Salvation, Part 1: The Problem
I have many things on my mind lately that I’d like to get down on paper screen. I thought this was the most important at the moment so I’d like to deal with this before we get on to some other pressing issues.
A student of mine asked me to write down some verses about salvation for her. I appreciate having students that are interested in doctrinal issues and at Silver State I had many. So I thought rather than just print out a list of verses, it would be a bit more helpful to walk through some of these passages and show what they are saying. Let’s start with Ephesians 2.
At the end of Ephesians 1, we find Paul explaining the preeminency of Christ due to the work of Christ in death and resurrection. When we get to chapter 2, Paul shifts the focus from Christ to us. He starts with “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.” (All quotations from the ESV, unless designated otherwise). So we ended chapter 1 with a view of the magnificence of Christ, and then Paul used that to show the stark insufficiencies inherent in man. He calls us “dead in . . . trespasses and sins,” “by nature children of wrath. . . .” To flesh this out, we must take a look at a few other passages.
In Genesis 3, we see the story of man’s fall into sin, but in Romans 5 we get a better view of what it really meant for the rest of us. Starting in Romans 5:12 we see over and over again phrases like “just as sin came into the world through one man,” “. . . many died through one man’s trespass. . .” “. . . the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation. . .”, “. . . one trespass led to condemnation for all men.” And we could go on through Pauline epistles to show this concept over and over again. So we see that because of Adam’s sin, all men are plunged into spiritual death. But what is spiritual death?
This is an important concept, because without the idea of spiritual death, Genesis 3 doesn’t make sense. See, in Genesis 2, God issued the commandment not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Then in chapter 3, the serpent says, “You shall not surely die.” And some people read through the rest of chapter 3 and conclude that the serpent was right because Adam and Eve are still alive. But God wasn’t necessarily speaking of a physical death. To be sure, physical death was the end result of sin, but it wasn’t the immediate point God was making. The day that Adam and Eve sinned, they experienced spiritual death. We learned in Bible class this year that in the Gospels people repeatedly misunderstood Christ because they were focused on the physical rather than the spiritual. We see this problem going all the way back to Genesis.
So back to the question, what is the spiritual death that Adam plunged the human race into? Back to Ephesians 2. Paul describes us as “dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. . . .” He then goes on to describe what this looks like. “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.” So spiritual death is described as a slavery to the world, the prince of the power of the air, and the passions of our flesh. The result of this spiritual death is condemnation (Romans 5:18), and the wrath of God (Ephesians 2:3).
Spiritual death is a description of our nature because of Adam. This spiritual death implies sin’s complete dominance over us. We are totally depraved. We are slaves. As Christ describes it, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.” In other words, if we are not children of God through the “adoption of sons” described in Ephesians 1, then our father is the devil and we are captives who will do his will. We are unable to please God (Hebrews 11:6 – “And without faith it is impossible to please Him. . .”). We are unable to understand the gospel (1 Corinthians 2:14 – “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”). We can’t even come to God on our own (John 6:44 – “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. . . .”). We don’t understand or seek for God as Paul says when he quotes the Old Testament in Romans 3: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good; not even one.”
So when we look at Ephesians 2:2-3 we are forced to recognize the fact that apart from Christ everyone is spiritually dead in sin. This death constitutes a slavery to sin and an inability to respond or seek God. Everything we do is sin. We are guilty from birth and the wrath of God is on us. We are completely and utterly hopeless in ourselves. That is the key. I have no ability to do anything to save myself.
The great part of Ephesians 2 is that it doesn’t end at verse 3. In the next post, we’ll get into what God has done, in love, to remedy our situation.
Categorized as Theology