Introduction
Have you ever noticed a mirror? I don’t mean have you ever noticed your reflection in a mirror; I mean, actually noticed the mirror itself.1
I have never once walked into a clothing store, passed by a mirror, and said to the passersby, “Wow! Look at this mirror! This thing is amazing! You can see yourself in it, the glass is immaculate, just take a look!” Most likely, what you really notice is the reflection in the mirror rather than the wonder of the glass. Mirrors were not created to draw attention to themselves but to what they are reflecting.
The story of mankind doesn’t begin with the fall in Genesis 3, but in Genesis 1-2, with the image of God. Theological liberalism wants to be free (or liberated) from any notion that man is inherently sinful. True freedom, says the modern liberal, is the ability to realize your own greatness, express your authentic self, and create your own reality; self-creation is the order of the day.
But true freedom is not ultimate self-determination or the ability to create your own reality (as the culture says), but to conform to reality as God created it. Such was the original righteousness of man in the garden.
The image of God in the beginning meant true, but changeable freedom. It meant that man’s mind was enlightened, being stocked with true knowledge of God, their affections (or loves) were well-ordered and oriented toward God, and their wills were unbound by anything that would hinder true conformity to His law. We were little mirrors displaying God’s glory.
A Broken Image: Man’s Sinfulness
Slightly different question: When do you notice a mirror? You notice the glass of the mirror when it is flawed. When there’s a smudge, a crack, or some kind of imperfection. Your eye becomes fixed on the glass and no longer on what it’s reflecting.
J. Gresham Machen describes Christianity as the “religion of a broken heart.” He is speaking of the reality of man’s sinfulness, their insatiable desire for self-glory, and their separation from the God who made them. He wrote: “…although Christianity does not end with the broken heart, it does begin with the broken heart; it begins with the consciousness of sin. Without the consciousness of sin, the whole of the gospel will seem to be an idle tale.”2
Mankind, after being created by God, fell from the scenic cliff of total perfection into the pungent, entangling swamp of sin. The mirror was irreparably shattered and marred. Genesis chapter 3 details the most horrific and dejecting event in human history. A mirror that once fulfilled its purpose by reflecting the image of its Creator has become a flawed image that draws attention to and exalts itself.
Even in our day, we see the exaltation of the self. God is the only One who can truly self-identify–“I AM who I AM,” He declares. However, many in the surrounding culture seek to self-identify and create their own reality rather than receive an identity that conforms to God’s design. Such is the outflow of the state of sin–the human will and personal autonomy become ultimate.
When a person acts, they do so by their deepest wants and desires, and those deepest desires are only explained by their true spiritual nature and the disposition of their heart, which is, of course, explained by the state of the image of God in that person, whether corrupted by sin or redeemed by grace.
Moral ability and therefore man’s will is inseparably united to the mind and affections of the heart; we cannot separate the will from the affections. The two are linked within the soul of man. This reality inevitably leads to an understanding of how the human will is enslaved and needs to be freed.
The 1689 London Baptist Confession helpfully sums this up:
Humanity, by falling into a state of sin, has completely lost all ability to choose any spiritual good that accompanies salvation. Thus, people in their natural state are absolutely opposed to spiritual good and dead in sin, so that they cannot convert themselves by their own strength or prepare themselves for conversion (9:3).
The Image of God & The Slavery of Sin
This may be an unpopular opinion, but ever since I was a kid, I’ve never been a fan of LEGO bricks. Now that I have kids of my own, I still don’t enjoy them. My 5-year-old son is incredibly creative and full of ideas, but I have to hold in all my impatience when a LEGO brick snaps off for the 114th time during the building process.
Recently, we built a rocketship together that took hours to build, and when I came home from work, he held up a shattered version of the rocketship. I could still identify it as some parts were intact, but it was not what it once was. But isn’t that just LEGO? $27.99 and 13 hours of my life for a shattered creation just 15 minutes later… (forgive me for venting)
This is what took place when mankind fell into a state of sin. The image of God can still be seen in part; it’s not totally lost, but it is a shattered image. The depravity of mankind does not reveal that man is as bad as they possibly could be. It means that they are as “bad off as they could be.” Pastor Jim Scott Orrick uses the illustration of a sponge. Imagine a sponge soaked in a bucket of vinegar.
You can take the sponge out, and it can be dripping with vinegar and just oozing with a foul stench. Or you can squeeze out as much of the vinegar as you want so that it’s no longer dripping, but no matter what, the vinegar touches every single centimeter of that sponge. You cannot fully rid the sponge of the vinegar. So too, the depth of man’s depravity runs to every aspect of body and soul; every part of man has been tainted and touched by sin, rendering them unable to respond to God positively.
Of course, we must acknowledge that non-believers—those who are not born again—can still do good things. Not every unregenerate person shows up in your life wearing a black cape and twirling a handlebar mustache. By God’s common grace, they can act with kindness toward others and do much good to benefit humanity.
However, there’s a difference between civic righteousness (good behavior that makes for good citizens) and spiritual righteousness, or good behavior that pleases God. Our corruption as humans is so deep that even the good things we do apart from Christ can be tainted with selfish motives, and that’s ultimately what God sees (1 Samuel 16:7).3
Thus, whoever is in the flesh, that is, the natural man, cannot do what is pleasing to God (Romans 8:8), for without faith it is impossible to please Him (Hebrews 11:6). The health or nature of the fruit borne by a tree is always dependent upon the root. If the root is bad, the fruit is bad. Jesus teaches us this in Matthew 12:33-35, “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good person out of his good treasure brings forth good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure brings forth evil” (cf: Matthew 15:18-19; Luke 6:45).
This is why this doctrine has been called “total” depravity since the totality of man is corrupted. The three texts (among others) that highlight this doctrine are Genesis 3 and Romans 1-3.
Genesis 3
Man freely walked in moral perfection, with every response to God being only positive. God, being King over them, gave the command not to eat of the forbidden tree. They obeyed up to a point. But “when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate” (Genesis 3:6).
Romans 5 gives us divine commentary on this passage: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come” (Romans 5:12–14). Sin “came into the world,” which means that all were made sinners; all men and women are born with inherent corruption.
Adam represented every human under his covenant with God (Hosea 6:7; Romans 5:18). He was our covenant head, the one who took upon himself the task of achieving life by personal, perfect, and perpetual obedience to the revealed will of God. Therefore, when Adam sinned, we sinned in him; his sin was imputed to us, and now all are made sinners by nature, condemned under that same covenant. The modern person likes to affirm, “Nobody’s perfect.” And that’s true. But our diagnosis is worse than that. We are not basically or inherently good. We are corrupt to the core of our being–death has spread, and we are all now “dead in our trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). To what extent? How deep is our corruption?
Romans 1-3
Romans 1:18 states, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven…” God here is provoked to anger; He is revealing His divine wrath to mankind. For what? “...all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” God’s anger is not capricious. He’s provoked to wrath by unrighteousness and ungodliness. Their ungodliness is so deep that they have suppressed the truth–they cast plain truth behind their backs. What else? “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened” (Vs. 21). From suppressing the truth, to further darkening their hearts, to exchanging the glory of the invisible God for images to worship (Vs. 23), man has sunk into a sea of unrighteousness. The idol factory–man’s heart–is open for business, the conveyor belt daily bringing forth foreign objects of worship and adoration.
How does God manifest His anger? He gives them over. “Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves…” (Vs. 24) We see depravity manifesting in gross and awful ways even today, and this reveals that the shattering of the image of God, and therefore, sin, is not merely a force corrupting us from without; it is poison corrupting us from within. This evil can also manifest in self-righteousness.
Romans 2 deals now with the “moral” man or the outwardly “good” person. “Therefore you have no excuse, O man, every one of you who judges. For in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, practice the very same things” (Vs 1). The bad news about “good” people is that the human heart is so corrupt that hypocrisy is a default. No amount of outward good can reverse the curse. God’s law doesn’t extend only to actions, but to the heart and mind.
Therefore, both the immoral gentile and the self-righteous Jew stand in the courtroom with this diagnosis: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:10-12; Emphasis mine). Many miss Paul’s malediction: “No one seeks for God.”
This is how deep our corruption is–we went from only responding positively to God and His commands to now despising Him; we, by nature, do not want God. We want the opposite–we seek/love our own lusts and pleasures (1 Corinthians 2:14). Sin doesn’t just arise from our enemies “out there”; sin is an enemy within; perhaps to our bewilderment, we find that our greatest enemy is the self. The image of God is still present, but it is shattered and enslaved–man still has a will, but now it is a sinful will.
We as humans have been given a very bleak diagnosis. We are sinners to the core of our being from the time we are born. Man fell into a state of sin where their free power of choice was not lost completely but rather corrupted. They went from desiring only righteousness to desiring only evil every moment of every day–“evil” defined as preferring something else above God and not being concerned with His glory. Any action that does not have God’s glory as its chief end; any love that does not have God as its chief object; and any practice that does not have God’s law as its ultimate guide is ultimately evil.
God doesn’t look upon us as heaven-deserving people who are “basically good” in need of divine assistance, but as hell-deserving sinners where, since the fall, “every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).
The Solution
As the storyline of Scripture progresses, we’re left wanting a specific solution: someone must come and be that perfect image.
Thankfully, Christ is that image.
The eternal Son of God, as He robes Himself in our nature, redeems humanity simply because He is that perfect human who shines as the perfect reflection of the Father’s lustrous character. It’s only necessary that the humans who took a hammer to God’s flawless image would need divine perfection to take on our humanity.
Jesus, then, shows what it truly means to be human. The reason is not only because He was sinless in His humanity, but because He is the last Adam who was not only the Son of God like Adam was (Luke 3:38), but He was “God with us,” the perfect image of God, the exact imprint of His nature.
Adam plunged us into a place where the curse of the law was upon us because he didn’t perfectly meet the standard. Christ perfectly met the standard of the law, then repaired the image of God in man by fulfilling the law in our place, becoming a curse for us, becoming broken on the Cross, and subjecting himself to the shattering brought about by the hands of the men He created.
As He was dying, He declared, “It is finished.” He satisfied the ultimate demands of God’s justice and absorbed the full weight of the wrath of God against sin. He took the blow. He paid what we owed. And as God raised Him from the dead, He accomplished for all time the redemption of all His people, offering hope, forgiveness, and eternal life which begins at the moment of faith in His Person.
Now anyone who trusts in the Son of God has passed from death to life since He has “delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Colossians 1:13-14). Now the saints stand and applaud as we sing, “Man of sorrows–what a name for the Son of God who came. Ruined sinners to reclaim; Hallelujah! What a Savior!”
Conclusion
The fundamental flaw of liberalism and modern progressivism is that they are seeking to call the righteous to repentance rather than allowing the weight of the law to reveal the weight of their own sin and thus drive them to Christ for salvation. Yes, salvation. Salvation from sin—its penalty of eternal hell, its power that keeps people in bondage, and its indwelling presence which imprisons the soul forever.
Machen concludes:
The fundamental fault of the modern Church is that she is busily engaged in an absolutely impossible task—she is busily engaged in calling the righteous to repentance. Modern preachers are trying to bring men into the Church without requiring them to relinquish their pride; they are trying to help men avoid the conviction of sin...Such is modern preaching. It is heard every Sunday in thousands of pulpits. But it is entirely futile. Even our Lord did not call the righteous to repentance, and probably we shall be no more successful than He.4
This chapter is adapted from my recent book, "The Freed Will: Reforming Our Understanding of Free Will.”
J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, New Edition (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 57.
Immediately, the objection can arise that one cannot just assume someone has ill motives while enacting some good in the world. Even if I grant that objection and they truly are motivated by helping others, expecting nothing in return, their motivation is still inherently corrupt simply because they are not acting by faith in God or to glorify God. God commands that all things ought to be done for His glory (1 Corinthians 10:31) and that whatever is not done in faith is sin (Romans 14:23).
Ibid. p. 58