Ephesians 2: Dead, then alive

Dead

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. Ephesians 2:1-3

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins... (Ephesians 2:1). There is no halfway language here. As promised to Adam and Eve, death would be inevitable if they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17) - that is, turned away from God and decided to define good and evil for themselves. Obviously our bodies, and those of the Ephesian Christians, were alive in the physical sense as we know it before salvation, so what does 'dead' actually mean?

Firstly, there is the physical trajectory of our bodies.  Somebody whose life is in unavoidable peril might use the phrase: 'I'm a dead man walking', but the fact is that whether it comes at 0, 20 or 80, death comes to us all.  Did you know that every time our DNA replicates, the end of the DNA strands (telomeres) are shortened, and so their ability to do so again weakens until eventually the process becomes impossible (this is the process of ageing)?  We don't know all the whys and hows, but when humanity rebelled the whole of creation became cursed, and when we look at life in our world we see eventual decay.  In Genesis 1 God brought order out of chaos, but in our world the second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy is the natural state to which matter is headed.  We have order to chaos.

However, there's more than that - being dead in our sins is being cut off from God, the source of all life.  Now, the physical death of our bodies is part of this, but this sits in a wider context of being cut off from God relationally.  Like the trajectory of our physical bodies, the trajectory of our very selves is also away from God, the source of life, constantly rebelling against him.  We find ourselves in a world and in bodies which mean that sin is pretty much inevitable, and Paul draws out three things that lead to this.  

1) Following the course of this world (vs 2a). 

We sin because we follow the course of this world.  Our fallen world and society means that sin is ever around us providing seemingly attractive alternatives to living God's way.  We may fear the disapproval of others, seek to belong, or simply wish to enjoy some short term that living God's way requires us to wait for.  Furthermore, the hurt caused to us by others can in turn cause us to hurt others or ourselves.  Try as we might, we cannot escape the mark of sin that affects us just by being in the world.

2) Following the prince of the power of the air (vs 2b)

There are further powers at work - and that is Satan, the fallen angel who whispered sin into the ears of Adam and Eve.  We know he has power - whispering to and tempting people ever since and opposing everything that is good.

3) carrying out the desires of the body/flesh (grk sarx) and mind (vs 3)

To take these words in isolation could cause us to conclude that all desires we have that come from our bodies are evil and sinful, but we know elsewhere from the Bible that God made our desires.  He made things like food and sex and made them to be enjoyed as well as for their utilitarian value.   And there are many other desires we can have for other things which are good and made by God.  However, sometimes our desires are distorted:  rather than desiring the right amount of something (food, for example) and feeling satisfied and thankful when we have taken what we need, we end up never satisfied, taking more than our fair share, hurting others in the process.  We come to worship the gifts, not the giver, believing that these are what will satisfy not only our bodies and minds but also our souls.  Furthermore, we often find ourselves desiring things that are a distortion or imitation of God's gifts: we might mistake popularity for belonging, lust for marital intimacy, or financial security for riches in heaven.

The situation seems bleak, but what is to come is like day is to night.

Alive

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, 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 coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.

Ephesians 2:4-10

God has loved us even since before he created us. We saw the eternity and majesty of God's love, and his timeless nature and plans that we can't even imagine, in the previous chapter, Ephesians 1. Here again we see a language of richness and excess as Paul expresses what he has seen - God being rich in mercy, and his great love. God's love was big enough to conquer that death of which we have just read. In clinging to Jesus and pinning our hearts to him, we die his death and are raised with him to new life. We may think of Paul's words to the Corinthians: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. (2 Corinthians 5:17). What was dead is now alive. The connection to the creator of life - the Lord God himself - is restored. Sin can longer keep us away.

Characteristic of the 'now and not yet' nature of the Christian life, Paul talks of the present and the future simultaneously. We are with Christ now - one foot in Heaven - but he speaks of the 'coming ages' when we will see Jesus face to face and more of the riches of his grace will follow.

But what Paul is especially keen to emphasise as he wraps this paragraph up is that it is God's initiative.  None of us have earned this.  We find ourselves in a ranging torrent facing certain death and are saved by a might saviour - there is no boasting there.  In fact, what such analogies don't quite convey is that salvation by Jesus Christ is not only not boasting but requires the very opposite: the belief that we are completely wretched, that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves.  Most people around us would accept a rescue in an emergency, but coming to Jesus is not just about saying: I need some help right now, but about saying: I am nothing without your love, and I can do nothing apart from you.  Take my life - all of it.

Finally, we have a purpose.  Life is not a static thing.  We are not repaired to a static state like one might repair an object.  When God created humanity he created us for a purpose - to be the stewards of his creation and to love and create families; to create order and life out of chaos.  This is the work that God continues to do and, just as in the beginning when he created us, he invites us take part in this work with him.   The ESV helpfully describes us 'walking in' the good works that God has prepared for us to do.  I think this wording conveys brilliantly the fact that we are working in God's grace - is up to us to simply follow what God has already won for us.

And so, we pass from dead to alive, through the marvellous and great love of Christ.  Not just from broken to repaired, from lost to found, or from bad to good - although all of these are involved, but from dead to alive, just as Jesus did.  There can surely be no transformation more dramatic.