Selected Reading, June 20, 2020

Besides what I’ve posted here this week—Jesus Died, the tenth truth in the 16 truths series, and Total Depravity, the latest edited and updated theological term—I recommend these.

Bible Study

Knowing the Bible: Hebrews
Here’s a twelve week study on the book of Hebrews by Matt Capps. The Bible study I host in my home/back yard has been working through Hebrews since January of 2019. But then we only meet once a month because we all spend a lot of time studying (20 hours or so for me) in between our face-to-face (zoom or in person) meetings. If you want something that goes faster than that, this looks good.

Gospel

Propitiation
Another Simply Put podcast. I’m linking this one because it fits so well with the 16 Truths post I posted this week.

Prayer

In this house of prayer
An old post from Steve Hays who passed away a couple of weeks ago. It’s fiction, but is likely based on Steve’s own practice of prayer. 

Theological Term of the Week: Total Depravity

total depravity
The inherent corruption of humankind which “extends to every part of our nature, to all the faculties and powers of both soul and body; and that there is no spiritual good, that is, good in relation to God, in the sinner at all, but only perversion.”1

• In scripture:

  [B]oth Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written: 

  “None is righteous, no, not one;
  no one understands; no one seeks for God.
  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
  no one does good, not even one.” (Romans 3:9-12 ESV)
  

  And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body  and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Ephesians 2:1-3 ESV)

• From the Second Helvetic Confession, Chapters 8 & 9:

  Sin. By sin we understand that innate corruption of man which has been derived or propagated in us all from our first parents, by which we, immersed in perverse desires and averse to all good are inclined to all evil. Full of all wickedness, distrust, contempt and hatred of God, we are unable to do or even to think anything good of ourselves.

  What Man Was After the Fall. Then we are to consider what man was after the fall. To be sure, his reason was not taken from him, nor was he deprived of will, and he was not entirely changed into a stone or a tree. But they were so altered and weakened that they no longer can do what they could before the fall. For the understanding is darkened, and the will which was free has become an enslaved will. Now it serves sin, not unwillingly but willingly. And indeed, it is called a will, not an unwill(ing).

• From Concise Theology by J. I. Packer:

  The phrase total depravity is commonly used to make explicit the implications of original sin. It signifies a corruption of our moral and spiritual nature that is total not in degree (for no one is as bad as he or she might be) but in extent. It declares that no part of us is untouched by sin, and therefore no action of ours is as good as it should be, and consequently nothing in us or about us ever appears meritorious in God’s eyes. We cannot earn God’s favor, no matter what we do; unless grace saves us, we are lost.

  Total depravity entails total inability, that is, the state of not having it in oneself to respond to God and his Word in a sincere and wholehearted way (John 6:44; Rom. 8:7-8). Paul calls this unresponsiveness of the fallen heart a state of death (Eph. 2:1, 5; Col. 2:13), and the Westminster Confession says: “Man by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation; so as a natural man, being altogether averse from that good, and dead in sin, is not able by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself thereunto”

• From Living for God’s Glory by Joel Beeke:

  [T]otal depravity means that sin is tragically inclusive, i.e., it dreadfully impacts every part of us. There is something terribly wrong not only with who we are inwardly, but with every aspect of our being. No element of our personality is less affected by sin than any other. Our intellects, our consciences, our emotions, our ambitions, our wills, which are the citadels of our souls, are all enslaved to sin by nature…. 

  Total depravity means that when God scrutinizes the human heart, affections, conscience, will, or any part of the body, He finds every part damaged and polluted by sin. Apart from saving grace, every part is alienated from God and actively pursuing sin. If the Spirit teaches us this experientially, we will understand Jonathan Edwards’ confession: “When I look into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness, it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell.”

Learn more:

1. Got Questions: Total Depravity - is it biblical?
2. Simply Put: Total Depravity
3. Loraine Boettner: Total Depravity
4. Bob Burridge: You Are Worse Than You Think
5. R.C. Sproul : Human Depravity
6. Brian Schwertley: Man’s Need of Salvation: Total Depravity and Man’s Inability

Related terms: 

• fall (of man)
• image of God
• inability
• noetic effects of sin
• original sin

Filed under Anthropology

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Do you have a a theological term you’d like to see featured as a Theological Term of the Week? Email your suggestion using the contact button in the navigation bar above. 

Clicking on the Theological Terms button will take you to an alphabetical list of all the theological terms.

16 Truths You Should Know: Jesus Died

Have you noticed that the truths in this series of truths you should know are telling a story? It’s the ultimate story, the true story of God and his work in the history of his creation. As with most stories, this true story has conflict. It has a problem to be solved—a big problem with no easy solution. 

The Problem of Sin

You may remember the problem, because we discussed it in a previous post. It all started in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and everything changed. Sin entered creation and history, and now nothing is quite right in the world.

Humankind is corrupted by sin, and each one of us is alienated from God because of it. We are born “hostile to God” (Romans 8:7; see also Colossians 1:21). By nature, we are estranged from our creator. And he is alienated from us, too. God, in his holy righteousness, hate sin and must separate himself from it. And separating from sin entails separating from us, because sin corrupts every part of our being.

In this post, we’re focusing on the solution to God’s side of this two-way alienation. (We’ll deal with the fix for human hostility toward God later.) God’s perfectly holy, righteous and just response to sin is, to use the terminology of scripture, the outpouring of his wrath. God’s just nature requires that he give us our due, and what our sin has earned us is a death sentence (Romans 6:23). We all stand condemned to death, awaiting the execution of the judgment against us.

And there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t fix this problem. 

The Riddle of Forgiveness

Thankfully the story doesn’t end here (although had God chosen to simply leave all sinners to face his wrath, he could have). Instead of executing justice against all humanity, God made a plan to save people from condemnation. He designed a way to forgive their sins and reconcile with them.

Forgiving sinners required a plan of action because God can’t simply ignore sin. He is the perfect judge of the universe and he assures us that he “will not acquit the wicked” (Exodus 23:7). He will, he says, “by no means clear the guilty” (Exodus 34:7), which is exactly what we ought to expect from a judge who always does what’s right.

And there’s the rub. If God never acquits sinners, how can he forgive them? How can he show them mercy, but also leave none of their sins unpunished? Mark Dever calls this “the riddle of the Old Testament,”1 but we could also call it the riddle of forgiveness.

God’s plan of salvation answers this riddle. Because of the work of Jesus, God can forgive human sin in a way that preserves his justice. As the eternal Son fulfills his mission, he provides a way for God to show mercy to justly condemned sinners without any sin going unpunished. 

Jesus Brings Peace

Christians call the work Jesus did to provide a way for God to save sinners atonement. The New Testament presents what Jesus accomplished when he died on the cross for sinners in several ways: It was sacrifice, redemption, reconciliation, and more. These word pictures are different ways to see this one complex work of God. Here, I’ve chosen to look through the lens of reconciliation, but at the end of this post I’ve listed a few resources that explain these other ways to view the atoning work of Jesus.

In Jesus’s work of reconciliation, God took the initiative to make peace with sinners. Because of human sin, God and humankind are, in a sense, at war with each other. God sent his Son to make “peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:20).

The death of Jesus on the cross shields sinners from God’s righteous response to their unrighteousness. Jesus turned away, or propitiated, God’s wrath toward sin, and reconciled God to sinners.

 

The Heart of the Gospel

The death of Jesus propitiates God’s wrath because it is a penal substitution. In his death, Jesus represented his people, and endured their death penalty. On the cross, God counted human sins to the sinless Jesus, and he bore the just punishment for them. He stood in our place and bore God’s wrath on our behalf. The term penal substitution comes from these truths: Jesus substituted for sinners and endured their penalty or punishment.

That Jesus endured the wrath of God against our sin on our behalf is the reason we can be pardoned. Our death sentence was not merely waved away, but it was carried out when Jesus died in our place. Propitiation through penal substitution makes it right for God to forgive sinners. It solves the problem of sin and answers the riddle of forgiveness. 

There is much more that could be said about Jesus’s saving death, but then this is just a blog post. His death is the centerpiece of God’s plan for his creation, the heart of the gospel, the sinner’s only hope, and the subject of the song of the redeemed throughout eternity:

And they sang a new song, saying, 

“Worthy are you …
for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation … .  (Revelation 5:9)

Worthy is he, for he died in our place to remove the barrier to our forgiveness! 

Suggested resources for further learning:

• Simply Put Podcast: Propitiation
• The Atonement: Its Meaning and Significance by Leon Morris,
• The Cross of Christ by John Stott 
• Theological Terms reconciliation, redemption, sacrifice

1 The Message of the Old Testament by Mark Dever, page 104.

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Previous posts in this series:

1. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Has Spoken
2. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Is One and God Is Three
3. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Is Who He Is
4. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Has a Plan
5. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Created the Universe
6. 16 Truths You Should Know: We Are Made in God’s Image
7. 16 Truths You Should Know: We Are All Sinners 
8. 16 Truths You Should Know: God Saves
9. 16 Truths You Should Know: The Son Came