Those Once Dead Now Alive in Christ (Ephesians 2:4-7)
Introduction
The onset of World War 2 in 1939 produced wide and varied changes in culture and society. In order to support the war effort, many different industries were refocused to provide supplies for the troops. Everything from industry to shipping to agriculture was affected. In order to win the war, we needed an effective army. But an army without things like food, fuel, metal, and fabric cannot be effective. And these materials without a means of transporting them across the sea were useless.
Thus, the Governments including ours imposed a ration on certain kinds of supplies in order to make sure there was a fair distribution among the population. Every citizen received a ration booklet which had coupons for things like sugar, meat, and gasoline. In order to purchase these items you needed to expend your coupon and pay the sum.
As you can imagine this radically reshaped common cultural artifacts. Sugar was rationed and replaced by honey and molasses. Meat was stretched with beans, lentils, and vegetables. People rendered their own animal fat to replace butter. Clothing styles changed to use less fabric. E.g., Nylon was rationed and so women began using eyebrow pencil to draw a thin line down the back of their legs to give the illusion they were wearing stockings. Scarce gasoline encouraged walking and biking. Vehicles were maintained more meticulously to make them run longer. Many household began growing “Victory Gardens”—vegetable gardens at home to help defray the cost of food.
This shaped the culture. This bonded Americans together in a common sense of shared purpose and sacrifice. Resourcefulness and frugality became a paramount virtue. Family recipes that doubtless stood unmodified for decades were changed. Large events often have significant effects on individuals.
This is very much the same dynamic that is at play in the book of Ephesians. God is up to something magnificent in history. God desires to magnify his name in the praises of his saints by renewing the entire universe. God has accomplished that through the death, resurrection, ascension, and rule of Jesus Christ our Lord. And through his great work, Jesus Christ has instituted a new world, a new order, a new society. And while we wait for his second coming and the full institution and imposition of that world order on all the earth, he has left here on earth his church to be the sample of that future world.
In other words, the future world has broken into the present through the work of Jesus, and the power which establishes that future world is displayed by saving sinners. The cosmic realities of 1:10, the “plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him,” have collided with individual sinners. I am now a walking, talking, living, loving, worshipping, breathing miniature model of that future world. We are literally the living proof that God’s plan is right on track. And my life displays the glories of that coming world by acting like the new humanity which will one day rule it.
As we discussed last week, if I am to be that miniature model of the future world, then God must overcome my sin which ruined the first world. So we talked about sin in verses 1-3, “You were dead in your trespasses and sins 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—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and mind, and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.” The most fundamental description of sin is death. We were dead in sin, dying in every conceivable way precisely because we were dragged away by our passions and lusts and destined for the wrath of God.
Adam was the head of mankind and of creation, and he was the doorman who opened the door to death through his sin. Sin decimated the creation. To this day it lays in bondage to sin, death, and decay. And God is not satisfied to allow his creation to be ruined. Yet, to deal with death he must deal with sin, and to deal with sin he must deal with man. And this he has done in those precious words, “But God…”
And that is the heart of the message today: We who were once dead are now alive because of the compassion and love of our God. God has dealt decisively with the problem of sin and death in Jesus Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand. And God has decisively dealt with the problem of sin in us by making us alive together with him and raising us up with him and seating us with him in the heavenly places. We who were dead are now alive. And so, Paul expounds three truths in connection with our new life that we might “praise the glory of his grace.”
I. God Stands Between Us and Our Sin (vv4-5a)
The first of these truths relates to God’s gracious nature. Between us and our spiritual death stands God. God saves us, not because we deserve it, not because we were particularly important or attractive, not because we did anything or worked the system, and not even because we trusted him for salvation. God saves us because he is gracious and merciful.
Were we left to ourselves, we would be hopelessly lost. This was the whole point of verses 1-3. Dead people do not respond to stimuli. You can shout at a coffin all day and its occupant will not move at all. So also, those who are spiritually dead are not sensitive to God, don’t respond to his calling, do not desire his law. Sinners are so radically entrenched in sin, so deeply desiring to be like the world, so captured by Satan and his schemes, so enslaved to their lusts and desires, so tainted in their nature that there is no possibility of recovering themselves.
As we read earlier in Romans 8:7-8, “The mind set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law, indeed, it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.” It is impossible to do anything which would satisfy God on our own terms. Our minds are so set on the things of this world, so set on the fallen sinful human nature and its desires that Paul says we are “hostile to God.” We hate him. And that is evidenced by the fact that we do not submit to his law. The law comes in and forbids certain things and we are immediately drawn to them. The law comes in and commands certain things and we immediately flee from doing them. We do not submit to God’s law because we are hostile to God. And that hostility is so strong in the human heart that Paul even says that you cannot submit to God’s law. It isn’t that God forces you to disobey him, but that our antithesis is so strong against him that we would never want to in the first place. And therefore, we cannot please God. We cannot do what he commands. So he says, “Love me!” And we cross our impetuous arms and say, “No.” He says, “Believe my promises! Trust me!” And we call him a liar. He says, “Turn away from your sin,” and we say “I love my sin.”
As Jeremiah had said so long before to Israel: “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Then also you can do good who are accustomed to do evil” (Jer 13:23). Of course we know the long history of Israel. Despite their being rescued by the 10 great plagues and brought safely through the red sea, sustained in the desert by manna, given water from the rock, led into the promised land against all odds, what did they say? “Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?” (Num 14:3). And they’re just an illustration of what we all are like. How many times have we despised God’s grace? How many times have we believed we could do it on our own? How many times have we said, Yes, I can change my skin. I can change my spots. I can do good? And yet how many times have we simply gone back to Egypt, back to slavery to sin, back to yielding the members of our bodies up to be instruments of unrighteousness.
What then makes the difference? V4: “But God…” We are saved, not because we clean up our act, not because we try to do better, not because we managed to change our lifestyles. It is because God intervened.
And here is the crucial question: Why would he do something like that? And the answer is simple: Because he is full of mercy! When Moses asks his name, he says, “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex 3:14). When Moses asked the Lord, “Please, show me your glory!” He responded by saying, “Yahweh, Yahweh, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.” So also Deuteronomy 7:7, “It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharoah king of Egypt.”
And that is why Paul moves directly from our hopeless, fallen, sinful state and directly not into our responsibility to trust him but into God’s nature as a merciful God. “But God, being rich in mercy…”
God is rich in mercy. The storehouses of his mercy are boundless. He is so rich in mercy that he could spend and spend and spend for all eternity and never in the slightest bit deplete his stores of mercy. The warehouses are constantly full. They never empty but always flow out in abundant forgiveness and grace.
Mercy is simply kindness towards those in need. It is compassion. It is to look upon suffering and be moved in your heart to the degree that you act to alleviate the suffering. For God to be “rich in mercy” is simply a way of saying that God is so incredibly kind and concerned for sinners who are in need that he is willing to flow out in whatever degree is necessary to secure their good. God has looked upon us, in all our sin, in all our rebellion, in all our thanklessness, and is moved with compassion and so acts to intervene.
Many of us have a hard time believing this about God. We assume that God is a hard God, a ruthless God, a stingy God. Our mental image of the Father is one of Ebenezer Scrooge who begrudgingly donates a pittance to the poor because he simply wants to be left alone, all the while grumbling his own woes and careless to the hurts of others. But in reality, Psalm 103:13, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.” Ezekiel 16 describes a beautiful picture of the grace of God. He is pictured as a man who walks by a baby girl left for dead on the street in the blood of her birth and is so moved with compassion that he takes that baby girl in and raises her, makes her flourish like a flower, nourishes her, and clothes her. God looks upon sinners and smiles with favor because he is a God “rich in mercy.” And his mercy drives him to actions, which is why Paul continues to say…
God loves us with a great love. “because of the great love with which he has loved us.” God not only intervenes because he is merciful, he also intervenes because he loves us. The repetition of the phrase is a common Hebrew way of speaking and emphasizes his point. He doesn’t just have love for us; he has love with which he loved us. And that love is not the squishy sentimentality of our day, but the strong, powerful, radiant love of the Father as he acts in all the energy of his grace to do us good. And that is love.
Our culture would lie to you and say that you only love someone if you affirm them, regardless of what they do or want. Love is unconditional positive regard. Thus, if you don’t tell me I’m a superstar, that all my choices are golden, that I’m not a perfectly little angel, then you are not loving me. But that is not love. Instead, biblical love is the heart-level drive to do good to the beloved. Which means not only showering with blessing but also protecting and nourishing and where necessary rebuking and correcting. God’s love is not soft. God’s love is not simply God saying to us, “You’re great the way you are.” Rather, it is God mercifully saying to us, “You are not ok, and I will make it right. I will intervene. I will save.”
Why does he love us? This is a mystery of mysteries. Ephesians 1:4 has already said that same thing in a different way: He chose us. He loves us because he wants to. I can recall a friend who was dating his now wife. She was working through some logistical issue with rides to and from work, and so he offered to simply drive her. But he had to go way out of his way to do it. So she protested, “No, it doesn’t make sense for you to do it.” And he lovingly and gently responded, “It doesn’t have to. I do it because I want to do it.”
We also understand this in regard to our children. While we don’t really get to choose our kids, we do have to choose our kids every day. If anyone else treated you the way your kids treated you, you would disown them very quickly. But you daily choose your kids. Why? Because they’re yours. Because you love them. So also with God. He loves us with his great love, he is bound and determined to do us good precisely because he wants to, precisely because he loves us. And this is only amplified by the great contrast the Paul paints…
God loves us in spite of our spiritual deadness. “even when we were dead in our trespasses.” The richness of his mercy and the greatness of his love are magnified by their contrast to our sinfulness. It is not that God was merciful to us because he could find a way to somehow tolerate us. It was not that God loved us because we were good enough to be loveable. No! It is even when we were dead, even when our souls off-gassed the rot of spiritual death, even when we were enslaved to Satan and his world system, even when we were in love with our own lusts and desires, even when we were by nature children of wrath, he loved us.
And we need to tell ourselves this often: he loves us! He loves us! And that is amazing! Luke 7:47, Jesus teaches us a profound truth, “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.” That is why it is good to be confronted with your sin! Without seeing your sin, how can you ever love God, because without seeing your sin how can you ever see how much you’ve been forgiven of? Conviction is both the most uncomfortable and the most blessed experience in a Christian’s life. We should not be afraid to admit that we are sinners, even in specific ways, because it is in admitting that we are sinners that we see God’s overflowing and abundant grace.
II. God Rescues Us from Spiritual Death (vv5a-6)
If the first truth about our salvation relates to why God has saved us (because he is a gracious and loving God), then the second truth relates to how he has saved us. God is gracious and merciful, and therefore he acts to save us. God is the one who intervenes. He is the difference. But then God acts. He makes the difference happen. And how does he do that? There are three assertions: he makes us alive, he raises us up, and he seats us in the heavenly places.
Now, to properly understand these words, you need to see them in relationship to Jesus in Chapter 1. Ephesians 1:20 says that God’s power “worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead”—that’s resurrection—“and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places”—that’s both ascension and session. So there are essentially three movements here: Christ is raised to new life, Christ is ascended into the heavens, and Christ has been seated at the right hand of God in the spiritual realm.
It was through this work that Christ began his work to “unite all things in him.” Through his resurrection, Christ defeated sin and death and inaugurated a new humanity in himself. Through his ascension he enters the very presence of God to be our representative before God’s throne. Through his session he rules over all creation and puts all things under his feet.
Throughout the entire first chapter the little phrase “in Christ” has been repeated. All that is true of us is “in him,” because we are joined to him. Thus, blessing and love and holiness, and faith and all the blessings of the Christian life are in him. If we have been so united to him, then where he goes, we go. And so we follow him in these three movements. Just as Christ was raised from the dead and ascended into heaven and seated at the right hand of God, so also in him we have been “made alive together with him…raised up with him and seated…with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”
In other words, God is a merciful God who loves us in spite of our deadness, and so he acts to resurrect us to new spiritual life, to raise us up into his very presence in heaven, and to seat us as the rightful rulers of creation at his right hand and put all our enemies under our feet in Christ.
All of these things are true of us spiritually now, and we understand something of them in our Christian walk. And yet, we also understand that we have yet to experience the fullness of any of these until the end of the age. See how this works.
God has made us alive with Christ. We have been spiritually resurrected through Christ’s resurrection. Romans 6:4, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” He dies to our sin, and we die to our sin in him so that we might walk in newness of life. And so, we are alive!
What does that mean? It’s the opposite of being dead in verses 1-3. We were once dead in our sins, but now we are alive in Christ. We once lived a lifestyle of sin by walking in it, but now we live a lifestyle dominated by Christ and his commandments. We once took our cues from the world, but now we take our cues from the Bible. We once were influenced by the satanically shaped cultural atmosphere and under the dominion of Satan, but now we “resist the devil” and he flees from us (James 4:7). We once lived by the standards of what we want, what we desired, what we lusted after, but now we live according to the standards of what is right and pleasing to God, even if it means putting our desires to death. We once had a nature that was stained with the crimson blot of sin, but now we are a “new creation in Christ Jesus—the old is gone, the new has come” (2 Cor 5:17). We were destined for wrath, like the rest of mankind, but now we are destined for glory and blessedness and joy. We are alive.
Now, we don’t yet possess the fullness of our resurrection. Make no mistake, we are completely totally and fully alive! But we only possess and experience the spiritual dimension of that new life (Remember 1:3, “all spiritual blessings”). We still experience physical death. We are still perishable, mortal. The fullness of our resurrection is still coming. 1 Corinthians 15:50ff. READ.
God has raised us up with Christ. I believe this refers to being ascended with Christ—that when Christ ascended into the presence of his father in the clouds, we went with him, because we were united to him. Now, that does not mean that we are physically ascended with Christ, nor that we are physically in the presence of God in heaven. But it does mean that we are spiritually there, and therefore share in his spiritual position.
Colossians 3:1-3 states this very well: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Christ has been raised from the dead, raised into the heavens, and seated at God’s right hand; and you are right there with him. Your life is hidden with Christ. You have been tucked in the fold of his cloak and travel with him like our cell phones travel with us.
What’s the significance? It is multiform, but it is essentially this—your position has gone from the depths to the heights. You were once far away from God. Now you are near to him, even in heaven itself. You were once in the grave, but now you are raised up to heaven itself. Once you were, as it were, under the feet of Satan. Now, Satan, as it were, in Christ is under your feet, even as Paul says, Romans 16:20, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” You live in heaven! Your life is above the plane of earthly existence. You have been raised up so that your life is hidden with Christ in God! Thus all our spiritual energies flow from heaven into our lives through the presence of Christ in us by the Holy Spirit, even as we are present in heaven with him before the Father.
God has seated us with Christ. As Christ is now the rightful ruler of the universe, we rule with him. He is seated at the right hand of the father and subdues all his enemies under his feet. So also, in him, we have been seated at the right hand of the Father and his, in him, subdues all our enemies under our feet as well. And so, the heavenly powers to which we were once subject, the “prince of the power of the air” who was once “working” in us as the sons of disobedience, are subject to us! Christ is enthroned above them and rules them and is subduing them. His seat is “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (1:21).
Now, again, you can take this too far. This is true in the present age spiritually and positionally but not actually. We are spiritually and positionally seated above Satan, which means that we no longer have to obey him, we are no longer subject to his death-dealing powers, we are no longer enslaved to the world system he fosters. But we are not actually seated above Satan and so we shouldn’t go around yelling at demons or blowing shofars or “taking back this world.” We still live in the world that “lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19). Satan still assaults us and tempts us and attempts to destroy us. We’re still in a war. That’s where Chapter 6 will go. We are in a wrestling contest, a spiritual war. But that war is not one in which we are to go and drive the demons out of the atmosphere or to take back the kingdom of Satan through political action. Rather, it is a war to be “found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ” (Phil 3:9). It is a spiritual war, requiring spiritual powers and spiritual armor to accomplish spiritual effects in our spiritual lives and in the church.
Thus God stands in-between us and our sin. God acts to rescue us from our spiritual death. But all of this is flowing toward a great purpose, which is expressed in verse seven.
III. God Desires to Display His Kindness to Us (v7)
Why did he do all this? “…so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” And here you have God’s purposes in salvation, and it brings us right back to the heart of Chapter 1 and the concept of grace.
Why does God do what he does? What motivates him? Surely there are many motives that God has. We’ve seen several of them. He saves us because he is motivated to alleviate human suffering. He saves us because he loves us. He saves us in order to exalt his Son. He saves us to defeat Satan. He saves us to reunite the universe in Christ. He saves us to remove the blot of sin from his creation. But underneath all of these motivations, there is one, driving, central motivation of God: his own glory. God chooses us and predestines us so that we can praise him. Jesus dies and forgives us and lavishes us with grace and reveals his mystery to us and makes us an inheritance so that we would praise him. He sends his gospel to us and instills faith and repentance and seals us with the Holy Spirit so that we would praise him. The greatest aim of God in everything is his own glory.
Isaiah 42:8, “I am the Lord; that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to carved idols.” Isaiah 43:21 says that God saves a people who he forms for himself “that they might declare my praise.” Isaiah 48:11, speaking of his saving acts for Israel, “For my own sake, for my own sake I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.” Ezekiel 20:9, “But I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations among whom they lived, in whose sight I made myself known to them in bringing them out of the land of Egypt.” 2 Corinthians 4:15 says that Paul preaches the gospel “so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.” Phil 1:11 says that you are sanctified so as to be “filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.” 2 Thessalonians 1:10 says that Christ will return in order to be “glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed.” 1 Timothy 1:16 says that Paul “received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life.” In fact, all of creation funnels into this great end, exemplified in the praises of his saints in Revelation 5:12, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”
And this is what Paul expressed in Ephesians 1:6—He saves us “to the praise of his glorious grace.” That is why I had said “God desires to magnify his own name in the praises of his saints through the renewal of the universe.” This is the great end of God.
So, when it comes to expressing what God has done in giving us new spiritual life and raising us to the heights of heaven and seating us with Christ at his right hand, it all funnels into the purpose of verse 7. He did all this “that he might show…” that he might “display.” That he might “demonstrate.” He did it all to the praise of his glorious grace. In order to accomplish that purpose, he had to save a spiritual people and make them fit to love his glory and praise his glory and enjoy his glory. God saves us to show us something about himself. Namely, the immeasurable riches of his kindness.
That is something which every Christian knows something of. How can I describe “immeasurable riches”? How can I describe the indescribable to you? What does that mean!? I think that it will take an eternity to understand, which is why Paul says it happens “in the coming ages”—i.e., all future time; not only this present evil age, but also in the next, and the next, and the next, and so on forever.
Conclusion
Drawing to a close, we must return to one phrase which I intentionally skipped: v5, “By grace you have been saved.” God makes the difference. We were once dead, but now we are alive in Christ. Why? “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”
All of it is grace. Which is what the rest of the paragraph is about, and which is one of the most difficult things for human beings to grasp. Grace. And that will be the subject of our next time together.