Walking in Love When the World Goes Dark
What’s Ephesians 5 about?
Paul shifts from theory to practice, showing what it actually looks like to live as God’s beloved children in a broken world. This isn’t just about personal morality – it’s about becoming people who shine so brightly with God’s love that we expose darkness simply by existing.
The Full Context
Paul wrote Ephesians around 60-62 AD while imprisoned in Rome, likely as a circular letter to be shared among churches in Asia Minor. The recipients were predominantly Gentile believers who had been grafted into God’s family – people who had lived their entire lives outside the covenant community and were still figuring out what it meant to be “holy ones.” They faced the daily challenge of living distinctly Christian lives in cities saturated with pagan practices, sexual immorality, and economic exploitation.
Ephesians 5 serves as the practical bridge between Paul’s soaring theological vision in chapters 1-3 and his concrete instructions for Christian living in chapter 6. Having established their identity as God’s beloved children in chapter 4, Paul now addresses the question every new believer asks: “So how do I actually live this out?” The chapter flows from general principles about walking in love and light (verses 1-14) to specific applications in relationships and worship (verses 15-33). This isn’t legalistic rule-keeping but rather the natural overflow of people who have genuinely grasped how deeply they are loved by God.
What the Ancient Words Tell Us
The opening command to “walk in love” uses the Greek word peripateo, which means to order one’s entire way of life around something. Paul isn’t talking about occasional acts of kindness – he’s describing a complete lifestyle reorientation. When he says to be “imitators of God” (mimetes theou), he’s using the word from which we get “mimic.” Picture a child so in love with their parent that they unconsciously copy their mannerisms, speech patterns, and values.
Grammar Geeks
When Paul writes “walk in love as Christ loved us,” the Greek verb tense indicates ongoing, continuous action. This isn’t about loving when we feel like it – it’s about choosing love as our default operating system, just like breathing happens whether we think about it or not.
The contrast between light and darkness that dominates verses 8-14 would have hit differently for Paul’s original readers. In a world without electric lighting, darkness was genuinely dangerous – a time when bandits operated, when you could easily lose your way, when wild animals hunted. But light? Light meant safety, visibility, truth, and life itself. When Paul says “you are light in the Lord,” he’s not being poetic – he’s making a radical claim about their essential nature.
What Would the Original Audience Have Heard?
Paul’s warnings about sexual immorality and covetousness weren’t abstract moral principles but urgent practical guidance for people living in cities like Ephesus, where temple prostitution was a thriving religious practice and economic exploitation was normalized. The Artemis temple employed thousands of sacred prostitutes, and sexual license was considered a form of worship. For new converts leaving this world behind, Paul’s instructions provided a roadmap for navigating relationships they’d never experienced before.
The command to “not even be named among you” regarding sexual immorality would have been shocking. In Greco-Roman culture, sexual freedom (for men) was a mark of status and sophistication. Paul is essentially saying, “Be so different that these things don’t even come up in conversation about you.” This wasn’t prudish moralism but a call to embody an entirely different vision of human flourishing.
Did You Know?
When Paul mentions “coarse joking” alongside sexual immorality, he’s addressing the pervasive cultural habit of sexualizing women through humor. Ancient comedies and dinner conversations routinely included sexual innuendo and objectification – Paul is calling for speech that honors the dignity of every person.
But Wait… Why Did They Need This Warning?
Here’s what’s fascinating: Paul is writing to people who have already experienced dramatic transformation. These aren’t moral failures he’s addressing but the ongoing challenge of living out their new identity in hostile territory. The repeated emphasis on what is “fitting” or “proper” suggests these early Christians were genuinely struggling with questions about boundaries and behavior.
The transition from darkness to light wasn’t just theological – it was intensely practical. Imagine leaving behind everything that had defined normalcy in your culture: your social networks, your entertainment, your business practices, even your humor. Paul isn’t just giving rules; he’s helping them construct an entirely new social imagination.
Wrestling with the Text
The marriage passage in verses 22-33 stops many modern readers in their tracks, and honestly, it should. The word “submit” (hypotasso) appears in a cultural context where women had virtually no legal rights and marriages were primarily economic arrangements between families. Yet Paul’s instructions to husbands to love “as Christ loved the church” would have been equally radical – husbands in that culture held absolute authority and rarely spoke of self-sacrificial love.
But here’s where the ancient context illuminates rather than diminishes the text. Paul is subverting the dominant cultural narrative by introducing mutual responsibility and sacrificial love into relationships built on hierarchy and transaction. The call for wives to submit is immediately balanced by the call for husbands to die to themselves – both instructions would have challenged contemporary expectations.
Wait, That’s Strange…
Paul concludes his marriage teaching by calling it a “mystery” (mysterion) that points to Christ and the church. He’s essentially saying, “I’m not primarily giving you marriage advice – I’m showing you something about God’s relationship with his people that human marriage can only approximate.”
How This Changes Everything
What emerges from Ephesians 5 isn’t a checklist of behaviors but a vision of human relationships transformed by divine love. The progression is intentional: first, we grasp how deeply we are loved (imitators of beloved children), then we learn to extend that love to others (walking in love), and finally we discover that our relationships become living parables of God’s love story with humanity.
The challenge for contemporary readers is resisting the urge to either dismiss these teachings as culturally irrelevant or to flatten them into simple rules. Paul is inviting us into something much more revolutionary: relationships where power serves love, where differences create harmony rather than hierarchy, and where our homes become previews of the kingdom of God.
“When we truly understand that we are God’s beloved children, we stop performing for acceptance and start living from acceptance.”
The practical implications ripple through every aspect of life. How we handle money, how we treat our bodies, how we speak about others, how we structure our closest relationships – everything becomes an opportunity to demonstrate what it looks like when heaven touches earth through ordinary human beings.
Key Takeaway
Walking in love isn’t about following rules perfectly – it’s about living so consistently from God’s love that our lives become invitations for others to discover that same love for themselves.
Further Reading
Internal Links:
External Scholarly Resources:
- Paul and the Faithfulness of God by N.T. Wright
- Ephesians (Pillar New Testament Commentary) by Harold Hoehner
- The Letters to the Ephesians by Ernest Best
Tags
Ephesians 5:1-2, Ephesians 5:8-14, Ephesians 5:22-33, Ephesians 5:25-27, Love, Light, Marriage, Submission, Sacrifice, Imitation of God, Walking in the Spirit, Sexual Purity, Mutual Submission, Christ and the Church, Transformation, Holy Living, Relationships
