Princes and disobedience
Having picked up and pondered the word course let us pick up and ponder another word: prince. Satan is called a prince. He is a rouge ruler; God is the ruler of creation, ultimately in control, the king. Remember that Paul said God has placed all things under the feet of Christ? Remember, also, that at present we do not see all things under his feet? For God’s reasons, the world runs this evil course under the guidance of the fallen Lucifer.
Lucifer has things his way, and God permits it. If you don’t like that, I get it, but you will do best to wait for God to teach you of those matters. Just like Lucifer has things his way, God allows people to have things theirs. It is disobedient, unhelpful, harmful even, but God does not beat people with sticks to chase them into his kingdom. He offers a way out of death. The choice, however, is a grace God gives. He will thwart the cravings of our old lives just enough for us to see what he holds out and to enable us to accept or reject it. He does not place hooks in our noses and pull us into his kingdom though. That is the way Satan does things.
Paul & Company, too.
Is Paul any different? Are those from his evangelistic band from a different category?
3 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. (Ephesians 2:3–ESV)
No, Paul is no different. The Ephesians would not have known the disobedient Paul, Apollos, or that first couple Priscilla and Aquilla. Their introduction to Christianity came from these people, but these people were not born Christians. They each had moments where they accepted the offer of God. When this team made inroads with the gospel of Jesus Christ at Ephesus, they were well past that point.
The Ephesians probably could not conceive of Paul wallowing in wicked passion. Paul, looking out from his own heart could see them. He did not air this dirty laundry but merely stated it as a piece of his reality, the place in his history where God found him.
When I read “passions of the flesh,” or “carrying out the desires of the body and the mind,” I immediately conceive of the baser passions of immorality. Those would not have been where Paul fell, but his flesh was not molded around those tendencies. His flesh, his risk, grew up from items of personal piety, self-control, legalism, and conventions of Jewish traditionalism. He carried around those desires of the body and the mind assembling them into the things of his life.
Recall to mind where those things took him: on a hunt for Christians. In the name of God, he was arranging death for God’s children. He found himself up against God’s wrath that pre-Damascus day. In Acts 26 Paul wrote of that event. God’s micro-wrath had knocked him from his horse, blinded him and told him it was hard to kick against the things God was doing. Goe was doing things to bring new life to the world. Paul was getting in the way. We know how those events worked out. Paul took Christ’s offer.
Paul had lived in antagonism to God at one point. He would not have considered his actions aligned with the spirit of disobedience, but he came to understand it that way.
Next, let us shift our sketches from the world of Paul and the Ephesians up into our living rooms.
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