Ephesians 2:1-3
Date: October 13th, 2024
Speaker: Sam Crites
Scripture: Ephesians 2:1-3
Exegetical Outline
MIT: Every Christian used to be dead in sin, following the world, enslaved to their nature, and objects of God’s wrath.
2:1-2: Every Christian was at one time spiritually dead because they were sinners.
2:1: Ever Christian used to be dead.
2:2: Every Christian used to belong to the world.
2:2a: In the deadness of sin, they followed the course of the world into death.
2:2b: In the deadness of sin, they followed the prince of the power of the air in a spirit of disobedience.
2:3: Like the rest of mankind, we lived out our evil desires and were objects of God’s wrath.
2:3a: We all used to be slaves to our flesh, carrying out evil desires and thoughts.
2:3b: We all used to be children of God’s wrath, along with the rest of mankind.
Homiletical Outline
MIS: To understand the power of God to save, we must understand the power of death to enslave.
We walk in sin, because we are dead.
We were swept up in the current of the world.
We were enslaved by our own sinful desires.
We were children of God’s wrath.
Introduction:
In August of 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, Texas. A woman named Cathy Pham and her one year old son Aiden were trapped in their Meyerland home as the flood waters rose. Eventually, they kept moving up floors of their two story home until they were eventually sheltering on the roof as the flood waters continued to rise. The authorities could not reach them and they were beginning to lose hope.
In 2005, a similar hurricane hit Louisiana. It caused massive flooding in New Orleans and almost 1,500 people lost their lives. Out of that tragedy, an organization was born, “the Cajun Navy.” The Cajun Navy is a group of boat owners in Louisiana that register their watercrafts with FEMA to help rescue people in a hurricane. They saw the unpreparedness of Katrina and vowed to never let that happen again.
When Cathy Pham was clinging to her roof, in the middle of a hurricane, holding her one-year son, and she was told that help was not coming, a normal citizen, in a boat from Louisiana, a member of the Cajun Navy, rescued her off that roof. He saved her and her son.
How thankful do you think Cathy Pham was to see that Cajun? After feeling the wind whip the rain against her face like sandpaper, after hearing the news that help was not coming, after watching the waters rise over the edge of the roof that was her last place of refuge, what do you think it meant to her to see that boat come to her rescue? I bet she was never so thankful to see a redneck in her life. It was a deep understanding of her helplessness that gave her the ability to be thankful.
This is what we are going to see in Ephesians 2 this morning. We are going to contemplate the power of death in our lives prior to God’s intervention, so that we can appreciate the rescue that came to us in Christ. Let’s read Ephesians 2:1-3:
Ephesians 2:1-3
2 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 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— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
The main idea of the sermon this morning is this: to understand the power of God to save, we must understand the power of death to enslave. The purpose of Paul’s teaching on death is to illuminate the power of God to give life. Look back at Ephesians 1:16-19:
Ephesians 1:16-19
16 I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, 17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 18 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe
Two weeks ago, we saw that Paul prayed that the Ephesians would know three things: the hope to which God has called them, the great wealth of the inheritance he has given them in Christ, and the immeasurable power that he has exercised as he has gone to work on their behalf.
This power is the same power that brought Jesus out of the grave and elevated him above all authorities in heaven and on earth. This power is the same power that brought the Church into existence as the body of Christ. This power is the same power that gives life to those that are dead.
What Paul is teaching us in Ephesians 2:1-3 follows on and continues from what he was praying at the end of Chapter 1. He wants us to know the power of God. As Christians, to understand the power of God that is presently at work in our life, we must understand the power of death that he freed us from. So this week, we will think about the power of sin, namely the death that afflicts all of mankind, so that next week we can understand the power of life that God has exercised in Christ.
We will see four things about the power of death from Ephesians 2:1-3. First, all Christians used to walk in sin because they were dead. Romans 6:23 says the wages of sin is death, and all men were born into sin because of their father Adam. Romans 5:12 says:
Romans 5:12
12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned
One thing that is common to all Christians is that all Christians, at one point, were dead, and in their death, they walked in sin.
The second thing that we will see about the power of death is that all Christians were swept along by the deadly current of the world. We were not just dead spiritually, we grew up in a world of death. The course of this world flows toward death. All human culture is void of life because it has abandoned the author of life. Not only that, the Enemy is purposefully leading the world in that direction. Satan’s original rebellion against God is the same spirit of rebellion that is in the hearts of all men. They don’t want God, they are happy in their rebellion, and they are flowing, like a river cascading over a cliff, to inevitable and certain destruction. And we were caught in that current, unable to break free from the world.
The third thing that we will see about the power of death is that were enslaved to our own sinful desires. Not only were we by nature dead and trapped in the current of the world that was also flowing towards ultimate death, our own evil desires trapped us in sin. Because our nature was dead, we could only want the things of death. The striking thing about what Paul is teaching us is that our desperate situation was not a concern to us. We loved our deadness and sin. We want to be trapped in the current of the world and we wanted to be following the rebellious spirit of the Enemy. We loved our sin and darkness and nothing was going to convince us that we needed life. Our nature was death and all we desired was death. This was the power death held in your life, it was a prison of your own making as it turned your wants and desires against you to only want what would kill you and do you harm, not the one person that could give you life.
And finally, the fourth and final thing we will learn about death is that the power of death made us objects of God’s wrath. Ultimately, sin does not kill us, the wrath and judgment of God kills us. Sin would not be a problem if God was not angry about it. He did not make us this way. We were not meant to be enslaved by our nature, and our world, and our very own wills. Death’s conquest of God’s creation and our willingness to participate in that death aggravated and stirred up the righteous condemnation of God. Before the power of God entered our lives, we were in mortal danger of spending eternity separated from God in a place of eternal and deserved punishment because of our rebellion.
This is the state of man before God’s intervention. This is the power that ruled our lives prior to the power of life God exercised in Christ. It is this blight on God’s creation, death, that allows us to understand his love by contrast. This will not be a fun sermon, but it has a purpose. If we are going to understand the power of God to save us and give us life, we must first understand the power of sin to steal, kill, and destroy.
We walk in sin, because we are dead.
Let’s read Ephesians 2:1-3 one more time and consider where we were prior to God’s power intervening in our lives.
Ephesians 2:1-3
2 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 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— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
The first thing we must see about the power of death in our lives is that our deadness caused us to sin. This is the morbid common denominator for all Christians. Prior to Christ, we were as dead as dead could be.
This was not how God originally created us. Listen to how God created man in Genesis 1:26-31.
Genesis 1:26-31
26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Everything that God created during the six days of creation was declared to be very good, meaning, it was not marred or afflicted by anything at all. There was no sin in the world. We were not dead, we were both physically and spiritually alive prior to the fall. The death of Adam and Eve does not come until Genesis 3.
In Genesis 2, God placed the man in the Garden and he gave him one rule. In Genesis 2:16, this is what God said:
Genesis 2:16-17
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
And eat of the tree, they did. In the very next chapter, Adam and Eve are deceived by the Great Deceiver. They eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and in that moment, they die.
As their decedents, we are all born into that death. As we have already seen in Romans 5, sin entered “the world through the one man, Adam, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned… (Romans 5:12). This nature of death that we are born into is inherited from our Father Adam because Adam’s sin was our sin. In him, we have all sinned and so we all are born into the same consequence of Adam’s fall.
So our nature that we have inherited is spiritual death, and in our deadness, Paul says we do two things. We walk in trespasses and sins. So, do we die because we sin or do we sin because we are dead? The death we have inherited, leads to a walking in death. Nature precedes desires and choices. Because we are dead, we will walk in trespasses and sins.
But what of these trespasses and sin? Why does Paul say two things? Are they the same or are they different. The two nouns are trespasses, paraptoma, and sin, hamartia. Paraptoma means to purposefully cross a line. There is a rule or standard that has been set and we purposefully step outside of that line. Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the tree, but they chose to do it anyway.
On the other hand, Harmartia, the word for sin, means to miss the mark. A target or goal has been set, and we have failed to live up to it. We didn’t purposefully miss the mark, but we were deficient of what was required to measure up to God’s standard. Romans 3:23 says:
Romans 3:23
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
The standard has been set, perfection was what was required and we have all missed it.
Paul is being comprehensive in his explanation. In death, we have both purposefully transgressed God’s clear rules and regulations, and we have passively fallen short of God’s standard for excellence, the perfection that is required to have a relationship with him.
The first thing that we need to understand about the power of death in our lives is that our nature of death makes us want to rebel against God and makes us deficient of the holiness that is required to be in relationship with him.
All Christians were swept along by the death of the world.
The second thing that we learn about the power of death in our livers was that every Christian was not only a factory of trespasses and sin, but they were also swept along by the current of death in the world. Look at the second half of verse 2:
Ephesians 2:2
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
Not only were we walking in death on our own, but we were walking in death with everyone around us. We were literally caught in the current of the world that rushes away from God toward total and certain destruction.
Paul explains this one current of the world that flows on two different planes of existence. First, he explains the cultural plane of existence. He says that we are following the course of this world. Scripture teaches that the world is absolutely opposed to God. 1 John 2:15 says that if you love the world, you cannot love God. The world and God are at odds with one another. You are either moving towards God or you are moving with the world away from him.
If you have been a Christian for long, you know this is true. All the major cultural centers, movies, the universities, social media, the governments of the world, the news networks; everything in the world is pushing and pulling people away from God. And what Paul is saying is that the natural man wants to go.
The current of the world did not have to work hard to draw us away from God before we were converted. We loved swimming in that river. Paul says in Galatians 4:3 that, prior to Christ, we were enslaved to the elementary principles of the world. We didn’t want to swim against that current. We were caught up in it and we love adding our own effort to makes us go faster in the exact direction that the world was going.
Second, Paul explains the current of the world on the spiritual plane of existence. The world has a godless culture and the world has a godless leader. The Enemy, Satan himself, is spiritually leading the world in the same rebellion that he began originally.
Paul says that prince of power is leading the world and he is the spirit of the world. The Germans call this idea the zeitgeist or the spirit of the age. The idea is that every generation has a zeitgeist, a general feel and attitude, that defines who they are. During the Enlightenment, the spirit was scientific, rational, and focused on the individual. During the “Roaring Twenties,” the it was all about optimism, consumerism, and the arrival of modernity. During the sixties, the spirit of the age was all about free love, transgressing established rules, and fighting the power.
What Scripture is saying, is that if you had the eyes to see the true spiritual reality around us, in the age between Adam to the Second Coming of Christ, the spirit of the age could be described as the reign of the Evil One, the reign of Satan. He is the spirit of the age and his spirit is one of rebellion. Rebellion against God, rebellion against Christ, and rebellion against the Gospel; a rebellion that is instep with every single human being. Paul says this in 2 Corinthians 4:4:
2 Corinthians 4:4
4 In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
Prior to Christ, we were trapped by our nature and we were trapped by our world. Everything in culture and the people around us, everything the Enemy was leading us toward, was like a giant river with a strong current that was both pulling and pushing us to total and utter destruction. And we are going to see, in our third point, that we loved it.
We were enslaved by our own evil desires.
The first thing we see in this text is that by nature, we are dead. The second thing we saw was that the world, also, is dead and we are trapped in its current. The third thing we are going to see about the power of death in our lives is that we were enslaved by our own evil desires. Meaning, we loved our rebellious nature, we loved the rebellion of the world, and we loved being blinded by the lies of the enemy. We were not victims in our sin. We were willing and enthusiastic participants. Look at verse 3:
Ephesians 2:3
3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
We are going to deal with the children of wrath part in the next point but focus in on the first half of verse 3.
Paul has told us that our nature were death, therefore we sin. The world is a world of death, therefore everything in the world was pulling and pushing toward death. And now he has said, we lived in that world of death with passion. We loved it. Like what Paul says in Romans 1:32, we not only knew that we were in rebellion against our Creator, when we saw others rebelling, we loved it and we were encouraged in our own further rebellion.
Many of us know exactly what Paul is talking about here. We know that “bad company ruins good morals.” (1 Corinthians 15:33) But Paul is going further than that. He is not just saying that you were negatively influenced by the world. He is saying that you loved your worldliness. Every desire of your body and every desire of your mind was only to sin. There was no room for other desires.
The obscene power of death in your life is that it crafts a prison out of your own making. When you are by nature dead, you can only want the things of death, the desires of carnal flesh and of a deprave mind. You cannot want the things of life, meaning, you cannot want God. The chains of sin are chains the natural man wears willingly. They do not seem like a burden to him, but they are his greatest joy. Both nature and nurture are working with the natural man to keep with the natural man from ever seeing or understanding their need for salvation. And so Paul says in Romans 3:10-19 says:
Romans 3:10-19
10 as it is written:
“None is righteous, no, not one;
11 no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good, not even one.”
13 “Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
14 “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood;
16 in their paths are ruin and misery,
17 and the way of peace they have not known.”
18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
19 Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.
There is not a single person in all of history, born in Adam, that wants or seeks after God. They cannot. Their nature is death, they only want the things of death, and God is life. In 2 Corinthians 2:14, Paul says that the things of life smell like death to the perishing. They are revolted by righteousness. And so, the power of death in the life of the lost is such that it rules their appetites. They only want death because they are dead.
So, is man good? What about the man on an island who has never heard about Jesus? Can’t a lost person do charity or make some positive contribution to the world? These are all questions that are answered by our sermon this morning. All men have sinned in Adam. All men are dead by nature. All men follow the world that is leading in death. And all men love their deadness. They want nothing to do with life. They want nothing to do with goodness. They want nothing to do with God. The depravity of man it total.
We were children of God’s wrath.
So what? That sounds pretty terrible, but most people seem happy in their lives. So even if this is true, spiritually, what is the big deal? Why not just let people get whatever happiness they can out of this life and leave them alone? This is a crucial line of questioning, because all that we have said this morning about sin and the problem of the power of death in our lives is not sufficient to explain why God sent his Son to die on the cross. Said differently, sin is not a big deal on its own. It is only something to be concerned about if we finish the second half of verse three. Look back at the second half of Ephesians 2:3:
Ephesians 2:3
and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
The fourth and final point of our sermon is this: the power of death in our lives makes us children of God’s wrath. Sin is only a big deal, because God is infinitely angry at sinners. His wrath burns against our rebellion. The end of verse 3 is so essential to all that we have said up to this point, because without the eternal wrath of God against sin, sin is not actually that big of a deal. The power of death in our lives is that it locks us into a relationship with God that will only end in our eternal destruction. Why is this? I thought God was supposed to be kind and forgiving. Why does he hate sin so much?
Our problem is not that we do sin, but that we are sinners. Not that we dabble in the things of death, but that we are dead. The reason that God hates sin is that our sinfulness says something untrue about God. Let me explain.
When God made man, he made Adam in his own image. Meaning, there is some mysterious way in which humanity bears the thumbprint of God. We were meant to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth, and as we did, we would have filled the earth with the glory of God as hi image bearers. So, when he left the imprint of his image on our nature, he did not intend it to be marred by death. Our rebellion took his glory and associated the God of life with the rebellion of death.
As sinners, we are literally walking, spiritual corpses representing the God of life. It is untrue. The dead cannot represent the living. By existing, we are saying something false about the God of glory.
Which then makes the Gospel make even more sense. Why did God send his Son into the world to save us from the power of death in our lives? Because he loved his image bearers. He loved the beings he created to represent himself. His imprint on our natures, prior to the fall, makes us worth rescuing so that his glory, which we have fallen short of, can be vindicated.
“The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Corinthians 25:56)
Conclusion
As we conclude, we have seen that, prior to Christ, the power of death reigned in our lives. We inherited the nature of death from Adam. We were born into a world of death that culturally and spiritually led us away from God. We loved that. Our nature of death made us only desire the things of death, therefore, we were rightly objects of God’s wrath, because we associate his glory, the glory of life, with the stench of death. We took the glory he invested in each human being and we squandered it in sin.
These are three damning verses at the beginning of Ephesians 2. They do not look positively on the human condition. We are not merely afflicted by sin, we are stone cold dead in our natures. This was the starting place of every Christian prior to God’s intervention. And thinking about such a difficult topic is good for us.