Principle one, Man Spiritually Dead
Is man spiritually dead? What does this mean? Does it mean that I have no intellectual belief in God as an unsaved person? In Romans 1:21 we read, "For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened." Mankind instinctively knows there is a God but sometimes even that is taken away due to rebellion. So since the Bible speaks of unsaved man knowing God, to be spiritually dead as an unsaved person can not mean that I do not intellectually know there is a God.
So then what does it mean to be spiritually dead? God says by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 2:1-3, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world...all of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath." To be spiritually dead means that we are dead by nature to God's will and desires. There is no spiritual response to getting right with God on his terms. And so we by nature live in our sins, meaning that we continue in and condone our sins, doing things that we know are not in accordance with God's will but try to justify them because we can't imagine living without such sins. And in a real way this is understandable, first because it is not easy to say no to a lot of things that the Bible says is wrong and second because we need to be born again as Jesus spoke of in John Chapter 3.
Here it is important to note that when we are speaking of what it means that man is spiritually dead, we are only looking at God’s definition as given in the Bible. By man’s definition, we could think of ourselves as being very spiritual, but God’s analysis of the situation is quite different then ours often is, and so we have to set aside our own pre-conceived notions about spirituality and stick to God’s definition that He gives in the Bible, because anyone can be “spiritual” and yet think God’s ways are stupid and useless when they see how God wants them to live their lives, or even reject the salvation plan God has offered and think themselves spiritual. However in God’s eyes, there is only one view of valid, saving spirituality, and that is the kind we are concerned about.
If we are spiritually dead, our attitude towards sin would tend to be that it is not really all that bad -- thinking somehow our good works will outweigh our bad works, so it would not really be necessary to forsake our sins while living here on earth. Outside of Christ, we do not believe that we deserve to pay for our sins in hell while the fact is; we all deserve to pay for our sins in hell. This shows our deadness to the awareness of who God is, and how we are not spiritually sensitive to his holiness and justice, which demands eternal satisfaction for sin. We naturally can't understand that, because we have not had our eyes open to the understanding that we have rebelled against an infinite, Holy God that the punishment must fit the crime as also being of infinite proportions. Either that or we can fall into the trap of denying our sin saying "I don't see why that is wrong" because we like the sin and don't want it to be wrong. What a mess! Mankind naturally misses the point that what is right and wrong is determined by what God says, not by what makes sense to me. Otherwise, man is the one who determines truth, not God. Since man is spiritually dead and does not want to listen to him, men then try to discredit God's word because logically, if the Bible is not true they do not have to do what it says. It is repugnant for spiritually dead man to serve God as he reveals himself in the Bible and if they do, it can be only out of fear or customary tradition.
With looking at this spiritually dead nature of man, there is a dangerous tendency for saved people to think that they are morally superior to the unsaved. This attitude must be avoided and is not true because our faith was given to us by God (Ephesians 2:8) and only he can take the credit for that. And so it's no wonder that Titus 3:5 says that we are saved not because of righteous things we have done, but because of his mercy. What we need is not exactly that we will never commit sin again, for if that were true no one would ever be saved. But rather, it is the attitude and goal of the Christian not to sin. For example, we cannot as Christians live our lives willfully intending to sin. There is a great difference between someone who really wants to do what is right and fails and someone who intends to just keep on sinning and thinks they will be forgiven just because they ask for it. The person who wants to do what is right will be bothered by sin and take steps to deal with it. But the one that intends to just keep on sinning refuses to take action against it. Even repeated sins that the Christian commits will be fought against and struggled with. This is because the Bible teaches that saved people live in a body that wars against the spirit, Romans 7:15-25. This means sinful tendencies war against a spirit that has been made alive -- so if we sin, it is because in a moment of weakness we give in to our sinful tendencies and desires, but we must not intend to just keep on sinning. If we did that, that would put our salvation seriously in question. For that is one of the chief marks of the non-Christian.
If we are unsaved(and therefore still spiritually dead), what we need is a change of attitude towards our sin that is the result of being made spiritually alive by the power of God. (Eph. 4:5) This change in attitude is so contrary to man's nature that only the power of God can change it. This change of attitude recognizes our guilt and need to turn to Christ for the forgiveness of our sins which in turn causes us to turn from the sins we commit, and gives us a desire to be obedient to him out of gratitude, the payment for such sins having been paid for by Jesus at the cross. Are your sins paid for? Do you have such an attitude toward your sin? Unfortunately, many in the church twist the teaching of the Bible to allow them to continue in their sins, rather than confessing the evil of such sins and fighting against them. Do not let this discourage you from faithfully serving Christ. Not everyone who claims to be saved is.
If we look back to Ephesians 2:3, we can see that our nature is corrupt and sinful throughout. We cannot choose God, but we must. As we look at ourselves and all that strives against God things are hopeless, but with God there is hope. That our nature is corrupt and sinful throughout does not, however, mean that we are as totally corrupt in all our actions as it is possible for us to be. It means that the corruption extends to every part of us before we are saved. Our desires and thoughts have all become corrupted and our natural tendency while we are still unsaved is to not follow God's desires and to reject his thoughts about how we are to live our lives and what we should believe about him. Therefore we must not look to ourselves to try and save ourslves, or try to come up with some great big scheme where we think we have made some kind of program that makes us right with God, but we need to come to God and look to him, depend on him, call upon him to save us, not depending on our own works. Once we are saved and made spiritually alive, the result of that is a desire to follow and obey God.
We read in Mark 7:20-23 "What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean. For from within out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All of these evils come from inside and make a man unclean." So that we are totally depraved does not mean that every unsaved person commits all of these sins, but that they come from within, from a corrupt nature. Take, for instance, swearing. The words consist of that which is lewd, unclean, not fit for public discussion. Why do people love to use words that have to do with human refuse? It comes from within, evidence of the unregenerate nature of mankind. People think it makes them look cool or tough and dramatic but it really only emphasizes the seriousness of our condition outside of Christ.
There are some who believe that man is able to believe in the God of the Bible without God's help, but consider all we have seen, the nature of unsaved man, how we act. Since if we truly believe in the God of the Bible we will turn from sin and fight against it, how can it be true that unsaved man could ever desire to believe in him without his first changing them? Also, if God is making all people "spiritually neutral" so that their will is able to choose God by themselves, why would God's word emphasize that we are all spiritually dead before salvation? And as we will see later, if God is working equally in all people, the determining factor in man's salvation is his works, not God's grace.
After all that has been said, some may say, "what kind of God makes creatures that always sin and come under his curse? Is not God, if what you are saying is true, some kind of cosmic ogre that expects way too much from his creatures and as a result, all come under his wrath?" This actually is not the case at all. If we are to leave such an attitude of unbelief, we need to accept God's account of history. This is because God originally made man capable of perfect, perpetual, continuous obedience and our first representative of his own choice decided to disobey God when he had no reason to. God warned our first representative that if he committed a certain action, he would die - and die immediately (Genesis 2:16-17). He did not die physically as an immediate result of what he did, but spiritually. This is because his sin was eating of the tree of good and evil - so called because in order to eat of it you would have to rebel against the clear command of God, sinning, and thus dying spiritually. The result would be that man would know good in a way he did not know it before - he would have a knowledge of good by the removal of it. Man would no longer be a sinless being, but now we are born having a sinful, evil nature. Sometimes we do not realize what we have until it is taken away. And over this lies the darker cloud of being spiritually dead and now knowing evil. So it is not God's fault that we come into this world inclined to do evil. It is the fault of our representative, Adam, who was made perfect but chose to subject all of his offspring to spiritual death, (I Corinthians 15:22). If you think this is unfair, ask yourself if you could do a better job. Don't you think God would have given us the best representative possible?
At this point some may say, "what is this? Now you expect me to believe in fairy tales, the old Adam and Eve story - that I may believe God is who you say he is and that I am what you say I am?" Here I ask, what is so hard to believe about that? There was a place, called Eden - Just like there is a place called Seattle, Everett, or Bellevue. Except this wasn't a city, it was a garden. Ever seen the Buchart Gardens? Could an infinite God create such a place? Is that too hard to believe? But some may say, I believe an all-powerful creator could create such a place, but science says there was no creator and that we just evolved as a result of natural processes. Actually no, science doesn't say that. A scientific theory, and a crummy one at that, does.
A theory is something that is not proved. A law is something that is. The fact is, a scientific law opposes the theory of evolution. This law is the second law of Thermodynamics. Evolution claims that it is a process that in its course gives rise to an increasingly high level of organization in its products. The second law of Thermodynamics says however, that systems do not go toward a higher order, but naturally go toward a lower order. Energy changes into lower forms, things suffer wear and decay, genetic systems suffer mutations that decrease order in those systems. One argument I have heard for evolution is that the earth is an open system that receives energy from the sun that causes increasing order in the system. However, the standard thermodynamic equation says solar heat entering into the earth - system does not increase order, it increases entropy! The greater the heat energy in a system, the greater the decay in that system will be.
Another testimony against evolution is the relationship between DNA and protein. Since use of DNA to code protein production is the basis of all life on earth, in order for evolution to be true time, chance, and chemical reactions must cause the DNA to code protein production. The problem is that chemical reactions produce the wrong relationship for living systems. They scramble up DNA and protein units into deadly combinations that prevent, not promote, the use of DNA to code protein production. This is because DNA uses a series of bases (three at a time) to line up a series of R-groups (variable radical groups) that are part of the amino acid that "stick out" along the protein chain. And there is no chemical tendency for a series of bases to line up a series of R-groups in the orderly way required for life. All chemical reactions destroy the possibility of life being produced from DNA and protein. Time and chance do not help, because it is like trying to throw 13 on a pair of gambling dice. You can throw forever, but you will never get thirteen. The possibility is just not there - so the probability is zero.
So that God created this world and a place called Eden does not seem to me to be so hard to believe. Rather, evolution does. Our sinful tendencies are the result of Adam's fall who as our representative brought us into captivity of the curse of sin. We have thus all become something that is spiritually dead and biased against God. We, by the very nature of what we are deserve God's eternal wrath, whether we are believers or not because being a believer is due to God's work in regenerating us, not because of good things we have done. This is a hard thing for man to naturally understand, but it comes with the conviction of sin that is the result of regeneration. (the act of being made spiritually alive)
Readings for further thought: John 5:24-25, John 8:34, Jeremiah 17:9, Luke 9:60, Luke 15:32, Romans 8:7-8, Colossians 2:13-14.
So then what does it mean to be spiritually dead? God says by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 2:1-3, "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world...all of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath." To be spiritually dead means that we are dead by nature to God's will and desires. There is no spiritual response to getting right with God on his terms. And so we by nature live in our sins, meaning that we continue in and condone our sins, doing things that we know are not in accordance with God's will but try to justify them because we can't imagine living without such sins. And in a real way this is understandable, first because it is not easy to say no to a lot of things that the Bible says is wrong and second because we need to be born again as Jesus spoke of in John Chapter 3.
Here it is important to note that when we are speaking of what it means that man is spiritually dead, we are only looking at God’s definition as given in the Bible. By man’s definition, we could think of ourselves as being very spiritual, but God’s analysis of the situation is quite different then ours often is, and so we have to set aside our own pre-conceived notions about spirituality and stick to God’s definition that He gives in the Bible, because anyone can be “spiritual” and yet think God’s ways are stupid and useless when they see how God wants them to live their lives, or even reject the salvation plan God has offered and think themselves spiritual. However in God’s eyes, there is only one view of valid, saving spirituality, and that is the kind we are concerned about.
If we are spiritually dead, our attitude towards sin would tend to be that it is not really all that bad -- thinking somehow our good works will outweigh our bad works, so it would not really be necessary to forsake our sins while living here on earth. Outside of Christ, we do not believe that we deserve to pay for our sins in hell while the fact is; we all deserve to pay for our sins in hell. This shows our deadness to the awareness of who God is, and how we are not spiritually sensitive to his holiness and justice, which demands eternal satisfaction for sin. We naturally can't understand that, because we have not had our eyes open to the understanding that we have rebelled against an infinite, Holy God that the punishment must fit the crime as also being of infinite proportions. Either that or we can fall into the trap of denying our sin saying "I don't see why that is wrong" because we like the sin and don't want it to be wrong. What a mess! Mankind naturally misses the point that what is right and wrong is determined by what God says, not by what makes sense to me. Otherwise, man is the one who determines truth, not God. Since man is spiritually dead and does not want to listen to him, men then try to discredit God's word because logically, if the Bible is not true they do not have to do what it says. It is repugnant for spiritually dead man to serve God as he reveals himself in the Bible and if they do, it can be only out of fear or customary tradition.
With looking at this spiritually dead nature of man, there is a dangerous tendency for saved people to think that they are morally superior to the unsaved. This attitude must be avoided and is not true because our faith was given to us by God (Ephesians 2:8) and only he can take the credit for that. And so it's no wonder that Titus 3:5 says that we are saved not because of righteous things we have done, but because of his mercy. What we need is not exactly that we will never commit sin again, for if that were true no one would ever be saved. But rather, it is the attitude and goal of the Christian not to sin. For example, we cannot as Christians live our lives willfully intending to sin. There is a great difference between someone who really wants to do what is right and fails and someone who intends to just keep on sinning and thinks they will be forgiven just because they ask for it. The person who wants to do what is right will be bothered by sin and take steps to deal with it. But the one that intends to just keep on sinning refuses to take action against it. Even repeated sins that the Christian commits will be fought against and struggled with. This is because the Bible teaches that saved people live in a body that wars against the spirit, Romans 7:15-25. This means sinful tendencies war against a spirit that has been made alive -- so if we sin, it is because in a moment of weakness we give in to our sinful tendencies and desires, but we must not intend to just keep on sinning. If we did that, that would put our salvation seriously in question. For that is one of the chief marks of the non-Christian.
If we are unsaved(and therefore still spiritually dead), what we need is a change of attitude towards our sin that is the result of being made spiritually alive by the power of God. (Eph. 4:5) This change in attitude is so contrary to man's nature that only the power of God can change it. This change of attitude recognizes our guilt and need to turn to Christ for the forgiveness of our sins which in turn causes us to turn from the sins we commit, and gives us a desire to be obedient to him out of gratitude, the payment for such sins having been paid for by Jesus at the cross. Are your sins paid for? Do you have such an attitude toward your sin? Unfortunately, many in the church twist the teaching of the Bible to allow them to continue in their sins, rather than confessing the evil of such sins and fighting against them. Do not let this discourage you from faithfully serving Christ. Not everyone who claims to be saved is.
If we look back to Ephesians 2:3, we can see that our nature is corrupt and sinful throughout. We cannot choose God, but we must. As we look at ourselves and all that strives against God things are hopeless, but with God there is hope. That our nature is corrupt and sinful throughout does not, however, mean that we are as totally corrupt in all our actions as it is possible for us to be. It means that the corruption extends to every part of us before we are saved. Our desires and thoughts have all become corrupted and our natural tendency while we are still unsaved is to not follow God's desires and to reject his thoughts about how we are to live our lives and what we should believe about him. Therefore we must not look to ourselves to try and save ourslves, or try to come up with some great big scheme where we think we have made some kind of program that makes us right with God, but we need to come to God and look to him, depend on him, call upon him to save us, not depending on our own works. Once we are saved and made spiritually alive, the result of that is a desire to follow and obey God.
We read in Mark 7:20-23 "What comes out of a man is what makes him unclean. For from within out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All of these evils come from inside and make a man unclean." So that we are totally depraved does not mean that every unsaved person commits all of these sins, but that they come from within, from a corrupt nature. Take, for instance, swearing. The words consist of that which is lewd, unclean, not fit for public discussion. Why do people love to use words that have to do with human refuse? It comes from within, evidence of the unregenerate nature of mankind. People think it makes them look cool or tough and dramatic but it really only emphasizes the seriousness of our condition outside of Christ.
There are some who believe that man is able to believe in the God of the Bible without God's help, but consider all we have seen, the nature of unsaved man, how we act. Since if we truly believe in the God of the Bible we will turn from sin and fight against it, how can it be true that unsaved man could ever desire to believe in him without his first changing them? Also, if God is making all people "spiritually neutral" so that their will is able to choose God by themselves, why would God's word emphasize that we are all spiritually dead before salvation? And as we will see later, if God is working equally in all people, the determining factor in man's salvation is his works, not God's grace.
After all that has been said, some may say, "what kind of God makes creatures that always sin and come under his curse? Is not God, if what you are saying is true, some kind of cosmic ogre that expects way too much from his creatures and as a result, all come under his wrath?" This actually is not the case at all. If we are to leave such an attitude of unbelief, we need to accept God's account of history. This is because God originally made man capable of perfect, perpetual, continuous obedience and our first representative of his own choice decided to disobey God when he had no reason to. God warned our first representative that if he committed a certain action, he would die - and die immediately (Genesis 2:16-17). He did not die physically as an immediate result of what he did, but spiritually. This is because his sin was eating of the tree of good and evil - so called because in order to eat of it you would have to rebel against the clear command of God, sinning, and thus dying spiritually. The result would be that man would know good in a way he did not know it before - he would have a knowledge of good by the removal of it. Man would no longer be a sinless being, but now we are born having a sinful, evil nature. Sometimes we do not realize what we have until it is taken away. And over this lies the darker cloud of being spiritually dead and now knowing evil. So it is not God's fault that we come into this world inclined to do evil. It is the fault of our representative, Adam, who was made perfect but chose to subject all of his offspring to spiritual death, (I Corinthians 15:22). If you think this is unfair, ask yourself if you could do a better job. Don't you think God would have given us the best representative possible?
At this point some may say, "what is this? Now you expect me to believe in fairy tales, the old Adam and Eve story - that I may believe God is who you say he is and that I am what you say I am?" Here I ask, what is so hard to believe about that? There was a place, called Eden - Just like there is a place called Seattle, Everett, or Bellevue. Except this wasn't a city, it was a garden. Ever seen the Buchart Gardens? Could an infinite God create such a place? Is that too hard to believe? But some may say, I believe an all-powerful creator could create such a place, but science says there was no creator and that we just evolved as a result of natural processes. Actually no, science doesn't say that. A scientific theory, and a crummy one at that, does.
A theory is something that is not proved. A law is something that is. The fact is, a scientific law opposes the theory of evolution. This law is the second law of Thermodynamics. Evolution claims that it is a process that in its course gives rise to an increasingly high level of organization in its products. The second law of Thermodynamics says however, that systems do not go toward a higher order, but naturally go toward a lower order. Energy changes into lower forms, things suffer wear and decay, genetic systems suffer mutations that decrease order in those systems. One argument I have heard for evolution is that the earth is an open system that receives energy from the sun that causes increasing order in the system. However, the standard thermodynamic equation says solar heat entering into the earth - system does not increase order, it increases entropy! The greater the heat energy in a system, the greater the decay in that system will be.
Another testimony against evolution is the relationship between DNA and protein. Since use of DNA to code protein production is the basis of all life on earth, in order for evolution to be true time, chance, and chemical reactions must cause the DNA to code protein production. The problem is that chemical reactions produce the wrong relationship for living systems. They scramble up DNA and protein units into deadly combinations that prevent, not promote, the use of DNA to code protein production. This is because DNA uses a series of bases (three at a time) to line up a series of R-groups (variable radical groups) that are part of the amino acid that "stick out" along the protein chain. And there is no chemical tendency for a series of bases to line up a series of R-groups in the orderly way required for life. All chemical reactions destroy the possibility of life being produced from DNA and protein. Time and chance do not help, because it is like trying to throw 13 on a pair of gambling dice. You can throw forever, but you will never get thirteen. The possibility is just not there - so the probability is zero.
So that God created this world and a place called Eden does not seem to me to be so hard to believe. Rather, evolution does. Our sinful tendencies are the result of Adam's fall who as our representative brought us into captivity of the curse of sin. We have thus all become something that is spiritually dead and biased against God. We, by the very nature of what we are deserve God's eternal wrath, whether we are believers or not because being a believer is due to God's work in regenerating us, not because of good things we have done. This is a hard thing for man to naturally understand, but it comes with the conviction of sin that is the result of regeneration. (the act of being made spiritually alive)
Readings for further thought: John 5:24-25, John 8:34, Jeremiah 17:9, Luke 9:60, Luke 15:32, Romans 8:7-8, Colossians 2:13-14.
posted by Brian J. Patterson at 1:28 AM
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