Dead in Sins.

“You hath He quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others. 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, (by grace ye are saved ).”¹

Such is the testimony of the Holy Ghost, addressed to saints who were specially favoured by the advanced and sublime revelations contained in the epistle to the Ephesians. He does not say that sin had introduced some disorder into the moral faculties of the soul. He does not say that they retained a divine spark in the breast, which, with the kindly influences of proper culture, could be kindled into a flame. He does not say that they possessed a germ which, with the appliances of religious teaching and Church nurture and good example, could be developed into salvation. He does not say that they had been injured by the fall, and were like a man with a broken limb who needs a surgeon, or like a sick man needing a physician; but they were dead, and therefore needed God. If the inspired Apostle used language with even an ordinary degree of intelligence and meaning, he plainly teaches that those to whom he wrote had once been dead, actually dead, in sins; and death implies three things: first, absence of life; second, insensibility; and third, helplessness.

This teaching, however humbling to the pride of the human heart, is abundantly confirmed by the testimony of the Lord Jesus and of the Holy Ghost, given elsewhere in the Sacred Scriptures. For example, scarcely have we opened the gospel of John before we find it written of the former, “In Him was life;” and, “as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His name: which were born, not of blood (not by natural descent ), nor of the will of the flesh [not by natural desire ), nor of the will of man [not by anything man can do for us], but of God.”² Thus we derive life from Christ, and become the sons of God, or are born of God, by believing on His name; and that this life is something we did not previously possess, that this birth is something more than reformation or the improvement of the nature inherited from our earthly parents, is conclusively shown in the interview between our Lord and Nicodemus.

A religious Jew who could boast of a long line of religious ancestors, and who no doubt was sincere and scrupulous in the observance of the religious duties imposed by the religious system under which he was training for heaven, " came to Jesus by night, and said unto Him, Rabbi, we know that Thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles, that Thou doest, except God be with him.” He was convinced that the mighty miracle-worker was not an impostor nor a fanatic, and he wished to converse with Him about the eternal interests that engaged his attention. The Son of God at once let him know that it was not a teacher he most required, but a Saviour; not instruction, but salvation; not ordinances, but a new birth: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus obviously understood the unexpected remark to signify the very beginning of life, such as he had at his first birth, for he answered in amazement, “How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?”

The Saviour showed him that even if he could enter his mother's womb a second time, or a hundred times, or a thousand times, and be born, it could do him no good, for he would come forth with the same sinful nature, received from all his sinful mothers back to the days of sinning Eve; and hence “Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” What is meant by being born of water and of the Spirit will be seen further along; it is enough at present to notice that it broadly hints at the vileness and worthlessness of man as he is by his first birth. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” There must be the impartation of a new nature, the implantation of a new life, according to the last verse of the remarkable chapter, “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.”³

Still more explicitly our Lord says, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live.”⁴ The context shows that he reſers to the spiritually dead. He had just before said, that heareth My word and believeth hath everlasting life,” and then He exhibits the real condition of believers up to the time they receive everlasting life: they are dead in sins. Immediately afterwards He says, “Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth.” Here He does not say, the hour is coming, and now is, for He speaks of dead bodies in the grave coming forth at their resurrection, thus carefully distinguishing between them and the dead souls that now hear His voice and live. In the same chapter He declares, “Ye will not come to Me, that ye might have life;”⁵ but the words would have no meaning, if we have life, whether we do or do not come to Christ.

Again He exclaims, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, ye have no life in you;”⁶ “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”⁷ It is needless to say that our Lord did not use language carelessly, and, least of all, did He use language that can only mislead. Hence it is certain that men do not naturally possess the life to which He here alludes, nor can they gain it by any efforts of their own, however religious they may be; but it must be received solely from Himself. The very purpose of the Holy Spirit in directing the gospel of John to be written was, “that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that, believing, ye might have life through His name."⁸ But if this is so, surely we do not have life except through His name, or, in other words, through Himself.

We are not surprised, therefore, to find Him speaking of the unconverted as dead, when He said to the man who would bury his father before following the Lord, “Let the dead bury their dead;”⁹ and when he represented the prodigal's father giving warm welcome to the wanderer in the joyful cry, “This my son was dead, and is alive again.”¹⁰ Nor are we surprised to learn that the whole current of Scripture in its bearing upon His redeemed people, who have slipped down into the world, is an earnest exhortation to arise from among the dead, because it is a most unseemly thing for those who have life to be seen grovelling amid the associations of the charnel house. “Wherefore He saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light;”¹¹ or as Rotherham translates it, “Up! thou sleeping one, and rise from among the dead, and the Christ will shine upon thee."

Again, it is written, “We thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead,” or literally, “the all died.”¹² A thorough and very able Bible scholar says of the tense here employed, “It is the aorist, and refers to the state Christ's death proved them to be in.” But however this may be, there can be no mistake concerning the meaning of the solemn testimony, “Being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh;”¹³ “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth;"¹⁴ “He that hath the Son, hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God, hath not life."¹⁵ Of all the children of Adam, male and female, old and young, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, moral and immoral, religious and irreligious, it is thus plainly, positively, and repeatedly affirmed in the word of God, that apart from Christ, or until Christ is received, they have no life.

Of course it is not meant by this that we have no physical life. But there is little in such a life of which the sinner ought to boast. The beasts of the forest and of the field, the lion, the tiger, the elephant, and even the ass, have more animal life than man at his best estate; and the strongest man on the earth would be unwilling to lay a large wager upon the continuance of his life for one month. Nor is it meant that we have no mental or intellectual life. But neither is there much ground for boasting here. The devils, as shown by the entire history of the human race, have far greater sagacity and knowledge than the most gifted and the most accomplished of the sons of genius. In short, man's physical life, commencing with the utter helplessness of infancy, terminates in a vast majority of instances with the brief period of childhood and youth; and in the remainder it is protracted for a few years amid aches, and pains, and sicknesses, and all the symptoms of rapid and inevitable decay, until the grave closes the unsatisfying scene. Man's intellectual life, commencing in every generation with the utter ignorance of infancy, is slowly and laboriously cultivated, until in very rare cases it is developed into something vigorous; but just as its powers are disciplined, they are enfeebled by old age, or rudely arrested by the hand of death.

Life is a term of various import, and it is manifested in diverse forms. It is life that keeps the invisible insect afloat in the sunbeam, and sporting in the water drop. It is life in the unicorn, that makes man afraid to trust him “because his strength is great.” It is life that gives “the goodly wings unto the peacocks,” and “feathers unto the ostrich.” It is life in the war-horse, that has “clothed his neck with thunder.” It is life in the behemoth, that hardens “his bones like bars of iron.” It is life in leviathan, that “maketh the deep to boil like a pot.”¹⁶ It is life that lifts its head in the tiny floweret, which the foot of a babe may crush. It is life that lodges in the gnarled oak, tossing back the storm from its giant arms. Life is everywhere about, above, beneath, within us; but how manifold are its outward expressions and evidences! It is common and proper to speak of the life of a tree, the life of a beast, and the life of a man; yet how unlike they are! Yea, how totally unlike is the animal and intellectual life of man! How unlike they both are to spiritual life, or the life of God in the soul!

The late Sir James Simpson of Edinburgh, who was not less eminent as a Christian than he was as a physician, tells in one of his excellent tracts of a man who was fatally wounded in the last duel fought near that city. A bullet struck the spine of the challenger; and when asked, some hours afterwards, how he felt, " I feel,” he replied, “exactly what I am—a man with a living head and a dead body mysteriously joined together.” This is precisely what every man is by nature, except that he has a living body and a dead spirit mysteriously joined together; so that it may be said of the whole world, “alienated from the life of God;”¹⁷ and of him who only professes to be a Christian, “He that loveth not his brother abideth in death;”¹⁸ and even of a formal Church, “Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.”¹⁹

It is of a woman,—it may be a refined, highly cultivated, and beautiful woman,—it is written, “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth;” or, as Noyes translates it, “She that giveth herself up to pleasure is dead while she liveth.” If pleasure is the aim and end of her existence, as it is with thousands of fashionable young ladies, although nothing can be said against her character by the admiring world, although she may be the brightest and the fairest of the social circle, the Holy Ghost declares she is carrying about a dead heart in a living bosom, she is but a walking corpse. Many a father, yea, many a Christian father, looking with unutterable pride and yearning upon the young girl who is the joy of his home, if he could see her in the light of God's word, would exclaim in deep distress, “My daughter is even now dead.”²⁰

“O dead in sin!
     Wilt thou still choose to die
     The death of deaths eternally?
     Dost thou not feel the gloom
     Of the eternal tomb?

“O dead to life!
     Wilt thou the life from heaven
     Reject, the life so freely given?
     Wilt thou choose sin and tears
     Through everlasting years?

“O dead to Christ!
     Wilt thou despise the love
     Of Him who stooped from joy above
     To shame on earth, for thee,
     That He might set thee free?

“O dead to God!
     Wilt thou not seek His face?
     Wilt thou not turn and own the grace?
     Wilt thou not take the heaven
     So freely to thee given?”

1) Eph. ii. 1-5.

2) John i. 4, 12, 13.

3) Read attentively the whole of John iii.

4) John v. 25.

5) John v. 40.

6) John vi. 53.

7) John x. 10.

8) John xx. 31.

9) Luke ix. 60.

10) Luke xv. 24.

11) Eph. v. 14.

12) 2 Cor. v. 14.

13) Col, ii. 13.

14) 1 Tim, v. 6.

15) 1 John v. 12.

16) Job xxxix. -xli.

17) Eph. iv. 18.

18) John iii. 14.

19) Rev. iii. 1.

20) Matt. ix. 18.