Daily Bible Reading 28th 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—
Paul, then, is intent on magnifying the grace of God to us. We have already seen in 1:3 how he 'speaks well' of that grace, and how, later in that chapter, he prayed that his readers might know something of its immeasurable greatness. And later still, in 3:8, he speaks of 'the unsearchable riches of Christ'. We need to keep this ever in our minds as we look at the dark and sombre statements in 2:1-3, which give such a profound insight into the nature of sin. The first phrase in 1, 'dead in trespasses and sins', describes what it means to be a sinner. They take us right back to Genesis 3, and to the warning words spoken to Adam and Eve, 'In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die'. Sin - disobedience, rebellion, against the word and will of God - is a killer. Something happened to man when he transgressed the direct and unmistakable command of God: he died - not indeed in the physical sense, at that point in his experience, for Adam and Eve continued to exist, but in the deep and tragic sense that it became impossible for him to recover his former position, impossible to regain his freedom to do the divine will, impossible to realise his divine destiny. For he was no longer a free agent, but now a captive, and no longer able not to sin, although not thereby ceasing to be a responsible person. This is not the time or place to enter into a lengthy discussion of the relation between freedom and responsibility: it is sufficient to say at this point that being 'dead in trespasses and sins' means that there is nothing in the sinner that is capable of responding to God. He is insensitive to any spiritual considerations of any kind, and it is this that makes Paul say, in 1 Corinthians 2:14, 'The natural man receiveth not the things of God, for they are foolishness to him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned'. The implications of this are very considerable, and fundamental to a proper understanding of the gospel itself, as we shall point out in tomorrow's Note.