Ephesians 2:4-10 United with Jesus

Did you ever make up a word to describe something or someone that you just couldn’t find the right word for? Most of us have. The early church found itself needing to redefine or even invent new words to describe what they were learning about God and the salvation He provided for us through the sacrifice of Jesus.

For example, the early church could not find an adequate Greek word to describe God’s love. So they took a word that was almost never used “agape” and poured into it new meaning that described as closely as a word can what it means to describe God as love.

In our passage for today, Ephesians 2:5-6, we find that Paul literally made up three words you will not find anywhere in Greek literature before he wrote them in his letter to the Ephesians. Read Ephesians 1:19-20. Paul declared that God has done a similar thing for us and has done it because when we are saved, we are united with Jesus and partake of His victory. 

So, Paul took the Greek prefix “syn” that meant “together with” and combined it in a way that had never been done before with the Greek words meaning “make alive,” “raise up,” and “sit down” and used those new words in Ephesians 2:5-6 to declare, “made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.” Then he declared “And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus” The thrust of those new words was to say that in some way Christians have been united with Jesus in being made alive, being raised up and being seated with Him. 

Jesus alluded to the union of believers with Him in verses such as John 17:22-23. Read those verses. Jesus declared a similar truth in John 15:4-5. Read those verses. In those and other verses Jesus alluded to the union His followers would have with Him, but before His death and resurrection it was impossible to understand all that implied. Following those events, Paul was able to present the depth of meaning that God intended when Jesus spoke of oneness and union.

It is not easy to understand that. The closest I can come to a parallel that may help us understand the union that takes place when we accept Jesus as our Savior is the description Paul gave to the church in Corinth of our union with Adam and Eve.

In I Corinthians 15:22 Paul wrote, “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” The essence of that is that when Adam and Eve sinned all of humanity was somehow united in that sin. We are all born with a sin nature. We act on that sin nature, so we seldom think about the fact that we are guilty of sin because somehow, we were united with Adam in his disobedience. The second half of that verse presents the truth that Paul was expressing to the Ephesian Christians. Just as somehow when Adam sinned, we are all somehow a part of that even though we are born centuries later. In some way, although we are living 2000 years after Jesus was raised from the dead, ascended to the Father and was seated at God’s right hand, we are united with Him. 

That does not fully explain it but here are many things we cannot fully understand. John 3 opens with John recording that a man named Nicodemus, who was a member of the Jewish ruling council, came to Jesus and called Him good. The discussion moved on and, with Jesus saying to Nicodemus, according to verse 3, “no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” That blew the mind of this biblical scholar, so he asked Jesus how in the world that was possible. Jesus then said to him, according to verse 6, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” Dixon paraphrase of that is “You really can’t understand it because while you can understand to some degree the physical world in which you live, there is a spiritual world, and it is beyond your ability to understand that.” Jesus went on to say that while we try to understand the world we can see, understanding the world we cannot see is another story. Jesus then gave an example in verse 8 which reads, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” Jesus said there are spiritual things that we just cannot understand. 

Not being able to understand it all does not mean we are not obligated to understand all we can, so we continue to read and study the Word. Little by little, with the help of the Holy Spirit, our understanding gets deeper and the wonder of our faith grows.

While we cannot understand really the spiritual dynamics of being united with Jesus in His resurrection, ascension, and seating, we can begin to understand in part what each means to us as Christians.

At the heart of what Paul was presenting is the provision of God’s love, mercy and grace which is, according to Ephesians 2:5. Read that verse. The verb form Paul used here means that something that happened in the past, i.e., we decided to invite Jesus to be our Savior, but it has implications today, i.e., we are alive. Because we are alive in Jesus, we can “be raised us up with Christ and seated with Him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.”

Today we are alive in Jesus and can enjoy all the benefits of that life. There was a time when we were dead because of our transgressions but today we are alive in Jesus. Being dead in our transgressions meant in part that we were dead spiritually with implications for eternity. Being alive with Jesus means that we are now alive spiritually with implications for eternity. 

When we present the challenge of the gospel to someone we talk in terms of where one will spend eternity if they do not make Jesus their Savior. In a sense, that is the most glorious part of the salvation Jesus provided. The new life provided by Jesus assures us that when we die, we will go to be with God in heaven and will be given new glorified bodies. But Jesus did not die just so we can spend eternity in heaven. Jesus died so we can be alive spiritually today. Salvation is not a place called heaven; it is fellowship with God. Salvation is a fellowship with God that will continue for all eternity in a place we call heaven. At its core it is fellowship with the God in whose image we were created. 

Too often when we think of the provision of Jesus on the Cross, we rejoice in the fact that He bore our sins. We rejoice at the fact that He paid the price of our disobedience and shed His blood in place of ours. That is truly majestic and to be celebrated. But the redemption story did not end on Good Friday with our penalty of sin paid in full. The redemption story does not really end until 40 days later. The redemption story includes both an empty tomb and an ascended Savior who sits at the right hand of God the Father.

Think about this. A criminal is pardoned so allowed to go free. How foolish would it be for that person to shout from his cell “I’m a free man” and continue to live in prison the rest of his life. That is similar to a Christian who has been made alive by faith in Jesus but continues to live as if he were still in a dead place. 

Satan doesn’t like it when we talk about salvation, but he is at least glad if when we do, we talk about it only the future aspects of it. I suspect that Satan sighs when he catches us thinking about our salvation but smiles a bit when we allow our minds to think of it primarily as a future place. I doubt that Satan is happy when we think about heaven as a place with no cancer and with the streets of gold, but I suspect he is at least glad that we fail to realize that heaven is living in intimate fellowship with God.

The salvation provided by Jesus is intended to not only declare us no longer responsible for our sins but to release us from our cell where dead people live and move us into the glorious presence of God. We are made alive with Jesus to have immediate fellowship with Him. 

Paul’s message is clear. Because you are a Christian you are already alive spiritually and that means you can continually have fellowship with God. The only thing that remains is for us to leave our death cells and walk out into the light of His love for us.

Ephesians 2:4-10 But God!

Ephesians 2:4 beings with the simple declaration of “but” and clarified that by almost immediately adding “God” to his statement. In the Greek, the two words are not separated so it literally reads, “But God.”

“But God” is one of the truly great phrases in the Bible. It is used to describe a major option to a situation that would otherwise be hopeless. In the case of Ephesians, it takes the hopeless situation described in Ephesians 2:1 as, “you were dead in your transgressions and sins” and turns it into “But God in love, mercy and in grace made us alive” in verse 4. 

But God! Hopeless and helpless because of our sin, God stepped in acted on our behalf. God stepped in and provided a way that we might be made alive, a way for us to be alive spiritually and a way for us to be made alive physically as we are promised a new, glorified body that will have no decay and will never die. When God stepped in, He made it possible for us to spend eternity alive with Him in His home which we call heaven. But God!

In Ephesians 2:1-3 we have the picture of what we deserve because of our choice to follow Satan and to sin. In Ephesians 2:4ff we have the picture of what the love, mercy and grace of God has provided for us. Ephesians 2:1-3 describes God’s justified judgment on sin while Ephesians 2:4ff describes God’s gracious provision for that sin.

Ephesians 2:4ff details what God has done for us. In verses 5 and 8 Paul declared that “by grace you have been saved.” In verse 5 Paul wrote that God has “made us alive with Christ.” In verse 6 Paul wrote that God has “raised us up with Christ.” Then Paul wrote in verse 6 that God has “seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” 

Paul used several different words to explain why God chose to offer life even though we deserved death. In verse 4 Paul described God as loving and merciful. In verse 7 Paul wrote about God’s kindness. Then, in verses 5 and 8, Paul described God as being gracious. Paul stacked one after another the key characteristics of God to describe what it took to offer us life. 

In verse 4 Paul wrote about God’s “great love for us.” God loved us and then that He made us alive with Christ. Too often Satan tells non-Christians that they need to first get their act together so God can love them and then they can ask Him for forgiveness. The Bible is clear, God has always loved us and there is nothing we can do to gain more love. Our responsibility is to respond to His love and what it offers us. Read Romans 5:8. His love us does not negate His justice so our sin will be paid for, either by us or Jesus. 

Paul described God’s love as being “great.” Read Ephesians 3:18 and 19. 

The biblical description of God’s great love for us needed a totally different word. In Greek that problem is solved using various words to describe the difference between brotherly love, erotic love, and God’s love. Paul was describing God’s love that moved Him to provide salvation from the death sentence we were under.

God has provided salvation because He is loving. John recorded in I John 4:8 that God is love. See also John 3:16 and I John 3:1. God’s gracious provision of salvation from the death that sin caused begins with His love. As deeply as God hates sin, He loves the sinner and wants him to return to Him. The parable of the Prodigal Son returning home pictures the Father running out to him and throwing His arms around him and shouting, “My son has come home.” Love responds that way. Read what Jesus said about a sinner returning to God in Luke 15:10. 

God provided salvation because He is love and directed that loved to us. He also provided salvation because He is “rich in mercy.” Make note of the fact that God is rich in mercy. In verse 7 God is described as rich in grace, which is, according to that verse “incomparable.” Read Ephesians 3:8 and 16. A rich, loving God has provided a rich redemption for us. God is rich so He is not limited in what He can shower upon those He loves and who belong to Him.

God chose to provide for our salvation because He is “rich in mercy.” Mercy is the act of withholding deserved punishment. Read Psalm 86:15. In the context of Ephesians, the punishment deserved is eternal separation from God, but God is love and He is merciful. God rich mercy flows from His love. Deserving of death, God in mercy reached out and offered us that which we did not deserve. He mercifully offered us life.

In verse 7 Paul used another term to describe God. Paul said that God is kind. In Ephesians Paul presented a slightly different picture of God’s kindness. Here, Paul wrote that one of the goals of providing salvation was to allow God to bless us with kindness. The Greek word that Paul used denoted one who had a sympathetic concern for others. Read Romans 2:4 and Ruth 2:20. 

In Paul’s letter to Titus, he did connect God’s kindness with salvation when he reminded them, as he reminded the Christians in Ephesus, that before they were saved, they were living in sin, and deserving of judgment. Then Paul wrote, according to Titus 3:4-5, “But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.” Here in Ephesians God’s kindness is associated with His desire to shower blessings on the redeemed day after day and then for all eternity. When we talk of the characteristics of God we generally talk of His love and mercy and grace, but we need to remember He is also kind. His kindness impacted His desire to redeem the lost and like all His characteristics, it impacts His desire to shower us with blessings.

One important thing to note is the connections between the attributes of God spoken of here and the characteristics Christians are expected to display each day. God is loving and so should we be loving. God is merciful so we should show mercy. God is kind so we should seek to demonstrate kindness in our interactions with others. God is gracious and so too should we be gracious. Galatians 5:22-23 lists the characteristics the Holy Spirit seeks to develop in us and there can be no doubt that they are those same characteristics of God enumerated here. Read those verses and then Colossians 3:12. 

Paul added that God who is great love and mercy is also gracious. God is gracious because, like all His other attributes, it is who He is. Read Exodus 34:6. To be gracious means to show kindness to one who does not deserve it. Isaiah 30 presents an interesting picture of God’s graciousness. The chapter begins with God saying to Israel, “Woe to the obstinate children.” The chapter goes on to detail the sins of the nation and what it is costing them. It peaks in verse 18 that reads, “Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you;therefore he will rise up to show you compassion.” When Paul refers to God as being gracious in Ephesians. he is specifically referring to all the undeserved blessings God has promised to shower upon believers. Specifically, he was referring to God’s desire, because He is gracious, to make “us alive with Christ,” raising “us up with Christ,” and promising to seat “us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” It is ours via grace because we, as Paul so clearly stated, there is nothing mankind can hope to do to earn or deserve it. 

I would encourage you this week to think again about the truth that without the salvation God provided through the death of Jesus you would be dead in sin. 

Think about the nature of God who loved us, who is rich in mercy, who is kind beyond our imagination and encompasses grace and know that every one of those characteristics are still available to us today as we seek to live as those who have been redeemed. 

Ephesians 2:1-3

In Ephesians 1 Paul described of the past, present and future aspects of God’s plan for redemption. He wrote about God’s determining to redeem a lost humanity, of Jesus coming to provide for that redemption, and of the ministry of the Holy Spirit sealing those who make a commitment to Jesus. Paul then noted at the resurrection of Jesus God seated Him in heaven. Read Ephesians1:20-21.

In the first 10 verses of chapter 2, Paul presented the past, present and future of the believer. In verses 1-3 we have what the believer was before committing to Jesus. Verses 4-6 and 8-9 picture what it means now to be a Christian. Verses 7 and 10 picture what we look forward to as Christians. Collectively they present the best summary found anywhere in the Bible of what it means to be a Christian. Collectively they note that we who were dead in trespasses and sins (v.1), have been “made alive with Christ (v.5), and God has, “seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus (v.6) so that “in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.” (v. 7)

Read Ephesians 1:1-3. That was our condition before making a commitment to Jesus. Apart from God’s provision of a Savior that is not only what we were but what we would forever be. The message of Ephesians 2 is that God also has the power to raise dead men and women who were dead in sin to a new life in Jesus. 

Verse 1 declares, “you were dead.” It would be easy to pass over this with a simple, “That’s what we might have but let’s move on to a study of all we have in Jesus.” The problem with that is we cannot appreciate what we have if we do not understand what we did not have. In addition, we will never grasp the seriousness of witnessing for Jesus unless we understand their real condition outside of Jesus.

Ray Stedman, in his study of Ephesians, looked at these verses as a commentary of every culture and in particularly ours today. He wrote, “In these verses we find Paul’s great analysis of our problem. We are not a little misguided. We are not culturally deprived or misled in our thinking. The solution to the human condition is not better education or a social program or enhanced self-esteem. No, our problem is more fundamental and hopeless than that. Our problem is that, apart from God, we are dead.” Our Riches in Christ,loc 1077.

There are the various ways mankind has evaluated himself over the years. Pundits have swung from extreme pessimism to extreme optimism. Historically, many have seen mankind doomed to an ultimate self-destruction because of his evil tendencies. Currently the prevailing view of humanity is extremely optimistic. Many, while acknowledging that we are far from perfect, declare we are moving forward in the right direction. The Bible evaluation is very clear. Without the life giving, life changing work of Jesus in an individual he is dead in transgressions and sins.”

To understand Paul’s analysis of our condition of being dead outside of Jesus we should review the biblical definition of death and the various deaths that the Bible describes. The root meaning of the biblical word for death is “separation” and the Bible describes three aspects of death. There is a “spiritual death”, “physical death” and “eternal death.” Spiritual death is separation from the Holy God caused by our sinfulness. The fellowship intended in creation is lost. We are unable to enjoy time Him. We are told that in the Garden of Eden God spent time with Adam and Eve, described as walking with them. Sin separated and that experience is no longer possible.

Physical death is separation of the body and soul. While modern man want to see mankind as simply a physical animal, the Bible sees him as complex with not only a physical dimension but a soul or spirit. Genesis records the creation of man as a part of God’s overall creation but notes in 1:25 that God created man in His image. Read Genesis 2:7. When a man dies the soul or spirit that God breathed into him separates from the body. The body decays and returns to the dust from which it came. The soul or spirit, however, continues to exist.

Eternal death is separation from God forever. Eternal life is living forever in the presence of God. In contrast, eternal death is being forever separated from God, dwelling in what the Bible describes as hell compared to the heaven prepared for believers. 

Paul’s depiction of man before redemption as being “dead” is important to note. Paul did not say they were in danger of being dead, but they were in a state of being really, totally dead. Current thinking on man’s condition is that all we need is a little more learning and the desire to just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. The problem is spiritually dead people can’t do a thing. Dead people can’t grab their boots and pull themselves up. Dead people can’t learn anything. Mankind is dead in sin and no amount of learning or motivational thinking or sensitivity training is ever going to change that.

The term that Paul used implies absolutely or totally dead. It is not a figure of speech but a picture of what we really are. When Paul called those outside of Jesus dead he was suggesting that they were behaving as if they were dead, they were actually dead in the biblical sense of the word. Outside of Jesus mankind is dead spiritually, will die physically and will be eternally dead. 

In Ephesians 2:1 Paul wrote that mankind is dead in his transgressions and sins. Sin separates and that sin is described as being in the form of transgressions and sins. Some commentators see a difference between the two terms, seeing the first as unintentional sins and the second as intentionally doing what we know God has forbidden. It is not clear that Paul had those specific differences in mind but overall, the point is that we sin, and sin separates from God, a separation identified as “being dead.”

Being dead spiritually is a problem for all mankind. The “you” in verses 1-2 refers to the Gentile church in Ephesus but later Paul included himself as a Jew. Paul wrote in verse 3, “All of us”. Paul made that truth abundantly clear in Romans 3:23. Read that verse. 

Why do we have that condition?  Read Ephesians 2:2. Here Paul spelled out the truth that one is either a follower of God or of Satan. There is no other option. We may describe Satan in many ways but in the end, it is either God or him. We can give Satan the name of another god such “Buddha”, call him “scientific enlightenment”, call him “coming of age” but it comes down to either God or Satan. 

Paul described the condition of a spiritually dead person as following the ways of this world. The word translated here as “world” is used 186 times in the Greek New Testament, and in almost every instance has an evil implication. Literally Paul was declaring that before we were given spiritual life through faith in Jesus, we were captive to the ethical and social system of the present evil age.

The reason this world is evil is that Satan, described here as “the ruler of the kingdom of the air” is ultimately the one who directs every aspect of it. Of course, the ruler of the kingdom of the air is not going to make it obvious that his ways are opposed to God and therefore evil. He knows how to hold the line, so he seems acceptable. Satan presents his evil ways as popular, fun, enriching, freeing etc. In the end it is all dead and leads ultimately to eternal death or separation forever from God.

The picture of mankind outside of Jesus is not a pretty one. We are dead in sin, cannot help ourselves and therefore, according to verse 3 “we were by nature deserving of wrath.”

For the Christian that is not the end of the story. Read Ephesians 2:4-5. Let us never take that for granted. We did not deserve the redemption offered by Jesus.

Don’t jump ahead without once more remembering what you were before you made Jesus your Savior. It is in remembering what we have been saved from that we can fully rejoice in what we have.

And do not forget those folks you know who have never made a commitment to Jesus. They may live exemplary lives compared to others but without Jesus as Savior they are dead, dead spiritually and they will ultimately be dead eternally. Read Romans 10:14. Each of us can be the someone who shares Jesus so they who are dead can be raised by the power of God to life everlasting. What an exciting opportunity that presents to us.