The basic outline of this passage is simple: “You were dead,” verse 1, and “God . . . made us alive,” verses 4-5. As usual, the message is in the details, but the heart is that stark before-and-after picture—which is not as simple as using a neutral-density filter on your camera, as in the image I used for this week’s slide. We were dead, but God made us alive.
In what way were we dead and what did that mean? Paul begins, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked”—and note, he doesn’t say, “You were dead because of your trespasses and sins.” What Paul means is subtly but profoundly different from the way the church usually talks about sin, because we tend to do so in terms of law as the world trains us to do. Law says, the problem is the things you do, and when you do the bad thing, you get punished for it. God says, the problem is sin, the snarling, fanged, aggressive darkness in each of our hearts; the bad things you do are symptoms. Law says, you have done bad things, so you are spiritually dead and need resurrection. God says, that’s backwards: you are spiritually dead and need resurrection, and because of this, you do the bad things spiritually-dead people do.
You might object that you are in Christ, you are no longer spiritually dead, and yet you still do the bad things spiritually-dead people do. Good; you’re spot-on. Paul doesn’t say, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins you used to do,” which would presume you no longer do any of them anymore. Rather, he says, “You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked.” It’s not merely that you did bad things, it’s that this was the whole pattern of your life. Doing bad things, whatever particular bad things they might have happened to be, was your way of living. Your life was expressed in them, and defined by them. But while that was once your pattern, it is no longer; it has been conclusively broken.
Paul continues, you walked in this pattern following the course of the world. This is an interesting statement. The world considers itself radical and creative, and will deride Christians as just doing what we’re told. Truth is, though, as Paul sees, the way of the world is well-worn and drearily predictable. Sin may look bold and exciting, but it’s just the path of least resistance. As Paul develops his thought, the course of the world is following the prince of the power of the air. This is, of course, our ancient enemy, the Devil, whom Paul also describes as the spirit now at work in the sons of disobedience. Remember what we said two weeks ago: the significance of the word “sons” is not gender but status—sons are heirs. This could mean they have inherited their disobedience, or that their inheritance will be the consequences of disobedience; given the parallel description “children of wrath” in v. 3, I think both are true. The point is clear: the world thinks it’s setting its own course because it has rejected God, but its freedom is an illusion. The ways of the world are laid out for it by the Devil.
Note the next thing Paul says: following the course of the world is living in the passions of our flesh—which is to say, of our fallen human nature—carrying out the desires of the flesh and of the mind. Trace this carefully. The world thinks it is free and Christians are not because we define freedom as being able to do whatever we want. When our government tells us we can’t do something, it is “restricting our freedom,” and then we argue over whether or not the restriction is justified and appropriate.
Some of you probably recognize the name of Sam Allberry, who recently left a pastoral position at a Nashville megachurch for reasons connected to same-sex attraction. The discussion around that has been telling, in a couple ways. Many conservatives in the American church seized on “same-sex attraction” and missed the actual reason Allberry had to step down: yes, it had to do with a relationship with another man which apparently did not progress as far as a fully sexual relationship, but that relationship ended before he took the position at Immanuel Church, and the church leaders were aware of it. Allberry had to step down when the leaders discovered he hadn’t told them the whole truth about that relationship—the concern was not sexual behavior but breach of trust. On the other hand, a great many liberals said, essentially, “Good, now Allberry can escape his slavery and live in his full freedom in Christ as a homosexual.”
To focus on the latter response for a moment, that’s rooted entirely in a worldly understanding of freedom as being able to do what we want. That’s the exact backwards of biblical: the Scriptures call that slavery to our lusts. Our age has not only embraced that slavery but doubled down on it, making desire one of its chief gods. The theologian and essayist R. R. Reno dubbed it “the Empire of Desire.” Following our culture is going through life, in Reno’s words, “asking never what is right and true but instead what is ‘healthy’ and ‘empowering’,” building our idea of human flourishing on that approach. The West replaced its Christian foundation with a Dollar General-brand Epicureanism that got as far as “maximize pleasure and minimize unpleasantness” and said, “OK, we’re good—no further thought required.” But if you can do whatever you want, you know what you can’t do? Anything else. The ultimate example of this is the drug addict. It doesn’t matter if you know what would be best for you, or what you would be happiest later to have done—your desires in the moment are running the show. That’s slavery. Freedom in Christ is the freedom to choose not to do what you want. It is the freedom to follow the deepest, truest desires of your heart in defiance of the ones you’re feeling in the moment.
So, then: dead. Not mostly dead, but all dead. Not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead. And then comes the best two-word combination in the English language: But God. Dead doesn’t mean struggling, it doesn’t mean trying and failing, it means there’s nothing there to try—but God. But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love for us, changed the entire picture. The underlying concept here is a word you’ve heard from me before, the Hebrew word ḥesed. Ḥesed is the unyielding, unrelenting covenant love and faithfulness of God; as Sally Lloyd-Jones put it in the Jesus Storybook Bible, “No matter what, in spite of everything, God would love his children—with a Never Stopping, Never Giving Up, Unbreaking, Always and Forever Love.” At the same time, the covenants God makes with his children are covenants he initiates, which are predicated on his goodness and faithfulness rather than ours, to which he is faithful even when we are not, and so the grace and mercy of God are also a live wire running through this word. That’s why our English translations so often translate it “mercy.”
We need to see that God’s wrath is not fundamentally against sinners or against sinful acts, it’s against sin. His wrath is an expression of his love. It is the response of the lover toward anyone or anything that harms the beloved. However hard we cling to our sin, it’s a destructive force in our lives and our world; as the Puritan John Owen put it, “Be killing sin or it will be killing you.” This is not God being mad at us because we didn’t give him his way, it’s his wrath against the power of darkness which is trying to eat us alive from the inside out. If we cooperate with him, the blade of his wrath is a surgeon’s scalpel cutting away the spiritual tumor; the poet T. S. Eliot called it “the sharp compassion of the healer’s art.” It’s only when we put ourselves in between God and our sin to protect it with our lives that his wrath truly falls on us.
In any case, the wrath of God is temporary, because sin is ultimately temporary. His love is eternal because his life is eternal, and his gift of life to us is eternal. And it is, make no mistake, pure gift. We’re always sliding back into believing we have to earn his gift of life because it allows us to believe we can earn that gift—but we can’t. Before he gives it, we’re not able even to want it. A dead person can’t want to be alive because there’s no person there to have a will to want to do anything. As Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, there’s no “there” there. Resurrection life is a gift which comes to the dead purely from outside, purely as God’s free gift by his will.
This points us forward to Paul’s next emphasis. God didn’t just make us alive, he didn’t even just make us alive together as one body, he made us alive together with Christ. The Reformed theologian Michael Horton sums it up well: “All of our righteousness, holiness, redemption, and blessing is found outside of us—in the person and work of Christ.” To say we have been united with Christ is to say a difficult thing to understand. It’s rarely preached on in most American churches because it’s impossible to reduce to three bullet points and a story about a cat. It’s a mystical reality. Paul doesn’t try to define it, only to illustrate it: in Galatians 2 he says he has been crucified with Christ; in Romans 6 he says we have been baptized into Christ’s death; in this letter and 1 Corinthians he calls the church the body of Christ. He doesn’t spell this out for us, he paints pictures to shape our imagination. Jesus did the same thing in John 15, telling his disciples, “I am the vine and you are the branches.” We are one in Christ; we are united with Christ; don’t think you can explain that reality, just live into it, experience it, know it in the tips of your fingers and the marrow of your bones.
This is the work of the Holy Spirit in you, and it’s so certain, Paul confidently says God seated us with Christ in the heavenly places. He is declaring as present fact something which is not our present experience. He’s telling us this world is not our true home, as we talked about in our series on the Psalms, and does not hold our primary allegiance. Our true citizenship is in the coming, inbreaking kingdom of God, and our true home is where Jesus is. Here—we’ll talk more about this when we turn to 1 Peter in a couple months—we are resident aliens called to seek the welfare of the city, and the nation, in which God has planted us. It’s the reality of the letter to the exiles in Jeremiah 29 writ large, on a cosmic scale. The accompanying promise is writ large as well: God has done this so that he might bless us with the immeasurable riches of his grace. You might look at that and say, that’s only for heaven, but he doesn’t say “the coming age” like he does in 1:21. The point of the phrase “the ages to come” is to incorporate the whole future, both this age and the next, in the terms of this promise.
And what is that promise? What are the immeasurable riches of his grace? Well, what follows? For—i.e., “this is why I can say this”—by grace you have been saved, through faith. We shouldn’t take “saved” in too small a way, either; this doesn’t just mean we go to heaven when we die. This is the second time Paul says, “by grace you have been saved,” and look back at verse 5: that phrase expands on the statement that God made us alive together with Christ. Being saved means being raised from spiritual death, filled with the life of God, united with Christ in his life, by the work of his Holy Spirit. And Paul says “immeasurable”—God doesn’t give us just enough life, he gives it superabundantly, poured into us and through us like a flood; and he gives it freely. It’s nothing we have to earn or could ever earn. It’s all gift, first to last. If anyone says you have to earn it by faith—no, not even that: even our faith is God’s gift.
So, if we don’t earn our salvation by doing good things, does it not matter whether we do good things or not? No. We are God’s handiwork, his craftsmanship, created for his purpose; he created us to do his works, and he created the works for us to do, preparing them for us in advance. The order is flipped: not, we do good works, therefore God saves us, but God has saved us, therefore we do good works—specifically, God’s works prepared for us. We have a callback at the end of verse 10 to the very first clause of this passage: where once the pattern of our lives was doing bad things, now we’re being re-patterned to do the will of God. Where once we were spiritual zombies, our lives defined by our spiritual deadness in our slavery to sin, now our lives are defined by the overflowing life of God poured into us in Jesus Christ.
Now, in applying Scripture, we have to address our practical concrete reality. This means, in part, acknowedging that while we’re being re-patterned to God’s will, we still do many bad things, and we’re tempted to many more. We have to acknowledge this both to keep our expectations for ourselves and others reasonable and to recognize that God allows this reality for at least one reason: to drive us back to dependence on his grace. We need to let that sink into our hearts to so great a depth that we grasp a critical truth: however grave anyone else’s temptations and besetting sins are, ours are only different, not less grave.
I say this in particular because the Enemy these last few years has been pulling a nasty sleight-of-hand on the church in this country that deeply concerns me. We know his main frontal assault on the American church is, and has been for some time, on matters of sexual behavior. The original focus was on sexual attraction to people of the same gender; that has expanded considerably. The Enemy’s signature victory in this regard has been the concept of “sexual identity.” Biblically, our identity should be only in Christ: to find our identity in anyone or anything else is idolatry. That idolatry is now rampant in our culture. Identity and Desire are the two chief deities in the modern American civil religion, the two greatest cultural idols we must confront and challenge.
The Enemy is now working to use that idolatry to drive anyone who experiences any sexual temptations beyond that of simple adultery (and I hate that putting it this way makes adultery seem like a minor deal, but that should tell you something), whether it be same-gender sexual attraction or what have you, out of any churches where they might actually hear the gospel. That the Enemy is doing this in liberal churches which see nothing wrong with any of it is only to be expected. The grievous thing is that he is at work to the same purpose in churches and among Christians who still affirm the biblical teaching that sex is for marriage between one man and one woman. How? By spurring them to declare that for a man to experience sexual attraction to another man, or a woman to another woman, is in and of itself disqualifying for leadership. This creates a two-tiered system of temptations in which my temptations don’t disqualify me from leadership—temptations which could theoretically include adultery and murder, though I assure you mine personally do not—but certain other people’s temptations do.
How do you justify it? Well, I know how I’ve seen people justifying it: by asserting that same-gender sexual attraction is homosexuality and experiencing it makes you a homosexual. Their argument rests on picking up the identity idolatry championed on the left and affirming it. To be clear, I’m not saying any of the folks driving this bus have realized they’re doing that. They want to maintain the church’s commitment to Scripture and to seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and in their concern they are powerfully affected by the extremely high levels of anxiety in American culture.
One, if it’s the effect, what matter the intent? If churches formally tell those who experience sexual attraction to others of the same gender, “Your identity is not in Christ, your identity is that you’re a homosexual, therefore you are unfit to lead; ask again when you’re different,” what’s going to happen? People who experience that attraction are going to go to churches that say, “Sure, your identity is ‘homosexual,’ and that’s great!” and then they’ll all sing “Dancing Queen” by ABBA. (In case you’re wondering: that’s not random, and I’m not making it up.) We’ve seen this with the Christian Reformed Church since it formally took this position. This approach identifies a fissure that needs to be bridged with the gospel—and slams a wedge into it.
Two, the way this was pushed in the CRC, and the way it’s being pushed in the EPC, is through fearmongering. Those who want to see this double standard on temptations established as an official EPC position have been sending out blast e-mails to all sorts of people in the denomination accusing those who disagree with them of pushing compromise with the world. I know they have been because I came here and walked straight into conversations with people who’d already been freaked out by those e-mails. This is not honoring to God. As James 1:20 assures us human anger will not accomplish the righteousness of God, it’s equally true—because closely linked—that human fear will not accomplish the righteousness of God. If you see e-mails accusing anyone of trying to compromise the EPC’s integrity—please don’t swallow the poison bait. Come talk to me, or Marcia—or both of us. It might not be quite true to say we’ll be happy to have that conversation, but that’s why joy is different from happiness, right, Marcia?
I’ve run long this way because two things are happening this week: the EPC General Assembly is this Tuesday through Thursday; and next Sunday I am called to stand here and preach on Ephesians 2:11-22, in which Paul uses our passage this morning as his foundation to move hard into his teaching on the unity of the church. I do not want to think about the Enemy fracturing the unity of this denomination. I do not want to think about the mistrust he’s been sowing in our presbyteries. I would much rather just be here and focus here and talk about us and let the rest of the world go play mumblety-peg. But I have to stand before the word of God in integrity. I have to be able to read 2:14, “Christ himself is our peace, who has made us both one and broken down the dividing wall of hostility,” and face that statement in honor—and I can’t do that if I see people trying to build up that wall in the name of Christ through fear-mongering and name-calling and accusations, and I ignore it.
So, please, brothers and sisters, pray for the General Assembly of our denomination this week. Pray every day, and pray fervently. But please do not pray for a vote, for a position, for a specific outcome. You might agree with my understanding, you might think I’m out to lunch on what the EPC should do, and we should not be praying against each other. I’m asking you to do what I’ve felt the Holy Spirit poking and prodding me to do: pray that God will humble the General Assembly. Pray that his Spirit will move in power in that gathering as the Spirit of humility. Plead with God to put the ruling elders and teaching elders in Cherry Creek on their knees—before him, and before one another. May the holy fear of a holy God rest upon that assembly, and may they be filled with a bottomless knowledge of their utter need for grace. And as we ask for them, so may it be granted to us. In all holy fear: let’s pray.
“Before and After ND,” © 2011 Ram Yoga. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic