Modern Man’s Struggle with Reformed Theology
July 8, 2009
Man as Sinner vs. Man as Evolving
Natural Man and Reformed Theology.
Tonight, man as sinner versus man as evolving.
If this gives you a headache, you don’t have to come next week, okay?
I will give you a pass. You
don’t have to do this. But if this
does not give you a headache, maybe we can think it through and maybe we can
even try to do a better job of being a Christian in the world today.
Because that’s what I want you to do.
Quick review. Two parallels here: man as a Christian and man as a natural man. The Christian man believes in the Sovereignty of God, the natural man tends to believe in the sovereignty of man. The Christian believes in the authority of Scripture as an external source of truth, the natural man believes that he has rights and no one should tell him what he should or should not do, especially if the majority votes that it is okay. Hence, if the majority votes through its court systems or legislature that abortion is okay, what is all the commotion about? We voted. Heaven is what the Christian believes in. That there is an eternity out there. The natural man says that whether there is an eternity or not, all we really have is now. And so I want what “now” has to offer me. The Christian also says that not only is there Heaven out there, there is hell out there. And the natural man says, nah, not really. Everybody is responsible, I am not. Group responsibility—remember, if everyone is responsible, no one is responsible—that’s this mush over here of this modern man’s thinking versus this crispness of Christian (i.e. “Reformed” thinking)
Tonight, we are shifting gears a little bit because what we said so far in this
series, most Christian groups—might dispute a little bit—but pretty much agree.
It’s acceptable to the majority of Christians.
But tonight we are shifting gears.
I told you, I think, once upon a time, that one of our historians of the
church in the
My number one point of the struggle is the concept of human beings – mankind,
human beings, men and women, boys and girls – oh gracious, did that not sound
like John Reed Miller? Men and
women, boys and girls – I remember him saying that – that’s a side trip, I won’t
go there. I just remember hearing
him preach, “men and women, boys and girls”…well, anyway.
Man as sinner, human beings as sinners.
Now, let’s just define what we are talking about here.
I’m going to do it fairly quickly, so take your nap if you want to, but I
am going to do it fairly quickly.
Confession of Faith
Chapter 6:
Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptation of Satan sinned,
in eating the forbidden fruit. This
their sin, God was pleased in
accordance with His wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order
it according to His own glory.
By this sin, they fell from their original righteousness and communion with sin
and so became dead in sin and so became wholly defiled in all the parts and
faculties of soul and body.
They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of the sin was imputed and the
same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to all their posterity, the sin
being from them by ordinary generation.
From this original corruption whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and
made opposite to all good and holy incline to all evil, do precede all actual
transgressions.
Phrase: “utterly indisposed to
good.” Boy, I am telling you.
To most people, that is going to be like a real clanging symbol that they
don’t like to hear in their ear.
Number five…
This corruption of nature during this life doth remain in those that are
regenerated and although it be through Christ pardoned and mortified, yet both
itself and all the motions thereof are truly and properly sin.
Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law
of God and contrary there unto, doth in its own nature bring guilt upon the sin
whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God and the curse of the law and so
made subject to death with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal.
Ephesians 2:
As for you, you are dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to
live when you followed in the ways of this world.
And of the ruler of the Kingdom of the air, the Spirit who is now at work
in those who are now disobedient.
All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the craving of our
sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts, like the rest, we were by
nature, objects of wrath. But
because of His great love for us, God who is rich in mercy, made us alive with
Christ even when we were dead in our transgressions.
It is by grace you have been saved.
That’s the core of Christianity right there.
By grace, we have been saved.
We’re sinners. But by grace,
we have been saved. I have pages of
verses backing it up but I am not going to take the time to read them right now.
Reformed theology then believes in Total Depravity.
Now, I sometimes like to get the simplest definition that I can possibly
get because that’s the one that is easiest for me to get my head around.
Baker’s dictionary of theology, “total depravity,” or “depravity, total”
is the way that it is listed. What
total depravity is not: (I love the
way they lay it out here!) Total Depravity does not mean that every man has
exhibited his depravity as thoroughly as he could.
We are not as bad as we could be!
We are not all as awful as we could be.
Total depravity does not mean that sinners do not have conscience or
naïve, native induction concerning God.
Yea, we are sinners and we are totally depraved, but we can still
recognize that there is a God.
Satan knows that there is a god.
Total depravity does not mean that sinners will indulge in every form of sin.
There are some things that I wouldn’t do, I don’t care what you tell
me—whether I was a Christian or not.
All sin is not appealing to all people.
Total depravity does not mean that depraved man does not perform actions
that are good in the sight of men.
Yes, we have benevolence from pagans.
Yes, we have non-Christians who do public works and goods.
Of course we do. All total
depravity does not mean that people don’t attempt to do good to fellow man.
That doesn’t mean that it is good, by the way.
The heart determines what we do and the heart is deceitful above all
things and who could know it. But,
it looks good to us.
Okay, total depravity. Now, I’m
talking about this right wing over here; this little sliver of people over here
who believe this kind of stuff. The
bulk of people in the general cauldron of Christianity in this country would
generally fall under the heading of being Arminian.
Now, I know that this congregation is fairly well educated, so you know
about Arminius and his name and the Latin version of his name, and you know that
he was reared in a very Reformed home, but he got to the point where he
questioned the sovereign grave of God in salvation, and hence, they came up, the
Arminians, with five-points. And
the five points of Calvinism are a reaction to those five points.
These are the five points:
God elects or reproves on the basis of foreseen faith or unbelief.
God has a big DVD player and He can skip forward to the end of the movie
and see how the good guy is going to be open to the Gospel and says, “I will
elect Him.” And He skips forward
and says, “nah, I don’t elect her.”
It’s based on God’s ability to look into the future and see the heart of man.
It is not based upon the will of God.
Salvation is based upon the will of the individual and God validating
their willingness to accept Him.
Now, we could pause here and I could go off on a side trip on this one, right
now. Most Christianity in the
Now man as evolving. A whole different deal.
Man as evolving doesn’t want to use the word sin.
It’s offensive as a matter of fact, so we use another word as opposed to
sin. And we will get to more of
that in just a minute. But that
other word tends to be, “morality.”
So we want a common morality and morality tends to be what we as people agree to
and vote on and have a consensus to .
Now, if we believe that man is evolving, we have to in some way
understand that his religion is evolving to. Hence, we try to harmonize so our
84% do try to harmonize evolution and the development of religion.
Now, I’m not going to go into all of that.
I don’t claim to be an expert at evolution—that’s not my message.
Please hear me. But there
are certain things that evolutionary theory does talk about.
There are only sort of five key views, one of which is getting more and
more popular. One of which is
starting off, they use the word descent.
I think a more proper term would be “ascent” – they see us as moving up.
But lets use their term, “descent.”
In religion, there is descent with modification as a mere process of
change. We just, you know, change over time.
So that morality changes over time.
By the way, morality has changed over time.
I bet you there are some women in here with britches on.
My grandmother would not be caught dead with britches on.
I just want to tell y’all that, okay?
Of course, my wife wears britches to church, but my grandmother wouldn’t.
And she would have said it was immoral for women to wear britches to
church. But anyway, you get my
message. Okay?
There is a change of morality—it evolves.
That kind of thing.
Secondarily, using dissent with modification is a creative process.
Simple, spontaneous, life becoming more complex from a single cell to a
two cell to a fifty-cell to an organism to a functioning organism with differing
abilities, senses, etc. We’re evolving into a more complex creature.
We also evolve into a more complex creature in terms of our understanding
of God and faith, etc. Dissent with
modification with a creative process at work and the most common creative
process proposed by the evolutionists, Christian or non-Christian, and I believe
there can be Christians who believe in this—it si not the unpardonable sin.
A particular form, one of the most popular forms is the survival of the
fittest. So only the fit survive.
And so, the dog with the tail that can
swat the flies away survives and the one without a tail doesn’t.
You know? Survival of the
fittest. I have said this before
and I will probably say it again before we finish this series.
We are in a real conflict in the world today and we won’t even realize
philosophical y what we are doing.
The people who espouse evolution the strongest are the ones who are fighting the
hardest against it because the ones who espouse evolution tend to be more
socialistic in their thinking, but they are the ones who do not want the
survival of the fittest—they want survival of all.
I made that point before but I need to make it again because here it
comes – it is coming up again.
Survival of the fittest. If that
were the case, then we would believe that there would be a tiered level to
society. Those who had not
developed as highly would be lower on the totem pole and what we believe today
is that there should be no totem pole.
Interesting.
Number four, dissent with modification wit ht eh addition that there is a
spontaneity here—there is a spontaneous something here that calls life.
And then the fifth view, commonly called theistic evolution.
And this is where you believe in the evolutionary process but you believe
that there is a spontaneous something that happens because God steps in and does
something to the evolutionary process.
Theistic evolution tends to be very popular in the church today.
Now, forgive me, I don’t mean to make light of it but I am going to give
you my little four-stepper here.
Some believed that something came from something by means of something. Others
believed something came from nothing by something.
Still others believed that humans came from something by something.
And then others believe that humans came from something by God.
There is a something in all of them, though.
The question that cannot be answered by the evolutionist is, “where did
it start?” I understand there can
be change, but I don’t understand where it started.
If you take God out of the equation, where did it come from?
The something is the big catch-all, the big problem.
Well, I always have to stir psychology into all of this mess, don’t I?
Well, the psychologists have a research model here.
Again, we are looking at morality.
And we’re trying to explain human behavior that violates social norms.
Of course, Brister would call it sin.
But we are trying to explain human behavior that violates the social
norm. That violates morality, even.
How do we explain it?
Here’s a quote, “Some individuals are more likely than others to engage in
wrongdoing. For instance, those who
cheat on exams tend to be low in the ability to delay gratification, low in
interpersonal trust, and low in self-esteem.
Such people also tend to be high in sociopathic tendencies, high innate
need for approval, and high in chronic self-destructive tendencies.
Now that may sound like a bunch of garbage to you, but do you realize
what I just said? We have laid out
about six areas that if society will address those areas, we can make people
more moral. We can educated them
out of –well, what the Christian will call, “sin.”
So if we have a program in the schools to teach children to delay
gratification, they won’t get into trouble as much.
And if we have a program that helps their self-esteem, they won’t be as
likely to cheat and steal. And
furthermore if they do cheat and steal, it is our fault for not having a program
to teach them not to cheat and steal, by giving them good self-esteem.
Is that not what we are doing mainly in society today?
Oh, how do we get morality then?
Again, evolving. Again, the
Christian calls it sin but this evolving morality—will we need to train people
so that they will be more aware of, sympathetic to, and involved with the
process of change and see the greater good?
Forgive me, I may be saying something I shouldn’t say, but maybe that’s
how we expect a country dedicated to our destruction and to the destruction of
others, to sit down and REASON with us because surely they are going to
understand that the greater good comes from NOT doing this.
I’m sorry, but that reminds me of trying to educate a Kamikaze pilot
diving on a ship in WWII. I don’t
think it would work. But anyway,
side note. In terms of religious
thinking, a lot of what I’m telling you right now comes from this book right
here – I always like to “show and tell,” well, this is show and tell.
I had a client at one point in my career who was a text book salesman for
a book company and he would send me free copies of these textbooks—they give
them out to the professors in all the schools, you see.
And he would slip me some every now and again.
This is when that he gave me—a college textbook on the study of
adolescents. If you have a kid in a
college right now, if they take a course on adolescents, it may not be this
textbook, but it would be one very similar to it.
The reason I say that is because in that textbook, it is understood – I
want to give you this model that is developed by two people, Meadow and Kao.
They came up with a system of how we are to understand the development of
religion/morality in our young people.
And if you have a child in college, they will have studied something like
this at some point in time. This
theory says that we all start off over here, in what they call an extrinsic
orientation to religion. That is to
say, my religious thinking is determined overwhelmingly by what goes on around
me. So, if my parents teach me the
catechism, I will learn the catechism words. So
I instill that. You all have heard
the phrase—“give us the child until he is six years old and we will have him for
life” because we will inculcate certain things in them. This extrinsic—we
surround them with religious stuff.
But in our moral/religious development, there is a next stage that comes and
that’s where observance begins to take over.
Observance is when I begin to do the ritual of the church.
I get where I go to Sunday morning, SS, and church so much, that if we go
on vacation, I feel guilty if we don’t go.
So now my religion is not just what I have had extrinsically around me.
It is also involves, “I am used to doing these things and if I am not
doing them, I don’t feel right.” So
that sort of keeps me shaken up.
Extrinsic observance. So the theory
goes that religion becomes more intrinsic. It becomes part of the way I think
and feel inside. It becomes the way
in which I breath, the way I think, the way it is a part of my personality.
But this text book doesn’t stop right there.
It goes on through a fourth stage.
It makes a circle and brings it back up to here.
They say that the highest form of moral/religious development is when the
individual develops what they call, “autonomy.”
Autonomy – the tendency, where I begin to think for myself.
The more important religion is the particular family of the individual,
the more likely it is that religion will become a significant factor in the
young person’s moral development.
Moving on, autonomous religiosity or religiousness is a step beyond intrinsic
faith and represents the most mature stage of personal religious development.
Individuals who have reached this level of religious development, exhibit
a more advanced religious orientation characterized by greater independence of
thought and practice and concern for others than those in earlier stages whereas
most higher religious groups advocate intrinsic religion, they seldom promote a
thoroughly autonomous faith because such independence of though and behavior is
generally against the vested interest of organized religion.
Now, what am I saying? What
they are saying in the textbook, talking about religious development, and
teaching our children in college, by the way, what they are saying is that the
more independent your thinking is, the higher development you have in terms of
your religiosity. Not only that,
the more you think about other people, the more highly developed your religious
thinking is. Now what does that do
to the concept of divine absolute truth?
What does that do to the concept of biblical standards?
What does that do to the concept of a confessional church whereby you
adhere to the confession of faith and the catechisms?
It says that that is not the highest development of morality and
religiosity. You need to move on
from there and we wonder today why people aren’t gong to worship and to church.
We wonder why only these right wings weirdoes over here have attendance
on Sunday morning? With a church that is filled up?
I know the Pentecostals are filling them up too. I ‘m not talking about
that. But what I am saying is, we
have a whole generation being told that you are the authority figure to make the
decision about religion and it is up to you about what you wish to believe.
And we wonder why they stop going to church.
We don’t fight the fight because we don’t know if there is a fight.
There is no such thing as absolute truth in that system.
Now, there are other things I could say, but common sense seems to
support a developmental moving away from sin.
I happen to believe that common sense happens to support, not a moving
away from sin, but a sophistication of sin. So that my sin becomes more
sophisticated, so it is not that I go out and go to a house of no
repute. I now have my
computer where I can get virtually access to visually and auditorially, anything
that I wish to watch. Sin becomes
more sophisticated—we don’t move away from is, we just get more sophisticated.
It still does not explain the rawness of sin.
Reaction…I’m through.
Reformed Theology holds to the sinfulness of humans and their inability to
choose the good. Liberal theology has advocated the position of Reformed
Theology and apparently favors theistic evolution and its developmental model of
morality. Arminian theology works
to see man—wants to see man and is capable of grabbing hold of God but
understands that he may lose his grip.
The Reformed doctrine of total depravity is a bitter pill for the
humanist to swallow, a difficult pill for the Arminians to swallow, but a real
comfort to the one who puts all hope in God’s unmerited grace.
So I end up by reading this:
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sin in which you used to
live when you followed the ways of the world and of the ruler of the Kingdom of
the air, the Spirit who is now at work in those who are now disobedient.
All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the craving of
our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts, like the rest, we were
by nature, objects of wrath—but, because of his great love for us, God who is
rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in
transgressions. It is by grace you
have been saved and God raised us up with Christ and seated us with Him in the
Heavenly realms with Christ Jesus in order that the coming ages he might show
the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in His kindness to us in Christ
Jesus, for it is by grace you have been saved through faith—it is not from
yourselves. It is the gift of God,
not of works, so that no one can boast.
That’s Reformed Theology and that’s Christianity.
Let’s pray:
Heavenly Father, we pray that you will enable us to have that sense of awareness
of your good pleasure, that awareness that we wish to serve you and love you,
but Lord, may we always realize that we struggle with and live with the sin
within us as we go through the process of sanctification.
And until we reach that process of glorification, we will have that
struggle. Encourage us, but may we
be encouraged by your Sovereignty, by your love, and by your care, by the fact
that you did it all. In Christ’s
name we pray, Amen.
Please stand…
And now may the grace to the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God the Father
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all, Amen.
Singing of Doxology.