The Rest of the Story
Ephesians 2:1-7
“The Rest of the Story”
Your pastoral staff had a great week! Last Tuesday we flew to Los Angeles to join more than 3,000 other pastors at the Shepherd’s Conference at Grace Community Church. Then we spent the rest of the week listening to John MacArthur and R. C. Sproul and Al Mohler expound on the glories of the gospel—particularly the doctrine of justification by faith alone, which is under attack from a number of different angles today. Along with me, Pastor Newton, Pastor McGarvey, Pastor Schlenker, and Justin Hall, our Missions and College intern, were able to attend due to the generosity of an anonymous donor, thank you, and the graciousness of all of you as a church allowing our absence. Thank you, too.
We also heard a great worship leader with an enormous voice. He had just debuted with the Vienna opera the week before and he wowed the crowd every time he sang. So, we brought him back with us! In addition, there were a number of different workshops on many topics, but several were given to this same effort of contending for the gospel, magnifying its glories.
And here I was preparing to preach Eph.2! But, hey, what’s the connection between justification by faith and Eph.2:1-10 anyway! I believe I rewrote my message in my mind at least twice during each and every session! How can you capture the glory of the gospel in a brief exposition? I finally decided just to let Scripture speak for itself—and our passage for this morning does a pretty good job. Let’s consider three amazing truths from Eph.2:1-7 this morning regarding our salvation by God.
The Situation: We were dead in our sins…. – 2:1-3
In ch.1, Paul celebrated God’s purpose in salvation and in ch.2 he is explaining what it actually involved, what it actually took, to accomplish it. This is the rest of the story.
Vs.1 opens with the words, “And you,” which follow right on the heels of the glorious exaltation of Christ at the end of ch.1. Paul is saying, “By comparison to the glorious and exalted son of God—the one under whose charge God has placed all things (22) according to his set purpose (9)—you were dead in your trespasses and sins.” He is continuing the first and second person distinction of Jew and Gentile. You here still refers to the Gentiles as the ones who were dead before God. But the Jews have the same problem, they’re folded back in down in vs.3. We’ll get there in a moment.
But saying we are dead, in comparison to the glory of Jesus just shared, offers a metaphor of how able we are to help ourselves in meeting God’s standards. We’re dead! And when he said dead, he didn’t mean sick. Jeremy Bentham is the father of a school of philosophy known as utilitarianism. Utilitarianism teaches that whatever is good for the greatest number of people is right. Bentham had an odd sense of humor. He left his money to the University College Hospital in London on the condition that his embalmed corpse would be present at all the board meetings. He died in 1832 and the board kept his wish; I can’t tell you if he’s still there today, but it’s quite possible. So, there he sat, dressed in proper 19th century garb, dead as a doornail. The minutes record that Mr. Bentham is “present but not voting.”
Several years ago, when we were not yet driving the nice minivan we have today, I was running some errands on a Thursday and I stopped by Natalie’s school on the way home to pick her up. I left my flashers on and went over to the fence by the playground to call her. She came running and we hopped back in the car two or three minutes after I had left it. I turned the key and nothing happened; there wasn’t even a click. The battery was dead; the car had to be towed.
Long before this event, our daughters, preschoolers, used to have an aquarium in their bedroom for which we bought them a cool little freshwater crab. It was in there for a couple of days, but then it just disappeared; we couldn’t find it anywhere. They kept a whole collection of little stuffed dolls and animals behind the fish tank, as though they were watching the fish, and we knew that the little crab must have escaped and, well, camped somewhere in all those dolls. We searched long, but found nothing, so were not only concerned about where we might eventually find it, but who might eventually find it! One day more than a year later Nicole, probably four years old, came running to Jean and told her there was something under her clothes chest that was supposed to be in the fish tank. Sure enough, there was the crab, perfectly preserved and hard as a rock. We kept it for quite at whiled after that and it never crawled away again! Why? Because it was dead!
When you’re dead you can do very, very little to help yourself.
We’re dead in our trespasses and sins. They have separated us from God. Paul’s words for sin here are essentially synonyms meaning day in and day out, personal sins—missing the mark or straying from the path of righteous living—but taken together they seem to emphasize the idea that this daily reality is an established pattern. We’re lured away from godliness by billboard pictures or reckless drivers or late deliveries or countless other things.
Sometimes we even feel like these catalysts toward sinfulness are crafted just for us—like we have an enemy who is working against us. And we do. At other times we’re distracted by very familiar bad habits or polluted thoughts that seem to drag us in a direction we don’t really want to go.
Many people live there, though, you know—not even feeling the tension or remorse for their trespasses and sins. And Paul is saying that his Gentile audience used to be a prime example of such people. They struggled against the world, vs.2a, the devil, 2b, and the flesh, vs.3, both in body and mind. They were in a hopeless situation. They were dead. In their very nature they were the objects of God’s wrath (3)—the severe but meticulously measured judgment of God against sin. They were guilty before God from every conceivable angle—in a plurality of ways: They were guilty due to their actions. They were guilty by their very nature. They followed the course of this world (2)—a difficult wording (lit., the age of this world, but this translation seems to capture the best likelihood. They followed the prince of the power of the air (2)—also challenging since the word for air usually means the air one breathes rather than the sky. But Philo used the word to speak of the air which extends upward from the earth’s surface to the sphere of the moon (the lowest of the heavenly zones). And he understood the air as the home of incorporeal souls—of demons and spirits. The same point is made in 3:10 and 6:12 where the abode of principalities and powers is said to be the heavenly realms (Bruce, 282). And if there is any dissimilarity between the power of the air and the heavenly realm, it is that the power of the air is a lower region indicating the closeness of the enemy’s evil influence to the world (O’Brien, 160).
A similar mention is made in 2Co.4:4 where Paul says that the minds of unbelievers are “blinded by the god of this age.” The noun, spirit, and the verb, at work, at the end of vs.2 are apparently used here to present the work of Satan as in direct contrast to the work of the Holy Spirit. Paul used the same word, at work (2), as he used back in 1:19.
We all, vs.3, means that Jews and Gentiles alike were dominated by the sinful nature—dead in their sins. Lived means to move to and fro; to behave in accordance with a given standard. We still say this today, don’t we? “Hey, I live there” speaking of some unique, usually unpleasant, set of circumstances?
The flesh is that self-regarding element of human being which is corrupted at the source. If left unchecked it gravitates to the works of the flesh listed in Gal.5:19-21. The desires of the body are probably clear, but the fleshly desires of the mind essentially refers to hostility toward God, rebelliousness against him. Rom.8:7-8 says, “For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” Children of wrath, as I mentioned earlier, means deserving of God’s punishment, and by nature here in vs.3 is contrasted to by grace coming up in vs.5.
Paul has painted a pretty careful picture here of every kind of people living in every from of rebellion against the precise purpose for which God created them—in fact, he has crafted it to emphasize that we lived in intentional and diametric opposition to the very person and work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We could not have been more rebellious if we tried, for indeed we were trying. Rebellion is where we lived. And that very realm is the realm of death—spiritual death.
But God…
The Solution: But God – made us alive in Christ…. – 2:4-6
Just those two words at this point, but God, introduce a ray of hope into the helplessness of our deadness in sin; they interrupt the established flow of vss.1-3. God’s being rich in mercy recalls the OT description of his abounding in mercy (Exo.34:6; Psa.103:8; Jon.4:2, etc.) and also his delighting in mercy (Mic.7:18). His rich mercy toward us stands in opposition to our sinful passions and desires that were deserving of his punishment. We earned his disfavor. We deserved his wrath. And how did he respond? In rich mercy, rooted in great love,Paul wrote to the Romans: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Vss.5-6, then, hit the primary meaning of the passage. Vss.1-10 have two sentences: 1-7 and 8-10. The subject of the first sentence is God, and made alive is the main verb. Without the adjectival clauses, these first five verses could read: “You were dead in your transgressions and sins, but God made us alive with Christ.” This is the meaning of this passage—not just a summary, but the core. Paul is endorsing the words of Jesus himself when he said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (Joh.5:24).
By now we’ve become used to contrasts and reversals and contrary efforts in this passage: made us alive stands in contrast to and reversal of dead in vs.1. And by grace (5), again, is contrasted to by nature in vs.3. By nature we deserve his wrath, but by grace we receive his love and mercy. And this statement, by grace you have been saved, anticipates vs.8, but it is so central that the moment can’t pass without at least making mention of it!
Grace is a full and rich word in Paul’s description of salvation. It is the theological word that describes Christ’s work of salvation. It emphasizes the absence of human merit in salvation. It captures God favorable disposition toward rebellious people contrary to what they deserve. But here we really don’t need to leave the confines of Eph.2 to have a pretty clear idea what it means: We were dead but God made us alive in Christ! That’s grace!
Made alive is not the only verb in this passage, though. We have also been raised up, vs.6, and seated—just as God did with Christ back in 1:20. So we are made alive and raised up and seated with Christ. The second two verbs seem to operate as amplification of the first. We’re made alive with Christ, which means that we’re resurrected with him and seated with him in the in the heavenly realm. And the verbs are past tense meaning that they have already happened—they are as good as done. Rom.6:4 mentions that “Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father,” and we are raised with him so that we may walk in newness of life. This is emphasizing the present day impact of our being raised with Christ—what good it does for us here and now. Col.3:1 makes a similar point: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.” We are raised to live godly lives here and now with our hearts set on Christ who is seated with God above.
Here in Eph.2, however, the picture is different. It is more like Rom.8:30: “Those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.” We are seated with Christ in the heavenly places; glorification is as good as done! The job of salvation is completed by Christ, and it is recorded as completed for a purpose….
The Purpose: To showcase his grace…. – 2:7
God has raised us up and seated us with Christ now in order to demonstrate to successive ages or generations the incredible value of his grace. It is almost as if this is God’s public relations program if it is not disrespectful to say it that way. When were dead, he made us alive; when we were in sin, he purified us; when were yet in the flesh, he has glorified us.
Enter: kindness, vs.7; kindness is used only by Paul in the NT. It is loving kindness, or actually love demonstrated through tender action. God’s active and persistent tenderness toward us, therefore, is a demonstration to the ages of how valuable his grace is. F. F. Bruce (288) wrote, “The ‘surpassing greatness of his power’ exerted in the raising of Christ (Eph. 1:19-20) is matched by the ‘surpassing wealth of his grace in his dealings with those who belong to Christ. Because (we) are ‘in Christ Jesus,’ he deals with (us) as he has dealt with him. The vindication and exaltation that Christ has received are his by right; the share in that vindication and exaltation bestowed on believers in Christ is (ours) by divine mercy, grace, and kindness.”
Conclusion
The point of the passage is clear: our salvation is of the wholly of the Lord and wholly undeserved; but as we conclude this morning I would like to suggest three personal lessons that we should hold on to and share.
No experience of sin, no matter how slight, leaves us any better off before God than dead. And as we have seen, we’re not just sinful in our behavior, we’re sinful by our very nature. We’re born into it. We didn’t just receive it with our mothers milk, sin has been present with us since we were conceived in her womb. Finding a human being with out sin is like trying to find water that is not wet. No experience of rebellion, no matter how deep, leaves us unreachable by God’s grace. As Martin Luther observed, Jesus is a better savior than you are a sinner. No matter how far you have run from God, and no matter how fast, you cannot out-distance his grace.
No experience of conversion, no matter how grand or how bland, is less of a miracle than any other. Every single time someone receives God’s saving grace in Christ, a dead person has been raised to life. It just doesn’t matter whether one was buried deeper than another. It doesn’t matter if one was dead longer than another. It doesn’t matter whether the corpse was well-dress or in rags. When conversions happen, the dead have been raised. And every single one is an ornate trophy of God’s grace, bearing witness—just by their very existence—of God’s immeasurable kindness expressed to them in Christ Jesus.
When I was a kid I loved to play football. Summer was for baseball, but the other three season were football. One summer when I was in Jr. High our family planned to visit some friends who lived in Akron, OH. We later moved there, but this was prior. My dad told me that we were going to get to visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton on the way. I thought I had died and gone to heaven! I still remember driving up to that very interesting architectural structure, walking up the sidewalk, entering, seeing that big, seven-foot stature of Jim Thorpe and beginning the tour. We saw bronze bust of Jim Brown, Bronco Nagurski, Red Grange—the local boy made good. It was like hallowed ground, but not one of them spoke to me! The trophies, the awards, the statues, were all lifeless.
Not so with God’s hall of fame. So great is his grace that the trophies that celebrate it will be alive and breathing for all eternity. Heb.11 starts the list: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and more. And each of us would now be listed along with them!
My friends, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is glorious. It remedies the greatest problem that faces human kind throughout world history. It changes the unchangeable. It fixes the unfixable. It raises the dead to eternal and abundant life. And it comes to us purely as an expression of God’s mercy rooted in his love—of his grace expressed in kindness. It is a gift that cannot be repaid given infinite wealth and never-ending time. And it is all of these qualities precisely in order to showcase the glory of God in salvation.
The God who created the universe that is sloshing over with his glory, chose to show his glory most clearly and evidently and completely and enduringly in the changed lives of those who were dead in trespasses and sins. He made them alive, raised them up, and seated them with his Son in his Kingdom. As we leave here this morning, let us do so as conscious and intentional trophies of God’s grace—as glorious lights reflecting the matchless grace of God to a world that is in desperate need of it.