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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadCambridge Greek Testament for Schools and Colleges - Ephesians 4:6 - 4:6
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6. εἶς θεὸς καὶ πατὴρ πάντων, ὁ ἑπὶ πάντων καὶ διὰ πάντων καὶ ἐν πᾶσιν. The deepest ground of unity, underlying and sustaining both the unity of love and hope, and the unity of common service of the One Lord who has been revealed in human flesh, is the unity and universal fatherhood of God. This truth St Paul had proclaimed at Athens as the ground of the unity of the race, Act 17:26; Act 17:28; cf. Heb 2:11; Heb 12:9. The thought of the Fatherhood was at the heart of the prayer, Eph 3:14. The unity of God in the same way knits Jew and Gentile in Rom 3:30 and is the ground of all-inclusive intercession in 1Ti 2:1-5. In Rom 11:36 St Paul has been describing the working out of the counsel of God in human history, and God is therefore acknowledged as the source and way and goal of the whole development, ἐξ αὐτοῦ καὶ διʼ αὐτοῦ καὶ εἰς αὐτὸν τὰ πάντα. Here the thought is of the fundamental constitution of the universe, and God is ἐπὶ πάντων ‘supreme over all’ (cf. Rom 9:5), ‘all-pervading’ διὰ πάντων: the thought is not easy to define or to parallel. Robinson paraphrases ‘operative through all.’ It is possible, esp. if we read ἴνα πληρωθῇ πᾶν τὸ πλήρωμα τοῦ θεοῦ in Eph 3:19, that it may mean ‘to whose perfect manifestation all things minister’) ‘and immanent in all’ ἐν πᾶσιν, the converse of Act 17:28 (ἐν αὐτῷ γὰρ ζῶμεν καὶ κινούμεθα καὶ ἐσμέν). πάντων and πᾶσιν may be either masc. or neuter. In connexion with πατὴρ it is natural to take πάντων as personal. But there seems no reason to limit the reference in the prepositional phrase. In any case the addition of ἡμῖν to ἐν πᾶσιν is alien to the spirit of the passage.