The Hope of Total Depravity

Amazing grace - how sweet the sound - that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost but now am found. Was blind but now I see.

We all know and love those words written by John Newton, but do we believe them?

Before? Wretched. Lost. Blind.

After? Saved. Found. Seeing.

As my local church, Resurrection Church in Greer, South Carolina, has journeyed through the Gospel of John, some questions have popped up for some people for the first time, and seeing God sovereignly turn on light bulbs above people’s heads is always a glorious thing, but there are always some who are wrestling with God’s sovereignty in salvation, so that’s who this is for. Anyone else who benefits is a bonus.

Defining Terms
John’s Gospel, like all of Scripture, is chock full of God’s unyielding, meticulous sovereignty in salvation, but we often start at the doctrine of election, how God decides who will be saved. For all our general contractors in the church, that’s like building a house by starting on the walls. You can’t get there without first laying the foundation.

And that brings us to a vital doctrine that has led to some of the most vicious debates in all of church history. Are you ready for this biblical truth?

Apart from God’s grace, you are just the worst, as am I. And we are all this way because our covenantal representative before God, Adam, rebelled and spiritually died, and we rebelled and spiritually died with him (Romans 5:12). We aren’t as bad as we could be (e.g., Not everyone becomes so utterly depraved as to lead or participate in a genocide), but our desires have become so twisted that we hate light and love darkness (John 3:19-20).

To save on time, I’ll refer to this as the doctrine of Total Depravity, because I can’t type a paragraph every time I bring up the topic. But whether you call it the first point of Calvinism or Sovereign-ism or just a biblical understanding of humanity’s state, I trust you’ll see that the thrust of biblical truth is that fallen Man can do nothing to bring about his salvation. The rot courses through every fiber of our being, both physically and spiritually.

And because we are Totally Depraved, not a single person can come to Him in faith on his own accord (John 6:44). Not only do we want to scurry for cover when someone flips on the light of the Gospel, our only possible responses are to either run or rage. Our depravity is so complete that the only possible responses to God and His Gospel are negative (Romans 8:7).

Controversy and Clarity
”Command what You will, and give what You command,” wrote Augustine of Hippo in his Confessions in the late 300s. His understanding was that God is free to command whatever He wills, but our nature is so corrupted that we’re incapable of obedience without divine intervention. He understood that Original Sin, Adam’s sin that we mysteriously but covenantally participated in, affected us to the core, even down to whether we could even entertain obeying God. In other words, humanity is Totally Depraved.

However, a British monk by the name of Pelagius responded by saying that it would be unjust for God to hold one man’s sins over another’s head and that infants are born with no sin nature whatsoever. Not only that, but someone could actually live a perfect life without sin, fully obeying God along the way. In effect, Adam only fell as an example, and the Fall had no actual effect on us. Thus, the heresy of what became known as Pelagianism was born.

And deep down, we know that Augustine was right. We know that before God interrupted our lives with His grace, we were sinful zombies (Ephesians 2:1-3), and weren’t just hostile to God, we thought His ways were stupid (Romans 8:9; 1 Corinthians 2:14). We needed a heart transplant.

And that’s exactly what God promised to sovereignly do. In prophesying of the church through Ezekiel, God said:

I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances. - Ezekiel 36:26-27

Note two things here. For one, even though I’m not an engineer, I know that a block of granite is terrible for moving blood around a living body. For two, who does Ezekiel credit as the cause for our obedience? He credits the Spirit, which is what Jesus echoes in John 6:63:

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.

Yes, a Wretch
So, again, can you really sing “Amazing Grace” and agree that you were a wretch, lost, and blind?

The natural human response is to put up a wall around the truth. We want to sheepishly respond with, “What? I’m a good person!” when confronted with just how grotesque our sin is. But deep down, we know what John Newton and Augustine knew.

We know that we’re not even a Princess Bride style “mostly dead” on our own merits. We know that we’re dead-dead. All the way dead. Corpse on the bottom of the sea, being picked at by bottom feeders dead.

Dead.

And that is what gives us hope. We understand that our faith, the instrument that God uses to justify us, is as much a gift as the air we breathe, which God also created (Ephesians 2:8-9).

And if God can bring your sorry carcass to life, He is surely able to save those you love, which should bring us to two responses.

Pray
Prayer for your lost loved ones is not “all you can do.” You really get to approach the triune God in the name of His Son and request He do something about it. God has promised that at the end of the day, His Church will contain multitudes, and part of how He has determined to gather people to Himself is through prayer (Psalm 22:25-31; 1 Timothy 2:1-6; Luke 10:1-2).

Proclaim
If God has resurrected your soul to eternal life, He has also tasked you as part of His Church to disciple the nations (Matthew 28:18-20). While this does not mean that everyone is a professional missionary, this does mean that we are to be prepared to share the good news that Christ is Lord (1 Peter 3:15), that God has ordained that the faith come by hearing (Romans 10:14-17), and that God is reconciling the world to Himself in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:18-20). We do this with the understanding that God’s Word always accomplishes exactly what He intends (Isaiah 55:11), so we have nothing to lose and everything to gain (Philippians 1:21; Mark 10:28-31).

In other words, we trust God with the results. We know that we contributed nothing to go from wretched, lost, and blind, to saved, found, and seeing. We had nothing to do with neither our physical birth nor our spiritual birth, and that fact should bring us even more joy and comfort than thinking we did. We were Totally Depraved, and God fixed that for His glory and our joy. Celebrate that with the others He has done that for this Lord’s Day.

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