I suppose we are all familiar with the categories of sin and depravity. We are all familiar with the Bible’s ugly descriptions of fallen humanity and equally familiar with the internal corroboration of our hearts and the external corroboration of our lives. The simple fact is, we are sinners. We are people who have offended a holy God and people who act out that rebellion every day.
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I know you have read the second chapter of Ephesians and reveled in the beauty of what God has done in calling some people away from a life of rebellion and toward a life of righteousness. What Christian hasn’t read it with joy? What Christian hasn’t seen the word “but” there and rejoiced that God entered in and changed everything? “But God…”
I wonder if you’ve noticed one fascinating little part of the text—the change in actors or the change in agency.
Read the first three verses of the text, and allow me just a little bit of liberty with the pronouns:
And I was dead in the trespasses and sins in which I once walked, as I followed the course of this world, as I followed the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in me and in all the sons of disobedience—among whom I once lived in the passions of my flesh, carrying out the desires of my body and my mind, and I was by nature a child of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Ephesians 2:1-3)
You can hardly fail to notice that it’s all about me. This is who I am when left on my own, when left to live my own life in my own way. And it’s not a pretty picture. It’s an ugly plummet from sin to sin, from spiritual disobedience to spiritual death and destruction.
And then there is the word “but,” and look what happens after that.
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which God loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, God made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and God raised us up with him and God seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages God might show the immeasurable riches of God’s grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
You can hardly fail to notice that it’s all about God. This is who God is when God acts in accordance with his character. And it’s a beautiful picture. It’s a beautiful progression from love to mercy to grace to life to righteousness to glory.
The point and the purpose is simple. When we take action, we find only destruction. When God begins to move, we are given grace.