Trespass And Death

The word, “trespass” has technical meaning that most people don’t think about. Usually, folks see the word in a “Do Not Trespass” sign. That is, ‘Don’t be here unless you’re invited.’

Legally, a trespass is a crime against real property. A trespass occurs when someone enters onto another’s property without permission or legal excuse. The law is absolute: it doesn’t matter if you were lost and wandered in, you were trying to catch a Frisbee and landed on the other side of the property line, or were intent on committing a felony within. It doesn’t matter that you caused no harm to the property. It doesn’t matter the motivation or circumstances – if you enter the property, you have trespassed. Just crossing that line is an injury to the owner – specifically, that owner’s property rights. This includes both under the surface (mineral rights) and above the surface (airspace).

Even deeper, any violation of another’s person, property, or land is a “trespass.” The core idea is 'interference.' If you smack someone upside the head: trespass to the person, specifically battery. If you take someone’s property for your own use: trespass of property, specifically robbery or conversion. And so forth.

That brings us to the text:

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins (Eph. 2:1 ESV)

Here’s the thing: when we trespass against God’s order, we violate his ‘rights.’ God, as Creator of … everything, has the ‘right’ to not have his stuff messed with. That not only means the physical stuff of creation, but also the way things are supposed to be. God set up the world so that it would work in a particular way. The way things are now are not the way they are supposed to be. Who messed it up? We did. And we continue to mess things up. We continue to mess people up. We continue to mess up how things are supposed to be. We have stepped outside of our bounds and stepped onto God’s ‘rights.’

But that sounds rather dry, technical, and abstract. Another translation uses the term, “offenses against God.” This shapes our understanding that our bad behavior (sin) is a personal affront to God.

 “Offenses against God” – the phrase hit me as significant. All the wrong I have done is an insult to God: how he intended things to work and people to be. My sins have caused various breaks in God’s peace (shalom) – some minor, some major. They are trespasses for which I showed lack of respect and honor to God, who is the Creator and King. I admit to those things. I admit I am a sinner.

What the text then says is that my condition was death. Now I didn’t feel dead – but the whole narrative of the Bible tells me that what I feel now is really like a Novocain induced fog compared to the way it’s supposed to be. In fact, says the Bible, I was born into an alienated relationship with God – a separation. I was born into sin. I didn’t know it at the time.

When I was growing up in the late 1950’s and ‘60’s in Los Angeles, I knew that the sky was always a hazy brown, that you shouldn’t breathe too deeply, and that all sunsets were a spectacular diffused orange. That’s the way it was. Then people told me something that I didn’t know. The air is supposed to be a vivid light blue, your lungs shouldn’t hurt when you breathe deeply, and that a real sunset was really more spectacular and subtle than what I knew. I didn’t feel like the sky was broken, but it was. And it took a complex of Herculean political and engineering tasks to clean up the air in the L.A. basin over the next few decades. In the meantime, I’ve lived in Alaska, western Washington, and southeast Michigan – as well as travelling to other places – where the sky was not broken. Now I know more of what the sky should be like.

We don’t feel like we are separated from God because that’s what it’s been like. Some of us get that little niggling thing that something isn’t right. But we ignore it, tell ourselves to get over it, and move on.

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 tells us: we are dead to him, because of our sin.

But.

That doesn’t have to be the end of the story.