Alive from the Dead

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 11, 1913

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 40, No. 10.

Alive from the Dead

Chapter 2, Verses 1-5

(NOTE.—The first chapter gives us a great general view of God's purpose concerning man, of the power that He has furnished for the working out of that purpose in His Holy Spirit of promise, of His desire expressed in the inspired prayer of the apostle, that God's people might meet all that He required of them, that they should be "to the praise of the glory of His grace." The remainder of the epistle has more or less to do with personal experience, and what God does for the children of men.)

Questioning the Text

1. What did God do to these believers?

"And you did He make alive, when ye were dead." Verse 1. Note 1.

2. By what means were they dead?

"Through your trespasses and sins." Verse 1. Note 2.

3. How, then, did these who were thus made alive once walk?

"Wherein ye once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the powers of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience." Verse 2. Note 3.

4. Was that true of these particular believers alone?

"Among whom we also all once lived in the lusts of our flesh." Verse 3. Note 4.

5. What did we do while living in the lusts of the flesh?

"Doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind." Verse 3. Note 5.

6. Of what were we children during this time?

"And were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest." Verse 3. Note 6.

7. By what was the great change wrought?

"But God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ." Verses 4, 5. Note 7.

Notes

1. "And you."—Let the letter of the epistle come home to each one of our hearts,—count ourselves among the "you." "You did He quicken," we have in our Common Version; "you did He make alive," literally. When God created man he had the twofold life of the soul and the spirit,—the soul the life of the flesh, the life that is in the blood (Lev. 17:11), the life that is common to both man and beast; but he had a life higher than that, the spirit-life, the life direct from God. Losing that, man became a dying creature; losing that, he was spiritually dead, or, as expressed by the apostle elsewhere, "separate from Christ," "without God," "alienated from the life of God," accounted dead because doomed to die, and requiring the creative power of God in order to make him alive.

2. "Through your trespasses and sins."—If man had lived according to the law of his being, which was the great moral law of God, he would never have died, never would have been accounted dead. The higher life was in harmony with the higher law; the lower, soulical life was in harmony with the physical law of the being. But when man transgressed the higher law of his existence, the results of that transgression extended through everything below, and the very law that was transgressed became the power which destroyed. And so we read in 1 Corinthians the 15th chapter and the 56th verse, "The sting of death is sin; and the power of sin is the law," which causes the death of the sinner. It is the turning aside of the electric current from the wire which is supposed to be its proper channel into the body of the man who intercepts that current, that causes his death. He has perverted the law, or the channel, of that current's operation. When man perverts the power of the living law of God, that law must cause his death. All death is in consequence of sin. Death is but finished sin. James 1:15. Would we know, therefore, how evil sin is? Look upon death, its finished work.

3. "According to the course of this world."—When man departed from God, he followed the lower plan, he chose another leader, yielded allegiance to another kingdom, and that kingdom was the kingdom of this world, the course of this age—this world that had yielded itself to the prince of the powers of the air. When Lucifer transgressed the higher law of his being, he fell, and there fell with him a third of the angels of God. Those are the powers of the air under the control of Satan, and those who turn from God and yield to him are walking "according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the powers of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience."

4. "Among whom we also all once lived."—God makes no discrimination among men, so far as their salvation is concerned. "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." Rom. 3:23. "There is none righteous, no not one." All, therefore, need saving. Some have not yielded themselves to sin as deeply as others. Some are not as sick with the awful malady of sin as are others, but the same deadly disease germs are indigenous to every son and daughter of Adam, and without Christ we all follow the lusts of our flesh. There is no respect of persons with God. However men may regard them, He sees mankind utterly lost and without hope in themselves.

5. "Doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind."—The flesh is sinful flesh, and the mind is the carnal mind, or the mind of the flesh. See Rom. 8:7. The doing, therefore, is fleshly, sinful doing; in fact, there can be no other doing. One is bound to sin who is ruled by the carnal mind. Outwardly his works may seem to be good, but the motive that prompts him is a selfish motive after all. There is no difference between the purchasing power of a dollar given by a sinner and a dollar given by a righteous man. There is greater potency, however, in the latter for good than there is in the former. The one has behind it the selfish motive and selfish thought of the giver; the other has behind it a life that is consecrated to God, a prayer that the dollar may be used for all that God designed that it should be used in the conversion of souls to Him. It is not that God wishes to decry, or belittle, the deeds which men do, the efforts they put forth to do good; it is that He may save them that He would lay bare the hopeless condition of the man without a divine Saviour.

6. "Children of wrath."—The Bible calls men the children of that which they assimilate in character. Jesus called the Jews the children of the devil, because they were doing the work that Satan would have them. Some of them are called children of Belial, or worthlessness, because of their worthless lives. The apostle calls them in this our lesson "sons of disobedience," because those thus called love disobedience. But he would also have us understand that the sons of disobedience are the children of wrath, and God's wrath ends in death. God tells us this that He may save us from it. He would have us understand that disobedience will end in utter extinction of being, and that all those who are like-minded will be found at the last children of wrath.

7. "But God."—In this is our hope. Notwithstanding the awful condition of the children of men and their utter hopelessness so far as man is concerned, in God there is hope. First, He is rich in mercy toward the sons of disobedience; secondly, His great love wherewith He loved us moves Him to do all in His power that He may save us, and that great love has demonstrated itself in the giving of the Lord Jesus to die that the sinner might be saved. He loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses. That is when we needed to be loved, saved when we needed to be saved, mercy extended when the mercy was needed; and all this made us alive together with Christ, not apart from Him, where we are left to ourselves, but with Christ, or, as some of the ancient authorities read, in Christ, in Him who lives forever.

We will have more of this wonderful sentence in our next study.