Lu Ca

@linesgold5

Michigan, USA

Joined September 2011

788 Following

158 Followers

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Oloyede Olayinka

@YinKysmileS

1 day ago

Consistently, I’ve seen how deep allegiance to a theological framework can make otherwise careful readers suddenly refuse to read a metaphor the way Scripture itself uses it. I used to wonder why intelligent Christians understood metaphor perfectly well everywhere else, yet the moment Paul says sinners are “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), “dead” suddenly acquires all the properties of a physical corpse. The sinner supposedly cannot hear, understand, respond to, or believe the Gospel at all until God first regenerates him and gives him spiritual life. Then I realized why this particular metaphor has to be protected so fiercely. If “dead” is allowed to mean what spiritual death actually means in Scripture, an enormous theological construction built upon corpse-like inability begins to wobble. So what is spiritual death? Scripture's first great picture of death should already make us careful. God told Adam, “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17). Adam sinned that day, but he did not physically collapse like a corpse. He remained conscious. He heard God's voice. He understood God's questions. He answered God. What changed immediately was his relationship to God: guilt, shame, fear, alienation and eventual physical death entered human existence (Gen. 3). Paul similarly describes unbelievers as “alienated from the life of God” (Eph. 4:18). That is enormously helpful for understanding what he means by being “dead in sins.” Spiritual death is separation and alienation from the life of God under the dominion and condemnation of sin, not the cessation of every spiritual faculty such that God's own Word cannot address the sinner unless he is secretly made alive first. In fact, Ephesians 2 itself refuses to let us turn Paul's dead sinner into a corpse. These “dead” people walk according to the course of this world. They follow its influences. They fulfil the desires of the flesh and mind (Eph. 2:1–3). These are remarkably active corpses! And here is where the corpse interpretation becomes even more difficult. If spiritually dead sinners literally cannot hear or respond to God's revelation until regeneration has already occurred, why does practically the entire evangelistic ministry of Jesus and the apostles consist of reasoning with spiritually dead people? Jesus preached, warned, pleaded and invited: “Repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). He told unbelievers, “Ye will not come to me, that ye might have life” (John 5:40). Notice carefully: He does not say, You cannot come because you don't yet possess life. He says they refuse to come that they might have life. Peter stands before unbelievers and says, “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19). Paul went into synagogues and “reasoned with them out of the scriptures” (Acts 17:2). At Corinth he “reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath, and persuaded the Jews and the Greeks” (Acts 18:4). At Ephesus he spent months “disputing and persuading the things concerning the kingdom of God” (Acts 19:8). Why reason with corpses? Why persuade corpses? Why warn corpses? Why command corpses to repent? Why send missionaries across the world carrying a message addressed to people who supposedly cannot respond to that message until God performs an entirely separate regenerative act upon them first? Paul himself tells us why God sends the preacher: “How shall they believe in him of whom they have not HEARD? and how shall they HEAR without a PREACHER?” (Rom. 10:14). Then he gives the mechanism: “Faith cometh by HEARING, and hearing by the word of God” (v.17). God absolutely moves first. That has never been the dispute. God loved first. God sent Christ. God provided the atonement. God sends the messenger. God gives the Gospel. The Spirit convicts. God draws. Grace initiates from beginning to end. But Scripture identifies the Gospel itself as God's divinely appointed instrument for bringing the sinner to faith: “the gospel of Christ… is the POWER OF GOD UNTO SALVATION TO EVERY ONE THAT BELIEVETH” (Rom. 1:16). And Paul says something even more troublesome for regeneration-before-faith theology: “In Christ Jesus I have begotten you THROUGH THE GOSPEL” (1 Cor. 4:15). Peter likewise says believers are “born again… by the word of God” and immediately identifies that word as “the word which by the gospel is preached unto you” (1 Pet. 1:23–25). So yes, God makes the spiritually dead alive. The question is how Scripture says He does it. The apostles didn't walk around trying to identify already-regenerated people so they could finally preach the Gospel to them. They preached Christ to sinners, reasoned with them, persuaded them, called them to repentance and testified to them because the Gospel itself is God's gracious means of bringing sinners to faith and life. And now apply the metaphor consistently. Paul tells believers they are “DEAD TO SIN” (Rom. 6:2). If “dead” necessarily means absolute inability to respond, congratulations: Christians should now be incapable of sinning. Yet three verses later Paul must tell these dead-to-sin believers, “Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body” (v.12), and “Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin” (v.13). John even tells Christians who are dead to sin that if they nevertheless sin, “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). Apparently everyone understands that “dead to sin” does not mean incapable of responding to sin. So why must “dead in sin” mean incapable of responding to God's Gospel? That conclusion isn't contained in the metaphor. A theological system put it there. Spiritual death is terrible. The sinner is alienated from God, enslaved to sin, guilty, condemned and utterly unable to save himself. He needs divine grace from beginning to end. But inability to save yourself and inability to respond to the God who graciously seeks, draws, convicts and addresses you through His powerful Gospel are not the same proposition. And we should stop quietly substituting one for the other. If being dead to sin doesn't make the believer incapable of responding to sin, being dead in sin cannot, merely from the word dead, prove that the unbeliever is incapable of responding to God's gracious Gospel. Let Scripture define its metaphors. Don't make Paul's metaphor carry the weight of a theological system Paul never placed upon it.

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