Well, we have arrived at Ephesians 2, and the very first thing we are told is that the Christian was once dead. I love the irony in the fact that we are entering Ephesians 2 on the day where all of us are suffering from one less hour of sleep this morning (Daylight Saving’s Time). So, what I thought I would do before we plunge ourselves into our passage this morning is to first reflect on four of the weirdest ways people have died.
- For those of you who are still angry that you lost an hour of your sleep, just know that it is a miracle you made it this morning. It is estimated that 450 people die falling out of bed every year.
- According to statistics, you are twice as likely to die from an angry vending machine than a hungry shark.
- It is reported that about 24 people die annually from being hit by champagne corks in the face, mostly at weddings. Less people die from poisonous spiders than flying corks from champagne bottles!
- The weirdest death I learned about was that of Joao Maria de Souza of Brazil, who was killed in 2013 when a cow fell through his roof and crushed him while he slept.
Whether it is by falling out of a bed, a falling cow through your roof, or the inevitable and eventual failing of your health, all of us are going to die one day.
What does “Dead” Mean?
I do not need to spend a whole lot of time explaining what “dead” means. The word the apostle Paul used from the original language means exactly what the word “dead” means. If you are confused as to what the word for dead (nekros) means, it means this: “no longer having life.” However, why does the apostle Paul use the word “dead” to describe who or what the Christian used to be? Paul could have said, “you were sick in your offenses and sins.” He could have chosen the words, handicap, wounded, or he even could have used the same line from The Princess Bride, which was: “mostly dead.” The difference between dead and mostly dead is that when you are mostly dead, you are slightly alive. Of all the words the apostle could have used, he chose the word, “dead.” What if Ephesians 2:1-4, stated this instead? “And you were mostly dead in your offenses and sins…. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were barely alive in our wrongdoings, made us completely alive together with Christ…”. But that is not how Ephesians 2 begins is it?
To understand what Paul means by the word “dead” we need to go to the place the apostle pulled the word from in the Bible, and that place is found in Genesis. You remember the story; in the beginning, even when, “…the earth was a formless and desolate emptiness, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters… God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1-2). Then, after all but mankind was created, on the sixth day God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness…” (1:26). God created mankind above and separate from the rest of creation, for unlike the rest of creation, mankind was created in His image: “So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (vv. 27-28).
It is from Genesis 2:15-17 that Paul pulls the word “dead” from to explain what the Christian once was: “Then the LordGod took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and tend it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.’” The Hebrew word used for “die” (מות) in Genesis 2:17 means death, and every other time the word is used, it is used for death.
When we come to Genesis 3 and Adam and Even ate the fruit God told them not to eat, they did not physically die in that moment, but what happened next gives us a sense for what it means to be dead in the way Paul describes the Christian used to be. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit, they were tempted by the words of the serpent who said: “You certainly will not die! For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4-5). The physical death Adam, Eve, and the rest of creation would eventually experience is that which all living things would now succumb to, but it also included a type of death that was beyond physical. They experienced a death of innocence through shame (v.7), they experienced a death of an intimacy and peace within the relationship their marriage was designed to produce (vv. 16-17), and they experienced a death of the kind of peace (shalom) they were created to experience with God and His creation (vv. 8-15; 4:1-8).
The “death” God warned Adam and Eve about was a spiritual death and it was their sin that vandalized the shalom they enjoyed before their rebellion towards God through their sin against God out of a desire to be like God. This is the kind of death Paul was referring to in Ephesians 2:1 and is the kind of death (nekros) Jesus had in mind when one of His disciples asked to bury his father; Jesus said to his disciple: “Follow Me, and let the dead [nekros] bury their own dead [nekros]” (Matt. 8:22). What Jesus said to His disciple is to leave the corpse of his father to those who are still dead in their offenses and sins—this is the kind of death all people are born into before they ever experience a physical death.
How Guilty Where You?
So, what does it mean to be “dead”? Paul tells us in the first verse: “And you were dead in your offenses and sins…”. Just so that you are clear, if you are a Christian, you “were” dead, and your deadness was twofold: “…in your offenses and sins.” Again, Paul is intentional with his word choice here, and instead of using only one word, he uses two. We are dead in our offenses in that we were guilty of overstepping God’s moral boundary. The Greek word Paul used for “offense” (paraptōmo) can also be translated: offense, wrongdoing, sin, transgress, or to trespass.
When I was fourteen years old, my friends and I decided to break into a house we believed was abandoned, to steal copper, and we did it in broad daylight. We thought we were cunning enough to get into the house without being noticed, in spite of the fact that the street the house was on was a very busy road and on the other side of the road, directly across from the house we decided to break into, was a popular Harley Davidson Shop. Well, you probably are not surprised that we did get caught. Within minutes of my one friend finding his way into the house through a window, a big scary man on a Harley demanded that we stand face forward toward the house while 3-4 police cars arrived. The three of us were put in separate police cars after we were interrogated by one of the officers. We knew that we were in big trouble because we trespassed and broke the law. I was also convinced that I was going to be a dead teenager once my father found out what I had done.
When Adam and Eve bit into the fruit, what you need to understand and what you must understand is that it was not just a misstep taken, but a deliberate act of cosmic treason to not only be like God, but to dethrone God! What else could have been the motive for Eve and Adam, who was right next to his wife when she bit into the fruit and gave it to him, to take and eat the very thing that God said would bring pervasive death? The temptation was to doubt the goodness of God because of the fruit He forbade them to eat: “You certainly will not die! For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4-5). The temptation was to believe what Adam and Eve needed was not God but what was forbidden by God!
Since Adam and Eve bit into the forbidden fruit, sin, like a terminal disease has found its way into the womb of every woman just as the Psalmist lamented: “Behold, I was brought forth in guilt, and in sin my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51:5). “What does this mean?” you ask. It means this: “…just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all mankind, because all sinned” (Rom. 5:12). Or in the words of Cornelius Plantinga: “Sin is a plague that spreads by contagion or even by quasimetric reproduction. It’s a polluted river that keeps branching and rebranching into tributaries. It’s a whole family of fertile and contentious parents, children, and grandchildren.”[1]
Your deadness in the form of your offenses and sins was not the kind of deadness that leaves what was once alive stiff and inanimate; no, your deadness expressed itself because, “…you previously walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all previously lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the rest” (vv. 2-3). You were a dead person walking! You were the spiritual and moral equivalent of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead! Notice how our offenses and sins were manifested:
- We followed the prince of the power of the air (the devil).
- We were disobedient.
- We lived in the lusts of our flesh.
- We indulged the desire of our flesh and mind.
- We were children of wrath.
According to verse 2, this is the course of this world. The word for “course” can also be translated “age”; the point is that we walked according to the spirit of the age because it was our nature to do so. We were spiritually dead and stood before a Holy God as a walking corpse who, according to Romans 3, not only did not seek God (vv. 10-11) but had no fear of Him (v. 18). As the walking dead, we were enemies of the God of the living (see Rom. 5:10). As children of wrath, we stood before God as objects of His just wrath because of our offenses and sins. If you are not a Christian than Ephesians 2:1-3 is still true of you. You are still spiritually dead, and you are still a child of the wrath of an infinitely holy and just God and the place reserved for you, if nothing changes, is a condemnation you will never recover from; the kind of condemnation we are warned about in Revelation 20:11-15,
Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat upon it, from whose presence earth and heaven fled, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them; and they were judged, each one of them according to their deeds. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
People are generally okay when it comes to topics such as the love of God, the mercy of God, the grace of God, and even the justice of God. What many struggle with most is the wrath of God. Dr. James Boice said of these verses in Ephesians, “The worldly mind does not take God’s wrath seriously because it does not take sin seriously. Yet if sin is as bad as the Bible declares it to be, nothing is more just or reasonable than that the wrath of a holy God should rise against it.”[2] If you struggle with just how serious God takes your sin, you need not look any further than the cross of Christ.
What is the Remedy for All Your Sin?
I will spend an entire sermon unpacking what we see in verses 4-7 next week, but for now, let me show you Ephesians 2:4-5 against the backdrop of verses 1-3. We were dead in our offenses and sins, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our wrongdoings, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) …”
- We followed the prince of the power of the air (the devil), but God…
- We were disobedient, but God…
- We lived in the lusts of our flesh, but God…
- We indulged the desire of our flesh and mind, but God…
- We were children of wrath, but God made us alive with Christ.
How did God do it? Obviously, He did it through Jesus, but the reason He did it was threefold: 1) He is rich in mercy, 2) His love is great, and 3) His grace is sufficient. Mercy happens when you do not get the punishment you deserve, and grace is when you get something you did not earn or deserve. If you are Christian, the reason you received God’s mercy and grace is because His love for you was greater than your offenses and sins against Him.
Permit me to show you something that I hope will bless you as much as it has blessed me this week. Remember what Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:18-19; he was praying that the eyes of the hearts of those reading his letter would see and know three things: “that you would know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the boundless greatness of His power toward us who believe.” The word Paul used for “boundless” means, “to surpass, to go beyond, to exceed.” As you remember from last week, that word is used to stress the kind of power that raised Jesus from the grave and made your salvation possible. That power in conjunction with the richness of God’s mercy, the greatness of God love, and the sufficiency of God’s grace is infinitely greater than all your transgressions and sins.
Christian, although you were once a child of God’s just wrath, He has made you a son/daughter because He has done the thing that only He could do, He made you alive with Christ. Romans 5:10-11 is for you Christian: “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, he shall be saved by His life. And not only this, but we also celebrate in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.”
If you are not a Christian, then you need to hear this: the same mercy, love, and grace that has made the Christian alive in Christ is available to you if you would just receive by faith the Jesus who makes God’s mercy, love, and grace possible; there is no sin that is too great for God’s mercy, love, and grace to overcome—and it is still held out to you by a holy God who has every right to consume you by His wrath.
