Ephesians 5: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Paul tells the believers at Ephesus to imitate God and to live in love, and to keep sexual sin, greed, and coarse talk out of their life together. He sets darkness against light: they are to expose deeds done in secret, use their time well, and be filled with the Spirit instead of drunk with wine. The chapter ends with instructions for households, where wives are told to submit to their husbands and husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loved the church and as they love their own bodies.

Claim by Claim

1. 5:1
   • Be imitators of God.
   • The hearers are beloved children.
2. 5:2
   • Walk in love.
   • Christ loved us.
   • Christ gave himself up for us.
   • Christ gave himself as an offering and a sacrifice to God.
   • That offering was a fragrant aroma.
3. 5:3
   • Sexual immorality must not even be named among you.
   • No kind of impurity must be named among you.
   • Greed must not be named among you.
   • Not naming such things is what is fitting for saints.
4. 5:4
   • Obscenity must not be named among you.
   • Foolish talk must not be named among you.
   • Crude joking must not be named among you.
   • These things are not fitting.
   • Thanksgiving should take their place.
5. 5:5
   • You know this with certainty.
   • No sexually immoral person has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.
   • No impure person has any inheritance in that kingdom.
   • No greedy person has any inheritance in that kingdom.
   • The greedy person is an idolater.
6. 5:6
   • Let no one deceive you with empty words.
   • The wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience.
   • The wrath of God comes because of these things.
7. 5:7
   • Do not be partakers with them.
8. 5:8
   • You were once darkness.
   • You are now light in the Lord.
   • Walk as children of light.
9. 5:9
   • The fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth.
10. 5:10
    • Test what is pleasing to the Lord.
11. 5:11
    • Have no fellowship with the works of darkness.
    • The works of darkness are unfruitful.
    • Rather, expose them.
12. 5:12
    • It is shameful even to speak of the things they do in secret.
13. 5:13
    • All things that are exposed are made manifest by the light.
    • Whatever is made manifest is light.
14. 5:14
    • For this reason it says the following.
    • Awake, you who sleep.
    • Arise from the dead.
    • Christ will shine upon you.
15. 5:15
    • See carefully how you walk.
    • Do not walk as unwise.
    • Walk as wise.
16. 5:16
    • Redeem the time.
    • The days are evil.
17. 5:17
    • Do not be senseless.
    • Understand what the will of the Lord is.
18. 5:18
    • Do not get drunk with wine.
    • In wine there is dissipation.
    • Be filled with the Spirit.
19. 5:19
    • Speak to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs.
    • Sing and make melody in your heart to the Lord.
20. 5:20
    • Give thanks always for all things to God the Father.
    • Give thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
21. 5:21
    • Submit yourselves to one another in the fear of God.
22. 5:22
    • Wives are to submit to their own husbands.
    • Wives are to submit as to the Lord.
23. 5:23
    • The husband is the head of the wife.
    • Christ is the head of the church.
    • Christ is the savior of the body.
24. 5:24
    • The church is subject to Christ.
    • So wives are to be subject to their husbands in everything.
25. 5:25
    • Husbands, love your wives.
    • Christ loved the church.
    • Christ gave himself up for the church.
26. 5:26
    • Christ did this in order to sanctify the church.
    • Christ cleansed the church with the washing of water.
    • The cleansing was by the word.
27. 5:27
    • Christ did this in order to present the church to himself in glory.
    • The church is to have no spot.
    • The church is to have no wrinkle.
    • The church is to have nothing of the kind.
    • The church is to be holy and blameless.
28. 5:28
    • Husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies.
    • He who loves his wife loves himself.
29. 5:29
    • No one ever hated his own flesh.
    • A man nourishes and cherishes his own flesh.
    • The Lord nourishes and cherishes the church in the same way.
30. 5:30
    • We are members of his body.
    • We are of his flesh.
    • We are of his bones.
31. 5:31
    • For this cause a man will leave his father and mother.
    • A man will be joined to his wife.
    • The two will become one flesh.
32. 5:32
    • This mystery is great.
    • The speaker says he is speaking concerning Christ and the church.
33. 5:33
    • Each one of you individually is to love his wife as himself.
    • The wife is to reverence her husband.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

5:1

The King James "followers" does not mean followers in the modern sense of people who go along behind. The Greek word is mimetai, the root of our word mimic, and it means imitators: people who copy what they see someone else do. It was ordinary language for how a child picks up a parent's manner, or an apprentice a master's craft.

5:2

"A sweetsmelling savour" is a set phrase from the older Hebrew scriptures, where the smoke of an animal burned on an altar was said to rise as a pleasing aroma to God. It was standard temple language meaning the offering had been accepted, not a comment on how the smoke actually smelled.

5:3

"Saints" in the King James is not a title for a small class of exceptional people. The Greek word means simply those set apart for God, and the letters use it for every member of the congregation, ordinary people included. "Covetousness" in 1611 English means greed, the itch to have more.

5:4

"Not convenient" has shifted since 1611. It did not mean inconvenient or awkward; it meant unfitting, not proper to the occasion or to the sort of people being addressed. "Jesting" translates a Greek word for quick, clever talk that turns coarse: not humor as such, but wit used crudely.

5:5

"Whoremonger" is the King James word for a sexually immoral person generally, not specifically someone who buys or sells sex. An "idolater" was someone who bowed to a carved or cast image of a god, a common and visible practice in a Greek city like Ephesus, so calling greed idolatry compares it to something the readers watched happen in the streets. "Inheritance" carries the sense of an allotted share in an estate, the way portions of land were parceled out to families.

5:6

"Children of disobedience" is a Hebrew-style idiom carried over into Greek. "Children of" or "sons of" plus a quality means people characterized by that quality, so the phrase means the disobedient, not anyone's actual offspring. The same idiom produces "children of light" two verses later.

5:8

"Sometimes" in 1611 English means at one time, formerly, once. It does not mean occasionally.

5:9

The King James reads "the fruit of the Spirit" here; the oldest surviving Greek copies read "the fruit of the light," which fits the run of light and darkness images around it. The difference is one word in the manuscripts, and translations split on it.

5:10

"Proving" is the older English sense of putting something to the test to find out what it is, as metal is assayed or a scale is proved. It does not mean demonstrating a conclusion already reached.

5:11

"Reprove" here does not mean to scold. The Greek word means to bring into the open, to show a thing for what it is, which is why the next verse continues with light making things visible.

5:13

"Made manifest" means made visible, brought out where it can be seen. The word appears twice in this verse and is the same idea as "reprove" in verse 11.

5:14

"He saith" introduces a quotation, but these lines are not found in this form anywhere in the older scriptures. They read like a snatch of an early Christian song, possibly one used at baptisms, and they echo the language of Isaiah 60:1 about rising and light shining.

5:15

"Circumspectly" is built from Latin words meaning to look around. The Greek word underneath means precisely or carefully, the care of someone watching where each foot lands.

5:16

"Redeeming the time" is marketplace language: the verb means buying something up, the way a trader corners the available stock. The word for "time" is not clock time but the opportune moment, the chance that is there now and will not be later.

5:18

"Wherein is excess" translates a Greek word for reckless squandering, the behavior of someone throwing away money, health and reputation with no thought for tomorrow. The same word describes the prodigal son's spending.

5:19

"Speaking to yourselves" is 1611 English for speaking to one another; the Greek pronoun is reciprocal, not reflexive. As for the three kinds of song, the terms overlap and the first readers would not have drawn hard lines between them: "psalms" suggests the sung poems of the Hebrew scriptures, "hymns" songs of praise, "spiritual songs" songs prompted by the Spirit.

5:20

The Greek behind "unto God and the Father" has a single article covering both words, meaning one person described two ways: the God who is also Father. It is not naming two.

5:21

"Fear" here is the older sense of awe or reverence before someone greater, the attitude of a subject before a king, not fright. The King James reads "of God"; the earliest Greek copies read "of Christ." In Greek this verse ends the long sentence that began at verse 18 and runs straight into verse 22 without a break.

5:22

In the oldest Greek copies this verse has no verb of its own. It borrows "submit" from verse 21, so the line reads something like "wives, to your own husbands, as to the Lord." The verb itself was ordinary Greek for arranging yourself under someone, used of ranks in an army and of order in a household.

5:23

"Head" translates the Greek kephale, and what it meant figuratively is genuinely disputed. In some Greek usage it carries the sense of source or origin, as the head of a river; in other usage it means the one in authority. Both senses were live in the first century, and the choice between them is not settled by the grammar here.

5:26

"The washing of water" is a bath, and in the Greek and Jewish world a bride was bathed and dressed before being handed over at her wedding, so the picture running through these verses is a wedding preparation. Ancient readers would also have heard baptism in it. "Sanctify" means to set apart for God's use, not to make morally nice.

5:27

"Present it to himself" continues the wedding picture: at a wedding the bride was formally presented to the bridegroom. "Without blemish" is borrowed from the sacrificial rules, where an animal offered on the altar had to be free of defects, so the word carried the sense of passing an inspection.

5:29

"Cherisheth" in 1611 English keeps the Greek word's concrete force: to keep warm. It was used of a bird brooding over its young. Paired with "nourisheth," feeding, it describes the plain daily work of keeping a body alive.

5:30

"Of his flesh, and of his bones" appears in the manuscripts the King James translators used but not in the earliest surviving copies, which stop at "members of his body." The phrase echoes Adam's words about Eve in Genesis 2:23, "bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh," which sets up the quotation in the next verse.

5:31

This verse is a quotation of Genesis 2:24, the comment that follows the making of the first woman. In that world leaving father and mother was a striking way to put it, since a married son normally stayed within his father's household.

5:32

"Mystery" does not mean a puzzle or something unknowable. The Greek word musterion means a secret that was hidden and has now been told, and the letters use it for things disclosed rather than things withheld. "Great" here means weighty or profound, not large.

5:33

"Reverence" translates the verb that goes with the noun "fear" in verse 21, so the wife's attitude is described with the same word Paul has already asked of everyone toward one another. In English of 1611, reverence meant deep respect.