Daily Bible Reading 27th September 2024 // Ephesians 2:1-5

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 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— 3 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. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—

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The two possibilities of interpretation of these verses are as follows: one is to concentrate on the doctrine of sin that they represent, dark and solemn as this is; the other is to look at them in relation to the grace of God, as a background to what is said here about that grace. This second possibility is the more profitable of the two. We do not view sin in isolation, in Scripture, but rather in relation to grace, for sin is the dark background against which the operation of God is seen in its fullness and at its best. The Paraphrase of Titus 3:3-9 expresses this very well in its opening two verses:

How wretched was our former state,

When slaves to Satan's sway,

With hearts disorder'd and impure,

O'erwhelmed in sin we lay!

But, O my soul! for ever praise,

for ever love His Name,

Who turn'd thee from the fatal paths

of folly, sin, and shame.

And so, dark as the opening passage is, we place our emphasis on the grace of God that sets to work on this most unpromising of raw material, to build it into a church. One thinks readily of the parable in Jeremiah 18 of the potter and the clay: marred in the hand of the potter, the clay is taken up and made into another vessel, but it is not the marred clay so much as what is done with it by the potter that is the important issue. And so it is here.