Total Inability

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

The Doctrine of Total Depravity and Why It Matters

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. I don�t do this very often, but I just started the show 55 seconds ago and didn�t like it so I hit record again. Normally, if I�m up to about a minute already, why waste the time?

I try to do three shows at once, and if you start talking and two minutes into the show you realize it�s not going well, we just power through it, right? And plus, you�re listening at 1 .5 speed anyway, aren�t you?

That�s how I like to listen to podcasts. We here at No Compromise Radio want to point you to the Lord Jesus Christ who never compromised. I think of what happened at Calvary, and none of the attributes of God are ever compromised, including Calvary.

And we talk about whatever I really want to talk about, as I see fit, according to the Directory for Public Worship, as seems fit under the minister. I think that was yesterday�s show. Feeling pretty good in terms of lungs.

The last two weeks I probably felt better in life, but we just keep plowing forward, trying to exercise, trying to�am I trying to eat right? I�m trying to eat a lot. I�m not trying, it just happens. Today I�d like to talk to you about a topic that maybe is no fun, but it�s true.

And it�s important. Matter of fact, if you don�t understand the topic that I�m going to address today, it causes all kinds of other problems. On the positive side, if you understand this theological topic today, it will assist you in many other theological areas.

And it�s the doctrine of depravity. It�s the doctrine of what we sometimes call total depravity. And really it is not a total depravity, it�s more a whole depravity, W-H-O-L, or wholly W-H-O-L-L-Y, not H-O-L-Y, but W-H-O-L-L-Y.

Two L�s, there�s no A in holy, but there�s two L�s in the holy that I�m talking about. And when Robin said, you know, holy haberdashery, he wasn�t using this word, he was using H-O-L-Y, and I�m using W-H-O-L-L-Y.

Every faculty, the whole of man, has been affected by Adam�s sin. Our minds have been affected, our wills have been affected, our consciences have been affected, our bodies have been affected, our emotions, our feelings, our whole person has been affected by the fall.

When that original sin happened and Adam disobeyed God, and he, as our federal head, Adam, our public, the public man, he sinned, we got credit for that, and then consequently a whole slew of things have happened.

And we call this total depravity, our whole depravity. And what Paul is going to do in Ephesians 2, he wants to kind of set the backdrop. He wants to show a contrast. He wants to have the folks at Ephesus, mainly Gentiles, but there�s I�m sure some Jews there, to be reminded of what they were, and then that exalts the work of the Lord.

I mean, if we�re kind of sick, then we�re given an antidote. But if we�re spiritually dead, as Ephesians 2 says, we�re going to need to be not resuscitated, but we�re going to need to be made alive, and that�s Ephesians 2 as well.

And if you get this right, it�s going to help you in lots of other areas. Let me just tell you at the very beginning what one of those areas might be. If you think man is just kind of sick and not dead, then you might believe in a conditional election.

God chooses people conditioned on what they do. But if men are dead, women are dead in trespasses and sins, then there�s nothing good in them, then God�s going to have to do all the work. And therefore, if you get anthropology correct, it�s going to help you in other areas.

I think about contrast, and some have said Ephesians 2, 1 -3 is like the black velvet that a jeweler would use, as he would set the diamond ring on top of that, and you know, the lighting�s just perfect, and you see the contrast of the brilliance of the light in the diamond compared to the black velvet backdrop.

And Ephesians 2, 1 -3 would be that black velvet, and Ephesians 2, 4 -10 would be the diamond. And I think that�s true. One time Kim and I were flying from Phoenix, which was 80 degrees, to Omaha for Christmas.

And in Omaha, without windchill, it was minus 20. And I think we were coming from LAX to Phoenix then to Omaha, but we were on the flight from Phoenix, and we were interviewed. What was it like to experience a 100-degree temperature change, that contrast?

Just a few short hours, you went from 80 degrees to minus 20 degrees. And there was a local news station there, I think it was ABC, and they interviewed people, and they interviewed Kim and I, and they interviewed me, they interviewed Kim and me, and they interviewed I?

No, me. They interviewed Kim and me, which just sounds funny. And we made it on the local news that night. And Grandma and Grandpa were watching, and then they called, and they knew we were in town because they saw us on the TV.

I tried to hide my earring. Did I get the hoop earring in 1989 before I was saved? Oh. And basically what we have in Ephesians 2 is this, it's a story of contrast. Dead in sin, alive in Christ. And as Calvin said, this is to magnify His grace by a comparison.

He focuses strongly on the riches of divine grace. He reminds them how wretched they were before they were called to Christ, for we never become duly sensible of how much we owe to Christ, nor estimate sufficiently His kindness toward us until the unhappiness of our state outside Him has been set before our eyes.

And as you know, as you study the Bible, Jesus, dead, raised, exalted. And we were dead, God raised us and exalted us. As chapter 1 talked a lot about the Trinitarian work of God and God the Father to be praised for His election, the Son's redemption, and the Spirit's sealing, we kind of get a perspective now from where we are, or where we were, rather, as unbelievers.

So chapter 2, Ephesians, we're talking about sin. And I've heard different titles for verses 1, 2, and 3. Here are some of the titles that I've heard. I didn't make up any of these, but I've heard some of these.

The Way We Were, Dead Men Walking, Natural Born Killers, Rebels Without a Cause. And the one that I came up with was Tales from the Crypt. That's what's going on here. And if you want to read Romans 1, 2, and 3, at least up through verse 20 of chapter 3, you can, and I suggest you do.

But if you want something that's a condensed version of Romans 1, 2, and 3, you could read Ephesians chapter 2, verses 1, 2, and 3. Three verses that essentially say the same thing. And Paul gives the bad news first, verses 1 to 3, then he gives the good news.

I mean, he's already given us good news and praises in chapter 1, verses 3 through 14. But now in this contrast, he talks about we're dead in trespass and sins and made alive together in Christ. Not in life, what am I talking about?

I looked at my notes and got confused. J .C. Ryle heard these verses read, the first 10 verses of chapter 2, in a worship service and got saved. This is one of those passages where if you ever want to walk through the Bible with an unbeliever, these 10 verses, bad news, good news, this would be a great place to go.

If you want to give a personal testimony sometimes, I don't like when people just get up and talk. I like it when people give a testimony and they base it on Titus 3, for instance. Or here, Ephesians 2, might even be easier.

This is who I was, this is who the Lord is, this is great saving work, and here is the doctrine of divine grace. And Calvin said to remind them of their former condition was needed as they need to understand their own sin.

We sometimes as Christians are essentially told by pastors that our noses have to be rubbed in our old sin. Paul's not doing that here, right? You know, you have a dog and they urinate on the carpet and you rub their nose in it.

Paul isn't doing that. But he's also not doing what some people do. I guess I've probably done it in the past. Who knows? I've done a lot of other dumb things, so I've probably done this dumb thing too.

You almost kind of go back and look at it as a romance and the fun and the nostalgia of what it was like to be an unbeliever, the things that you could do, and how good you were at doing some of those bad things.

I think sometimes we have to be careful, or not, I don't think, I know we have to be careful so we don't do that. We are prone to forget how bad we were, and we are prone to forget what the gospel has done for us and in us.

We need to be reminded about grace greater than all of our sin. Yes, it's humbling, yes, it's bad, yes, it's negative in a sense, but what we were like before God saved us, it exalts and extols and magnifies the grace of God that he would so save us in the state we were in.

Ephesians 2, 1, and you were dead in the trespasses and sins. Dead in trespasses and sins. And isn't it fascinating? The first word in the verse is, and, and we've got this tied together. We've got it tied together, Christ is raised and exalted, and so are we with Christ, we union with Christ, and he says, and, he's tying it together, and he's telling us our former condition, you, emphatic, you Gentiles in Asia Minor, including Jews, they were there too, every person, no exceptions.

You were dead in trespasses and sins. Not just gangbangers, not just terrorists, not people like the Boston Strangler, no. You're dead. And if I were to try to describe this first section, I'd probably use the word dead.

We're gonna use dead, dominated, and doomed. Here's the word dead. We were dead. Now what's that mean? I mean, people, unbelievers are alive. They walk and talk and sing and shout and praise and cry, but it says they're dead.

This is a good word, a good summary word, and it means lifeless. We're not talking about a physical death. People are walking, but it's a spiritual death. And it is a word that if we tease it out, dead to spiritual things, dead to the greatness of Jesus, dead to the word of God, dead to wanting to glorify God, dead to wanting to love God, dead to wanting to love neighbor, dead to the law of God, dead.

Now there's a conscience in law, okay, maybe I misspoke there, but you get the point. You take the reflex hammer, you hit it on the patient's knee and you expect reflex, but the person's dead. Jesus said, follow me and allow the dead spiritually to bury their own dead physically.

And you can use it either way, but this particular verse, chapter two, verse one is spiritual dead. They can't do anything. They can't understand spiritual things. They have no feelings and emotions and affections for the things of God.

It doesn't say weak. It doesn't say sick. It says dead. Colossians two says the same thing. And you were dead in your transgressions. You go to a dead body and you talk to it, you shake it, you poke it, you yell at it, you scream at it, you beg it, and there's no response.

So there's no response. Man is dead. Unbelievers are dead. They're lost. The depravity they have is whole. It's holistic. And they're dead in trespasses and sins. That's interesting. Plural. Trespasses and sins.

You've seen signs, no trespassing, don't go past the spot, and we do. Sins miss the mark. You try to shoot the bow and the arrow or the darts to the center arrow, a center of the target, and you miss that center target, and you've missed the mark, and you fall short of the standard.

And that's what we have done. We could call these sins of commission. We step over the line. And sins of omission. We don't hit the mark. Trespasses and sins. False steps and missing the mark. Wrongdoing and not measuring up to God's perfect and holy standards.

And we can't do anything about it. Because we're dead. Say, well, we can't, the self-help won't work. We're powerless to overcome this. Something would have to be done to us because we couldn't do anything on our own.

God said to Adam, the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you're going to die. As a matter of fact, he did spiritually die, did he not? The second that he ate of the tree. Trespasses, they have the idea of, we're doing it on purpose.

And now, because of all this, Adam's sin and deadness, we're inclined to evil. We don't have any ability. Some people call total depravity total inability. We have no moral ability to do anything that's pleasing in God's sight.

To choose him, to worship him, to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. No capacity to do it. The London Baptist Confession of 1689 says in chapter six, although God created man upright and perfect and gave him a righteous law, which had been unto life, had he kept it and threatened death upon breach thereof, yet he did not long abide in this honor.

Satan using the subtle subtlety of the serpent to subdue Eve, then by seducing Adam, who without any compulsion did willingly transgress the law of their creation and the command given unto them in eating the forbidden fruit, which God was pleased, according to his wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to his own glory.

Our first parents by this sin, the confession goes on, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God. And we in them, whereby death came upon all, all becoming dead in sin. There it is.

And holy, W-H-O-L-L-Y, defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body. There, that's what we're talking about when it comes to total depravity, whole depravity. We don't mean total like you're totally as far gone as you could be, all right?

The priest, some priest, I guess, begged for their lives to Hitler, and Hitler granted them that. Hitler was nice to his dog, I think, until he killed the dog. Confession says, they being the root and by God's appointment standing in the room and said of all mankind, the guilt of sin was imputed and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity.

We're talking about our first parents, to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation, being now conceived in sin and by nature, children of wrath, the servants of sin, the subjects of death and all the other miseries, spiritual, temporal and eternal, unless the Lord Jesus set them free.

Last bit from the London Baptist Confession, from this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled and made opposite to all good and wholly, W .H., inclined to do all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions.

Amazing. I mean, it's January 1st, wasn't too long ago, and I make these resolutions and we never keep them. Why is that? Well, there's lots of reasons. We're lazy. We set too high of a standard. We're incapable of doing it.

But the unbeliever says, I'm going to promise to do better. I'm going to promise to be more religious. I promise I'm going to go to church more. I promise I'm going to love God more. But they don't have any way to do it because they're dead.

They're zombies. Ephesians 4 says they're darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart. And they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.

Now, why we have to face the fact of our depravity before we were saved is so that it magnifies. We can see the difference. We can see what was needed in order to save us. If we were just sick, maybe a little medicine, but we're going to need something more than that.

And if there's no one who seeks God and we're unwilling to come to him, John 5 and Romans 3, and those in the flesh cannot please God, Romans chapter 8, natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God for their foolishness to him and he cannot understand because they're spiritually appraised, 1 Corinthians chapter 2, we need help.

We're going to need a lot of help. We can't do what we need to do. We can't please God. We can't love God. We can't love neighbor. To quote an old Puritan, how many times do you have to spit in the master's face if you're a servant?

Hey, the rest of the time, I'm really good. I'm obedient. I do what I'm told. How many times do you have to spit in the boss's face, but you know, I'm on time. I clock in and I stay late and I don't steal pencils from work.

We are evil by nature as unbelievers and we can't do anything. We're fallen. We could be more depraved, but every area of our minds, body, soul, our person is contaminated by sin. Don't we kind of know this in society, by the way?

We have three branches of government, so they check each other because we don't trust people in power. Don't we understand that at nighttime, the last thing I do is I make sure all the doors are locked and then I turn off the lights.

We know. We know what's in the heart of a man and when we find out, it's not too good. The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

That's Genesis six. Side note, I know God wrote the Bible. I mean, men wrote the Bible, right? God breathed the spirit of God, moved them along, but nobody really wants to talk like this. You don't put this on your CV, your resume, on your LinkedIn account.

This is not what's going on. It's humbling, but it helps us to be thankful. It helps us to be reminded, but God being rich in mercy. We were rich in sins, but verse four of chapter two, God's rich in mercy.

I said earlier that we have to understand this or else many of their doctrines will be messed up. J .C. Ryle said, there are very few errors in false doctrines of which the beginning may not be traced up to unsound views about the corruption of human nature.

Wrong views of the disease will always bring with them wrong views of a remedy. Wrong views of the corruption of human nature will always carry with them wrong views of the grand antidote and cure of that corruption.

So we need a clear understanding of man's condition from God's perspective in order to understand his plan of redemption. And therefore, my premise, if J .C. Ryle's right, is that therefore my premise is right.

We're dead in sins. And kind of to make it worse, if it could be worse, we're dominated by things. We think we control our lives as unbelievers. We think we control what's going on. We think we're manifest destiny and captains of our own ship.

We call the shots. We make decisions. But we're really dominated. The word I'm going to use is we're enslaved. Remember those things that you would put your fingers in as a kid and then if you tried to pull the two fingers out at the same time, you'd be stuck?

What do we call those? Well, I looked it up. They're known as Chinese finger traps, Chinese finger puzzles, Chinese thumb cuffs, or Chinese handcuffs. And they were practical joke toys and you would have a cylinder that was just a little bit bigger than your index finger and you could put your finger into that cylinder made out of bamboo.

And if you pulled both of your fingers out at the same time to try to get them out of the trap, it would push the trap, make it smaller and you couldn't get out. So you'd have to push the trap together and then it would make it larger and then you could make openings that are bigger and free your fingers.

What does that have to do with anything? I have no idea, but the show's about over. We're following the course of the world. We're enslaved by Satan. We are dominated even by our own lust. We're going to talk about that next time, too, on No Compromise Radio.

I looked at the clock and their time is gone. So you can write me, Mike, at NoCompromiseRadio .com. Hopefully Ben and I will put some more videos together soon enough. We're glad to be on the radio show.

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God bless you. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.