What We Were and What We are Now!
What we Were and What we are now!
When Ephesians 2 opens, we are spiritual corpses in death valley. When it closes, we are not only seated in Christ in the heavenlies; we form a habitation of God through the Spirit. In between we have the mighty miracle that brought about this remarkable transformation.
I The Past
We were not just dead; we were dead in trespasses. The Greek word translated “trespasses” is paratōma, which means “a falling aside when one should have stood upright.” This word conveys the idea of falling aside from truth and uprightness and is used to describe Adam’s disobedience (Romans 5:15–18). The law was introduced so that this form of sin, paratōma, might be thought of as criminal in the mind of the sinner—just as it is in the mind of God.
We were also dead in sins. The word translated “sins” is derived from hamartono, which means “to miss the mark, to wander from the right path, to go wrong, to do wrong.” Sin entered the world when Adam fell (Romans 5:12).
The natural consequence of falling aside, of missing the mark, was death. Thus, in our natural state, God sees us as dead in trespasses and sins.
When a man sets out to make something, he usually starts with the best possible materials—the purest clay, the finest marble, the choicest wood. But God goes to the refuse heap and selects materials that are worthless. He begins with people who are dead!
It is amazing what modern medicine can do for a patient. Doctors can remodel disfigured faces, transplant kidneys, implant lenses, bypass arteries—as long as the patient is alive. Once the person is dead, doctors can do nothing more than pull a sheet over the body and transfer the corpse to the morgue. But God begins with people who are dead in the fullest sense of the word—dead in trespasses and sins.
(2) We Were Deluded (2:2a)
Before we accepted Christ as Savior, our utter deadness to spiritual things was evident in our behavior. We walked according to “the course of this world.” In other words, the spirit of the age held us in its iron grip.
this world is the sworn enemy of God. The Bible warns of this enmity repeatedly: “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (1 John 2:15). John summarized the spirit of the world as “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (2:16). The spirit of the age is determined by the spirit of the world
“The spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.”
The force of these words is far stronger than our translation suggests. Paul was not simply saying that we were disobedient children, for the Greek word rendered “children” is derived from huios. Huios, meaning “a son,” has special reference to one’s origin, nature, and relationship to his father. Therefore Paul was saying that we were sons of the disobedient one—Satan. We had the nature and character of that evil spirit who prompts people to disobey God. Through one man’s disobedience sin entered the world, so we are heirs to a disobedient spirit.
One of the first behaviors a child displays, as soon as it is able to express its developing personality, is disobedience. No one ever has to teach a child to be disobedient. Rather, a child has to be taught to obey, and the lesson has to be reinforced often. Disobedience comes naturally. Satan has an enormous advantage—our fallen natures are allied to his.
God has to overcome this disobedient spirit in man. That is one reason He took redeemed Israel to Sinai, gave them the law, and instituted an age-long course of discipline. That is why He found such delight in His Son, who did “always those things that please” the Father (John 8:29), and why in this age He commands all men everywhere to repent (Acts 17:30).
So complete are the results of the fall that we have no natural interest in obeying the gospel; our first inclination is to disobey God. Even after we accept Christ, we find it difficult to tread the path of obedience, to believe that God’s will for us is “good, and acceptable, and perfect” (Romans 12:2). All too often Satan still manages to persuade us that our own way is best, and that God’s will is irksome, unpleasant, and even downright dangerous. “If you let God have His way,” Satan whispers, “He’ll send you to serve in a leper colony,” or “He’ll spoil all your fun.” Satan slanders God with such suggestions. Our all-wise and all-loving God would never call us to do something for which He had not adequately prepared us and given the appropriate measure of His grace.
Such then was our past condition. We were without God, without Christ, without hope. We were sinners by birth, by choice, and by practice. Our lot was cast in a world controlled by the evil one, and our eternal destiny was to live forever under God’s wrath and curse. But the Holy Spirit does not leave the matter there
II The Present Eph 2:4-6
Thank God for that “But”! The buts of the Bible are always arresting; they are hinges on which great issues turn. Think for instance of the buts in the lives of Solomon (1 Kings 11:1), Uzziah (2 Chronicles 26:15–16), and the prodigal son (Luke 15:20, 22).
Paul had painted a very black picture of human depravity and divine wrath. Now this glorious “But” draws our attention to God’s mercy and love.
God is rich in mercy. It would have been cold comfort merely to be informed that God is rich. He is rich. We will never fully know how rich He is until we arrive at our heavenly home. Then we will see how He paves the streets of His city with gold, builds walls of jasper, makes foundations blaze with precious stones, and forms gates of pearl. Ten million times ten million million worlds are His. He makes the ministers of His throne a flame of fire and sits high and lifted up on a rainbow-circled throne bathed in the ringing anthems of celestial throngs. He is rich in wisdom, rich in majesty and might, rich in glory. And he is rich in mercy! He has lavished the vast treasures of His mercy on us. Blessed be His name.
(b) Its Reality (2:5a)
“Even when we were dead in sins.”
God in His great love did not shrink from us even when we were dead in sins.
Sir Henry Rider Haggard provided an illustration of such love in his novel, Montezuma’s Daughter. His hero, Thomas Wingfield, found himself trapped among the Aztec Indians during the last stages of their empire. He married, half willingly and half by the sheer pressure of circumstances, the lovely daughter of Montezuma, the princess of the Otomie. He cared for her, admired her, and was more than half in love with her. But half his heart was far away in the England of his birth and with the sweetheart of his boyhood days.
Then the Spanish conquistadors forced the Indians into a desperate war. By virtue of his hatred of the Spaniards and his rank among the Indians, Thomas Wingfield was in the forefront of many fierce battles. The Spaniards, however, brought more than war, famine, and rapine—they brought the plague. Princess Otomie contracted it in its most terrible form, but fortunately escaped not only death but also the terrible disfigurement the plague so often left in its wake. As her husband nursed her through her illness and ravings, he learned of the depth of her love for him and of her secret fear that he might leave her. When Otomie recovered, she asked her husband to give her a mirror and she breathed a great sigh of relief when she saw that she was still beautiful. In telling this part of his story Wingfield said:
Supposing Otomie was now as many were … a mass of dreadful scars, hairless, and with blind and whitened eyeballs, should I then have shrunk from her? I do not know, and I thank heaven that no such trial was put upon my constancy. But I am sure of this; had I become a leper even, Otomie would not have shrunk from me (italics added).
God’s love was put to an even greater test. He loved us when we were dead in trespasses and sins. The apostle’s astonishment was expressed in that word even. “Even,” he said, “when we were dead in sins.”
(2) God’s Love Shared with Us (2:5b–6)
(a) It Plucked Us from the Tomb (2:5b–6a)
“Hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) And hath raised us up together.”
The only thing to do with a dead person is to bury him. We have no other solution to the problem of death. The corpse can be washed and groomed, and the cosmetics and the skills of the embalmer can be employed. But the body is still a corpse, and the only place for it is the tomb.
God, however, is not daunted by death. Our trespasses and sins had brought us to the place of death, but then God acted in grace and power. He quickened us. He made us alive, plucked us from the tomb. The resurrection of Christ was the key. Since all our trespasses and sins were dealt with on the cross, when Christ arose it became possible for us to arise. God raised us from the tomb in which our trespasses and sins had placed us, just as He raised Christ from the tomb in which our trespasses and sins had placed Him. The debt was cancelled. Sin’s penalty was paid. Death’s hold was broken. We were quickened together with Him. Grace triumphed over guilt and the grave; God reached down into the corruption of death and raised us up.
(b) It Placed Us on the Throne (2:6b)
“And made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
Imagine the awesome wonder of it: God has seated us on His glorious throne! In Christ we are already seated where He is. God has enveloped us in Christ so that when He looks at us, He always sees Him. No matter how or when God looks at us, He sees Christ—sees Him in all the beauty of His holiness, all the glory of His grace, and all the splendor of His person. We are like the boards of the tabernacle in the Old Testament that were hewn from gnarled, twisted acacia wood and then encased in gold. When people looked at those boards, all they saw was the gold. The same is true of us. When God looks at us, He sees Christ.
God has “made us sit together in heavenly places.” If we could start at some point on earth and draw an imaginary line upward from earth to Heaven, up to where Christ sits at the right hand of God, at first we might draw our line up beyond the highest mountains. But the line would have to go higher than that. We might reach up beyond the clouds, beyond the stratosphere, beyond the radiation belts that girdle the globe. But our line would have to go still higher. We might trace the line on up until it is among the stars, climbing farther and farther into the starry heavens, leaving the Milky Way and our nearest neighbor galaxies far behind. But still we would have to go higher. At last we might leave behind the remotest star in space and cross the Great Divide between a space-matter-time dimension into an eternal, spiritual dimension. Our line might pass from star land into glory land, climbing past the shining sentinels at the gates of Heaven ever upward to the towering peak of the ultimate Zion. If we finally reached the dizzy peaks and pinnacles of glory, we would see the dazzling throne where God sits, where Christ sits, where He has “made us sit.” We sit there together. This is a thought beyond all thought: He has raised us from the tomb and placed us on the throne. The verbs quickened, raised, and seated in Ephesians 2:5–6 are all in the aorist tense—it is already done.
c. The Prospect (2:7–10)
III The Prospect
(1) Unstinted Grace (2:7–9)
(a) Eternally Revealed Through Us (2:7)
“That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.”
Man’s sin gave God the opportunity to display a side of His character that otherwise might never have been fully revealed. In His work of creation He displayed His wisdom and His power. (The more we learn about astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine, the more we learn about God’s infinite wisdom and power.) On the stage of redemption God demonstrated not just His grace, not just the riches of His grace, but the exceeding riches of His grace. As Robert C. Chapman put it:
God is love I surely know
By my Savior’s depths of woe.
That grace will be eternally exhibited through the church—the ultimate vehicle of its expression—to an awed and admiring universe. All the varied ranks and orders of creation will see God’s throne and will see Christ there, bearing in His body the scars of Calvary, the only marks of sin evident in glory. They will also see us there, trophies of God’s grace.
(b) Eternally Revealed To Us (2:8–9)
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”
Here is one of the great summaries of the gospel in the New Testament. Some argue over what the gift is, but it seems clear that it is neither grace nor faith. The gift is salvation, made available to us by God’s grace and received by us through faith. Since salvation is a gift, it cannot be earned, merited, or otherwise purchased. The Holy Spirit emphasizes, “Not of works; lest any man should boast.”
Suppose God were to take people to Heaven on the basis of their good works. It would then be possible for those people to boast, “I am here because I did this.” “I am here because I did not do that.” “I am here because of my sacrificial giving.” “I am here because of my ascetic living.” Boasting is an expression of pride and pride was the original sin, the sin that transformed Lucifer into Satan. Because of his pride, Satan was cast out of Heaven and the vast cycle of sin began. Boasting in Heaven about one’s works would necessitate another expulsion and give rise to a fresh outbreak of sin, so God has put salvation on a basis that levels the axe at pride and completely eliminates boasting. Salvation is the gift of God. It is not of works.
Every false religion has at its heart the principle that salvation must be earned, merited, purchased at a price. The sinner must do something to deserve God’s favor. The gospel strikes at the root of all false religions, for it declares that salvation is God’s gift, available to sinners solely because of His grace and unmerited favor. Salvation can be obtained only by believing, but through all eternity the nail prints in Jesus’ hands will remind us of the enormous cost of God’s free gift.
(2) Unstunted Growth (2:10)
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.”
Good works are part of God’s plan. They are not the price of salvation, but the proof. The believer is not saved as a result of good works; good works are the result of salvation. They are the result of God’s working in the believer’s heart. They are the evidence that he is alive from the dead. They are the proof of the glorious togetherness that exists between the believer and the Savior.
The Lord, when here on earth, lived a life of good works. He “went about doing good,” Peter summarized (Acts 10:38). Now through His indwelling Spirit He continues to do His good works in us. This was all part of the eternal plan. The word translated “workmanship,” poiēma, indicates that we are His poem, His masterpiece. Each of our lives is the canvas on which the Master is producing a work of art that will fill the everlasting ages with His praise.
A great dispositional change marks genuine conversion, so that a person who is still dead in trespasses and sins is in contrast to the believer who has been quickened together with Christ. If we profess to be Christians but our lives exhibit no evidence of behavioral change, we are self-deceived.