Total Depravity | The Whole Counsel

Before we get started this week, we wanted to let you know that we had some trouble with our audio equipment, and so we apologize for the subpar sound quality.

But I've been promised that next week will be all right. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Jon Snider, and I'm with Chuck Baggett, who became a grandfather again this week.

So that was pretty exciting. Yeah, third time. We're going to be talking again about a sermon from this book called

Salvation in Full Color, put together by Richard Owen Roberts. It's a collection of 20 sermons by Great Awakening ministers in the colonies.

And it covers the theme of salvation, and it covers it in a very specific way.

The sermons are laid out in a way that the men that preach these sermons would agree with this order.

And we might think that order isn't as essential in these, as long as you get the truths in the sermons right.

But really, one of the great benefits of this book is that it shows us just how beneficial order is.

We're going to be looking at the theme of total depravity this week by a preacher named

Gilbert Tennant. Gilbert Tennant was a pastor in the early 1700s, came with his family from Ireland to the

Northeast and part of what was not yet the United States. And he's 14 years old, was converted somewhere around that time.

And his father, a minister? Yeah. That's right.

Yeah. A whole family were preachers. His father was a minister. His brothers were ministers. And his father operated, which you might know about, the famous Logg College.

It was instrumental in training a lot of young men before there were really colleges instituted in the

United States, especially for that purpose. So his early training was there in the Logg College.

And a few years later, he helped his father in training some of those men that came after him. He became acquainted with George Whitefield through that Logg College, I guess.

Not that he was George Whitefield then. George Whitefield was not trained there, but he became acquainted with him there.

And accompanied Whitefield on some of his preaching tours. He was evidently a fiery preacher.

And some of the other ministers didn't always feel like he exhibited as much grace toward them as he could have, as he called out what he saw of sin within the ministerial ranks.

But he was used to God. And revival broke out under his ministry in one of the

New Jersey churches that he pastored. Thomas Prince, one of his contemporaries, described his preaching, and I want to give a little quote here, as both terrible and searching.

It was for matter justly terrible, as he, according to the inspired oracles, exhibited the dreadful holiness, justice, law -threatenings, truth, power, and majesty of God.

And his anger was rebellious, impenitent, and Christless sinners. The awful danger they were in every moment of being struck down to hell, and damned forever, with the amazing miseries of the place of torment.

By his arousing and spiritual preaching, deep and pungent convictions were wrought in the minds of many hundreds of persons in that town.

And the same effect was produced in several scores in the neighboring congregations. Another pastor during that time spoke of talking to more people in the week following Gilbert Tennant's preaching than he had in the previous 20 -plus years of his ministry.

Yeah, one of the remarkable things about the Tennant family was that they were known for going into a town and preaching only on the themes that they felt would plow the earth of the hearer's souls.

And so things like the character of God, and the law of God, and the sinfulness of sin, the coming judgment.

And they would do that for a number of weeks in a row, and every day, preaching every day. And when the town, when they said that when the town could talk of nothing but the dreadfulness and the holiness of God, then they would leave, and they'd go to another town.

They would come back sometime later, a few weeks later, and they would preach nothing but the good news of Christ.

And that whole approach really, very interesting to us today. But it really was used by the

Lord to prepare the hearts for the gospel. So while we're talking about the theme of total depravity today, and while they were really, you know, sons of thunder, that's not all they were.

They did preach the gospel in a really sweet way once the people were prepared. One of the things that, about this whole idea of total depravity, while there are some wrong ideas about it, and we're going to be hopefully talking about the right ideas about in a moment, but it is really a significant doctrine.

And it's one that you might think you could skip over. You could say, well, we know we're sinners, so let's just go on to the work of Christ.

But to really get a right understanding of what the Bible means when it says that we're sinful, and what is the nature of sin?

What's the extent of sin? Those things, to really to know them, to see them as God sees them, to feel them as God would have us to feel them, it is such a significant benefit to our souls.

And I want to give one example before we jump into the sermon. Jonathan Edwards. Edwards grew up in a healthy church with good preaching.

Obviously, it was a Reformed type of a church. But Edwards, as a teenager, said that while he believed that God was sovereign, and he had a right to elect or to predestine, he also felt that that was a cruel doctrine, that God had the right to do it, and God did it.

He could see those both in Scripture, but he could not see that there was anything kind about that until he said

God showed him the sinfulness of his own sinful heart. And when he felt the depths of that stain, he realized that the electing, you know, sovereign love of God would be the only hope a man like him would ever have.

So for him, the heinousness of sin, the seriousness of sin, the depravity of the heart, these were realities that led him to understand the rest of the gospel in its right light.

I think you also see in this subject the importance of the order we were talking about earlier, you were talking about earlier, of beginning with the character of God and then looking at the law of God, as we did last week, how those are things that inform our understanding of total depravity.

If we don't see that correctly, how in the world would we feel the weight of depravity where you agree with what someone like Tennant says about these truths, some of which are kind of shocking if you have not considered them before?

Yeah, yeah, certainly. The passage that Tennant preaches from is Ezekiel 33 11, turn ye from your evil ways.

And as he lays out this sermon, he gives a couple of introductory remarks. First, the author of this entreaty, we'll talk more about that in a moment.

Then the object of this entreaty, the fact that he is writing to unregenerate people, and that that includes everyone at one point or another.

So this is spoken to everyone. And then the matter itself. And from there, he launches into the actual issue of depravity and lays it out.

And there are five basic headings, and there are some applications at the end, but the five headings, the unconverted are destitute of all spiritual good.

The unconverted are ignorant of all spiritual good. The unconverted are utterly impotent or unable to do any natural good.

The unconverted are not only destitute of good, ignorant of it and impotent, but they have affixed implacable spite against it and its author.

And then fifth, the unconverted are prone to all evil, the seed and root of which is in them.

So those five things we'll primarily be looking at during this podcast. I really like the way that he opens.

He gives us the author of the entreaty. Who is it that commands humanity to turn?

And I think that this is very encouraging because you might get the wrong idea of a kind of a dreadful passage like this, that it's all gloom and doom, but actually it's exactly the opposite.

It's God crying out to a people that live in a hopeless darkness, calling them out of the darkness to turn away from the edge, from the precipice of self -destruction and to find hope in him through Christ.

And he describes the author of the entreaty of God. He says, If we don't keep that reality in mind, then the five things that we're going to talk about, they might seem to us, it's like an angry judge who's just hollering down on us.

Different reasons that there's no hope for people like us. Instead of God crying out to us and giving us different reasons, there's no hope in us, but there is great hope in him.

So before we talk about those five things that this depravity entails, let's talk about a few things first that it does not entail.

So when we say that a person is totally depraved, some people probably object because they look at themselves and think, well,

I'm not as bad as someone else, there's all these kinds of sins that I don't do.

But when we talk about the doctrine of total depravity, we're not saying that a person is as sinful as they could be.

It's not the degree of sin, but it is that we're completely polluted.

There's a strain that has affected every part of us. So that everything we do, our thoughts, imaginations of our heart, evil continually, everything we do is tainted by sin.

Yeah, you remember that Christ said, it's not what we put in our bodies that makes us sinful, it's what comes from our heart.

And Jeremiah does say, you know what you've mentioned, that the heart is deceitful, it's wicked, it's above our understanding.

Now, if that's the case, regardless of what we're doing outwardly, apart from the wonderful work of Christ to change us, to give us a new nature, to give us new motives, new abilities, alive in him.

Until he does that, total depravity means that even when we look like we're doing very good things, that hidden under the cloak of good deeds is that stream of pollutant, that me -centeredness that really spoils everything.

So looking then at the five areas that the tenant brings out, the first one is that sin has removed all innate good from us.

You think of Paul's statement in Romans 7, 18, that my flesh dwells in no good thing. Yeah, so when

Paul says that, it doesn't mean that people can't do nice things. It doesn't mean that there aren't some activities that we see in the worst of sinners that are kind and thoughtful.

But that when in light of God's measurement of what's good, perfect good, acceptable to God kind of good, there is nothing good in us.

Paul describes it as being spiritually dead in Ephesians chapter 2. That is not that we're sick and we're kind of weak like a person with the flu, but we're actually unresponsive to God ultimately.

We are not the kind of people that understand, Paul says. We don't understand God. We're not the kind of people that seek for God, and we're not the kind of people that obey

God. So all innate good, the good that was in Adam, has been lost with the entrance of sin.

Second thing he says is sin has made us ignorant of what is true spiritual righteousness.

That is, we could say sin has blinded us. We are blind or ignorant of true spiritual good in a couple of ways.

One is we're blind to the beauty of Christ. We don't see him as he is, and what we do see, we detest.

We don't appreciate him at all, but we're also blind to the true nature of sin.

We don't see it as it is. We don't feel the danger that it poses. It just doesn't seem that bad to us.

I can't remember who gave the illustration, but I remember reading about a blind man.

It was referring to this kind of scenario. So here's a person who's blind, running around in the street in the midday heat.

The sun's beating down on them, and they're going around saying there is no sun. Never mind that they feel the heat, and they're sweating.

They don't see it, and so they say it doesn't exist. It's our natural bent to be that way towards the heinousness of sin, but also the sweetness of Christ.

Paul writes in Ephesians 4, verses 18 and 19, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their hearts, and they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.

Yeah, you know, we think of the sorrow we would feel if someone told us, you know, so you've just had another grandchild born, but what if the next thing we heard is, but Chuck's grandson was born blind, and we would immediately think of the loss.

He'll never have these things, you know, that we take for granted. He'll never see the things we've seen, and when he hears these things, he won't understand, and you know, we think of all the sadness that would go along with being physically blind, but can we imagine how heinous sin is, how bad it is, that it brings into the soul a blindness that will last apart from a spiritual surgery forever, and it's not that we won't see colors and beautiful scenes, and when people talk around us, we wouldn't be able to understand it.

It's not that it'll affect the way we live, so we're handicapped. It's that we will forever and ever be blind to the beauty of God, and we will never have been able to walk with him.

So sin is a thing that total depravity means that we're spiritually blind.

Another thing is that it makes us utterly powerless and unwilling to do good apart from the work of God in us.

So we could say simply like this, sin has made us the kind of men that will not obey

God to the point that we cannot obey God. You think of Romans chapter 8, where Paul talks about the natural man, okay, a man without that wonderful new birth, he sees the law of God, he cannot get it.

What's the big deal? Why do you want to obey this God? I can't see him or feel him, and Paul says that that ingrained opposition to God's law is so great that he cannot obey.

So we could say that sin has made us incapable, but it's also made us unwilling, which

I think is even sadder that seeing the things God says about himself in scripture, and the kind commands we have to come and find life, we are so entrenched in our sin, we are so in love with this interior jail cell that we're in, we will not respond apart from his invading work.

It's an important distinction too, because if it's just an inability, then we might cry out, there's an excuse, you know,

I would, but I can't. But the sad truth is, well you can't, but you also won't, you will not.

Yeah, now there is an abuse of this, and you've kind of hit on that. We often find in the church setting, dealing especially with like young people that have grown up under this teaching, they'll say, well

I want to be a Christian, I really want to be a Christian, but I just can't seem to be able to, so God must not want me to be, or maybe

I'm not one of the elect, you know, one of these things. So the abuse is rooted in this, that the idea is that because my nature is sinful, and not just my behavior, that somehow that lessens my guilt, and my responsibility.

I remember reading Robert Murray McShane from the 1800s on this, and he found this in his church, you know, in Church of Scotland in Dundee, and what he said to the young people that brought up this excuse was, that your depravity, the depravity in your nature, does not make your activities less sinful.

Like, well I'm just born this way, so I'm not as guilty. He said what it does is, it shows you how desperate your condition is.

It's not just what you're doing is wrong, it's what you are is wrong, and the reason the

Bible points this out, is because until God shows us the truth about our nature, we will all harbor the fictional hope that tomorrow morning, if I try really hard,

I could become a better person, you know, because you can kind of scrub up the outside, but once we see that it's our very heart, it's our nature, we realize deep down,

I can't change that, and hopefully that leads us then to go to the one being that can.

It's also a very passive view, the wrong view, you know, this is a very passive view, that this is kind of where I am, so there's nothing

I can do, just sitting back, and it's not anything I'm doing so much as it is who I am, and it's true, it is who you are, but it's also what you're doing, and you are actively doing this, you know, you're actively adding sin to sin.

Someone wrote and said that we're storing up treasure, and the treasure is all as sin, this treasure is all fuel for our eventual punishment, hell, but we treasure, we prize it right now, but it's just more sin to be added to our future judgment.

One objection that might be raised with this statement that depravity removes from us the willingness and ability to do good.

One objection might be that, well, what about all the religious people around the world? Are we saying that what they do is not good?

And the very frightening thing that he points out in this book, and such that you can see why he was quite an effective preacher, is that he said to religious people that your best religion, basically, has earned you hell, because it's been all about you.

I mean, you think about it, it's one thing for a person to indulge greed, and anger, and bitterness, and unforgiving spirit, and lust, and whatever else, but it's another thing to come to Christianity, and to take all the trappings of Christianity, and instead of it being all about him, you actually twist and bend it, so it's all about you.

And you think that God is a little pleased, because you've done a little bit of religion, but really, he points out here, it's worse.

Listen to what he says, it's quite a shocking statement. He says, "...you deserve damnation for the very best thing you ever did in your whole life.

There is a dreadful blasphemy in all that you do, for you do nothing for God's sake, but only for your own.

Thus you make for yourself, sorry, thus you make yourself your last end and chief good."

That's the old way of saying the ultimate goal, and of consequence, you become your own

God. Horrible blasphemy, and yet upon these filthy and blasphemous works, you venture your eternal all.

How shocking, you say. Please do not be offended. I speak nothing but the very truth in love, with the design to drive you from a foundation that will infallibly ruin you, if you abide by it, and to shut you up to Christ, who is the only door of hope.

I think we see a good example of that, too, in the New Testament, with the Pharisees, who were very religious, and yet plenty of dead works.

Yeah, and you think about the Pharisee, he looked like he loved God. Why? Because he was so devout, or so devoted to religion.

But he looks like he's devoted to religion, because he talks and acts like he loves God's law.

But when we read the Sermon on the Mount, for example, just one example, Christ points out that the Pharisees did not love

God. They did not love God's law, and the evidence was they kept adjusting the law to fit them.

So God, you know, when he talks about, for instance, adultery, he's really talking about heart issues, not just externals, and they limit it to the external.

So they take God's law, and they adjust it so it fits their lifestyle. So do they really love the

Lord, or have they, in fact, made God a useful servant for them, and they're the center of religion?

So the fourth point, the unconverted are not only destitute of good, ignorant of it, and impotent, which are our first three points, but they have a fixed, implacable spite against it and its author.

Romans 8, 7 says the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

Paul writes to the Colossians and say that their minds are hostile toward God. There's not just a hatred or an avoidance of the law of God, but it is a hatred that's directed to the author of the law.

It's a hatred toward God himself. McShane said that if we could get

God to come down close enough, if it were possible to kill him, we would stab him in the chest. And the evidence of that, if we think, no, that's not true, the evidence of that is that when

Christ came to earth, what did we do? Christ came, and he did good. He went around doing good.

He did not go around unnecessarily offending people or hurting people. He did good, but he also pointed out sin, and the people looked for ways to destroy him, and at the appropriate time, they did kill him.

Yeah, the old writers used to call sin, they used to call it the murder of God.

It was an attempt to do away with God. Every sin is a desire deep down that I wish

God wasn't there, or at least I wish he wasn't the way that he describes himself in scripture. One reason why we probably don't notice how opposed we are to the

God of the Bible is that we have a God of our imagination oftentimes. So we think, no, no,

I am not at all, okay, I'm not as good as I should be, and I know I fail, but I'm not at all anti -God.

I'm really kind of, I'm glad God's there, but what you're glad of is the God that you invented in your mind is there.

But when you read the scriptures, and someone really presses that on your conscience, it's quite offensive. And then you hear the comment, that's not my

God. Yeah, yeah, and it's true. That's right. We don't have the God of the Bible. Well, the last thing he mentions that sin does to our character, and of course, this is without the work of God.

This is what salvation saves us from. It saves us from ourselves. And the fifth thing he mentions is that sin has made us not only capable of every kind of evil, but prone to it.

In other words, while depravity doesn't mean that each of us will do every sin that we're capable of doing, it does mean that deep within us is the seed of a sinful nature that is capable if God did not restrain us.

So one thing I think we need to keep in mind is that we're not all convinced that the same things will make us happy.

So if I'm looking for significance through relationships, then I might be willing to sin against God in areas where he lays very clear lines of how to show love in relationships, and I ignore that.

So you take a man who, he reaches middle age, he thinks, I, my significance comes from being admired by a younger woman, so he leaves his wife and he takes up this younger woman.

Well, why would he do that? Another man looks at that and thinks, I would never want to do that. It's not that you're better than that man, necessarily.

It's that you don't think that would please you. All of us have things, apart from Christ changing our minds, all of us have things that we think,

I desperately need this to be happy, and I would be willing to do anything really to get it. It's just different for each of us.

Yeah, and for one person it might be reputation. So I would not do that because it would spoil my reputation.

If I had the opportunity to do it and keep a good reputation, I might very well do it. So those are

Tenet's five descriptions of total depravity. It helps us to see something of the breadth and depth of this terrible sin as it affects us.

He closes with three applications. The first one is, every person without exception is commanded to turn to God for hope and healing and rescue from sin.

We could say every person, it's a universal command, is commanded to turn to God to be rescued from yourself, which is a beautiful thing.

There's no limitation in this passage. It doesn't say if you go to the right kind of church, if your parents are

Christians, or even if you understand all the doctrines, but if you see yourself to be a sinner, you fit the passage.

Run to God for hope. The second is that you must turn to God with your whole heart.

You do not get to give a partial turn or lay aside the most awful as you see them of your sins while you cherish the favorite sins and hang on to them, but every one of them must be put away.

And even the most favorite, he calls it your aching, even that aching must be slain.

So there's the warning to put those aside so that God does have our hearts for the supreme love.

The third application is that we should turn to the Lord, not just all of us with whole hearts, but we should do it speedily, or as the

Puritans would say, to seek God in finding times. And throughout the sermon, he mentions the danger of delaying.

And you might think that it will be easier to come to Christ later. It'd be easier to lay your life before him later.

But he points out that the same hindrances will be there later. The same lies will be there later that cause you to hold back today.

But by your constant embracing of those lies and allowing those hindrances, they will grow stronger.

So the longer we delay, humanly speaking, the more difficult we will find it to turn away from this self -destruction and turn to Christ.

John Wesley wrote a hymn based on this same passage, and the opening line is,

Sinner, turn, why will you die? Now the whole hymn isn't perfect.

Some of Wesley's theology as he goes on isn't as good. But I picked out two verses from the hymn that are really quite striking.

So let me just read those. Sinners, turn, why will you die? God, your maker, asks you why?

God, who did your being give, made you himself that you might live? He, the fatal cause demands, asks the work of his own hands, why?

You thankless creatures, why will you cross his love and die? Sinners, turn, why will you die?

God, your Savior, asks you why? God, who did your souls retrieve, died himself that you might live?

Will you let him die in vain, crucify your Lord again? Why, you ransomed sinners, why will you slight his grace and die?

Let me give you one more. Sinners, turn, why will you die? God, the

Spirit, asks you why? He who all your lives hath strove, wooed you to embrace his love.

Will you not his grace receive? Will you still refuse to live?

Why, you long -sought sinners, why will you grieve your

God and die? Really quite a penetrating question. Why, sinners, will you grieve your