1 Corinthians 4:7 says,
“For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?”
At Straits Correctional, we are working our way through (laboriously, given the primarily Arminian/Pelagian composition of the attendees) R.C. Sproul’s “Willing To Believe” study. Last Sunday night, we were discussing session four, with Augustine’s “non posse peccare’s” and the like when one young man raised his hand.
He wanted to know why – and how – all of a sudden one day the Gospel made perfect sense to him and he believed it, repented and trusted/submitted to Jesus. We had been over ground such as this before and I repeated my earlier statements which included the sovereign gift of faith that God gives (Eph. 2) and God opening his heart (Acts 16:14) so that he could believe just like Lydia did.
He didn’t like that.
He launched into an explanation of where he was before he believed. He talked about believing “in God” since he was four years old and also how he was a thief as long as he could remember. Then he said he had been hearing the Gospel and had always blown it off but then one day he believed.
We had already been over 1 Cor. 2:14, Philippians 2:1-4, and especially Romans 8:7-8 – the guys really have a hard time understanding the reason that pagans DON’T believe is because they CAN’T believe. The guys will say they agree with the passages above but when it comes down to the end of the day, they really don’t, in practice. They just can’t believe in Total Depravity because it is so antithetical to everything they have been taught (and continue to be taught outside of our class). Was it Spurgeon who said everyone is an Arminian by birth or by nature? Memory fails me now.
This young man could not grab hold of the fact that the faith he has now is something he did not have before and that it was a gift, given sovereignly, out of the eternal love of God. He couldn’t believe that Romans 8:7-8 applied to him in his pre-Christian life – that he was “dead in his sins and trespasses” and he was a “child of wrath” before his eyes were opened and he had ears to hear. Luke 24:31 (“And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.’) , Luke 24:45 (“Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures,…) and Acts 16:14 (“The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul.”) were for someone else, not him.
The church has done such a good job of convincing everyone – every single person on planet Earth- that their spiritual eyes are open and they have spiritual ears to hear by dint of their having a pulse – that trying to communicate a Reformed concept of man’s ongoing fallen nature gets you blank stares, vehement objections or like this young man, something inside of him that wants to believe he had something to with his believing outside an act of a sovereign, loving God.
These issues, again, ultimately go back to a lack of proper understanding as to the Fall. People don’t like to hear just how bad things are as a resultof what happened in the garden. Without a proper understanding, though, we end up like this young man – we think we are the ones responsible for exercising the “measure of faith” that God has supposedly given everyone (a misinterpretation of Romans 12:3 – they never think about 2 Thess. 3:2 when contemplating the Romans verse).
The clip below from The White Horse Inn concerning man’s basic “goodness” sums up the issue:
Far too many will affirm the verses referencing man’s state – “dead in sins and trespasses,” “child of wrath,” etc. as true, but will only in practice affirm that truth in the past tense. They don’t believe that anyone is in that state today – they believe that deep down, people are “basically good.” No, they’re not. Because they’re not, we need a loving, living God to intervene to rescue us from our burial plot in the spiritual cemetery. Praise God He does just that.
