He Grants What He Commands

And you were dead in your offenses and sins, 

in which you previously walked 

according to the course of this world, 

according to the prince of the power of the air, 

of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

–Ephesians 2:1-2 NASB

The dead believe nothing, being incapable of any kind of thought or faith. In the common view of the Christian Gospel, human beings are sick but not dead. A sick person can be argued into heaven. They can be persuaded that Jesus is the Savior. Arguments for the existence of God can change the mind of a sick person. A sick person can believe and theoretically by that faith can enter into a state of forgiveness and redemption.

Paul says we are dead before we are in Christ, not merely sick. We have total incapacity, like a corpse. There is no possibility of being argued into the kingdom of God. We can only be resurrected to New Life.

To put this another way, the common reading of Paul’s letters and the prevailing theology of salvation thinks that people can surmise the existence of God through logical arguments and even conclude intellectually that Jesus is real and has saved us. The common view is called Justification Theory or the Justification Gospel and it goes like this:

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, but you are guilty of rebellion against God. God is offended but he has made a way for you to be forgiven. He became one of us and experienced death like we do. His death was an unjust tragedy, because he never sinned. In the worst form of this flawed Gospel, Jesus is our whipping boy—a custom in which an unfortunate proxy is chosen to be punished in someone else’s place. And all you have to do is believe. God’s grace is not a free gift, but it is an affordable one, they would say. Instead of having to become morally perfect, you can just decide to believe. God rewards that act by pretending you have become morally perfect.

There are many problems with the Justification Gospel. God is not vengeful or retaliatory. God does not punish Jesus. God is not against us and never has been. Rather, he has been for us since before time (see more: "Chosen Before Time" ). 

But that is not all. Another problem is that the dead cannot believe. In fact, it is impossible for you to “decide” to believe something. You have to be persuaded that something is true in order to believe it. If someone said, “You will experience eternal bliss if you believe in Nirvana,” you cannot simply decide, “I believe in Nirvana.”

What am I trying to say? The point is so confusing because we have always heard the common reading of Paul, always been presented with the Justification Gospel instead of the actual Gospel. We are so unaware of the truth, even when the Bible says it plainly we do not believe it.

But God, being rich in mercy, 

because of His great love with which He loved us, 

even when we were dead in our wrongdoings, 

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 ages to come He might show the boundless riches of His grace 

in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 

For by grace you have been saved through faith; 

and this [is] not of yourselves, 

[it is] the gift of God; 

not a result of works, 

so that no one may boast.

–Ephesians 2:4-9 NASB

When we were dead, God gave us grace. We did not help ourselves. We could not help ourselves. God made us alive to his New Reality. He did it by “grace.” This already strongly hints that God granted us everything we need in order to be reconciled to him and ultimately resurrected and redeemed. But there is more.

It is not of ourselves. I am not sure how Paul could say it more plainly, though we persistently refuse to believe him. It is the gift of God. And a gift is a gift, not something we paid for even at a discount. It is not a “work” we performed. We did not produce belief as some great work of redemption. And no one may boast. There is nothing for Jesus-followers to boast about since we are the recipients of free grace.

We did nothing. God did it all.

Some will try to find a way to put us back into the process. They fixate on the “through faith” in this passage and say, “Aha, see, it is through our faith—our discovery of Jesus and act of belief in him—that God deems to save us.”

Not only do they ignore the fact that this reading of “through faith” ignores the other statements including: “by grace,” “not of ourselves,” “gift of God,” and “no one may boast.” They also ignore Paul’s other uses of faith with respect to the gift of grace.

The faith Paul refers to is not our faith, but the faith of Jesus. This is a paradigm-changing realization and I would not expect you to simply take my word for it. You can read more about it here (“The Faith of Jesus”).

There are two key truths about faith as it relates to salvation that we find in Paul. First, Jesus in faith endured the persecution of lesser men, all the way to the point of death. Jesus’ faith led him to death on the cross and held him there. Second, faith is the sign that we are saved. When we find that we possess faith, we know that God has worked in us and we have been saved.

Our act of believing is not a condition. God’s grace is not conditional. It is free grace.

Long ago, Augustine said, “Command what you will and grant what you command.” God has done just that.

God supplies the faith. We do not manufacture it. (See “It’s Not Free If It’s a Discount”).

How does this granting of faith happen? We do not know. We can speculate. God enlightens our spirit. Where there was no faith, suddenly there is. It is hidden, something God’s Spirit does. And we find that we believe and by that belief we know God has reached down and grasped us. As Paul put it, “I press on if I may also take hold of that for which I was even taken hold of by Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:12). Christ “took hold” of us and immediately we found ourselves being held. 

He also tells us “a natural person does not accept the things of God . . . because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14 NASB). That is, a person who is dead cannot accept the message of the Gospel. In the same vein, “no one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3 NASB).

You did not believe in your own power. You and I received a gift. And God did not ask us to pay for part of the gift by “believing.” Instead, it happened like this:

God in Godself always loved us, from before time. At the right time, he became one of us in order to reenact the drama of our life and death, identifying with us in our lowly condition. And when he died, we died with him. When he rose, we rose with him. But you might say, “I have not died yet or been raised.” Sure, not in your timeline because you are time-bound. God is not. The New Reality already exists for him.

This grace act of God was always his plan. He was never against us. And when the time is right, he grants us faith and we experience the New Birth. This is not of ourselves. It is the gift of God. So that no one may boast.