The Dead Ascend

  • Tim Cain
  • May 8, 2010
  • Series: Ephesians

Tim Cain

May 8th, 2010

Ephesians 2:1-

Kaleo El Cajon

I wonder if any of you remember where you were or what you were doing on January 12th this year?  I have to admit that I don’t remember what I was doing.  What about that week?  Does that week stand out to many of you?  Maybe you had a birthday or maybe you remember a few things about that week but I would venture to guess for most of us that week doesn’t stand out as exceptional in anyway.  If I were to ask you what you were doing on the 23rd of January I bet I would get the same response from you.  I know for me none of those dates really stand out.

But I was reading about a man named Emanuel and for this man those dates were radically important.  Emanuel will never forget these dates.  You see on January 12th Emanuel was getting ready to take a bath and all the sudden his whole world began to shake.  I will let him tell it in his own words.  He says, “I had just removed my clothes to take a bath, then I heard a huge noise. The house was dancing, it was shaking and then it all came falling down," he goes on to say "I was knocked to the ground. It was completely dark all around. I believe I lost consciousness."  He remained like this for a few days, stuck on his left side with his feet caught under a bed and his world completely black.  And then he began to hear voices.  He says, "I was calling out to people but my voice bounced back" he said. "I could hear them but they could not hear me. Every time I called them they did not respond so I became discouraged. That's when I started to believe I might be a ghost. I could not understand how I could hear them, but they couldn't hear me."  He goes on to say “I lost hope, I thought I was dead, I really thought maybe I was a ghost, It was black all around. I was confused. Was I alive or not? Anyhow I was resigned to dying. I prayed to God."

Do you see why I say that Emanuel will never forget those days?  Those days were so dark and so frightening, there is no way that he could forget.  For eleven days Emanuel lived like this.  And then one day he heard his mother’s voice.  He says, “I could hear her voice and then she heard my voice too…That's when I believed I may be saved after all. I shouted out ‘Mama, mama, mama, I'm alive!’"  Emanuel’s mother was able to get an Israeli rescue team to come and they were able to remove the rubble and get him out.  He says of that day, “When I came out, there were a lot of people there, they were all cheering.  It was like a big party and my mother was hysterical. She was making a lot of noise, embracing me, hugging me, and kissing me all the time. She had been talking about me in the past, as though I was dead."  

That was January 23rd.  It was a day that Emanuel will never forget.  On that day he heard his mother’s voice.  On that day he knew he wasn’t a ghost but that he was still alive.  On that day saws cut away the rubble and Emanuel saw the light of the sun for the first time in days.  Oh Emanuel will never forget that day.  What makes that day so special is that he was saved.  On that day Emanuel was rescued against what he thought were impossible odds. 

You see all of us here saw the sun on January 23rd.  All of us talked to other people, all of us ate something, walked around, and basically we lived.  And yet while we ate and drank and looked at the sun and talked to our friends we didn’t find these things that exceptional.  Most of us forgot about those days.  Emanuel will never forget.  He will never forget the days spent in darkness.  Days without food, drinking his own urine, believing that he was a ghost, and hearing voices that would not respond to his cries.  You see Emanuel saw a sun he never thought he would see again, Emanuel spoke to his mother that he thought he would never talk to again.  You see with each day that Emanuel lay trapped in the darkness his longing for rescue and his gratitude to those who saved him grew. 

You see what I want us to realize is that our appreciation for our salvation is directly related to our understanding of what we have been saved from.  Our appreciation for our salvation is directly related to how desperate a situation we are saved out of.  All of us were given life on January 23rd, for us in California we woke up from a nights sleep and that is why few of us really remember that day or have a great appreciation for seeing the sun that day.  For Emanuel he was rescued from under a pile of rubble where he had lay trapped for eleven days and so for him that day will ever live in his memory as the day he was rescued, the day he realized he was not a ghost, the day he got his life back.  That is why Emanuel will never forget January 23rd.

Paul has spent the first chapter of Ephesians emphasizing how amazing our God is.  How perfect his plan is and how powerful he is to bring it all to fruition.  Paul has taken us up into the heavenlies and shown us the immeasurable power of our God.  But now he comes to talk about our salvation from our perspective.  He comes to remind us who we were when our God came and rescued us.  And the reason this is such a huge deal is because Paul knows that who we believe we were when we were saved will have a radical effect on how we feel about our salvation.  How we understand who we were apart from God will radically affect how much we appreciate and depend upon God’s presence in our lives today.  And so Paul turns his gaze from the heights of heaven to the depths of our own sin.  He turns his gaze from the majestic power of God to the desperate plight of sinners.

And so Paul begins Ephesians 2, by reminding the Ephesians and all who would read this letter who we were apart from Christ.  Apart from Christ we were, “Dead in our sins and trespasses in which you once walked.”  Paul’s assessment of our situation apart from Jesus is that we are dead.  Guys we have to stop and hear this word.  We have to stop and come to grips with what he is saying.  He says that apart from Jesus people are dead.  Now most of us find this very hard to believe.  We find it hard to believe because we didn’t look dead, we didn’t feel dead; our non-Christian friends walking around don’t seem dead.  We know that even before we were Christians many of us did some good things, what could Paul possibly mean when he says we were dead? Well, it is vital to understand Paul is not saying that our physical bodies are dead, that is obvious, and he says we were dead in our trespasses and sins “in which we once walked.”  So he talks about a kind of death that still allows people to walk.  A death where people are still able to move around, to act and think and do.  What Paul is saying is that apart from God our souls, that part of us, which is eternal, that part of us, which calls out so desperately, to be filled is dead.  It is empty.  That is why, like we talked about last week, nothing on earth can ever truly fill it.  No matter what we try and dump into our souls it is never enough.  Jesus talks about the possibility of gaining the whole world and yet forfeiting your soul and what he is saying is that nothing in this world can ever fill your soul. And yet he wants us all to know that the saving of our soul is of supreme importance.

Its hard to figure out how to illustrate what Paul is talking about and I am not sure that any illustration will ultimately do it justice but there is an illustration that has helped me at least get my mind around what this could look like.  I am not a biologist so it is possible this illustration is way off from a scientific perspective but I think you will get the point.  When you go out to a field and pick a flower what happens?  Does it immediately curl up and die?  No, no if you put it in water and take care of it the flower will often stay pretty and look great for a little while, but eventually what do you know is going to happen to the flower?  It’s going to die isn’t it?  In fact, in one sense, when does the flower die?  Does it really die only when its leaves fall off and it withers or does the flower die the moment it is disconnected from its life source?  The moment it is cut off from its roots, that is when I would say the flower truly dies.  Oh it might look nice for a while but you are looking at a dead flower.  I believe that this is a helpful way to understand our own situation.  You see when God told Adam and Eve that on the day they ate of the tree they would surely die he was telling the truth and on that day they did die.  Not physically, but spiritually the moment they were cut off from their life source they died.  The moment they turned away from God and chose to follow after the serpent they cut themselves off from the very one who was their true-life source.  That is why God kicked them out of the garden and put angels around the tree of life.  Paul tells us in Romans 5:12 that, “through Adam sin entered the world and death entered through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.”

Paul wants us to know that our situation is even worse than Emanuel’s.  We are not merely trapped, we are not like the one hundred thirty or so survivors who were pulled from the ruble of that earthquake but we are like the two hundred forty thousand who died.  That is who we are like.  I will never forget being in Indonesia when the Tsunami hit and watching the news over there, which is so much more graphic then any news we see here, and I watched as a line of hundreds of women carrying their dead children to a massive hole were weeping as they dropped them into it.  That is our plight.  We were dead.  Helpless, humanly beyond hope, to be dropped into a massive hole and covered up.  My friends we must understand our desperate plight, we were dead.

Paul goes on to describe what this death looks like.  In our death we lived like rebels against God.  In our death we actually acted, but we acted in disobedience to our maker.  In our death we actually fight against his glory by instead seeking our own.  Oh we might do things that appear good or kind or sacrificial but always for some motivation other then the glory of our creator.  Always in an attempt to live life independently of our maker who alone is worthy to be worshiped. 

In our death Paul tells us we followed the course of this fallen world.  We gave into our secular culture.  We let our culture define who we were, why we were here and what it would look like to succeed.  Not only did we follow willingly after our culture but we also followed the prince of the power of the air.  We served God’s enemy.  We gave ourselves to him just as Adam and Eve did by refusing to worship our good God and instead living for ourselves.  Paul says we followed after the same Spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.  Do you know what Paul is trying to say?  He is trying to say that the person that you look down on, the person that you feel is really evil, the person who you look at and have no hope for them.  The person that you would call a son of disobedience, you were once just like them, following the same enemy of God that they are following.  Paul is leveling the playing field.  He is saying, don’t look down on others who are living utterly despicable lives and giving themselves to everything evil for you too once followed the same evil enemy of God that they are following.  Even if you followed him in different ways, you too followed the prince of the power of the air who is now at work in the very people you feel superior to.

He continues to remind the Ephesians and all believers of this truth by changing the pronoun to we and using the word all.  He says, “Among who we all once lived in the passions of our flesh.”  We all, Jews and gentiles, those who grew up in a Christian home and those who have lived a rebellious life, all of us were dead in our sins, following the enemy of God instead of the God who made us. 

You see Paul’s words are so strong that it is really easy for us to think that he is talking about someone else.  That he is talking about the prodigal sons, that he is talking about those who are saved out of other religions, that he is talking about those who have lived like rebels.  It is so easy for us to want to forget about just how much we needed God.  It is easy for us to downplay the depths of our own sin.  We hear words like, “dead in our sins and trespasses, following the course of this world and following the prince of the air” and we know that Paul can’t really be talking about us.  But that is what I love about the way he ends it.  You see Paul’s first few lines seem to sound so dark and so evil and so hopeless and we know that we have issues but we are pretty sure they aren’t quite as bad as Paul makes them sound.  Paul ends this section by explaining what it looks like to be dead in our sins.  What it looks like to be dead in our sins and to follow Satan is to live life for ourselves.

Do you hear what he is saying?  He describes what it looks like to be a son of disobedience and what he describes is someone who, “lives according to the passions of their flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and mind.”  He says what it looks like to be a son of disobedience is to live for yourself.  To do what you want to do.  To let yourself be driven by the way you feel, by the desires of your heart.  To let things like your comfort, your preferences, your feelings drive the way you live.  That is what Paul says it means to be dead.  Do you hear what he is saying, all of the sudden we know that we all fit the bill don’t we?  All the sudden following Satan doesn’t mean killing people and joining a gang but it means complaining and saying hurtful things to others.  It means not listening when others talk, it means demanding that you get your way. 

AW Tozer says, “There is within the human heart a tough fibrous root of fallen life whose nature is to possess, always to possess.  It covets things with a deep and fierce passion.  The pronouns “my” and “mine” look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant.  They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could ever do.  They are verbal symptoms of our deep disease.  Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended.  God’s gifts now take the place of God, and the whole course of nature is upset by the monstrous substitution.”

Paul goes on to explain that because of this monstrous substitution we were children of wrath just like everyone else.  Again Paul is universalizing our desperate plight.  He is saying that without Christ all people are under the wrath of God.  Oh what a frightening verse this is. Hebrews 10:31 reminds us that it is “a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”  The wrath of God is not his temper, it is not arbitrary and it doesn’t come out of nowhere.  Stott defines God’s wrath by saying, “God’s wrath is his personal, righteous, constant hostility to evil, his settled refusal to comprise with it, and his resolve to condemn it.”[1]

Oh how desperate our situation was.  Truly it was beyond hope.  We were dead and yet even though we were dead we were actively living like enemies of God.  Guys, Paul’s longing is that we as a people would realize just how desperate our situation was.  How hopeless and impossible and ugly, and undesirable we were.  How we lived like selfish rebellious enemies of our creator who made us and offered us eternal joy and satisfaction in himself.  Guys, until we grasp the depths of our sin we will never understand the massive heights of God’s grace.  Until we acknowledge how worthless we were we will never know how amazing and immeasurable is the grace of our God.  We are so foolish.  We are constantly thinking of ourselves as better than we are. Constantly believing we deserve more then we truly do.  One secular author goes so far as to write, “Man is a wolf; who has the courage to dispute it in the face of all the evidence in his own life and in history.”[2]

I don’t think I will ever forget when I realized the depths of my own sin and even then I know I barely scratched the surface.  I was in Zimbabwe on a mission’s trip with my college basketball team.  We were doing a basketball camp in an absolutely devastated ghetto.  Eighty percent of the people there were out of work, well over fifty percent of them were infected with AIDS and we were teaching them how to play basketball.  We worked all day with them and then when the sun went down we showed them the Jesus movie and talked to them about Jesus.  As we drove off that night it should have been a really special time.  We should have been marveling at the Gospel.  Instead we found out one of the guys on the team had been sharing his water bottle with some of the people in the village.  Some of the team began to tell him how stupid he was and how he could get AIDS from that and the next thing you know everyone in the van was calling him Magic Johnson and laughing.  That night I remember I couldn’t sleep.  I remember sitting in my bed realizing just how insanely wicked my heart was.  I remember thinking who on earth am I?  How could I tell people about Jesus, look them in the eye, hug them, tell them I loved them, and then make light of the disease that was destroying their lives?  Seriously I could not fathom who I was.  I could not fathom the darkness of my heart, and as I thought of the darkness of my heart I could not fathom that God let me live.  I didn’t know why?  I didn’t understand how God could let someone with a heart like mine bear his name.  It didn’t make any sense. 

This is where verse 4 comes and changes everything.  You see verses 1-3 are meant to totally demolish any hope we might have in ourselves, any thought of our own worth, our own merit, and our own goodness.  It comes to kill any hint of self-reliance.  And so as we come to the end of verse 3 we are to be asking the questions that I was asking.  The goal of verse 1-3 is that we might come to the end of ourselves.  That we might despair of having anything to offer God.  He wants us to realize how bankrupt and empty and dead we are on our own.  He wants this so that our hearts are prepared for what Paul has to say in verse 4.  You see verse 4 comes in the midst of our own death, our own sin and selfishness and rebellion, and into that mess Paul shouts “BUT GOD.”  BUT GOD.  You see as we despair of having anything in ourselves to off we find ourselves frantically looking anywhere for hope and into that desperation Paul introduces God.  The God who raises the dead.  Listen to what a God we have.  Even though we are by nature children of wrath Paul says, “BUT GOD being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”  But God, the God of mercy, the God of love, the God of immeasurable grace and kindness has broken in.

Now some of you might be wondering why we had to spend so much time talking about our desperate situation before we began to talk about God’s love.  Why couldn’t we skip the beginning and simply spend the whole sermon on God’s love and how amazing it is, how deep and sweet it is.  I want to tell you why.  It is because when we think of love we immediately presume the depth of love is directly related to the worth of the object.   Let me explain.  When you ask someone why they love their wife or their children you expect to hear things that are special or amazing about their wife or children.  You expect to hear things like, “Oh they are the sweetest kids, they have this smile, this energy, and they are so precious.”  That is what we assume. In other words, if you asked someone why they loved you you would expect them to say things about you in their answer.  You would expect them to say because and then rattle off amazing things about you.  This is because we live in a world full of conditional love.  We live in a world where we love objects because they are lovable.  We love beautiful things, cute things, expensive things, nice things, comfortable things, and unique things.  This is the culture that we live in; it is the way our minds think.

Now let me explain why this is so dangerous.  It is dangerous because if I were to tell you all about the love of God and how much he loves you, what do you think you would naturally begin to think about yourself?  You would naturally begin to assume that you were pretty special.  You would probably reason, “God loves me, he is not stupid, he knows what he is doing, I must be lovable.  He must see something in me that no one else sees.  That would be your logic.  In this way God’s love is actually used to build our own self-esteem.  We use God’s love to make us feel good about who we are.  That is how God’s love is seen in so much of modern Christianity.  God’s love tells us good things about us.

Paul doesn’t want us to think like that.  In fact he wants to make sure we get something into our heads, God’s love is not meant to say anything good about us.  That is why he says that we were dead, enemies, sinners, willing followers of the devil, children of wrath, and sons of disobedience.  Guys could Paul be more clear that God is not loving us because we are special or because there is something in us that is intrinsically worthy of his love?  You see there is a question that Paul wants us to ask after we read about God’s love for us and that question is “how can God possibly love me?”  Paul wants us to be so aware of our desperate and ugly situation that we would say “How can God possibly love me?”  “What could he possibly see in me that would cause him to look upon me with kindness?”  That is the question Paul wants the first three verses in Ephesians 2 to raise.  “Why would God love a corpse?  Why would God love someone who was more entranced with the pleasures of this world then with the beauty of their creator? Why would God love someone who followed around his enemy?” 

Of all the questions the one that shouts the loudest to me is, “How could he love a people who he was angry at?”  Guys this one is massive, how can God possibly love a people he is angry at?  We were all children of God’s wrath, children under his just and righteous anger and yet he loved us.  How?  Do you see the question?  HOW?

Paul’s answer is one word.  It is the word “Grace.”  “Grace”, oh what a word.  You see Grace is a word that turns all the attention away from us and back onto God.  Grace takes all the attention off of its object and shines it directly on the one giving it.  If God’s love is grace then it has nothing to do with what we deserve.  If God’s love is grace then it doesn’t say anything good about us.  It can’t be used to boost our self-esteem because it has his love was not based on anything lovable in us.  In fact if his love is grace it is actually based on our unworthiness.  That is what grace means.  It is undeserved favor. 

You see when I sat there in my bed in Africa wondering how God could possibly let me live when I had such a wicked and dark heart the answer was GRACE.  And the darker my heart, the more unworthy I was of God’s love and the more powerfully his grace could be known.  That is why God has chosen to save sinners.  He has chosen to save those who were dead, who were enemies, who were under his wrath.  It was to show the immeasurable greatness of his grace.

I pray that you won’t misunderstand what I am saying.  Our God does love us.  Never doubt his love.  His Love is real and it is huge and it is for us.  He loves us.  All the blessings we have been talking about are demonstrations of his love for us.  But what I want you to see is you don’t have to find a reason for his love in yourself anymore.  Do you hear me?  Guys I want you to realize how freeing this is.  You do not have to find a reason for God’s love inside of you anymore. 

When you sin and fail you no longer have to wallow in despair.  You no longer have to sit around and wonder how God could possibly love you.  You don’t have to because you have an answer.  It is grace.  His love is not about what you deserve, it’s about how big his grace is.  Yes you don’t deserve it.  Yes you will never find something in yourself that is worthy of God’s love, but, your God is a God of grace and that means he loves people who don’t deserve it.  He loves the unworthy, the unlovable, the dead, the selfish, the rebels.  Don’t you see that our unworthiness is the canvas that allows his grace to shine the brightest?

Oh my friends we must get rid of the ridiculous idea that God’s love for us is because of anything in us.  We must remember that the love of God was shown on the cross and none of us deserve the cross. The cross was the place where God showed how much he loved people he was angry at and it wasn’t because they deserved his love.  In fact the reason he was angry with them was because they deserved his anger.  And yet because he is a God of grace he was able to pour out his love on undeserving sinners.  Oh how amazing that our God is a God of grace.  On the cross he poured out his just wrath against our pathetic sin on his own son so that he might pour out his grace upon us.  On the cross we see just how desperate our situation was.  My friends we must not minimize our sin.  We must not minimize our desperate plight; it cost our Savior his life.  He died to be able to pour out his love on sinners.  Jesus died to cloth the undeserving with his righteousness so that God could pour out his love upon them.  Last week we talked about how the greatness of God’s immeasurable power was demonstrated when he raised his perfect son Jesus from the dead and seated him at his right hand in heaven and gave him all power and authority.  That is where the immeasurable greatness of his power was shown.

Here Paul shows us where the immeasurable richness of his grace was shown.  The immeasurable riches of his grace was shown when he chose not only to raise his deserving Son from the dead, but when he chose to raise up dead sinners with him.  He has chosen not merely to raise his son who deserved it but in order to show his grace he has chosen to make dead sinners alive together with Christ.  It’s amazing, it seems Paul actually makes up a word in order to express this idea.  He puts two words together to mean, “Made alive together with him.”  Instead of saying this using multiple words which would be typical he shoves words together so that he can say it all in one word.  You see for Paul the unity of Christ with his people is so important he wants to demonstrate it by making up one word to show what it means to be united with Christ.  To be “Made alive together with him.” 

Guy’s our God is a God of grace.  He has saved sinners so that both now and forever more we might be living testimonies of his glorious grace.  Oh my friends I beg that we might understand God’s grace.  That his grace would draw all of our attention off of ourselves and return it to the God who alone is worthy of our worship.  That his grace would smother all our pride.  Oh how foolish is pride for dead people raised from the grave through the death and resurrection of the perfect Son of God.  Oh how foolish is our arrogance in the face of that reality.  And oh how ridiculous is our despair.  You see both despair and self righteousness has at their source the same problem, their attention is on ourselves.  In our pride we look at ourselves and somehow are deceived into liking what we see, in despair we look at ourselves and rightly reject what we see and yet we refuse to take our eyes off of it but instead choose to wallow in our hopelessness.

Paul calls the Ephesians to look at themselves only long enough to kill their self-reliance and to cause them to look away from themselves in desperation.  That is what looking at ourselves is meant to do.  To cause us to look away in desperation and when we look away we find that our God has not abandon us.  Instead we find that His grace is greater than our sin.  Oh you who despair of your sin look to your savior.  Listen as Paul shouts “BUT GOD.”  Oh sinner, you are no match for the grace of God.  Do not be a fool, your sin is no match for his grace, and your depravity cannot compete with his blood.  His death was sufficient and his love has never been dependant upon anything in you.  So, tonight worship him.  Worship him for his grace.  Get your eyes off of yourself and gaze upon him, for he and he alone is worthy of your worship.

 

 


[1] Stott The message of Ephesians 76.

[2] Freud.  Quoted by Driscol in Doctrine, what Christians should believe.  156.

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