Irresistible Grace, What We Believe, Part 23

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We choose to violate God's law. We choose to be just as disobedient as Adam was in the garden. Actually, no, we're more disobedient.

We're probably more disobedient than Adam for this very simple reason. Adam was innocent.

He didn't understand good and evil. He was innocent. So when he made that choice, he really didn't fully understand the wrath of God, the consequence of sin.

But you and I can look in this world and we understand the consequence of sin and those of us who are saved, we understand the grace of God.

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, the

Executive Director of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community, joined by my co -host here,

Bud the Wiser, host of The Bud Zone. How are you, Bud? Greetings, brother. I'm doing well.

I deserve worse and I'm thankful for better. I should say you're also the editor -in -chief of all the blogs that go on at strivingforeternity .org,

so you wear multiple hats. This one's blue today, I see. Oh, it is blue, yes.

There you go. Not necessarily because of a melancholy spirit, but just because it's sitting on my desk and I put it on.

I would also like to point out that people need to listen to my other podcast that I just kind of host, which is

Andrew Smith's Truth For You. That's a good podcast. Yeah, that one's getting a lot of attention. He's a good preacher, though I did have some struggle with the recent one where you guys got onto the covenant theology stuff.

Yeah. Oh, covenants are the way to go. Oh, well,

I can say one thing for sure. In heaven, one of us will be wrong.

Both of us could be wrong, but hopefully one of us will be right on this. But you know, the reality is we won't care then.

We'll just rejoice that we're with Christ. Yeah, no kidding. No kidding. So we're going through a series and we're hoping that you will join with us.

We're in a series that we're calling What We Believe, and this is basically going through the doctrinal statement at strivingforeternity .org.

You go to the About section, What We Believe. We're going through the doctrinal statement, and the reason we're doing this is, one, well, teach theology.

Two, explain all that goes into a doctrinal statement and what's it saying and what is it not saying.

And we've been going through this. We're in the doctrine of man. We're going to wrap this up.

Well, we're going to kind of wrap up man this week. Next week, we're going to do a separate one that's in the section on man on the issue of abortion.

So next episode that we record will be on that in this series.

But we want to go through this and talk about the effects of Adam's sin and how far -reaching was that.

Now, if you've missed the earlier parts of this series, I encourage you to go back. Actually, I encourage you to go back to the very first one in the series, because that would be very helpful to get all the context.

But at least in the section of man, we've been building a top of previous episodes.

So we've been talking about this idea of that man is sinful, that we have an imputed sin, we have an inherited sin.

We've been talking last week about this idea of total depravity. What is it not? What is it?

It's not the idea that we're totally as depraved as we possibly could be, but it is the idea that the depravity, the effect of sin, has affected every person—well,

I should say every person who has a human father—every person who has a human father, and it affects their entire being.

So it's their thinking, their emotions, and also their volition.

And that's what total depravity really is addressing. Working off of that, we're going to finish up. We're going to talk about Adam's disobedience, what the penalty of that was.

So with that, Bud, would you start us off by reading the two paragraphs that we have we're going to cover today? Yeah, sure.

And I'll just point out to folks before I read this, you've got a number of parenthetical citations from Scripture kind of scattered throughout these paragraphs.

I'm not going to read all those citations. People need to go to the About section on Striving for Eternity and study those citations.

But there are numerous ones there, so this is not just something you brought out of your head. This is actually grounded in Scripture.

Now, the content that we're covering today starts with this paragraph. In Adam's sin of disobedience to the revealed will and word of God, man lost his innocence, incurred the penalty of spiritual and physical death, became subject to the wrath of God, and became inherently corrupt and utterly incapable of choosing or doing that which is acceptable to God apart from divine grace.

With no recuperative powers to enable him to recover himself, man is hopelessly lost.

Man's salvation is thereby holy of God's grace through the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Because all men are in Adam, all men of all eras, Jesus Christ being the only exception, inherit a nature corrupted by Adam's sin.

All men are thus sinners by nature, by choice, and by divine declaration.

And this builds very much on what we said last week or last episode in this series, because what we talked about with total depravity is the fact that our volition is affected by sin.

That's very important for you to understand and have that right definition before we get into this week's episode, because if you have the wrong definition of total depravity, you're going to think that what we're saying here today is heresy.

It's just the reality. I mean, and so this is part of the issue that we end up having with a lot of this is that people are often using wrong definitions, and this is why we're taking the time to explain things.

This is why the doctrinal statement tries to define this, and if you really think about this, this whole issue of the sin nature and the effects of it, we have three paragraphs.

This is the third episode that we're dealing with it, building on top of each other, because this has the understanding that we must have, which is, you first must understand that we inherited sin.

It's imputed to us from Adam. We inherited it from our father. Because we have a sin, a sin nature, that has the effect on our total being, our thinking, our emotions, our will, and because of that, that gets us into what we're going to discuss today.

So let me start off. In Adam's sin of disobedience to the revealed

Word of God, Adam didn't have the

Bible. What do you mean the revealed Will and Word of God? He didn't have the

Bible. What do you think, bud? Well, I think that he had way direct information from the

Lord. Go there. Go to Genesis and prove it. Yeah. He had direct revelation.

Yeah. I mean, the revelation we see in Genesis 2 .15, then the Lord God took man and put him into the

Garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it. And the Lord commanded the man saying, from any tree of the garden you may eat freely, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat.

For in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die. So he had direct revelation and a direct understanding of the

Will of God. The Will of God was for him to eat of any tree except one.

Okay. So, bud, I want to do a test because I think in this account that we have in Genesis 3, we're going to see something different.

How many trees were they able to eat of? Let me think. We're not actually given a count there.

But it's a lot of them, right? All of them. All of them except one. Okay. And that becomes important because they're told not to eat of it, and a lot of people give

Eve a hard time, right? Because when the serpent is tempting

Eve, Eve says you shouldn't eat it or even touch it, and people say, see, Eve twisted

God's word. I don't know that, because we don't know what Adam said to Eve. I mean,

Adam might have been like we are with kids, where it's like, don't even go near that thing, right?

He may have just said, hey, let me give you a little bit extra, like, this is what God said, this is me. We don't know if that's something that Adam said or she came up with.

We don't know the intention behind it, but we do know one thing. When we look at Genesis chapter 3, the serpent says this in Genesis 3 .1,

Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast in the field which the Lord had made. And he said to the woman,

Indeed has God said you shall not eat from any tree in the garden?

But how many of the trees does Satan say they can't eat from? Yeah, he suggests you can't have anything.

That's right. This is the deception, and this is common today. You see this today where people who will sit there and say, well, if you say a woman can't be a pastor or preach in the church, then she can't do anything.

No, she can do everything according to Scripture but that. There's a whole lot of things she could do, just like there are a whole lot of trees that you could partake of, but there's one that they couldn't partake of.

There's one thing in the church a woman can't do, not because she's not more capable, it's just because God has declared that.

And there's a lot of things we see like that. We're seeing this now with homosexuality. If you don't praise someone's homosexuality, then you don't let them—they can't do anything.

That's the same thing that we see here, but that's an offshoot of a rabbit trail.

Yeah, you're going somewhere else with this, but that's okay. That's okay. But I just wanted to point out so people realize when you hear someone say you can't do anything because Scripture says you can't do one thing, then that right there is—well, we know where that thinking comes.

It comes from the mouth of Satan. God gives us a will. He explains what He wants us to do.

In Adam's case, it was direct, it was revealed, and it was the literal

Word of God. It was—you know, Adam heard this. He didn't need to see it written down in a

Bible. And so he was disobedient to that. Now, one thing that I will say that we can end up having is we could think we know the will of God and be wrong.

I know that's hard for some to believe, but Paul had that. You don't believe me?

Well, let's look. Philippians chapter 1, Paul says to the Philippians—he says,

I'll start in 21 just so we have context—for me to live is Christ and to die is gain, but if I am to live on in the flesh, this will mean fruitful labor for me, but I do not know which to choose.

But I'm hard -pressed from both directions, having the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is very much better.

Yet to remain in the flesh is more necessary for your sake. Verse 25 is the key.

Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all for your progress of joy in the faith, so that your proud confidence in me may abound in Christ Jesus through my coming to you again.

He is confident that he will remain and return to the

Philippians. That didn't happen. That was not God's will. God's will was for Paul to lose his head, quite literally.

And so I just want to point out that when we talk about the will of God, there are times that people are convinced they know what

God's will is for their life. Paul was convinced, and he was wrong.

So when we speak of the will of God, unless we see it in Scripture—I mean, clear teachings of Scripture or clear principles of Scripture—we don't know for sure it's the will of God.

It could be our will. Now, Bud, you've probably had this experience, but I know a woman who needed to choose between one of two jobs, and she was reading her

Bible, and God told her which job to take, because she saw the words, go north.

And the job north was the one to take. Right? Yeah. People talk about this, God is speaking to me.

No, he isn't. Not that way. A good book to get, if you struggle with hearing from God, hearing the voice of God, or you're trying to hear the voice of God, get

Jim Osmond's book, God Doesn't Whisper. It really goes through in detail the fact that God doesn't speak to us through nudges or feelings or—he speaks to us through the

Word of God. Adam knew clearly what God's will was. You can have any tree but one.

And so in that, he disobeyed. Now, we've dealt with this in the previous episodes.

It's Adam's disobedience that brought this curse in, not Eve's. Eve had partaken of the fruit.

She didn't realize she was naked until Adam partook of the fruit. Adam was the federal head. And so that is the reality, that it was because of Adam's disobedience.

And so let's get into the effect this ended up having.

Now, one of the effects—I don't have this verse in here, and I don't deal with this, but there is an effect of Adam's sin that's beyond humanity.

Okay? Now, the first sin that occurred in the universe was actually not Eve's or Adam's. It was actually

Satan's. Satan fell first, but there wasn't an effect on Satan's fall that affected anything as far as we know other than the angelic race—those angels that ended up falling with Satan.

When Eve partook of the fruit and disobeyed God, again, we don't see a curse of sin. But once Adam did, there was a curse that affected far beyond humanity.

Romans 8 .20 says, So we know that all of creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.

So you end up seeing that when Adam and Eve fell, all of creation was affected by this.

The entire universe is groaning because of what

Adam did. It's a far -reaching consequence. But let's look specifically at the effect on mankind.

And so as we look at this, we have a lot of different points that we're making here. So first, man lost his innocence.

We saw that in Genesis 2, right? Man suddenly lost his innocence.

He recognized he was naked. He knew both good and evil now, meaning he understood the sin.

He now was affected by that. So he lost that aspect where he was innocent of evil.

Now, at this point now, he commits evil. We're going to find that more at the end of this.

But he's no longer innocent of evil. He now has an understanding of it. Genesis 2 .16

-17. Also, another one is he incurred the penalty of spiritual and physical death.

So once he did this, he brought sin into the world. Romans 5 .12

says that there was no death before sin. Once Adam sinned, the punishment of death began.

Now, some people say with, well, you know, Andrew, in Genesis 2, there's clearly a contradiction, because we see that it says that the day you eat of it, of that fruit, you will die.

Did Adam die that day? What do you say, Bud? That day?

Did he physically die that day? Oh, no, of course not. No. And people will say, well, the process of death began.

Well, that's not what he said, is it? He didn't say the process of death will begin. He said that day you will die.

So let me ask the question again, Bud, because you picked up that I changed,

I added a word. Did Adam die that day? Yes, Adam did die that day.

That's right. And what kind of death did he die? Well, he died a spiritual death. That's right. And so we tend to think, when we think of death, we think of the physical.

Adam, when he partook of the fruit, the fact that he knew he was naked is the evidence of his spiritual death.

If you understand the fullness of Scripture, and particularly the grace of God, the fact that he did not physically die the moment he ate was an immense amount of grace from God to him.

Don't miss that. That's inherent in what's going on there. That's right. I mean, the thing is, is that we tend to think only in the physical, and yet God ends up dealing more with the spiritual.

Yeah. And so he incurred a penalty of spiritual death, and that was immediate. He knew that.

The third thing is he became subject to the wrath of God. He became subject to the wrath of God.

Let me look at some verses. First off, when we say that the penalty of spiritual and physical death, well, the spiritual death is where we're focused.

Ephesians 2 .1 says, you were dead in your trespasses and sins.

Not partially dead, not kind of ill. You were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formally walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience.

Among them we too all formally lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.

So we were under God's wrath and children of that wrath. Why? Because we were dead in our trespasses and sins.

By the way, Bud, I don't know what you're going to think on this, but when people will use the illustration of Lazarus and they say, see,

Jesus said, Lazarus, come forth, and he was dead, and because Lazarus was dead, he couldn't bring himself back to life unless Jesus said it, therefore we can't bring ourselves back to life unless Jesus calls us.

Even if we're going to say, and we're going to, that that principle is true, that we need God to call us, that doesn't mean that's what the account with Lazarus is saying.

The account of Lazarus is a historical narrative, and it's explaining what actually happened. There wasn't some more spiritual meaning behind it, and you need to make sure you interpret the

Bible the way it was meant to be written. One reason why. Recently this week I heard of one of the podcasters, that Doctrine Matters podcast with Stephen Dew, was talking about the fact that there is a new thing that they're talking with Lazarus, I think it was, coming back from the dead with the same claim of Jesus calling him out.

The issue there is they say that he was being called into his, to live his lifestyle.

He was being called, but God called him out of the world, but didn't change him, and therefore homosexuals can be called out into the world of Christianity, but not have to change their lifestyle.

Now if you are taking that first usage of Jesus calling out the dead, then you can't criticize the latter argument, even though the look on your face was a cringe, bud.

You obviously didn't hear this one. No, no. You need to be listening to more of the podcasts in the

Christian podcast community. I barely have time to listen to ours. The thing that we end up seeing is that God says that we're, he emphasizes this over and over, that we are dead.

I mean Romans 3 23, we use this when we evangelize all the time, for all have fallen short of the glory of God.

We know that verse. We know Romans 6 23, for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our

Lord. We know these verses. We use them when we evangelize. We explain that we are dead, and because we're dead, we're subject to the wrath of God.

You could look at Romans 1. We don't have time to read all of it, but when you look at that, you look at not only are we individually under the wrath of God, but when we give ourselves over to our devices, over to our lusts,

God is going to bring the entire nation or entire world under that judgment, and we're suffering that now.

If you need the evidence of it, read Romans 1. Homosexuality doesn't bring about God's judgment.

It is God's judgment. Yeah, exactly. The correlation too, which is very,

I mean I hope most people listening will recognize this, when you're reading Ephesians 2, and it's saying you're dead, and your sins and trespasses.

You know, connect this back to John 3, where Christ is encountering Nicodemus, and what's the big issue there?

Jesus is telling him you must be born again. Now, Nicodemus takes a simple, a simplistic approach to it.

How can this happen? Well, Jesus is not talking physically. He is talking spiritually, because you're dead.

You need to be born from above. You need to be born again. So, this is the theme of the gospel throughout, you know, the

New Testament and in the Old Testament, and it starts right here with what we're dealing with with regards to the fall of Adam.

The first message we have of the gospel starts in that garden. Yeah, yeah.

We're just a chapter ahead of it. I mean, we're going to later see not only the curse, but also the gospel.

Yeah, and do you see how many of these verses that I'm reading are tying those two together? It's not just that we're dead.

God doesn't leave us just, you're dead, that all the bad news. No, he always provides hope. That's exactly what he provided to Adam and Eve as soon as they fell in the garden.

A hope of the seed to come. God always provides that hope.

Rabbit trail. Giving the warning now. Folks, if you are looking at our culture, you're looking what's going on in the world, you're looking at the inflation rate, and you're looking at the riots going on, and you're looking at the political theater happening, and you're saying, what is happening?

God still provides hope. Stop looking as a downer. If you're a Christian, you have the greatest hope.

You have eternal life. I thought you were going post -meal there for a sec, bro. That's great to hear.

You have eternal life. We're not saying the world is going to get better.

I know you're thinking that. You're going to edit this out, aren't you? I can tell now. Oh no.

Look, 10 ,000 years from now, we're going to joke about how wrong you were on your post -meal view. Well, okay then.

I'm just glad that when I was on your Bud's Own podcast, I didn't get grilled about my pre -meal position.

I was expecting it. We ain't going to fret over this stuff. So as we get back on track here, we're under the wrath of God.

So the fourth thing. So first, man lost his innocence. Second, incurred the penalty of both spiritual and physical death.

The third thing, became subject to the wrath of God. Fourth, and became inherently corrupt and utterly incapable of choosing to do that which is acceptable to God apart from a divine grace.

All right. There's a lot here to unpack, and people get upset with this. I know.

So what are we dealing with here? This is building on everything that we have said, and if you don't go back and look at the previous episodes we did on the sinfulness of man, his nature, and seeing this, you will struggle with what

I just read, and I understand that. And that's why we're taking the time to unpack this.

So let us first say what this is not saying. This is not saying that God is going to regenerate a person against their will.

That God is going to come in, you got this sinful, wicked person, they're an enemy of God, they hate God, and God is going to sit there and say, you know what?

I'm going to make you love me. You don't want to love me, but I'm going to make you love me. And he just turns a switch.

That's not what this is saying. That is how many straw man this argument. A straw man argument is when you give a different definition so it's easy to knock down.

Well, what we do here on The Wrap Report is burn down straw men. So let's burn that down and realize that is not the argument.

We're saying right here what the argument is. Because of the fact that he lost his innocence, he's a penalty of spiritual death, he's subject to the wrath of God, and everything we said in the previous episode where he talked about that he's totally depraved even his volition is affected by sin, therefore he became inherently corrupt.

In other words, even his will is corrupt. His entire being is corrupt.

We dealt a whole episode on that last episode with total depravity, and we addressed it even in the previous one before that.

Why do we spend all this time? Because this is a difficult concept for some people to understand, and we want to make sure we're really clear on what we're saying and what we're not saying.

It is because he is corrupt in every part of his being that he is utterly incapable of choosing

God or doing what God thinks is acceptable without God doing something first.

I'm going to explain what the doing something first is, that divine grace, but let's first deal with this. The fact is that you and I will always, in our sinful state, choose sin.

Okay? 1 Corinthians 2 .14. Let's look at this one first. By a natural man does not accept the things of the

Spirit, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised.

But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself he appraises by no one.

For who has known the mind of the Lord that he will instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ?

Notice the contrast there. In our natural state, we will not accept the things of God, because we're an enemy of God.

We're going to think the things of God are foolishness, but once we're regenerated, we understand the mind of God.

He removes the veil. God actually indwells us in the personal Holy Spirit, and it's because of that that we can appraise all things.

So we, as I've said before, we have a will that is enslaved to sin prior to our salvation.

Okay? It's enslaved to sin. Romans 5, Romans 6. Our will is enslaved to sin.

When the Holy Spirit indwells us, we now have a free will. Now we can have a genuine free will.

Why? Because of what God did in us. This connects as well back to Romans 1, just to inject this, where you see the wrath of God being, you see that sort of systemic wrath being poured out in all these different layers.

But verse 18 says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against, you got to note this, all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.

So we're ungodly and we're unrighteous. But who are those men? Those who are doing what? Suppressing the truth and unrighteousness.

Well, this is what you're talking about here. We're utterly incapable of choosing or doing that which is acceptable to God, because we're unrighteous and we're ungodly.

We don't desire that. We never sin against our will, but if you read on in Romans, it says no one seeks after God.

We don't do that in that natural state that Paul's talking about in Corinthians there. So, sorry. Yeah, no,

I mean, that's the thing. And there are people, though, that will try to say, in the desire to get away from this divine work of God, this divine grace, because they want to so say human beings did this, that we chose

God, and we've dealt with this, there are some people who will end up going as far as to say, well, we're born with a neutral nature.

It's not sin, it's neither. Or they'll say we have a good nature. What they want to deny is the sin nature, and some will go so far as to say that we can actually live a perfect life and not sin.

Well, 1 John 1 .8 disagrees with that. It says if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.

Why? Because he was speaking to the Gnostics, who believed that they could, anything physical was evil, and anything spiritual was good.

They actually, the Gnostics, taught that you could sleep with a prostitute, and as long as you didn't give your spirit over to her, it was okay.

You didn't sin. So they thought they could actually live sinlessly perfect in that day, and to that context,

John says, you deceive yourself, and the spirit's not in you. What we're saying is that we, in our natural state, unless God does anything, we will not choose

God. So how does this happen? Because, bud, I know my own experience.

Sitting on the steps of a Dairy Queen, July of 1984, sitting on that steps,

I repented. I chose to put my faith in Jesus Christ.

I mean, isn't that repentance? I changed my mind, and I chose Christ. I turned from sin, turned to Christ.

That was something I did. But did I? Of course you did.

Repetition is good for memory, for learning things, and for retaining things, and so I want to repeat something

I've said on multiple episodes, all the way back when we first started in talking about the

Bible, because this is where we see this doctrine called superintending. The doctrine of superintending is the doctrine where God works through the human person in such a way that the things they choose to do are exactly as God intended them to be, such that God gets 100 % of the credit.

Catch that. That's very important. Let me say that again. The doctrine of superintending is the doctrine that God works through the human such that the choices that they make are exactly what

God intended for them to make, such that God gets 100 % of the credit. Super important doctrine.

That is how we can say that John wrote 1 John, but it's God's word. God worked through John, so he had his own style.

He chose his words, but even though he chose his He doesn't get the credit for it. God gets credit because he was working through John.

Did John know that God was working through him? Don't think so. He just was writing, but God was working through that in such a way that everyone knew that was inscripturated or inspired.

They knew that was scripture. We see this doctrine also in our sanctification. We're commanded to do good works, and we choose to do good works, but James says we don't.

God does them. God works through us. Again, the doctrine of superintending. God works through us such that the good works that we choose to do are actually because God is working through us to do them.

Do we know God is working? No. We think we're choosing, and yet behind the scenes,

God is working within us, so we don't even notice that he's doing that, and that is the same thing employed here.

God works through us in this divine grace through the doctrine of superintending.

He works through us so that the choice we make to repent, to turn from sin and turn to Christ that we think we're making all on our own, it's actually

God working through us so he gets all the credit. Now, one of the things with that means that because he's doing that work, we not only can't take credit for it, but it also means it's a simultaneous act.

There was not a time where you repented or believed in Christ, then

God saved you. There's also no time where God regenerated you, and because he regenerated you a second later, a millisecond later, you then believed.

One of the Puritans puts it this way. Can someone be a unregenerate believer?

Think about that. No. You can't be an unregenerate believer. Can you be a regenerate unbeliever?

No, that doesn't make logical sense either, and it's not biblical, so what's the answer? Simultaneous. God works through us that we are being regenerated at the same time we're believing, and you say, but I don't understand that.

God could do more than we understand. God can work through us, and we don't even recognize that, and that is what

I believe is happening, and I think that's what solves this big debate that so many people have. Who chose first?

Did I choose or did God choose? The answer is yes, and so this is something a lot of people have difficulty with, but anything you want to add to that?

Well, you're going down another rabbit trail that's going to lead us to the issue of election, which adds another dimension to this, but no.

Proceed. Okay. So as we look at this, the next sentence we have here, with no recuperative powers to enable him to recover himself, man is hopelessly lost.

That's what we've been saying throughout. We don't have the ability to save ourselves because of our state.

We have no power to recover ourselves. Man is hopelessly lost.

Man's salvation is thereby wholly of God's grace through the redemptive work of the

Lord Jesus Christ. This is what we've been trying to say with this whole idea of the fact that God superintends.

He works through us such that he gets all the credit. That's what we're saying in that sentence.

Man's salvation thereby is wholly God. He gets all the credit. Can John write scripture on his own?

No, it wouldn't be God's word. God had to work through him. So that's what we end up seeing, this same thing throughout.

I think that's an important point though, Andrew, for folks not to forget in the exhibition of grace and the exhibition of wrath and the exhibition of any effects of the

Lord's providence in the history of the world from time back going forward, everything is for his glory.

He is doing everything to glorify his name, to exalt his son. So we can easily become trapped in this sort of man -centric view of things.

Well, how does it affect me? Well, there may or may not be effects to you, but the ultimate thing is that God is getting glory from all these things, from justice, from wrath, from grace, from salvation, all these things.

So that's a doctrine you can't forget. So it's important you point that out. It's wholly of God's grace.

What he does, he is doing for our good as a believer, but also for his own glory. Yeah. I mean, this is some stuff that a lot of people disagree on.

There's lots of debate in Christianity. Understand that. But my encouragement to us is that we would be careful in how we communicate this, because there's a lot of people fighting, and what they're doing is talking past each other.

That's what a doctrinal statement tries to do, and that's why on this one we're trying to lay this out, because a lot of, as you said, but a lot of this builds off the other.

The fact that we're totally depraved, right? This is the terminology that's used. Total depravity.

We addressed that in the previous episode. That leads to this idea of an irresistible grace, that God works through us, so we're choosing

God because he's working in us. It's not that it's against our wills. It's with our will.

He works with our will, and that's going to lead into the fact that, you know, we were unconditionally elect.

Why? Because God, before the foundation of time, chose us. Why? Because he knew what he was doing. He's outside of time.

He is all -knowing. So he knew who he would choose. So you end up seeing that each of these things are tied to one another.

When you look at what people call Calvinism, or the tulip, or sovereign grace, however you want to word it, they're all based on one another.

And so when we look at this, we end up seeing that if you have a wrong definition, especially on total depravity, the rest of it falls apart.

And if you have a right definition of total depravity, the others become necessary. And that's why we're spending the time on this, because it becomes essential in that.

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So we thank you for that. So as we get to this last paragraph, bud, this is continuing off of what we had said.

Because all men are in Adam. We spent time going through this in two previous episodes, that we are...

Adam's our federal head, we're in Adam, in the sense that we have the sin imputed to us from Adam.

We're not responsible for what he did. What he did as the federal head has the effect, as I said earlier, on all of creation.

Because we are men, all men are in Adam, all men, of all errors,

Jesus Christ being the exception, because he did not inherit sin, he didn't have a human father.

So all men, except for Christ, inherent a nature corrupted by Adam's sin.

Now we spent a lot of time, two episodes on this, and we needed to take that time to explain that out, because that's what so much of this is based on.

We're coming back to it to repeat it, because it becomes important. And what we're doing with this is we...

I bookended this. Started with it, but now what I want to do is bring this back. So I'm in this doctoral statement,

I'm emphasizing this again. Every one of us, we saw this in Romans 3 .23,

we saw this in Ephesians 2, we are all sinners. Every one of us.

We are corrupt. In fact, Romans 14, if we take a look there,

Romans 14 verse 1, the fool has said in his heart there is no God. They are corrupt.

They have committed abominable deeds. There is no one who does good.

The Lord has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God.

They have all turned aside. Together they have become corrupt.

There is no one who does good. Not even one.

That's what God says. But Andrew, you don't know my heart.

I know that I'm good. I know that I love Jesus. I'm a saved.

I love Christ. I love Christianity. Well, I do think there's a verse for you.

I think God has revealed his will to you if you're trusting in your heart. Jeremiah 17 .9,

the heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick.

Who can understand it? If you're going to trust your heart, let me be clear, what

God says through Jeremiah, your heart's deceiving you. Yeah. Yeah. Don't follow your heart.

Follow Christ's. And that's the thing. We want to be in God's will, then that's what we have to do.

Not a single one of us, and the Psalms make it clear, are doing good. We're all corrupt.

Every single one of us. Why? Romans 5 .10

-12. If while we were enemies of God, we are reconciled to God through the death of his

Son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.

And not only this, but we also exalt in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation.

Therefore, just as the one man entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned, for until the law, sin was not in the world, but sin was imputed where there was no law.

There was sin in the world, even where those that didn't have the law of God in writing, in other words, they didn't have the scripture, it was still imputed to them.

They still had that. They were enemies of God and needed to be reconciled with God. And all of this, to wrap up to this next sentence, and this becomes, this is very important, so this is kind of the climax of this, all men are thus sinners by nature, by choice, and by divine declaration.

We've gone through many scriptures, and hoping that you would see this throughout the scriptures here, that the scriptures are clear that you and I were born with a sin nature.

So we are sinners by nature. Because we have a sin nature, we sin. We mentioned this last time, right?

Adam and Eve, they weren't born with a sin nature. They had a nature, they had a sin nature because they sinned.

In other words, they started off without a sin nature, they sinned, that gave them the sin nature. We sin because we have a sin nature.

So why do we sin? Because of that nature. It's part of our nature. But guess what? We can't just say, hey,

God, this is the way you made me, because we choose to sin. It's a choice we make.

We choose to violate God's law. We choose to be just as disobedient as Adam was in the garden.

Actually, no. We're more disobedient. We're probably more disobedient than Adam for this very simple reason.

Adam was innocent. He didn't understand good and evil. He was innocent.

So when he made that choice, he really didn't fully understand the wrath of God, the consequence of sin.

But you and I can look in this world, and we understand the consequence of sin. And those of us who are saved, we understand the grace of God.

We can truly understand good and evil. And we still disobey God. You want to be blaming

Adam for your choice to sin? I got news for you. Your sin is worse than Adam's.

The devil didn't make you do it. You did it. That's right. There's a great book by Chris Lungard called

The Enemy Within. It's kind of Cliff Notes version of John Owen's two works on the indwelling sin and mortification of sin.

His book is called The Enemy Within. And it's a great title. Because he's saying, hey, it's not the devil.

It's not the world. It's the flesh. We want to blame it on the others. Yeah, all those things are contributing factors.

But the fact is, you know, we are not by nature good. We are by nature evil, corrupt, and unrighteous.

Ungodly is what the other term Paul used in Romans 1 when we look to that.

We understand amazing grace. The other thing I'll put out there is this sentence, this closing sentence in the statement on the doctrine of man that says all men are thus sinners by nature, by choice, and by divine declaration.

That's the order. I mean, that really is sequential. This is how we understand this.

But when that sovereign grace of regeneration, when God does save you, you're actually taking that same statement and reversing it.

All men are thus saints first by divine declaration. Then we suddenly want the righteousness of Christ.

We suddenly desire it. And then our nature is being conformed through progressive sanctification to the image of the

Son. So he's undoing in Christ all that Adam did in sin. So really remarkable.

You might need to edit this statement and put that in there, because it's the reverse of what you just said there, which is perfect.

Yeah, this wasn't by accident that we put it in that order. Now, folks,

I'm going to say that these things happen, as what Bud just said, simultaneous. I have that in my book,

What Do We Believe? I give all these things that happen simultaneously, because this is the way

God works through us. And so this is that leads one to the other.

Because we have a sin nature, we are going to choose to sin. But that sin that we commit makes us guilty.

We are under the wrath of God. That's the divine declaration. We're under that wrath until God does a work in our heart, that divine grace that we spoke of, where he regenerates us.

That regeneration will change us without us even realizing it. As he's regenerating us, we're repenting.

We're choosing God. And then the Holy Spirit indwells us, and our nature changes.

Now we have a free will. So we've been talking several weeks, really bad news, all about man's sinfulness.

But let's end on a good note, is the fact that what this all leads to is what we'll end up talking about next episode in the series, but the one after that, as we get into salvation, the soteriology, the study of salvation.

But we can touch on it here as we already have, and that is, as we saw, there's always hope. Every time we're looking at these passages, what are we seeing?

In each of the passages, we are seeing, repeated, yes, there's the curse of sin, and there's the hope of eternal life.

If you're listening to this, and you have not converted to Christ, you're listening to this, and you're still dead in your sins,

I may encourage you to recognize that Jesus Christ, God Almighty, came to earth for the purpose of dying on a cross as a punishment for our sin, so we could be set free.

But we have to stop trusting our good work, stop trusting our good nature that we don't have, stop trusting our religion we were born in, and trust

Jesus Christ. We turn from our sin, that pride that keeps us thinking that we're going to make it on our own, no, we turn from that, we trust what

Jesus Christ, God Almighty, did on that cross when He died, when Jesus died on that cross and made a payment of sin.

We want to turn in our thinking, be converted to Christ and have eternal life today.

You have to hate your sin. If you're still wanting to have your sin and Christ, you're not going to be converted.

You must hate sin. That's the very definition of what it means to be a Christian. Why do you hate sin?

Because you know what that sin cost. It put Christ on the cross, and that is something that we can never repay, and there's no way someone could be a

Christian and say, but I'm okay with my sin that cost Christ everything.

He who knew no sin became sin, that you might become the righteousness of God. 2

Corinthians 5, 21. You really think if you understand that verse you can continue in sin?

I'm not saying we don't sin, I already said that. If we say we have no sin, we make Christ a liar, but we deceive ourselves.

The truth is not in us. No, we still continue to sin, but we don't love that sin.

We hate the sin because of what it cost Christ. If you haven't repented, if you haven't been converted, may you do that right now.

If you have done that, contact us. Let us know. We'll send you a free Bible. Just let us know at info at striving for eternity dot org.

Info at striving for eternity dot org, and we'll make sure that you get a

Bible. We'll make sure that you get some things that would help you in your new walk. We have materials that we could provide for you, and we would try to see if we could find someone in your local area to be paired up with.

Someone could start discipling you and walking with you in your new faith. And if we could be of any help to you, if you need a speaker at your church, you want us to come to you, just email us at that same email address, info at striving for eternity dot org.

We'd be happy to come to your church to speak. Church size doesn't matter. We don't have a speaking fee.

We'll come to your church, no matter how large or how small, because we're concerned with helping churches to disciple their people, and that's what we look to do.

So we're glad that you're here. Bud, you know what? What's that? That's a wrap.

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.