What does it mean to be spiritually lost?

Let us see what that character of "lost" is. There were the two things; I was guilty before God (not merely lost, though "lost" goes a great deal further), and besides that, there was the state I was in. "Guilty" refers to judgment; but when I say "I am lost," I speak of my present state. My carnal mind is enmity against God, so "they that are in the flesh cannot please God." I am "guilty" by reason of what I have done; but I am "lost" by reason of the state I am in. I am not in the earthly paradise in which Adam was, nor am I in the heavenly paradise where God is. Where am I? Totally away from God. It is not in the first moment of that awakening we learn the extent of this - that it is all over with me (not that God cannot take me out of that place). You must make the tree good, as well as its fruit. It is not merely that I have done wrong - the fruit - by which I am "guilty" - but the tree is bad. God is holy, and I am unholy; so I never can be with Him - though, of course, grace comes in - but that was our condition.

THE SEPARATION THAT EXISTS BETWEEN MAN AND GOD was brought in by sin. The love and the confidence that were natural to him in his innocent state were displaced by the fear and distrust that took possession of his heart in consequence of the transgression of which he was guilty; and that fear and distrust of his Maker dominate and shape the lives of every one of his descendants. And it is not that wholesome and reverential fear that has its congenial habitation in the heart of every intelligent being who is in right relations with God, but it is that terror that is born of the sin of which his conscience tells him he is guilty, and which prevents him from looking at God in any other light than that of a merciless Judge, and this is so wrought upon by his viperous enemy, the devil, that even the overtures of his Creator’s unfathomable grace are utterly disbelieved and refused.

Two words describe the natural condition of fallen man, and they are dead and lost. Alive—fully alive—to this godless world, to its pleasures, to its pride, to its lust, to its vices, and to everything that will minister a momentary gratification to his insatiable desires; but dead to God by the enmity of his apostate condition, and by the darkness in which he has found his God-forsaken home; but a darkness that is loved, because he thinks it hides from view the deeds of which he feels he ought to be ashamed.

And lost, because in him there is neither power nor desire for recovery. He can invent no remedy for his fallen condition. He is sin’s servant, and his lusts like a whirlwind carry him away in the path of destruction. He can neither retrace his footsteps nor moderate the rapidity of his headlong career. Therefore he will banish the thought of God from his mind altogether, for every such thought only increases his misery.

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.

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 —"

In order to know man's sinful condition, we do not need to know what is the record of his life. The proof of sin in man is that he is at home outside of God's presence, and absolutely unhappy in that presence — a proof that includes all men. We need not lay specific transgressions to men's charge. God, who knows the heart, alone can do that and He knows there is plenty in every man's life that, when the records are opened, will show much actual transgression. But that man is at a distance from God, none can dispute: the thought of God, as the psalmist says, gives him trouble. This is where God must find a man if He finds him at all. The apostle speaks of it in that way. To saints in the assembly at Ephesus who had been Gentiles, he says: "Ye were … strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world." How did the creature become a stranger to the Creator? There can be but one answer: Sin has come in and brought in alienation and distance from the God of goodness and love. But, thank God, it is just there that His grace begins.

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.

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."

How serious is spiritual death. Many speak ignorantly of a Divine spark in every man that only needs to be fanned into a flame, but the Bible speaks of the sinner as “DEAD in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), of “being alienated from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18), and presses even upon a religious man like Nicodemus the necessity of the new birth, even as the Apostle Paul speaks of the believers being quickened with Christ. Doubtless the latter is a more advanced thought than the former, but evidently both lie in the domain of God’s sovereignty, for a man can no more produce his second and spiritual birth than the first and natural birth, and no man can quicken himself. The power of producing life lies alone with God.

Certainly, there is not a soul who does not need forgiveness, though we do at times fall in with some of the ninety-and-nine just persons who judge that they have no need of repentance. But they are deceiving themselves. The wise man's words are all too true: "There is not a just man upon earth that does good and sins not" (Eccles. 7:20). The summing up of the Apostle is even more conclusive: "There is no difference, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23). Such comprehensive language leaves no door of escape for any; the whole human family is brought thereby under the judgement of God. Moreover, from such a condition none can extricate themselves; no amount of human effort, as amendment of life, almsgiving, etc., can possibly purge away a single sin.

It does not, I think, mean here that there is no difference in degrees of wickedness, or that God makes no distinction between men; for we read in Rev. 20 12, "The dead were judged … according to their works," and in Luke 12:47-48 we have the same thing; but that there is no difference in the sight of God between the Jew and the Gentile for the simple reason that "all have sinned," and "all" do "come short of the glory of God." See how this sentence cuts at the root of all human pride and self-righteousness. First of all God says "all have sinned." How easily, and with what indifference, do people use the language of Scripture! How common to hear people say, "Yes, of course we are all sinners," as if it was a matter of course, and it did not make much difference whether we were or not. But have you ever thought, dear reader, what God says is the consequence of being a sinner? He says, in Rom. 6:23, "The wages of sin is death." And what then? "After this the judgment." (Heb. 9:27.) And after the judgment? "The lake of fire." (Rev. 20:15.) And then? Eternity. But not only have all sinned but notice the expression, "all do come short of the glory of God;" not "have come short," but "do come short," is the correct way of reading it. What a standard God gives! God does not say, "You have come short of what you ought to be." Most would own that; but He says, "You have come short of my glory."