Passage

Ephesians 4.32

Book: Ephesians · ASV / WEB / KJV / YLT

Immediate context (±2 verses)

ASV

30. And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, in whom ye were sealed unto the day of redemption. 31. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and railing, be put away from you, with all malice:

32. and be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you. (Ephesians 4:30-32, ASV)

WEB

30. Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander, be put away from you, with all malice.

32. And be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving each other, just as God also in Christ forgave you. (Ephesians 4:30-32, WEB)

KJV

30. And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. 31. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice:

32. And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. (Ephesians 4:30-32, KJV)

YLT

30. and make not sorrowful the Holy Spirit of God, in which ye were sealed to a day of redemption. 31. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all malice,

32. and become one to another kind, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, according as also God in Christ did forgive you. (Ephesians 4:30-32, YLT)

See this page's graph and discover linked topics

Setting

Speaker: Paul the Apostle.
Audience: Believers at Ephesus. Several of the earliest witnesses, including P46 and the original hands of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, lack the words "in Ephesus" at 1:1, which has long suggested the letter circulated among the churches of the Roman province of Asia rather than addressing one congregation alone.
Location: Written from imprisonment. Paul calls himself "the prisoner of Christ Jesus" (Eph 3:1, 4:1) and "an ambassador in chains" (Eph 6:20); the traditional identification is the Roman custody of Acts 28.
Time period: c. AD 60-62 on the traditional Roman-imprisonment dating.

Theological reading

Ginesthe de eis allēlous chrēstoi, eusplanchnoi, charizomenoi heautois kathōs kai ho theos en Christō echarisato hymin.

The verse is the positive half of a pair. Verse 31 clears the ground, naming five things to be put away: bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour and slander, with all malice. Verse 32 supplies the replacement. This is the put-off-and-put-on pattern that governs the whole ethical section from 4:17, and it is why the passage is not a list of prohibitions. Vices are displaced rather than merely forbidden.

Three terms. Chrēstos is kind, useful, serviceable, the adjective behind the wordplay some early writers noticed with Christos. Eusplanchnos is literally good-boweled, the ancient idiom locating compassion in the viscera, and it denotes tenderheartedness rather than mere goodwill. Charizomenoi is the participle of charizomai, to give freely as a favour, built on charis, grace. Paul does not use the ordinary word for forgiveness here; he uses the word for gracing, which makes forgiveness a species of gift rather than of accounting.

The ground is the pattern. Kathōs kai ho theos en Christō echarisato hymin, "just as God in Christ also forgave you." The aorist places the divine forgiveness as an accomplished fact prior to the command, so the imperative rests on an indicative. The believer is not asked to originate forgiveness but to extend what has been received, which is the same structure as the parable of the unforgiving servant.

Why it sits where it does. The command follows immediately on the warning not to grieve the Holy Spirit (4:30) and precedes the call to imitate God as beloved children (5:1). The three verses form one movement, and the connection is that the Spirit who unified the church is grieved by the speech and temper that divide it, so the remedy is not restraint alone but a positive kindness modelled on God's own.

In practice. The verse is among the most cited in the corpus on forgiveness because it supplies both a standard high enough to be difficult and a ground secure enough to make the standard bearable. Cited without its second half, it becomes moral pressure; cited whole, it is a consequence.

Key words

Theologically-loaded Greek or Hebrew words in this verse may have entries in the lexicon. Curated to roughly 100 contested terms across the corpus, not every word; see Lexicon Roadmap.

G5547 - christos, christos, Strong's G5547
G1096 - ginomai, ginomai, Strong's G1096
G2316 - theos, theos, Strong's G2316

Quoted in

Arguments and defeaters:

Concepts:

Lexicon:

G0859 - aphesis

Why these four translations

ris3n chose ASV, WEB, KJV, and YLT for two reasons together. They are the most literal English translations available (formal-equivalence: word-for-word renderings that preserve the Hebrew and Greek grammar rather than smoothing it into modern dynamic-equivalence idiom). And they are in the public domain in the United States, which means fair-use quotation at any length requires no publisher license. Modern licensed translations (NASB95, ESV, NIV) restrict volume of quotation under their copyright terms, so they are not used at stub-level coverage here. NASB95 appears only on hand-curated rich passage hubs under Lockman Foundation's fair-use allowance.

The four:

ASV (American Standard Version, 1901). The basis of the modern critical-text English tradition.
WEB (World English Bible, contemporary). Public-domain revision in the ASV line, in current English.
KJV (King James Version, 1611). Reformation-era, Textus Receptus base.
YLT (Young's Literal Translation, Robert Young, 1862). Hyper-literal preservation of Hebrew and Greek grammar; useful for word-study work even where English reads stiff.

See Bibles for the full per-translation history, translators, textual basis, strengths, and weaknesses.