The Depravity of All Humans
Ephesians 4:17–19
Ephesians Lesson #155
June 26, 2022
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Father, we are so grateful that we have Your Word. It is Your truth that is transformative because it is true, because it is Your Word, because You have revealed it to us. Father, there is so much pressure in the world around us to compromise, to go with a “better solution,” to basically follow in the sin of Eve looking at the forbidden fruit and seeing that it was good to her eyes.
“So often we look at the world around us and think that their ideas, their thinking looks good, sounds good, feels good, it must be a better idea. But Father, we see that that is the path of death. As Proverbs says, “there’s a way that seems right to man, but the end thereof is death.”
“Father, we pray today, as we study, that we would be challenged to recognize that throughout Your Word the focal point is changing the way we think before we change the way we live. We so often put the cart before the horse and try to change the way we live before we change the way we think.
“Father, help us to understand these things as we study this morning. In Christ’s name, amen.”
Slide 2
We continue our study this morning in Ephesians.
Slide 3
We are in Ephesians 4:17–19. These three verses are a summation, really, of man’s basic problem. We did an overview of this section and these verses last week, and I’m going to read them before I begin with comments.
Ephesians 4:17–19, “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord, that you should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over to lewdness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.”
These three verses set up the shift that will occur in Ephesians 4:20, where Paul then begins to tell them how Christians are supposed to think and how they are supposed to live.
So this morning, after last week’s sort of flyover summary of the first 3-1/2 chapters in Ephesians and just summarizing the flow of these three verses, I want to take some time to drill down on this because this is an extremely important passage to understand.
One of the neglected areas of theology is known as anthropology or biblical anthropology. When most of us hear the topic of an academic discipline of anthropology, we think perhaps of archaeologists, we think of sociologists; and indeed, anthropology or the study of the human race is part of sociology. But long before we had the ideas of sociology—which didn’t come around until the early 1800s, we were talking in theology about biblical anthropology. In other words, what does the Bible teach about us as human beings? What does the Bible say about us as mankind? Who is man? What is man made of? What is the nature of the human being?
The Bible says that we were all created in the image and likeness of God. That sets biblical thought against the thought of every other religious system and every philosophical system that has existed in the history of the human race, because all other systems are ultimately grounded on idolatry, where they create God after their own image, just the reverse.
But God said He created us after His image. That is so important because that means our starting point is that each of us has significance and value and meaning because we are in the image of God.
When you come to the covenant with Noah in Genesis 9, and God authorizes capital punishment for those who commit murder, it is important to notice that God doesn’t say, “Well, you need to restrain people. And so this is going to act as a restraint on them if we have capital punishment.”
That isn’t the reason. That’s the reason a lot of sociologists and political theorists give, but that’s not the biblical reason.
The reason is because if you take a human life, you’re taking the life of someone who’s created in the image of God. Every life, every human being, has value no matter what they’ve done, no matter who they are, no matter what their economic class, no matter what their ethnicity, every human being is created in the image and likeness of God.
But that is not what the world says. The world is comprised of a worldview that is summarized by the word “paganism,” the word I like to use. That’s every religious system in the world other than that which is grounded on the Bible. So that’s basically the foundational beliefs of the Jewish people and Christianity. As I said last time, that excludes Islam because Islam grew out of a polytheistic worship where Mohammed just took one of 360 gods and made that the one “god”, but it was still grounded in this previous pagan worship.
The god he chose was the moon god Allah. When you look at flags of Islamic nations, you always see the crescent moon. That represents Allah. He was just taken out of this pantheon of 359 other gods.
But paganism has always had a different view of mankind. Paganism always sees the universe as eternal. How many times just in the last week have you heard someone say or have seen this in some TV show where somebody comments, “Well, the universe must want me to do this,” or “the universe must want me to do that.” They have imputed personality and will to the universe.
But the universe is purely material. There’s no thought in that which is purely material. It is just idolatry of the material universe. This forms the foundation of the basic pagan worldview that is governing most of the world today, and that is pure materialism.
In pure materialism, a human being is a product of time plus chance. You and I, in their view, are just the result of an accidental electrical discharge on a mass of protoplasm that somehow over millions of years developed into some sort of sentient creature. And that is just bogus, because that basically means we are purely material, whereas, the Bible says we are composed of material physical bodies. Now that’s a vast difference.
When you look at a human being and all you see is something that is the accidental result of millions of years of evolution, and as a result of that they’re purely physical, they’re purely material, there’s no immaterial soul, there’s nothing eternal about them whatsoever. That when they die, they just go back into the ground and they go back to dust and nothingness. But the Bible says that man was created with an immaterial soul and an immaterial human spirit.
The contrast comes down to how people are treated. In a worldview where man is the accidental product of evolution, we necessarily must view human beings as nothing more than a collection of chemicals and electrical charge. That’s all we are.
No wonder we have kids growing up that are discouraged, that are depressed, that are killing one another, that are doing these horrible things because they are treated and told that they are nothing more than an accident. They understand that and this is depressing to them. They have no hope, they have no meaning, they have no value. And this is self-destructive.
It flows out of the psychology that has developed since the late 19th century. You have Freudian psychology, Jungian psychology, Maslow, you have actually hundreds of different models of psychology and human behavior. But ultimately they all treat human beings as nothing more than material beings that are the product of these various random genetic determinative features plus these electrical discharges and it’s all material. So you end up basically with some form of a deterministic philosophy where the society and people can all be manipulated.
In fact, back in the 60s there were a number of elitist thinkers. Timothy Leary is a name known to many because of his experiments with LSD. But there were numerous others who believed that in order to solve the sociological problems of the human race, to get rid of violence, to get rid of racism, to get rid of criminality, what the government needed to do was to basically spike the water systems of the country with some kind of drug or LSD or something like that, and then everybody would be calm and peaceful.
The world sees our problem as something that can easily be fixed through chemicals or through some other kind of material solution because they don’t understand what man’s real problem is. According to the Bible, the real problem is sin. But if your starting point is human viewpoint paganism, this is really going to impact psychology.
Psychology is one of the most insidious and dangerous, false views of mankind around because humanistic psychology is predicated on this evolutionary view of what makes us a human being. Freud hated the concept of sin, so in humanistic psychology, the problem isn’t sin; therefore, the solution is always going to be fake, fraudulent, and ineffective. But that’s where we are today.
That influences so many things. It influences business psychology to some degree. It influences marketing. It influences management styles. It influences politics. It influences the laws that are passed by the legislature that is dominated by people who do not believe the Bible and believe man alone, apart from God, can bring in a perfect world.
You have a shift towards Marxism, which borrowed the idea of a future, perfect world under the authority of Jesus Christ, and has secularized it and taken God and Christ out of it, and it says that on the basis of certain economic principles where you have a government that controls everything, we can bring in a utopic society.
But everything about Marxism, everything about socialism, is antagonistic to a biblical worldview because its view of man, its view of what makes us distinctive and unique is false. So because they have a false starting point, then whatever their solutions are, not only are they false, but they’re destructive, and they will end up destroying any culture, any society, that is built upon those ideas. We have to recognize that the basic problem is going to be sin.
I remember when I was a seminary student having a discussion—it was a hot topic back in the 70s, and unfortunately, I think we’ve sort of lost this battle—on whether there was really such a thing as a Christian psychology. And yes, in one sense there is a view of a biblical psychology, which was held by many theologians who would study what the Bible says about the soul and the spirit and what the Bible taught about sin and about how that affects human behavior. But that is not what is known as Christian psychology today.
In fact, the reality in most Christian psychological models is that they’ve just taken some model from the secular world, and they baptized it by adding a lot of proof texts to their principles.
If you go through and you really study most of those texts in context in the Bible, you will find that that’s not what that’s talking about it all. And this has led to numerous problems within Christianity.
After 60 years of so-called Christian psychology, what so we see in the Christian pew? We see a divorce rate that is at least as bad as that outside of the church. We see a morality that is just about the same as that which is outside of the church. You go around to the vast number of these mega-evangelical churches, and you don’t see any kind of knowledge about the Bible, any understanding of the spiritual life, any understanding of the spiritual walk. This is a real problem because at the very core there is not anyone wrestling with what this passage and Romans 1 and others are actually saying.
So what we have to do is develop a biblical understanding of the nature of human beings and an understanding of what causes these sociological problems, such as gun violence, criminality, judicial reform, biblical justice, racism, poverty, the breakdown of marriage and family. If we don’t begin with a biblical understanding of human beings as God created them, and that the problem is sin, then we’re never going to come up with an adequate solution.
And the solution cannot be presented by the government. We try to legislate these things, but the legislation is not predicated upon an understanding of mankind as fallen sinners. In fact, most of the legislation somehow seeks to resolve human beings of responsibility for their behavior. And they seek to provide solutions that ignore personal, individual responsibility, because we are just made up of these deterministic molecules and chemicals and we’re just material. So therefore, we’re just doing certain things because that’s the way we were made. So let’s treat it with chemicals or electric shocks or whatever it may be. So we have to look at what the Scripture says.
Slide 4
Now Paul starts, as I pointed out last time, by reminding us of where he started this particular chapter. He says in Ephesians 4:17, “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord—and he gives this basic command—that you—that is, you Gentile and Jewish believers who are now united together in one body called the church, and they are in a local church that represents this in Ephesus—should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk, in the futility of their mind.”
Now at the very basic, basic level, what do see here? We see that we are not to continue to live after we’re saved like we thought and lived before we are saved. The bottom line is we’re to think and we are to live differently.
What I want to point out initially is, notice the emphasis, is the emphasis on society, is the emphasis on culture or emotion, or is the emphasis here on thinking? You have these descriptions:
Ephesians 4:17, “the futility of the mind—not emotions, not culture. It’s the mind, it’s thinking wrong things,”
Ephesians 4:18, “having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God—that’s a fundamental problem—because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness—or the hardness—of their heart.”
All these terms have to do with thinking. Christianity is about how you think. Do you think about life on the basis of God as the Creator? Do you think in terms of biblical reality, or do you think in terms of nonbiblical reality? Those are the only options. Non-biblical reality may have a million different flavors, but it’s all nonbiblical. Biblical reality has one flavor, it’s God’s view which He has expressed in the Scripture. And so the emphasis in Scripture is on not an external change of behavior, but an internal change of thought.
Slide 5
We see that from what Jesus said to the Pharisees in Matthew 23:25–26 (parallel in Luke 11:39), where He says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence.”
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of this kind of superficial legalism within Christianity where the whole idea is a form of morality—just do these things and it’s all external without teaching people to think differently, that a believer is not to think like a Gentile unbeliever.
A Christian is to think on the basis of the Bible, and if you think on the basis of the Bible, it’s going to change how we live, it’s going to change the things we’re attracted to. But we don’t do it superficially. We have to do it internally.
Then He says in Matthew 23:26, “Blind Pharisee …”
Now pay attention to that word “blind.” We’re not going to get there this morning. We’re going to get there next week. But pay attention to the emphasis on blindness in terms of spiritual blindness and what that means.
He says to the Pharisees, “You’re spiritually blind.” These are the best trained biblical scholars in Israel at the time. Most of them had the Torah memorized word for word from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy, and a large number of them had the entire Old Testament memorized. And He says they’re spiritually blind and ignorant. Now that’s how you win friends and influence people!
Jesus loved everybody. He did! Not the liberal love, but the biblical love, which recognizes the truth and telling the truth, even though it may offend somebody, even though it’s going to step on peoples’ toes, even though it is not culturally acceptable and somebody’s going to want to cancel you. And yes, indeed, they tried to cancel Jesus, didn’t they? But He came out of that grave after three days. You can’t ultimately cancel the truth. The truth will always come out.
But a question we should ask is, how these Pharisees become blind and what is the nature of this blindness? We’re going to see that idea of being spiritually blind is also applied to Gentiles. So that’s part of our fallen nature. We have to understand what that means, and that’s part of what we will do today and next week as well.
Slide 6
So what Paul goes on to say here is that we should no longer walk as the rest of the Gentiles walk. “The rest of the Gentiles” indicates that they were once part of that group, but now they are different, they’re taken out of that group, so that they are no longer considered part of that group.
So, you have unbelieving Gentiles and you have believing Gentiles, and also believing Jews. This whole description here in Ephesians 4:18–19 is a powerful indictment of the behavior of a culture that is without Christ, without God, and without the Scriptures.
Slide 7
Paul begins this by saying in Ephesians 4:17, “This I say, therefore, and testify in the Lord …”
Slide 8
The “this” simply refers to what he is about to say, the statement that you should no longer walk like Gentiles walk. The fact that he says “I testify in the Lord” is typical of Paul because what he is doing is he is relating what he is teaching back to the authority of Christ. That’s his ultimate authority. This isn’t Paul’s opinion. This is what God has revealed to him and what he is to be teaching the Gentiles.
Slide 9
The “therefore” at the beginning—he’s taking us back to the very beginning, the first three verses of this chapter.
Slide 10
This is a continuation of a thought that he diverged from from about Ephesians 4:4–16, and now he is coming back to it.
At the beginning of Ephesians 4 he said, “therefore,” that is, the conclusion as a result of Ephesians 1–3. He said, “I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, strongly urge you to conduct your life in a manner worthy of the exalted position to which you were summoned.”
Now I have used that phrase “conduct your life” because that’s what the metaphorical meaning of walking is. It is how you live your life. Technically, it’s how you think and how you live your life. You can’t separate your thought life from your overt life.
He goes on to say in Ephesians 4:2–3, “with all genuine humility and gentle kindness with patience putting up with one another in love and being diligent to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.”
Slide 11
So, he is saying, “In light of that, therefore, because of what I said earlier, you are no longer to walk as the rest of the Gentiles.” As I translated earlier, you’re to walk, you’re to conduct your life in a manner worthy of the exalted position to which you were summoned. And that means you don’t live like you did before you are saved. You don’t live like the rest of Gentiles. He’s drawing a hard and fast distinction between those who are living on the basis of God’s Word and those who are not.
Slide 12
This word “walk” is the Greek word PERIPATEO, which physically, it just refers to walking. But it had a figurative meaning that described a person’s way of life. We often talk about the Christian way of life. That’s just another phrase for the Christian walk, their lifestyle, the way a person conducts his life.
We live in a world today that wants to validate everybody’s lifestyle. No matter how perverted it is, no matter how destructive it may be, we want to validate that because we don’t want anybody to think they’re under condemnation. But the Bible says that we were all born under condemnation, we’re all sinners, we’re all fallen. It’s not a statement of pride or arrogance or judgment from any of us. It’s just a statement of truth. We’re all born in that state of condemnation, and Christ came to save sinners and to pay for sin.
Slide 13
Some of these conclusions that we reach from the statement that we are to walk differently is that we ought to and should think differently. By that I don’t mean what we think about—that’s content—but how we think. People are not taught how to think very well, and this involves the methodology, what they’re thinking is based on.
Slide 14
Now this starts with our starting point, the authority of the Scripture.
If you’re going to think biblically, you have to recognize that God is the starting point—not your experience. It’s not your autonomous or independent logic.
You read about miracles and say, “I’ve never seen anything like that. That can’t happen.” See, what you’re doing there is you’re using your limited finite reason to judge the veracity of Scripture. We can’t start there. We have to start with the presupposition that this is the Word of God and that this is true.
So we don’t start with empiricism, rationalism, or mysticism. We start with what the Word of God says.
Psalm 36:9 exemplifies this. There David writes, “For with You—talking to God—is the fountain of life; in Your light we see light.”
Light is a picture of illumination of truth.
If any of you have been down deep inside of a cave or cavern, you know what it is to be in almost absolute darkness. Usually there’s some sort of large room, all the lights are turned off, and you can’t see your hand in front of your face.
How much light does it take for you to be able to read a book down there? You just strike a match, and you can read. Just that light from one match will illuminate the whole room and you see truth. It is in God’s light then that we are able to think accurately.
Now that doesn’t mean that unbelievers can’t think of some truth. They can all come to some level of truth. Think about Adam and Eve in the Garden. God said, “You may eat of the fruit of the tree of any tree in the Garden except this one.”
They were given a responsibility to take care of the Garden, and so as they were taking care of the Garden, let’s imagine that God hadn’t told them anything. They would have no idea that this one tree was a tree that would bring death into their existence. So they can learn a lot of things as they looked at all of these other trees.
They could notice that the fruit of this tree is red, the fruit of this tree is yellow, the fruit of this tree is a little browner, some of it was sweeter, some of it not so sweet. They could observe all kinds of trees—that some trees were more like bushes, some trees are taller. All these different trees produce all kinds of different things. And the more they studied, the more they analyzed, the more they could learn true things—lowercase “t.”
But everything had to be understood within the framework that they could not eat of this one tree—that there was an exception. And that one tree, if they disobeyed God, then that would bring death, alienation from God, into their existence.
So see when we talk about the fact that you have to make the Bible your ultimate priority, we’re not saying that the Bible is an absolute textbook on history, or the Bible is an absolute textbook on biology, or the Bible is an absolute textbook on chemistry or geography, but that the Bible gives you the critical information needed in order to properly understand everything in these different fields.
So that if you looked at all of the data that Adam and Eve could’ve learned from just looking at the trees, just empirical observation, you could come up with tens of thousands of observations, all of which would be true.
But in terms of how that fit within the overall framework of creation, they could not truly understand it without understanding that there was a difference between everything and the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That gave ultimate meaning to everything else. We can only understand life within the framework of what God has revealed. It is in His light that we see light. It’s only when we presuppose His Truth that we can understand all Truth.
That’s our starting point, and it’s how we think, not what we think.
Slide 15
The second point is the content of our thinking. Not only do we change how we think, but we change what we think about.
In Philippians 4:8–9 we read, “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy, meditate on these things.” And then the next verse, “The things which you have learned and received and heard and saw in me, these do, and the God of peace will be with you.”
Now I want you to think a little bit about this verse. You have a number of words used here that describe certain conditions: true, noble, just, pure, lovely, good report, virtue, praiseworthy. What do those words have in common? They presuppose that there is an absolute, so that you can know that something is true in contrast to something that is not true; something that has virtue versus things that don’t have virtue; things that are noble versus things that are not noble; things that are just in contrast to things that are not just.
In other words, you can’t really apply this unless you presuppose that there are moral absolutes in the universe. Moral absolutes don’t spring out of time plus chance. Moral absolutes are grounded in the character of God.
So we have to presuppose the righteous, just, loving, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent veracity of God in order to even talk about these words. These words presuppose that there are moral absolutes, and those moral absolutes are grounded in an unchanging and immutable deity. You can’t even talk about them.
That’s one of the things I’ve always thought. It’s kind of ironic, when you talk with skeptics, with those who are attacking Christianity. They say, “How can you love a God who allows a war like this in Ukraine? How can you believe in a God who will allow the Holocaust? How can you believe in a God who will allow suffering and allows evil?”
The starting point to refute that is, “Where you get the idea of evil? Where do you get the idea of justice? Where you get the idea of good or bad?” Those are terms that only come into existence if you have an eternal reference point that is good, that is perfect righteousness, that is justice, and has revealed what those things are.
The way the unbeliever uses those terms is that they are what society thinks at this time in history—today on June 26 what is just, what is right, what is of good report. Tomorrow it may change.
In paganism there’s no guarantee of immutability, of consistency, of stability because you don’t have a stable, infinite, unchanging reference point. So that they can’t even critique evil, and the fact that, “How can you have a God that allows evil,” well, where do you get the idea of evil if you don’t have the idea of absolute perfection? What gives you the right to even use this language when you think ultimately that everything is relative, and your basic starting point in life comes out of an evolutionary scheme that says that that which enabled evolution to take place is the survival of the fittest.
To have survival implies conflict, to have conflict means one creature is going to survive by destroying another creature, killing another creature. Death is the mechanism of Darwin’s evolution, and death is what they see in the evidence of the fossils. For them death is normal. Conflict is normal. Violence is normal. Because you have to have death, conflict, and violence in order to have an environment where the fit can survive.
So unjust violence and warfare and conflict are normative for them. They can’t even talk about evil because that which they want to define as evil is necessary for their system to even work.
Paganism is an entire web of thoughts that characterize the Gentile world, the non-Jewish world, and that we are no longer to think like that. And then we are to have individual thoughts and the content of our thoughts are to conform to the character of God. So we are to think differently, and we’re to think about things differently.
Slide 16
This is why the Bible comes along and says what is important is that we have to have a renovation or an overhaul of our thinking. We’re not to think like the world’s culture around us.
By culture I don’t mean going to the symphony, going to opera, going to theater, things of that nature. That’s part of culture. But every group of people has a culture. You have a culture in your family. You have a culture at your office. You have a culture in any given business. Any collection of individuals has a culture, and culture is always downstream of a belief system, of a value system.
What I mean by that is a person’s values determine what they’re going to do with their life and how they’re going to solve problems and conduct themselves. That’s culture. Culture flows out of their belief system of what’s right and wrong, what has value.
Where do you get those values? You either get them from God or you get them from man. Man’s values are always changing, and they are not dependable.
Slide 17
So we are to be transformed as Romans 12:2 says, “And do not be pressed into the mold of the thinking of the world, but we’re to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, that we may prove—or demonstrate—what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God—or that God’s will is good and perfect and acceptable.”
It’s transformational and it has to do with learning. It ultimately comes down to that which is in the mind.
Now I had an interesting experience this last week when I went to this conference in Missouri. The conference was held at the College of the Ozarks. I’ve heard of the College of the Ozarks but knew nothing about it. It is located just outside of Branson in southern Missouri. It is a fascinating place, but the focus of that school is to transform the thinking of their students.
This college was founded by Presbyterian missionaries around 1900 in order to provide for the impoverished, ignorant, uneducated people of the Ozarks. Ninety percent of their students have to come out of a background of poverty—a background where they’re living way below the poverty level, and they don’t have much of a background in a lot of things. You can just imagine what they’re coming from. They have their mission statement, and I’m going to read some of these things to you. They have these banners and signs all over the school, all over the buildings, to remind the students of why they’re there.
Let me tell you, the students don’t pay tuition; they have to work. Every student works. They have a lot of different categories of jobs, but every student works on campus, and that covers about half of their tuition. The remainder comes from donations.
“The mission of the College of the Ozarks is to provide the advantages of a Christian education for youth of both sexes, especially those found worthy, but who are without sufficient means to procure such training.” That’s their overall mission statement.
They emphasize hard work. They have one sign that said “Welcome to hard work U.” That’s the nickname for the school, where students work for their education. They don’t pay tuition. They graduate debt free. And they develop character.
Some of their other banners that were up, that I took some pictures of, the vision statement is “The vision of College of the Ozarks is to develop citizens of Christlike character who are well-educated, hardworking, and patriotic.”
They have a patriotic goal. Their patriotic goal is “to encourage an understanding of American heritage, civic responsibilities, love of country, and willingness to defend it.”
They have a cultural goal “to cultivate an appreciation of the fine arts, an understanding of the world, and adherence to high personal standards. They have spiritual goals and educational goals, as well. They are doing what Romans 12:2 says. They are transforming the students from the culture that they came out of into this kind of a patriotic, mature, Christian culture.
Part of what they do is they teach these kids good manners. Every kid on that campus, you’d run into them, they knew you were a visitor, they’d say, “Welcome to our campus.” “We’ve heard a lot about your group.” “Is there anything I can do to help you?” The students were the servers at the tables for the meals, and the cooks, and the dishwashers, and everything. They were so polite and so nice. If you had some problems, they would just do whatever they needed to do to find somebody to help you or to help you themselves. It was just impressive!
But I realized they didn’t learn most of this until they started at that school. So that school had a fabulous system that they had developed for transforming these kids from whatever background they came from in order to prepare them to be patriotic, spiritually mature contributors to society when they graduated. And that’s what we are to do in the church.
Slide 18
Ephesians 4:17 is basically saying the same thing as Romans 12:2, that we’re not to walk like the rest of the Gentiles. And then it describes “that,” so we know what “that” is. But we’re to be different, and that’s what will come after we get to Ephesians 4:20.
Slide 19
So the result of this change is not just what the believer does, but how he thinks.
1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
Later Paul will say do all things without grumbling or complaining. Well, that’s part of it. You’re to do everything to the glory of God. “Even the things I don’t like to do?” Yes, even the things you don’t like to do.
What comes to my mind is a statement that John Walvoord made to me one time. He was talking about a young man who was a seminary student and was also an elder in his church. He said, “Whatever I asked him to do, no matter how much I knew he did not like doing it, he would do it better than anybody else.” He was talking about Pastor Thieme when he was a student at Dallas Seminary.
So, we are to do all things to the glory of God. That includes our work.
Slide 20
Ephesians 6:5–8 says, “Bondservants, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in sincerity of heart, as to Christ, not with eye service—it’s not just superficial—as men pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ—you’re not working for whoever your human employer is, you’re working for the Lord in that slot—doing the will of God from the heart, with goodwill doing service, as to the Lord—and not to men, knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord—, whether he is a slave or free.”
Slide 21
The next thing that Paul will say is don’t walk “in the futility of their mind.” He is saying that the Gentile world out there, outside those influenced by Judeo-Christian worldview, they’re operating on something that it has no purpose and meaning. It’s in the futility of their mind.
Slide 22
In English the word “futile” means that it’s something that serves no useful purpose. It’s completely ineffective. That’s how God describes the thinking of the non-Christian because he starts in his thinking as if there is no God.
That’s why Scripture says “the fool says in his heart there is no God.” Because he says there is no God, that’s what makes him a fool. His thinking is empty, it’s futile. No matter what brilliant things he comes up with because he doesn’t have the biblical divine viewpoint framework. It’s empty. It’s the futility of their mind.
Slide 23
The Greek Word for futility is this word MATAIOTES, which is translated as futility. It can mean absurdity, or it can mean purposelessness.
In order to understand this word, we sort of have to be reminded of one of my favorite hermeneutical principles called “the law of spandex.” Just because you can wear spandex doesn’t mean you should wear spandex.
Now that’s important to remember. Just because a word can mean something doesn’t mean it means that in this context. That’s important for this particular word. This word basically means something that serves no useful purpose. It can also mean something that is empty.
Some have taken the view that the main idea here has something to do with emptiness or a vacuum in the soul. You have a vacuum in your soul because there is no truth there. You’ll suck in all kinds of false doctrine. Now that’s a true statement, but is that what this word means in this context?
Another nuance of this word is the idea of absurdity. Now it’s clearly true that the beliefs of the pagan world are absurd. But is that what it means in this context? Not at all. It has the idea of not being able to achieve its purpose. It’s the futility of their mind. God created our minds to think God’s thoughts after Him, to think about reality the way God made it.
Because of sin and our rebellion, we don’t want to think about things the way God made them. And as a result, our minds don’t achieve the purpose for which God intended them. Therefore, our thinking, the thinking of the Gentile, the nonbiblical thinking, is not achieving the purpose of God. It is futile and that fits the meaning of this context.
Slide 24
In Romans 8:20, Paul uses the same word. He says, “For the creation was subjected to futility.”
This doesn’t mean a vacuum. It means it’s not achieving its purpose anymore once sin entered in.
In 2 Peter 2:18, “For when they—that is, the ungodly—speak great swelling words of emptiness ...” They have no meaning or value, no purpose. It’s not that they are a vacuum.
So even though those statements are true—this is one of the biggest dangers in a lot of preaching. People say things that are true, maybe biblically true, but it’s not what that passage says. It’s not what the word means in that context.
Slide 25
It’s a change that allows the mind not to achieve its purpose.
We will continue with Ephesians 4:18 next time, coming back and reviewing some of these concepts. But this is the world around us. This is the Gentile world. This is the way they think. They can accomplish a lot of things. They can go to the moon. They can build skyscrapers. They can develop computers. But everything is done within a framework that is without purpose, without meaning, because only God can give it meaning, value, and purpose.
They look at the human race as without meaning or value. They look at people as just tools to achieve their ends, whatever they are. So we have to recognize that they are doing what they do because they’re spiritually dead. They have no other option, and for that they should have our pity. But also we need to transform them by the gospel, and that’s the focal point. It’s always about giving the gospel no matter who you’re talking to.
Closing Prayer
“Father, we thank You for these passages that give us a very uncomplimentary view of who we are as fallen creatures, as rebellious creatures, who have succumbed to sin and who basically have a worthless, purposeless life. It is just a façade when people think that they have some meaning and purpose in life apart from You. It is a cause of such depression, discouragement, suicide, violence, drug addiction, all kinds of different chemical addictions.
“Father, we know that the ultimate solution is only a transformation that can come from Your Word because Christ died on the Cross for our sins, and there must be a spiritual rebirth, a regeneration. There must be a movement from spiritual death to spiritual life because of faith in Christ. That’s the only solution that has any eternal value, any temporal value, any significance.
“We pray that anyone listening today here or online or down the road in time will understand the gospel, the good news, that there is a transformation possible, that we don’t have to remain spiritually dead, hopeless and helpless, that Christ died for our sins. The solution is to trust in Him. ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.’
“Father, we pray that we will be challenged by what we must do, not be conformed to the world, that we should not walk like the rest of the Gentiles walk, not live like them, think like them, but be transformed. It’s not easy, not quick. A challenge for a lifetime. We pray these things in Christ’s name. Amen.”