77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #68)

68.     Isn’t human nature inherently sinful, evil, or ‘totally depraved’?

Not according to the Bible.  Our human nature, or structure, including such distinct faculties as the psychical, aesthetic, lingual, logical, social, economic, juridical, ethical, and fiducial (faith), was created good, but our dying flesh waywardly craves, covets, and lusts.  Our nature and conscience align with God’s law to jointly testify against our misuse and abuse of our own bodily and other created structures.  Because mankind lacks access to the Tree of Life due to the ban actuated subsequent to Adam’s sin, we all suffer deficiencies of meaning and power; consequently we all crave something, anything, to fill that yawning void.  This is what pushes us to sidestep the guardrails of wholesome laws and to stray away from the true path to life pointed out by God’s good and right directives.  This constitutional entropy is the source of corruption in civilization at large, luring and seducing us to conceive irreverent and decadent thoughts and consummate our gratifications in wrongdoing and defilements, often ending in premature death and even agelong irreversible loss.  The disposition of our deteriorating flesh is only alienation toward God.  Thus, little lasting good is achieved merely by ‘laying down the law’ since this can incite our decaying flesh to act out yet worse exhibits.  The provision of Holy Spirit from God through the heroic labors of the Lord Jesus is the effectual antidote—the Spirit’s ‘law’ of Life-in-Christ-Jesus.  Human beings are structurally good but directionally evil, so we need this marvelous provision of the New Covenant in Christ—rich endowments of life-making Spirit in divinely just response to Messiah’s wickedly shed blood.  Hereby God imparts and inscribes and sheds abroad His own ‘law’ or principle of love in the very core of our being, setting us repeatedly, sustainably, free from sin as we walk accordingly, crucifying the flesh along with its addictive passions and bearing fresh fruit of messianic virtues for God’s credit.  Through our new Master Jesus we can now actually regard ourselves dead to the offenses and wrongdoings in which we once walked, and, conversely, consider ourselves living to God, progressively habituated to right-doing.  Accordingly, we can remain confident that God is perfectly pleased when we exert faith in His Explanation of Life, inspired and published by His Holy Spirit of Life, operating its wholesome, loving effects within maturing saints as we keep trusting and obeying.  Speak of a Lifestyle!

Proclamation of the Premial Gospel in Panoramic Context

Every now and then I get the urge to epitomize the whole scope of the creation-fall-redemption pattern that characterizes the Bible as a whole.  Maybe I’m strange that way.  Anyhow, what follows is one such attempt, written exactly six years ago, at the outset of the proliferation of notes on the atonement that now provide the inspiration for this blogsite.  I simply may have needed to clear away some cobwebs of tradition and then reconnect the dots after my own fashion in order to prepare for a fresh initiative.  If so, it succeeded in achieving that aim beyond my expectations.  I have newly edited the piece for this blog—a practice I hope to continue for future blogs since there’s nothing on earth that can’t be improved!

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The Creator of the universe imposed laws for life, fruitfulness, and prosperity on the works of His hands.  His highest and noblest creature, humankind, was placed in a governing and administrative role over all these diverse creations in order to bring them to even greater glory.  To fulfill this mandate, humankind was crafted in the very image and likeness of their Creator—possessing sovereignty and authority, including the capacity for knowledge, wisdom, and understanding of these created products, which would be requisite for their task of stewardship.

However, although equipped, accordingly, with pristine control over their personal desires—because sovereignty and authority over the whole creation necessarily includes this as well—Adam nevertheless chose to disobey the divine directive that embodied the Creator’s wisdom, which is environmentally friendly to life.  The structural result of that disobedience inevitably followed:  eventual death of the living organism.  After all, the right to the Tree of Life was conditioned upon obedience to the truth, which in turn preserves holiness and staves off the entropy of decay.

Furthermore, God also created other orders of beings — spirits assigned their own special tasks to perform in the total economy of the universe.  The highest of these beings, whose administrative role in relation to human salvation also entailed far-reaching sovereignty and authority, had ominously rebelled against God and brought vast ranks of these spirits down with him, who in turn became agents of temptation to mankind, with the goal of securing a hostile takeover of the earth.

Nonetheless, God’s ultimate blueprint encompasses a created realm of pervasive righteousness, abounding in wisdom, where agelong life prevails and thrives.  However, in order to reach that goal He needs a crew of administrators who similarly love uprightness and wisdom and therefore willfully stay in the truth, come what may.  In order to sift the bad from the good, God would need to test them.  But since only evils of various kinds and degrees can validly test the resoluteness of faithfulness, and yet God himself can only inspire human beings with a right and true spirit, another being was needed for that unenviable task—an Adversary whose wisdom had been compromised so as to exemplify precisely what God did not want to remain permanently within His universe.  In this manner, God could conveniently educate mankind in what not to do and handily show them the consequences of heading the wrong direction.  Yes, this Adversary was “perfect” for the job.

However, since God himself is completely just and wise, He would, at length, dispose of both this Adversary and all other beings (whether angelic or human) who persist in rebellion against His law of love and its developmental wisdom for created life.  Whoever remain steadfast would by then have learned faith and obedience in the very face of temptations to commit lawlessness, persist in foolishness, and proliferate viciousness.  They would be, in a word, mature in love, ready to inherit allotments prepared specially for them in God’s realm of uprightness, harmony, and joy.

However, in order to spare all the faithful from the fate of agelong destruction and death that still remorselessly grips their education process, due to their inheriting mortal flesh from Adam in the wake of his ban from the Tree of Life, God gave the Devil enough rope to hang himself.  The Father allowed Satan to exercise his viciousness against His own perfectly sinless and ever-obedient Son, whose death would accordingly be unjust in the highest degree.  It is this strategic injustice that constituted an irresistible temptation to the Adversary, whose impulses toward lawlessness by then knew no bounds.  Ironically, he was ensnared by his own habit-formed vicious character into doing “what comes natural” toward the One Person whose slaying would evoke the Creator’s virtually immediate counteraction…yet not by destroying the Destroyer but by reversing the crime and then super-compensating the Victim with overwhelming, superabundant legal damages.  Thus the resurrection from the dead of God’s own Son, crucified  publicly, excruciatingly, and totally unjustly, evoked God’s ultimate demonstration of His righteousness-and-justice, including exaltation to the throne of the created universe.

Thus was the Adversary’s doom sealed, and superabundant graciousness let loose within the created order, when the promised Holy Spirit fell from heaven on that historic Day of Pentecost — Festival of Firstfruits.  This is the legacy of all who endure in trusting God and hence incline toward keeping His directives, whatever the cost.  God’s own Spirit of holiness/wholesomeness is His surety for our ultimate inheritance of allotments in the New Earth.  By experiencing this taste of what is to come if we remain faithful to God’s Explanation, we can endure shame, reproach, humiliation, hardship, abuse, hatred, oppression, persecution, and even painful death, if necessary, with our trust intact, awaiting an inheritance sealed and all but delivered.

Thus, Satan’s injustice at the cross justified God in avenging Jesus by raising him from the dead, that is, by overcompensating that seemingly irreparable injury and awarding damages incalculable!  This is the ultimate payoff of God’s premial justice to our most worthy Savior.  His just due includes acquiring sisters and brothers — daughters and sons of his Father!  In the striking words of the apostle Paul, “In him we were allotted” (Ephesians 1:11a).  [3/25/06; 8/26/21; 3/15,19/22]