The spiritually dead person is alienated from the life of God. There is no capacity for a response. And it isn't just a question of being dead and inanimate. It's like John Eady, the great Scotch commentator, said, it's a case of death walking. They are literal spiritual zombies.
Because they don't know they're dead, they're still going through some motions. Welcome to Grace to You with the Bible teaching of John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Listen to self-help gurus today, and you'll likely hear them tell you how to make failure a thing of your past, or maybe how to use pain to your advantage, or even how to tap into the power you already possess in order to change your life. Problem is, self-help speakers don't point you to the only source of real life-changing power.
But that's exactly where John MacArthur leads you today on Grace to You. Find out how to use the immense spiritual resources God has designed you for if you're a Christian, and see why, as the title of John's study says, you are richer than you think. Turn to Ephesians chapter two and you can follow along as John begins the lesson. We ask ourselves often the question, what does it mean to be saved? What does it mean to be a Christian?
What does it mean to be really born again?
Well, here is the definition of that. And there's a lot of confusion about it. There are a lot of people, as we know, claiming to be born again today that it's very obvious don't know the meaning of it. I remember when I was speaking to a group of movie people, actors and actresses, in Hollywood one time. And I presented Jesus Christ of this handsome, strikingly handsome, a dark-complexioned man from India who was an actor, a young actor.
And I got all finished and he came up to me and he said, I am a Muslim. But he said, What you have said has intrigued me and I would like to have Jesus Christ. And I thought, boy, that's fabulous, because you don't have Muslims do that very, very often.
So we went off in a little side room at the hotel where it was happening, and I presented Christ to him, and he prayed a little prayer, and he invited Jesus Christ into his life, and then he opened his eyes and looked at me and said, And now, isn't it wonderful? He said, I have Jesus and Muhammad. And I said, I don't think you understand. Christianity is not going up to the shelf and saying, I'll take one of those, and let's see, one of those. That isn't it.
A lot of confusion about what it means to be a Christian. What it means to have Christ, what it means to be born again. But if you look with me at Ephesians 2:1 to 10, it ought to eliminate any doubt and any question. Because it's here.
Now, remember that the book of Ephesians is concerned with what it means to be in Christ, what it means to be one with Jesus Christ, what it means to be a part of his body, the church, of which he is the head, what it means to have been master-planned into the body from before the world began. We saw in chapter one. Through verse 14, that Paul presents the master plan of God in eternity past. Then in verses 15 to 23, he prays that we would understand it, that we would really get a grip on the meaning of being in Christ, what it means to be a part of God's eternal plan, what it means to have been elected, redeemed, and granted an inheritance forever with God. We've talked about the tremendous wonders of our position.
All that we have in having Christ is in chapter 1.
Now, Paul moves from eternity past in chapter one into time in chapter two. In chapter 2, we find the Apostle Paul describing the very process of salvation, the very act of salvation, the very miracle of salvation that drew us into realizing this eternal plan. The plan is in one. How you get in it is in chapter two.
Now, I want to tie another thing into your thinking also. The Apostle Paul is very concerned that we understand that as Christians, we are possessors of the power of God. All right? It isn't just that when you're saved, you get your sins forgiven, plus nothing. No, no.
You receive all the power of God. It's all there at the moment of salvation, and that's the message of verse 19 of chapter 1. where he is praying that we would understand The exceeding greatness of his power toward us who believe according to the already present working of his mighty power. In other words, Paul is praying, oh God, may these Christians know, may they know the tremendous power that is theirs in you. That's what is on his mind.
He wants us to understand this power. And so he gives an illustration of it in verse 20. Remember, we looked at it last time. It is the power with which he raised Christ from the dead and set him at the right hand. It is resurrection power, it is exaltation power, okay?
That's his first illustration. He's praying, oh God, may these Christians understand their resource, their reservoir, their power, their might. their energy. May they know what they have in having Christ. And in order to illustrate that, he says, it is the power that was so powerful, it unlocked the chains of death and set Christ free and drew him right up to an exalted place at the right hand of God.
That's the power. Further, he says in chapter 2, it is the power that raised you from the dead and lifted you to the exaltation of the sons of God to sit you at the right hand of God with Christ. In other words, this is point two. To understand the power of God, look at the resurrection of Christ and His exaltation. Secondly, to understand the power of God, look at your resurrection and your exaltation.
You say, what do you mean? Have I been raised from the dead? Have I been exalted? Yes. Spiritually, that's already happened.
Physically, it'll happen in the future.
Someday you'll be raised out of this world. Physically, the redemption of the body. Romans 8 talks about, and you'll be with Christ, and you'll be in his image.
Someday, the resurrection and exaltation of the body. But already past tense, if you're a Christian, God has accomplished the resurrection and exaltation of your soul, of your spirit. And that's the miracle Paul wants to talk about in chapter 2. And in so discussing it, presents to us a great picture of the doctrine of salvation. But really, this presentation is an illustration of the power of God granted to the believer.
Now, let's look at it. And as we examine this, verses one to ten. I want you to see. Six aspects of salvation.
Now, the general outline of this text is that he presents. Salvation in three tenses: past, verses 1 to 3, present, verses 4 to 6, and 8 and 9, and future, verses 7 and 10. He sees the past, the present, and the future. of the Christian What he was, what he is, what he will be as salvation takes place. And so we're looking at that.
But under that general thrust, I want you to see six aspects of salvation. And these are the sick. Salvation is colon. From sin. By love.
Into life with purpose through faith unto good works.
Now we'll give those one at a time. First, Salvation is from sin. From sin. And this deals with the past. The past From sin.
Look at verse 1. And you, and we'll skip the part that's italicized. If in your Bible it's italicized, that's meaning it's added, and it's all right there, but we'll skip it because it picks up later in the. in the text. And you who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which in time past, now you see we're in the past tense of the Christian life, you walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience.
Among whom Also, we all had our manner of life, it's past tense again, in times past, in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. We'll stop right there.
Now, there is probably no clearer statement on the sinfulness of man in the New Testament than that. That really delineates it. And it makes Paul's first point. You are a sinner and you are dead.
Now, if he's going to tell us about God's power, God's power is best demonstrated in resurrection. And the resurrection of Christ was demonstration number one, and your resurrection from sin is demonstration number two. If you're a Christian, you've already been raised from the deadness of sin. And maybe that's a greater miracle than physical resurrection. Look with me at verse 1 again.
and you who were dead.
Now, this describes the condition of every individual. You were dead.
Now, listen to me. If you're a Christian, this is your past. If you're not a Christian, this is your present. This is where you are right now. You're dead.
You see, man's trouble is not that he's out of harmony with his environment. Man's trouble is not that he can't make meaningful relationships. Man's trouble is he is dead. In 4:18 of Ephesians, it says he is alienated from the life of God, so that his deadness is not deadness in the physical, it is deadness in the spiritual. He is dead to God.
His body is alive, but his inner man, spiritually speaking, is dead. You say, what does it mean to be alienated from the life of God, dead to God? The best way to see it is in reference to physical death. Physical death is an inability to respond. And no matter what the stimulus is, physical death means you can't react.
You've been to enough funerals, and so have I to know what physical death is. Doesn't matter what the stimulus is, no physically dead individual ever reacts to any stimulus. I remember one time I was sitting in my office over here.
some years back and a little Boy came banging on the door and And he was crying, and he said, Are you the reverend? Are you the reverend? And I said, Yes. And he said, Come, please, come, please, quickly, quickly. And so he took off running, and I ran after him.
We ran down Roscoe Boulevard, halfway down this block, and Cross the street into a house and And I got in the house, and the lady was standing there, a young lady, and she was weeping, and the tears were running down her face. And I said, Well, what is it? What's wrong? And she said, My baby is dead. My baby is dead.
My baby is dead. And she pointed to the bedroom, and I walked in, and lying on the bed was a little lifeless baby of about three months. It was turning a funny kind of a blue color, and there was absolutely no breath at all. And I asked her if she had tried to revive the baby, and she said yes. Yes, and she picked up the baby and she caressed the baby to her breast and loved it and kissed it and cried tears all over its little head, but there was absolutely no response.
And soon the ambulance arrived, and they were unable to do anything. The baby was dead. And I thought to myself, you know, I'm sure. That in terms of human relationships, the very strongest stimulus there is is the love of a mother for a little infant. If that mother can't get a response out of that little infant, that's death.
Physical death, the inability to respond. Spiritual death is the same thing. All the caresses and all of the affection and all the tears and the love of God draw out absolutely nothing. Because a spiritually dead person is alienated from the life of God. There is no capacity for a response.
And it isn't just a question of being dead and inanimate. It's like John Eady, the great Scotch commentator, said: it's a case of death walking. They are literal spiritual zombies because they don't know they're dead, they're still going through some motions. Death walking. Jesus put the two concepts together, physical death and spiritual death, in the eighth chapter of Matthew when he called a certain man to be his disciple and follow him.
And the man said, Well, I'll follow you, but first let me go home and bury my father. And Jesus said in Matthew 8:22, let the dead bury their dead. And he put them both together: let the spiritually dead bury the physically dead. I've got better things for you to do. And so it is that man is in a state of death walking.
1 Timothy 5:6, Paul said, She that lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. It's a case of going through a zombie-like activity. And what is the activity of the death walker? Look at it, verse 1. Dead in trespasses and sins, functioning in the area of sin, functioning in the area of trespass.
Now, I want you to notice something. We are not dead because of sin. We are dead because we were born sinful. We are not dead because we commit sin. We don't do a sin and then die.
We're born dead. That's why we sin. I always think of it this way. I am not a liar. Because I lie.
I lie in the first place because in my heart, what? I'm a liar. A man does not kill and thus he is a murderer. He kills because he is a murderer. The Bible says that it is what comes out of a man.
that defiles the man. And we are dead, and that deadness functions in sinfulness. The in here in the Greek is what is called a locative of sphere. It is talking about the sphere in which we live. It is not a because of, it is an in, it is a location, a position.
And by the way, The opposite of being in Christ is being in trespasses and sin. The word sins is interesting. Hamartia. Very familiar word. It's a hunter's word.
It means to miss the target, to miss the mark. A man shoots his arrow and misses the target. The second word, paraptama, the word trespass, means to slip or fall or stumble or go the wrong direction. Both are true of man. And I don't know, commentators through the years have tried to make distinctions between what these two words mean.
They're basically two ways of looking at the same thing. And it's just that God uses two words, and both of them in the plural, to show the totality of sinfulness that is the result of deadness. Being alienated from the life of God means total deadness, total sinfulness.
Now you say, but hamartii, in the sense of missing the mark, what do you mean by that?
Now, watch. This is the real, true biblical definition of sin. Sin is a failure to hit God's heart. Target. All right, well, you say, what's God's target?
Here it is, listen. For all have sinned. Even Kai there. Come short of the what? Glory of God.
Sin is A failure To glorify God. Romans 1 says that. When they knew God, they what? Glorified him not as God. That is sin.
Sin is coming short of glorifying God. It does not mean when we say a person is a sinner, it does not mean that they're all the same level of vile, rotten, degraded, corrupt, decaying sinners. You could have 20 dead corpses, and they could all have varying degrees of decay. They'd all be dead, but different degrees of decay. And so it is in human history and humankind.
All are dead, but there are variances in the decadence, in the decaying of what is left. But sin is not a question of decay ultimately, it is a question of falling short of something. In other words, now listen to this. We all understand that a robber is a sinner, and a murderer is a sinner, and a rapist is a sinner, and a liar is a sinner, and so forth, and so forth, and so forth. We're all clued in on that.
But listen to me. Sin Has much more to do with what you don't do than what you do. You got that? Sin is really not an issue of what you do, but of what you fail to do. It is that you fail to come to the glory of God.
It is that you fail, Matthew 5:48, where Jesus said, Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect, and that's where we fail, right? Or, as it is written, 1 Peter 1:16, be ye holy, for I am holy. Glory. Holiness, perfection, that's the target, and that's where we fail.
Now, there may be different levels of morality, different degrees of decadence, but we all fall short. It would be as if the whole congregation from Grace all lined up on the Pacific Ocean and said, We're going to have a jump-off, folks. We're going to see who can jump to Catalina. And you can have as long a run as you want. And we'll all run down to the beach and everybody jump, and we'll see who gets there.
Listen, we'd all end up at different levels in the water, but nobody would get to Catalina. And the same thing is true in terms of the spiritual. There are different levels of attainment in human life, there are different levels of morality and so forth, but nobody gets to the glory of God, and nobody gets to perfection, and nobody gets to holiness. That's why we only know that in Jesus Christ when his righteousness is given to us by God. You see, it is not so much that sin is what I do, it is what I fail to do.
I'm trying to jump to perfection, I don't make it, and I land in the sea of sin.
So, my behavioral sins are simply what is left when I can't make it to God's standard. And I say that because a lot of times we meet good people. And we say, I'm a good guy. I mean, I do civic good, humanitarian good. I'm a wonderful father.
I love my wife, love my kids, take care of things. I'm very generous, very kind. Listen, nobody would ever deny that, and that's very wonderful. I mean, that's a good way to be. Jesus recognized that in Luke chapter 6, verse 33.
Jesus said, If you do good to them who do good to you, what thanks do you have? Sinners do the same. Jesus said sinners do good to each other. That's right. People do good to each other, but Jesus said, people who do good to each other are still called what?
Sitter. Because sinning is not an issue of what you're doing to each other. It's not relational. You can't say, well, I'm all right because I do good to people. That isn't the point.
The point is, it's what you don't do, and you don't live a holy life, and you don't live a perfect life, and you don't reach the standard which is the glory of God. That's the issue. And in Luke 11, 13. Jesus said this. If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask?
In other words, he says, you know, there are people who give good gifts to their children. What kind of people are those, Lord? Evil? What do you mean, evil?
Well, their evil is not manifest in the fact that they do good for their children. It's manifest in what they don't do and can't do. And that is to reach the standard of the glory of God. Let me show it to you another way. John 16:8.
And when he has come, the Holy Spirit. He will reprove the world of sin.
Now, watch. The Holy Spirit is going to convict people of sin. He's going to move into the hearts of men and convict them of sin. What sin? Verse 9: Of sin because they believe not on me.
Now, notice: the sin of which the Spirit will convict is the sin of not doing something. You see that? It's not the sin of doing something, it's the sin of not doing it. You are not living to the glory of God, you are not perfect, you are not holy because you are not believing on Jesus Christ. And no matter what else you do, you're just ankle deep in the sea a long way from the goal.
That's the problem.
So, man is dead. He is dead in his inability to reach God's standard. and he falls and slips and stumbles and goes the wrong direction. Because of his deadness, he is a death-walking zombie. manifesting a total inability To accomplish God's standard, even though from time to time he manifests some moral goodness.
So is A death walker. Let's look at verse 2. What you say, well, uh What environment is he functioning in? This death walker who is Wandering through Existence What is the sphere in which he Functions. All right, verse 2.
In which, in time past, you walked according to the course of this cosmos. This world, this age, stop right there. First thing he says You are not only dead. Before you're a Christian. But you are functioning as a death walker doing sins and trespasses.
According to the course of the world. In other words, you are a victim of the spirit of the age. People say Well, we do what we want. My football coach used to say to me, I'd become a Christian, but I want to do what I want. And I say to him, but you're not doing what you want.
You're doing what the world dictates. You are walking according to the course of the cosmos.
Now, the word cosmos here doesn't speak of the physical world, it speaks more of the ideological world of sin, the conceptual world of evil, the system of Satan, the system which he generates. In other words, the zombie, the death walker, does indulge in the sins of the times. He's right up on him. He's current. He lives according to the world's standards, the world's values in his own time.
He's conducting himself in complete harmony with the spirit of the age. The Germans call it the Zeitgeist. The spirit of the times. He just does what the world does. It is an age alienated from God, and he has a mind alienated from God.
They're in harmony with each other. He just walks in the sphere of sin in the spirit of the age. The cosmos Which Satan dominates according to John 12:31, the prince of this world. Jesus said, he dominates it. And it pressures man, and man succumbs and does what the world system tells him to do.
That's total depravity. Total depravity is death walking. Death walking In sin and trespass according to the spirit of the age. That's total depravity. Doesn't mean you never do a good thing, it just means you're locked into a circle that you can't escape.
A death walk. in the spirit of the age. You're listening to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. The title of John's current study, Richer Than You Think.
Now, today John used some well interesting terms to describe unbelievers. He called them zombie-like and death walkers. makes you wonder how there could ever be hope for any of us. I mean, what can a spiritually dead person do to make himself spiritually alive? Here's how John answered that question.
Nothing. Nothing. That is why Jesus said to Nicodemus, You must be born from above. That's a very, very well chosen metaphor. You must be born from above.
Uh y you didn't contribute to your first birth. Obviously nobody contributes to their physical birth. And that is why Jesus used that analogy. You had no contribution to your first birth. and you make no contribution to your second birth.
You didn't make a contribution to your first birth because obviously you didn't exist.
Well, you can't make a contribution to your new birth because, you know, in a sense, you don't exist either. spiritually dead. You are a nothing, a no-one. virtually none existent. Theologians have called that the doctrine of absolute inability.
Absolute inability. That is the foundation of our understanding of God's work of salvation. All the other elements of salvation. Come together. and find their place based on this doctrine.
To say it another way, The foundational doctrine. on which salvation's understanding is built. is the doctrine of human depravity. total depravity. This is the fundamental problem of all humanity.
It is not a lack of self esteem that is man's problem. It is not that he is out of harmony with his environment. It is that he is dead, virtually nonexistent. He needs life. That's right, friend.
And you probably have some questions about what John called the doctrine of absolute inability or other doctrines related to your salvation. To help answer your questions, let me recommend John's book called The Doctrines of Grace. It looks at core issues of salvation that you may never have considered. Order a copy of The Doctrines of Grace when you call or go online today. The phone number to call 80055 GRACE and our website gty.org.
The Doctrines of Grace costs twenty dollars and shipping is free. This book tackles foundational questions, challenging content about man's sinfulness and the work Jesus Christ accomplished to save sinners. It's an ideal resource to review with someone you've been discipling. Again, to order John's book called The Doctrines of Grace, call us at 800-55GRACE or shop online at gty.org. And when you visit gty.org, be sure to catch up on any articles you may have missed on the Grace TU blog.
And remember, the blog features only some of thousands of free resources available at our website, including more than 3,600 sermons by John MacArthur, all of them free to download in MP3 and transcript format. Our web address one more time, gty.org.
Now for the entire Grace DU staff, I'm Phil Johnson with a question. How would your life change if you inherited $1 billion?
Well, if you're a Christian, you have something more valuable. See what I mean? Join us again tomorrow for 30 minutes of Unleashing God's Truth, one verse at a time, on grace to you.
