Charles Ellicott Commentary Ephesians 5:6

"Let no man deceive you with empty words: for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the sons of disobedience." — Ephesians 5:6 (ASV)

Let no man deceive you with vain words.—It seems likely that St. Paul has in view, not mere worldly condonation of evil or low heathen morality, but some anticipation of that Antinomian form of Gnosticism which held that the things done in the body, being evil only by the irresistible, inevitable gravitation of matter to evil, could not touch the soul.

We know that in the Colossian Church there was an anticipation of the more ascetic Gnosticism (Colossians 2:21; compare also to 1 Timothy 4:1–5). As the earlier Judaistic rigour had assumed this later form, so the earlier Antinomianism (Romans 6:1) may probably have passed into the more systematic and speculative Antinomianism of the Gnostic type. (Compare to Philippians 3:18-19.)

In this same spirit St. John, himself familiar with the life of Ephesus, writes earnestly: Let no man deceive you; he that doeth righteousness is righteous (1 John 3:7).

Here the Apostle warns them that it is for these sins that the wrath of God is coming on the children of disobedience, i.e. , on the heathen; and urges the Christians not to fall back, by being partakers with them both of their sin and their punishment, into the gross heathen darkness out of which they had been saved.