“All we like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to their own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”Isaiah 53:6.
“All we like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to their own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” Isaiah 53:6.
Is humankind essentially good or bad? It’s important to know what we believe. For that we go back to Genesis 3. Adam and Eve, with full use of their brain – untouched as our brains are by a sinful world - chose to comply with the suggestions of the evil one and sin entered the world. Paul teaches that Adam was representative of the human race – positionally we entered into his decision to sin (“as in Adam all die, so in Christ will all be made alive”). We may not like what he did, but experientially we have all shown that given the same conditions we would do exactly the same thing. David said, “Surely I have been a sinner from birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me” (Psalm 51:5). We are all sinners by nature and practice. Our sins spring from our nature of sinfulness – what is inside comes out. Every person is this way. Romans 3:23 says “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” We don’t believe that humankind is essentially good, but that we are essentially rebellious to God.
To see this we don’t need to go back to Stalin, Hitler or Mao. This week there are incursions against the tyrannical regime in Iran which has been happy to torture and kill its own citizens by the thousands; we follow the stories of Mexican cartels that exist on the misery of the addicted, and in our own province we a revolted by a person who is willing to murder many young innocents.
That is not to say that people are not capable of doing wonderful selfless deeds – sometimes we see things in the world that puts us Christians to shame! But because of our sinful human nature, there is nothing within us that can meet God’s perfect and holy standard. Sin means missing the mark of God’s bullseye or perfection. We can do good deeds but because of our nature, they do not earn us a place in heaven – we cannot save our own soul. We have a bias toward evil, and the bible teaches us that we need to be reborn spiritually. We need a Saviour to change our core spiritual condition.
Jesus Christ was fully God – holy and perfect. But he was also fully man tempted in everyway that we are. Our sinful nature is spiritually inherited through the father – this is why it was important that Jesus Christ be born of a woman but not of a man – he was born without an inherited sinful nature. He was the only one who could be our champion in wresting our lost souls from the clutches of the deceiver.
We are not saved by gradually getting better and learning more. We have an enlightened society, yet we struggle with sin as much as any society (abortion, child pornography, plagiarism, lying at the border, gossip, resentment, revenge and online hatred). We don’t believe things will get better and better as the age marches to resolution. We believe the course of history will decline and that Jesus will return to deal once and for all with the sin question.
Today is a day to confess your sins and sinfulness afresh to the Lord and invite his Holy Spirit to take control afresh. A day to be thankful for salvation offered full and free!
Pastor Leon Throness
