Ephesians 2:1-10

All right, welcome back to the listeners commentary on Paul's letter to the Ephesians in this session. We're going to be looking at Ephesians chapter 2 verses 1 through 10. And this is one of the most well-known and well-loved passages in the entire book of Ephesians. It's a section of Ephesians that if you've ever struggled with, say, the performance syndrome, where you feel like you're just not measuring up or you've got to do more or you've got to be good enough, this text and the theology of this text can speak into that. If you've ever wanted to know why we, God's people, exist for the praise of His glorious grace, as Paul said in 13 through 14, this text tells us what that grace did for us and how it's played out in our life. This is a really central text, not only for the big message of the letter to Ephesians, but a central text for all of Christian understanding, Christian self understanding, and as a result of that Christian living. So this is a really, really important text for us to explore together in this session. And Ephesians 2 1 through 10 flows directly out of the preceding context in our last session. We looked at Paul's prayer for the Ephesians and by extension for us. And Paul ended that prayer by asking God that they might know that they're passing greatness of His power that's for those who believe. And then Paul went on to describe that power and how that power raised Jesus from the dead and seated Him at God's right hand. Well, here in Ephesians 2 1 through 10, Paul says, "Here's how you experience that power." And he talks about us experiencing a resurrection and us being seated with Christ, and so that what's true of Christ is also true of us. And so this text is directly connected to the end of chapter 1, and sometimes the chapter divisions in the Bible just aren't that helpful because they break up the flow of thought. And here's one of those places where if you just stop at the end of chapter 1, and then all of a sudden you think there's a hard line or a hard break between that in chapter 2, you miss the connection, but it's directly connected by saying that just as Christ was raised from the dead, so we've been raised up. Just as Christ was seated in the heavenly places, so in Him we've been seated in the heavenly places with Him. And so it directly applies the power of God displayed in Jesus to the Christian experience. A couple of other preliminary observations from this text versus this that there are really two main chunks to this section versus one through 7 is one big sentence with one main verb in Greek. And so that's one chunk, one through 7, and it starts by addressing the problem in verses 1 through 3, 1 through 4, and then in verse 5 you get the main verb and this shift then to the solution, what God did about the problem. And so this is a problem solution text in verses 1 through 7, and then the second main chunk is verses 8 through 10, which restates the point and draws out the key implications of what that means for us based on what God did for us. Another preliminary observation is just note carefully in verses 1 and 2 and then verse 3 how they sort of stand in comparison. It says and you in verses verse 1 talking about and you the original readers and possibly again implicitly the Gentiles, probably implicitly the Gentiles, it's Paul's not making that explicit contrast here, I'll do that later, but probably implicitly the Gentiles, you the original readers and implicitly the Gentiles and then verse 3, we also notice that comparison. You, what's true of you, and we also the comparison. And again, that certainly includes Paul and his ministry team and again implicitly likely meaning we Jews. We who as he said and in verses 3 through 14, we who were first to hope in Christ, we talked about that a couple sessions back. And so they're probably implicitly here, it even seems more clear that there's this implicit comparison between you, original readers and Gentiles, and we also Paul and his team and likely Jews. And then one other preliminary observation about this text, and that is pay attention to the movement of the passage. It says this from dead in sins and being children of wrath, i.e. the lowest of the low where you're people under wrath and deserving wrath to raised up with Christ and seated with him in the heavenly places to the highest of the highest. So that movement of the text is so important for us to pay attention to from being at the very bottom of the spectrum dead in sins, children of wrath to raised up with Christ. Paul is heading toward the point ultimately explicitly in the very next paragraph where that Jews and Gentiles are all one body, but first he shows that all of us together were both rescued from the same predicament, and we were rescued in the same way, according to God's mercy, grace and love, and what he did for us in Jesus. And so the reason we can have unity in one body is because as so many people have noted, the ground is leveled at the foot of the cross, all of us, regardless of our background, were rescued the exact same way. All right, let's jump in and look at then some of the details of the passage. Let me read to you verses one and two, and it says this, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the heir of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Notice how it begins and you directly addressing the original readers who are predominantly Gentiles, and that's why I say it's likely this is implicitly talking specifically about Gentiles, particularly with the comparison in verse three when it says, we also, we too, had the same problem, and so I think and you, you Ephesians, you original readers, you Gentiles, you were dead in your trespasses and sins, and so that the pre-Christian experience could be thought of as a living death. Yes, you walked around physically, yes, you looked alive, but you were, you were spiritually dead, you were trending towards death, right? Like all your momentum was heading towards death, not just physical death, but ultimate and final death that the pre-Christian experience is a state of living death. You were dead in your trespasses and sins, just two words that have a lot of overlap, trespasses tends to refer to known violations of right and wrong, like where you actually crossed a boundary, you stepped out of bounds, there was a clear line, sins is more general in the sense of just general wrongdoing, just missing the mark, just, you know, so trespasses and sins, two words that just refer to our wrongdoing that put us in this state of death. So you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked, your former way of life prior to coming to Christ in your own personal BC before Christ, you formerly walked in trespasses and sins, walked is the imagery of when about your life, the way you carried out your life, it was just carried out in trespasses and sins, in wrongdoing. And so in which you formerly walked and then he has three phrases that all seem to kind of overlap and build upon one another, a very Jewish way of writing actually when we are looking at Jewish poetry, say the Psalms, we talk about parallelisms where you know, you use two lines that say something very similar or overlap and kind of fill out the whole thought. Well that's almost what we have here where we have three phrases that very much kind of overlap and are just a way of talking about the same reality. So in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, phrase one, according to the prince of the power of the air, phrase two, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, phrase three and those phrases are all kind of overlapping and pointing towards the same reality. So according to the course of this world, what does that refer to? Well, literally the word course is I own in Greek, the I own of this world. And that word I own literally means age, oftentimes that's the way it's translated as age, so it could refer to an age or a very long period of time. There is some evidence in the ancient world that I own was used to refer to a personal I own, some sort of idea of like a spiritual force or a spiritual power, sort of like the English equivalent would roughly be like the ruler of the age, right, like almost a personification of the spirit of the age. And there is this idea in Greek thought and Roman thought of like this I own, the spirit of the age. And that's likely what Paul means here is some sort of vague personal spiritual power who's over the present world order. He's in charge. And that is pretty clear what Paul has in mind based on the following phrase that makes it clear. And again is really just amplifying what he just said where he says, according to the prince of the power of the air. Now we're getting more clear. Now we're getting a better idea that he's talking about some sort of spiritual power that is at work in this world, the prince of the power of the air. Again, an interesting phrase. And though he doesn't use the word the devil or Satan, that seems to be who Paul is referring to here is the Satan or the devil, right? And there's no exact parallel to this very phrase in the New Testament, ruler of the kingdom of the air, ruler of the domain of the air. But that's the idea, domain of the air. When he says the power of the air, it's more like the domain of the air, the kingdom of the air, sort of like the sphere of the air. And the air in, again, kind of ancient world thinking was thought to be inhabited filled with like various spiritual powers and spiritual forces. And remember in Ephesus and the surrounding area, this was a stronghold for that idea and thus a stronghold for ancient magic where the goal was to try to control all those spiritual forces that inhabited the air in some way. So you had intentions and formulas, right? Well, this is the prince of all of that. This is the ruler of all of that. And so in greater biblical theology, we're talking about the devil or the Satan, Satan himself. And he Paul goes on to kind of describe him further in the third phrase where he says of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. And so the spirit that is now at play, at work, in mankind, apart from God and outside of Christ, the this spirit, i.e. the prince of the power of the air, i.e. the spirit of the age, the eye on the Satan who stands behind all of this. He's at work in all of this. He's at work in the sons of disobedience and just pay attention to that phrase, sons of disobedience because it's going to stand in parallel to what Paul says in verse three, when he talks about children of wrath, sons of disobedience, children of wrath, two ways of just describing the categories into which mankind fits. So sons of disobedience doesn't just refer to men or males. It refers to mankind as marked by their disobedience to God. We'll talk about children of wrath in just a second, all right? So the Satan himself is now at work in the fact that people everywhere are disobeying God. And so you, you were, that's how you live. That's how you carried out your life and that was a living death. You were dead in your trespasses and sins. That's important because remember, he's tying this to what God did in Jesus and the power that's available for us who believe that power, as you'll say very shortly, has to do with reversing our state of deadness, all right? Now, he goes on in verse three and says among them we too. And that's that comparison between you were dead and we too also are we also all formally lived. And so I think the comparison here, even though it's implicit and not explicit, even though it's not 100% clear, in view of the very next paragraph where there is an explicit contrast between Jews and Gentiles and all of that in one body. I think here he implicitly is really comparing you Gentiles and verses one and two and we Jews in verse three. And that's important for understanding what he's saying here. So among them, he says we too all formally lived in the lust of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and the mind. And we were by nature, children of wrath, even as the rest. Now, let's just walk down through a hit a few of those details. We too, we Jews, Paul his team at the very least, likely we Jews in contrast with you Gentiles or in comparison there. So we too all formally lived in the lust of our flesh. And so even for those who have the scriptures like Paul and his team and even for those Jews who were the first to hope in Christ, they knew better, they knew the law, but they still formally lived in the lust of our flesh. And this is consistent in Paul's theology that the law, the Old Testament law, which was a gift from God to his people and was such a good thing that could be celebrated in the Psalms and elsewhere as a gift. But the law couldn't change the fallen humanists of mankind and fallen humanists have even to Jews as God's people. And so they rarely indulged their fleshly desires, their sinful desires as well. And so we too also formerly lived in the lust of our flesh. We carried out the lust of our flesh as well. We were dominated by sinful desires and fleshly desires, he says, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind. And so these fallen human ambitions and fallen human desires both in the flesh. And though it's not limited purely to the body, it has more bodily overtones here because of its contrast with the mind. So indulging the desires of the flesh, just fleshly desires, bodily desires, and of the mind ambitions and thoughts, right? And all of that more internal. So we indulged those things. And he says, and we were by nature, children of wrath, even as the rest. I think it's important to hear the implicit contrast with Jews here to understand really what he's saying. We too were by nature, children of wrath. Like we Jews who were supposedly God's people, we were no better off than Eugeniles. We were heading in the same direction. We were on the same path as Eugeniles. We were children of wrath. Now, when you hear the phrase children of wrath, don't think small kids, okay? It's very much like the phrase children of Israel. Does children of Israel refer to only small kids? No, it refers to the people of Israel, it's just a way of referring to a category of people. So, sons of disobedience and verse two refers to human beings who disobey God. And here children of wrath refers to we, we also appall his team and the Jews outside of Christ, we too were children of wrath. We too were objects of God's wrath. We were destined for God's wrath. That's the idea of that phrase we were by nature, children of wrath. And when he says by nature, there's a couple of different ways to understand the word by nature. The contrast is implicit here or the comparison with Jews and Gentiles is implicit. So, don't know how much weight you want to make that hold. I would love to just sit down with Paul and ask him, but could we be by Jewish nature, that even as Jews, we thought we were so much better, we act so much better. And yet, even our Jewish nature still put us under wrath because we were still sinners, could be that. Or it could just be our general sinful nature. And that tends to be the way I've always read this here because I don't want to put too much weight on the implicit comparison. But so, we were by nature, by our sinful nature, by the nature that we acquired as sinners, we were destined for wrath. I think that's the way we should understand that Bauer-Arton King Rich, a Greek dictionary, uses this verse as an example of the meaning "natural condition" for the Greek word translated in nature here. That's the word "fusus" in Greek. And that dictionary says the way we should understand the word here is just in our natural condition. In our natural condition, as once born people, outside of Christ, wrath was our destiny, even as the rest, Paul says, meaning rest of what? Well, the rest of mankind. We Jews were, we were just as much children of wrath as the rest of mankind seems to be the idea he's getting at here. But he says in verse 4, God solved that. So don't miss the contrast here in verse 4 where he says, but God, but God. So, verses 1 through 3 is the problem. Verses 4 through 7 tells us how God solved that problem. But God did something about this. And that's really important. It wasn't, but here's how you can get out of it. Here's what you can do. It's here's what God did. So, but God, being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us. Notice all of those words to pile up God's mercy, compassion, kindness, but God motivated by mercy. Notice he's rich in mercy. That's who God is. Rich doesn't just have a little bit of it. It's like he's rich in it. He's got a treasure chest of mercy. So, God is rich in mercy because of not just a little bit of love, his great love with which he loved us. That he actively showed us his love. He showed us his mercy and his love. So, but God being rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us. Man, we don't have time to just sit there. But in your own reading of this text, I would encourage you just to sit with that. Ponder that. Imagine that. Feel that. That this God is one who is full of mercy. This God is one who is great in love and he has actually displayed that great love and mercy for you and just sit with that. So, God being rich in mercy because of his great love with which she loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions. Notice that he didn't wait till we got our act together. He didn't wait till we had our life all cleaned up. Very similar to what Jesus says in Luke 15 in the story of the prodigal son where the father runs out to the the wayward son and welcomes him back, not when he had his act together, but he was dead Jesus says in there. And now he's been made alive again. And that's exactly what God did for us. He even when we were dead in our transgressions, so in our state of spiritual deadness, in our living death, God intervened. And what did God do? Well, notice the connection with the end of chapter one, he made us alive together with Christ. So there we were dead in our transgressions, dead in our trespasses and sins, and he made us alive. All of us who are in Christ have been brought from death to life. We've experienced the power of Jesus' resurrection already. Yes, there's more to come, but we've already experienced it going from a state of spiritual death to spiritual aliveness. This reminds us that there's really two kinds of people on planet earth. There are the dead people and there are the alive people and the ones who are alive are those who are in Christ. So he made us alive together with Christ. In him, we've experienced the power of resurrection. And then Paul can't help himself. He's going to explain and explore God's grace more fully later in the passage, but he can't help himself. This is just such an amazing thing that God did. He just immediately says, by grace, you've been saved. And it's parenthetical here, but it's the fact that God would take dead in sin sinners and make them alive and give them life in Christ. It's such a testament to God's grace that Paul just has to get it out of the system here. By grace, you have been saved. It's by God's work, by God's favor, by God's kindness that you have been rescued. That's the idea of being saved. You've been rescued from your state of spiritual death. When you hear the word saved here, don't immediately jump to, you're going to go to heaven when you die. That very well is true if you're in Christ. Think of being rescued from your state of spiritual death. You've been brought back to life. Now, and you have life right now, a kind of life you didn't have before you were in Christ. So he made us alive to get with Christ and verse six and raised us up with him. And so, whereas Christ was resurrected, we've been resurrected. We've been raised up again. Notice the connection with him, with Christ, with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places. Wait, hold on. I feel like I'm sitting right here in my room recording this. No, you're also seated in the heavenly places with Christ. Just as Christ was exalted above all the heavens at the end of chapter one. Well, you've been seated with him. You're in Christ. You share in his exaltation. You share in his glory and his glorification. And so, what's true of Christ is true of you if you're in Christ. You're alive. You're resurrected. You're exalted with him in the heavenly places. So that here's the goal of it, verse seven. So that in the ages to come, in the coming age, when God makes all things new and everything, right? Like in the ages to come, both in the here now and in the great glorious new creation, in the ages to come, he might show the word show there is display, demonstrate. He might display the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ. So that those who are in Christ, we, God's people in Christ, we the church are the display of God's surpassing riches of his grace and kindness towards us. We are exhibit a of how gracious and kindhearted God is. That's what it means to be in Christ. And just before we move on to verse eight, look down through verses four through seven. You have mercy. You have love. You have grace. You have grace again. You have kindness. All these words stacked on top of each other, verses four through seven, to highlight. God solved our desperate predicament because he is so merciful, loving, gracious and kind. That's who God is. That's who Paul wants to make sure we see when we realize what God did for us. We see the greatness of his grace and kindness. And the more we understand that the greater we will be a display of that grace and his kindness, God rescued us. God rescued us from our desperate predicament so that he could display the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. Well, with that then, Paul turns and verses eight through ten to really draw out some implications of that and to talk about that grace and what are the implications of that grace. So he says in verse eight, "For by grace you've been saved." And so notice four explaining what he just said that we are the display of the surpassing riches of his grace. Why? Well, because by grace you've been saved. So for by grace you've been saved through faith and that not of yourselves, it's the gift of God not as a result of works so that no one should boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand so that we should walk in them. All right. So he says by grace you have been saved, grace is basically the idea of favor. It's the idea of active kindness. It's this benevolent spirit that makes you want to do good for somebody. So we often dub out like a doctrine of grace and that can turn it into something so mechanical. It's always the expression of a person. It's personal. This is a characteristic of God. He is somebody who is gracious. He looks on us with favor and kindness. That's the idea. So for by grace you have been saved. Notice that it's a present reality. You're in a state of having been saved right now. Present accomplished facts. So you have been saved through faith. So grace is what God has done. What motivated God to provide this rescue, this salvation for us. And it's through faith. That is how we respond to it. We simply open up our hands and receive it. We simply reach out our hand take hold of God's hand and we are raised up with Christ. He raises us up simply by faith, by trusting in Jesus, by trusting in who he is. That's the idea. Faith is this idea of trusting in Christ, putting our confidence in him. So for by grace you've been saved through faith. And it's not of yourself. It's the gift of God. Just to clarify that last phrase when he says it's not of yourself. Well, what's not of yourself? What's the gift of God? Well, grammatically there is no word that the gift of God literally refers back to in the text. It seems to refer to the whole complex of things. This whole idea of being saved. That salvation itself, this whole thing that we are now rescued from our dead in sinness, right? Like that is a gift of God. So it's not as some have mistakenly thought that faith is the gift of God here. Grammatically that's impossible in the Greek because of the nature of the words and they have to agree and gender and all this and Greek. And so it's not the gift of faith. It's not the gift of God. There's literally no word that it refers back to grammatically. It seems refer to the whole complex of the idea. So salvation itself, this whole thing is a gift from God. God has given this to you surely as a gift. And how do you how do you get a gift? Well, you receive it. You receive it. And that's how you receive salvation. That's how you receive this gift of God in Christ. That's being raised up with him. That's being made alive with him. That's being given new life and being seated with him. How do you receive that? You just you just receive it like a gift and say thank you. It's not a result. He says in verse 9 of works. So it's not something we earned, right? It's it's a present, not a paycheck is the idea. So you get paid for your work. That's not a gift. So it's not a result of works. It's not a paycheck for a job well done. So it's not a result of works so that no one should boast. So we have nothing to boast about. We can't be arrogant. We can't have a superiority complex, right? We can't be egotistical. I'm better than you because you know, I'm raised up with Christ and I'm alive in him. It's purely a gift. We could never have done this ourselves. God just gave it to us. So it's a gift and one of the implications of it being a gift is no more boasting, no more boasting, no superiority complex humility and that humility is necessary for unity. As Paul says explicitly in Philippians chapter 2, implicitly in where he's going where he talks about Jews and Gentiles need to learn to live together as one new humanity. That'll be very shortly. The very next paragraph here is going to talk about that. Well, the fact that it's a gift makes that possible. So it's a gift and there shouldn't be any boasting, any arrogance, any pride because we've been given this gift because of what God did for us in Christ. Then verse 10 draws out the other implication for we are His workmanship. The very fact that we have this new life, the very fact that we're alive in Christ, that's His work, not our work. We're a product of His creative genius and His creative power. It's His work that did this, not our work. We are His workmanship created in Christ for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. So this isn't a result of works. The ultimate outcome will be works. We don't work to get saved. We work because we are saved. It's just like, I want to honor God. I want to show Him my gratitude. It's just grateful love. We believe that God is right and He knows what He's talking about. So we're so grateful to be rescued from our predicament. But now, we begin to take God seriously. We listen to Jesus and we begin to do what's right. So we are His workmanship, His creation created in Christ Jesus for good works as the outcome of this gift that God gave us, which these good works God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. God always intended way back beforehand as He planned what He was going to do in Jesus and planned His rescue plan. Knowing what a creating human beings was going to cost, God planned ahead of time what would be involved. And part of that would be a people for His name, through whom He could display His glory. And so God prepared for us to reflect His wisdom, grace, goodness, and power back into the world. That's what God prepared. And so when we work the works of God in the world, we're living out our divine calling that God prepared us for in the very beginning. Man, such a beautiful text with so many important applications for us. Let me just draw out three really important implications. One is the real awfulness and the real domination of sin. When sin can be described as a living death, when sin can be described as being controlled by the spirit of the power of the air, when sin could be described as putting us on a path towards wrath and condemnation. That's we have to take the real awfulness and domination of sin seriously. It is deep, it is powerful, it is overwhelming, and it is something that we, as human beings, cannot solve on our own. We can't just throw money at it and education at it, and politics at it and policy at it and also boom, fix humankind's problem. There's a deeper problem and it requires a deeper solution. The other implication I would draw out of this is just the greatness of God's love, mercy and grace. And I highlighted that as we went through the commentary on this section is just all those words stacked on top of each other to highlight this is who God is. Whatever your picture of God may be, let it be shaped by these words. Let it be shaped by this description of God who's rich and mercy, rich and grace, great in love, full of kindness. That's who God is. So reflect on that, sit on that, absorb that, and then the last implication I would draw out of here is just the possibility of Christian transformation. You were dead in your trespassing sin, but God made you alive. You now have new life, like the new ability to be who you were meant to be. One of my common analogies for it in this text is like if you take a plant, a potted plant and you rip it out of the soil, that plant still looks alive, it still has flowers on it, it still has green leaves on it, but it is trending towards death. And if something doesn't happen soon, that plant is going to die. Well likewise, the same is true with those in Christ, that outside of Christ, we're like a plant ripped out of the soil, but when we're brought into Christ, we're repotted, we're replanted. And now we have life again, we can begin to produce the fruit for which we were designed and intended in the very beginning. So may you live out this text, may you absorb it until it shapes the way you view your life.