Charles Ellicott Commentary Ephesians 4:14

"that we may be no longer children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, in craftiness, after the wiles of error;" — Ephesians 4:14 (ASV)

That we be no more children.—Here the process of growth is described negatively; in the next verse positively. We are to be no more children.

The word used here and in 1 Corinthians 3:1; 1 Corinthians 13:11; Galatians 4:1; Galatians 4:3; and Hebrews 5:13 (often rendered “babes”), is a word almost always applied in a bad sense, like our word “childish”—not to the guilelessness, the trustfulness, or the humility of children, which our Lord emphatically blessed (Matthew 18:2–4), but to their unforeseeing and unthinking impulsiveness.

The distinction is marked in 1 Corinthians 14:20, Be not children in understanding: howbeit, in malice be you children, but in understanding be men. Thus, in 1 Corinthians 3:1; 1 Corinthians 13:11, and Hebrews 5:13, it describes crudeness and shallowness of conception; in Galatians 4:1 and Galatians 4:3, incapability of free self-direction; and here, liability to disturbance and change by every external impression from outside, so as to be “everything by turns and nothing long.”

Tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.—The metaphor is of a ship drifting at the mercy of a storm, tossed by the waves, and carried round from time to time by every blast. The word “tossed” is more properly used of the waves themselves, but the following words seem to show that here it is applied to the ship rising and falling with them.

The word “doctrine,” as usual, is a general word for all deliberate “teaching,” whether acting on the understanding or the heart. It includes, in fact, all influence consciously exercised to a definite end.

The metaphor is then dropped, and the evil influences to which childish instability is prey are described—first, as the “sleight,” i.e., the sleight of hand of the dice-thrower, describing quick, sudden deceit of detail; next (to substitute an accurate translation for the unusually paraphrastic rendering of our version), as a “craftiness devoted to the systematic plan of deceit,” thus referring to deeper and subtler forms of delusion.

This reference is so definite in the original that we are tempted to believe St. Paul had in view some particular scheme of erroneous teaching, which had already struck root in the soil of Asia Minor. The Epistle to the Colossians shows that such false teaching had appeared at Colossæ; it was, perhaps, the germ of the more full-grown Gnosticism noted in the Pastoral Epistles.