Dead, Then Suddenly Alive

Paul was still a prisoner in Rome, still writing his letter to the Christians in Ephesus. He had already told them that God chose them before the world began, and he had prayed that they would see how strong God is: strong enough to raise Jesus from the dead and seat him at his own right hand, above every power.

Now he turned to the readers.

"And you were dead," he wrote.

Ephesus was famous for a huge temple to a goddess named Artemis, and its silversmiths got rich selling silver copies of her shrine. (A silver shrine was a model temple with a model Artemis inside, sized for a shelf. She never once climbed down off it.) Many of the Christians in Ephesus had grown up bowing to her, and some had paid good money for scrolls of magic spells before they believed in Jesus and burned them.

The spells had never worked. Nothing they tried had made them alive.

"You were dead in your wrongs and sins," Paul wrote. "You lived the way everyone around you lived, and you followed God's enemy, the ruler of the power of the air." Then Paul counted himself in. "All of us lived like that, doing whatever we wanted, and we deserved God's anger, like everyone else."

A dead man cannot fix himself. He cannot try harder, or say sorry, or get up.

Then Paul wrote two short words.

"But God."

"But God is rich in mercy," Paul went on, "and he loved us with a great love. Even when we were dead in our wrongs, he made us alive together with Christ. It is by grace you have been saved! He raised us up with him and seated us with him in heaven."

(Paul said that twice in a few lines. The second time, he stopped to explain it.)

Grace is kindness you did not earn and could never pay back. "You have been saved by grace, through trusting him," Paul wrote. "It is not your own doing. It is God's gift. It does not come from the good things you do, so no one can brag."

So a man in chains told people on hard benches in Ephesus that they already had seats in heaven, and that God would keep showing them his kindness for ages and ages, like a treasure chest that never runs empty.

"We are what God has made," Paul wrote, "made new in Christ Jesus to do good things. God got those good things ready ahead of time, so that we would walk in them."

The silversmiths of Ephesus made silver shrines that could not move. God was making people who could walk.

A dead thing cannot be talked back to life, not even by an apostle. It needs someone to reach in from outside.

Someone already had. Outside Jerusalem a man had been killed and laid in a tomb, as dead as anyone in Ephesus had ever been. God reached into that grave, lifted him out, and seated him above the ruler of the air and every other power. Paul's word for what happened next was "together." When that man came up out of death, everyone who belongs to him came up with him.

That was how a prisoner in Rome could tell people who once kept spell scrolls that they already had a seat in heaven. Each seat was beside Jesus, and he was already sitting in his, alive.