I’d like to begin this morning by asking you a question: Why do we need a Savior? We’ve spent nine weeks taking a look at Ephesians chapter 1 and marveling at how God has entered into our lives and poured out tremendous spiritual blessings for those who are His children. We’ve seen how God has chosen us from before the creation of the world and predestined us to be adopted into His family. We’ve seen how Jesus has redeemed us from slavery to sin and an empty life. We’ve seen how the Holy Spirit is in our lives as a guarantee of our spiritual inheritance. And we’ve seen how God fills our lives with His resurrection power. But that still doesn’t answer the question: Why did God need to do this in our lives?
Perhaps Paul realized that his readers may have been asking that very same question. So as we come to chapter 2, Paul takes his readers back to what their lives were like before they experienced God’s grace. Let’s read the first three verses of the chapter out loud together:
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.
Ephesians 2:1-3 (NIV)
There is a sense in which we don’t want to get too caught up in what our lives were like before Jesus redeemed us. The Bible is clear that our present lives are not to be paralyzed by thinking too much about what has happened in the past. But at the same time, I don’t think that we can ever fully recognize the significance of what God has done for us without understanding exactly what we were like at one time. So as Paul continues writing in chapter 2, it’s like he holds up this gigantic mirror that allows his readers to look and see what they were like before God entered into their lives.
And frankly, it’s not a very pretty picture. In fact, there is a sense in which is one of the hardest truths in the Bible because most of us don’t really want to hear just how bad we are apart from Christ.
We’re kind of in the same boat as a man I heard about this week. His doctor called him and said, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Which would you like to hear first?” “Well the good news, I guess,” the man replied. “I just got the test results back from the lab and you only have 24 hours to live,” said the doctor. “That’s the good news?” asked the man, “What could be worse that that?” “I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday.” That’s pretty much what our lives were like without Christ. We may have still been walking around, but for all practical purposes we were dead. In fact, as I was looking at some other sermons on this passage this week, it seemed that most common title for this passage was “Dead Man Walking.”
In just three short verses, Paul gives us a clear and complete picture of what all of our lives once were like. So let’s take a look in the mirror of God’s Word and see what are lives were once like apart from God.
WHAT MY LIFE WAS LIKE BEFORE CHRIST:
1. I was dead
Let me take you back to the question I asked just a few moments ago: Why do we need a Savior? I think that most Christ followers would answer that question something like this: “I have sinned and am guilty before God, so I need a Savior who can forgive my sins and take away the punishment I deserve.” And while that statement is true, it just doesn’t go far enough. What Paul makes really clear in this passage is that without a Savior, we’re not just in God’s dog house – we’re in the morgue.
Many of you know that I really enjoy watching crime dramas like C.S.I. And one of the key characters in all those shows is the coroner, who has to examine the dead bodies to find out how they died and why they ended up in the morgue. Fortunately for us, Paul has done the work of the spiritual coroner and tells us why we ended up in the spiritual morgue:
• Why we’re in the spiritual morgue:
Paul uses two words to describe the behavior that leads to our spiritual death. Although the words are often used as synonyms by Paul and other New Testament writers, they have a slightly different meaning:
o Transgressions = False step
The word translated “transgressions” in the NIV and “trespasses’ in other translations is a word that means to take a false step, go off a path, slip, or fall. As used here it is a picture of us wandering from the right path, whether that occurs as a result of inattention or a deliberate act.
o Sins = Missing the mark
This word comes from an archery term which means missing the mark. As used here it is a picture of us failing to hit the target of God’s standard for our lives. So it includes both sins of commission – doing something in opposition to God’s moral standard – or omission – failing to do something that God has commanded us to do.
The transgressions and sins in our lives do not just make us sick. They are our spiritual cause of death.
So why is it such a big deal that we are dead and not just sick or in God’s dog house? To answer that question, let’s think for just a moment about a couple characteristics of a dead person:
• Characteristics of a dead person:
o Unable to respond
Something that is dead is completely unable to respond to its surroundings or to others in any way.
A woman brought a very limp duck into a veterinary surgeon. As she laid her pet on the table, the vet pulled out his stethoscope and listened to the bird’s chest. After a moment or two, the vet shook his head sadly and said, "I’m sorry, your duck, Cuddles, has passed away."
The distressed woman wailed, "Are you sure?"
"Yes, I am sure. The duck is dead," replied the vet.
"How can you be so sure", she protested. "I mean you haven’t done any testing on him or anything. He might just be in a coma or something." The vet rolled his eyes, turned around and left the room. He returned a few minutes later with a black Labrador Retriever. As the duck’s owner looked on in amazement, the dog stood on his hind legs, put his front paws on the examination table and sniffed the duck from top to bottom. He then looked up at the vet with sad eyes and shook his head. The vet patted the dog on the head and took it out of the room.
A few minutes later he returned with a cat. The cat jumped on the table and also delicately sniffed the bird from head to foot. The cat sat back on its haunches, shook its head, meowed softly and strolled out of the room. The vet looked at the woman and said, "I’m sorry, but as I said, this is most definitely, 100% certifiably, a dead duck." The vet turned to his computer terminal, hit a few keys and produced a bill, which he handed to the woman. The duck’s owner, still in shock, took the bill. "$750!" she cried, "$750 just to tell me my duck is dead!" The vet shrugged, "I’m sorry. If you had just taken my word for it, the bill would have been $25, but with the Lab Report and the Cat Scan, it’s now $750.
Before God entered into our lives, we were completely unable to respond to Him in any way, since we were spiritually dead. That’s why it’s crucial that it is God who is the one who initiates our relationship with Him as we’ve already seen in Chapter 1 of Ephesians.
In His letter to the church at Rome, Paul explains this idea in even more detail:
The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.
Romans 8:6-9 (NIV)
Paul makes it really clear that apart from the Holy Spirit in our lives, we are incapable of submitting to God or pleasing Him. And we’ve already seen that the only way to get the Holy Spirit in our lives is through the grace of God which God provides for us through His Son.
o Decaying
When a person dies, his or her body begins to decay immediately. After Anna Nicole Smith died on February 9, you’ll remember that her mother and several of her male companions had a court battle over where her boy would be buried. And if you read or heard any of the news accounts of those proceedings you’ll remember that all the parties involved asked the judge to make a quick decision since, even with all the preservatives that had been pumped into her, her body was beginning to decay.
Without Christ, that is also an accurate picture of what is happening to us spiritually. Since we’re spiritually dead, and there is not a thing we can do about it on our own, we’re decaying spiritually. Our lives are becoming more and more corrupt each day.
As I was thinking about this whole idea of being spiritually dead this week, the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead came to mind. When we read that account in John 11, we find that by the time Jesus arrived at Bethany, Lazarus had been dead for four days and his sister, Martha, commented about the odor that resulted from the decaying of his body. The other thing that is readily apparent from that account is that Lazarus didn’t do anything in order to be resurrected. He was completely dependent on what Jesus did for him.
Before God initiated a relationship with Him, we were all spiritual Lazaruses – rotting away, completely helpless to do anything about our condition. We were dead in our transgressions and sins.
2. I was dominated
The second characteristic of our life apart from God is that we really don’t have any control over our lives. Our lives are dominated by three powerful forces that we can’t break free of on our own:
• World
…you followed the ways of this world…
Paul is describing here a life that in which we habitually conform to the ways of this world. Our behavior is determined by the powerful influences of our culture’s attitudes, habits, preferences and desires.
In his book, Living Beyond Mediocrity, Charles Swindoll, quite accurately, I believe, identifies the four major objectives of our world as fortune, fame, power, and pleasure. That seems to pretty well describe what drives the lives of most people.
In his letter to the Galatian church, Paul writes about how we were slaves to that system of beliefs without Christ:
So also, when we were children, we were in slavery under the basic principles of the world.
Galatians 4:3 (NIV)
If you back and look at this verse in context, you’ll find that when Paul writes “when we were children” he is clearly referring to our lives before we became Christ followers. And just as he writes in Ephesians, it is clear that without Jesus Christ in our lives, we are in slavery to a worldview that is totally and completely hostile to God.
The Scriptures are filled with warnings to us as believers to not succumb to such a mindset. Here are just a couple:
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…
Romans 12:2 (NIV)
Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him…
1 John 2:15 (NIV)
But the problem is that without Christ, we’re just not capable of freeing ourselves from the ways of the world.
If that was the only force that dominated our lives, that would be bad enough, but there are two additional powers that also dominated our lives without Christ.
• Satan
…the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient…
We’ve already seen Paul write about the idea of rulers and powers at the end of Chapter 1. And we discovered there that Jesus has been raised to the right hand of the Father, far above all these other powers. We also saw that all these other powers have been placed under the feet of Jesus. So how is it that this “ruler of the kingdom of the air” can have power over our lives?
First of all, we need to remember that Paul is writing to believers in his letter. And while there are forces that can try to influence our lives, those of us who are Christ followers are not under the dominion of those powers since we belong to God and are part of His family.
We also need to identify what Paul means by the “kingdom of the air”. Paul was obviously familiar with the Jewish concept of the heavens of his day. According to that model, there were three levels of heaven:
• The air – the atmosphere in which human life takes place here on the earth
• The universe beyond the earth where the other stars and planets are located
• The third heaven, which is beyond our human vision, is the place where God resides.
So the “kingdom of the air” is just another word for the earth where mankind makes his abode. And according to this verse, there is a ruler who has power over this “first heaven”. There is no doubt here that Paul is writing about Satan and the demons that he controls.
Fortunately for those of us who are believers, Jesus already defeated Satan on the cross. But Even though he is already defeated, Satan does not surrender without a struggle and he continues to make his influence felt. And before we had Jesus in our lives, we were completely powerless to battle that influence. In fact, the literal interpretation of this passage is that the ruler of the kingdom of the air is the spirit who is at work in the “sons of disobedience”. I can’t help but think that Paul was influenced here by the words of Jesus when he spoke to some of the religious leaders who questioned His divinity:
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.
John 8:44 (NIV)
Before we accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior, that describes exactly what our lives were like. We were sons of disobedience and the devil was our father. There was nothing we could do to get out from under his influence.
Before Christ, we were dominated by the world and by Satan, but there was also a third force that dominated our lives.
• Flesh
All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts…
The word which the NIV translates “sinful nature” is literally the word “flesh”. I actually like the NIV translation, because it makes it clear that Paul is not referring to our physical bodies, but rather to the sin nature that we are born with.
Every person who comes into this world enters it with this sin nature. No one has to teach us how to sin because, as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve, every person is born with this sin nature.
Our sin nature is kind of like a worm in an apple. Do you know how a worm gets into an apple? I always assumed that it ate itself into the apple from the outside. But what I discovered this week is that the worm actually comes from the inside of the apple. What happens is that an insect lays an egg in the apple blossom. Some time later the egg hatches in the middle of the apple and the worm eats itself out. We’re born with that sin nature inside of us and it continues to make its way out day after day.
And just like the world and Satan, this sin nature, or flesh, dominates our lives until Christ enters into our lives. Look at how Paul described this sin nature in Romans:
The mind of sinful man is death, but the mind controlled by the Spirit is life and peace; the sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.
Romans 8:6-8 (NIV)
Notice that Paul writes that those controlled by the sinful nature cannot submit to God’s law or please God. Without God’s help, there is no way that we can ever live lives that are pleasing to God, because our very nature prevents us from doing so.
Apart from God, I was dead and I was dominated. And also…
3. I was doomed
…Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.
The result of my spiritual death and my domination by the world, Satan, and the flesh is that I was under the wrath of God. What that means is that all of us are inherently deserving of the divine judgment of God.
Since God is a holy God, He cannot sit idly by when people transgress His law, fall short of His standards and live their lives according to the principles of this world, Satan and their own sin nature.
Frankly, most of us don’t like to think about the wrath of God a whole lot. And so I think we often get a wrong picture of what that wrath is like. We tend to picture it as God getting angry from time to time, lashing out in anger and then forgetting it.
But when we look at what the Bible teaches about His wrath, we find that His wrath is consistent, controlled and judicial. Perhaps that is what makes it so frightening. God’s wrath is an inevitable response to all that stands in opposition to His righteousness and holiness.
God’s wrath has both a present and future element to it. Jesus Himself spoke of the present aspect of God’s wrath:
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on him."
John 3:36 (NIV)
Notice that Jesus made it quite clear that those who reject Him have God’s wrath remaining on them. And the verb “remains” is in the present, not the future tense. In other words there is an aspect of God’s wrath that we experience right here and now when we choose to reject God. I think that is what Paul was referring to in Romans when he described how God gives those who reject Him over to their shameful lusts and that they experience the painful and deadly consequences of their behavior.
And obviously there is also a future aspect of God’s wrath. Paul writes about that in Romans:
But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.
Romans 2:5 (NIV)
For those who do not respond to the grace and mercy of God, there is a future judgment to be faced. And at that time, those people will experience the wrath of God and be separated from Him for eternity in a place of eternal torment.
In a sense, this has to be one of the most depressing messages I’ve ever preached. There’s not a whole lot that I can really do to put what Paul writes here in a positive light. The fact is that all human life apart from God is just not a pretty sight.
But on the other hand, this is also one of the most exciting messages for those of us who are followers of Jesus Christ, because it shows us the awesome greatness of what God has done for us. He has reached down into our lives and delivered us from death to life. He has freed us from the domination of the world, Satan and our own sinful natures. And He has delivered us from the wrath that we deserve. We’re going to see that even more clearly next week. And God did all that for us, not because we deserved it, but because of His grace and mercy.
If you’re here this morning and you have never accepted Jesus Christ as your Forgiver and your Master, then you are exactly as Paul describes you in these verses – dead, dominated and doomed. But perhaps God has been speaking to your heart and drawing you to Himself. Don’t leave here this morning until you respond to his call. You can do that right there where you sit by praying to God and thanking Him for drawing you to Him, telling Him you’re sorry for your sins and asking Him to forgive you, and placing your faith in Jesus Christ alone as the payment for your sins. You don’t have to use fancy words. Just speak to God as a friend and tell Him what’s on your heart. Or if you’d like to know more about how to do that, just check the appropriate box on the flap of the bulletin and we’ll be happy to talk to you more about that.
