Dead Men Walking

by Bruce Mills

“And you were dead in your trespasses and sins" (Ephesians 2:1). In those nine words, there is perhaps no clearer statement in Scripture on the sinfulness of man apart from Christ. In the original Greek text, it literally says “And you, being dead in your trespasses and sins.” In other words, man does not become spiritually dead because he sins; he is spiritually dead because by nature he is sinful. Except for Jesus Christ, that is the condition of every human being since the Fall, including every believer before he is saved. It is the past condition of believers and the present condition of everyone else.

Now contrary to most modern thinking, including such esteemed theologians as Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Phil, man’s basic trouble is not being out of harmony with his heritage or his environment, but being out of harmony with his Creator. His principal problem is not that he cannot make meaningful relationships with other human beings, but that he has no right relationship to God, from whom he is alienated by sin.

His condition has nothing to do with the way he lives; it has to do with the fact that he is dead even while he is alive. He is spiritually dead while being physically alive. Because he is dead to God, he is dead to spiritual life, truth, righteousness, inner peace and happiness, and ultimately to every other good thing.

One of the first indications of physical death is the body’s inability to respond to stimulus, no matter what it might be. The simple fact is that a dead person cannot react. He no longer responds to light, sound, smell, taste, pain, or anything else. He is totally insensitive because there is no life in him.

That is the way of spiritual death as well. A person who is spiritually dead has no life by which he can respond to spiritual things, much less live a spiritual life. No amount of love, care, and words of affection from God can draw a response. A spiritually dead person is alienated from God and therefore alienated from life. He has no capacity to respond. Apart from God, men as spiritual zombies, the walking dead who do not know they are dead. They go through the motions of life, but they do not possess it.

This is the primary reason why I am convinced that Calvinism is correct and Arminianism is wrong. According to what this passage says, men and women are “dead in…trespasses and sins”—they cannot possibly respond on their own to the Gospel apart from the work of God to raise them to spiritual life.

But Arminianism teaches that the fall of man was not total, maintaining that there was enough good left in man for him to will to accept Jesus Christ unto salvation.

Arminians believe that election is based on the foreknowledge of God as to who would believe. Man’s “act of faith” is seen as the “condition” or his being elected to eternal life, since God foresaw him exercising his “free will” in response to Jesus Christ.

The founder of Arminianism, Joseph Arminius, held that redemption was based on the fact that God loves everybody, that Christ died for everyone, and that the Father is not willing that any should perish. The death of Christ provided the grounds for God to save all men, but each must exercise his own “free will” in order to be saved.

He also believed that since God wanted all men to be saved, He sent the Holy Spirit to “woo” all men to Christ, but since man has absolute “free will,” he is able to resist God’s will for his life. He believed that God’s will to save all men can be frustrated by the finite will of man. He also taught that man exercises his own will first, and then is born again.

He even said that a man cannot be saved by God unless it is man’s will to be saved, and a man cannot continue in salvation unless he continues to will to be saved. In other words, he can lose his salvation.

In other words, man’s salvation depends on his own ability and will to stay saved. I find such teachings to be absolutely incompatible with this passage. Before we were saved, we were like every other person who is apart from God—“dead in…trespasses and sins.”

The Greek case indicates the sphere or realm in which something or someone exists. It tells us where we were before our salvation. We were in the sphere of being dead in trespasses and sins. We were not dead because we committed sins, but because we were in sin.

A person does not become a liar when he tells a lie; he tells a lie because he already is a liar. He does not become a thief when he steals; he steals because he already is a thief. And so also with murder, adultery, covetousness, and every other sin.

Committing sinful acts does not make us sinners; we commit sinful acts because we are sinners. Jesus confirmed this when He said, “The things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders” (Matt. 15:18-19).

Now, someone might ask, "Do you mean that because all men are equally dead in sin that they are all equally corrupt and wicked?" No; twenty corpses on a battlefield might be in many different stages of decay, but they are uniformly dead. The manifestation of death occurs in many different forms and degrees, but death itself has no degrees. Sin manifests itself in many different forms and degrees, but the state of sin itself has no degrees. Not all men are as evil as they could be, but all fail to measure up to God’s perfect standard.

As a state of being, a sphere of existence, sin has more to do with what is not done than with what is done. God’s standard is for men to be perfect just as He Himself is perfect (Matt. 5:48). God has never given any standard for man but perfect holiness.

It is because of that perfect standard of holiness that men apart from God cannot be anything but sinful. Because he is separated from God, he cannot do anything but fall short of God’s standard. No matter how much good he does or attempts to do, the standard of never doing or never having done evil at all is unattainable.

Because I live on the Gulf of Mexico, let me give you an illustration I have used many times. Let’s suppose that all of us decided we would go down to the beach, and we all lined up and took turns trying to jump across the Gulf of Mexico. Some of us might jump only a couple of feet, but others might jump 8 or 10 feet out before we landed in the water. Even if we brought in a professional broad jumper, he might be able to jump 25 or 26 feet. But no one would be able to jump to the other side of the Gulf. Our degrees of success would vary only in relation to one another, but in relation to achieving the goal, we would all be equal failures.

That is the same way it is with attempting to achieve God’s holiness. Every unbeliever is an equal failure. That’s why the morally good, helpful, kind, considerate, self-giving, generous person needs salvation as much as the serial killer on death row.

The person who is a good parent, a loving spouse, an honest worker, and a civic humanitarian needs Jesus Christ to save him or her from the eternal condemnation of hell just as much as the drug-addicted prostitute or the heartless terrorist. They do not lead equally sinful lives, but they are equally in the state of sin, equally separated from God, and equally estranged from spiritual life.

Jesus once said, “If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same” (Luke 6:33). On another occasion He said, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (Luke 11:13). What He was saying is that a person apart from God can do humanly good things.

But as the Lord points out in both of those statements, the person is still a sinner, still evil by nature, and still operating on a motive less than that of glorifying God. A sinner’s doing good is good, but it cannot change his nature or his basic sphere of existence, and it cannot reconcile him to God.

There is one more passage which states this principle, which I personally think is the most frightening passage of Scripture in the Bible. It’s found in Matt. 7:22-23. Jesus is concluding the Sermon on the Mount, and he tells the listening crowd what it will be like at the Great White Throne Judgment, and He says, “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’”

In other words, there will be many people who will stand before the Lord and try to justify themselves on the basis of their wonderful works of power, and their wonderful teaching done in His name, and He will send them to hell because they never had a personal relationship to Him.

Being good and kind to other people pleases God. You might even say it is a step in the right direction. The only problem is that 100,000 such steps cannot bring a person any closer to God because it is a sinner’s condition of sinfulness and not his particular sins that separate him from God, his particular acts of goodness cannot reconcile him to God.

So, man is in an impossible situation. He is spiritually dead and entirely unable to extricate himself from that situation. How then, is he supposed to have a relationship with God? How will he ever be able to avoid God's wrath and just condemnation to an eternal hell? We'll examine the answer in our next post.

Human Free Will - Fact or Fiction?

by Robert Fraire

Free Will is one of those phrases that most Christians take to be a central truth of their Christian faith. For most of us the idea of "free will" was preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in Sunday School and assumed whenever Christians gathered. But I'm here to say that no one really believes that men have free will. And the Bible teaches in fact that man's will is not free.

So if you are still reading this post, let us examine the words Free Will. In order for a will to be free their must necessarily be No limitations on it. If the Will is Free, it must be able to accomplish whatever it sets out to do. But we all understand that to be false just from our own experience. To start with an extreme example: If a man wills to fly can he accomplish it? No, not unless he is in an airplane. So then can a man marry any woman he wills to marry? At 5' 6" and 42 years old can I dunk a basketball if I will to do so? (No I can't)

Ok, so we would all agree that man's will is limited in many ways. One of those ways is that our bodies can only accomplish things that are phyically possible. Are there other ways that the human will is limited? Yes, man's will is limited by his desires. A man will make choices that he thinks are best. He may choose to forgo pleasure for a time in order to reap greater benefits later. But men won't do what doesn't make sense for them to do. Unless of course they are insane.

So what is it in man that forms his desire? Here is where I will turn to scripture. The Bible tells us that man was created from the dust of the ground. Therefore part of man is his Flesh. The Bible then tells us that God breathed into the man and he became a living being. Or as the King James says, a living soul(Gen 2:7). So here we see that man has an eternal part to his being, his soul, or his spirit. So man has a spirit and a flesh. Those inform his will as to what is the right thing to do. So when a man is faced with a decision he does not make a choice in a vaccum. Whatever his spirit and his flesh tell him he then chooses.

So now what does the Bible tell us is the state of man's flesh and his spirit? In Genesis 3 we see the sin of Adam and Eve and that their punishment was death. That death was not only their eventual physical death, but also their spirit died as well. And by die, I mean that it ceased to be able to do what God commanded it to do. Romans 5:12 tells us that through Adam sin entered the world, and through his sin, all his descendants faced the same consequence that he did. We inherited a spirit that was dead in terms of being able to obey God. Our spirit was tuned to sin, and our flesh was tuned to sin. Jesus termed this truth in this fashion: in John 8:34, "everyone who sins is a slave to sin." And Paul echos this truth concerning our flesh. In Romans 7:14 Paul says "...but I am flesh, sold into bondage to sin. So if the spirit is a slave to sin, and the flesh is in bondage to sin then what will be the choice that man makes on his own? He will always choose to reject God's gospel. He is a slave to sin, nothing in him desires God. He is an enemy of God and the gospel message and his messangers are the stench of death to him (2 Cor 2:14-16)

In Romans 3: 10 - 18

as it is written,
"THERE IS NONE RIGHTEOUS, NOT EVEN ONE;
THERE IS NONE WHO UNDERSTANDS,
THERE IS NONE WHO SEEKS FOR GOD;
ALL HAVE TURNED ASIDE, TOGETHER THEY HAVE BECOME USELESS;
THERE IS NONE WHO DOES GOOD,
THERE IS NOT EVEN ONE.
THEIR THROAT IS AN OPEN GRAVE,
WITH THEIR TONGUES THEY KEEP DECEIVING,
THE POISON OF ASPS IS UNDER THEIR LIPS;
WHOSE MOUTH IS FULL OF CURSING AND BITTERNESS;
THEIR FEET ARE SWIFT TO SHED BLOOD,
DESTRUCTION AND MISERY ARE IN THEIR PATHS,
AND THE PATH OF PEACE THEY HAVE NOT KNOWN.
THERE IS NO FEAR OF GOD BEFORE THEIR EYES."

So does a man who hears the gospel choose to accept it or reject it? Yes he does. And everytime he exercises his will, he chooses to reject! His will is NOT free, it is a slave to sin because his spirit and his flesh that inform his will are slaves to sin. Without the supernaturual work of regeneration by God himself all men would be lost, always rejecting God's invitation of the gospel.

So then where do people get the idea of "free will"? One place is a verse like John 3:16 In that verse, scripture says: "that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life."
The logic that follows is that since God gives a choice (whoever believes) then man must have the ability to believe. But this verse does not state that everyone is able to make the positive choice for faith in Jesus. It only states that whoever does believe will be saved. If I said, whoever runs a mile in less than 4 minutes will make the Olympic team. That, in no way states that you have the ability to run a sub 4 minute mile.

So then who does make the positive choice for faith in the Gospel? Earlier in John 3 Jesus says that it is those that are Born Again who will see the kingdom of heaven. So what occurs in the act of being born again? The Holy Spirit removes the man's dead spirit, and puts in a spirit that is free from sin. Thatman with a new spirit hears the gospel and then is able to exercise his will and always chooses to believe in Jesus Christ.

What a great God He is. In His mercy and through His grace, His Spirit brings new life to men, who then call out in faith and are redeemed. If you are a Christian today you are so because of God's work in your life. Not because you had something extra in your "free will" that decided to choose God. In fact, He chose you.

"Free Will" and Evangelism

by Bruce Mills

Most of my Christian friends—other than many of those who attend my church and a few others—are Arminians in their doctrine of salvation. That is to say, they believe that every person has the ability in and of himself to choose to receive Christ as Savior. For the vast majority of them, this viewpoint is based entirely on their own experience in coming to faith in Christ. It is not based on any in-depth study of the doctrine of salvation and the differing viewpoints of James Arminius and John Calvin. For most of them, it is entirely centered on their own human understanding and perspective of salvation, without any effort to understand the critical issues which are involved.

The problem with that kind of thinking is that it simply is not found in Scripture. The Bible constantly portrays man as completely dead in sin, enslaved to sin, and totally unable to choose to do anything other than sin. Man is not merely spiritually sick—he is spiritually dead! He is a religious and moral cadaver. Therefore, man rejects the gospel because it is man’s nature to do so.

So then, no one has “free will” as defined by the Arminians, because a person’s will is the extension and invariable expression of his nature. No creature ever acts in violation of its nature and, therefore, every person willingly chooses to reject the gospel because that is the desire of his heart. No one is free to act or choose contrary to his nature any more than an orange tree is free to produce almonds. Thus, no one seeks to come to Jesus because it is not his nature to come. In fact, it is man’s nature, and therefore his will, to flee from Christ.

So why is it that, when confronted with the gospel, a person may choose to believe the message regarding his lost, sinful condition and God’s forgiveness through Christ’s substitutionary atonement, and then come in repentance and faith to believe? It is only because God, in His sovereign grace, grants that person the faith to believe.

I recently read a wonderful quote from George Whitefield, written back in the 18th century, which illustrates what I have been saying. Whitefield wrote:

“Come, ye dead, Christless, unconverted sinners, come and see the place where they laid the body of the deceased Lazarus; behold him laid out, bound hand and foot with grave-cloaths, locked up and stinking in a dark cave, with a great stone placed on top of it. View him again and again; go nearer to him; be not afraid; smell him. Ah! How he stinketh. Stop there now, pause a while; and whilst thou art gazing upon the corpse of Lazarus, give me leave to tell thee with great plainness, but greater love, that this dead, bound, entombed, stinking carcase, is but a faith representation of thy poor soul in its natural state; for, whether thou believest or not, thy spirit which thou bearest about with thee, sepulchered in flesh and blood, is as literally dead to God, and as truly dead in trespasses and sins, as the body of Lazarus was in the cave. Was he bound hand and foot with grave-cloaths? So art thou bound hand and foot with thy corruptions; and as a stone was laid on the sepulcher, so there is a stone of unbelief upon thy stupid heart. Perhaps thou hast lain in this state, not only four days, but many years, stinking in God’s nostrils. And, what is still more effecting, thou art as unable to raise thyself out of this loathsome, dead state, to a life of righteousness and true holiness, as ever Lazarus was to raise himself from the cave in which he lay so long. Thou mayest try the power of thy own boasted free-will, and the force and energy of moral persuasion and rational arguments (which, without all doubt, have their proper place in religion); but all thy efforts, exerted with never so much vigour, will prove quite fruitless and abortive, till that same Jesus, who said ‘Take away the stone’; and cried, ‘Lazarus, come forth’ also quicken you.”

Why do I think this issue is important? Because we must always remember that while it is our responsibility to proclaim salvation, we must never forget that it is God who saves. God uses our evangelistic efforts as the instrument by which He accomplishes His sovereign purposes in bringing some to salvation, but it is His prerogative to bring about results when the gospel is given. If we ever begin to think that our gospel presentation can be so fine-tuned as to become an incontrovertible convincing argument which will cause individuals to see their sin and then, using their own “free will,” choose to believe and generate within themselves the faith and repentance that are necessary for salvation, the result will be that our methods will quickly degenerate into similarity with those of snake oil salesmen.

J. I. Packer puts it this way. He says that if we regard faith and repentance merely as the product of human effort, “we should regard evangelism as an activity involving a battle of the wills between ourselves and those to whom we go, a battle in which victory depends on our firing off a heavy enough barrage of calculated effects. Thus our philosophy of evangelism would become terrifying similar to the philosophy of brainwashing.”

It is only when we recognize God’s sovereignty in every aspect of salvation, from beginning to end, that we can avoid these errors as we share our faith. No decision for Christ is ever the result of a slick, well-articulated gospel presentation, and no rejection of Christ is ever the result of a stumbling, inept presentation of the gospel. Every person who comes to faith in Christ does so because God has chosen that person in Christ before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4) and then draws that person in time, giving him the gracious gift of faith to believe. Our duty as Christians is to do our best to share the gospel with everyone we can, using the most effective means available to us, but entrusting the results to our sovereign Lord.