NOTES for Eph 2:8-9

The apostle Paul speaks of our salvation as an accomplished fact. The apostle uses the perfect aspect of the past tense to emphasize that in God's great love all this has already taken place, already exists. And the person who believes in the reality of God's gift becomes a full participant in the salvation already accomplished by Christ.

The apostle notes that this is a free gift, not compelled by our works. For him this is important because since salvation is given to us according to the riches of God's mercy and not according to our merits, so that no one may boast, it follows that it can be received only by faith, not by works of the law. The apostle expresses this thought many times in different letters, because over us hangs, like the sword of Damocles, the temptation to think that by our labors we deserve God's mercy. But this mercy, this gift of Christ's Blood, is so great that nothing can earn it. As for good works, according to the apostle's word they are the goal and content of that new life in Christ to which we are called.

When speaking of the Christian life, Paul also has in mind the path of righteousness followed by those who sought the fullness of God’s life even before Christ came. Even then, those who walked that path saw clearly that righteousness was impossible without a radical transformation of human nature itself, which had been stricken by sin. Yet it was impossible to transform it completely by human effort alone, even with God’s help. The very environment in which this spiritual work took place was destructive: the fallen world lies in evil, and much of what was accomplished was undone by the spiritual aggression of the fallen world’s environment.

A different environment was needed for a complete, qualitative change in human nature, for its transfiguration, and no one could create such an environment on earth. God’s presence alone proved insufficient: evil opposed the person from without, acting through a world that lived by the laws of sin, and from within the person, whose heart was likewise infected by sin.

Under such conditions, all changes proved partial and temporary. A person could not change in earnest; every change for the better was unstable, and when God’s immediate action ended, the person quickly slipped back into their former state. There was no spiritual momentum: the person marked time, and by doing so achieved only that evil and sin did not gain final and undivided power over them. Full spiritual work required a different environment, one that could be called an environment of love, if love is understood in the Gospel sense.

In the Bible, love means above all a corresponding attitude directed towards the spiritual well-being of its object. Love is an intention that helps a person’s spiritual formation and development and strengthens their relations with God and their neighbours—conscious relations, without which a full spiritual life is impossible. But in the fallen world, the environment in which all relations exist remains natural and psychic. To designate it, the apostle uses a Greek word usually translated as “air,” although it originally denoted a special natural realm in which, among other things, the Olympian gods dwelt.

Christ comes to create a new environment, an environment of love, where spiritual work will proceed much more simply and rapidly and can become progressive, so that a person ceases to mark time as usually happened before. The Kingdom itself exists as a relationship of love between the Father and the Son. In such an environment, the power of sin is possible only insofar as a person grants sin such power over themselves: the aggression of one’s surroundings is excluded in the Kingdom. Conditions for spiritual work become ideal, the impossible becomes possible, and even the consequences of sins already committed change if the person renounces sin itself.

Those consequences no longer weigh upon the person as they did before Christ came. Of course, changes do not happen by themselves; even in the Kingdom, active spiritual work is required of a person, but there it has a chance of being far more fruitful than in the untransformed world. The chances of salvation therefore increase sharply, although no one can, of course, give anyone any guarantees: a person is free, and God does not take that freedom away. Not even in the Kingdom.