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HOW MANY COLLEGE CREDITS FOR MY OBEDIENCE? #1

STAGNANT AND SLEEPY

Does the devil ever dangle a little silver doodad before your eyes and smoothly say: "You're getting very sleepy. Your eyelids are soooo heavy"? In Ephesians two, we find that hypnotism — Lucifer's kind — is a thriving business today. People are "dead in trespasses and sin."

I have a rather gritty piece of Scripture to share with you here on this Monday, and then I'm going to play the role of "Ebert & Roeper" for a moment. But first our Bible verse of the day as we move into the second chapter of Ephesians. This is an incredible letter by the Apostle Paul, and it's an eye-opener just how practical and necessary his God-given insights are here in the year 2002.

"It wasn't so long ago," he writes — and this is from The Message paraphrase — "that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience."

That's quite a metaphor, isn't it? "Mired in that old stagnant life of sin." Now, while that imagery is fresh in our minds, I want to share a bit of social commentary — not my own — about a film that came out back in 2001. I hope and pray you missed it — I drove MY car quickly in the other direction from the multiplex and the pay-per-view showings — but it was entitled Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. I know absolutely nothing about the plot or who is in it, but here is what the commentary said:

"The relentless torrent of foul language becomes numbing and finally makes the film seem more crass than amusing. It's not just that Jay is profane, but that he's incapable of being anything else." Then they added a note about its official rating: "MPAA rating R, for NONSTOP crude and sexual humor, pervasive strong language, and drug content. Guideline: The strong language and the crude sexual humor could scarcely be more incessant."

Well, speaking of "stagnant life of sin" and Paul's warning — "You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live" — there it is. This film is out on video and DVD now, so you've been warned. And maybe you're thinking to yourself: "All right, Reverend Melashenko, so you clipped that puritanical see-no-evil review out of Christianity Today or maybe from Donald Wildmon's monthly newsletter." No, I didn't either. Actually, that strong condemnation and warning came, word for word, no deletions, from the secular reviewers at the Los Angeles Times. Even Kenneth Turan and company, at the "Calendar" section of one of America's leading newspapers, admitted: "This is powerful, dangerous, morally poisonous JUNK. Be forewarned: it's evil personified. Go and watch this sewage at your own spiritual risk."

Is it possible for a person to be so steeped in the stagnancy of sin that, for all practical purposes, they're dead? Not physically dead, but numb inside to the point where the soul is on life support? Here in the second chapter of Ephesians, this is what Paul is saying.

"As for you, you were DEAD in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world."

It's encouraging to notice the past tense Paul uses here. "You WERE dead in your transgressions and sins." Apparently there is such a thing as resurrection from spiritual death, from the stupor and the stagnation of sinful existence. In fact, that's the essential point of chapter two: spiritual death can be followed by a new life. In some Bibles, chapter two is even titled "Made Alive in Christ," borrowed directly from verse five. And obviously, Paul is writing here to people who have at least enough spiritual life and interest to pick up the letter and read it. They aren't corpses just yet. But many people in his original Ephesus audience of 60 A.D., and now again today, were at one point so dedicated to sinful thinking that it may as well have been death. The New International Version text notes for verse one diagnose their spiritual coma this way:

"A description of their past moral and spiritual condition, separated from the life of God."

What do you think about that? A person can be, in a secular sense, alive and aware and vibrant and socially conscious — maybe working in Hollywood, California, like Kevin Smith, making millions of dollars producing R-rated films for Miramax. And yet, "separated from the life of God," as the Bible puts it, they're dead in the one way that really counts. They make a 95-minute film that is filled with things that are — from the world's P.O.V. (point of view) — clever and insightful and deep. And yet, measured against God's yardstick, there's so little pulse there that it basically registers as death.

The official Bible commentary for my own Adventist denomination is filled with good scholarly material for Ephesians. And the writers make this observation about verse one:

"Man is suffering from more than social maladjustment or annoying complexes — he is in a state of spiritual death. The state of the unregenerate has a close analogy to physical death. In the latter there is lacking the living principle that is essential to growth and energy, and this is precisely the condition of the spiritually dead."

Would you accept with me that in both the physical and spiritual realm, God is the Creator? Fair to say? Certainly there is an original blueprint, a divine image, where people like Adam and Eve were just so unbelievably ALIVE! They were healthy; their bodies were perfect. Every cell in them was doing just great because it was flourishing in Eden. Then sin came, separation from God came, and death was the very quick result. Well, the same is true in the spiritual realm. We were made according to a spiritual blueprint, and back in Ephesians chapter one it was essentially defined by two words: IN CHRIST. Men and women "in Christ" are alive; they live the abundant life. They understand the things of eternity and their lives are ordered by a flawless pattern.

Everything lines up. But when people depart from that, things fall apart and the EKG readout of the soul quickly goes to a flat line. C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity about how history is just one long cycle of repeated experimenting by people, trying to figure out a way to have LIFE, to have abundance and understanding and wisdom and a well-ordered society . . . without God. And it breaks down every time. Stagnation and stupor and spiritual death are the result every single time. "The machine conks" is his colorful way of putting it. We're not just experiencing a hormonal imbalance here or ineffective karma or discombobulated feng shui. The problem is much more fundamental than that: we're apart from God. Period.

We've been borrowing gratefully from the Tyndale New Testament Commentaries for Ephesians, which were written by Dr. Francis Foulkes. He has some astute insights about this business of spiritual death and "apart from God." Notice:

"Man's trouble," he writes, "is not merely that he is out of harmony with his environment and with his fellows." Speaking of bad feng shui. "He is ‘alienated from the life of God,' that is, with respect to his true spiritual nature he is dead in TRESPASSES . . . and SINS." Then he adds, by way of explanation: "There is probably no essential difference between the two nouns ("trespasses" and "sins"); the root meaning of the first is ‘missing the mark' and of the second ‘slipping' or ‘falling from the way,' and thus both express man's failure to live as he could and ought. Men were MADE in God's image to live as children in His family, aware of His presence, rejoicing in His direction."

What a tragedy to, as he puts it, "slip away" . . . but also what a powerful trilogy of safeguards here: "[Living] as children in His family, aware of His presence, rejoicing in His direction." Let me tell you, friend — that's LIFE. That's the secret of it all right there. In His family, aware of His presence, rejoicing in His direction.

Dr. Foulkes goes on to point out that, as creatures with free will, God doesn't make us live in His family. If we want "stagnant," we can have "stagnant." If we want spiritual death, there are plenty of vacancies in that hotel too. Here's the rest of his essay:

"Freedom was given, but with it a warning that it involved the possibility of disobedience, and that disobedience WOULD lead to death. This death is not primarily physical death but the loss of the spiritual life given, life in fellowship with God and the consequent capacity for spiritual activity and development. Thus the description here is not merely metaphorical, nor does it refer only to the future state of the sinner. It describes his present condition, and the Bible indeed often thus speaks of man in a state of spiritual death because of sin."

Our time is up, friend, but let me just say this. We have all this talk here about a shredded blueprint, about comatose Christians, and about "dead in trespasses." There's almost a hologram of a skull and crossbones hovering over chapter two here. What motivates the warning? Why the sensational metaphors? Just one thing: God loves us so much that He can't stand to see us outside of Eden. He can't stand to see us not wearing our oxygen masks, slowly growing dizzy and disoriented and not realizing it. All through this chapter, it's His "great love for us," and His rich mercy expressed on our behalf, that brings about our rescue and our resurrection.