Ephesians 2:5-6 Even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together with Christ, (by grace you are saved;)… I. THE CAUSE OF SALVATION. God's rich, free, sovereign grace. No other source of salvation to guilty man. 1. There is no power in man to save himself. A dead body cannot walk; nor can a dead soul move by its own will. 2. There is nothing to attract love in a dead, corrupting carcase, and there is nothing to attract God's love in a dead, corrupting soul. II. THE MEANS OF SALVATION. Christ's death. We must here dwell on the contrast, and at the same time the union, between Christ and the sinner, as mutually interchanging their condition each with the other; the sinner transferring through God's grace, or rather God transferring through His grace, and the sinner embracing with gratitude by faith the blessed transfer, of all his guilt, misery and curse to Jesus; and Jesus transferring, God the Father imputing, and the sinner by faith with joyful gratitude receiving, all the riches of Christ's righteousness, redemption, and salvation, put down to his account as a guilty sinner. III. THE EFFECTS OF SALVATION. "Hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Believers become the children of God, and sharers in His inheritance. Your children, you would say, are your heirs; they are to possess your property. Men make their eldest son the heir of their properties. The law which subverts that of primogeniture, which divides estates. and necessitates that property be divided among all the members of a family, soon reduces the family to beggary, for our poor earthly properties are easily exhausted. But the children of the King of kings are all heirs of eternal glory. The rays of the sun are undiminished in their bright effulgence, the lustre of that luminary is not dimmed, although the beams of His glorious orb have been diffused throughout the world from the first moment of the morning when God set him in the firmament of the heavens to rule the day; he still pours forth from his redundant fountain floods of unexhausted and exhaustless light, and every creature that basks beneath his beams enjoys the fulness of their power too much to leave him room to grudge the world beside. But what is all the glory of the orb of day compared with that of Him whose fiat struck that orb but as a spark from solid darkness? and what is the inheritance of him who is an heir of God and a joint heir with Christ? (John 17:22.) Christ's inheritance. Christ's glory is their inheritance and their glory, and there is not one whose glory is diminished by the fulness of glory that all enjoy. (P. J. McGhee, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) |
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