This blog essay is being released at the beginning of Lent. It is appropriate that we reflect on Lent and the call to discipleship, sacrifice, and attention to Christ that is manifested in Lent.
In writing to the Ephesians, Paul really liked long sentences! We saw it in Ephesians 1:3-14 and we see it again in Ephesians 2:1-7 where Paul begins with a similarly long sentence. In my thinking Paul likely dictated this letter to the Ephesians. We know he did that to the church at Rome. At the end of Romans, Paul’s colleague Tertius inserted that he did the actual writing of the letter while Paul spoke it (Romans 16:22). That’s why portions of Ephesians sound like a person who is speaking while someone writes down their words. A speaker does not usually add commas and periods in their speech. The listener discerns the flow of language and its sentence structure.
To add to this, it is important to remember that writing materials were expensive and writers used every space available without using punctuation. There were seldom spaces between words as the readers knew the language well enough to discern the words and their relationship to other words. Thus, when we read the Bible, we should consider reading it without chapter and verse divisions as they did not become common until after the 1200s. The first printed English Bible with chapter and verses was the Geneva Bible of 1560. This is more than mere historical tidbit information. It is an invitation to read Paul’s letters, and all the Bible, without these artificial divisions.
To read Ephesians without chapter and verse divisions one would go immediately from Paul’s statements in Ephesians 1 into Ephesians 2. To illustrate, the end of Ephesians 1:22, 23 is about the triumph of the body of Christ due to God’s exceeding great power manifested in the resurrection of Jesus. Upon that triumphant note of the majesty and glory of the body of Christ, Paul moves quickly to “And you who were dead in trespasses and sins . . .. (Ephesians 2:1).
So, let’s move into Ephesians 2:1ff. by connecting the dots that Paul laid out in the first chapter. If you read the King James Version, the New King James, the American Standard Version, the Common English Bible, the Revised Standard Bible, you will notice that I left out a phrase in Ephesians 2:1 quoted in the previous paragraph. That is because the phrase, “He made alive” is brought forward from Ephesians 2:5 in those translations. This is done in Ephesians 2:1 to take some of the sting from Paul’s graphic description of the human condition outside of Christ.
My personal view is that we should read Ephesians 2:1-3 as Paul said it with the intentional emphasis on the lostness of humanity outside of Christ. Thus, read again all of Ephesians 2:1-3, the focus of this blog:
“And you who were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in
1 Many translations italicize words that are added for the sake of clearer English understanding.
the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others.”
I don’t think Paul expected to get many “amens” from those who read and heard this passage in Greek. In English it doesn’t thrill my soul! It’s possibly an abbreviated version of what Paul wrote to the church in Rome in Romans 1:18 through 3:20. If Paul wrote Ephesians from Rome in the early 60s A.D., then Ephesians 2:1-3 is a condensed version of the Romans passage mentioned in the previous sentence.
Ephesians 2:1 begins with a plural “you.” Many commentators take this “you,” and the “we” in 2:3, as referring to Gentile and Jewish members of the Christian community. But could not the “you” also refer to all in the Ephesian Christian community and the “we” refer to Paul and those with him? This would be Paul’s way of saying that outside of Christ, everyone he knows, including himself, is under the bondage of sin, regardless of their ethical behavior or lack thereof.
Following the plural “you” is the stark reality of being “dead in trespasses and sins.” Outside of Christ, we have a natural life; but spiritually we are dead to God. John Wesley wrote of this condition, “Not only diseased but dead; absolutely void of spiritual life; and as incapable of quickening yourselves as persons literally dead.”
Paul named two categories of disobedience that are part of our “death-ness” before God. Trespasses is the Greek word paraptoma and sins is harmartia. Paraptoma is used in the New Testament in the Gospels, Paul’s letters, and the epistle of James. It carries the meaning of “a false step, a blunder.” It’s not merely a mistake. It carries the sense of a moral and spiritual wrong against another, particularly against God. Romans 5:15 in the New King James translates it as “offense” in terms of Adam’s sin that has impacted every person on earth and the created order.
Noel Brooks quotes William Barclay’s comment about harmartia: “It does not in the New Testament describe a definite act of sin; it describes the state of sin, from which acts of sin come. In fact, in Paul, sin becomes almost personalized until sin could be spelled with a capital letter, and could be thought of as a malignant, personal power which has man in its grasp.” It is often said that harmartia means to miss the mark. That is correct, but like paraptoma, it is a word that should not be considered lightly. To miss the mark is not to be “slightly off center.” It is to be outside the revealed will of God, that is, lost.
In Ephesians 2:2 Paul takes these two words which describe why we are spiritually dead and connects them to how the Ephesian believers, and we prior to our faith in Christ, lived in the world. Just as Paul says, we “once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience.” I cannot
2 Wesley’s Notes on the Bible edited by G. Roger Schoenhals (Grand Rapids, MI: Francis Asbury Press, 1987) 535. The old English word “quickening” refers to being alive or making alive.
3 Brooks, 59, in his earlier cited work on Ephesians.
4 Brooks, 59, quoting Barclay’s New Testament Words, p. 119.
help but think of Psalm 1:1 and its description of those who “walk in the counsel of the ungodly,” who “stand in the path of sinners,” who “sit in the seat of the scornful.” Such persons are not blessed by God and their judgement is vividly described in Psalm 1:4-6.
As challenging as it is, Paul does not distinguish between the good moral person without Christ and the person known to the world as evil, wicked, even demonic. Being a good person in the eyes of humanity does not constitute saving grace. The good person is guilty of self-righteousness, pride, self-satisfaction, self-dependence, and the ultimate failure to acknowledge their need for the Creator.
All of humanity, then, from Adam to this day, walks according to the subtle, seductive, malevolent intent, will, and action of the devil. He will mask himself in good deeds, good words, even as light itself, but he remains an evil imposter who has rebelled against his Creator and who seeks to destroy all that God has made good.
Ephesians 2:2 gives a three-fold dimension of how Satan operates in the world. There is “the course of the world.” The word “course” translates the Greek word aion. It is the way in each generation and culture that the world operates. The second dimension is “according to the prince of the power of the air.” Here, Paul used the same words that he uses in Ephesians 1:21, that Christ is seated “far above all principality and power.” The words for “prince” and “principality” are the same: archos. Exousia is the word for “power” in both places. This second dimension clearly introduces the evil personality behind the wickedness of powers and the course of the world. He is the fallen angel known as Satan, the devil, the accuser of the brethren, the serpent of old. The third dimension is “the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience.” This is a Hebraic expression, and it acknowledges that the evil one, Satan, works in the spiritual realm of human experience.
Paul closes this section in Ephesians 2:3 by including himself, as a Jew who has God’s revelation in the Torah, and also as a person who “once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind.” This is an interesting insight about Paul, as he makes it clear in other letters that his moral life was righteous according to the law (see, for example, Philippians 3:6). Paul confessed in Romans 7:7 that he would not have known that he was experiencing covetousness unless the Torah had revealed that to him.
Paul’s statements about the spirit of the world are echoed in 1 John 2:15, 16, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
5 For a good example of the Roman view of the “good life” about 100 years after Paul, read Marcus Aurelius Antonius, Meditations. He began his thoughts with, “From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper. From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character. From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence, not only from evil deeds, but even from evil thoughts.” This is not bad advice for any person at any time. But it is not sufficient for salvation from sin. We cannot remove the death of trespasses and sins by our own efforts.
6 2 Corinthians 11:14.
7 Revelation 12:10; 20:2.
8 For a chilling read of how these three dimensions operate in open evil and seduce ordinary people, read Ordinary Men: Reserve Polic Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browing. Also, Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society.
For all that is in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – is not of the Father but is of the world.”
We must be careful here that we do not associate “the world” with all that is good that God has created and seeks to redeem. That is not the teaching of the Bible. When we see the beauty of the created order and when we see the beauty in human acts of kindness and grace, we are seeing expressions of God’s goodness. So the warnings about the “world” are meant to make us aware that outside of Christ, we view the world from a perspective influenced–and even dominated, at times–by the evil one.
The final clause of Ephesians 2:3 reminds us of our fallen condition and the holiness of God. We are “by nature children of wrath.” The wrath of God is not the anger of a capricious, angry, bitter being, sitting in the heavens and waiting to strike us dead. It is the inevitable consequences of violating God’s righteous order to which He has called us to live. But it is also more than a mere theological cause and effect mechanism. God is holy and God is love. God is patient in His judgment and wrath, longing for His creatures to repent and turn to His life. We are indeed children of wrath by our fallen nature and by our trespasses and sins. But we are also His children, made in His image. Like the waiting Father in Luke 15, God stands watching for us to return home.
I began this essay by referring to the first day of Lent, 2025. Lent is a forty-day period from Ash Wednesday, today, to Holy Week. It offers us an opportunity to walk with Jesus in His forty days of temptations in the Judean wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11; Mark 1:12, 13; Luke 4:1-13). Lent calls for fasting, giving up something for these forty days. This can be the time to start breaking cycles of thought and action that are negative in our lives. It surely must be a time to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal places of unconfessed sin, unrepentance, and evil strongholds so that by God’s grace they can be forgiven, turned around, and overcome. These forty days are a good starting point for renewed spiritual focus on those areas in our lives where we are vulnerable to temptations. Jesus battled temptations during His forty days in the wilderness, and He overcame them by the power of the Word of God. I encourage us to focus on God’s Word during these days as we prepare for Holy Week and continue our study of Ephesians.
Finally, this week is a good starting point in Ephesians 2:1-3 for us to remember how crafty Satan is. Ephesians 2: l-3 beckons us to the “spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him” of Ephesians 1:17 so that we are not foolishly entrapped by the spirit of the age in which we live.
