- Written by Steven Amis
For the past few weeks, we have been discussing the doctrine of total depravity and its deep implications for our understanding of man’s condition before a thrice-holy God. We have, in essence, talked about what it truly means to be lost. Believers who got saved later in life have clear memories of their life before Christ, and they have a wealth of experiential knowledge of their enslavement to sin and what it was like to live with complete and total disregard for the things of God. Conversely, there are believers, such as myself, who got saved while in their youth and therefore never got to experience their total depravity fully blossom. But regardless of when the Lord saved you, all of us started out as slaves to our own sinful lusts and desires. Yes, even when you were five years old and singing “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…” in Sunday school, you were in fact a whole-hearted, fully devoted servant of sin if you were not yet converted. Yet God, because of His great love for us, did not leave us in darkness, but shone the light of Christ in our hearts, and opened our eyes so that we may see the beauty of His grace and truth. This of course poses the million-dollar question: how did God accomplish this? To answer that question, let’s recap what we have discussed so far in this series and understand the tension that exists.
- Written by Steven Amis
As we discussed last time, our sinful nature was passed down to us by Adam as a result of his sin. Everyone who is born out of the loins of Adam is born spiritually dead, and we are therefore inherently evil with a disposition towards satisfying the lusts of our flesh, the lusts of our eyes, and the boastful pride of life. Our thinking and reasoning are broken because of sin. Man is indeed corrupt and sinful, but just how deeply does our sinful nature impact the choices we make? Can an unbeliever ever reject his sinful tendencies and choose righteousness?
- Written by Steven Amis
When God created the universe in six days, He described everything He made as “very good” (Genesis 1:31). As fallen human beings, it is difficult, if not impossible, for us to comprehend what it means to live in a world where everything is perfect. No sin. No disease. No suffering. No death. Even our greatest imaginations of a true utopia pale in comparison to life in the Garden of Eden prior to the Fall. Adam and Eve enjoyed perfect communion and fellowship with their Creator and with each other, both being “naked and not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25). We all know what happened next in Genesis 3: the serpent deceived Eve into eating from the tree of which God commanded our first parents not to eat, Adam willfully chose to disobey God, and all of creation was cursed as a result of Adam and Eve’s sin. Paradise was gone, innocence was replaced with shame, the perfect fellowship that Adam and Eve once enjoyed with God was now broken. Access to the Tree of Life was now blocked off by the cherubim.