-It’s very simple, yet so sublime: you were dead. He made you alive.
-On the surface tho, this statement doesn’t make sense because if you are reading it you are obviously alive and generally speaking dead people don’t come back to life. Of course this death which paul describes is primarily a spiritual state, as he is clearly writing to living, breathing human beings. Physical death typically comes long after one is born and is a long-standing symptom of spiritual death, which as much as anything is a separation. That greater part of us which was designed to relate to our Creator is dead, shut off to Him, and we are born in that condition. But on that point, not only is it problematic to try and explain to dead people that they are dead, but it is especially so when we are talking about something spiritual (i.e. generally unobservable), and when someone has been born into this state it is then all they understand. A slave who was born a slave has no understanding of what it might be like to not be a slave. And we are talking about human beings who have been slaves to sin and death their entire lives. We are all born into that condition. To take it one step further, death-to-life is not a natural process, particularly not in our broken/fallen universe, nor is it even humanly possible. There is no natural source of knowledge or power for re-animation, spiritual or physical (or any real life animation for that matter - life out of nothing). We’re not talking about resuscitation from apparent death, nor are we talking about the accumulation of amino acids in some primordeal soup. Only God has the ability to do such a thing, to bring forth life where there is none, or to bring it back once it has left. Life is a miracle, physical life being a gift which we take so for granted, spiritual life an even greater gift which we can barely comprehend and which in order to resurrect cost God His one and only Son.
-How did He accomplish this? In this case by removing the instrument of your death. You were dead because of the transgressions - you had broken God’s law in many and sundry ways. And He graciously forgave every. Single. One. In Christ.
-Now of course as infants we are technically incapable of transgression, not-yet-able to make choices, to say nothing of being capable of making moral choices to disobey our Creator. Even so we are born separated from God in spirit, inheriting this spiritual death from our parents and their parents before them all the way back to the first parents, who first chose to transgress the one thing God had asked them not to do. And then as we grow older, transgression manifests itself naturally as surely as fish are born to swim. You do not need to teach a child to disobey, to lie and deceive and cheat and steal, to be impatient and unkind and angry and selfish. We all come by this quite naturally. And yet, this is not how man was designed originally. The mould is defective and broken. No, we were designed for something divine, for eternity, for paradise. For undistracted, unhindered, free and open communion with our Creator, almighty God, the thrice-holy God of wonders, the One in Whose presence are pleasures forever. Joy unspeakable. Breathtaking goodness. And now He has made this all attainable in Christ.
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