” must not characterize the Christian.

Paul adds finally, all these are to be put away. The basic concept behind the Greek here (airō) is “to raise or lift up.” Used in the figurative sense, as it is here, it means “to pick up and carry away, to make a clean sweep.” Indeed, may we sweep away these hindrances to Christian living.

Expositor Martyn Lloyd-Jones offers this solemn challenge: “The Apostle is exhorting the Ephesians to put away all this evil. He does not say that because they have become Christians it has automatically dropped off . . . And again we notice that he does not merely tell them to pray that these sins may be taken out of their lives. Pray by all means, but do not forget that Paul tells the Ephesians to put them off, to put them far from them, and we must do the same. It is not pleasant. It is not at all pleasant even to preach on these things; it is very unpleasant for us to face them . . . but, says the Apostle, we must do it, and if we find any vestige or trace of these things within us, we must take hold of it and hurl it away from us, trample upon it, and bolt the door upon it, and never allow it to come back.”

And may we add, we will battle some of these tendencies daily, but the challenge is to consciously sweep them out of our heart and bolt the door behind them. They grieve . . . the Holy Spirit, so they must go.