Is there more bad news around these days or do we just have better access to it? A sampling of the last few days’ news stories.
* 12 year old boy dies at Disney World, Florida (family tragedy become national news). * CN train derailment in BC, two killed. * Two teenagers convicted of drowning their mom in the bath.
There’s a fair bit of bad news in this morning’s passage too. But if you hang on to the end there’s good news as well.
In January we had a short series from Ephesians chapter one, and if you can remember that far back you’ll recall that the focus of Ephesians is on being “in Christ.”
* In Christ we have access to God. * In Christ we have a new family, with a new family name and a new family history. * In Christ we are set free from being prisoners of our sins, past and present. * In Christ we have a sense of direction, we know where history is going and we can get on board with God’s programme for making the world a better place. * In Christ we have a destiny – a purpose – to show God’s goodness. * And in Christ we have all that we need to do that – the grace to love our enemies like God does, the faith to believe that God can make a difference in our lives and others and see it happen, the hope that makes life worth living.
And that’s just in chapter 1. After that great chapter in praise of Christ and what he has done. After all the great things he says about the church, the community of believers – access to God, a new name, a sense of direction and destiny. After all that, at the beginning of Chapter 2 Paul brings us all back down to earth with a bump.
Chapter 1 just builds and builds, right up to the last line, 22God put everything under Christ’s authority and made him ruler over all things in the church which is 23his body and which is filled with Christ, who fills everything. Jesus is Lord over everything, and he fills his church, and we’re part of his church and isn’t everything just wonderful? Then, just as you’re enjoying that heavenly vision, just as you’re starting to feel a little full of yourself, “Aren’t we something special? We’re God’s special people!” Paul pricks the balloon.
As for you, you were dead… Excuse me?
you were dead… in your transgressions
and sins,
All that stuff you used to do? It was killing you. No, it wasn’t killing you. It had already killed you. You just hadn’t realised it and lain down yet. The Bible talks about this in two ways. “Transgressions” are when you do something you shouldn’t, like stealing or even gossiping. “Sins” are when you don’t do something you should, like caring for the weak or speaking the truth. The word in Greek means, “missing the mark.”
So it’s not just about “sex, drugs and rock
‘n roll,” or whatever else you want to label it. It’s more subtle than that.
Paul describes it as , “following the ways of this world and of the ruler of
the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are
disobedient.”
So what kills us? What cuts us off from God? Just being normal, simply following the ways of this world. It’s not that most people set out to be bad, though some do. It’s just that we naturally follow the ways of our culture and society. And it’s not that all of culture is bad, but it is shaped by a set of values that are often at odds with God and God’s values. Wherever people are dehumanised we can see what the Paul means by following the ways of this world. Whether it’s by political oppression, or bureaucratic systems, or secularism, or materialism, or poverty, or hunger, or any kind of injustice, that’s the way of the world. And it kills people, usually little by little, from the inside, but they’re still dead.
But it isn’t only human culture that’s involved. That would be enough of a hurdle to life. The other thing that keeps us from being alive is “following the ways… of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.”
There is a spiritual reality above and behind the physical reality we see. There is a battle going on between good and evil and the Bible is clear that you can only be on one side or the other. There is no neutral ground, there is no “home free.” If you are not consciously following, or seeking to follow, the ways of God, then you’re under the influence of the ruler of the kingdom of the air.
You’re dead. You just don’t know it.
[Some do know it and struggle with that knowledge. The obsession of some rock bands with death and suicide is evidence to me that at least some artists see through the veneer of civilisation and come to the same conclusion as Paul – we’re all dead.]
And just in case the Ephesians felt like
Paul was putting himself in a different class with the “you were dead” thing,
he makes it clear that he was no different. 3 All of us
also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh
and following its desires and thoughts.
Now the Ephesians were mainly Greeks, pagans, but Paul was a Jew. In fact he was a very religious Jew. He took his religion very seriously and made sure he did everything just right. But still he describes himself as one of the sons of disobedience. That’s an expression that means somebody who, by nature, does what’s wrong.
He even describes what that looks like, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. I really don’t think it’s helpful for the NIV to translate “flesh” as “sinful nature.” What Paul probably means by “flesh” is simply the experience of being human apart from the work of God’s Spirit in our lives. He fills out the idea by saying that we follow our own desires and thoughts. So when Paul talks about “the flesh” he’s not just talking about physical stuff. He means anything that is self centred rather than God centred, and he includes his own pre-Christian career as a religious teacher!
You see, this is why Jesus was so harsh with the Pharisees. Like Paul, they didn’t indulge in all kinds of obvious sin. They didn’t get drunk, or have orgies, or steal. But because of that they weren’t as aware of their need for God. They thought they were OK because they were so religious, but Paul, who used to be one of them, counts all of that as simply self gratification, albeit religious self gratification, but still just self gratification.
The result of all this is that, Like the
rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.
Now this is not a popular idea. The idea that God is angry. That certain kinds of behaviour and attitude deserve punishment, and that God will punish them. What’s strange is that most people really like Jesus, but that most of the teaching we have on this comes straight from the lips of Jesus himself.
This isn’t just “karma,” “the law of cause and effect,” “what goes around comes around.” This is a person (God) who is angry because of what is happening and plans to do something about it. God’s anger is not like human anger. It isn’t spiteful, or malicious. It isn’t about revenge. It isn’t arbitrary. It has only one target – evil.
[If you find that hard to deal with, think about Rwanda. * Over the course of only 100 days, 1,000,000 people were slaughtered. * During this time, more than 6 men, women and children were murdered every 60 seconds of every hour of every day. This was kept up for more than 3 months. * An estimated 11% of all females, or approximately 535,000 women, living in Rwanda at the time of the genocide were victims of a concerted rape campaign. * As a direct result of the 100 days of death and violence in 1994 there are now more than 60,000 widows living in Rwanda, caring for more than 200,000 orphans.
All this was planned. Weapons and machetes were stored in advance. People were trained how to kill. There were even instructions given over the radio on how to disembowel pregnant women.
Romeo Dallaire, who was in command of the UN protection force at this time, writes about it in “Shake Hands With The Devil.” He writes of meeting with the leader of the group that was carrying this out. He was hoping to get some refugees out of the mess and so he asked that this leader call a temporary halt. Imagine it – giving the order for two or three hours to stop slaughtering men, women and children – like putting a hold on a production order – then afterwards giving the word and it was back to the bloodbath.]
When Dallaire met with that man he had an overwhelming urge to just take out his side arm and shoot him between the eyes. It took all his training as a soldier to restrain himself from doing that. But his anger at the senseless slaughter of human beings is pale in comparison to God’s anger at the evil in the world, at what human being do to each other and to his good creation every day.
That’s what Paul means when he says we are
children of wrath. We have messed up royally and we are in the path of God’s anger
over the mess we have made of ourselves, of others and of creation.
But, praise God, wrath is not God’s last word on the subject of humanity. Verse 4 begins in Greek with the words “but God.” If it wasn’t for those words we might as well all go off and jump off a cliff at this point, but Paul has been taking the Ephesians down this long dark path to remind them of where they came from. He’s been telling them the bad news so they can appreciate the good news.
And the good news is that, even though we’ve screwed up, even though we’ve hurt ourselves and hurt others, God still loves us. Take a moment to think about that. Think about the worst things you have ever done. Now think about the worse things that you wanted to do but didn’t because you didn’t have the opportunity, or you couldn’t get away with it. God knows all that about you, and he still loves you.
And it’s not a wishy washy kind of love that says, “Oh, that’s OK. Don’t worry about it.” No, God’s wrath is still there, but he also loves us, he also wants the best for us. (That’s what love means in the Bible – choosing the best for the other person. It has very little to do with feelings.)
So God has a dilemma. His sense of justice,
says we should be punished, in fact that we should die. But his love realises
that while that may be good for the rest of his creation, it isn’t very good
for us. And out of that tension comes God’s mercy. 4 But because
of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy…
You can only have mercy on someone who is guilty. Mercy is meaningless unless it’s turning aside something that’s deserved. People who aren’t guilty don’t need mercy, they need justice. But we’re all guilty, that’s the point Paul just made, so we all need God’s mercy.
In his mercy, God planned a life exchange. Instead of treating us like the rebels we are, he treats us like his Son. He can do that because Jesus, his Son, took our place of the cross and died a rebel’s death. When we put our faith in Christ, when we trust him with our lives, he takes us to the cross with him. We just saw that without God we’re dead, and Jesus takes all of that death to the cross with him.
But Jesus didn’t stay on the cross, or in the grave. He rose again and everything that God did for Jesus at his resurrection he gives to us as we identify with his Son. There are three “together” words in verses 5 and 6.
5 [God]
made us alive with Christ (even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by
grace you have been saved.)
He made us alive together with Christ. What could be better for people who are dead, than to be made alive again? And that’s exactly what Paul says, God has made us alive again. Just as God made Jesus alive when he was dead in the grave, so he makes us alive again. He pours his life into us and makes us new people who live a new life in God.
Secondly, he raised us up together with Christ. 6And God raised us up with Christ. Just as God raised Jesus from the dead, so he raises us from the dead. When God raised Jesus from the dead Jesus was the same, but different. Some people recognised him, but others didn’t.
[I have a German friend who came to faith on the streets of Kabul in the early 70s. He changed so much as a result of his conversion that the German embassy at first wouldn’t believe he was the same person! He had a resurrection life that was different from anything he had before.]
After we put our faith in Jesus we still walk around in the same bodies. We’re still the same people, we’re just different, changed by his life within us.
and seated us with him in the heavenly
realms in Christ Jesus,
Thirdly, after Jesus had risen from the dead he ascended to heaven, and sat down with his Father. And, because we’ve exchanged lives, we’re right there with him! The point is not that we’re literally up in the sky, but that we can have fellowship with God in our daily lives. We live in two places at once – here on earth, and with God in heaven – and all this without the benefit of technology.
[I was checking my email at the breakfast table on Friday when I was Skyped by the ECI team in Kabul. Skype is an internet chat system and they wanted to meet with me online because they had some concerns they wanted me to address as a board member. While that was going on, Sharon also Skyped me from Peshawar, asking for advice about her current visa crisis. You could say I was in three places at once, Hamilton, Kabul and Peshawar.]
When we identify with Christ, God sees us as in him. (There’s that phrase again.) That means that wherever Jesus is, we are too, including in the very presence of God.
So what’s the result? The result of our sin
was that we became objects of God’s wrath. The result of our salvation is that
we – you and me – become the showpieces of God’s goodness. 7 in
order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his
grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
Think about it. When God wants to make a
point about his character, he points to us. It’s the same idea we find in Job,
where God’s reputation rests on the behaviour of his people. Not that we have
anything to be proud of. Verse 8 says, 8 For it is by grace you
have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of
God— 9 not by works, so that no one can boast.
Mercy is not getting what you do deserve. Grace is getting what we don’t deserve. No-one deserves to be saved. [This week someone was telling me about the way an adult child was treating their mother and she said, “She doesn’t deserve her mother’s love.”] No-one deserves to be loved. And no-one deserves to be saved. It’s all grace.
Now some of you might have heard this emphasised so strongly that even the faith with which we respond to God is a gift from him. That’s not what this is saying. It’s actually saying something much bigger, that the whole process of salvation by grace is God’s great gift to humanity.
And the way we bring glory to God is by
living out our destiny. 10 For we are God’s workmanship, created
in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.