Biblion Bible Commentary
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Dead in Transgressions
Ephesians 2:1-3
1 You were made alive when you were dead in transgressions and sins, · WEB
The diagnosis is not weakness but death, and the sentence includes the writer before it is finished.
The chapter opens on a condition rather than a behavior: dead in transgressions and sins. Not sick, not failing, not struggling. The letter chooses the one word that rules out self-improvement, because a dead man's problem is not that he is trying insufficiently hard.
Verse 2 describes what that death looked like from outside — a walk, a course, a direction — and names two influences over it. The course of this world, which is the ordinary current of an age, and the prince of the power of the air, which is not ordinary at all. The letter does not explain the second phrase and does not soften it; it will return to the same realm in chapter 6 Ephesians 6:12.
The phrase children of disobedience is a Hebrew way of saying people characterized by a thing, and the letter uses it again of those under wrath Ephesians 5:6.
Then verse 3, and the pronoun changes. We also all once lived among them — Paul puts himself and his fellow Jews inside the description he has just given of gentile deadness. The letter has already made the gentile readers' former condition explicit Ephesians 2:11–12; here it refuses to make theirs a lower category.
And the last clause admits the extent: by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. Not by accident, not by circumstance, and with nobody exempted. Three verses of diagnosis with no remedy offered — which is what makes the first two words of verse 4 the turn of the chapter.
settled What this mark means