Ephesians 2:1-2

One might ask, "What's the big deal? Why all this concern about whether one sins a little bit or not?" Well let me show you:

I don't know how many times you've read those two verses (undoubtedly hundreds of times). Even in the course of sermons you've heard, because the ministry has a tendency to go over verses like this fairly often. But again, in the course of time in the church, it's very easy to drift from the effect of what these verses are saying. We begin to take them for granted. But I don't want us to take them for granted.

He said that we were dead! D E A D in trespasses and sins. Now surely that can't be taken literally. Well I'll tell you, if you have a tendency to overlook that verse and slide by it, that would be a mistaken attitude, because the Bible takes sin and death very seriously. It takes death just as seriously as it does sin. The two go together. Does not Ezekiel say, "The soul that sins, it shall DIE"? The life that sins, it shall die! Do you see equality between the two words? Sin equals death.

There's a New Testament parallel to that. The apostle Paul says, "The wages of sin is death." You do one and it leads to the other. If one sins, at the end of life is death. The idea brethren, the concept of the immortality of the soul—immortality as a natural birthright simply because one has been born—is something that is absolutely foreign to the Bible. There is no life inherent within us.

The Biblical solution to death is resurrection. One has to be made alive. Resurrection requires an act of God that is awesome—somewhat akin to the recreation that we see in Genesis 1, when God restored life to the entire earth and gave Adam and Eve (made of the clay of the ground) life as well.

Think about this: Only God can resurrect. Man's fate [without God] is death—we're going to die. Death is a reality and sin leads to death. Since any hope for life beyond death depends upon God, then any hope of any life beyond death depends entirely upon how we stand before God. Sin cuts a person off from God, therefore sin equals death.

Western civilization's concept of immortality came out of Egypt by way of Greece through the teachings of men like Plato. It has so captured the imagination of our thinking that the realistic and true Biblical concept of sin and death is difficult for us to take seriously.

Remember how I started this sermon. Are we taking God seriously? God tells us in His word that we do not have immortality as a birthright. It is something that has to be given. Because we sin we earn death. Because hope of a life after death depends upon the relationship with God and sin cuts us off from God, sin equals death.

You can begin to understand why this dichotomy Paul described in Romans 7 was so important to him. He was struggling. He didn't want to do it and he was wondering how he was going to get out of this struggle. Yet he also taught that we should make every effort to overcome sin.

Let's consider this: If we are immortal simply by reason of being born, and immortality equals the state of blessedness we are all hoping for, then why do we need to take the problem of sin, of morality, of how we treat each other, and how we worship God, seriously?

Brethren, if life (like the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans have taught us) is merely existence and survival and at the end of which there is already immortality, then what is religion? Religion then is nothing more than a cultural institution teaching a philosophy. There are no ultimate decisions about life that are necessary, and any choices become merely matters of whether or not we want to please ourselves for the moment. Character has only physical and momentary ramifications and settling things between God and us has little or no meaning. If immortality is already our birthright then it opens life to totally hedonistic approaches. There's no reason to be moral. But you turn to the Bible and the issues of … . . .

Ephesians 2:1-3

Please turn over to Ephesians 2, verse 1. No wonder so many psychiatrists and their patients do not understand many of their negative moods and attitudes. Here in Ephesians 2, we are going to read verses 1 through 3.

And then in Ephesians 6, verse 12, Paul emphasizes the importance of putting on the whole armor of God in order to fight against this prince of the power of the air, the spirit.

So these evil spirits place damaging moods and feelings in vulnerable or unsuspecting human minds. And to some people, they implant impulses to want to give in to sin or give up on life.

Ephesians 2:1-2

Here is the same kind of context we find in Galatians 4. "You" in this case very, very likely means Gentiles.

I read that because we need to understand that all of us—Israelite, Gentile, it does not matter who—have been in bondage to Satan and his demons to some degree, some more than others. All slaves, but some more than others.