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!

77 Questions about the Atonement (Q&A #63)

63.     Once a person gets saved aren’t they always saved?

All who keep trusting God and keep walking in His Spirit are safe in His trothfulness and graciousness, by which they are kept wholesome and free from sin (and, incidentally, stay safe from any buildup of God’s indignation).  By remaining in the Lord’s energetic Explanation of graciousness and truth, and by regularly enjoying his Supper, featuring His very Spirit (“in flesh and blood”!), our trust gets nourished so that we stay strong and whole in God’s sight, in spite of pressures from our own decaying flesh, within, and the decadent world, without.  Nothing in the created order can separate us from His secure love when we stay in His powerfully wholesome and vivifying Explanation, which sustains the Spirit of sonship we received at baptism when we repented and started trusting God.