In the blanks below write the two most significant statements in today’s reading assignment. Be prepared to discuss why the statements you chose were significant to you.
“If you at the moment are not experiencing this warfare, do not be lulled into complacency… His goal is to break your fellowship with your God and render you useless for service to your Redeemer, Jesus Christ – warnings to live by.
“A traitor lives within! It will betray me… Until then its presence must be acknowledged, its tactics studied, its tactics discovered and resisted, and its victories confessed, – an intriguing shift in perspective – invaluable”
If you do not seem to be experiencing the warfare of your flesh against God, what two possible reasons are discussed on page 36 for that lack of struggle? “One is either drifting with its current, and therefore not feeling its strength, or one is falling for the crafty deception of remaining silent only to strike when one is not watching.”
Charles Williams… gave several ‘modern ideas about sin’ that, of course, do not fit the biblical view of man. What are some other modern views of men that are used to explain his nature?
“My Ethics Philosophy class was more than twenty years ago, if I ever knew any such theories and phrases, they are long since forgotten.”
What does the term total depravity mean?
“The sin principle has infected every part of man’s being. It does not mean that an individual man is as wicked as is possible, but that his fundamental crookedness has penetrated his total being. No part of his body or of his immaterial being is left untouched.”
If, as the Bible says, you are totally depraved, and, therefore, every faculty of your understanding, will, affections, and conscious has been corrupted, what kind of cautions should you take when making decisions and when we were relating to other people?
“I should pray frequently and seek God’s will and the Spirit’s leading so that I don’t make wrong decisions or relational blunders out of my own sinful corruptedness.”
Since man is totally depraved, what is wrong with the modern idea that man’s solutions are going to come from ‘looking within’?
“The only man who has perfection and a solution to sin within Himself as Jesus. In everyone else, the solution isn’t there to be found.”
Praise – “You are holy, healer, helper, High Priest, and ‘hallelujah-worthy.’”
Repent – “I’m sorry I surrender to my total depravity so often.”
Yield – “I will try to remember to seek Your guidance and help for more.”
Dearest Rachel –
As much as I have my problems with Calvinism (especially their concept of predestination; the idea that God created vastly more than half the human race deliberately and inevitably intended for hell imputes a malevolence to Him that I just can’t accept), the concept of ‘total depravity’ is one that seems badly named. Sure, we can all agree that nobody’s perfect, but totally depraved? That sounds like we’re incapable of doing anything good, which from observation is demonstrably false, at least from a human perspective. However, this is a good refresher to understand that the evil that is within us from birth – our inheritance from Adam – may not necessarily be on display at all times, but it is enough that it permeates us from head to toe, heart, mind and soul.
And, in fairness, it isn’t as if whatever ‘goodness’ we exhibit amounts to anything. Isaiah’s comparison of them to ‘filthy rags’ could as easily translate to ‘used tampons’ today; and the very fact that such a description sounds as gross as it does is the very point.
In any event, the fact that we are, to a man, shot through with the evil, the pride, the self-centeredness that we are renders us unfit to be able to even diagnose, let alone fix our problem like some modern philosophers think. Of course, they would tell you that mankind is basically ‘good,’ while having an insufficient understanding of what it means to be ‘good.’ Jesus Himself reproved a man for calling Him that, insisting that “no one is ‘good’ but God alone.” Which is not to say that He was denying His divinity or anything; He only wanted the rich young man to think about what he meant by claiming that He or anybody was ‘good’ (particularly since he apparently thought of himself as ‘good’ since “I have kept all the commandments since I was a youth.” Are you sure about that, young man?).
But while our college philosophy courses have long since been forgotten, one doesn’t need a college degree to recognize that we’re not perfect; and that is the standard by which we’re to be compared to. ‘Goodness,’ from a biblical standpoint, is equivalent to perfection, and so we cannot be ‘good,’ let alone ‘good enough.’ Any attempts at self-improvement are like trying to step deeper into the quicksand in order to extricate ourselves; it just doesn’t work that way, and we’ll only sink that much deeper into our own overconfidence.
Fortunately, there is One who is willing to pull us out, who stands outside of the mire. We just have to be willing to follow His instructions and take His hand – which not everybody is willing to do.
Letters to Rachel 