The Old Man’s Spiritual Debility

The Apostle Paul tells us in Ephesians 4:17-19 that the true Christian no longer conducts himself (or herself) like the non-Christian. He then actually lists a few characteristics that can really be boiled down to three traits. First, the Old Man is characterized by Intellectual Deficiency (v. 17b).

Second, the Old Man is characterized by Spiritual Debility (v. 18): Having the understanding darkened . . . through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart. The person who does not know Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord has a complete spiritual debility, a feebleness, weakness, and impediment. As mentioned last time, we live in a day of unparalleled knowledge. Without doubt, many in our day, as in Paul’s, would be much more insulted to be called “ignorant” than they would “sinful.” But man is indeed ignorant and feeble. The reason is because his understanding has been darkened. As in verse 17, the mind is again in view. Man cannot understand spiritual things because his mind has no light in it. In other words, there’s no light in his mind because there’s no life in his heart.

It’s significant that a description of the non-Christian is that he or she is in darkness. As Jesus declared in John 3:19: “Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” People talk often about being “enlightened” or “seeing the light” in some new philosophy. But Scripture declares with certainty that light is found only in Christ. As Jesus Himself declared, “I am the [definite article—one and only] light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (Jn. 8:12). Only when we follow Christ, do we have light. Recounting his conversion, Paul said that the Lord called him to be a witness to the Gentiles, “To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light” (Acts 26:18).

Paul goes on to say that this darkness is true because of man’s ignorance, which is the Greek agnoia (English, “agnostic”). As one Greek authority tells us, this ignorance is not caused by something external, but by man himself. In ancient use, it could refer to a man who lives without knowledge does so either because he hasn’t heard the truth or because he has refused the truth, and that if he “had received it, it would have freed him from his ignorance of his own origin. In other words, he just closed his eyes to the Truth, he refused to believe what was right in front of him. This certainly exposes the so-called “agnostic.” He says that he doesn’t believe we can know if there is a God, but he says this only because he does not want to know. His ignorance is deliberate, but if he would just believe, he would be freed from his ignorance.

Paul further adds that all this is because of the blindness of their heart. Here is a fascinating truth. The Greek for blindness (porosis) not only means “blindness,” but also “hardness.” It comes from poros, “to harden, to form a callous (when broken bones heal), and thus to petrify, to become hard.” And may we add, the callous is harder than the bone it self. Man was, indeed, broken at the fall, and his heart has deliberately continued to grow calloused toward God, with the result that it is petrified, stone hard. The prophet Ezekiel had a vision of the salvation that would be revealed in the New Testament when he wrote: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26).

Paul painted a similar picture when he wrote to Timothy that man’s “conscience [has been] seared with a hot iron” (I Tim. 4:2). The Greek for “seared” is kauteriazō (English, “cauterize”). Just as scar tissue looses feeling because of nerve damage, man has no spiritual feeling because sin has cauterized him. This thought leads directly to a final condition, which we’ll examine next time.