September 10 Sermon: Fallen Humanity

Consider these questions as you listen to this week’s message:

1. How does the doctrine of Total Depravity shape our understanding of our own condition before God, and why is it crucial in comprehending the need for God's grace?

2. In what ways do the passages from Genesis and Romans illustrate the profound impact of sin on humanity, and how do they highlight the necessity of God's intervention?

3. How does the recognition of our total depravity lead us to a deeper appreciation for the grace of God in Christ, and how might it motivate us to share this message of salvation with others?

Transcript:

If I were to ask you to make a list of some of the most recognizable and well known songs it is likely that has you drill down your list, the song Amazing Grace might make it in the top five. It is a tune that is used and recognized even in contexts outside the church. You’ve probably seen a movie that used the tune in a funeral scene. In fact, I thought of two films right off the top of my head and they both used bagpipes, and, as soon as i thought of them the images of the films were brought to mind. Many people who have rarely darkened the door of a church even know the song. Most people know the tune and many of the words. It’s one of those hymns that if the lights went out we could probably finish it. The first verse would be super strong with most of our voices getting to the line “was blind but now I see”. Sure, we’d probably struggle with some of the verses in the middle, they aren’t as well know, but I’m confident we could get through them with a significant portion of people knowing those verses by heart but when that final verse kicked up with “When we’ve been there ten thousand years” I’m confident that we would have nearly as much volume from our collective voices as we would have on verse one. It is a song that is embedded deeply into us.

‌As well, it should be, it speaks of the grace of almighty God to his people. As we express each week as we gather to worship, this mercy shown to us in Christ is the only hope that we have. We trust solely in the grace of God for our salvation because we know that we don’t have any righteousness of our own. The grace of God is the undeserved favor of God shown to the people he has brought to himself. Over the course of the next five weeks we are going to be having a series where we take a journey to better understand grace and what we know as the doctrines of grace.

‌Most people are familiar with the split that came in the 16th century between the Roman Catholic church and Protestants. There was obviously a lot that occurred to have this schism in the church but we know the basics of it with Martin Luther opposing practices of the Roman Catholic church and his taking a stand for the doctrine of justification. This was an understanding that you and I do not earn our salvation by the works that we do but instead it is a gift of God where we as sinners receive the perfect righteousness of Jesus Christ and we are declared righteous before a holy God because we are clothed in the righteousness of Jesus. We receive this gift by faith and we trust that the good news that Jesus took on our flesh, lived a perfect life in our place, bore the wrath of God for our sin, and rose again to defeat sin, death, and hell. This is our understanding of how we are saved and this rediscovery of the gospel message spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. By the time the 17th century rolled around there was some controversy in the Reformed churches about grace and the understanding that God appointed or elected his people to salvation. A group known as the Remonstrants who followed the teaching of someone known as Jacob Arminius and had five points that emphasized human effort in salvation. To respond to this the Reformed Churches met in Dordrecht in the Netherlands and deliberated the teachings of the Remonstrants against scripture. While those present were primarily Dutch Reformed there were German and Swiss Reformed present along with delegates from England and Scotland as well. From this came a document known as the Canons of Dort and the teachings of this document are commonly referred to as the five points of Calvinism or you may have heard them referred to with the acronym TULIP. This acronym stands for total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

‌We refer to these five points as the doctrines of grace and they help us to not only understand the Biblical teaching on the grace of God but to also keep us from error. After that very short history lesson, you can understand why our series on Understanding Grace is five weeks.

‌As I’ve already mentioned it is vital that we have an understanding of the grace of God because it not only tells us something important about the nature of God but it also tells us something essential about ourselves. If I am in need of grace from God, then it tells me that my condition before him is not something that I can remedy on my own. And so, as we kick of this series this morning we are going to be looking at the first point commonly known as Total Depravity. This doctrine says that humanity is deeply affected by sin, making us unable to save ourselves. Because this is the state of affairs for us we need grace.‌

As I mentioned several weeks back when we were looking at Psalm 53 this idea isn’t a doctrine that is only found in a verse or two in scripture.

‌It is an overarching theme and it is connected to what we saw in our Old Testament passage from Genesis 3 this morning. That is the pivotal, historical moment that caused us to be totally depraved and in need of amazing grace.

‌It is a story we all know. God, in his love, created humans on the sixth day and all of creation was very good. He placed them in the garden and made a covenant with them. We didn’t read the details of this covenant this morning but we know them very well.

‌In this covenant, we read that their remaining in the garden was conditional upon their obedience to the command of God to refrain from eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This command we see here is familiar to us. We not only know the command but it is well known how the story went down afterwards. The serpent comes and tempts Eve and then Adam eats of the fruit and the promise of death comes to the human race. Again, we are familiar with the command of God here in Genesis 2 but if we go back and think about the content of holy scripture up to this point, you can’t miss how striking a statement the last four words here are. The idea of death isn’t present in the creation account. Instead, everything is good and God declares his work very good. There is no death. Death is a violent intrusion on God’s very good creation because of what we read about in Genesis 3 today. But I want to be very clear about something. This intrusion is about more than the physical death that causes us to suffer and grieve in this life. There is spiritual death as well. When humanity fell into sin we became incapable of pleasing God on our own because the fall was absolute. It was not a little decline or a detour of the path. We were plunged into sin and death. The apostle Paul uses really helpful language to help us understand this at the beginning of Ephesians chapter 2 when he describes the state of affairs for the people in Ephesus before they came to faith in Christ.

‌He says that they were dead in trespasses and sins. That is clear language for us and easy for us to understand. As you have likely heard me say before, we have the idea that in our sin we are sick and in of a little medicine to take care of us. We think that perhaps we’ve fallen off the ship and we are in need of someone tossing us a life ring that we can grab hold of in the storms of life. That is nothing like the state of affairs we are in. We are dead in our sin. We don’t need a life ring. Pardon my harsh imagery but we are a rotting corpse at the bottom of the ocean apart from Christ. We don’t need something to help us to float, we need someone who is capable of diving to the bottom of the ocean and bringing us up and giving us life.

‌That is where the fall has placed us. We are totally depraved.

‌And again, this isn’t just something I can jump to a few verses here and there to find. It is a message that consistently found in scripture and in every type of literature found in the Bible. It’s present in the narrative portions of scripture, not only at the fall but in the way God ordains history to take place. Think back to when we were in Genesis looking at the life of Abraham. I kept saying over and over that we like to think that the story of Abraham and Sarah waiting for the child of the promise is a comeback story but it’s a resurrection story. Sarah’s womb was not only barren, she was too old to bear a child, it was dead. To keep the promise, God had to not only ordain that her womb would have a child, he had to bring it to life. We also see this in the poetry of scripture as the psalmists talk about their need for God in the midst of their sin. The prophetic portions of scripture show us the desperate need for God’s rescue. The gospels also clearly let us know our need for a savior and do the epistles of Paul and the other authors of the New Testament.

‌In order to have an understanding of grace, we need to have an understanding of sin. And there may be no better place to help us grasp this than the culmination of Paul’s argument about human sinfulness in what we read from Romans 3 today. And we see that Paul is deliberate to point out to us that sin is in fact a human problem. In the book of Romans he formulates his argument by pointing out sin and depravity in not only Gentiles but in Jews as well. At then in chapter 3 he drives this home by quoting from that line from the Psalms we saw earlier. That there is none righteous, not even one.

‌This is a desperate state of affairs that we have written off far too easily in our modern time. We don’t have a deep grasp of what sin has done to us. If our culture acknowledges the existence of sin at all it would not say that it renders us incapable of reaching God. The idea would be the needing to be thrown a life ring or just needing to tweak a behavior here or there. We don’t have a grasp of who God is and so we aren’t even in the ballpark of who we are. God is holy and we are creatures from the dirt who have rebelled against him. That is not a situation remedied by a few changes in behavior here or there. We are need of a radical rescue because there isn’t a one of us who has kept God’s law perfectly. And our understand of total depravity is shaped deeply by these verses quoted from the Psalms here in Romans. No one is righteous and no one seeks after God. This means that the solution is not within us. We’re the problem. We need an intervention from outside of us by this righteous God that we have offended.

‌And, as you’ve likely heard me say before, this is a theological truth that is verifiable. Original sin is on display not only in scripture but in the observable world. We don’t need to teach children to be rebellious. It is not an acquired trait. We are born in sin and it comes out in our actions and the attitudes of our hearts.

‌We see then, why we are in need of this amazing grace that God has given us in Christ and both of the passages that we read this morning display that grace for us very clearly. Our sin has separated us from God but God has done something to remedy the situation of total depravity.

‌In our Old Testament passage we saw once again the promise we have seen so many times. God did not leave our first parents without hope after they rebelled against him.

‌He promised that one would come from the seed of the woman who would destroy the work of the serpent and restore humanity to favor with God. This promise is the theme of scripture from this point forward. And the good news is that despite the circumstances created by his rebellious creation, God was faithful and in the fullness of time, the Lord Jesus Christ, the promised seed of the woman, was born to bear the wrath of God for the sin of his people. Our passage in Genesis reminded us of the promise and you can go online and go back to our sermons in Genesis to see more of the significance of this promise in Genesis 3, there is so much more in this passage than what I have time to draw out today but I want to go back to our passage in Romans before we close up to remind us of how the Word and Spirit use this doctrine to drive us to Christ.

‌We see here that the truth of our sin is exposed in us by the law of God and look at what it does. It stops our mouths. It takes away any claims that we think we have that we are righteous before a holy God because we see that there is no work of the law that will cause us to be declared righteous before God. No amount of good works and no amount of our following of religious rituals will ever cause us to be seen as righteous before God.

‌When this word comes to us and the Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin and unbelief we abandon any hope that we have of saving ourselves because we understand that we have no ability to be righteous on our own. We cry out to God in repentance and faith and we trust in the mercy that God has shown to us in Christ.

‌And as we consider what this means for us, I want us to think about what a blessing this is. We were born dead in sin. We had no capacity to turn to God on our own. We blind and unable to see the truth. Deaf and unable to hear his word. Spiritually lame and unable to walk in righteousness. Our hearts were hard. They were stone but now they are hearts of flesh that believe the truth of the gospel. This doctrine that tells of human inability could be perceived as depressing but the truth is that it is one that should cause us to rejoice because our mouths were stopped by the law and the word of God came to us and gave us eyes to see and ears to hear that we might be rescued from the state of fallen humanity that we were plunged into by our first parents. And so, for an application for you and I as we step out into the world this week is to do two things. The first is that as we see the fallen state of the world may we rejoice in the salvation that we have in the Lord Jesus Christ and secondly, may this cause us to pray that God the Holy Spirit might quicken faith in the hearts of others who hear the gospel, that they might rejoice in the great rescue that we have been given in Jesus.