Ephesians 2:1-3

Having praised God for the greatness of His mercy to us in Jesus Christ, having interceded for Christians to God, asking Him to enlighten our eyes to come to a greater understanding of His power, Paul gets personal, showing God’s merciful power toward us in the depths of our predicament. Paul wants us to be realistic about human nature. All around us today, in this world of trouble, people say that the answer to the problems of this world is found in the human heart. Paul says the opposite is true. All of the problems in this fallen world are found in the human heart, but the answers are not found there. The answer, Paul says here in Ephesians 2, gives us optimism as Christians, even in the midst of this dark and depressing, sinful world. We see the first part of our position in Christ, having been reconciled to God and seated with Christ.

¹As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, ²in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. ³All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.

Paul just finished a great prayer, in which he exalted the power of God in Christ by proclaiming His sovereign reign over all things, that He is the fullness of the Church, which is His body. And then Paul turns his attention to “you.” He begins, “As for you.” Christ is the King, the fullness, the life; but as for you, you were dead. When Paul says, “You were dead” (as he also does in Colossians 2:13), he is speaking of current believers (specifically Gentiles) prior to their genuine conversion. He means that you were in a state of spiritual alienation from God, prior to the grace effect in your life. Calvin says, “As spiritual death is nothing else than the alienation of the soul from God, we are all born as dead men, and we live as dead men, until we are made partakers of the life of Christ.” You who are now alive in Christ were once dead, and it’s crucial to know this, according to Paul. Why is this reality so important? Let me suggest two reasons:

First, as believers en route to heaven through the process of sanctification, we always need to remember the grace of God that called us out of darkness and into His glorious light. At no point along the journey of our Christian lives do we rob God of glory; apart from Him, we can do nothing. And so it’s important, as we live lives of repentance, that we keep in mind what we deserve – God’s wrath due to our sin. Paul will hit that point in a minute, but knowing our deadness is important to give all the due glory to God for His work in us and for His love for us. Ligon Duncan says, “Unless we study to know our sin and to see it for what it is, and unless those of us who have come to faith in Christ remember what we were apart from the grace of Christ, then we will never ever appreciate the magnificence of God’s saving grace to us in Jesus Christ.”

The second reason that this concept of deadness is so important regards our approach to evangelism. Benjamin Franklin said, “God helps those who help themselves.” I think it was Dave Stone in a sermon who said the opposite, “God helps those who cannot help themselves.” Dave got it right. Life is communion with God, and apart from communion with God there is no real life. You can be breathing, doing the things you want to do, choosing between various alternatives according to your greatest desire; and yet, if you are not in saving fellowship with the God who created you for eternal fellowship with Himself, you are not experiencing life – you are, in fact, dead. Apart from Christ, you are dead; you can do nothing. “Everything done apart from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23); “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6).

Jesus came to give life, not to give us a boost that we would experience life, but because we (mankind as a whole prior to and not merely as us individually) had forfeited life through sin. When we consider the plight of unbelievers, we must realize that we are living in a graveyard. When we live for Christ, it happens before blind men; when we speak the words of truth, our neighbors are deaf. When we evangelize and call non-believers to come to Christ, it’s like standing over a tombstone telling the dead and buried to arise and return to life. They can’t hear; they can’t listen; they can’t respond; they are dead! Thus, prayer becomes the tool most effective in evangelism. Only God can open the blind eyes, unlock the deaf ears, and breath life into dry bones (see Ezekiel 37; John 3). If we think for a moment that our unbelieving neighbor can choose Christ apart from first receiving life from the Holy Spirit, then we will have a wrong motive and a wrong method for sharing the gospel with them.

Now Paul not only says that “you were dead,” but he tells you how this came to pass. “You were dead in your transgressions and sins.” With the word transgressions, Paul is calling to mind the truth that we have crossed over the boundaries that God has set for us. And with the word sins, Paul is saying that we have completed missed the purpose for which God intended us to live. These are terrible truths, and the summary of them is the state of deadness, death – separation and alienation from God. This news is completely contrary to the news of the world – “You can do it! People are basically good, especially when they sincerely try hard in whatever realm they desire to succeed.” Paul says, “No. People are dead. They can’t do it.” In regards to evangelism, an analogy is often used that unbelievers are weak and wounded sinners, lost and left to die; they are merely sick, or half-dead; they need only reach out and take the hand of Christ, or open their mouths and take the medicine that heals. But the true analogy, the Biblical analogy, is that unbelievers are dead. Jude 12 goes so far as to call some of them “twice-dead.” They can’t reach out and accept Christ; they can’t open up and take their medicine. They wouldn’t want to if they could, according to Paul. They need the “But God made you alive,” of Ephesians 2:4.

In v1-2, Paul is speaking specifically of Gentiles, and he includes Jews in the thought process in v3. His point is that those who are spiritually dead are dominated and directed by the urgings and the desires of the world, the flesh, and the devil. He says of the Gentiles, “You followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.” (We’ll elaborate on the devil’s elaborate title when we come to Ephesians 6:12.) Paul includes himself, and his people, in this total depravity. In v3, he says of the Jews, “All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature [or flesh] and following its desires and thoughts.” This is the spiritual condition in which everyone – Jew or Gentile – apart from Jesus Christ finds himself or herself. Though Gentiles suffer inner temptation, Paul seems to indicate that the main forces behind their sinful condition are the world and the devil. Likewise, though Jews suffer from outward temptation, Paul seems to indicate that the main force behind their sinful condition is the sin nature, or flesh. Perhaps Paul is acknowledging that those with the law have had their sin nature awakened, while those without the law simply sin apart from an aggressive attack from within.

Paul is saying that our spiritual condition of deadness is not just theoretical; it is evidenced in our outward life. It can be seen in our actions and in our choices. In the world, then, we see men and women, apart from Christ, rebel against God. Their lifestyles exhibit living in the “carvings of the sinful nature,” the lusts of the flesh, “following its desires and thoughts,” indulging the desires of the mind. We see active rebellion against God. The world says that if you desire something, it must be good, and therefore no one can tell you that you can’t do what you desire. But Paul says that kind of living is simply irrefutable proof to the truth that the world is spiritually dead. These desires, though they may be alive and burning in us, are according to the flesh and they lead to death.

Paul implies that we were subject to Satan (Galatians 4:3; Colossians 1:13), unable to change (Jeremiah 13:23) from our spiritual deadness. We were in active disobedience; we “followed” or “walked” (Gentiles) and “lived” (Jews), “following” the world and the flesh and the devil. In v3 we read that we, like the rest, “were by nature objects of wrath,” or “children” of wrath. We were no different, certainly no better. You Gentiles used to live like them; we Jews lived like them too. Our very nature – the state of fallen humanity – deemed us worthy of wrath (Romans 5:12-21). Because your infants and toddlers and children came from the seed of sinful Adam, God’s wrath is justly hanging over them (John 3:36); sin, the cause of death, reigns in them, even though they haven’t yet committed a single act of rebellion against God.

Vincent Cheung says, “It would be wrong to assume that a person becomes a sinner only after he personally commits his first sin, since all of us are ‘by nature objects of wrath.’ Spiritual death necessarily implies total spiritual inability and passivity…. This in turn means that God shows mercy and love to a person not because that person is willing to receive; rather, the fact that the person is willing to receive is because of God’s mercy and love, producing this willingness to receive in the person” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Thus, the conclusion here is that God’s grace did not manifest itself in us because of a choice we made, because of a disposition we created in our hearts. Rather, God worked in us to bring about that choice and receptive disposition. (Theologians call this biblical view monergism, in which salvation is wholly a gift and a work of God. The unbiblical view is called synergism, in which man must at least freely cooperate for God to save him. But the biblical view contends that any cooperation from man is in itself a gift and a work of God.) The implication for Paul is that, now, you are different; now we live differently, because of v4. Lord willing, we'll look at it next time.