Stark though it may sound, confrontational though it may be, the Bible compares the unredeemed to the walking dead. Outside of Jesus Christ, men and women are “dead” in their trespasses and sins.

The Bible’s picture of mankind ought to temper our expectations for what life can look like outside of God’s kingdom. Education is vitally important. Legislation is clearly necessary. But neither one, nor both of them together, is able to deal with the basic issues of the human heart. Worldly remedies only take us so far because they cannot address the greatest problem: that our natural condition is that of being “dead in the trespasses and sins in which [we] once walked … by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Ephesians 2:1, 3).

The alienation that marks humanity outside of Christ is primarily vertical: an alienation from God. Yet the effects spill over in other directions. Paul goes on in his letter to the Ephesians to describe how this vertical alienation had affected horizontal relations between Jews and Gentiles (Ephesians 2:11-12). The deep-seated hostility between Jew and Gentile in the ancient world was caused by nothing less profound than human sin. Both were separated from God, as represented by the curtain that hung in the temple, and both were separated from one another by the metaphorical wall that existed between them (v 14).

The truth is that such hostilities are bound to continue apart from Christ. Though it is good to invest in our communities and to labor for real change in our society and for the good of our neighbors (and indeed, God directs His people to do so—see, for example, Jeremiah 29:7), this is not where a Christian ultimately focuses their primary energy in ministry or places their hope for renewal. In Jesus, and only in Jesus, God has created and is still creating a new society where divisive barriers are broken down by grace. God has provided in the authentic local church “the genetic blueprint” for “a broken world remade.”[1] When people encounter churches where that blueprint is seen, they will experience a taste of what God is planning to do when sin and tears and sorrow are no more, when in a new heaven and in a new earth all He has purposed will be completed.

Alienation—both vertical and horizontal—is inevitable apart from Christ. But in Christ, and in the society He is building and of which He is the head, such alienation has been crucified. Taking the reality of sin seriously means that you and I will invest in whatever way we can in our local church in order to ensure that it is a place where grace has torn down barriers and the blueprint of God’s future kingdom is plain to see. Until we get there, we have the opportunity to work for, and enjoy, the foretaste now.