Ephesians 4:18

18. Understanding The region of the play of reasoning, the channel of the ordinary thought-current. As the intuitive power above, of these men, was filled with vanity, so the current of thought flowed in darkness.

Alienated Foreignized, de-citizenized, as if belonging to another race from the sons of God. From the life of God That divine regenerative life produced by the vitalizing touches, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, by which we are sons of God. St. Paul’s participle, alienated, glances back to a period when they were home-born natives of the kingdom of God.

And this is true both of our humanity and of every man born into this atonement-pervaded world.

Bengel and others discern a parallelism between the present four clauses by which the first corresponds to the third, and the second to the fourth. Thus:

Having the understanding darkened,

Through the ignorance that is in them:

Being alienated from the life of God,

Through the callousness of their heart.

But, we may add, this whole double process of darkness through ignorance, and alienation through hardness, is the result of the vanity, in the intuitive mind, by which God has been discarded and apostasy been committed.

Blindness Rather, hardness. The Greek term is derived from a word signifying stone, and is then applied, in surgery, to a hardening of the flesh into bone ossification. Hence, viewing the heart as the symbolical seat of the moral emotions, the word designates a stolid insensibility to moral impressions. It forms an encasement through which the life of God cannot enter.