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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Ephesians 3:19 - 3:19
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19. γνῶναί τε. We pass now to the second method of approach, the personal appropriation of the universal Truth. γινώσκειν has characteristically in St Paul, as in the Bible generally, a personal object, e.g. Php 3:10. The Hebrew mind was not interested in abstract speculation.
τὴν … ἀγαπὴν τοῦ χριστοῦ. Cf. 2Co 5:14; Rom 8:35; Gal 2:20; Eph 5:2; Eph 5:25 : see also Rom 8:37. This love was decisively manifested in His self-surrender on our behalf (Gal 2:20; Eph 5:2; Eph 5:25). By His Death on behalf of all (2Co 5:14) it has become the source of the new life (Gal 2:20) of the believer, and the constraining power (2Co 5:14) by which every act in that life is determined. Here the personal apprehension of that love is the fruit of the indwelling of Christ Himself in our hearts, and becomes the spring of our perfecting in the final consummation, cf. on ἐν ἀγάπῃ, Eph 3:17.
ὑπερβάλλουσαν τῆς γνώσεως. St Paul is not here, as in 1Co 8:2 f., comparing the relative values of love and knowledge. The love of Christ transcends our faculty of comprehending it, as the wisdom of God remains (Rom 11:33) to the end too deep for any plummets of ours to sound. He seems instinctively to shrink from any language that would minister to intellectual self-satisfaction. See e.g. 1Co 8:2; 1Co 13:12; Gal 4:9.
ἵνα πληρωθῆτε εἰς (or πληρωθῇ) πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ θεοῦ. See Additional Note on πλήρωμα. ‘That ye may be perfected up to the standard of the perfect fulfilment of God,’ or ‘That all the perfection of God may be perfectly displayed.’ The Eph 3:1 preferred by Westcott is attractive by its boldness and as supplying in relation to the perfect manifestation of God through the Universe a thought strictly complementary to the perfecting of the manifestation of the Christ through the Church in Eph 1:23. Hort rejected it because he could not (somewhat strangely) see any sign that St Paul was here thinking of the Church in its universal aspect. It is perhaps safest to retain the common reading. ‘Knowledge’ even from within of the transcendent love of Christ must issue in the moral transformation of each individual before ‘the perfection of God’ can come.
πληρωθῆτε. Cf. Eph 5:18; Col 2:10; Col 1:9; Php 1:11.
εἰς, ‘up to the standard of,’ ‘till you reach the goal of.’ Cf. εἰς τὴν ἑνότητα, Eph 4:13.
πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα. Cf. Col 1:19; Col 2:9.