Man, Dead in Trespasses and Sins
By Pastor Matt Black
13
August 2006
Lord's Day morning
Ephesians 2:1-2
Introduction: Open your Bible to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. We enter into a new chapter this morning, Ephesians chapter 2. We are going to see the devastating result of the Fall today. The title of this morning’s message then is “Man, Dead in Trespasses and Sins.” Let’s stand together and read Ephesians chapter 2 and verses 1 through 10.
[Stand and read Ephesians 2:1-10]
We will never know God as we ought to unless we know the truth about ourselves. The world today tells us that we don’t love ourselves enough. There is a great lie out there about the human race. We never want to think the worst about ourselves. We are told that our greatest problem is low self-esteem. The world wants us to believe that we are not bad people really. We are simply dysfunctional. We are co-dependent.
Friend, man’s greatest problem is not that he has low self-esteem, that he’s dysfunctional, or that his father was an alcoholic. Man’s greatest problem is sin.
“Minimizing sin is as common as sin itself. It’s not uncommon to hear people refer to their own sin as a “weakness” or “shortcoming.” “Nobody’s perfect,” they say. They may even be courageous enough to admit, “I made an error in judgment.” But sin is no minor issue. If there is no sin, then there is no salvation. If we are no great sinners, then Christ is no great Savior.”[1]
I. Man’s greatest problem is that he is Dead in Sin.
We must look at this ugly subject of sin and death. Paul says to these Ephesians 2 and verse 1, “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins.” It is true that man is dead in sins. The only proof you need is physical death. Physical death is only a result of the spiritual death that this verse is talking about. We are all born without the life of God in us. Ephesians 4:18 says the same thing in a different way. There Paul says we are “alienated from the life of God”. Because of sin, we are dead to God. The Bible says this everywhere.
Ezekiel 18:20, “The soul that sinneth, it shall die.”
1 Corinthians 15:22, “For as in Adam all die.”
James 1:15, “sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.”
Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death.”
Hebrews 9:27, “And as it is appointed unto men once to die.”
The fact that 10 out of 10 people die is proof that “all have sinned”. That is exactly how Romans 5:12 puts it, “death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.” We have all sinned. 1 John 1:8 says, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.”
Varying degrees of corruption, but all are DEAD!
Though there are varying degrees of corruption, there is only one degree of death. Dead is dead. Many a mother in days past died in child birth. Though the mother be dead, she seems to have the signs of life. Her body is still warm. It looks like she’s only sleeping, but she is just as dead as a soldier mangled in the battle field. There are those who are dead like Lazarus was dead, and he lie four days in the grave. By that time the Bible says his body stank. There are those bodies that have so corrupted that they are unrecognizable as human beings except that they have a skeleton.
When the Bible says that man is “dead”, what does that mean?
A. What does it mean to be “dead in sin”?
1. To be dead in sin is to have no ability for God
Man, by his fall into a state of sin, has wholly lost all ability of will to do any spiritual good or to seek salvation. “No man seeketh after God” (Romans 3:11). Because we are born in Adam, we take on his sin nature. Everything we touch is defiled. We are not able to do good. No man doeth good, not even one! No one seeks after God! No one! None! Zero. Not at any time! That’s what the Bible says. We are only able to sin. Genesis 6:5, “Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart [is] only evil continually.” Romans 8:8, “So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.” What does Romans 5:6 say? “For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” The words “without strength” mean just what it says. We have no ability to save ourselves. We are dead.
When the Bible tells us in 1 Corinthians 15:22, “For as in Adam all die” it means that man has lost all ability to do any spiritual good—he cannot convert himself aside from a gift and miracle of God. This is what we call grace.
Illustration: we often picture salvation as “throwing out the life line.” Go ahead and throw it out. Man will never grab it. It’s not because he’s drowning, grasping for it, and grasping for breath. Dear friends he’s not grasping for anything. He’s a dead corpse at the bottom of the ocean!
But this seems to insult what we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. It seems that there are nice people in the world. There are many seemingly nice people in the world, even sincere religious people that are “dead in trespasses and sins”. “They have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge” (Romans 10:2). They are in the most dangerous position.
So much of the time we see lost men all around us trying to please God, and we think there must be some goodness in them. The words of our text show us that man has no light in him whatsoever. Man is NOT good in any fashion. Our text says that man is “dead in trespasses and sins”. Let’s look at those two words.
Trespasses: This word has the idea of going somewhere you shouldn’t. 1 John 3:4 tells us “sin is the transgression of the law.” The word “trespasses” in our text means to “slip, fall, deviate, or go in the wrong direction.” We may trespass purposely or our of ignorance, but we are still trespassing. Have you ever crossed onto someone’s property where there was a “No Trespassing” sign? Don’t do it. Don’t cross the line! That’s what God says. He says don’t lie, don’t covet, don’t lust after another. He says don’t take His holy name in vain, don’t steal. What have we done? We have trespassed these sacred lines of God’s holiness. The thing is, we are not aware that now we cannot be with a holy righteous God. We are dead! Most people think they are good and will go to heaven with they die.
Sins: The word “sins” here means to “miss the mark”. Most people are trying to be good. They have a conscience and they are aiming to do right. The problem is, no one ever has hit the mark. We all “come short” of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). Because there is no life of God in us, this all we can do. We have no ABILITY to please God or do right. We are “dead…in sins”.
So we have no ability to please God. And yet we are NOT neutral. So many people paint man as neutral. He comes into this world with a blank slate. That is far from the truth. As long as you believe that you will remain in slavery to your sins. Actually the Bible says that we are not neutral. We are aggressively opposed to God. We are dead in trespasses and sins. That is we are continually testing God with each one of our sins. It is not that man cannot hear God telling him “no”. We all have God’s law written in our heart. We know what is right and wrong, but we cannot stop ourselves from sinning.
2. To be dead in sin is to have an appetite for sin.
In John 8:34 Jesus said, “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” To be dead in trespasses and sins is to have a love for sin and this world that overcomes all desire to please God. You see because of our sinful nature, we love sin. “Men love darkness” (John 3:19).
We actually inherit the desire to sin from our father Adam. That is how Romans 5:12 puts it, “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”
Perhaps you are here today, and you do not want to follow Christ because you say you are not ready. The truth of the matter is that you love your sin, and your sin is blinding you from God. Eve was blinded by her own lust for the fruit, and she fell into sin. We are all like Eve.
B. When do people fall into this death?
Actually, the Bible tells us that we are born dead! We call this “original sin”. You may need to teach a child how to talk or how to walk or how to think correctly, but you do not need to teach him how to sin. He knows it naturally. He has fallen into sin the moment he was conceived.
Psalm 51:5, “Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
Psalm 58:3, “The wicked are estranged [GO ASTRAY] from the womb: they go astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies.”
So we see that we are all born dead in sins. Man’s greatest problem is that he is DEAD in sins.
But he is not only dead in sins.
II. Man is not only dead in sin, he is Defeated in sin. We read in verse 2, “Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience:
A. Before Christ we were controlled by our Sin.
Man without Christ cannot help himself. Before we accepted Christ as Savior, our utter deadness to God was evident in our behavior. We all born slaves to sin. We are ignorant of the life of God, and we are simply following the world. With glee we followed all that the world told us to follow. We thought we were doing our own thing, but we were really in slavery to our own sins and lusts.
B. We were also controlled by the spirit of this age. We call this the world. We walked according to the “course of this world”. The spirit of the age had an iron grip on us!
This world is the sworn enemy of God. 1 John 2:15 says “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” What is it that rules the attitude of this age? Look at the next verse (16), “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.”
C. Finally the Bible says we are controlled by Satan. The Bible clearly says that there are spirits in the unseen world of the air. These spirits are fallen, malignant, and bitterly hostile to God, and they are ruled by the “prince of the power of the air”. This dark ruler who roams the unseen spiritual realm is Satan. He is the one who brings evil influenes to bear upon the world of men.
Satan of course cannot be all places at once, but the Bible here says he controls the wicked influences of the world.
Look at the end of verse 2, we are called “the children of disobedience.” That’s what we are outside of Christ. So we are not only dead in sin and defeated in sin we are disobedient in sin!
III. By nature we are Disobedient in sin. The force of these words is far stronger than we can grasp in our English language. Paul was not simply saying that we are disobedient children. The word children means “sons” and it “has aspecial reference to one’s origin, nature, and relationship to his father.” There fore Paul was saying we are sons of the disobedient one—Satan. We had the nature and character of that evil spirit who prompts people to disobey God. Through Adam’s disobedience, we are all heirs of his disobedience.
Remember what Jesus said in John 8:44? “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.”
Conclusion: As we close look at verse 1 again. It says “you hath he quickened.” That is not actually there in the text, but was put there to make the thought clearer. Verse one tells us the same thing as verse 5, that “when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ.” Listen, you will never look to the life that is in Christ if you do not see your sin and call it what it is. You will never need resurrection if you do not think you are dead. You will never seek the victory over death that Christ has gained if you do not see that you are defeated and enslaved in sin. You will never seek forgiveness if you do not realize you have violated the holiness of God. The word “quickened” means to be “made alive.” Some of you know what it is to be given a new lease on life. You have been close to death and God has spared you, and it changed the way you life. Spiritually, not only have we been close to death, we were dead, and God has brought us back from the dead! We need to live like those brought back from the dead!
Closing Hymn: Christ Liveth in Me (insert)