EPHESIANS 2:1-10 - "But God..."

Introduction

One of my favorite parts of God’s creation is that He gave us dogs. (I don’t know whether you’re a dog person or a cat person, but God calls us to love one another no matter what...) One of the things with dogs is how much human speech they can understand (cats may understand what you’re saying, but they just don’t care...)

But dogs really can pick up on what you’re saying to them in a remarkable way. And I have come to the conclusion that the four most terrifying words in the English language for a dog (judging from our dogs’ reactions, anyway) are: “WHAT DID YOU DO?”

You can see the guilt in their eyes—they duck their heads, don’t make eye contact, try to slink away or hide—anything they can do to try to escape the crushing load of guilt they have incurred from eating five packages of granola bars they found in the box on the basement steps… (Unlike cats, who are incapable of feeling guilt at all...)

I think it’s so poignant watching a dog struggle with guilt because it feels so familiar somehow, doesn’t it? Just like Rizzo trying to slink away from me standing over her with an empty Nature Valley Granola wrapper, we all instinctively shy away from facing our guilt. But because we are human beings created in the image of God, we are far more creative in avoiding our guilt.

Sometimes we deflect it— “It wasn’t my fault, it was because of what she said or what he did or the way they behaved”.

Sometimes we defend it— “I am not to blame—it was my parents’ fault; they are the reason I am the way I am!”

Another popular ploy is to simply deny our guilt— “You are trying to make me feel guilty, but I should not feel guilty over this! This behavior, this attitude, this position I have taken is something I take pride in!!!”

But one of the easiest and most common ways to try to avoid guilt is to diminish it. “Well, nobody’s perfect!” Or “Well, at least I’m not as bad as that person is!” Or “God just forgives me when I sin, it’s no big deal!”

If you look around you’ll see examples of these different ways of avoiding guilt everywhere. But there is another difference between us and man’s best friend when it comes to guilt. Because the way dogs perceive the world means that twenty four hours after she ate all the granola bars, Rizzo has completely forgotten she did it. But you and I can be tormented for twenty four years by one guilty act, if we do not deal with it the way God’s Word instructs us. So long as we try to diminish or deflect or deny or defend our guilt, we will be miserable. As we read earlier in our worship, when David wrote in Psalm 32 about his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah:

Psalm 32:3–4 LSB

When I kept silent about my sin, my bones wasted away Through my groaning all day long. For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; My vitality was drained away as with the heat of summer. Selah.

It wasn’t until David confessed his guilt that he received freedom from that guilt:

Psalm 32:5 LSB

I acknowledged my sin to You, And my iniquity I did not cover up; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to Yahweh;” And You forgave the iniquity of my sin. Selah.

The only real release from guilt is to acknowledge and confess them honestly to God. There are countless souls gasping under a terrible load of guilt that not only weighs them down mentally and emotionally and spiritually but even destroys their physical health because they have been told that the solution to their guilt was to find some way to avoid it or redefine it or minimize it.

But I want to submit to you that the only real reprieve from guilt comes from honest and accurate confession. And the verses before us this morning in Ephesians are a powerful help for us in this work, because they give us an absolutely unflinching view of what we are apart from Christ, what we are in our own sinful nature. And more than that, they give us an absolutely marvelous view of the mercy and kindness of God toward us in our guilty state.

So here is the way I want to summarize this text for us this morning:

God’s GRACE is GLORIOUS to you when your GUILT is GRIEVOUS to you

In these verses we come to the end of the first major section of Ephesians—God’s blueprint for living, as we have been calling it, begins with an understanding of our new IDENTITY in Christ. Paul has just finished his glorious introduction to the letter in Chapter 1, opening our eyes to the marvelous riches of His grace that we have received in our salvation, and has just concluded by pointing to the resurrection of Christ as God’s greatest demonstration of His power and authority:

Ephesians 1:19–20 LSB

and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe according to the working of the might of His strength, which He worked in Christ, by raising Him from the dead and seating Him at His right hand in the heavenly places,

Paul says that the greatness of His power toward us was shown in the might of His strength that took Jesus out of the grave and seated Him in Heaven. And here as Chapter 2 opens, Paul is going to demonstrate that it was the same power of God that took you out of your grave and set you in the heavens in Christ!

Freedom from guilt comes to us through Christ as we stop trying to avoid dealing with our guilt, but to acknowledge it. And in order to do that truly; in order to stop hiding behind all of your excuses and evasions, you have to come to the realization that you are

I. More DEPRAVED than you ever thought (Ephesians 2:1-3)

Look at the way Paul talks about us in verses 1-3:

Ephesians 2:1–3 LSB

And you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

What is the first thing that Paul says about us in our guilt and sin?

We were DEAD (v. 1)

The fundamental point in our relationship to God is not that we were mistaken or ignorant or uneducated. We are not just “in a bad way”, with bad habits that just need improving or shabby moral standards that need tightening up—we are dead and rotting in our depravity. Paul says that we are dead in “transgressions” (some translations read trespasses)—the idea there is that we know we are in the wrong and do what we want anyway. We see the “No Trespassing” sign and walk right past it.

The other word used to describe our death, “sins”, is a word that refers to our inability to raise ourselves to the standard God requires— the word breaks down to the idea of “missing the mark”. We think to ourselves that if we just try a little harder to “work on” our “character flaws” we can eventually get them into good enough shape that we can present them to God as evidence that we are really a good person deep down inside. But Paul says that you are no more able to “work on yourself” to get to God’s standard of righteousness than a rotting corpse is able to get itself cleaned up enough to go to the spring formal.

Not only does the Scripture say that we were dead in our trespasses and sins, but

We were DISOBEDIENT (v. 2)

Paul goes on to say that we

Ephesians 2:2 LSB

...walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience

In God’s sight, you were not only a dead, rotting corpse of sin and transgression, but you existed in a living death, walking as far away from Him as you could, walking “according to the course of this world”. Whatever the world around you said to do, you did it. Whatever there was to go along with, you went. Your appetites, your desires, your judgment of right and wrong—all of it was governed by the world’s standards.

And all of that walking was done “according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the sons of disobedience...” Paul is casting his line clear back to Genesis 3:15, when YHWH tells Eve that He would put hostility between her seed and the seed of the Serpent—in our spiritual death we were following that same Serpent; you walked according to the rule of the Devil; his sons of disobedience were your role models.

And how did those sons of disobedience govern their lives? What was the rule that you walked by at that time?

Ephesians 2:3 LSB

among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind...

In your spiritual death, you were governed by your lusts, your desires. You wanted what you wanted when you wanted it, and it didn’t matter who got in the way or what price you or anyone else had to pay. You were consumed by your greed, your gluttony, your lust. Whatever feels good, do it; whatever party there was to be had, party away. You may have openly dissipated yourself in drugs, alcohol, porn and partying, or you may have kept a lid on all of those outward behaviors and just indulged your passions on the inside. But whether outwardly or secretly, your depravity was not hidden from God.

The all-seeing, everywhere-present Creator, the Ancient of Days, Almighty YHWH Himself has been present and has seen every sin you have ever committed. Every. Single. Time:

Hebrews 4:13 LSB

And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are uncovered and laid bare to the eyes of Him to whom we have an account to give.

Which means, in short,

We were DOOMED (2:3b)

Paul says it at the end of verse 3: We were

Ephesians 2:3 LSB

...by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

A certain mindset will want to quibble with the notion that God sees every sin you have ever committed: “Well, doesn’t the Bible say that ‘God’s eyes are too pure to see evil’? (Habakkuk 1:13) So how can He be watching me sin?” Fair point—that means that one of you has to go. He will not bear evil in His sight anywhere, and since there is nowhere you could go to indulge in your evil away from His sight, then the only solution is for you to be destroyed.

The wrath of God is the point at which the holiness of God meets the sinfulness of mankind. When we speak of wrath, we always smuggle in human emotions—when we experience wrath as an emotion, it is often uncontrolled, unjust, out of proportion to the offense, or mixed with pride or vindictiveness or selfishness.

But the wrath of God is entirely holy, never out of proportion, always exactly suited in perfect proportion to the offense, and it is under the complete and unflinching and unstoppable will of the Almighty and Everywhere Present Ruler and Creator of the cosmos. And that unstoppable, unflinching, utterly holy and righteous and just wrath was burning against you. Not just because of something you had done; God’s wrath burned against you because of what you were. There was no aspect of your humanity that had not been affected by your sin—you were by nature an object of His holy hatred and loathing; your mere existence was enough to draw His wrath, let alone all the ways you had sinned against Him.

God’s Spirit inspired the Apostle Paul to pen these verses to demonstrate how hopeless your plight was before God—the depravity of your death in your transgressions and sins. But the Scriptures do not leave us here in our plight—you may see here in this passage that you are more depraved than you ever thought, but Paul goes on in in the next four verses to tell you that you are

II. More LOVED than you ever thought (2:4-7)

Verse 4 begins with what have been called the two most beautiful words in all of the Scripture:

“But GOD...”

You were dead in trespasses and sins… “But GOD...”

You were eagerly following the world, the flesh and the devil… “But GOD...”

You were an object of wrath, fit for nothing but eternal destruction… “But GOD...”

Look at these verses and wonder, Christian, at the nature of

God’s HEART toward you (2:4–5)

Ephesians 2:4–5 LSB

But God, being rich in mercy because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—

Though you richly deserved nothing but His eternal wrath, the depths of His mercy are richer still! You could not, and can never, sin your way to the bottom of the mercy of God; though He has the power to punish, instead He chooses compassion for you.

Though you were the ugliest, most detestable sight in His eyes, you did not arouse His disgust; instead, He looked on you and loved you! Paul repeats it again there in verse 5, as if he himself has a hard time wrapping his head around it:

Ephesians 2:5 LSB

even when we were dead in our transgressions...!

Consider the enormity of this love and mercy—there was nothing in you to commend you to God; there was nothing but wickedness and rebellion and selfishness and pride and hatred and malice and lust and uncleanness and sloth and gluttony and the stain of the sin of Adam. And He would have been no less loving or merciful or just if He had just left you that way.

But instead, He looked on you and loved you! And why did He love such a monster of sin and wickedness and rebellion? The answer comes in the rest of verse 5:

Ephesians 2:5 LSB

even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—

You were lying dead and decomposing in the grave of your sin and transgression, so Jesus had to descend into the grave to rescue you! The same power that raised Christ from His grave two thousand years ago is the same power that raised you from the death of your sin! When He could have just left you to your decay and passed you by with His love and withheld His mercy from you, instead He came to earth in mortal flesh and took on Death itself in order to bring you to life with Him!

And if His love and mercy ended there, it would certainly be more than we could ever dream of—but God’s love for you did not stop at rescuing you from your spiritual death—consider in the next few verses

God’s WORK in you (vv. 5–7)

Ephesians 2:5–7 LSB

even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

If we have come face to face with how deep our depravity runs; if we have been broken by the depth of the wickedness and sin that we find in ourselves, it is all too easy to consider God’s behavior towards us as some sort of half-hearted obligation—kind of like The Man’s Pledge on The Red Green Show: “I am a man. But I can change... If I have to… I guess...”

Beloved, please hear this—God did not look down on you when you repented and trusted in Christ and respond with “OK, I’ll save you… If I have to… I guess...”

Just look at what God’s Word tells us about God’s demeanor towards you, Christian—look at how many times Paul says that you are with Christ— you are made alive with Christ (v. 5). You are raised up with Christ (v. 6), you are seated with Christ (v. 6). Your entire salvation—from your call out of the grave of your sin to your eternal enthronement in Heaven—all of it is accomplished with Him. He is not indifferent toward you; He is not halfhearted in His work in you; He delights in you because you belong to His Son!

Everything that these verses relate about our standing before God in our salvation was accomplished because of the perfection of Christ’s work—He was raised from the dead and made alive and seated in eternal glory in Heaven because of His perfections. And so are you! you are raised from the dead and made alive and seated in eternal glory because you are in Christ by faith.

And He wouldn’t have it any other way! God aims to spend all of eternity lavishing His grace in kindness toward you! He delights in you, Christian—just as He delights in Christ Himself. God the Father spoke out of Heaven at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my Beloved Son, in Whom I am well-pleased” (Matthew 3:7)—beloved, when you have come by faith to be in Christ, God says the same about you! You are well-pleasing to Him; you are His beloved, you are His object of eternal delight— in C. S. Lewis’s memorable phrase, you are “a genuine ingredient in the Divine happiness”—you are more loved than you ever thought!

But see here what would have happened if we had stuck with our typical tendency to minimize or rationalize our guilt before God—if we have not come face to face with just how depraved and evil we are apart from Christ, we would have next to no understanding of how great His love is for us!

A “pretty good person” thinks they were kind of worthy of loving anyway, so hearing that God loves them doesn’t really come as a surprise— “Well of course God loves me, why shouldn’t He??” People who have been working overtime to minimize their guilt or explain it away or redefine it or simply ignore it will never understand the magnificence of these verses.

Only the one brokenhearted by his sin, the one who has been utterly undone by the realization of how deep her depravity has run and how much destruction and pain and emptiness and anguish it has caused to those around—only the heart that owns its crushing load of guilt and shame can truly leap for joy at the realization of God’s great love and grace in Christ!

God’s grace is glorious to you when your guilt is grievous to you—you are more depraved than you ever thought, but you are more LOVED than you ever thought. And see now in the last three verses of our text the promise that, in Christ you can be

III. More HOLY than you ever thought (2:8–10)

In verse 8, Paul summarizes the first seven verses of the chapter in a statement that pinpoints the fundamental reality of our lives as Christians:

Ephesians 2:8 LSB

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this not of yourselves, it is the gift of God;

Because of where he wants to end this chapter—with the works that we do for God—he needs to make sure that it is absolutely clear that

You did not WORK for your salvation (vv. 8–9)

Ephesians 2:8–9 LSB

[it is] not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not of works, so that no one may boast.

A heart that has come to terms with the depth of its depravity before God in sin is the best soil for growing a life of humility in godly deeds. This is why I love the quote from Oswald Chambers, who said that he never met a man he could despair of once discerning what lay in his own heart apart from the grace of God—no matter what kind of ministry God calls you to; no matter how godly a family you raise or how many souls you lead to the Lord or how effective your Bible teaching or how compassionately you minister to the poor and hurting and lonely; no matter how far you excel in spiritual and moral good in your life, you can never take the credit for it! It is all the gift of God! You did not work for your salvation; instead, Paul says,

You are the WORKMANSHIP of God (v. 10)

Look at verse 10:

Ephesians 2:10 LSB

For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.

In his commentary on this passage, John R.W. Stott tells a story from his days in Cambridge:

Towards the end of my time as a theological student at Ridley Hall, Cambridge, the Rev. Paul Gibson retired as Principal, and a portrait of him was unveiled. In expressing his thanks, he paid a well-deserved compliment to the artist. He said that in future he believed people looking at the picture would ask not ‘Who is that man?’ but rather ‘Who painted that portrait? (Stott, J. R. W. (1979). God’s new society: the message of Ephesians (p. 82). InterVarsity Press.)

Beloved, this is the deepest desire of every heart that has been crushed by its load of guilt and shame—this is the sign that you have been truly forgiven—when God then goes on to use you for His glory! It is one thing for God to assure you of your forgiveness in Christ, it is another for Him to then invite you into His work in this world! To go from an object of His wrath to His trusted servant; from a “son of disobedience” to a son of righteousness through His grace! Look at the marvelous transformation from the beginning of our passage to the end—in Verses 1-2 you were “walking” in the wickedness of this world—in Verse 10 you are “walking” in the good works and ways that your Father in Heaven has laid out for you to do!

From wrath to workmanship; from guilt to glory—this is the grace of God for guilty sinners. But this grace cannot be glorious to you if you insist on diminishing or denying or defending or deflecting your guilt before God. If you continue walking according to the course of this world, you will never truly escape the crushing burden of your guilt. The ways that this world tells you to cope with your guilt will never remove it. It might numb it enough for you to be able to pretend it’s gone, but it will always be there.

And this is because (as verses 1-2 tell us) this world operates according to the “ruler of the power of the air—Satan, the Chief Accuser (the name “Satan” comes from a Hebrew word meaning “prosecuting attorney”.) When our First Parents fell in the Garden, he was there, and he has been using that guilt to blackmail this entire planet ever since. All of his schemes run on the existence of that guilt that we all share. From “white privilege” to “homophobia” to “the patriarchy” to “toxic masculinity”—all of those bogus accusations are given their potency because deep down we know we are sinners, and so all of those things just might be true of us!

So alongside the bogus accusations this world’s system throws at us, there is also the real guilt that we bear before God—our actual lusts and hatreds, our real acts of abuse or violence, the genuine perversions and rebellions—the Accuser has no interest in seeing those go away, because if they did, his fake accusations would have no power. So the world tells us to deny, deflect, diminish, defend—but the one thing this world’s system can never do is relieve you from your guilt.

The only way to be truly forgiven of your guilt—to truly walk free—is to come to the One Who was crushed under the wrath of God for guilt that was not His. Jesus Christ lived a perfectly guiltless life here in a world system that runs on guilt and accusation. Throughout His whole life He was accused of every sin in the book—of being a glutton and a drunkard (Matthew 11:19), of being possessed by a demon (Mark 3:30), of being an illegitimate child (John 8:41), of being a blasphemer (Matthew 26:65). Satan himself met Him in the wilderness, trying to get Him to fall into the same trap as Adam and Eve, but He never succumbed to his temptations. The world tried for years to get some kind of handle on Him in order to steer Him, but it never could, and so it tortured Him to death on a Cross, where He died under the wrath of God for guilt that He never incurred.

And so this is the freedom from guilt that you are offered today—the world around you wants you to believe that God hates you for your guilt; that He is vindictive and cruel and full of scorn and loathing for you. But see here in these verses that yes—while you are more depraved than you ever thought, you are more loved than you ever thought! God has seen you in your guilt and loved you—He will release you from it, and in doing so will release you from this wicked world’s system of accusation and shaming and blackmailing—not when you deny or deflect or diminish or defend your guilt, but when you confess it for what it is:

1 John 1:9 LSB

If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

And when you come by faith to Christ and receive the forgiveness for your guilt that He earned on that Cross, your condemnation is gone forever:

Romans 8:1 LSB

Therefore there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

So lay it down—stop trying to defend yourself, stop trying to diminish or deny or deflect your guilt. Confess it before Him and He will do what this world can never do—free you of it once and for all. He has paid the price, He has promised to set you free, set you as His precious child, set the righteousness of His Son on you and set before you good works to do and goodness and mercy to follow you as you walk in them, when you come—and welcome!—to Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Hebrews 13:20–21 LSB

Now the God of peace, who brought up from the dead the great Shepherd of the sheep through the blood of the eternal covenant, our Lord Jesus, equip you in every good thing to do His will, by doing in us what is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:

What are some of the ways people try to deal with their guilt? How do their coping mechanisms compare to the Biblical prescription for dealing with guilt?

Read Ephesians 2:1-3 again. How does Paul describe our condition before we came to Christ? How do you think a typical non-believer would respond to this description of spiritual death and slavery to the world?

Why is it so important to truly understand our condition before God in order to deal with our guilt properly?

Read Ephesians 2:7 again. What does this verse say is the reason that God raised us up with Christ? How does this verse help you understand the nature of God’s attitude toward you?

Paul writes about our “walk” in Ephesians 2:2 and Ephesians 2:10. What is the difference in our “walk” between these verses? What does this say about the presence of the New Birth in you as a Christian?