“And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, 2 in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. 3 Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), 6 and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; 9 not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”
Three buddies were discussing death, and one of them asked the group, ‘What would you like people to say about you at your funeral?’ His own answer was, ‘He was a great humanitarian, who cared about his community’. The second said, ‘He was a great husband and father, who was an example for many to follow’. The third answered, ‘Look, he’s moving!’ Pastor Darrin Hunt, of Susquehanna Valley Bible Church in Selinsgrove, PA, submitted this story to SermonCentral.com.
Everyone wants to go to Heaven but no one wants to die. In truth however, people who do not know Christ and who do not have His Life-giving Spirit in them are walking, talking paradoxes. They fear death, and yet they are dead.
They live in dread of the inevitable, never understanding that from the day they were born, they were already dead and there is no hope for them except in Christ.
RADICAL DEPRAVITY AND GOD’S WRATH
“I once was rebellious, corrupted by sin,
Pursuing the Devil’s dark path,
Oblivious, dead to the state I was in,
An object of God’s dreadful wrath.”
J.M. Boice
This is a fundamental doctrine of the church, and the church has absolutely and completely thrown away her capacity to evangelize the lost in this world if she fails to teach the doctrine of man’s radical depravity; of mankind’s spiritual death.
Let me briefly explain this term, ‘radical depravity’. The reformers came up with an acrostic to help remember the doctrines of grace. The acrostic spells the word ‘TULIP’, and the letters stand for Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, and the Perseverance of the saints.
Now I am not getting into a teaching of these doctrines today, but only give you this acrostic to show that while it is convenient it is somewhat unfortunate in that if used shallowly it can lead to some misunderstandings. The reformation preachers of recent years have realized this and they have begun to change the terminology somewhat. An example of what I’m saying is in this first doctrine on the list from which past preachers got the ‘T’ for tulip, which is ‘total depravity’.
The reason I say this is unfortunate is that if I teach that you and I are by nature totally depraved, then I leave myself open for someone to point out that most of us are quite capable of doing good things, having good and healthy thoughts, and on occasion even acting quite sacrificially toward our fellow human beings.
So I cannot say we are totally depraved, since the word ‘total’ would indicate that there is absolutely no capacity in any one of us for any good whatsoever. If we were truly in that state we would be no different than rabid animals, attacking and biting and killing one another until there was no one left.
So, as I say, reformation preachers of recent years have begun using the term ‘Radical Depravity’, because the depravity in man, his incapability of knowing or understanding God in any way, is radical; that is, we are affected in our entirety by the sin nature.
There is no part of us that is not affected, and because of that our spiritual ruin is complete. Now let me explain this further.
People think, and they express this belief often, even within the church, that what makes people bad is the commission of sins. If they themselves are possessed of an even temperament and are content to go through life obeying the laws and being civil to others and have no habits that are harmful to themselves or others, then they tend to think that they are good people and sin cannot be attributed to them.
I recently heard a preacher say that after he had been preaching about sin and the sin nature in man, a woman of his congregation was reported to have said to a friend, ‘his preaching is offensive to me; he seems to think we are all sinners but I’ve done nothing wrong’.
But you see, what she and many do not understand is that the fruits of the sin nature are just that – fruits. So we have this penchant for naming sins and judging the worth of people on what they do or do not do, or the degree to which they do those things.
When we do this we have made two basic errors in judgment. We have implied that if a person is good enough they don’t need a Savior, and secondly we have implied that since it is the commission of labeled sins that make a person bad, we apparently get to apply those labels. And of course, if we can do that, then we only need avoid the labels we ourselves have applied and then we ourselves will be ok.
Both of these errors exclude the need for a Savior, which taken to a conclusion denies the efficacy of the cross of Christ, which is sin. Oops! There it is; unavoidable and inescapable.
Paul says to the Ephesians – and through this divinely inspired letter, to all of us – that we who are believers in Christ all formerly walked (lived) in worldliness, in worldly thinking and acting, and in that condition sin manifested itself in lusts of the flesh, in disobedience to God, in indulgence of the flesh and mind, and he says we were ‘children of wrath’.
Now if you look down at these verses in your Bible you will see that he calls all who have not believed in Christ for salvation ‘sons of disobedience’. Then in verse 3 he uses this term, ‘children of wrath’.
Why does he use these terms? Well, first let me explain that he is not saying that wrath and disobedience were somehow our parents. He is not saying that because our parents were disobedient we are sons of disobedience – although in a certain sense that is true because we inherited the sin nature from our parents as they did from theirs as has been the case since Adam and Eve sinned.
But in using these terms, ‘sons of disobedience’ and ‘children of wrath’, Paul is establishing that we were all born exposed to wrath. We all came into this world already under the wrath of a holy God.
Now this wrath is not some outburst of uncontrolled anger. There is a Greek word for that and it is used in the Bible. It indicates an agitated condition of the feelings. But the word that is used to describe God’s wrath, is not like that. It is a word that suggests a more settled and abiding condition of the mind. It is a righteous indignation that waits for the proper time to take revenge, but does so in justice and with emotional control.
So we all – notice he says ‘even as the rest’ at the end of verse 3, meaning no one is excluded from this – we all were by nature children of wrath; born exposed to wrath.
So you see, you never had a chance. You never had an opportunity to decide that you were going to live a good life and be a good person and avoid God’s wrath against sin and eternity in Hell. You’ve been on that road from the very beginning, even before you had self-awareness.
Now this is what I want you to see today as we go on to our next point. You will never understand Christ and the need for Him to come and die on the cross, until you have understood this doctrine of your fundamental disobedient nature and your inevitable and unavoidable exposure to the wrath of God.
If you read verses 1 through 3 of Ephesians 2 and stop there, you will see that there is no good news in it. There is nothing to be happy about in those verses, and the language employed by the Apostle encompasses everyone of the human race, none excluded.
It doesn’t matter what gender you are, what skin color you have, what your position is in your particular society or culture. It doesn’t matter who your parents or grandparents were or what any of them or you have accomplished in this world. It doesn’t matter what your physical condition is, whether a champion sportsman or an invalid who can only blink your eye to communicate. None of that matters.
Your spiritual condition, the one you were born with, is dead in trespasses and sins, sons of disobedience, children of wrath, even as the rest.
Now here is what you must understand. This is why Christ had to come! He is the only one in all the universe and whatever lies beyond, including Heaven, who could have done anything about this problem.
That is why verse 4 begins with,
BUT GOD
“But God who is rich in compassion and love,
Not leaving my soul to the grave,
Has given me life; born again from above,
By God’s sov’reign grace I’ve been saved.”
J.M. Boice
I want to explain to you why only God could have done anything to save you. I’ve already said it, but I want to tell you by illustration the kind of thinking people have in their heads about salvation that is just wrong thinking and ultimately steals God’s glory and therefore must be taught against.
Let’s say you have a close friend who has become very ill. He is laying in a hospital bed with tubes and wires coming out of him from everywhere and going to machines that monitor every bodily function, every breath, every brain wave and so forth. These machines are virtually silent, registering none but the slightest indications that there is anything going on at all in your friend.
Your friend is unresponsive in any way, but just on the chance that maybe he can hear you, you whisper in his ear. You encourage him. You tell him it’s not time to die and that his family and friends are rooting for him. You refuse to give up until finally you fall asleep sitting by his bed, your head down next to him. Suddenly, in the wee hours of the morning, you are awakened by a slight movement of your friend’s hand. The machines start to make all kinds of noises again and within the hour your friend’s eyes are open, within days he is eating and joking and talking with you, and within weeks he is out of the hospital and getting back to a healthy and productive life. One day he tells you, “You know, I’m only here because I heard you calling me as though from afar and I came toward the voice until I could hear other sounds and understood that I was in a hospital bed, and after that I only wanted to get well”.
Well, I could make up other stories, about someone drowning, going down for the last time and just in the nick of time closing his fingers over a life preserver. Or someone being saved from certain death at the penultimate moment by some other brave and desperate act committed by a loved one.
But this is to illustrate the kind of thinking that people have about salvation and coming to Christ. It always has to do with their dire circumstances, and someone giving them the gospel, pleading with them, praying for them, and then one day that person exercising that flutter of faith that ‘accepts’ Christ and the moment they do the Holy Spirit gives them life and enters them and in a flash they have gone from death to life, from unbelief to belief, from being destined for Hell to being destined for Heaven.
That is not what the Bible teaches. To more accurately illustrate the doctrine of the power and effectiveness of God’s grace to save, the story would have to be about a man who was dead in a hospital bed, sheet over his face and machines rolled to another room where they could be of use. It would have to be of a man who had drowned, whose body lay at the bottom of the lake being lined up for dinner by the resident fishes.
The Bible teaches that 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, raised us up, not only from death but from this fallen world, and seated us with Christ permanently in the heavenly realm.
You have to understand that the capability did not exist in you to understand or believe anything, any more than a dead drowned man can swim to the surface for help or a corpse in a hospital morgue can hit a button to call for a nurse.
God – are you listening? – God, ‘made you alive’.
God made us alive. Do you know why I like that wording? I like it because it doesn’t say ‘God gave us life’ or ‘God brought us back to life’ or anything to indicate either that we were deserving or that we exercised a choice to accept.
You see, all those illustrations fall short on one point. They all imply previous life in the person. The man who drowned was once alive. The man in the hospital bed was once healthy.
But we never were. We were born exposed to wrath. We came into this world sons of disobedience. We all, by our very nature, walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air (that’s the Devil), of the spirit that is even now working in the sons of disobedience.
But God, rich in mercy and love that He wanted to lavish on us, made us alive!
Even when we were dead in our transgressions He made us alive by His own power, of His own volition, according to His own initiative, He made us alive, gave us faith to believe, and by His grace alone He positioned us above this world and this world system, in Christ, seated with Christ, a place from which, according to His power, we can never and will never be moved.
Made alive.
What a contrast we are given in these verses! All of us, dead, rotting corpses, wasted, and exposed to wrath – God, rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us.
This isn’t the only place we see this contrast.
We hear Jesus telling Nicodemus that God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son, so that whoever believes in Him might not perish but have everlasting life.
We see the gospel writer telling us that as Jesus looked upon the multitude He felt compassion for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.
We see Him weeping outside the tomb of the man He was about to raise to life.
We see Him touching lepers, and comforting adulteresses, and blessing prostitutes, and visiting the homes of thieves.
We hear Him from the cross, whipped and pummeled and stripped and nailed down hand and foot, His compassion pouring out faster than His blood, saying, ‘Father, forgive them…’
Where, oh where do we get this picture of a frowning, scowling, angry God, sitting on His lofty throne insisting that we better ourselves and work our knees and knuckles to the bone trying to please Him?
Where does all that come from? We don’t get it from God Himself; that’s for certain!
Of Himself, He says, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity and sin…”
We don’t get it from Jesus either. He said, “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father”
And we don’t get it from the Apostle Paul. He says,
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us…”
SO THAT
“Since grace is the source of the life that is mine –
And faith is a gift from on high –
I’ll boast in my Savior, all merit decline,
And glorify God ‘til I die.”
J.M. Boice
Now, we’ve talked about what God did and why He had to be the one to do it and how it was all by His grace and power because it was done while we were in the absolute helplessness of death.
Having said all that, we move to the ‘why’. Why did He do that? Let’s talk about that and then close with a look at what our response is to what He has done.
Verse 7 begins with ‘so that’ meaning ‘in order that’, ‘for the purpose of’,
God made us alive together with Christ and raised us up and seated us in the heavenly places in Christ,
‘…so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.’
There are several things to understand from this and the first and primary in importance, I think, is to realize that it is for the glory of God.
We always tend to put ourselves first, don’t we? We think it’s all about us. He did it to save us. He did it because He loves us. Well that’s all true of course. The Bible says so. I even said so a few minutes ago. But we are not first. We are not primary.
When Satan tempted the man and the woman in the Garden of Eden, he cast aspersions upon God’s character and upon His sovereignty and upon His power.
He indicated that God did not care for them; that He did not have their best interest in mind, when he implied that God was afraid if they ate of the tree they would become like Him.
The devil attempted to diminish God’s power when he contradicted His word saying they would not surely die just because they disobeyed and ate of the fruit.
He diminished God’s sovereignty by presuming to contradict Him at all, and tempt Adam and Eve away from their Creator; to be independent of Him and run their own lives.
So they sinned. And mankind died.
But God’s power was not diminished. His sovereignty over all was never in danger of being usurped. And He has shown us that He is rich in mercy and loves us with a great love, and cares for us enough to make us alive together with Christ and seat us above all principalities and powers.
What has He accomplished and He alone? He has vindicated His character, He has shown His power, He has established forever His sovereignty, for in the ages to come, that is in the eons of eternity, our very presence in Heaven will demonstrate the surpassing riches of His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
Our glorified existence in the Heavenly realms will be perpetual evidence of His love and His power and His Lordship over all, and it will all be to His glory for He alone has done this – only He could to this – only He would do this; MADE US ALIVE!
OUR RESPONSE
“Yet now I am living with work to be done
For I am God’s workmanship too,
Created in Christ with a race to be run,
Which God has ordained me to do.”
J.M. Boice
Reading verse 10 again in the light of all that has come before in this passage, got me looking at the subject from an entirely new angle than which it is usually approached.
How silly, how arrogant are we, that we get entangled in debates over what constitutes ‘works’ in Biblical terms, or whether salvation is to any degree by works, or to what degree the believer is to devote his or her life to works and where, and blah, blah, blah.
If we were dead in our transgressions, and if it is only by God’s power and initiative that we were made alive and now have life, and if we have this new life only because of His grace and kindness in Christ Jesus, lavished on us in His mercy and His great love with which He loved us, then where do we get off thinking we have the right or ability to choose how and where and to what degree we serve Him – work for Him as the church and as individuals in His body the church?
Listen to verse 10 carefully:
“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them”
Break that down. We are His workmanship. That means we are the result of His work. We are something He has wrought. If he had not, we would not be.
Created in Christ Jesus. We are a creation of His. Paul said that to the Corinthians, didn’t he? “If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation, old things are passed away, all things are brand new”
What are we created for? For blessing. For fulfillment. For comfort. For happiness. No. None of those things. We are created for good works. What good works?
Well, whatever we choose and are willing to do. No. Works that He prepared before He made us.
Now think about this. When a man develops a new tool, he does so because there is a job – a work – that he wants to get done. So when he conceives this tool in his mind, and when he begins to shape and form and build that tool, he does so with the task in mind that he wants to get done. He designs the tool for the particular purpose of that task.
Men don’t build tools and then stand back and say, ‘Now what is this good for? What can I accomplish with this new tool?’ ‘Gee that has a funny part attached to the back; I wonder what that does?’
No. God prepared works beforehand for us to do, then made us alive together with Christ and set us to work.
We don’t have a choice that is not sinful. Do you hear what I’m saying? Only in sin do we have a choice because the act of deciding whether or not to live for God is sin and out of the sin nature. The divine nature does not question God in regard to His love or His power or His sovereignty; the divine nature is yes and amen and desires only to walk in the works He prepared beforehand and designed us for.
Do you see why in the beginning I said that unless we understand our radical depravity in our natural state we could never understand why Christ had to come or what He accomplished on the cross?
It is only when we comprehend that while we were dead we were made alive by His grace alone, and that we were made alive through Christ alone and that it is for His glory alone – only then can we begin to comprehend that we only begin to have any function or purpose at all when we are walking in the good works He prepared beforehand for us to do.
So I will pose this question and we will be finished.
What are the good works that are prepared for us to do?
Well if God made us alive and seated us with Christ in the heavenly places, and if it was so that in the ages to come He might demonstrate in and through us the riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus, and if this was all for His glory, then we should conclude that the works He has prepared and designed us for are those things that glorify Him.
Do you hunger and thirst for righteousness? Do you desire to be sanctified; to be made more like Jesus? Do you walk as a child of Light, trying to learn what is pleasing to the Lord? Do you love the brethren as Christ loved you and gave Himself for you? Do you long to see Him come in all His glory to rule and reign in a new heaven and earth where righteousness dwells? Do you desire to glorify God in your body – that is, in yielding your members to Him for His use?
Do you desire to be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in you when asked? That’s an important one, because He has made us a kingdom and priests to our God, and He has given us the immeasurable honor and privilege of being the vessels through whom He works that others might be
MADE ALIVE.
