Expositor's Bible Commentary 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)

The metaphor of maturity is carried over from v.13. There must be no symptoms of arrested development among believers, who are to abandon childish attitudes and act their age (1 Corinthians 13:11). Paul switches metaphors as he depicts the features of spiritual infantilism. Its victims will be tossed to and fro like a cork in a surging sea (James 1:6) and whirled around by every chance gust of fashionable false teaching, which creates dizziness in the mind. The source of this dangerous teaching is to be traced in the cleverness of people who craftily seek to lead us astray. “Cunning” is cheating at dice and so, by extension, trickery of every kind. “Craftiness” is unscrupulousness that stops at nothing. Error is organized with a deliberate policy to undermine the truth of God. Paul may well be thinking of emergent Gnosticism .