Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Ephesians · About this commentary
The Futility of Their Minds
Ephesians 4:17-19
17 This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, · WEB
The old life is diagnosed as a chain that begins in the mind, and the final stage is the loss of the capacity to feel it.
The instruction is negative and specific: no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles also walk. The readers are gentiles themselves Ephesians 2:11, so the comparison is with what they were rather than with another race.
And the diagnosis begins where the letter's diagnoses always begin — not with behavior but with the faculty behind it. In the futility of their mind. The noun means emptiness, something that does not achieve what it is for.
Verse 18 traces a chain, and the order runs the opposite way from what a reader expects. Darkened in their understanding comes first; alienated from the life of God follows; and the cause of the alienation is given as the ignorance that is in them, which is itself caused by the hardening of their hearts.
So the sequence is hardness, then ignorance, then alienation, then darkness. The letter does not describe people who reasoned their way out of God and then hardened. It describes hardening as prior, with the darkening of the mind as its consequence — which is why the remedy in the next paragraph is a renewal in the spirit of your mind Ephesians 4:23.
Verse 19 gives the end state, and the word is a medical one: having become callous. Tissue that has thickened past sensation. The one thing lost is the ability to feel the loss.
What follows the numbness is not restraint breaking down but its opposite — a deliberate handing over: gave themselves up to lust. And the last phrase pairs uncleanness with greediness, which the letter will name again as idolatry Ephesians 5:5.
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