“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

God is calling you to repentance of your sins that He may bring you into His family. No one can be saved from eternal wrath by good works. Only through Christ can you receive salvation and go to heaven to live with Him forever. He wants you to come to Him and give your life over completely to Him and follow Him.

“The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”   

How can the Triune God (God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit) who is righteous and just pardon mankind who is guilty of breaking His holy Law and allow them to live with Him forever? Here is another way to put this question. Would a judge who allowed a murder to go free be a just judge? No, he would not be a just judge he would instead be an abomination because no one paid for the murder the man committed. In the same way, God cannot pardon lawbreakers without there being someone who paid for the law breaking activity. The only way mankind can pay for their sins is to go to hell and live there forever. This is the eternal wrath from which one must be saved. How do we do away with this punishment? Jesus Christ, the Son of God, became fully man while being fully God and took upon Himself all of the sins of His children. Through this act, He became sin (this doesn’t mean He sinned), or in other words, took our sins upon Himself and became the abomination that we were and was crushed by God upon the cross which paid for His children’s sins. No human could satisfy God’s justice. Only God who made the Law could satisfy the demands of the Law which He did by sending His Son to take His wrath upon Himself in your place. Once you become a Christian, God can never pour His wrath out on you, but can only pour out the love He has for His Son on you because you will be a part of His family. Here is a sermon that explains this very well. Look for the title “The Meaning of the Cross” and click on it to listen to the MP3.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

Again, Paul is talking to believers when he wrote the book of Ephesians and is describing to them what they were like when they were unbelievers. As an unbeliever, your only choice is to follow the ways of this world in its iniquity (sinful behavior). You might not engage in the same practices as are displayed by the whole of unbelievers, for example, you might not be a serial killer but you might be engaging in habitual lying. Not any one person commits every sin known to mankind, but because you are completely depraved, you are entirely capable of every sin and only abstain from certain sins because of God’s grace upon every person’s life. This is called common grace not saving grace. If God’s grace was lifted from your life, you would indeed commit every sin known to mankind and more. The prince of the air, who is Satan, is at work in each unbeliever’s heart to lead them unto disobedience. He is able to lead them to disobedience because they have a depraved nature which follows him and wants to do the things that are of him. When Christ calls you from that bondage, He gives you a new nature one that is regenerated and can respond to Christ. He will give you a new heart one that seeks forgiveness and Him as Lord and Savior. Because of His blood that He shed for His children, He can justify those whom He draws to Himself and save from God’s wrath.

“in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience–”

Who is the god of this word? There is only the true God and the false god and they are the Triune God and Satan. If you are an unbeliever, Satan has been allowed to keep you blind to the Gospel of Christ. You don’t refuse the Gospel because you are intellectually bright, or have reasoned with logic to disprove there is a God, or have had some bad experiences in the pasts with Christianity or for any other reason. You refuse the Gospel because Satan has blinded your mind and you have not a regenerated heart and the gift of faith with which to receive the Gospel. This power has been given to Satan by God, but God is in control. When God decides to call a person out of darkness into His marvelous Light, nothing shall stand in His way. Not Satan and not the dead spirit of the person He calls. God can quicken your dead soul because Jesus Christ died on the cross and took upon Himself the Father’s wrath and paid for the sins of His children.

“In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”

I must start this explanation by stating why the author uses the past tense verb “were”.  Paul wrote Ephesians through the Holy Spirit to believers at Ephesus. They were already saved and no longer dead spiritually. However, those who are not saved are spiritually dead and are completely separated from God. Just as a dead person cannot do anything for himself to become alive again, neither can a spiritually dead person regenerate his dead soul. God is the only one who can supernaturally through the Holy Spirit regenerate you and bring you unto spiritual life. You bring nothing to this process in way of help. It is only through His grace that He makes alive any person. If you at all feel a drawing to Him and to the Gospel, that is God regenerating you!