Since we’ve been hanging out for a while, you may have noticed that my life keeps having these incidents where it seems as though my world is either blowing up or crashing down. Or both. Good observation. In getting my head on straight again, talking with you about God and who he is has been helpful. Immensely helpful. However, the types of hurts God has given permits for have been mighty. Not mightier than God, but mighty. And so, I’ve been going to a counselor.
One of the things the counselor said to me about dealing with people who have emotionally brutalized me in the past but are currently changing direction is this: glance in the rearview mirror.
When we drive, we keep our eyes on the road (please get off the phone!), focusing on the cars or pedestrians (or deer, for those of us in Colorado) in front of us. We identify threats, we observe who has a habit of ramming into other cars, we identify the aggressive people in the big black trucks with the loud engines and rolling coal–we are intent on what is coming up. We need to be ready to adjust. We need to be situationally aware.
While we focus on what is up and coming, we also want to cast our eyes behind us in our rearview mirrors to remember what has come before. It’s a quick glance to keep the whole picture of the road in our memory.
It was a great analogy for how to consider this one relationship in particular where this lady has been truly a horrible person in the past, but she now is in a growing relationship with our Savior and God. I am focusing on where we are going together, but it would be foolish at this point to forget what has come before. If for no other reason than to praise God in the miraculous transformation. And so I also glance in the rearview mirror.
This is what I see Paul writing to his audience. He starts with the glance in the mirror.
2 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Ephesians 2:1–3 (ESV)
Mimicking Paul, we too will cast a glance in the rearview mirror. If only to recognize the horrible people these (and we–but we aren’t applying yet!) were. They were; it’s not the end of the story.
The two categories for interpretation are who the recipients were spiritually and who used to lead them.
The Spiritual Resumé
Examining the text, what words and phrases does Paul use to describe the audience? Let’s make a list of what we will investigate.
- The audience was dead.
- The audience was by nature children of wrath.
Dead
Beginning the study of this concept, I noticed a feature in Logos Bible Software that points out the sense of a term. In this case, the word dead isn’t a literal dead but instead is a spiritual dead. Logos Bible sense lexicon defined this type of dead as characterized by lack of spiritual life or vigor; being completely indifferent toward the things of God. It’s a word that Paul uses to describe the condition of the heart of these folks. In a minute, we will see that Jesus also used this word to describe the condition of another person’s heart.
Keeping to our concentric circles, we will see how Paul used the term first. Right here in our current passage of Ephesians 2:1-10, Paul uses the word twice, once in verse 1 and then repeats the idea in verse 5.
2 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins
Ephesians 2:1 (ESV)
5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
Ephesians 2:5 (ESV)
Here is a hermeneutical principle to be aware of. As students of the word, we want to focus on the topic the author intended to teach. Paul’s topic is the heart condition of the recipients prior to belief in Christ as their Savior. Framed another way, Paul was NOT teaching about the physiological condition of Christ after he was crucified.
Paul is not describing how Jesus was or was not literally dead (he was literally dead), he is describing how the audience was dead. They were dead in their trespasses. This is not a commentary on the deadness of Christ but the deadness of those who are not alive with Christ.
What we learn here is that Paul and the audience were dead in sin. Further, in verse 5 there, Paul defines his meaning with the phrase by grace you have been saved. If we apply the technique of making the statement an opposite, we have something like
“even when we were dead in our trespasses, we were not alive with Christ–without grace you are not saved–“
Yikes. If we leave it like that, I get a wretched knot in my tummy and I start to panic. This is NOT the case. We are only glancing at the reality of what is in the rearview mirror. Hang in there with me. What have we learned from this cross reference?
- They were dead in sin.
- They were not alive with Christ.
- They were not saved.
Moving one concentric circle out, consider more writing of Paul in a related book…
13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses,
Colossians 2:13 (ESV)
As students of the word, one of the tools in our toolbox is the ability to notice opposites. If we see a concept and its opposite is also present, it will help us to define and understand the original word. For example, we are trying to see what Paul means by dead. Here in Colossians, we virtually have the same phrase dead in your trespasses. What comes after is enlightening though. Paul says that God made them alive, but then further explains what that means with the phrase having forgiven us all our trespasses.
Being alive is equivalent to have sins forgiven. In terms of the word dead, what does that mean? Being dead in this sense is equivalent to having all their trespasses held against them. Unforgiven. Let’s add it to the list.
- They were dead in sin.
- They were not alive with Christ.
- They were not saved.
- They were unforgiven.
Even though Paul discusses this topic regularly, we are going to take a brief look at how Jesus used this word in one of his parables.
If you remember the parable of the prodigal, the younger son was wretched and disrespectful to his father. Once the son had the father’s wealth, he went away and spent it in wanton living. When he ran out of money and was wallowing with the hogs, he remembered his father. Coming up with a spiel he hoped to get him at least in with his father’s servants, he went home. The father had been watching, waiting, hoping. Having his desire for his son to return realized, the father said of him in Luke 15:24, “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to celebrate.”
It’s a rich and multi-faceted parable, worthy of deep study. However, we are grabbing a nibble of it, looking at this idea of dead. From the little I’ve learned about Eastern literature and it’s structure, a lot can be gathered from the way words are lined up. Below I made a simple table to help us see the information organized.
According to the father in the parable, the son was dead and is now alive. The son was lost and is now found. I see this is as an example of synonymous parallelism. The two statements next to each other are synonymous. One serves to illustrate the other. We can see what equals what clearly in the table above. Being dead equals being lost. Being alive equals being found. Jesus defined this spiritual deadness in this way. Let’s include what we’ve learned on our list.
- They were dead in sin.
- They were not alive with Christ.
- They were not saved.
- They were unforgiven.
- They were lost.
We could go all over the NT looking for this concept of dead and defining it further, but this is a glance in the rearview mirror, remember? We will look at one more term in this section that helps the audience understand what they once were.
Children of Wrath
Briefly, we will touch on this term. The translators made this pretty clear for us English speakers, but I want to open to you the idea of trying to interpret figures of speech.
Realizing that we live in a Christian literary culture that values the concept that the Bible is LITERAL, it is important to understand exactly what that means. I will eventually get to a Basics Bite that covers figures of speech in more detail, but for now we will address the details we need to interpret this section.
If we look over the 5 translations I regularly have open in my Logos Bible Software, each one translates the Greek the same way. Describing all current believers, Paul wrote “and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind”. Each one calls them children of wrath.
Most of the translations include cross referencing for other verses that Paul may or may not have been alluding to, but more importantly for us students of the word are the translator notes that both the NET Bible and the Lexham English Bible (LEB) attach to this phrase. Below is a screenshot from the LEB (it’s getting the press time because I’m so excited to find it sharing similar information to the NET):
Semitic idiom? What does that mean?
What do we do when we don’t know something? We consult an expert. Let me share one of my hermeneutics mentors, Dr. Zuck, when he writes of idioms.
The Greek of Romans 16:4 reads, “They laid down their neck.” This idiom is best rendered in English by the words “they risked their own necks,” or as in the NIV, “they risked their lives.” The idiom “the son of” followed by a quality indicated that the person possesses that quality as in Ephesians 5:6, “the sons of disobedience” (Greek). Christians are “sons of the light” (1 Thes. 5:5) in that they are characterized by light, that is, they do not consistently live in the darkness of sin. A “son of peace” (Greek, Luke 10:6) is one who is characterized by peace.
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This is how the translators could identify an idiom and give us burgeoning students this heads-up that there is a figure of speech here. And now we have another tool in our toolbox for interpretation. We can read children of wrath and at least have a question rise in our minds, “is this an idiom?”
Wrap Up
We are not finished looking in the rearview mirror, but as has been my intention, I want to keep what we discuss each time we meet to a manageable Bite. As we conclude for this time, let’s organize what we’ve interpreted from our section.
- They were dead in sin.
- They were not alive with Christ.
- They were not saved.
- They were unforgiven.
- They were lost.
- They were children characterized by wrath
Even as a mere glance, this list is flat-out depressing. Interestingly, the three verses we are focusing in on, Paul wrote them (in the Greek) as an incomplete sentence. Possibly Paul was wanting to make sure his audience was anxious to get to the next part–he was possibly leading them to keep reading. Just a glance. This isn’t reality now for believers. It’s bad news, but there is more to the story.
Have you noticed that I am not including any of us in the list? I am intentionally keeping it impersonal. The order of study remains:
- Observation
- Interpretation
- Application
We are firmly in the realm of interpretation. As we have discussed before, interpretation is the discipline of discovering what the text means. Only when we enter into the discipline of application can we then discover what the text means to me. This is a very important distinction as we will learn more tools to put in our Bible study toolbox.
Our Bible Study Bite for today is a point of hermeneutics. I would like for us as students of the word to begin to open our minds to the possibility that scripture might have figures of speech that are not to be understood as we might define the words individually. Other languages have figures of speech that need to be understood as the norms of that language intend, not how we might hear individual words.
In this Bite we started to crack the door on this idea with the recognition that dead isn’t necessarily biologically dead and that children of wrath is an idiom. The people were still breathing and they were not literally offspring of an emotion. But they were characterized or destined for that emotion. Ponder this idea. Consider it in light of other places in scripture you might be reading. There is a vast array of interpretive tools we will get to explore as we start to understand figures of speech.
This was part 1 of glancing in the rearview mirror. We remembered for a few minutes what believers once were. Next time we will remember what believers once followed.
