1Once you were dead, doomed forever because of your many sins. ²You used to live just like the rest of the world, full of sin, obeying Satan, the mighty prince of the power of the air. He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God. ³All of us used to live that way, following the passions and desires of our evil nature. We were born with an evil nature, and we were under God’s anger just like everyone else.God is in the process of breaking through the problems of men and restoring harmony, peace and joy in the midst of the death that comes with sin.

We must understand the difficulties our Lord faces – the condition of mankind in its lost state and the utter impossibility of man changing anything about it by himself.

It takes the great power of God; nothing else will suffice. That is the theme of the first half of chapter 2.

The Condition of Man:

What Paul tells us here in verses 1-3 of chapter 2 is probably one of the most difficult truths for human beings to understand. We don’t accept it. We won’t believe it. As a result, we have no realistic outlook on where we are, either on the tremendous hopelessness of our condition if we are without Christ, nor the glory and wonder of our position if we are in Christ.

This is a most ungrammatical sentence in the Greek. The statement …"And you he made alive…" that starts the section in some translations actually comes in verse 5 in the original text. The translators have inserted this to help us in our English versions of the text. Paul is so intent upon getting before the people in Ephesus and the other cities where the letter will go the description of humanity and its problem that he runs right on, ignoring grammar and everything else.

The point that Paul is driving at is this:

Mankind is dead, in trespasses and sins.

There are two basic characteristics associated with being dead:

1. impotence, powerlessness

   A pastor was once given a tour of a funeral home by a young Christian from his church who worked there. He took him into the room where bodies were prepared for burial. "Tell him about Jesus." the young man said to his pastor. How impotent is a dead person. How impossible to reach him when he is dead. How difficult, how hopeless it is for him to respond to any appeal about Jesus.

2. corruption

Paul tells us that mankind is dead in trespasses and sins.

What is a trespass? This is a word that comes from a Greek word that means, "to miss your step." If I start to walk downstairs and I aim at the first step, but miss it and come down on another step, that is a trespass. I have misstepped. I did not intend to, but I missed it. Though my intention was right, the result of my action was wrong.

Paul says that mankind is guilty of missteps.. We don’t mean to do them, but we end up missing the way. We start out with great ideals, with an image of what we would like to be. We aim at that, we try to be that, but somewhere we miss the mark. And even when we achieve the things we thought we wanted, we find them to be hollow pleasures, empty and unsatisfying. Many of us have "destination sickness"…the malady of having arrived at the very place you wanted to go, but not liking it when we get there and remaining unsatisfied with it all. That is the powerlessness of human life. We cannot fulfill our best ideals. No matter how hard we try, or how much we resolve, something keeps us from them. That is the mark of death which is present in human life everywhere.

The result for mankind is that there is either a great pessimism about life which sees no hope whatsoever for the future or a naïve, unrealistic optimism about the future…the Brave New World idea..that somehow in spite of all the problems, we are going to find some way to work it all out.

Paul is telling us here that this well-intentioned, misstepping tendency within mankind is one of the things that mark his death.

If that were not bad enough, there is the matter of our sins to be understood. There are times when we deliberately and intentionally choose to do the wrong thing. Sin is a violation of truth when we know it to be truth. The Psalmist has said: "For him who knows what is right and fails to do it; for him it is sin." Most of us come from good homes where we were taught good moral standards. And yet there are times when we do things in utter disregard of those standards bothered us when we first did them. But later they became commonplace occurrences without any difficulty at all. They did not bother us at all later on.

Paul goes on to tell us about the three forces at work that lie behind this condition:

1. The first condition is found in the phrase; " following the course of this world." Literally, this means "following the age of this world." The characteristics of the age we live in exert certain pressures on us. We are pressured to conform by the world in which we live. Paul means human society by the expression "the world"…secular, human society that is trying to live without God, determined to work out its own problems without any interference from God. That world will produce tremendous pressure on us to conform. You have felt it…and so have I. Think about some thing as simple as fashion. We hardly dare to be different. Or if we are different, we break away all together and form another society whose members are made to conform within it…An example of this was the hippie society of the 60’s. You never saw a hippie with a crew cut!
   1. Peer pressure is real. We are governed by the attitudes of our associates and we are pressured to conform by our peers…and don’t think for one minute that the Church is immune to this!
   2. The world rejects anyone who is noticeably different. The Japanese have a saying that "the nail that sticks up is the one that gets hammered." Christians are noticeably different…and that is why the world hates genuine Christianity.
2. Beyond the World there lies something else…a sinister being. Paul calls this force "the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience." He takes us back behind what we call the normal activities of life and pulls back the veil and reveals to us what is really there. He says that there is an organized realm of malevolent spiritual beings, headed by a ruler of incredible subtlety and power who is at work behind the scenes to create disobedience. That is the devil’s stock and trade…creating disobedience.
   1. Paul calls him the "prince of the power of the air". It may be that Paul is trying to tell us that as the air is all around us and invisible; so the devil and his demons are also invisible but all around us…arrayed against God and constantly manipulating the human race…using the pressures of the world and the flesh to affect the minds and hearts of mankind so that we act disobediently.
   2. If you are disobedient…there must be something to obey in order to be disobedient. That disobedience is in the face of the truth…the truth of God’s Word. God’s Word of truth is always trying to capture our attention and to set reality before us. But thee is an evil spirit at work in society which is working against God’s truth.
   3. Think about how this really works. It is amazing that we have such a commitment to disobedience. Why do we have litter laws? It should be sufficient to merely point out to people that if you throw beer cans and other trash along the road you will destroy the beauty of the road. Merely putting up a few signs reminding people of that fact ought to be enough. But it isn’t. People throw the cans out and hit the signs that say "Don’t Litter!" That is a mark of a disobedient spirit at work.
   4. That is why our initial reaction to some demand is almost always: "Why should I? Who do you think you are? Why should I do what you ask?" And even when someone politely asks us to do something, our first reaction is often "Well, tell me why. I want to know first."
   5. There seems to be a tinge of disobedience in everything we do. Paul says this is so because there is a disobedient spirit at work that is constantly challenging every law and force which God has called into being for the good of mankind.
3. The third force we need to reckon with is found in Ephesians 2:3: "Among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh [literally, the desires of the flesh]. This brings the focus down to an individual level.
   1. He speaks here about what we often call the "lusts of the flesh". We need to understand what Paul is talking about here because the "the lusts of the flesh" does not necessarily have a bad connotation.
   2. The flesh is our basic human nature. It is the way God has made us. With that human nature comes basic human desires that are appropriate for our nature. We have a desire to eat and drink that is good. It is ok for us to have a desire for sleep. There is an appropriate desire for sex as part of the process of human procreation. And there is nothing wrong with them. That is the way God has made us.
   3. But something has gained control of the flesh and has twisted it. Paul speaks to us of "the desires of the body and of the mind." The word for desires here is the word "will". It carries with it the thought of an unbreakable resolve, a determination. The closest English word for this idea is the word "drive." What Paul says here is that these desires become drives and when they become drives they are wrong. That is the subtle twist the devil brings to the normal desires of human nature. When a desire becomes a drive it is wrong. It becomes something that masters us. When something becomes a drive, we idolize it, build our lives around it, sacrifice other values to it and it becomes idolatrous.
   4. These drives involve not only the body but also the mind, Paul says. Our thoughts can be an expression of the lusts of the flesh in the wrong sense. The Mennonites had a radio spot nearly thirty years ago now that took the words of Jesus about looking upon a woman to lust after her and stated the principle this way: "In the head or in the bed, it’s all the same."

Paul then shows us how all of this comes out in the end: The inevitable conclusion is that "we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind…" People like us are the subject of "children of wrath…"

1. Wrath as it is used here is not to be pictured as God is sitting in heaven with his hand poised over the smite button just waiting for you or me to mess up giving him an opportunity to zap us.
2. That is not the concept of the word Paul uses here for "wrath." The wrath of God is what we might well call the "law of inevitable consequences." It is simply this: when we make a wrong decision it will hurt us, even though we intended it to be right.
3. For example, if I should walk down this aisle and into the wall behind you, I would suffer the wrath of God…the inevitable consequences of doing that is getting my nose bent out of shape. That wrath is designed to awaken me, to make me realize that I am violating a basic law of my own nature.
4. We recognize that in the physical realm…but in the moral realm we get all upset. We say, "It isn’t fair. Why shouldn’t I run off with my neighbor’s wife/husband? Why should I have to experience any evil results from that? Evil results will come, inevitable consequences will result from that if I do it.
5. We are subject to wrath…the inevitable consequences of our actions when they are wrong. The devil, with his clever subtlety works through the world to force us to conform to patters which destroy, and works through the flesh, so that we move in utter naiveté from a normal satisfying human need into excess that destroys.

The final thing that Paul addresses in this passage is that we are children of wrath by nature. We have a birth defect; we are born that way. We are born into this condition and there is nothing we can do about it. We can rearrange the furniture but we can never solve the problems we face. That is because it is in our very nature.

But God has not left us without hope…He acted on our behalf.

So without some action from outside of humanity there is no escape for us. For this reason the words…"But God"…are so important for us. He is the answer to the problem of the death that comes from our trespasses and sins.

That is the subject of our next study…"he made us alive…" There is hope for us in the midst of a seemingly hopeless existence.

 --Dennis Gleason