From Death to Life - What are we saved for? (Ephesians 2: 1–10)

This Podcast is part of a 10-year project to complete an in-depth, daily study of the entire Bible, chapter by chapter, verse by verse. 

Episode Notes: From Death to Life - What are we saved for? (Ephesians 2: 1–10)

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that the last few episodes have taken us up the mountain with Paul. We’ve stood with him as he blessed God for every spiritual blessing in Christ. We’ve listened as he prayed that the eyes of our hearts would be opened. We’ve explored the hope, the inheritance, and the power that belong to every believer.

But today… He takes us down the mountain, back into the valley of human experience, back into the story of who we once were, back into the darkness from which God rescued us.  Because before you can appreciate the height of God’s grace, you must understand the depth from which He lifted you.

 Ephesians 2:1–10 is one of the most breathtaking passages in the entire New Testament. It is the gospel in ten verses. It is the Christian story in miniature. It is your testimony and mine, told with clarity, honesty, and astonishing beauty.

 This passage will tell us who we were, what God has done, and who we are now.

 So, take a breath. Settle your heart. And let’s step together into one of the greatest passages ever written.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Welcome back, friends. It's a joy to be here with you again as we continue our journey through Paul's letter to the Ephesians. Now, if you've been following along, you know that the last few episodes have taken us up the mountain with Paul. We've stood with him as he blessed God and blessed us and talked about every spiritual blessing we have in Christ. We've listened also as he prayed that the eyes of our heart would be opened, and we've explored the hope and the inheritance and indeed the power that belongs to every believer. But today Paul is going to take us somewhere different. He's going to, in a sense, bring us down from the mountaintop, back into the valley of human experience, back into the story of who we once were, back into the darkness from which God rescued all of us. Because before you can really appreciate the height of God's grace, you must understand the depths from which He's listed you. Many say Ephesians 2 verses 1 to 10 is one, if not the most breathtaking passage in the entire New Testament. It is in effect the Gospel in ten verses. It is the Christian story and experience in miniature, and it is your testimony and mine, and it's told with clarity, honesty, but also astonishing beauty. And Paul begins with the three words that are as blunt as they are devastating. He will say you were dead. Not you were sick, not struggling, not misguided, not spiritually unwell, dead, cut off from God, unable to save yourself, unable to change yourself, unable to reach for God at all. Paul wants us to feel the weight of that, because once we can feel that, we can perhaps also feel the wonder of what comes next. Because into that darkness, into that hopelessness, into that spiritual death, Paul will speak two of the most glorious words in Scripture, because he will say, but now, but God who is rich in mercy, but now God because of his great love, but now God who refused to leave us where we were, God has made us alive in Christ. This is the turning point, the hinge, if you like, on which the gospel door swings open and everything changes because God stepped in, God stepped through it, God crossed the threshold. Salvation is by grace, pure, undeserved, unearned grace. Grace that raised the dead, grace that rescues the helpless, grace that lifts us into new life, and grace that seats us with Christ in the heavenly places, and a grace that turns sinners into saints, and spiritual wanderers lost into worshipers. This passage tells us who we were, what God has done, and who indeed we are now. It tells us from whence we came and how we were rescued, and what, importantly, he's rescued us for. And it shows us that grace is not just the doorway into the Christian life, it is the foundation upon which we build, the spiritual air we breathe, the very oxygen that enables us to complete the whole journey. So in today's episode we're going to walk slowly and reverently through just ten verses, and we're going to let Paul tell us the truth about ourselves, our past, as well as our present, but most importantly the truth about our future. And my prayer today is that as we do so you will discover the wonder of your salvation and perhaps see it again with fresh eyes. Because if Ephesians 1 that we looked at these last two days shows us the riches of God's grace, well now Ephesians chapter 2 will show us the reach of God's grace and how far he came, how hard and how far he had to come to find us, and how he has lifted us up in his Son the Lord Jesus Christ. So take a breath, settle your heart, and let's step together into one of the greatest passages ever written. Let's step across that threshold with God. Welcome to Episode 6, the opening verses of Ephesians chapter 2. Thanks for being with me today. Now, Christians over the years have offered many good answers to that question. If you come from an Anglican background, you might quote the Westminster Catechism from a few centuries back, which says man's chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. And that is indeed true, beautifully true. Others will say we are saved to serve, also true. Some, especially perhaps if you're from a Baptist or Brethren circle, will say we're saved to win souls. Again, true. But Paul is about to give us an answer that in a sense towers above all others, an answer so profound yet so simple, so breathtaking that it reshapes the entire way we can think about our salvation. And he begins by taking us back to what we were before God stepped in. Because I don't think you can understand the greatness of your salvation until you understand the depths of the problem, and that what Paul is going to show us first today. The opening three verses say, As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sin, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of the world, and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the Spirit who is now at work in you, and those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath, children of wrath, it says in some translations. So, Paul divides this coming passage today we're looking at into two movements, two sections. The first we've just read, it talks about who we were in verses 1 to 3, and then from 4 to 10, it will tell us what God did in response to that. But he begins the opening section with that blunt, shocking statement as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins. Not that you were sick, not that you were just struggling along, not spiritually misled, not morally confused. You're dead, he says, spiritually dead, walking, talking, breathing, yes, but dead on the inside, spiritually got dead, cut off from God and separated from his life, actually unable to respond and unable to save yourself. Paul is using the strongest possible image here to describe our spiritual condition before Christ. We were not drowning and reaching for help, as some describe it. We were at the bottom of the ocean dead. Fish food. We were not working our way towards God, we were spiritually lifeless, lying on the ground. We're not searching for this truth. It actually says we were spiritually unresponsive. That is why salvation must be by grace, because dead people cannot rescue themselves. And Paul has used the word here dead deliberately. Just as physical death represents the separation of the body from the soul, the spiritual death described here is the separation of the soul from God. It means the person has no spiritual life, no spiritual appetite even, certainly no spiritual understanding, and no spiritual power or desire. We were, as someone I once read put it well, spiritual zombies, moving, breathing, functioning, but cut off from the life of God. And this is what stirred God's heart. This is what moved him to rescue us. Not because we were pleasant, but because we were lifeless dead. Not because we were worthy, but because we were dead. And Paul says we were dead in our transgressions and our sins. Dead in our transgressions, the things we'd done wrong, dead in the sin, which is the condition we were born into. We were stuck in a sort of spiritual quicksand, and the more we struggled, the deeper we sank. We were not victims of circumstances, some would say. We are portrayed here as participants in our own rebellion against God. And then Paul goes further because he said we actually chose to follow the ways of the world. Before Christ, it was the world that shaped our thinking, our values and our desires, and even the priorities we set. We lived according to the standards and ideas of the cultures around us, driven by trends, pressured by our peers, ideas and standards formed by the philosophies of the current age. We were shaped by the opinions of our friends and others, this expectation of the society, the ideologies of the moment, and the moral climate of the environment in which we live. We march totally to the drumbeat of the world without even realizing it. And Paul says, Well, folks, it's time to sober up and leave the influence of the world behind you. Leave behind, as he forcefully describes it, the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. So Paul is not saying that as unbelievers, or in fact that all unbelievers are Satan worshippers, he's saying something far more subtle, but just as serious. He's saying that the world's systems, its values, its philosophies, its philosophies, its priorities, its ideologies, even, are all influenced by Satan, the enemy of God. You see, Satan doesn't always need to work directly. He works indirectly through cultures, through ideas, through the spirit of the age. He can plant ideas in the world and people conform to them without even realizing their source. This is why the world leaves God out of its thinking. This is why the world rejects God's truth so often, and this is why the world celebrates what God absolutely calls sin and mocks what God calls holy. The enemy doesn't need to possess people when he can persuade them and he can influence them. He doesn't need to frighten them, he can just distract them. That's the most effective. This is the spiritual environment in which we all live before Christ rescued us. We were living according to the flesh. And Paul says all of us lived among them at one time, gratifying those cravings of the flesh and following those desires and thoughts. The flesh here is talking about our fallen nature, the part of us that always resists God, rejects his authority, and pursues our own desires. And before Christ we were living totally according to those impulses and cravings, our appetites, our desires. We did effectively what we wanted, when we wanted it and how we wanted it. But we were not actually free as we thought in those choices. We were enslaved by those desires. But Paul then says something that levels the playing field for everyone. All of us lived that way, he says, not some, not those worst people, the worst people in society, not just those who are obviously immoral, but all of us. And Paul includes himself in this, and he includes the Ephesians to whom he's writing to, and he includes every believer who ever reads this thereafter. We were all in the same condition. We were all spiritually dead, and we were all shaped by the world. We were all under the influence of that enemy, driven by our fleshly desires, and then Paul delivers that final blow, and as the King James Version puts it, that by nature we were children of wrath. This is the darkest line in the passage today. It means we're not just neutral in this, we're not innocent who've been overwhelmed. We were spiritually unsafe because we were living under the judgment of a holy God. Not because God is cruel or because God is angry by temperament, but because sin is destructive by nature, and by nature God must respond against it. This is the human condition before grace steps in. But this also, when recognizing this, can be the darkness before the dawn. That is the who you were before the point at which God stepped in. And Paul wants us to feel the weight of it before he reveals how God steps in, and he wants to reveal the weight not to crush us, but to prepare us for the glory of what comes next. Because the next section of the passage begins with the opening words that change everything. But now. Let me read verses four to nine for you. But now, because of the great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace you have been saved, and God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages we might show the incomparable riches of His grace expressed in His kindness to us in Jesus Christ. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not from yourself, it is a gift of God, not by work so that no one can boast, for we are now God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus, to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. So Paul has just described the human condition outside of Christ, dead in sin, shaped by the world, influenced by the enemy, driven by the desires of the flesh, and he explained why that condition was so hopeless, because living in the flesh means you're living under the control of those physical cravings, impulses, and desires. God, of course, has given us free will, but outside of his purposes, we will nearly always choose the path of those appetites. We choose what feels good, what looks good, what sounds good, what satisfies us in the moment. And because our nature is fallen, we tend to choose destructively. We don't drift towards holiness, we always drift towards self-indulgence. We drift towards sin and we're moving further and way further away from God. That's the direction of drift towards total separation, which is why Paul says we were children by nature children of wrath, because sin destroys everything it touches. And yet, this is crucial, God's anger is directed at sin, not the sinner. He hates sin, but he loves the sinner. He hates disease, but he loves the patient. He hates the change that bound us, but he loves the captive who is bound up. And this is the point where Paul turns that corner. This is the moment where the darkness breaks in and the light of the gospel floods in. But God, those two greatest words in Scripture, but God, the two most beautiful words in the Bible. We were dead, it says, but God. We were enslaved, but God. We were condemned, but God. We were powerless, but God. We were lost, but God. This changes everything because God stepped in. Not because we improved ourselves, but because He chose to intervene. Not because we were worthy, but because He was merciful. Paul says He acts because of His great love for us. And the word for love used here is agape, a love that seeks the highest good of the other, even at great personal cost. So this is not sentimental love, this is sacrificial love. This is the love that looks at the broken world and says, I'm going to step into that. This is the love that looks at your rebellious hearts and says, I will come and redeem that. And this is the love that looks at those of us who were all spiritually dead and says, I will bring new life to them. God saw the terrible state you and I had fallen into, dead, enslaved, and condemned, and he still loved us, and he loved us enough to act, and he loved us enough to rescue us. And Paul says he did that, he did that, by doing that he made us alive with Christ. So this is a spiritual resurrection going on here. This is the new birth of which we speak. This is what Jesus actually meant when he said you must be born again, because we were spiritually dead, but God, but now God has breathed new life into us. We were separated, but now God united us in Christ. We were cut off, but it is God who has brought us near. This is nothing to do with self-improvement or even moral reform. This is not about religious effort. This is about resurrection. This is God doing for us what we could never do for ourselves. But he continues and tells us he raises us up with Christ and seats us with him in the heavenly realms. This is astonishing because not only did God make us alive, born again, he raised us up and seated us with Christ. So that means we now share in Christ's resurrection life. We share in that victory, we share in his authority, we share even in Christ's access to the Father. We share in living with Christ in that heavenly position. None of this is being put in the future tense now. This is the but now follow-on. This is all present tense. This is who you and I are now. Now you may feel weak, but you're seated with Christ. You may feel defeated sometimes, but you are seated with Christ. You may feel significant sometimes, but you are seated with Christ. Your circumstances may feel low, but your position is higher. Higher seemed immanageable because you are now seated with Christ, and this is grace, and this is why God saved us. Paul gives us the answer to that question, the answer of why God saved us, the answer that towers above all above all others. He did what he did to make us alive so he could raise us up, and the why is he to enable us to sit with Christ in the heavenlies. And then Paul puts meat on the bones of that statement and says, so that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. So God in saving us is doing it to display his grace. Not just now, not just in this life, but did you notice in the coming ages, forever. Your salvation, your individual personal salvation is a demonstration of the grace of God. You are a trophy of grace, a display of grace, a living testimony of the grace of God. God saved you so that throughout eternity he could point to you and say, Look at what my grace can do. He could have displayed his power by forcing obedience from a scared people, instead he displayed his grace by offering a gift. He could have saved us by compulsion, of course, instead he saves us by compassion. He could have demanded some sort of payment, instead he paid the price himself, and that truly is grace. Grace alone is the heart of the gospel. And now Paul reaches for that most famous verse, a verse that in itself has brought countless people to faith when he says and he says, picking up verse eight, for it is by grace you have been saved, through faith. And this is not from yourself. It is the gift of God, not by work so that no one can boast. No one can boast. If salvation depended on us, heaven would be full of people saying, Look what I did. But salvation depends on God. So instead heaven will be full of people saying, Look at what God did, what he did for me. Grace removes all boasting. Grace has to remove pride from our state. Grace removes comparison. Grace removes fear. Grace puts all the glory where it belongs on God, and he brings the whole passage to the climax with this breathtaking sentence. The final verse we look at today, because he says, for, because we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. That's the final verse we look at today. Paul is showing us what salvation produces, and it tells us that it produces us as God's handiwork, his masterpiece created for good works, that he prepared in advance for us to do. Now the word translated here as handiwork is actually the word polemma, the word from which we get the English word poem. What Paul is getting at here is he's saying you're God's poem, his work of art. You are God's masterpiece. You're not a rough draft, you're not a scribble, you're not a mistake, you're not some sort of half-finished project, you're a masterpiece, a completed masterpiece of grace. God did not simply save you from something, he saved you for something. You were created in Christ Jesus to do good works, not to earn salvation, because the salvation has already been given. Saved for good works, not by good works. Paul is being crystal clear here. We were not saved by the good stuff we did. We are saved for the good works we can do in the future. Good works are not the root of salvation, they are the fruit of our salvation. They're not the cause, they are the consequence, they're not the price, they are the proof that the price is being paid. God saves us and good works show the world that. So why did he save us? Not because we're good or clever, not because we're worthy, not because we're better than anyone else, he saved us because he loves us and because he wants us to display the riches of his grace to everyone throughout all eternity. Paul wants to make it clear. If you think you were saved because of something you did, then you've missed the entire point of God's salvation story. The entire point of the Bible. And if you think you've been saved because you're a good person in any way, then you've misunderstood God's grace. And if you think you're saved because you were smarter, heaven forbid, or more moral, or more religious, or more spiritual, or more deserving in any way, you have again misunderstood the whole gospel and the whole Bible. Salvation is God's work from start to finish. He not only planned it, he initiated it in you, he accomplished it in you, he is applying it in your life, and he secures it and sustains it from everyone who simply receive it. That, my friend, is grace. That, my friend, is salvation, and that is the gospel. Thanks for being with me today. Tomorrow, in our next episode, Paul will take us deeper into the mystery of that reconciliation. How God not only reconciles individuals to himself, but how he can reconcile people to one another and create a new humanity in Christ. But for now, just rest in the truth that has been revealed to us today. You, my friend, listening to this wherever you are in the world, are God's handiwork. You are his poem, you are his great artwork, his masterpiece, you are his trophy of grace, and he has prepared good things for you to do as you walk in this life, and he prepared them before the very foundation of the world. And you know what? Some passages in the Bible are so deep that they're like oceans. They're not rivers we're meant to cross, they're like oceans we need to swim in. And I think Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1 to 10 is such an ocean. Now you can stand in the shoreline and you can have a paddle, you can enjoy the view, or you can wade out and swim deeper. And we're going to do something I don't think I've ever done before in this podcast series. Tomorrow we're going to revisit the same passage a second time and go swimming again in these deep waters again. Because, friends, it's gonna be worth it and you're not gonna want to miss it. So, I hope I'll see you back here again tomorrow. If you've not done so already, then please subscribe wherever you get your podcast from, and that way you can make the study of God's Word a project, a plan, a journey from your entire life from this point forward. Thanks for being with me today. Bye bye for now.