“And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses”
“being dead in your trespasses”
“Being dead” is death spiritually, not physically. Before we received forgiveness in Christ, we were dead to God by existing in a state of violating his standards. That is the persistent predicament of the lost, but it is the past of the child of God. Instead of being dead to God, the Christian is alive to God. Instead of being dead in trespasses, the believer is dead to sin.
The word “being” indicates our status quo of death toward God. Non-Christians are in the status quo of death. Unbelievers are outside God’s eternal plan for salvation and out of phase with God personally.
Death means separation, not annihilation. Before we came to know Christ, God cut us off spiritually from himself (John 5:24,25; 2 Cor. 5:14,15; Rom. 6:13). Those separated from God are dead in sin. As death deteriorates the physical body, so sin corrupts the soul. As a physically dead man cannot help himself, so a man dead in sin is unable to help himself. He is dead personally to God, so he cannot pray. He cannot please God. He clearly cannot measure up to the standards of who God is. He has no capacity for knowing God (1 Cor. 2:14). He has nothing by which he can know God.
A “trespass” is to cross or violate a standard. Non-Christians have stepped across God’s standards; they are in the status of defiling God’s character.
“and the uncircumcision of your flesh”
The non-Christian’s nature is “uncircumcised,” that is, separated from God. “Uncircumcision” describes our state of being before we came to know Christ. We were dead to God in our state. When we believed that the cross circumcized our violation of God, God put us in right relation to himself. However, the corrupt moral condition of the desires of the sin capacity still operates in the believer. This state is a violation of God in principle.
The term “uncircumcised” refers to both males and females. All human beings have fallen sin capacities.
PRINCIPLE:
Every Christian has a factory that produces sin– the sin capacity.
APPLICATION:
The Christian cannot live the Christian life by operation bootstraps. The sin capacity undermines our ability to live before God. That is why we must go to the cross and depend upon Christ to live the Christian way of life.
