When we’re talking about this portion of Ephesians 5, we’re therefore talking about that which is basic in God’s plan for the human race and that which is of the utmost importance to our own well-being. And yet in spite of the fact that marriage is the first and most foundational of all human institutions, marriage is under attack in our day as it perhaps has never been in recent history, nowhere else and at no prior time. This is so intense, so pervasive, so insidious that one has to conclude that it’s not merely a matter of human failure or selfishness, as we might sometimes think to be the case, but rather something demonic, something that flows not merely from human failure but from that great spiritual warfare that is going on in this world between the forces of God, on the one hand, and those of Satan, on the other.
The second half of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians (chapters 4 through 6) deals with the Christian life. This is Paul’s pattern in his letters: first, doctrine, then application. The second half of this section of Ephesians deals with relationships. The Christian life does not consist solely of the relationship of the individual to God, but it also always involves relationships to other people as well.
Perception of these truths will come about by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, for it is only as God pours out "a spirit of grace and supplication" that the repentance and turning depicted here occur. It is only by the power of God’s Holy Spirit that they occur anywhere or to anyone. But where the Holy Spirit is present, this is what happens: first, a mourning for personal and national sin, and, second, a turning from that sin to look in faith to the Lord Jesus.
The judgment against the nations will be an accelerating one to judge from the increasing intensity of the verbs used in this section: "reeling" (v. 2), "injure" (v. 3), "destroy" (v. 9). This battle, in which God intervenes at the crucial moment on behalf of his people, will be the greatest victory the nation of Israel has ever achieved - greater than its conquests in the day of King David, greater than the deliverance of the Maccabees, greater than the conquests of the Six Day War or any other. But just at the time of this, their greatest victory, God intervenes in another way to achieve his final conquest over them.
The second part of the statement tells what God is going to do. He is going to make "Jerusalem a cup that sends all the surrounding nations reeling" (v. 2). Jerusalem and the surrounding area of Judah will be besieged; this will be the time of Jacob's trouble. But out of that will come the judgment on the Gentile nations that the next verses describe. The cup is the cup of God's wrath or judgment (cf. Is. 51:17; Jer. 25:15-28, 49:12; Ezek. 23:31-34; Rev. 14:9-10, 16:19).
