Self-Centered, Not God-Centered
Ephesians 2:1–7, the powers of the air, and the end of magic
By Michael A. Graham
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 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—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
— Ephesians 2:1–7 (ESV)
Begin with the sentence, because the sentence preaches before anyone does. In Greek, Ephesians 2:1–7 is a single sentence, and it refuses to give us a main verb. It opens on a corpse—“you were dead”—and then hangs there, clause after clause: the trespasses, the course of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the passions of the flesh, the children of wrath. Three verses of description with nothing to stand on, no verb to finish the thought, the sentence itself lying in the grave. Then two words break in—“But God”—and the verb the sentence has been starved of finally arrives: he made us alive. From there it rises and does not stop: made alive with Christ, raised with Christ, seated with Christ, displayed before the coming ages in the immeasurable riches of his grace. The lowest place a human being can occupy and the highest both sit inside one unbroken sentence, and the only thing between them is God.
So Scripture sets the shape, and everything here only follows the text down into the grave and up to the throne. The chapter moves in four beats, and this essay simply walks them in order:
The Principle — God is rich in mercy, and great is his love for us (2:4, 7).
The Problem — But I was dead in sin, living for the world and myself (2:1–3).
The Gospel — But God made me alive with Christ; by grace I am saved (2:4–5).
The Response — Today I am raised with Christ to live the new life in him (2:6).
One word of orientation before we begin. Paul writes the death first and the mercy after, but it is the mercy that lets us bear to look at the death. No one reads “you were dead” honestly until he already knows the “But God” is coming. So we start where the gospel’s light starts—with God—and only then turn and look at what we are.
The Principle: God is rich in mercy, and great is his love for us (2:4, 7)
When Paul finally breaks the long descent with “But God,” the first thing he tells us is not what God does but who God is. Before the verb arrives, the motive piles up: he is “rich in mercy,” and he acts “because of the great love with which he loved us.” The mercy is the headwater; everything else flows from it. And this is where we must begin, because God is the standard against which everything else in the chapter is measured. Start anywhere else and the diagnosis to come looks like mere misbehavior to be scolded; start here, with the God who is self-giving mercy and love, and our condition will show up as what it really is—the refusal of the only life worth having, offered by the only One who has it to give.
“Rich in mercy” reaches back to the name God spoke to Moses on the mountain: “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Exodus 34:6). This is not a passing mood in God but his covenant character, the love that has bound itself and will not let go. It is the love that cried out through Hosea over a people who had earned abandonment: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim?… My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender… for I am God and not a man” (Hosea 11:8–9). A man would start over with someone better; God will not. And “rich” is no loose flourish—Ephesians cannot stop spending the word: the riches of his grace (1:7), the riches of his glorious inheritance (1:18), the immeasurable riches of grace (2:7), the unsearchable riches of Christ (3:8). Mercy here is not rationed by the teaspoon to those who have earned a little. God is wealthy in it, and he spends it on the dead. His mercies, as Jeremiah confessed amid the rubble of Jerusalem, “never come to an end; they are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22–23). And the love is doubled on purpose in Paul’s Greek—“the great love with which he loved us,” as if to say he loved us with a love, and will not be argued out of it.
Mercy and grace, which both stand in this passage, are not quite the same and not cleanly separable either. We are tempted to split them with a tidy line—mercy for our misery, grace for our guilt—and there is something to it: mercy looks on the wretched and is moved; grace looks on those with no claim and gives anyway. But Scripture pairs and trades the words constantly, and here they fall on the same person at the same moment—someone at once dead, and so pitiable, and a child of wrath, and so without standing. So Paul does not pause to sort them. He stacks them—great love, rich mercy, by grace—so their combined weight lands at once: the dead who deserved nothing are met by a God both moved by their ruin and free in his giving, and in him the two are one love. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The love that will make us alive is no vague benevolence; it is the love that died for us while we were dead.
There is one more reason we must begin with God and not with ourselves: we cannot see ourselves any other way. A heart curved in on itself has no vantage point outside its own curve from which to notice the curve, and so the knowledge never comes by looking harder inward. It comes by sight of God. Job arrives at self-knowledge not by introspection but by vision: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself” (Job 42:5–6). Isaiah is a man of unclean lips only after he has seen the King, the LORD of hosts (Isaiah 6:5). Peter falls down and says, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord,” only after the nets break with fish (Luke 5:8). We measure the depth of our condition only in the light of God’s holiness and mercy breaking in from outside. So we have looked first at the God who is rich in mercy and great in love—and now, only now, in that light, we can bear to turn and see what we are.
The Problem: But I was dead in sin, living for the world and myself (2:1–3)
The first word about us is the hardest, and Paul will not soften it. “You were dead.” Not weak, not sick, not struggling—dead. The Greek is the word for a corpse. A sick man can cooperate with his cure; a weak man can be helped along; a corpse can do precisely nothing. It cannot want to be raised, cannot reach for help, cannot meet a rescuer halfway. The whole weight of the passage rests on this being literal, because it decides who the actor will be. The dead do not raise themselves.
Watch how Paul describes this death—from every side at once, and the sides turn out to be one captivity. We “walked,” he says, “following the course of this world.” The word behind “course” is aiōn, the age—not the fashion of the moment but the whole entrenched epoch, the long-running order of the present world. We walked “following the prince of the power of the air,” a definite and personal ruler, the one Jesus calls “the ruler of this world” (John 12:31). And we walked according to “the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience”—at work, energizing, the same verb Paul uses for the mighty power by which God raised Christ (1:19–20), here turned to its dark mirror: a spirit operating inside the disobedient. Then the captivity moves indoors. We “lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind.” Not the body only—the mind as well. This is no crude appetite from which the refined are spared; it is intellect and will, the cravings of the respectable as much as the obvious sins of the flesh.
There is a sharp word buried in that phrase, “the sons of disobedience.” The Greek is not a word for mere rule-breaking; at its root it means the refusal to be persuaded—a willful, settled unbelief, the jaw set against God’s voice. That is sharper than indifference. The old life is not bored with God; it is entrenched against him. Which is precisely why the gospel that answers it must be God’s own work and not our achievement—the announcement that persuades the unpersuadable, faith given to those who would never have reasoned their way to it.
Notice what all of this does to the proud word independence. The verb “following” keeps repeating: we followed the age, followed the prince, obeyed the passions within. The person who imagines he is living for himself, free and self-directed, is in fact walking in lockstep—carried by the age, ruled by a power, energized from inside by another. The self that calls itself independent is the least free thing in the chapter. And no one stands outside it. Paul begins with “you,” his Gentile readers, but at verse 3 he turns: “among whom we all once lived… and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” The apostle climbs into the dock with everyone else. “By nature” means this is constitutional, not circumstantial; “like the rest of mankind” shuts the door on every exemption.
If we ask what, underneath the symptoms, this death actually is, Paul has already answered it one chapter into Romans:
For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him… and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images… they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. (Romans 1:21–25)
There is the heart of it. The death is not first a list of misdeeds; it is a direction. Twice Paul says exchanged. The creature is put where the Creator belongs; the self is moved to the center. This is what Scripture means by self-centeredness, and the word must be precise: not merely self-ish, grabbing the larger slice, but self-centered—the self installed in the place that belongs to God alone. We are self-centered, not God-centered.
Self-centeredness is magic
There is a lens that makes this diagnosis suddenly visible in modern life, and it comes from Jack Miller. In a lecture called “Faith vs. Magic in the Modern World,” Miller drew a line that runs straight through Ephesians 2. Faith, he said, uses the words and things of God’s creation to surrender to God; magic uses the same words and things to try to control him. Both pray, both speak, both handle holy things. The difference is the direction of the soul—outward in surrender, or inward in command. He took the definition from Geerhardus Vos, who called magic “a paganistic reversal of the process of religion in which man, instead of letting himself be used by God for the divine purpose, drags down his god to the level of a tool which he uses for his own selfish purpose” (Biblical Theology). The word to hold is selfish. It is the hinge.
For here is what the magic frame reveals about self-centeredness, and it runs deeper than it first appears. We usually picture self-centeredness horizontally—the larger slice, the overlooked neighbor, the small vanities. But Romans 1 and Ephesians 2 show it is finally a posture toward God himself. A self that means to be the center of its own world must manage the largest variable there is: the transcendent, the unseen, the future, death, God. A God it cannot control is an intolerable rival to a self that intends to reign. So self-centeredness, followed all the way down, cannot stay a horizontal sin. It has to reach upward—not to worship, but to manage. And that reach is magic. The magician is simply the self-centered heart that has come up against the wall of the uncontrollable and, refusing to surrender, has set out to master it instead. “Self-centered, not God-centered” and “magic, not faith” turn out to be one diagnosis on a single axis: the direction of the soul.
Jack Miller said it plainly, and refused to exempt himself or his students:
We’re constantly trying to manipulate things, and if we’re not surrendering to God we’re very likely habitually trying to manipulate Him. Now that’s a kind of a chilling thought, isn’t it? But I believe it’s true.
— Jack Miller, Faith vs. Magic in the Modern World
That word habitually is the whole problem in the religious heart—not the occasional lapse into magic but the standing reflex of a self that has not surrendered. And it is why magic is more dangerous than open unbelief, and far harder to see. The atheist denies God; the self-centered heart more often tries to employ him—to use his name, his promises, his church, to secure the life it has already decided it wants. Scripture names this where we least expect it. The third commandment—“You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain” (Exodus 20:7)—is not first about coarse language. Its primary reference is to any attempt to use the name of God to get our way: to wield his name rather than bow to it. The most doctrinally sound heart is not safe from this. It has only learned to do it in churchly vocabulary.
It began in Eden, which is why it reaches so deep. The serpent’s offer was the first spell: take a created thing, the fruit, and a word, the lie, and seize the divine prerogative without surrender—“you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). That is the entire grammar of magic, present already at the first sin: control instead of trust, technique instead of dependence, the self made god by managing the real God out of the center. The fall was the turn from faith to magic, from receiving the garden as a gift to seizing it as power; every charm and credential since is a footnote to the fruit. And underneath it all is fear. The self that will not surrender is afraid—of death, of the powers, of an unmanageable future. Magic is what fear builds. When the storm rose on the lake, the disciples did not lack technique; they lacked trust, and Jesus named it: “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” (Matthew 8:26). Faith lays down the reach for control, not because the dangers are unreal but because the One who holds them is rich in mercy and has already given himself. “Perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18); and with the fear it casts out the magic.
And lest we imagine the danger lies only out among the pagans, remember what Israel did with the holiest thing it owned. At Aphek they carried the ark of the covenant into battle as though the gold box could compel God to hand them the victory—and they were routed, and the ark itself captured (1 Samuel 4). The bronze serpent Moses once lifted up for Israel’s healing became, centuries later, an idol called Nehushtan that good king Hezekiah had to break in pieces (2 Kings 18:4). The object was never the problem; the grasping heart was. A man can make a charm of the ark, of the Scriptures, of the sacraments, of the soundest doctrine he knows—of anything at all—the moment he holds it to control God rather than to bow before him.
The same problem, ancient and modern
None of this was abstract in the city that first received this letter. Ephesus was the magic capital of the ancient Mediterranean. Its famous “Ephesian letters” were magical words and formulae, written on amulets and traded across the empire as protection against the unseen powers—spells to bind the spirits of the air. Luke records what happened when the gospel arrived:
And a number of those who had practiced magic arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all. And they counted the value of them and found it came to fifty thousand pieces of silver. (Acts 19:19)
A fortune turned to ash. Reckon it: a drachma was a day’s wage for a working man, so fifty thousand of them came to fifty thousand days of labor—the better part of a hundred and forty years’ earnings, several million dollars in today’s money, carried out into the street and set alight. These were not hobbyists dabbling in superstition; this was a serious investment in control, and they burned it. And the threat to the magic economy was felt at once: a silversmith named Demetrius, who made his living on shrines to Artemis, gathered the trades into a riot, crying, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth” (Acts 19:25). When a city surrenders to Christ, it stops buying charms, and the merchants of fear can read a balance sheet. Just before the bonfire, Luke had staged the whole contrast in a single scene. Some traveling Jewish exorcists, the seven sons of Sceva, try to borrow the name of Jesus as a spell—the name without the relationship:
But the evil spirit answered them, “Jesus I know, and Paul I recognize, but who are you?” And the man in whom was the evil spirit leaped on them, mastered all of them and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. (Acts 19:15–16)
The name of Jesus is not a charm. Words without union carry no power. So when Paul writes to the churches of this region, he is writing to former magicians, and “the prince of the power of the air” in 2:2 names the very powers their charms had spent their lives trying to manage. This is why the whole letter keeps lifting its eyes to Christ above the powers: God raised him “and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion” (1:21); the Christian’s struggle is “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (6:12). To a people who had spent their lives afraid of the spirits of the air, the gospel’s word is not that the powers are imaginary but that they are conquered.
We imagine we have outgrown all this. We have only changed the charms. And here we must be most careful, because the modern mind has a ready picture of magic—the wand, the witch in the woods, the séance, old and primitive and emphatically not us—and that picture is itself the disguise. It defines magic by its props instead of its posture, and the props are dated while the posture is universal. The costume changed; the liturgy did not. The clearest proof is the sentence we are surest of: that we are disenchanted, evidence-based people who have left magic behind, and that science is its opposite. That confidence is the master incantation of the age. It is, almost precisely, a spell that works by denying it is one. And it leaves us unable to see ourselves, because if the only image of magic is the witch in the woods, our own daily reach for control has no outline at all—it looks nothing like a witch.
Take the proudest case, the one that feels like magic’s exact opposite: science. The quarrel is never with the method, which is one of God’s good gifts—patient looking at the world he made, careful asking of questions and testing of answers. Done honestly, science is a humble thing. It holds its conclusions loosely, says “as far as we can tell,” reports its margins of error, and stands ready to be overturned by the next experiment. That posture—bowing to what is actually there, willing to be proven wrong—is far nearer to faith than to magic. The trouble starts not in the laboratory but in what we demand the laboratory be for us. We want it to hand us a guarantee. We want the data to promise that if we eat the right foods and run the right screenings and follow the right protocol, the tumor will not come, the plane will not fall, the child will be safe. But honest science can promise none of that; it trades in probabilities and revised estimates, not in sure things. Magic wants a sure thing. So we quietly ask science to stop being science and start being a charm—to give us not its careful “probably,” but a “certainly” we can clutch.
You can tell which one you are holding by what happens when the uncontrollable actually arrives. The biopsy comes back. A new virus spreads and no one yet knows how it travels. The market drops thirty percent in a week and takes the retirement account with it. Faith, in that moment, does the wise and obvious things—it sees the doctor, takes the medicine, washes its hands, gets the second opinion, follows good counsel—and then it can rest, because it never believed those measures were the thing finally holding its life together. It can say “I do not know how this will go” and still sleep. Magic cannot. Magic needs the guarantee before it can breathe, and when no one will give it one, it panics and grasps. Sometimes it grasps at the experts, making their word an oracle that may not be questioned and treating every doubter as a heretic; sometimes it grasps the other way, against the experts, assembling its own private certainties so it can feel it has seen through the priesthood and seized control for itself. Both are the same fear in opposite coats. The mask and the vaccine and the daily case-count could be, for one person, plain acts of love and prudence held in an open hand; and for the person in the next pew, talismans and tribal passwords clutched in dread. Same data, same hospital, same lab—two entirely different spirits, one surrendering the outcome to God and one straining to seize it.
And it reaches far past medicine, into the most ordinary corners of a life. The parents who believe the right school and the right schedule and the right diet will guarantee them a good child—and who come apart when the child struggles anyway, because the plan was never wisdom but a spell against the future. The saver who feels safe only when the account crosses a certain number, and lies awake when the market dips, because the savings were never prudence but a wall raised against death and dependence. The man who studies his fitness tracker as if the numbers on his wrist could add a day to his life; the manager who believes the spreadsheet controls the quarter; the person who grooms an image online as though, by governing how he is seen, he could govern his world. None of these things is wrong in itself—that is the whole of Jack Miller’s point. The object is never the issue. A thermometer read in faith is good stewardship: you take the child’s temperature, give the medicine, and rest. The same thermometer read in magic becomes an oracle you check every ten minutes, as though the number on the screen were itself keeping the fever down. The line between stewardship and magic does not run between the activities—both parents own a thermometer—it runs straight through the human heart, and it puts one question to everything we handle: am I using this to surrender the outcome to God, or to seize control of it myself?
Which means the man heaping his scrolls on the Ephesian fire is not the primitive we have outgrown. He is the mirror. He at least knew he was bound to the powers; he could name his master and count the cost of the bonfire. Our temptation is subtler and harder to repent of, because we have buried our powers under a vocabulary that flatters us and lost even the honesty of naming them. He was clear-eyed enough to see the bondage we have learned to call freedom. So the Problem is exactly as Paul names it, and worse than we knew: we were dead in sin, living for the world and ourselves—magicians who never suspected it, calling our captivity freedom (2:1–3).
The Gospel: But God made me alive with Christ; by grace I am saved (2:4–5)
Return to the two words that turn the whole sentence. “But God, being rich in mercy… made us alive together with Christ.” The reversal is total. Nothing in the first three verses produces the fourth—no thread of merit, no spark of life, no reaching hand in the corpse that God answers. The sentence has been starved of a subject and a verb across three verses, and the only thing that can rescue it is a new Subject entering from outside. Human deadness has exhausted every possibility, and the next word is God.
This is also, exactly, the end of magic. Magic is self-centeredness with its hands still on the levers. The first verse takes the levers away: you are dead. A corpse has no charm, no formula, no leverage, nothing to wield; it is self-centeredness at the end of its rope, unable even to try to use God, because it can do nothing at all. In a strange mercy, death is the end of the magical project. And then “But God made us alive” does the one thing no magician could ever do—it gives life as sheer gift, to those who could not lift a finger for it.
The verb itself is a resurrection word. Scripture treats the making-alive of the dead as a thing only God can do. “I kill and I make alive,” says the LORD (Deuteronomy 32:39); “The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up” (1 Samuel 2:6); “Am I God, to kill and to make alive?” asks the startled king of Israel when Naaman comes to him for healing (2 Kings 5:7). The psalmists pray it over and over—“give me life,” “revive me”—and Ephesians 2:5 is that prayer answered in the plain past tense: he has done it; he made the dead alive. And the small word together carries everything. We are not merely revived and left to ourselves; we are made alive with Christ, given his own risen life as ours. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus said (John 11:25). The life poured into the corpse is his.
There is a place in the Gospels where you can watch this happen in a body. Lazarus is not sick in his tomb but four days dead—“by this time there will be an odor,” his sister warns (John 11:39)—and he adds nothing to his own rising except to be dead and to be called by name: “Lazarus, come out!” (John 11:43). The word does not assist a flicker of life that was already there; it creates the life it commands. In a sense we are all Lazarus—spiritually four days gone, raised by a voice we never summoned. And then we are more than Lazarus, for he came out still bound in his grave-clothes and would lie down in that tomb again one day, raised only back into his old mortal life; we are made alive with Christ, given his own deathless life, and will never die that death again. He was resuscitated; we are joined to the Resurrection himself. And do not miss what that raising cost: it was the raising of Lazarus that hardened the council’s resolve to kill Jesus, and Caiaphas who said the terrible true thing—“it is better that one man should die for the people” (John 11:50). The voice that calls the dead man out of his tomb is the voice of the One already walking toward his own.
For the making-alive was never free to God. He did not wave the dead awake from a safe distance; “for our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). God went down into the grave himself, in his Son, and carried us up with him.
Paul cannot even finish the sentence before he blurts the conclusion: “by grace you have been saved.” A few verses on he makes it explicit—“by grace… not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (2:8–9). Works, technique, boast: that is the whole machinery of magic, and grace ends it. And the grammar guards the gift. “You have been saved” is a completed act with an abiding result—a settled standing, not a process still in doubt. For a heart trained to measure and manage and never quite arrive, that settled verdict is the rest magic could never buy.
Where does the power go that the magician was grasping for? Not away—it is multiplied, and relocated to the cross. Jack Miller took his lecture, in the end, straight to Colossians, the sister passage of our text:
And you, who were dead in your trespasses… God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. (Colossians 2:13–15)
The same verb stands here as in Ephesians—“made alive together with him”—and now we see how the powers are broken. The rulers and authorities held a legal claim, a record of debt that stood against us; and the cross did not negotiate with that claim, it canceled it, nailing it up for all to see. This is why the sons of Sceva had no power over the demon: their sins were never dealt with, never nailed to the cross; they stood outside Christ, with no union and no acquittal, and so the powers still held a rightful claim on them. The Ephesian charms had been trying for generations to manage powers that only Calvary could disarm. The gospel does not hand us a stronger spell against the principalities; it announces that their claim is already cancelled and they are already disarmed, in Christ.
And the human side of all this is not a technique but an empty hand. Here Jack Miller is worth quoting at length, because he names the great reversal magic can never make:
In faith you surrender yourself and then a mysterious thing happens, you discover you surrender yourself and you get everything. And if you don’t do this you can struggle forever and ever and ever and you try to get rich with your own little handfuls and it all melts away.
— Jack Miller, Faith vs. Magic in the Modern World
The little handfuls that melt away are every charm we have ever clutched. Faith is simply the open hand that has stopped clutching. Scripture had drawn the contrast long before, in the healing of Naaman the leper. He came expecting a performance—“I thought that he would surely come out to me and stand and call upon the name of the LORD his God, and wave his hand over the place, and cure the leper” (2 Kings 5:11)—the incantation, the gesture, the theater that magic always wants. Instead the word came back plain: go wash in the muddy Jordan seven times. There was nothing to perform, no power to wield, no technique to master. The only thing left for him to do was to go down into the water and bow—to surrender. It was the very opposite of magic, and it healed him. Faith, as Jack Miller put it, does not save you; it only gives you Christ, who saves you. But God made me alive with Christ; by grace I am saved (2:4–5)—not by any handful of my own.
The Response: Today I am raised with Christ to live the new life in him (2:6)
The sentence does not stop at “made alive.” It keeps climbing: “and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (2:6). Three times the small word with—made alive with Christ, raised with Christ, seated with Christ. We do not generate a new life of our own; we are joined to his. His resurrection is the ground of ours, his ascension the ground of our seat. And it is the very power Paul has already prayed we would feel: “the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority” (1:19–21). The same might that raised and enthroned Christ above every power has raised and enthroned us with him. The deliverance the Ephesian magicians spent fortunes chasing and never bought—safety above the powers of the air—is handed over free, in union with the One who is seated there and seats us with him.
And the seat is already ours. The same people who were dead in verse 1, walking under the prince of the air, are enthroned in the heavenly places by verse 6—and both are true of the same person, because both are true in Christ. Paul draws the pattern elsewhere from the two heads of the race: “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). In Adam we died, and our bodies still die; in Christ we have already been made alive and raised and seated, and we wait only for the body to catch up. So the Christian lives the resurrection now, in the middle of his own mortality—truly seated above the powers in union with Christ, and still walking, for a while, through a world that will one day bury him.
This is why the new life is lived by surrender and not by control—by faith and not by magic. The raised man has no more need of charms, because the powers that frightened him are already disarmed and he is already seated above them. He can hold his thermometer and his savings and his plans with an open hand, using them to steward and not to seize, because his security is not in his grip on them but in Christ’s grip on him. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10) is not passivity; it is the posture of a creature who has stopped trying to be the Creator and has found, to his astonishment, that in surrender he is given everything. Paul presses exactly this in the sister letter: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God… For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1–3). The raised life is lived upward, toward the One we are seated with, and no longer for ourselves—“those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:15). That is the whole turn from self-centered to God-centered: not a self straining to improve, but a self that has died and been raised, now living for Another. Then Paul lifts his eyes to the end of all things and tells us why God did it: “so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (2:7). The word for immeasurable means overshooting—riches that sail past every mark we could set. And the verb is show, display, exhibit. God’s purpose in raising the dead is exhibition: we are to be, forever, the displayed evidence of his grace, the trophy he holds up before the coming ages of what his kindness will do with corpses. The same word, age, that named our old bondage in verse 2—the course of this age—names our endless future in verse 7, the coming ages. We once walked according to the age of this world; we will be God’s exhibit of grace in the ages to come.
So the chapter ends where it began—one sentence running from the grave to the throne with no full stop between, hinged on “But God.” It tells the truth about us that we cannot bear to tell ourselves: that we are self-centered and not God-centered, dead under powers we were sure we had outgrown, magicians who never knew it, clutching little handfuls that melt away. And it tells a truth we could never have invented: that God, rich in mercy, has made the dead alive, cancelled the claim of the powers at the cross, and seated us above them as a free gift. The cure for self-centeredness is not a better effort to center ourselves on God; the curved-in self cannot straighten itself any more than a corpse can rise. The cure for magic is not a stronger faith-technique; that would be one more handful to clutch. The cure is resurrection—God’s own act, received with an open and empty hand. Faith begins exactly where magic ends: in surrender to the God who was never a tool to be used, but is a Father, rich in mercy, who makes the dead alive—so that today, raised with Christ, we live the new life in him (2:6).
This is the second of the Five Facts of the gospel in Jack Miller’s A New Life. The verse to carry and memorize this week (NIV 1984):
“But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.” (Ephesians 2:4–5)
Pray it back: Father, rich in mercy, you loved me with a great love. While I was dead, you made me alive with Christ. Today I rest—by grace I have been saved. Free memory cards and the five-facts summary are at anewlife.thejackmillerproject.com.