But God!

That is the contrast in the text: the living God and dead man; the beautiful, gracious God and ugly, sinful man; the loving and merciful Father and wretched and hopeless man.

In the context the apostle had spoken of the great power of God that he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead and set him at his own right hand in order that he might appear as head over all to his church, the fullness of him who fills all things in the church. And the apostle intended to speak of God’s power in the gracious salvation of the church and in his merciful deliverance of the church. But the greatness of that grace and the fervency of God’s mercy are measured against the backdrop of the dreadful condition of the church by nature. Man is dead in trespasses and in sins. It is the very deadness, and thus the hopelessness, of man that necessitates such an astounding work of God’s grace.

Man always wants to be something, to have some part in his salvation, to be first in some sense. But if man is by nature dead, then the only hope of man’s salvation is the grace—the pure, powerful, irresistible, wonderful, and wonder-working grace—of God, beginning in eternal election, continuing to the cross, and carrying through all the way to man’s everlasting salvation in heaven.

By grace are ye saved!

And so to impress on us the graciousness of our salvation, the apostle takes up a relentless description of man’s natural deadness. We were dead in trespasses and in sins, living in them and having our delight in them. We thought, desired, planned, willed, spoke, and acted according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience. Walking in the lust of the flesh and of the mind, we were children of wrath even as others. Quite worthless were we: worthy only of damnation.

Desperate, terrible, and hopeless was our condition.

What does scripture say elsewhere? We are blind, naked, poor, imprisoned, loving iniquity and hating righteousness, slaves of sin and of the devil, black as hell, miserable, wretched, guilty, and worthy of eternal punishment. And to make matters worse for man, he does not even know it. He laughs and plays, eats and drinks, and is merry. He tears down his barns and builds bigger barns as he accumulates more and more things in the world. He runs in the way of sin, greedy to satisfy his lusts and appetites. And after many years he lays down his head on his silken pillow one night and awakes in hell. There was no way out for us. And such was our hopeless condition that we did not look for a way out but gladly walked the broad way to hell.

But God!

The living God. The gracious and merciful God. You, being dead in trespasses and in sins, has he quickened together with Christ.

Dead sinners, quickened together with Christ. Christ our life, our food, our drink, our all in all; he who is head over all fills us with his fullness and gives grace for grace.

Wonder of grace. Astounding mercy. God has quickened us together with Christ.

This is the complete spiritual antithesis of the deadness of the natural man and of his flesh. We are alive now. We have been quickened with Christ. In the same sense in which we were spiritually dead in trespasses and in sins, so we are now alive in Jesus Christ. If in the deadness of man by nature he walked after the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience, then now he walks in newness of life, according to the working of the Spirit of Jesus Christ in him. If man was dead, so that in all his thinking, willing, and desiring he was motivated by enmity against God and hatred of the neighbor, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; if he was dead in sins and unto unrighteousness; he is alive now against sin and unto righteousness; alive now with an enlightened mind and heart and spirit; alive to God and to the things of the Spirit of God; alive with love for God and for the neighbor. If he was the slave of Satan, of the flesh, and of sin, now he is the servant of the living God, of righteousness, and of Jesus Christ. You cannot express this contrast, this antithesis, too strongly. Being dead in trespasses and in sins, God has quickened us.

And this quickening is no mere return to a former life. It is no mere return to the state of Adam and to that primitive state of natural and moral perfection in which Adam served God but could fall. And this quickening is not a return to a mere earthly and outward morality.

The quickening is a resurrection, an advance into immortality. So Christ said that whosoever lives and believes in him shall never die. To be quickened is the state in which death and sin and the devil have no more dominion over that man; to be quickened is the life of perfect freedom—freedom from condemnation; freedom from the crushing dominion of sin; freedom from the power of sin and death; freedom to serve the living God, to love him, to delight in him, to know him as our God and to be known as his children. To be quickened is to understand spiritual things spiritually, to be enlightened to see all things in the light of the revelation of God and the purpose of God for all things in his eternal covenant of grace.

You has he quickened!

So this quickened life is as far above the life that Adam lived in Eden as the heavens are above the earth and as far as Christ is more glorious than Adam, for Adam was of the earth earthy, but Christ is the Lord from glory. This quickened life is the immortality, glory, power, and incorruption of heaven. God has quickened us, who were dead in trespasses and in sins.

Amazing wonder of grace.

But still more: God has raised us up and set us in heavenly places. These things belong together, and these three can never be separated. Whomever God quickens he raises up and sets in heavenly places. To be raised up and to be set in heavenly places refer to the glory and dominion of the church over all things. God by his exceeding great power raised up Christ from the dead and set Christ at his own right hand and gave him dominion and power and glory and honor. God made Christ head over all, the victorious Lord of all, who has all power in heaven and on earth. He is exalted to God’s right hand. Christ holds the book of God’s counsel in his hand and does all God’s pleasure. Christ controls every creature and moves it infallibly to its appointed end.

And having quickened us, God also raises us up and sets us in heavenly places. We partake with Christ of his glory, dominion, and honor. As the head is glorious, so must the body partake of that glory and dominion. The elect church and the individual believer are lifted to the heights of dominion and power and sit already in heavenly places.

All those elect children of God who were dead, he quickens; raises to an immortal glory; and exalts to victorious dominion over sin, death, the world, the kingdom of darkness, hell, and the grave.

All this is done with Christ.

Without him we are nothing. Without him we are dead. Without him we walk according to the course of this world. Without him we are only slaves of Satan. Without him we fulfill the desires of the flesh and of the mind. Without him we are only worthy of condemnation. I want to impress this on you. You are alive, but you do not ever possess that life of yourself. You possess the life of Christ as you are with him and in him.

It is not I who live but Christ in me!

With Christ, then, we are quickened, raised, and seated in heavenly places.

With Christ means, first of all, that Christ is the ground of our quickening. God first raised Christ because Christ, in order to accomplish our salvation and earn the righteousness that is worthy of immortality, gave himself to the tribunal of God and was declared guilty and accomplished all the will of God for our salvation. And God raised up Christ. We being dead, he came into our night as the incarnate Son of God, and he took on himself the cause of our death, namely sin. So God made Christ to be sin for us, who knew no sin; God made Christ a curse for us, who was in himself the eternally blessed one and who was the perfectly righteous man. And Christ Jesus, our Lord, made the perfect, voluntary, satisfying sacrifice in order to obtain for us the forgiveness of our sins, the righteousness of God worthy of eternal life, and on that basis to obtain eternal life for himself and for us.

Through his obedience and because of his perfect righteousness and holiness and perfect sacrifice, death lost its right to have dominion over us; because Christ made satisfaction to the justice of God, he freed us from condemnation. And in Christ God raised us up and set us in heavenly places because Christ accomplished all the will and good pleasure of God for our salvation and delivered every one of his elect from sin, condemnation, and death.

Second, that we are raised together with Christ means that he is the source of our life. As the head he was raised to immortal life; as the head he went to heaven to appear in the presence of God for us; as the head he was exalted and became a quickening Spirit by whom the whole body lives. We are nothing in ourselves. All our life is hid with Christ in heaven. We live now, yet not us but Christ in us; and the life that we live, we live by the Spirit of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us.

How are you alive? Think of Christ! That is how you are alive now. Death has no more dominion over Christ. He conquered sin, death, hell, and the grave and overcame Satan and all his dominion. In that sense you are alive now. In that sense you can never die now.

Now! That must be pressed. We are alive in Christ; we are raised up in him; and we are exalted to immortal glory with him. Now! The text presents this as an accomplished fact; so that as surely as Christ lives, we live with him.

By faith! Is that not what the apostle means by “in Christ”? We are in him by the bond of faith. We are engrafted into Christ by a true and living faith. By that faith we are made partakers of all that Christ possesses. We are joined with him, made bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, his holy bride. Whatever is possessed by Christ the head is enjoyed by the church his body.

When we live by faith, then, surely this means that this life is an article of faith. We believe this truth that we are alive. We lay hold by faith on this reality and say, “Being dead in trespasses and sins, I have been quickened together with Christ. In Christ there is not now and never was condemnation to me. Sin in me is put to death; the dominion of Satan has been broken.” This life in Christ belongs to the things unseen. It does not yet appear what we shall be. We know that when Christ appears we shall be like him. Yet how far away that seems. We are yet in body and soul on the earth. It does not appear that we reign gloriously with Christ over all; for we are often the subjects of the oppression of the ungodly, the assaults of the world, and the temptations of Satan. It does not appear that we exalt triumphantly over all our foes, but we appear to go down to defeat time and again. We have these heavenly treasures, this immortal life, in earthen vessels. We lie in the midst of death; we live in the body of this death—mortal, corruptible, weak, and shameful.

Nor does it appear that we have been delivered from sin’s power. For this is the case with us according to the apostle: while we have a delight in the law of God after the inner man, we find another law in our members warring against the law of our mind to bring us into captivity to the law of sin. The flesh warring against the Spirit, so that we cannot do the things that we would. The good that we would, we do not; and the evil that we would not, that we do. And we cry out, “Wretched men that we are! Who shall deliver us from the body of this death?”

Faith is in us the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of those things not seen. We rise above and out of that deep misery and shame by faith. By faith we lay hold on Christ and look upon our crucified Lord, who shed his blood for us and for whose sake God has forgiven us all our sins. By faith we stand before God, reconciled to him through the death of his Son. By faith we believe that God raised up Christ and set him at his own right hand and that we are quickened with him and raised up with him. By faith we know that we are in him, that he is our head, that we are his members and inseparably united to Christ, so that he is responsible for us. His work is imputed to us; what he does, we do; what is done to him is done to us; when he died, we died with him; and when he was raised, we were raised with him and ascended far above all heavens. That is an accomplished fact in Christ; and by faith, faith alone, that is all ours.

By faith this resurrection, exaltation, and glorification of the church are also our present experience. Now! We live! And we are raised up and sit in heavenly places with Christ Jesus! Alive in the midst of death. That is true. But alive. Alive to God. Alive to the truth. Alive to heaven and to spiritual things. Alive to the things of the Spirit that we thought were foolish. Given power to become the sons and daughters of God.

This life and glory for the church are not merely what will be realized in the future. In a sense this reality of our life is first—first, before we even believe or ever lay hold on Christ by faith. He comes to us. He takes up his abode with us. He engrafts us into himself by faith and indwells us by his quickening Spirit. This is first. Christ implants within us the seed of regeneration, the beginning and principle of his resurrection life. We die to sin, and we are made alive to righteousness. He makes us new creatures. Quickened with him, all things have become new.

And alive and not able to die, we advance ever more toward the perfect day. Alive, yet the perfect manifestation and realization of this life in body and soul with our whole being, without the possibility of sin or death any longer, are yet to come. Raised with Christ now, we shall be raised in perfection. Our sitting with him shall be made perfect when we will live and reign with him in heaven, sitting on thrones and ruling in the whole perfect creation after sin, death, and the grave all go down to everlasting defeat.

God has done this! In Christ! By grace!

For his great love wherewith he loved us. God, God alone, God by a wonder of grace has done these great things for us. God in his great love and overflowing mercy has done this. God will perfect what he has begun in us in the day of Christ.

All God’s wonders in us are the revelation and the realization of his love. Because he loved us, he has done this! He loved you and me, dead sinners. He loved us who were his enemies; he loved us who hated him with an implacable hatred. He loved us while we were yet dead in trespasses and in sins. He loved us from all eternity with an unchanging and ever-fervent desire to have us with him forever.

You see, that is the point of the total abasement of man in what precedes this text. That is the point of the apostle’s relentless description of man’s depravity. God did not love the lovable. He loved the ugly, the worthless, the condemned, and the hopeless. He loved them. He did not love me because I loved him; he did not love me because I responded to him; he loved me while I was dead in trespasses and in sins and walked according to the course of this world.

For by grace we are saved. The beauty of God is his grace. The beauty of God that shines out in his grace is given freely, sovereignly, and eternally to the unworthy objects of that grace. By grace he elected us; by grace he eternally beheld us in Christ; by grace, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us; by grace he quickens us; and by grace he will perfect us in the day of Christ. All by grace because he loved us who were worthy only to die.

But God! You hath he quickened. He raised the dead! By grace he does the impossible for the salvation of his beloved.

On account of his great love toward us. Not merely, you understand, through his love or by his love or even out of his love; but because he loved us he quickened, exalted, and glorified his church in Christ. The love of God is the divine cause and motivation for all that God does by grace to save us. Why me? He loved me.

His love knows no bounds and stops at nothing to deliver his beloved. Hell and death cannot quench God’s love. His love overcomes and has the victory over sin and death. The love of God is his panting after us, his eternal desire for us, his desire that we might taste and know and see that God is good. And God’s love must be satisfied. God satisfies his own desire for us. Because he loved us, he quickened us, raised us up, and set us in heaven; and because of his love and by his grace, he will perfect that which he began in us.

And I ask, what did God desire? His mercy explains that. He is the fountain of richest mercy. He is blessed himself as the merciful God. He desired that we be lifted from the depths of our terrible misery of sin and death and that we be blessed eternally in him to live with him and enjoy him forever to the praise of his glorious name as the only good and ever-blessed God.

And how great was that love; how rich was that mercy of God; and how great was his grace toward us? Behold the death of his Son! God spared not his own Son. God gave his Son to the death of the cross that he might be for us the power of an endless life, to feed us, to nourish us, to join us ever more tightly and mysteriously with him, to transform us and change us from glory to glory.

By grace are ye saved!

Hallelujah!