The Doctrines of Grace 1
‘Total Depravity: Dead as a doornail with respect to God.’ (Ephesians 2:1-10)
By David Calderwood, GECN 03/02/13
For many Christians, and, I fear, some here today, the word ‘doctrine’ is like a swear word –
something to be avoided at all costs because it is boring and irrelevant.
But properly understood doctrine is always practical and the key to genuine Christian living
because it is the truth of Scripture gathered around a particular theme with direct implications
for how we think and act as Christians.
This morning I want to help you engage in this study of ‘The Doctrines of Grace’ by asking three
questions.
1. If someone asked you, “W hat is the Bible all about?” what would you say? Many Christians
would say, “It’s about God.” Right or wrong?
Clearly the Bible is totally God-centred, but it is not just about God. It is about God’s relationship
with mankind, how that special relationship collapsed and became hostile, and how God, in Jesus
acted to address the rebellion, fix the mess and restore the relationship..
Okay, since the Bible is about God in relationship with people: W hat is the most important
word or them e in the Bible?
Again, most Christians would quickly reply, “Grace”. Grace permeates every page of Scripture. It
speaks of what is required for God to re-establish and maintain relationship with his rebellious
people.
So grace reveals God’s character inasmuch as he treats his rebellious people quite contrary to
what they deserve.
And from this the third question zooms in even more. W ho is the active agent in the
salvation of a person? If you are a Christian, is your salvation entirely due to God’s activity in
your life OR have you contributed to your salvation at some point in some way?
Put the question another way: Did God save you by his sovereign activity in your life OR did God
provide assistance at key points so that you were able to save yourself by determined application
of your own resources and abilities?
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All the major reformers – Luther , Calvin, etc - having returned to serious study of Scripture, were
convinced that every aspect of salvation – from start to finish - is due to God’s sovereign actions
for us and in us.
They were forced to this conviction in response to the teaching of the bible that the nature and
extent of sin in a person leaves them unable and unwilling to save themself. That is why they used
the slogan grace alone.
But not all who called themselves Christians agreed with this teaching about salvation. Some
maintained that in spite of sin, a person could engage in a shared process of salvation in which
God does his bit and the individual also contributes.
With these questions in mind, I will introduce you to the history of what becam e known
as “The Doctrines of Grace” and the m nem onic of TULIP.
We need to go back in history to the year 1610. Almost 100 years after Luther started a debate
which became the Protestant Reformation, a Dutch professor of Theology, Jacobus Arminius, who
claimed to be a bible-based reformer, actually rejected what Luther and subsequent reformers
taught about salvation, and presented five alternative propositions.
These were based on the belief that though a person is severely affected by sin, they still have the
free-will or ability to choose to try and do the right thing towards God.
For his part, God sees this basic desire or faith and responds by giving the person the help they
need to achieve their salvation. God graciously makes available the death of Christ for forgiveness
of sin and the Holy Spirit’s assistance to live the life God desires of his people.
At the Synod of Dort in 1616 each of Arminius’ five points were answered and these answers
became known as ‘The Five Points of Calvinism’ or better, the doctrines of grace. They were never
intended to say all that Calvin said or teach all that the Bible has to say about grace, but they still
outline the major biblical teaching of salvation by Grace alone.
Now it should be noted that Arminius was only teaching what had been taught in the 5th century
by a man called Pelagius, a teaching that eventually became the dominant teaching on salvation
in Christendom until the protestant reformation.
In turn it has once more become the most common challenge to biblical teaching today – even
among so-called bible-believing evangelicals. And it is a serious challenge,. It is not just a slightly
different emphasis. Either God saves sinners OR God enables or helps sinners to save themselves.
The Doctrines of Grace teach that people, left to themselves, will not and cannot believe. But
given this hopeless plight, God acts in and for them, doing everything necessary for salvation,
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from long before they are born, until they get to heaven for eternity with Jesus. This is otherwise
known as the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation.
Salvation is not something that a person would naturally choose; it is not something we achieve
through our own resources; it is not a process in which we co-operate with God, each contributing
our part; it is not a position that we hang onto by our own efforts.
Friends, this has been a long introduction, but necessary if we are to understand the key to
salvation truth: that is, the Bible’s teaching about sin and its impact on mankind, which is known
as the doctrine of ‘total depravity’ and its companion truth of ‘total inability’
And now I want to dem onstrate this truth from Ephesians 2:1-10. There are dozens and
dozens of passages across Scripture I could use, but I just have time for one and this is particularly
clear. Paul makes two points as he writes to the Christians in Ephesus.
1. At one time you were spiritually dead (1-3).
On the matter of sin, Paul is absolutely clear about the extent and severity of human sinfulness.
In graphic picture language Paul says that at one time every person is like a corpse in terms of
their relationship with God. Every part of their being: body, mind, attitudes, emotions, affections
and will was effectively deadened leaving people totally unaware of their true spiritual situation
and unable to do anything to change their spiritual state.
How did such a desperate situation develop? Verse 2, it is the direct consequence of sin or
rebellion – the expression of which is following Satan’s rejection of God and his determined
opposition to doing things God’s way.
So, a person left to their natural inclinations is actually hostile to God. This does not always show
in an aggressive rejection of God. It may also show in a very religious person who is a rebel in
their religious practice by reducing God and making him fit their practice.
And this in turn leads to a legal problem with God as he responds to rebellion by justly
condemning the rebel. Verse 3, people are guilty before God, the objects of God’s wrath.
And worst of all people don’t even realise their predicament and certainly don’t realise that they
are unable to please God in any way. Any attempt to try and win God’s favour and make them
acceptable to God when they die is doomed to failure.
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At this point I want to pause and answer two common objections people throw up:
1. Are people really that sinful?
Total depravity does not mean any given person is as bad as is possible to be. Nor does it mean
that a person is not capable of doing good things in our world. Nor does it suggest that the
average person has no conscience of right and wrong. The Bible nowhere says that, and clearly
there is much good done in our world by many people.
But it does mean that the condition in which a person in born is not morally neutral. The reality
of the sinful nature which every baby is born with is that every person is hard-wired to oppose
and reject God’s rule in their life.
Sin has mutilated and disabled every faculty to do with being image bearers, so that a person
cannot think, choose or do anything that would be acceptable to God.
2. Don’t people have a free-will whereby they can choose to serve the Lord?
The problem here is that people confuse real choices with what is called free will. An illustration
might help. Imagine a vulture circling over a rotten sheep carcass which is beside a baked lamb
dinner served with gravy and vegies. Which will the vulture choose?
Clearly the vulture makes a real choice, and is free to do so. But it will always make the choice
based on how it is hard-wired. A vulture by nature will choose the rotten carcass.
In the same way, people, who are hard-wired to reject God in their hearts and minds and attitudes
will make real choices limited by their sinful nature. In practical terms people are not sinners
because they choose to sin. The opposite is true. People choose to sin because they are sinners,
hard-wired to disobey God.
So, where to from here? When you seek treatment from a doctor, the doctor’s assessment of your
illness determines the treatment he dispenses. If you have a headache he’ll tell you to take a
Panadol. But if you have life threatening heart disease, he’ll do major surgery.
Do you see the point? His starting point determines what follows. And that is precisely Paul’s
point. He doesn’t think that people are just slightly off-colour or sick spiritually so that they need
a little boost to get them back to the point where they can help themselves again.
No, a person’s predicament before God is much more serious than that. Before God they are
spiritually dead and helpless. He puts it in different words in verse 12 – without hope and without
God in the world. Now that’s a bleak prognosis isn’t it?
So where to from here?
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2. But God made you alive (4-10).
Friends, just let that statement sink in a moment. And then keep reading to see that everything
mentioned in these verses is something that God does for us or does in us. Salvation is God’s work
from start to finish.
God’s love and mercy combine to give new life to the sinner. God knew it would never be enough
just to announce to people that new life was possible through Jesus. Since people were dead they
needed to be renewed or resurrected and only God’s power could do that.
It was not enough to bring the gospel message to people, God needed to bring sinners to the
saviour and actually make them alive. It is not that we came alive by our own choice. Verses 6-7
God has given Christians all the same resurrection privileges that Jesus got.
Verse 8, even our faith, which is our response to Christ, is a gift from God. God, through his Spirit,
actually opens our eyes to our predicament, changes our desires and attitudes so that we reach
out and take God’s gracious gift of salvation.
And finally, verses 9-10, even the changed lifestyle of new obedience and service of Jesus, that
results from being saved, from having new attitudes and desires is something that God had
intended for us to do all along.
Given this, why do people find this truth so hard to accept?
It is because of the starting point for thinking about God and people and salvation. Throughout
history the pattern is the same. When people move away from God’s description of sin and the
sinner, then people start to believe they can save themselves with varying degrees of help from
God.
In our own day, the pattern is the same. So many so-called evangelical, protestant churches have
as their starting point the humanist philosophy of our society rather than the bible.
And the belief of our world is that man is at the centre of things. We are inherently good and
given the right circumstances, our own reason and logic can control our world and in the same
way we decide our own spiritual destiny.
So with this starting point these churches have lost a real sense of God’s holy character and
demands – God is happy to respond to what we think and decide is right.
And they have lost a real sense of sin – sin is no longer an offence against God, but simply a
breach of accepted standards in our world, and people are free to change these acceptable
standards.
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So the gospel is all about people and their needs and desires. It might be the gospel of self-esteem
– that Jesus will help you feel fulfilled and happy and strong, or the gospel of good Christian
disciplines and commitment, believing that if I read my bible enough and pray enough and go to
church enough and don’t have any bad habits, then I’ll be saved.
The Bible is totally opposed to any such thinking. God saves sinners, acting contrary to what we
deserve and doing for us what we could never do for ourselves. This is such a blow to human
arrogance and self-confidence that people prefer to replace the truth with a lie.
Given this, what sort of people ought Christians to be?
God is very clear that his ultimate purpose in saving sinners is that he would have a great
multitude of people, the church, who would gladly honour him and live under his rule and
thereby give him the glory and respect he so richly deserves.
If you and I really believe that we were as dead as a doornail in respect of relationship with God
and that God has made us alive by his powerful mercy and grace when we deserved only
condemnation, then surely we will be fanatically devoted fans who will love to sing the praises of
our God and saviour.
If you and I really believe that we were dead in sin and under God’s wrath before God’s grace burst
into our lives, then we will be both humble and compassionate – not looking down our noses at
the sin and desperate situation of others.
And if you and I really believe that sin is so offensive to God that nothing less than the death of
his son could deal with it, then we will be careful about our own sin, realising our ongoing
propensity to set our own agenda even if it means rejecting God’s word.
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