Ephesians 5
Ephesians 5 — Commentary and Meaning
The short answer
Ephesians 5 opens with one of the boldest commands in the New Testament: "be imitators of God, as beloved children." Everything that follows unpacks what that imitation looks like. Paul immediately defines it as walking "in love, even as Christ also loved you" — a love that gave itself up, at real cost, for people who had not earned it. The chapter's ethics flow from that single source. Children resemble their father; Christians are to resemble the God who loved them first.
From there, Paul draws a sharp contrast between two ways of living. Sexual immorality, greed, coarse joking, and drunkenness belong to darkness — the old life. Believers are to "walk as children of light," letting gratitude replace grasping and letting the Spirit, rather than wine, fill and shape them. The tone is not scolding so much as clarifying: you have been changed, so live like it.
The chapter's most debated section is its teaching on husbands and wives, introduced by the instruction to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Paul compares a husband's love for his wife to Christ's love for the church — a love that sacrifices, nourishes, and stays faithful. As the Stjerna and Schramm excerpt shows, Martin Luther read this comparison the way Scripture uses many vivid analogies: like the mustard seed or the yeast, it is an image designed to drive a lesson home. On that reading, the passage is not establishing marriage as a sacrament; it is pressing married people toward sacrificial, faithful love, the very thing the chapter has been describing all along.
Read this way, Ephesians 5 holds together as one sustained argument: imitate God — in your purity, your speech, your worship, and your closest relationships — because Christ's self-giving love is now the pattern for yours.
What scholars say
These excerpts answer two questions readers bring to Ephesians 5: Stjerna and Schramm present Luther's argument that the Christ-and-church comparison is an analogy teaching faithful, sacrificial marital love rather than the founding of a new sacrament, while Baker asks what it actually means to imitate God's forgiveness — and warns that a transactional picture of grace will produce transactional forgivers.
“The Bible is filled with analogies and parables that are designed to provide striking images to drive home lessons: “Faith is like a mustard seed”: it grows even if tiny. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast”: it leavens even if you can’t see it. Or “the Son of Man will come like a thief in the night.” So be ready at all times for his return. And the examples go on. The marriage analogy is similar: “Marital love is like the union of Christ and the church.” So be faithful and sacrificial to your spouse. Ephesians 5 is not divining a new sacrament here, Luther insisted, but driving home a lesson about marital love that much of the chapter has just explicated.”
“Ephesians 5:1 tells us to “be imitators of God, as beloved children.” Unfortunately our understandings of forgiveness in these terms so permeate our lives, actions, and ideas that our forgiveness takes on the image of God’s forgiveness as retributive. If we believe that God’s forgiveness trades in exchange, we will imitate it and withhold grace from those we are commanded to love. But on the other hand, true love, genuine love, loves and forgives while the offender is still an enemy. No exchange is involved there! We take a risk and extend grace where none is deserved, just as God did through Jesus (Rom. 5:8, 10; Matt. 5:44). But what, then, does it mean to forgive? What does forgiveness involve, and who receives it?”
What it means for you
The test of Ephesians 5 is not whether we admire God's love but whether ours starts to look like it. Sharon Baker's excerpt puts a fine point on this: if we quietly picture God's forgiveness as a transaction — grace released only after the offender pays up — we will forgive the same way, withholding grace until people deserve it. But the love this chapter describes moved first, toward enemies, at cost. Imitating God today might mean forgiving someone who has offered no apology, or loving a spouse with patience that isn't currently being earned. That kind of love feels risky. According to this chapter, it is also the family resemblance.
Ephesians 5 in context
Ephesians splits roughly in half: chapters 1–3 describe what God has done in Christ, and chapters 4–6 describe how to live in response. Chapter 4 begins that turn, urging believers to walk worthy of their calling and to put off the old self. Chapter 5 continues the same thread — imitation of God, light versus darkness, Spirit-filled worship — and then begins the "household" instructions on wives and husbands, which carry over into chapter 6's teaching on children, parents, servants, and masters.
Passages we cover in this chapter