Ephesians 2:1

Before their regeneration, believers were spiritually dead, separated from God, and unable to have fellowship with Him (cf. Ephesians 4:18; John 17:3). We were living in the sphere of rebellion against God (cf. Ephesians 2:2). Transgressions (false steps, cf. Ephesians 1:7; Ephesians 2:5) and sins (acts of missing the mark) describe deliberate offenses against God.

"There are three outstanding schools of moral pathology traceable throughout the centuries. Pelagianism asserts the convalescence of human nature. Man merely needs teaching. Semi-pelagianism admits his ill-health, but affirms that the symptoms will yield to proper treatment, to a course of tonic drugs and a scrupulous regimen. But Biblical Christianity probes the patient to the quick. Its searching diagnosis pronounces that mortification has set in and that nothing less than infusion of fresh lifeblood can work a cure. Nostrums and palliatives aggravate rather than allay the disease. Sin is an organic epidemical malady, a slow devitalizing poison issuing in moral necrosis; not a stage of arrested or incomplete development, but a seed-plot of impending ruin." [Note: Simpson, p. 46.]

"The unbeliever is not sick; he is dead! He does not need resuscitation; he needs resurrection. All lost sinners are dead, and the only difference between one sinner and another is the state of decay." [Note: Wiersbe, 2:18.]