The Dead Alive by Grace: A Beautiful Workmanship
Text: Ephesians 2:8–10 ESV
Our section this morning is the third of three sections in Ephesians 2:1–10. Don started this larger section in Ephesians 2:1–3 by explaining the black-backdrop of our lives when we were dead in our sin and Andrew moved us forward to the great news in Ephesians 2:4–7 of our amazing God and his breaking-in to our lives for our good and his glory.
All along in this larger section there has been a biblical language that is deep and amazing. Paul is using words and word-images that are steeped in biblical tradition but are not common in the world, and are becoming even less understood as our culture moves away from a Christianized context. For instance, look at Ephesians 2:1–3 with me.
“And 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.” (Ephesians 2:1–3 ESV)
There are phrases that should jump out to us as language that is odd and must have broader meaning in the rest of Scripture. Dead, trespasses and sins, children of wrath. These are the words that help paint the picture of how bleak our scenario is.
We are dead…not literally, but spiritually. Spiritually we do not just need a little boost, some guidance or direction. We don’t need instruction manuals, we don’t need better thoughts, we don’t need a new path. We don’t need wisdom or counseling or medication. As Don and Andrew both pointed out, we are not just treading water, waiting for a life preserver. We are on the bottom of the ocean, not moving. We need someone to drag us to shore and begin CPR.
This isn’t a new picture in Scripture. The prophet Ezekiel spoke about this death as well. Look with me at Ezekiel 37:1–14:
“The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones. And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold, they were very dry. And he said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.””
“So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.” So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army.
Then he said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are indeed cut off.’ Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will bring you into the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and raise you from your graves, O my people. And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will do it, declares the LORD.””
(Ezekiel 37:1–14 ESV)
This picture of the people of the whole of Israel includes you as well, Table Rock. Israel’s history demonstrated that the very presence of God amongst them, and having his very good law, and even being in the land he promised them would not be enough for them as long as they were spiritually dead. They needed God to bring them to life, and you need that as well.
And it is because of your “trespasses and sins” that this is your problem. Paul explains this well right here in Ephesians. Israel, you and I, we were all living in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the mind and the body (Ephesians 2:3). This isn’t a category people who are not Christian walk around with every day. They carry out the desires of their mind and body because they have no other desire. They can see that God is here in his world, but they don’t desire what he desires. They are dead, just like we were.
And that brings us to the wrath of God in this first section. This is a difficult phrase because it brings up so many hard images, but at its core it points out that you are I, left in our sins, are an enemy of God.
“The LORD is a jealous and avenging God; the LORD is avenging and wrathful; the LORD takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies.”
(Nahum 1:2 ESV)
Paul says in Romans 1:18:
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.”
(Romans 1:18 ESV)
Dead, trespasses and sins, children of wrath. These words and pictures are important. They are pointing us to this big picture of the despair of our situation as we lived in the world, in our sin. This is the dark backdrop of our life without God’s intercession. These biblically saturated ideas continue throughout the next section.
“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.”
(Ephesians 2:4–7 ESV)
Mercy, love, alive, raised and seated in Jesus. Where the ideas of Ephesians 2:1–3 might bring us to our knees in desperation and sorrow, these words are meant to be a ray of blinding light piercing through the darkness.
Mercy. Mercy is God’s ability to pass over the trespasses and sins that we have. He has every right to require us to live according to his plans, and when he finds a way to not count those sins to us, that is mercy. Despite what you may think, God has always been a merciful God to his people. As Moses is up on Mount Sinai, standing before God, this is what God says:
“The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.””
(Exodus 34:6–7 ESV)
Jesus uses the picture in Matthew 18:21–35 of a debtor having his great debt, an unpayable debt, removed in an instant by merciful creditor. This was you and me, unable to pay, forever indebted. And God gave us this mercy through Jesus:
“[Jesus] whom God put forward as a propitiation [sacrifice of atonement] by his blood, to be received by faith.”
(Romans 3:25 ESV)
And God chooses to show us this mercy in love. Not the kind of love you and I often have—a love that is seeking to fill a hole, a love that is always somewhat self-serving. He did this by a love that Romans 5:6–8 describes as wholly different than our love:
“For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
(Romans 5:6–8 ESV)
Hebrews 12:1–2 tells us that Jesus went to the cross for JOY, not compulsion or self-interest. God loves out of plenty, being fully content and loved within the trinity. We are told in 1 John 4:10 that this is love:
“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
(1 John 4:10 ESV)
And the result of this amazing mercy and love is you are now alive!
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
(2 Corinthians 5:7 ESV)
What Ezekiel is prophesying you have experienced in Jesus Christ! God has taken you out of your grave, taken your very dry bones, and knit them back together in love, through mercy. That you would be alive.
In addition to all this, God gives you an inheritance with Jesus Christ. As we talked about in Ephesians 1:11–14 this inheritance comes as you are now sons and daughters of God most high and you have been filled with his very Spirit. This is amazingly good news!
Grace!
I have spent a large part of this sermon this morning in review because our section is actually the application and conclusion of this section. You need to see this dichotomy of words and ideas and understand and feel what they mean for you and have the right response.
On the one side you should see dead, trespasses and sins, children of wrath and on the other side you should see mercy, love, alive, raised and seated with Christ. Seeing these two groups contrasted together should be an explosion of thought and emotion.
This last Friday night, sitting at dinner with my kids, the sun was just slighting peaking out from under these gray clouds that we have been living under recently, right at sunset. And against the encroaching black night sky radiant pinks, light blues and crimson streaks leapt out of the sky. As you think about your life and your predicament and then the amazing movement of God to reach out, show you mercy, make you alive, and raise you in glory with Jesus you should be thinking and feeling a bubbling up and a realization that can only result in one glorious exclamation like a sunset across the black sky: Grace! Unmerited favor from God!
For Paul this begins to bubble out even in Ephesians 2:3–7. Paul can’t even complete his thoughts about the good news of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ when he exclaims that this is all grace. Exclaiming grace—unmerited favor—is Paul’s application for us in this section. Where mercy is God overlooking our sins in Jesus, grace the amazing life he gifts us. We don’t deserve to be made alive again. We don’t deserve to be loved. We don’t deserve to be raised with Jesus and seated in the heavenly places.
As Paul is living out a very real demonstration of our application of this section right before us this morning, he also notices a very real threat. If this grace is as amazing as we are saying, then we shouldn’t be surprised by where Paul goes next in our passage this morning. Like every villain in every movie we have seen, if it looks attractive and good then someone—namely you and I—will want to try to buy it, find the secret to getting it, or work to achieve the same outcome on our own.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”
(Ephesians 2:8–10 ESV)
After describing and exclaiming the joys of this grace, Paul wants to be clear. You can only obtain this grace in one way—through faith.
Now you might be surprised reading this passage that there has been a lot of ink spilled trying to decide how grace, faith, and the word “this” right after those two words work together. Some have written that “this” refers only to your salvation. That would mean the main point of this section is a reminder that you are saved by God and this saving is not of your own doing but is a gift. Some say the “this” relates to faith. That would add to Paul’s meaning and additionally remind us that not only is your salvation only by God’s undeserved favor, but your faith is a gift from him as well. Some say the phrase should read more like “saved through faithfulness,” meaning this was Paul’s shorthand that you were saved by the faithfulness of Jesus to come and live a righteous life on your behalf and die for you and this all was a gift.
On the one hand, we want to simply say Amen! That you are saved through no work of your own is very obvious from the previous verses in Ephesians 2:1–7—God had to do it all. There are other places, like Philippians 2:8 and Hebrews 3:2 that say Jesus himself was faithful to God in his life and mission and accomplished our salvation through his faithfulness.
Yet here, when Paul has already shown us how little we did in our salvation in the previous seven verses, it seems he is doubling down to point out that even our faith is not something we can do. There are many other verses that say this. In fact, we were just in Acts which mentions this in several places, including Acts 5:31, 11:18, 13:48, 16:14. The scholar Abraham Kuyper says this:
Nearly all the church fathers […] judged that the words “it is the gift of God” refer to faith […] this was the exegesis […] of those that spoke the Greek language and were familiar with the peculiar Greek construction.[1]
This would be the death blow to any desire you and I might have to earn this grace from God. The entire process would be his, from start to finish. Even the faith necessary to believe would be a “gift” and it would be that way so that “no one could boast.”
This pattern, where God has to intercede into our lives from start to finish is all over Scripture. In Genesis 6:8 Noah finds favor in the eyes of God, not because of anything he did but because God wanted to show him favor. In Genesis 12 God blesses Abraham and those through him, but not because of any action of his, this is Paul’s whole argument in Romans 4. And we see this pattern again and again: Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, David, and Samuel (all mentioned in Hebrews 11 in the “Hall of Faith”).
Your faith, my faith, our trust in God only comes from him. As Paul says to the Philippians in Philippians 1:29
“For it has been granted [given, gifted] to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake,”
(Philippians 1:29 ESV)
The suffering is give/gifted (as we saw throughout Job) because God has also gifted to you to believe, to have faith, the very thing you need in your suffering. This is exactly what Paul is saying here in Ephesians 2:9. Everything in your life is a gift from God and grace, including the faith to believe in him.
This entire section of Ephesians 2:8–10 is leading you to two main actions out of this grand application for Ephesians 2:1–10.
First, can you have the same response as Paul and exclaim “Grace!”? Can you imagine his poor scribe in this section? Here Paul is talking, going along with a great, succinct explanation of the gospel, and right in his telling of the joys of God’s intrusion into our life through Jesus Christ he yells out “by grace you have been saved!” I imagine the scribe wondering if this was a holy version of Turrets syndrome, and asking Paul, “Do you want that in there or was that just you having a moment with the Holy Spirit?”
Do you ever feel that way about God’s plan for you? Do you marvel and wonder at his plan that was enacted for you, with no help and not because of anything you did? When you see your situation, when you your amazing God, do you exclaim “Grace!”? What would that look like? How would you talk differently to one another? Would you be faster to proclaim grace to your friends when they are struggling in their faith? Would you be faster to proclaim that to yourself? What can stand in your way to exclaim grace to your neighbors and coworkers if God has done all this for you?
Second, the conclusion of this section ends with a clear statement and call to each of us:
“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:10 ESV)
God has done this mighty work on our behalf because God has prepared good works for us to walk in. Before he even made you he has set aside good works for you to do. When we remove even our faith as something we have done as a potential work, this is the moment where you realize your distinction from our Catholic brothers and sisters. You are not saved by good works, but you are saved for good works. This very concept is why Jesus, Paul and the other writers of Scripture have no problem calling you to action. They require you to be a good neighbor, a good parent, a good spouse, an active member of the church because they know you have been created for good works in all these areas. Not as a way to save yourself, but as a way to walk out the life that God bought through your salvation and your very faith.
What good works do you need to walk in today? Not to save yourself, but to now live out this life that God has worked in you? Is there something you are neglecting to do, because it seems too hard, because you know you might fail? What fear is there in walking out your faith if it is an expression of your new life and is not earning you anything? This is where we will be heading in Ephesians as Paul tells us many good deeds we are called to walk in now our salvation is secured!
Conclusion
Christian, your whole life in Jesus Christ is grace. A great example of Gods favor on those who don’t deserve it. We are called to exclaim this grace throughout our life and to walk now in the good deeds of God with no fear, not even that we are securing or proving our faith, knowing our God is the God who has made the dead alive and will surely keep you and I alive to the end in Christ Jesus.
[1] Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit, (Trs H De Vries: Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1946), 407-8, accessed at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/kuype… on 1 February 2020. The chapter is entitled ‘Defective Learning’, and can be accessed at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/kuype…