Dear friends,
We come back today to the subject of men and women, though this time not from Genesis, but looking at how the New Testament looks at this topic.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Welcome again to Two Ways News.
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We're looking at the Genesis themes in the New Testament, and one of the big themes is sin. We are going to look at the universality, the depth and the origin of sin as the New Testament teaches it in the light of Genesis 3.
Peter Jensen: We're all experts in sin. Christians use the word 'sin', because that's how it's translated in our English Bibles. But the word is now used very rarely in the world around us. To go deeper, what do contemporaries think of human nature, and are they realistic?
Phillip: Without sin, I think it's very unrealistic, because sin is one of those universals that you can check on. You can do empirical studies on sin to find out its universality. However, there are several non-Christian alternatives that we have in the West, from the atheists and from the moralists. The atheist is basically committed to saying there is no such thing as sin, because there's no God; therefore, there's no one to sin against. I remember going to a philosophy lecture years ago, where the philosopher brought great joy to the lecture theatre. He said, ‘I can remove sin from the world. This is very simple: get rid of God. No God, no sin.’ It brought great cheers and applause. But he's right; logically, if there is no God, there's no transcendent morality; there can only be what there is, which is neither right nor wrong. The impact of social sciences has no category for sin in human nature. In fact, they don't even have human nature. There's a great decrying of any universal that you want to say about humanity.
Peter: Phillip, as well as the atheists, you've mentioned moralists. What do you mean by moralists?
Phillip: There are people who seem to be professional moralists, who make their living by condemning others or commending a cause to which they've espoused. There are many causes that people want to espouse today, and they do so in terms of morality: in terms of what ought to be. But without God, and without God's law, there's a big problem for the moralist. On what basis do you say that I should do anything? Who are you to tell me what to do or not to do? What law code is there? To be a criminal means you break the law, but the law is whatever the Parliament decides. But some things parliaments in the world have decided are what we would think are immoral. Yet you're a criminal if you've broken the law of the land. Where does the law of the land get its morality from if there is no morality? But our community is highly moralistic in its judgements on others.
Peter: They’re often shaped by a great cause of some sort which they've embraced to fill the longing in their own hearts that they should have a transcendent cause to support. Integral to that, it seems, is a kind of unspoken trust in human nature. The idea is that human beings are basically good, and if only we could educate them or pass a law, then somehow human nature would be changed, and the better side of their nature would come out in their behaviour.
Phillip: Take it back to Genesis, and you realise that we have a sense of morality because we're not animals. We're made in the image of God, which is why we think we have a responsibility which lies at the heart of us. So it is human nature to have morality. But the other side is absolutely right.
Peter: Cheating in exams was regarded as something that only a few people did and was abhorrent. Now with the advent of AI, it has become so prevalent that the university system itself is being shaken.
Phillip: AI has been accepted by some of the universities as being all right to use because they can't stop it. It's beyond their capacity to stop it, so they're now working out new ways to use it, which is not altogether wrong. But we're now training graduates how to better use AI. A consequence of this is that they may even have to go back to written exams to stop cheating.
Peter: The only part of Christianity to be demonstrated uncontrovertibly, in my opinion, is universal sin.
Phillip: Romans 3:22-23 says, “For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” That's the shortcut answer from within the Bible. We all sin. I've never met somebody who disagrees with that, though the atheist should, because he doesn't believe in sin.
Peter: I bet that philosophy lecturer would have objected if one of the students had cheated in their exam.
Phillip: Of course. But we still haven't really defined sin yet. How do you understand it?
Peter: Working from the Bible, it’s a transgression, a breaking of the law of God, a falling short of the law of God. I'll never forget talking to someone once who was not yet a Christian, and he asked me about this, and I said, ‘The law of God, in summary, is you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and your neighbour as yourself.’ He was crestfallen by this, for he could not fulfil the law of God, even though he knew it was correct. The Jewish people had the law of God given to them at Mount Sinai and elsewhere, but the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 2:14-16
For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.
Phillip: The Gentiles are the non-Jews. They haven't got the Ten Commandments, but you’re saying it's written on their hearts. Do you take that to mean that all humans have a sense of God's right and wrong?
Peter: I think so. I remember travelling with a mother and two of her children; one was two years old, the other about four. She had an ice cream which she gave to the four-year-old, and the two-year-old called out, ‘That's not fair!’ So a two-year-old knew the language of justice; spontaneously, of course, egged on by the fact that it was to do with him. Phillip, are two-year-olds sinful?
Phillip: That one certainly sounds so, because even if they didn't have a sense of justice, they had a sense of self-centredness. It was, ‘That's not fair’, also known as, ‘I'm not getting my way.’
Peter: With an appeal to a law, namely the law of justice.
Phillip: Let’s go back to your definition of sin. When you talk about transgressing the law, that's, to me, a transgression rather than the whole of sin itself. But when you put as the law, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself’, then it's not so much transgressing as failing to fulfil the law. Your friend was right in being crestfallen, as you can never fulfil the command to ‘love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind’, but that's because sin is something more than just breaking the law. Sin is replacing the lawmaker.
It’s like the Sovereign Citizen movement in America, where they say, ‘The law doesn't apply to me; I am sovereign; I don't accept the law of the land; I don't accept the sovereignty of the government over me; I am in charge of me.’ It's not just that we're lawbreakers; it's that we are outlaws. We can be moralists as outlaws; that is, we can be lawmakers, deciding what is good or bad because we've eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But a lawmaker is an outlaw because they've rejected God.
That's why I like you picking the two great commandments, because it turns to the disease of sin as opposed to the symptom of sin. Because of our rebellion against God, our disease, we then break God's laws; they are the symptoms of the disease. This spiritual disease we have is much more deep and profound than just breaking rules.
Peter: Yes, and this is integral to the biblical view of human nature and demonstrably to reality that, as the Bible says, we are born to sin. The sins we do, which may be sins of speech, thought, action, or inaction, come from within. In the Ten Commandments it says, ‘You shall not kill, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not bear false witness,’ but then it goes, ‘You shall not covet.’ The Tenth Commandment is very interesting, because covetousness is an evil desire that comes from the heart. The New Testament talks of the evil desire out of which comes sin. This stuns us because a desire is not something you can easily control. You can’t say, ‘I'm going to have a desire today.’ Not all desires are evil, of course, but there are some that are. In Mark 7 the Lord Jesus details a number of sins, but he does mention that they come from the heart and that they are the fruit of this evil desire of ours.
Phillip: Jesus tells it in Mark 7:15
There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.
The disciples didn't understand what Jesus was saying, and so he actually explained it to them in verses 20-23
What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.
It's seeing this sin disease that gives rise to so many different symptoms.
Peter: Yes, and it's a form of self-enslavement. In Romans 7:14-19, the apostle Paul says
For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
I believe he's held a mirror before us at that point. You have to be blind to yourself if you don't say that that's the truth.
Phillip: Most people reflect that tension within themselves at some time. ‘The very things I didn't want to do, I have done, and the things that I really should do, I haven't.’ You say we have to be blind to ourselves to not see it. We also can feel it. That knowledge of how thoroughly sin has infected and influenced me, that I wind up doing what I don't want to do. I can't blame Satan at that point, for I chose to do it. But we're not totally bad.
Peter: No. The earlier, particularly reformed theologians spoke about ‘total depravity’. I agree with that, to a certain extent. Phillip, please explain what is meant by ‘total depravity’.
Phillip: The belief is that even the good that I do is influenced by the sinfulness with which I do it. Consequently, there’s no part of me that is totally unaffected by my sinfulness. In Matthew 7:9-10, Jesus says
Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?
But Jesus can also say in that same passage, in verse 11
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
Notice Jesus' assumption is that we're all evil. Evil people can do good things, but the good things we do don’t change the evil heart that we have. And sometimes that motivation is so strongly self-centred.
Peter: My friend Terry Dean used an illustration in which he said, “We produce beautiful cakes, but we've done it with dirty hands.” So the things we touch, even the best things, are shot through with things that are not good. That’s total depravity. That’s us.
Phillip: Our motivation can be a big factor. Do you remember when we used to live next door to a three-storey building where there were two old ladies on the top floor? When they came back from holidays, we carried their cases up for them. I think anybody on the second floor would have said, ‘Those Jensen boys are lovely boys. Look at the way they carry the cases for the old ladies.’ The people down on the bottom floor would have said that Mrs Jensen's a good mother, the way she directs those boys to carry the cases. The people on the top floor would have said, ‘One of those boys is really good because he doesn't take money from the old ladies.’ It's a good thing we did, but our motivations were mixed. We won't say who was more mixed than the other, but here sin affects everything. Even our good things can be affected by sin.
Peter: In Adam, we are made sinners.
Phillip: Romans 5:19 says, “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners.”
Peter: Yet we are still responsible.
Phillip: Yes, that's because the one man's disobedience spread to all, as that one man was us. We were all there in the garden. It's not as if he did one thing that has nothing to do with me; he did one thing that is my life. You can see it in lots of illustrations. For instance, our great-grandfather – or perhaps our great-great-grandfather – to avoid being conscripted into Bismarck's army, fled from Denmark and came to Australia. We didn't choose to live in Australia. We didn't choose to have the name Jensen. But we have inherited from it that man's decisions; that man's life was our life because we were there in him, so to speak. Genetically, we were there in him. His decisions become our lives.
Similarly, we were all in Adam, like Levi was in Abraham, offering up tithes to Melchizedek, if you want to find another parallel in Hebrews 7:9. It's this sense that I am an individual and individually responsible, but those who come from me suffer the consequences of my decisions and participate in those decisions. So in Adam, we were made sinners.
Peter: Phillip, thank you very much. You have managed to end this podcast on a hopeless note. It's depressing, and it's because you were saying that we've fallen into a pit, and we cannot get ourselves out of it. Not even by the ladder of doing good things, because even the good things we do are not thoroughly good, or they're only a partial amount of the good we need to do. Where does that get us?
Phillip: That's why the Bible says in Ephesians 2, ‘We are dead in our sins and trespasses,’ and dead men can't make themselves alive again. That's exactly right. But Ephesians 2 is the wonderful passage that has a magnificent turnaround in that word ‘but’. For Ephesians 2:3-6 says
We all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
There's no way we could save ourselves but through God. God could do that and more; God did that because he makes us alive together with Christ. That's why salvation is of grace, of generosity, of kindness. You see the grace of God in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, giving to dead people new life. One man's sin made us sinners, but the one man's obedience – the Lord Jesus Christ’s obedience – to his father, even unto death, will make us righteous.
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this sermon given at City Night Church on Romans 7 entitled “Wretched Man.”
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