Ephesians 2:1-3
“And you he made alive, when you were dead in the trespasses and sins 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—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.”
This passage carries over from the previous chapter; it is part of Paul’s desire that we would understand who we are in Christ. At the beginning of Chapter 2 Paul emphasizes that God also demonstrated his power in that even though we were “dead” through sin, the Lord has raised and exalted us with Christ (2.1-7).
In the first three verses of Chapter 2, Paul describes the human condition apart from God. He is not giving us a portrait of some particularly decadent tribe or degraded segment of society, or even of the extremely corrupt paganism of his own day. This is the biblical diagnosis of fallen man in fallen society everywhere.
Lest any reader think of himself as somehow exempt from the condition of sin and death that Paul describes, he quickly goes on to write that the fallen, corrupted condition is something in which “we all once lived,” thereby adding himself and his fellow Jews to the list of affected people. Then he concludes with a reference to “the rest of mankind.”
Here then is the apostle’s estimate of every man without God, of the universal human condition.
“And you he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked” (verses 1–2).
The death to which Paul refers is not a figure of speech; it is a factual statement of every person’s spiritual condition apart from Christ. The cause of this death is “trespasses and sins.”
A ‘trespass’ (paraptoma) is a false step, involving either the crossing of a known boundary or a deviation from the right path. A ‘sin’ (hamartia), however, means a missing of the mark, a falling short of a standard.
Together the two words cover the active and passive aspects of human wrongdoing. They cover sins of commission and of omission. Before God we are both rebels and failures. As a result, we are ‘dead’ and ‘alienated from the life of God’ (4:18).
“Your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you so that he does not hear” (Isaiah 59.2).
This description of our condition apart from Christ is dreadful news. However, good news is coming.
“For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 3.23-24)
