"And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 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. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved."
Ephesians 2:1-5
All that follows in this grim catalogue of man's sinnerhood serves to bear out what has already been said. For, being dead in sins, man follows, as an inevitable consequence, the course of this world. If we compare the state of being dead in trespasses and sins with having come adrift from the true anchorage of life (and that is an apt way of putting it), then naturally and inevitably that man drifts downstream with the current. That is the course of this world. And anything without an anchor will drift downstream. The majestic liner and the dirty coaster will both alike drift, the princely yacht and the derelict hulk will go the same way. That is a parable of life: the natural man may be a respected member of the community or a broken down alcoholic, but although outwardly so completely different they share common ground in this: if they are outside of Christ, they both alike drift downstream, following the course of this world.
Nor is Paul finished yet with his analysis. Behind this world-course, he claims, there is a personal evil power directing operations, conspiring to ruin the souls of men - the devil himself, the 'prince of the power of the air'. We are probably less disposed to ridicule this concept today than previously. We have lived through so much evil and horror in society that we have been almost forced to take on board some such factor to explain the sheer extremity of the evil things we have seen in our time. By the same token we may become more disposed to take the apostle's climactic word, 'children of wrath', than hitherto, and recognise that the confident assertion that 'we are all children of God' is not a biblical concept except in the one general sense that God created us all, for in the all-important spiritual sense, only those born of the Spirit into newness of life can claim to be true children of God. After all, it was Jesus Who said, of the Pharisees, 'ye are of your father the devil'!