And you has he made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins:
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Gaius Marius Victorinus
AD 400
Death is understood in two ways. The first is the familiar definition—when the soul is separated from the body at the end of life. The second is that, while abiding in that same body, the soul pursues the desires of the flesh and lives in sin. –.
He enlivened you, when you were dead. These words, he enlivened or restored to life, are necessary to express the literal sense and construction, as appears from the following fifth verse. by what is here translated offences, are commonly understood trespasses less grievous than by the word sins. (Witham)
God hath quickened you, or restored you to life; these words, expressed in ver. 5, are understood in this: in some editions they are expressed. (Bible de Vence)
[The Greeks] speak of trespass as the first step toward sin. It is when a secret thought steals in, and, though we offer a measure of collusion, it does not yet drive us on to ruin…. But sin is something else. It is when the collusion is actually completed and reaches its goal. .
There is a distinction between the death of the body and the death of the soul. There is no reproach in the death of the body as such and hence no moral danger since there is no reproach. The body’s death is merely a matter of nature, not of choice. This death had its origin in the transgression of the first human being, and thereafter it has had its subsequent effect on nature. Its release will be swift. But the death of the soul is the result of free choice. Hence it entails reproach, from which there is no easy release. It is a much weightier task to heal a deadened soul than to raise a dead body, as Paul has already shown. Yet this is what has now happened, incredible as it may be. .
There is, we know, a corporal, and there is also a spiritual, dying. Of the first it is no crime to partake, nor is there any peril in it, inasmuch as there is no blame attached to it, for it is a matter of nature, not of deliberate choice. It had its origin in the transgression of the first-created man, and thenceforward in its issue it passed into a nature, and, at all events, will quickly be brought to a termination; whereas this spiritual dying, being a matter of deliberate choice, has criminality, and has no termination. Observe then how Paul, having already shown how exceedingly great a thing it is, in so much that to heal a deadened soul is a far greater thing than to raise the dead, so now again lays it down in all its real greatness.
And you, says he when you were dead through your trespasses and sins, wherein aforetime ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now works in the sons of disobedience. ...
We find Him, when he speaks of such as "were dead in trespasses and sins, wherein they had walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, who worketh in the children of disobedience."
