Year 2, Day 143: Ephesians 2

Who Am I?

Paul opens with a whopper of a sentence today.  In it Paul says that we all used to walk the path laid out by the prince of the power of the air.  We all used to be people called the sons of disobedience – an old-fashioned term for what I would today call the self-monger.  The sons of disobedience (self-mongers) are people who pursued their own desires in flesh and mind instead of being obedient to God’s ways. 

Then he adds that we were children of wrath.  This does not mean that we are angry people.  Paul is saying that we were children of God’s wrath.  We were human beings who, because of our constant living so as to fulfill our own desires, deserved nothing but wrath from God.  God gave us life, but we rejected His life and sought our own.  Thus we deserve His wrath.  The self-monger deserves wrath.

At the heart of this concept is the word “sin.”  For a long time, I had an unrounded definition of sin.  I thought sin meant “wrong doing.”  However, the Greek word that is used for sin is actually a term from archery.  The word is “hamartia” (ἁμαρτία).  It literally means “to miss the mark.”  When an archer draws back the bow and lets the arrow fly and he completely misses the target, that is “hamartia.”  Thus, sin can be defined as wrongdoing.  But really, sin is wrongdoing because we’ve missed the target.

This was a very important concept for me to understand.  Thinking about sin in these terms forces me to believe that there is a target for which I am being aimed.  It isn’t that God has some amorphous life out there that He wants me to resemble.  God has a plan, a calling, a way of living, a design, and an arrangement for life.  When we miss that target, we sin.  We are “hamartia.”  I am “hamartia.” 

Sin

Sin isn’t so simple that it can be defined by saying that we have done an activity on God’s grand “no-no” list.  We are sinners because we missed the mark that He set for our life.  It isn’t that we’ve done a bad thing here or there.  It’s that in general the goals and pursuits of my fleshly existence have missed the mark of how God genuinely wants me to live.

Yes, when we sin we usually do something wrong.  But to simply think of sin as doing something wrong is very limiting.  It makes life all about doing more on the good list and minimizing doing things on the bad list.  But to think about sin in terms of missing the mark has so much more meaningful applications to life.  By definition it implies that there is a mark towards which God is aiming me.  It implies that He has a calling for me.  It implies that He has a future for me to live.  So when I sin, I have failed to hit the mark towards which God has directed me.  That’s a potent change in the way we think about sin!

What Does This Mean For Humanity?

This brings me back to the “children of wrath” concept.  The reason that those who do not follow God are considered to be children of wrath is because they don’t even acknowledge that there is a mark that God has aimed them towards.  They are so interested in attaining their own mark that they don’t stop to think that there might be a better mark out there – God’s mark.  So they live in sin, perpetually missing God’s mark time and time again.  What’s worse is they are not even repentant of it.  They aren’t even cognizant of it.

In that thought we can find the difference between a child of wrath and a child of grace.  Trust me, I miss the mark.  I sin.  But thanks be to God that His Spirit calls me to repentance.  Thanks be to God that He has given the free gift of grace.  Through repentance brought about by the Holy Spirit our sin does not have to end in wrath.  God forgives us when we miss the mark.

This should unite us together.  Those of us who are repentant should be able to rally around God’s grace.  It should bring us together in humbleness.  It should bring us together so that we can discover God’s mark for us as individuals and as community.

Even more importantly it should bring us together around Jesus Christ.  He should be the cornerstone that holds us together.  He is the foundation upon which His church is built.  He is the one who brings us together in unity.  He is the one who reconciles us with God and presents us before God as a potter presents his pottery.

Where Does God Dwell?

Finally Paul uses this idea of being built in unity to speak about a dwelling place for God.  Think about this deeply for a moment.  God dwells within us.  God dwells within His church, and specifically God dwells within each of us.  God – who has a perfect dwelling place in heaven with His heavenly host – desires to live among us.  God desires to live within us, even! 

Together, we are the temple.  I am not the temple, but we are the temple!  I am a portion of the temple, joined together with you and all the other pieces out of which God makes His temple.  He desires to live among us!

That’s amazing when you think about it, considering that we were all once children of wrath.  God’s takes us who miss the mark and still turns us into His dwelling place.

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