Ephesians 2:3

3. Among whom Namely, the children of disobedience.

Conversation Daily intercourse and conduct.

Flesh Animal appetites and mind governed by them.

Desires Wills or volitions.

Flesh and… mind The lower and the higher depraved tendencies.

Were This verb corresponds with had and walked. Contemporaneously with our evil courses, and underlying them, was a nature by which we were children of wrath. The divine wrath condemned not only our guilty persons, but it reached more deeply to our very nature. On the phrase children of wrath, consult what we have said on the phrase children of disobedience, in Ephesians 2:2. But the Greek in Ephesians 2:2 is, properly, sons; here, children. Robinson’s New Testament Lexicon says: “By Hebrew genitive case, the child of any thing is one connected with, partaking of, or exposed to, any thing; often put instead of an adjective.” Matthew 11:19 and Luke 7:35, “Wisdom is justified of her children.” Ephesians 5:8, “Children of light,” that is, enlightened. 1 Peter 1:14, “Obedient children.” 2 Peter 2:14, “Cursed children.” So Septuagint, “Children of perdition.” A survey of these cases will show: 1. The absurdity of understanding that the expression children of wrath, has the least shadow of implying that men are born of the wrath of God. 2. A survey of such phrases as “child of hell,” “son of perdition,” shows that it will not do to affirm, with Eadie, that the phrase means more than exposed to the matter of which one is child. The “child of hell” was yet untouched by hell, though exposed to it.

So the child of wrath may be not touched by the wrath of God, yet liable to become so.

A thing is said to be thus or so by nature when it is so by birth or origin, or by growth, in distinction from being made so. A free agent is so by nature when he grows so in regular and normal conditions. See our work on “The Will,” p. 249. Now the question here is, (overlooked by commentators like Eadie and Hodge,) Does the phrase by nature children of wrath mean that the wrath lies upon the child at birth, or not? We affirm the negative, and believe it can be overwhelmingly proved. It is essentially the question of “infant damnation.” Josephus says, that David was “just and pious by nature;” certainly not in his infancy, but as he developed into manhood. Herodian says, that “barbarians are property-loving by nature;” not, certainly, in infancy, but in their adult development. AElian says, “The Cean is silver-loving by nature;” that is, when he has grown old enough to contract that love. AElian says, “The Athenians were envious by nature;” not so at birth, certainly, but by the character into which they grew. So AElian again, “warlike by nature;” and Philo, “peaceful by nature.” All the examples (most of which we take from Wetstein) imply, to be sure, a natural tendency at birth to the condition or character into which they grow; but not the condition itself. That is, they prove that the infant possesses the tendency apart from grace, to come into a subjection to the wrath of God, and so prove innate depravity; but do not prove that it is born under the wrath of God. The words do not decide that the infant is responsible for its inborn tendency, and so deserving of damnation at birth. The doctrine that the child is born under damnation lies in the very centre of the standard predestinarian system. That system assumes that any and every infant might be sent to hell forever, justly, and without a Saviour. On that assumption it bases its views of the mercy of God in redemption. Arbitrary reprobation is claimed to be just because all might be justly so doomed for original sin alone, without the commission of a single sin.

We hold, on the contrary, that though sinward tendencies exist in germ in the infant, yet there is no responsibility, and no damnability, until these tendencies are deliberately and knowingly acted in real life, and by that action appropriated and sanctioned. Then the man is condemned both for the guilt of the act and the pravity of his nature, now responsibly assumed and ready to be acted out, as described in Ephesians 2:1-2. See note, Romans 5:18.

But if the infant is irresponsible, how can Christ be to him a pardoner of sin and a Saviour? We might reply, that it does not make Christ any pardoner of sin to imagine a factitious sin, or a guilt which has no foundation in the nature of things. The pardon will remain just as factitious, just as merely verbal, as the guilt to be pardoned. But Christ still stands a Saviour to the infant, as we hold, in the following respects: 1. We have elsewhere shown that had Christ not been given the race would, in all probability, not have been permitted to be propagated after the fall. Notes on John 14:19, and Romans 11:32. So the grace of Christ underlies the very existence of every human being that is born. 2. Between the infant descendant of fallen Adam and God there is a contrariety of moral nature, by which the former is irresponsibly, and in undeveloped condition, averse to the latter, and so displacent to Him. By Christ, the Mediator, that averseness is regeneratively removed, and the divine complacency restored: so that the race is enabled to persist under the divine grace. 3. Christ, in case of infant death, entirely removes the sinward nature, so as to harmonize the being with the holiness of heaven. 4. Christ is the infants’ justifier against every accuser, (note on Romans 8:29,) whether devils, evil men, or mistaken theologians; asserting their claim through his merits, in spite of their fallen lineage, to redemption and heaven. Being thus purified, justified, and glorified by Christ, none are more truly qualified to join in the song of Moses and the Lamb.

If it be said, Yes, the infant sinned in Adam, we reply, (as in our note on Romans 5:12,) that the New Testament nowhere says that he “sinned in Adam.” It is contrary to fact that he did so thousands of years before he had any existence. Still, as there are in law what are called “legal fictions,”

so in theology there may be “theological fictions.” Such fictions are modes of figurative idea by which surrounding or analogous truths may be more vividly realized; as, for instance, where it is said of man and wife, “they twain are one flesh.” But such fictions must be so applied as not to contradict axiomatic truth and good. If from the oneness of man and wife theologians literally infer that the wife must die when the husband does, and so burn her on the funeral pile, they transform the fiction into a direful lie. And yet this would not be a millionth part as bad as the theologians picture God to be, when they make him hold infants to be justly condemnable to hell forever because, forsooth, “they sinned in Adam!”

If, however, we must say that infants “sinned in Adam,” let us be consistent, and add, but they also became justified in Christ. So Fletcher of Madeley beautifully puts it; as the entire race, infants and all, sinned, died, and went to hell before they were born, but only “seminally” and conceptually in Adam, so they are all redeemed and saved conceptually in Christ; and so are born into the world justified heirs of the atonement and heaven. Then fiction meets fiction; and beauty, truth, and reason are the outcome.

But if infants die, and death is the consequent of sin, why do sinless infants die? Because, we reply, in the fall the supernatural Spirit of holiness, by which man was raised above the natural law of death, was withdrawn from Adam and his posterity; and he and they were surrendered over to nature. See notes on Romans 5:12-19; Romans 11:32. And by nature, as an animal being, and by the law of material nature, he disintegrates and dies. So the justified and sanctified adult dies. For such are, under Christ, the laws of our probationary being, established after the fall, that death arising from nature is not repaired by immediate immortality of body, but by a bodily resurrection after the era of mere nature with us has past.

Even as others Literally, as also the rest. The rest of whom? All the commentators that we have consulted, Alford, Ellicott, Eadie, Meyer, etc., have, obviously, missed the true answer. Some, as Meyer, make it the Gentiles, as in addition to Jews; but nothing has been said of Jews or Gentiles thus far. Others, as Ellicott and Alford, make it signify the rest of mankind; but the words are too slight to cover so wide an extent. The true meaning is, the rest of the children of disobedience, in Ephesians 2:2. Paul’s train of ideas is: The devil worketh in the children of disobedience, among whom we indulged the same lusts, and were by nature as depraved even as the rest.