What does it mean to be dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1)?

Some of you, perhaps, have known what bereavement is, and the sorrows of bereavement — what it is to have your dear ones dead in your homes — what would you have said, if some one had come to you at such a time, and had spoken a word of power, and there had been a resurrection in your household? Would you not say divine power was put forth? This is what Jesus claims and what He has; because, as we have seen, He spake the word, and the dead came to life; and so He proved, as I have said, that He was divine, and able to bestow life upon those who listened to Him. To whom, then, is it He speaks these words? It is to every one who is dead in trespasses and sins. But you will say to me, "Am I dead?" It is God's word: "You who were once dead in trespasses and sins." You will say again "Am I dead?" Not as to the body, else you could not be here. What is death? It is separation from God; you have no life towards God. I will prove it. If I speak to persons in the street, and they do not, and cannot, hear what I say, am I not justified in saying that they are deaf, if they do not hear what I say to them? And supposing one were to turn round, and say, "I am not deaf," would it show that he was not? No. When God speaks to your souls, then, and you do not hear His voice, what does it prove? Does it not prove, at least, that you cannot hear the voice of God? And if you cannot hear the voice of God when He speaks to you, it can only be because you are dead in trespasses and sins. You have no power to hear, because death has come in. For what does the word of God say? "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." Shall we clear this point, before we proceed further? I want all unsaved souls to understand that they are dead as before God — yes, dead in trespasses and in sins. And, alas! there is something else. Not simply are you dead in trespasses and sins, but sentence is passed upon you as in that condition; not executed, we admit, but still the sentence is passed, and will be executed in God's time, when the day of His grace shall have closed. Shall we, then, simply understand this, beloved friends? Will you accept the statement — not my thoughts, be it observed, but God's own thoughts, God's word — that every unsaved soul is in a state of death? and it is to dead people that Jesus speaks in the passage before us.

Our state is set forth in Ephesians 2:1, as "dead in trespasses and sins." The next verse remarkably enough goes on to speak of walking in those trespasses and sins; but that is because the death there spoken of is death towards God. Those who are dead Godward are very much alive to "the course of this world," and "the prince of the power of the air," who operates in the "children of disobedience." To be dead towards God is entirely consistent with being alive towards the world and the devil: indeed the one springs out of the other.

Such were we, whether Jew or Gentile. At one and the same moment we were dead in trespasses and sins and yet active in all kinds of evil. Very much alive to everything wrong, yet wholly dead to God. Being dead towards God we were without any point of recovery in ourselves: our only hope lay in Him. Hence the great words with which verse 4 opens, "But God —"

The first verse tells us that we are by nature in the state of death--"dead in trespasses and sins." Man is dead spiritually; he is dead towards God (John 5:24-25). This fact that the unregenerated man is dead is much denied in our days. We hear of "the better self," or "the good spark" which is in everybody, and the truth God has revealed concerning man, that he is dead in trespasses and sins is but little believed. The next verse states the walk of the natural man. It fully shows the awful place in which man is as dead in trespasses and sins. The walk is according to his fallen nature; the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life are the governing principles of this walk. We are enemies of God by wicked works. And behind all there stands the prince of the power of the air, Satan. He works in the children of disobedience, which here means the Jews. Of this our Lord spake when He said, "Ye are of your father, the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do" (John 8:44). And again it is written, "He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. (1 John 3:8). It is a solemn truth, which God has revealed concerning our condition as fallen beings, that we are in the grasp of the prince of the power of the air; that man is under this mighty being of darkness. To what a place of degradation man has been brought by sin! This likewise is disbelieved by the great majority of professing Christians. A personal devil is ridiculed and his existence is denied.

The apostle carries us back now to what, alas, was our previous fellowship. We have been called to the fellowship of Christ, but how good for us to look back and see what He has called us out of. "And you," he says, "hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins." This is the first time in the epistles that we find such a statement with regard to man's condition. The epistle to the Romans speaks of our being under death as the penalty upon our sins. It speaks of our being dead to sin as the effect of the new place of identification with Christ in His death, which God has given us; but now there is something more than this. It is man himself who is dead. That state, impracticable of help to any except God, is his. There is no possibility of self-help. There is no possibility of working out of that condition. No work is conceivable in such a state. This death is Godward. There is not anything which for Him constitutes life at all. He says that this is not a condition of irresponsibility, however, but the reverse. It is "in trespasses and sins" that men are dead; active enough, fully active in this character in which the epistle to the Romans has spoken of them, but dead as to the hopelessness of it, as to the total absence of all response to God which it implies. Activity there is enough, "in which ye once walked," he says, "according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power," or authority, "of the air, the spirit which now worketh in the sons of disobedience." This is what gives its character then to the course of this world, age, as it is literally, as we have seen; the whole period characterized by that which is away from God, and with the ruler over it who, as the ruler of the power of the air, is exhibited to us as having that complete control of the earth which the heavens have for fruitfulness or for disturbance. This ruler is the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience. They are marked out as the sons of disobedience, as that which gives him title to the power which he manifests over them. How complete is this apostasy, then, from the blessed place in which God created man to be at the beginning, the one with whom He had come down to walk as with a friend. Nor was there any who did not share this place. "Among whom we also," he adds, we Jews as well as you Gentiles, "all once had our conversation in the lusts of our flesh." We had our common fellowship, terrible fellowship indeed, "in the lusts of the flesh, fulfilling the wills of the flesh and of the mind;" that is, the grosser or the more refined and spirit part of our nature, both alike evil and away from God. Thus we were "children of wrath by nature even as the rest." The Jew is in no wise exempt, but, on the contrary, as being in this condition in spite of all the blessing and privilege which God had bestowed upon him, is only, if possible, in a greater depth of evil than the Gentile. Such is man's condition, then.

In Ephesians 2 we find it stated in plainest terms, that when we were dead in sins God quickened us together with Christ. We must begin, in our meditations on this subject, in the region of death. We start from the tomb — we land in glory. God quickens out of the grave. We were dead in our trespasses and sins. That is, we were without spiritual life. Mark this carefully, we were without the least movement of spiritual life. "We were dead in sins." But when we were thus dead in sins, the blessed Lord lay dead for sins. At that solemn moment all were dead. The first Adam dead in sin, the last Adam dead for sin. Not a breath stirred to disturb the deep silence of death. It was as if the vessel had sunk and the waves closed over it. But now, when man could contribute nothing towards the great work, God enters the scene; but He enters it as the God of resurrection. He only can plant the pulse of life in a dead soul. "But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ." But to know our blessing we must see it in Christ, so we turn to Him, and meditate on what He is in God's sight.

There are two distinct things in which the Ephesians' starting.point is completely different from Romans. The starting.point in Romans is man's responsibility: he is guilty, all the world is guilty. There are proofs of sin both in Jew and Gentile; man is looked at as alive in sins. In Ephesians he is dead in them; a different thought altogether. Alive in sin in Romans, but, for that very reason, dead towards God - not a movement in his heart towards God. After a man is dead he neither speaks, nor moves, nor feels. I want to be dead to sin, and alive to God, and then everything changes. The point is to get sins and sin dealt with; the fruit cleared away, and the tree dead; and this is fully brought out in Romans: "Propitiation through faith in his blood;" and then, "Reckon ye yourselves dead to sin."

As dead in sins, we are totally away from God. Do not we know it, beloved friends? Take the most respectable, decent man in the world — the things of Christ have no interest for him — he is dead towards God; he may be intelligent, honest, etc., but you never get Christ in his heart. It was just the same with ourselves. It is not a question of reprobate criminals, but we were dead.

Both are seen together; dead would be the state, but trespasses and sins would be practice. It was because of what they were that their practice was in opposition to God. Hence in regard to the Jews it is more state than practice that is spoken of. In the first three chapters of Romans the whole human race is found to be guilty before God; that was through sins, but here state is more in view, and the need of new life if they are to be brought into line with Christ. So, whether Gentile or Jew both needed the sovereign mercy of God. Both were children of wrath by nature, though by practice they were different. Paul as a sample of that favoured race could say, "I obtained mercy" (1 Tim. 1:13).

The Jew, though in a place of external privilege, proved by his lusts that he had a fallen nature and was on common ground with the Gentile. Both Jew and Gentile are dead to God. In the Epistle to the Romans we are viewed as under the sentence of death as the result of what we have done — our sins. Here we are viewed as already dead to God as the result of what we are — as having a fallen nature. This condition of death is not, however, a condition of irresponsibility, for the Apostle describes man as “walking”, having “conversation” and fulfilling his lusts. It is to God that man is dead. To the influences of the world, the flesh and the devil, he is actively alive. Moreover, the devil has obtained mastery over man through his disobedience to God, and the fallen nature we have is the result of that disobedience — we are children of disobedience.