Welcome to Timeless Truth with Pastor Jim Thomas. In season 1, Pastor Jim is leading us in a study of Ephesians. Today’s passage is Ephesians 2:1-3.
“The Bible offers a range of images to help us understand different facets of the reality of sin: sin is lawlessness; sin is rebellion; sin is exchanging God for something created; sin is transgressing a limit… The church has also tried to understand all sins as flowing from a common source. For Augustine, for example, pride is at the origin of all sin. Among these different ways of understanding sin, the one upon which I want to dwell in the light of Genesis 3 is that sin is autonomy.”
– Christopher Watkin, Biblical Critical Theory: How the Bible‘s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture
Ephesians 2:1-3 is the ultimate description of our spiritual “before” portrait. This is what we were like before Christ…
Here is how the apostle Paul describes it…
- Before Christ we were spiritually dead in our trespasses and sins.
- Before Christ we were enslaved by sin and were being led about by the world, the flesh and the Devil
- Before Christ we were condemned by God’s righteous wrath
Now, with all that very real and very bad news (BTW, this is not fake news)… whatever you do, do NOT miss the next episode in our walk through Ephesians, because it begins in v4 with two words that really matter: “But God…”
