When we began our study of Ephesians chapter 2 last week, we saw that Paul painted a very realistic, and yet disheartening picture of what our lives were like without Jesus Christ. Paul made it clear that we need a Savior because without one, we are dead in our transgressions and sins; we were dominated by the world, Satan and our own flesh; and we are doomed to face the wrath of God. But fortunately, Paul doesn’t just leave us there. He makes it quite clear that God has an answer to all the problems that we have apart from Christ. Let’s read together what Paul writes about God’s answer.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
Ephesians 2:4-7(NASB)
Although we’ve been using the NIV translation in our study of Ephesians, you’ll notice that I’m using the NASB translation this morning. If you’re still working on memorizing the Book of Ephesians, I want to encourage you to go ahead and memorize this passage in the NIV. There is nothing really wrong with that translation, but unfortunately the NIV translators chose to change the order of the wording in verse 4. Normally, that’s not a problem. In fact, in order to translate the New Testament Greek into English it’s often necessary to change the order of the words in order to make it fit with our English grammar.
But in this case, by inserting the phrase “because of his great love for us” between “but” and “God”, I think the NIV translators missed out on the powerful message communicated by those two simple three-letter words: “But God.” In fact, in just those two simple words Paul conveys the very essence of the gospel.
There is a sense in which those two words may very well be the most important two words in the Bible. Because they show how God enters into the lives of those he has created in order to do a work that no man could ever do. Let me share with you just a few examples. I’m just going to put these verses up on the screen and read them. I don’t really need to comment on them because they speak for themselves.
The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days. But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded.
Genesis 7:24, 8:1 (NIV)
Pharaoh said to Joseph, "I had a dream, and no one can interpret it. But I have heard it said of you that when you hear a dream you can interpret it." "I cannot do it," Joseph replied to Pharaoh, "but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires."
Genesis 41:15, 16 (NIV)
You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.
Genesis 50:20 (NIV)
Like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be recovered, so we must die. But God does not take away life; instead, he devises ways so that a banished person may not remain estranged from him.
2 Samuel 14:14 (NIV)
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Psalm 73:26 (NIV)
He said to them, "You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts. What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.
Luke 16:15 (NIV)
You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.
Acts 3:15 (NIV)
He said to them: "You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.
Acts 10:28 (NIV)
Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
1 Corinthians 1:26, 27 (NIV)
I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow.
1 Corinthians 3:6 (NIV)
Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.
Hebrews 12:10 (NIV)
But God! Those have to be the two most exciting, encouraging, hopeful words in all of God’s Word. So it’s no wonder Paul chose to use them at this point in his letter. He just finished writing about the total hopelessness of man apart from God. But with just these two simple words, Paul immediately restores a sense of hope. Things looked really bad for all of us. We were dead, dominated and doomed. But God! There is hope! Paul is about to reveal how God entered into our lives to deal with the death, domination and doom that we all experienced at one time.
In two weeks, we’re going to come back to this passage again and see how Paul addresses each of the three problems that we faced:
• We were dead in our transgressions and sins but God made us alive with Christ.
• We were dominated by the world, Satan and our flesh but God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the heavenly realms.
• We were doomed but God showed us His kindness instead of His wrath.
But what I’d like us to do this morning is to focus briefly on why God did all of this for us. Why did God choose to enter into our lives to redeem us from the kind of life we looked at last week?
WHY DID GOD SAVE US?
We could answer that question in very simple terms. God saved us because of his nature. That’s really what Paul described in Chapter 1. It is God’s nature to choose us, to redeem us, to secure our future and to pour His power into our lives. But in this passage, Paul describes three particular attributes of God’ nature that bear particular relevance to God’s work in saving us.
1. He responded to our lostness with His love
…because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions…
I’m really amazed at how God responds to our lost condition. What we deserve is His justice and wrath, His anger and maybe even His disgust. But instead God responds to us with His love. I think that one of the reasons that we have such a hard time understanding how God could do that is that we don’t really understand that kind of love.
When we think of love, we tend to think of an emotion or a feeling. But the kind of love that God demonstrates toward us, and which by the way, he commands us to show towards others, is an act of the will, not an emotion. As we’ll see in a moment, God is moved with compassion toward us, but that is not the primary expression of His love for us. In fact, in this passage, Paul has a particular expression of God’s love for us in mind.
Let’s take a closer look at what Paul writes here. The first thing we notice is the greatness of God’s love. Paul uses both the verb and the noun forms of the word for “love’ and God’s love is also described as “His great love.” As we’ve already seen several times, Paul likes to use this kind of grammatical structure whenever he wants to emphasize the greatness of something. For instance we saw that back in chapter 1 when Paul wrote about God’s “incomparably great power.” As we’ll see in more detail in just a moment, the love Paul is describing here is without a doubt the greatest love the world has ever known.
But there is something about what Paul writes here that really catches my attention. When he writes about “His great love with which He loved us”, you’ll notice that he uses the past tense of love – God loved us. My first reaction was that Paul really must have meant to use the present tense – God loves us. After all, I know that God still loves me. But after further reflection, it appears to me that Paul really uses the exact words he wants to use. And he uses the past tense because he is writing about one particular action that God took in the past to demonstrate His great love for us. This is even clearer if we go to Paul’s letter to the Romans:
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8 (NIV)
There is little doubt that Paul is referring to Christ’s death on the cross as God’s greatest demonstration of His love for us. God didn’t just say he loves us. He demonstrated that love by His actions. Let’s just focus on that love by reading together several Scripture passages that focus on that act of God’s love:
I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Galatians 2:20 (NIV)
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
1 John 4:10 (NIV)
and live a life of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
Ephesians 5:2 (NIV)
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 3:16 (NIV)
But not only does God respond to us with His love, there are two other closely related aspects of His nature that Paul writes about in this passage.
2. He responded to our misery with His mercy
…being rich in mercy…
Once again, Paul uses a superlative to describe the magnitude of God’s mercy. God is not just merciful – He is rich in mercy.
Mercy is one of those terms that we tend to use a lot as believers. And we often tend to use it interchangeably with the next attribute of God that we’ll discuss – His grace. And while those two terms are similar in many ways, they are not the same thing. So let’s take a few minutes here this morning to see if we can’t arrive at a better understanding of God’s mercy and His grace.
Mercy is God’s attitude toward those in distress. When God looked down from heaven and saw us the way that we were without Christ, He saw that we were miserable. A life that is characterized by death, domination and doom could result in nothing else.
All of us who are parents can certainly relate to God’s mercy. One of my most vivid memories of my mercy towards my kids is the day that we were packing up after church back in the days when I was a church planter. I had brought an aquarium to church that day to use for our children’s message. And before I could get it packed up in the car, Pete backed up into it and it shattered and cut a deep gash in his leg. While we waited for the paramedics to come, all I could do was to keep his leg elevated and keep pressure on it. And later at the hospital I had to watch as the doctor had to clean out the wound, inject the anesthetic into his muscles and then suture the muscle and skin back together.
That day I had mercy on Pete. I saw him in his misery and distress. And I hurt deep inside as I watched him go through that. And that’s what God’s mercy toward us is like. But with one big difference. God has the power to do something about my misery. And, as we’ve already seen, God has done that for me with one tremendous act of love.
3. He responded to our guilt with His grace
… by grace you have been saved…
If mercy is God’s attitude toward those in distress then grace is God’s attitude toward law-breakers and rebels. Even though we deserve it, God does not want to leave us to suffer from the guilt that comes from being dead in transgressions and sins. So in His grace He reaches out to set aside the demands of law and to relieve us from the due punishment of our guilt and to set us free. It is the grace of God which has dealt with our guilt.
Grace also involves God’s power and His enabling for us to be able to do what He calls us to do. Perhaps we can see this best in another of Paul’s letters:
But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."
1 Corinthians 12:9 (NIV)
Although Paul is writing here with particular reference to his “thorn in the flesh”, the general principle is clear – it is God’s grace which gives us the power and ability to do what God calls us to do. This is especially true when it come to our salvation. When Paul writes that it is by grace we have been saved, he is saying that it is God who provides the ability for us to be saved completely independent of anything that we are capable of doing on our own. Paul is going to drive that point home even more forcefully just a few verses later.
Before we close, let me just share with you a summary of the difference between God’s mercy and His grace:
Mercy Grace
God’s solution to man’s misery God’s solution to man’s sin
Removes the pain Covers the sin
Restores Forgives
Withholds what we do deserve Gives us what we don’t deserve
Although mercy and grace are similar, but not the same, they both have one thing in common – we don’t deserve either one.
All of us were once dead in our transgressions in sins. All of us were once dominated by the world, Satan, and our own flesh. And all of us were doomed to face the wrath of God. But God responded to our lostness with His love. But God responded to our misery with His mercy. But God responded to our guilt with His grace.
This morning, I’ve intentionally made my message shorter so that we can have some time to meditate on and respond to what we’ve just discussed. In particular, we’re going to spend some time focusing on God’s grace. So the worship team is going to come back up to help us do that.
