Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

Psalm 8 to the chief musician on the instrument of Gath. A psalm of David. Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth, who have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants, you have ordained strength because of your enemies, that you may silence the enemy and the avenger. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have ordained.

What is man that you are mindful of him and the son of man that you visit him for you have made him a little lower than the angels and you have crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him to have dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet. All sheep and oxen, even the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish of the sea that pass through the paths of the seas.

Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is your name in all the earth. Amen. Let’s pray. Lord God, we do praise your holy name. We thank you, Father, for your wondrous word and for your presence with us today by the Spirit. We thank you for our Savior’s work. Minister to us, Lord God, a sense of who man was created to be, the horrible effects of his sin, and then the great wonders of our redemption. Thank you, Lord God, for this wonderful psalm before us.

Bless and guide us Lord God as we seek to think through this topic of who we are and how we can glorify you in Jesus’ name we ask for your blessing upon us and by your spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

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Well, we’re working our way through the Canons of Dort. And this week we do indeed have copies of the Canons of Dort in pamphlets or little booklets in the back in the pew holder. Sorry, on these front seats, we probably have the holder if you—I don’t know if they put them in the seats or not, but anyway, we’re trying to make available to you. It will be in the Canons of Dort for probably a couple months. And so we want you to begin to read through this material in your homes.

And we’re discussing kind of foundational truth for who we are as a church, properly evaluating our culture. You know, not everything in the Canons of Dort has immediate application to us. Much of it does, but their enemies were a little different than ours. Although the root and source is the fall in the garden, and so there’s much commonality, as we’ll see again today and in the next couple of weeks.

We’re discussing now what the Canons refer to as the third and fourth heads of doctrine. So you’re familiar with the term TULIP. This is, you know, what’s known as Calvinism. Well, if you’re not, you should be by now. I know that these words and the children’s handout today are a little big for some of them, but I know too that some of you adults like the little children’s handout to kind of remind yourself where I’m at and what’s going on.

So I put on there what TULIP stands for as we use it in the context of conservative Christians, Bible-believing Christians who see the historic church coming forth through men like John Calvin and Luther, etc. Now, you know, Calvin—well, yeah, you know, we’re not saying Calvin got everything right. He didn’t. Recent discussion in a group of pastors that were sort of very simpatico with you—know, Jim Jordan—says we’re not Calvinists, we’re Bereans. We’re followers of Martin Bucer more than Calvin. We’re not followers of any man ultimately, but we’ve been influenced probably more by Bucer, who influenced Calvin’s worship and who influenced Calvin in terms of the application of God to the culture, etc.

Any event, TULIP—the T stands for Total Depravity. Now that’s what we’re going to talk about today and I’ll tell you in a minute why we’re doing it today even though it’s first in this acronym. TULIP—Dutch Calvinism, I guess we could call this, right? Tulips from Holland.

Total Depravity, Unconditional Election. Choice. God chooses some people not based on any conditions. So, Unconditional Election. Election is like, you know, and again, we use these Christian words. And what do they mean? Well, it just means to choose. God chooses some people to send them to heaven, to bring them into the new life of Jesus Christ. We have Jesus dying on the cross for their sins.

So, unconditional—not based on the condition of anything in them, because of his love.

Limited Atonement. Limited. L-I-M-I-T-E-D. So the atonement is not limited in terms of its value. If anything, we would say that we believe more in an unlimited sense of the value of God than what many who teach that limited atonement is wrong teach. They say, “Well, Jesus died for every last sin of every last person.” We don’t think so. But we think that the value of Christ’s death and his blood on the cross, the great ransom price that he paid, far exceeds even that. You can’t really estimate the value of Christ the divine God-man and his death on the cross.

But it’s limited—the atonement in sense of who it was for. Who did Jesus die for? He died for his people, for his sheep, for his bride. Over and over again, the scriptures tell us this.

Jesus and the other important part of this that we kind of have talked about a lot, but it’s very important you get this home: People that believe in unlimited atonement tend to think that there’s no effectual atonement for anybody. If he died for everybody’s sins, why isn’t everybody going to heaven? If you take a biblical view of the atonement, that Jesus Christ, you know, redeemed us, propitiated God’s wrath toward us, was our substitute, and reconciled us to God on that cross 2,000 years ago—everybody he died for, that’s real atonement. Jesus made a real atonement, restoring man to God his Father again on that cross. And if it’s a real atonement, it obviously isn’t for every last person because God says some people go to hell.

So limited in terms of its scope. Who did Jesus die for?

Irresistible Grace. So Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace. What does it mean? Well, we’ll talk more about this in the next couple of weeks, but it means that if God wants you, he’s got you. His grace drawing you to salvation is irresistible by man. Who would want to resist it? But it is irresistible. We in our sin and folly do want to resist it. But God in his grace calls us to himself nonetheless.

And then finally, P stands for Perseverance. Big word. They keep going. They keep faithful. The Perseverance of the Saints. God preserves those that he has drawn.

Okay. So God unconditionally elects people to save out of the totally depraved body of humanity. He sent his son in time to die for their sins. He sends his spirit to draw them to himself and God will cause them to persevere in the faith. God preserves his people. That’s TULIP.

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The historical origins of these five points were five doctrines or sets of doctrines given to the Dutch church primarily by men who didn’t believe these things. And then there was a canon held. People met together in a city called Dort, or Dordrecht, and there they responded to these things under five heads of doctrine. So remember, TULIP isn’t the order in which we’re going through them because that’s not how they did it.

They started—I think—the right place to start with God rather than man. So they start with Unconditional Election by God, focusing on that first before they get around to Total Depravity. So the Canons, if we wanted to spell out the way their heads of doctrine be, it would be ULIPT, but what does that mean? Nothing. So we have TULIP, but remember it’s not the order of the Canons. And the order of the Canons is significant.

These were wise men. They didn’t get everything right, I’m sure, but they were very wise men. And I think it’s right to start with God first and then go to man. So that’s what we’re talking about now.

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Today we’re beginning then the section they—now they combine together Total Depravity and Irresistible Grace. Third and fourth heads of doctrine. They didn’t separate those in terms of their numbered points about them. And so we’re going to consider these, but we’re going to consider them first as Total Depravity and then we’ll talk about Irresistible Grace.

And as you see at the head of your outline, they didn’t call it Total Depravity, Irresistible Grace. They referred to it as the Corruption of Man, his Conversion to God, and the manner thereof. We call it Total Depravity. They didn’t. They called it the Corruption of Man, his Conversion to God, and the manner thereof.

So, what’s man like? How does God go about taking those that he has chosen and bringing them to faith in himself? How does he convert us? This is what this section of the Canons are about. Pretty essential, important stuff.

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So now in the Canons themselves, if you want to open that little Canons pamphlet up, open that up. And there is a section, I don’t know what page it’s on. I don’t have your same pamphlet as you have, but as you leaf through it, who can tell me where this third and fourth head of doctrine, what page that starts on?

65. 65. So turn to page 65. And you know, there’s different translations. The Canons, I think, were actually put together, I think, in Latin, not Dutch, but you know, the translations vary from one to the other. We’ve chosen a particular translation at random really. But 65 is where this whole section starts.

And as you start to read through that, just scan the first three or four points. I’ll just take 30 seconds here, just scan under that third head of doctrine, the first, you know, three or four statements or articles that they make. Look at that. Okay.

Now, you’ll notice that the first thing they say does not refer to man’s fall, right? The first thing they say in Article One is: Man was originally formed to the image of God. His understanding was adorned with a true and saving knowledge of his Creator and of spiritual things. His heart and will were upright, all his affections pure, and the whole man was holy. But next sentence, revolting from God by the instigation of the devil—and then it goes on to talk about Total Depravity.

They begin with a statement first, just like I think they’re right to start first with God, Unconditional Election, before they get to man’s depravity. Even with man, they begin by very briefly sketching man’s first estate. Some have called it his first condition. Then they talk about his second condition. And then finally, they’re going to talk about the result of God’s conversion of man into his third condition.

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There was a Puritan named Thomas Boston—died in 1732, Scottish Puritan—and he wrote a famous book called “Human Nature in the Four-fold State,” or the old word, four-fold estate. So what Boston did was he built on the work of Augustine many years—you know, over a millennium before—and he said there’s four states of man. We’re going to talk about man. Which state is he in you’re talking about?

There’s the original created state. And in man’s original created state, he could do right. He had the capability to do what’s right. That’s sure. But he could also do wrong. He could sin, as we know, because Adam did sin. So in the first estate, he can do right and he can sin. And this is the way Augustine described it, these four states, and Boston kind of did a whole book on this subject.

Well, then Adam falls and the state of man now has changed. It becomes what we would call totally depraved. Total doesn’t mean he’s as bad as he can get. It means that his fall, his twistedness, his depravity has influenced everything in his life, including his will, very importantly, as we’ll talk about in the next few weeks.

So man has fallen into this second estate, we could call it, or second state of man—his fallen condition. And in man’s fallen condition, he can’t do good anymore, but he can sin. So he could sin, he can do what’s right. Now he can sin, but he can’t do what’s right.

God then graciously converts people, a number of people, specifically a number that he’s chosen ahead of time. And he brings us to new life in Jesus Christ. That’s the third state. So you got the original created state, the fallen state, the redeemed state.

In our third state, which is where most of us are, Lord willing—hey, right. Well, that’s where all of us are. I assume that’s the case. In our state, we can do good. We couldn’t before we were converted by God, but we can now. We can do good. But we can still sin. So we’re sort of like Adam was, right? We can sin. But we can do good also.

In the final state, once we enter into the eternal state of man after our death and God raises us up in Christ in this new body—even before we get a new body in the final state after death—now we’re in the fourth state of man, they said. And in the fourth state, man can no longer sin. So for the first time, he cannot sin. But of course, he can do good.

Well, those are the four states. I might say there’s five because there’s a—you might want to differentiate where we go after we die, and there’s a difference between that and then finally the general resurrection of the body. But don’t worry about that. We can call it four states. So man’s created state, his fallen state, his redeemed state, and then we could say his glorified state.

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Well, these start with man’s created state. And while Total Depravity talks about the fallen estate—the second state of man—we want to spend a little time on that, but mostly today I want to look at man’s first state.

All right. Now, we do get a little bit on the fallen state here. First, look at your outlines. Point number one: Man’s Fallen State. And this is what I mean—his original state—his, it’s not his original state—his second state as seen in Romans 3:9-18. So if you turn in your Bibles to Romans 3, we have a description here of man in his fallen state.

Now, we read responsibly from Psalm 14 because much of this section is quoted from—well, all the citations are from the Psalms and the bulk of them are from Psalm 14. And you’ll notice as we read through Romans 3 that you’ll see this same thing. So Romans 3:9 and following:

“What then? Are we better than they? Not at all. Now he’s talking about Jew and Gentile. Two groups of people. God had created, you know, a priestly nation to minister to the rest of the world. And in the New Testament, that’s being done away with. This is what Romans is all about. It’s about how there’s not Jew or Gentile in the new world. There’s not a separate priestly nation. The gospel goes everywhere and not by way of a special priestly people set up any longer. So this Jew-Gentile thing is going away.

And Paul is saying that both Jew and Gentile in their second state, in their fallen state, after Adam, were all the same. It doesn’t make any difference if you’re Jew or Gentile. He’s saying we’re all—we better? No. For we have previously charged both Jews and Greeks that they are all under sin. As it is written: There is none righteous, no, not one. There is none who understands. There is none who seeks after God. They have all turned aside. They have together become unprofitable. There is none who does good, no, not one.”

So he’s saying first of all what you need to know about man’s second state is his condition. What is that state like? Well, it’s bad. And it’s bad universally. All men apart from God, before he brings them into the third state, begin in the second state. And they’re not righteous. They’re not good. There’s none who does what’s right.

What does righteous mean? By the way, we use these Christian terms and the world has no idea what we’re talking about, and so it makes up its own definition of the terms. And sometimes we don’t know what we’re talking about either. You know, a good standard synonym that you can use in your family talking to your kids about righteousness is justice. Justice. And so they’re not just anymore because they’ve rejected God and his law. That was the sin of Adam—creating for himself his own law. So they’re not righteous because they’ve rejected God’s law. Their state is one of rebellion against God and they don’t seek after God. They’ve turned aside. They’ve become unprofitable. There’s none who does good, no, not one.

So he begins with their state. They have a state of practical atheism.

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Now it’s important, maybe just to make a little pastoral point here to this congregation. “There is none who seeks after God. They’re atheists.” But you know, Paul is describing church people here too. The Jews he’s describing particularly—the who rejected Jesus. And church people who don’t have a sense of God in their lives, who don’t actively seek after God—they’re involved in what you could call practical atheism. They’re slip. That’s the old man. That’s what we tend to. That’s what God is replacing.

We have the capability of sinning. And when we sin, we fall into this being like the second state of man, even though we’re in the third. And we become practical atheists.

How about you? Are you an atheist? Well, no. You believe in God. That’s while you’re here. But are you a practical theist or a practical atheist? Is most of your life concerned with pleasing God and doing righteousness and justice according to his standard? We call it a Christian worldview these days, I guess. I don’t know. I guess it’s okay. But are you a theist in your practical life? Or are you actually kind of practically atheistic?

Be careful, right? God says that’s the second state and that’s not who we’re supposed to be anymore.

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Now he moved from that state into actual actions. “Their throat is an open tomb. With their tongues they have practiced deceit. 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 ways.”

All right. So now the actual—in man’s fallen state—Total Depravity—he’s totally in rebellion against God. He’s not as bad as he can be. We’ll see. He still can do some good. But he is depraved and twisted in everything he does. And worse than that, not only is he unable not to do these things as he’s in rebellion against God, but he’s actively given over to practicing death and trying to kill other people.

His mouth is a grave. In other words, he’s trying to—with his tongue—kill other people and bring them into his grave. You see, that’s the idea here. He wants to kill people. He wants to attack people. The poison of asps with their lips. You know, Satan—they’re like Satan. We’re going to see or Satan’s seed.

Satan in Revelation describes Satan’s attack on the church. And first he tries to persecute the church in Jerusalem and kill them outright. And when that fails, because they flee, you know, God always uses jiu-jitsu on Satan. He attempts to knock off the church and God just has it grow and multiply. It’s kind of like cutting back—well, I don’t know. There’s probably weeds or blackberries or something. You cut them back, they actually grow more. So you know, this is what happens. And then the church grows into the larger region and what Satan does then is—in Revelation he’s described as wormwood, and he throws wormwood or bitterness into the water. And what’s that? What that is, you know, when Jesus comes, the water now flows out of the temple and fills the whole earth, and that’s the doctrine of the church going out.

So failing to actually kill, literally, the church, attempts to kill them through the poison of asps under his tongue. He introduces false doctrine into the church. So Paul wrote Galatians, the other Jerusalem council—they, you know, antibodies poured into that river of poison that Satan has created, and the end result is the propagation of the gospel more. It’s a good thing God uses jiu-jitsu.

But the point is, this is what Satan is like. This is what man, apart from the grace of God, is like. He is positively given—not just to rebellion against God, but to murdering his fellow man. He’s involved in a death style.

“All them that hate me, God says, love death.” And this Paul is picking speaking specifically here about the Jews who are trying to poison the well. We use that term. That’s what Satan does. That’s what ungodly man does. This is who he is. This is man in his second estate.

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And then finally, the source of all this is described in verse 17: “The way of peace they have not known.” They’re not familiar with it. They don’t know it. They can’t have peace. And then the source of all this is given to us in verse 18: “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Why are they so rebellious against God? Why are they so destructive to humankind? No fear. No fear before their eyes. So this is how fallen man is described in Romans and also in the Psalter. He has a sinful condition, a sinful lifestyle, a sinful source of that—his he has no fear of God. And so fear of God is quite important for us as Christians. It’s the reverse of what he’s like.

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Now the second place we want to look at here is—let me mention something before we move on about Psalm 14 that we just read responsively.

Now Paul is using these quotations from Psalm 14 to talk about all mankind apart from the grace of God. Now Psalm 14, however, in its description of evil men, it describes those men who are persecuting the righteous. So it’s really describing two sorts of men: men still in the second state and men in the third state.

Because it goes on to say, after they’ve all gone aside, he says that these guys are “eating up my people as they eat bread. They were in great fear for God is in the generation of the righteous. You have shamed the council of the poor because the Lord is his refuge. Oh, that the salvation of Israel would come out of Zion.”

So Psalm 14 portrays a dark picture of man and his fallen state. But it also portrays man in his third state, his redeemed state—that out of that, men are going to be defended by God. Psalm 14 doesn’t end at a downer. It ends on an upper. That the salvation of God’s people will come out of Zion, out of the worship center of David, and as a result, they’ll prosper in the land. So remember that Psalm 14 has a happy ending.

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Well, Ephesians 2:1-9 is the other place we want to turn to look at these children of wrath. So turn there in your scriptures. Ephesians 2:1-9.

“I think is what we just read here. And it’s kind of similar. There’s different sections of this that describe different conditions of the unrighteous. And now he’s talking about men who have been moved from the second state to the third state, from their fallen state to the redeemed state. So in Ephesians 2, verse one:

“You he has made alive”—third state—”who were in your second state dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked according to the course of this world.”

Now, so he’s saying first of all, your condition was you were dead men walking. Okay? You were dead, but you’re not totally dead in the sense of you can’t do anything. What you’re alive to is sin. You’re dead to what’s right. You’re dead to God. You can’t do anything about that. You’re a walking dead man. But you actually not. It’s worse than that. It’s worse than that. You’re just dead in your trespasses. You’re alive still to sin. Your mouth is dead. It’s a supplicer, but you’ll use still that mouth to destroy other people and kill them. Okay?

So, “You were dead, but you walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience.”

So you’re dead, but you’re given over to disobedience. You’re dead to righteousness, to God. You’re alive to sin. You’re a son of disobedience. That’s what you are in the second estate.

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So in everything that you are, you can be characterized—not just a part of you. Total Depravity means that our twistedness relates to everything that we are. Not as bad as we can be. You can get worse. I mean, some people are like Hitler. Some people aren’t like Hitler. We’re not as bad as we could be, but we’re in rebellion to God and ministering death to varying degrees in every part of who we are.

“So this says, ‘Among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and we’re by nature children of wrath.’”

So we are children of wrath by nature. What does it mean children of wrath? Well, I think what it means is we’re children upon whom the wrath of God is always present. “Who told you God loves you? God hates all workers of iniquity. Children of wrath. Well, maybe it means they’re children who are always angry.”

No, because in Ephesians, verse chapter 5:6, listen to this: “Let no man deceive you with vain words for because of these things comes the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience.”

That’s why I stress children. So he says the wrath of God comes upon the children of disobedience, and he says that in your fallen state before you were redeemed—this is what you were like. You were dead men to God, but you were alive to sin. You had no ability to come to God or desire to you wanted to sin and kill other people and do horrible things. You are subject to your own sin. It’s worse than just doing it. You’re actually serving sin in your fallen condition. And you’re under the constant judgment of God. You’re children of wrath. You’re a son of disobedience. You’re a child of wrath. The anger of God is upon you.

So a man in his fallen state is totally depraved. He’s got a bad condition. He’s got bad actions going on. His source is no fear of God and his eschatology is the wrath of God. That’s how it’s portrayed for us here.

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Now we can also, in your outline, then there’s some brief comments I want to make before we get to Psalm 8.

The Fallen State as Total Depravity. Well, what does it mean? Fallen man can do still some qualified good. So we’re not saying by Total Depravity man can’t do anything good. The Bible calls some things that man does good. Fallen man does things that are good in the sight of God. We won’t look at the references, but in 2 Kings, other kings do the same thing. God says, “He did what was good in my sight.” And then he kills people and murders them and ends up, you know, in hell. So this is not a member of the elect community of God, but still he’s described as a king doing some good.

Even, for instance, Luke 6:33: “If you do good to those who do good to you, what is there to that? Even sinners do the same.”

So sinners can do good to people, some kind of good. We’re not saying they can’t. Acts 28:2: “The natives Paul says the natives the pagans there, if they were there to evangelize, showed us unusual kindness, for they kindled the fire.”

So you know, we’re not saying people can’t be kind, can’t do some good things. That that’s not what we’re saying by Total Depravity. But we’re saying that when they do good things—for instance, their motivation is not to serve God or to love him. Their motivation is rebellion against God. This is who they are. This is what they’ll always do. They’re always some aspect of sin to everything that they do in terms of either motivation or actual action.

And so, number one: it’s total in the sense of affecting all their actions. Even if they may be good actions, they have improper motives. And number two: every bit of their person is involved in their rebellion against God.

B. He is unable and unwilling to do true good. So he can do some good, but he can’t do true good.

Roman 8:7: “The carnal mind is enmity, hatred against God. It is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.” It’s not subject and it can’t be subject. It won’t subject itself to the law of God. It cannot subject itself to the law of God.

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Let me say here, by the way, that in order to understand the state of man, you have to understand that he’s related to Adam. We don’t like this, but the fact is the human beings are not isolated individuals. We’re part of a race of people. We all descend from Adam. And the beginning of our antinomianism is to deny that what Adam did has a direct covenantal impact on us. And the Bible says clearly that it does. “In Adam’s fall, we sinned all.” Okay? And because of that sin, the wrath of God is upon us.

“Well, that’s not fair.”

Well, take it up with God. It is fair. The only source of fairness and justice is God’s word and God’s law. And the problem with you is when you say that it isn’t fair, you’re thinking about yourself as a total isolated individual. Arminianism begins with splitting people up into little BBs rolling around on a table unrelated to everybody else. But even that analogy breaks down because BBs come from a common ingot or piece of steel. That’s who we are. There’s a commonality of the human race. God made it that way.

And we can talk about covenantal headship and we put per terms on it and that’s nice and good and it’s profitable for some of us. But what you need to know is, too bad: your humanity, humanity came from Adam. Adam represented all of us. And in Adam’s fall, we all sinned. Original sin is ours in Adam. Before we do one thing wrong, we’re guilty before God. And that’s what the Bible affirms.

And this is very important because the Arminians rejected original sin. The Arminians continue, by the way, with their breaking things up. Once they break every individual off from the corporate body of humankind, the next thing they do is break mankind into different parts. If you read in this section at home, where we might get to it a little later, what they end up saying is well, yeah, we can see where man’s mind isn’t quite as good as it used to be. He’s got some darkness going on. And we can see that men’s passions tend to get inflamed. We go after the wrong things in terms of what we want to, you know, our emotions get bad. But the will, you see, man’s ability to will good or to will evil—that’s not fallen.

And so what do we end up with? Salvation then is trying to change man’s intellectual understanding or man’s passions so that’ll make his will more able to choose what’s right, and eventually he comes to Jesus. Evangelism for Arminianism is changing man’s condition in terms of his environment, his educational environment or his moral environment. The root of this is Pelagius. Man’s will is not fallen, is what they say.

So they break up mankind from Adam. There’s no original sin. They break up mankind from himself. Our will is somehow separate from our mind and our passions. And then God’s way of looking at us, we’re one whole creature. Total Depravity, including the twistedness of our will. We have wills. We have free wills. We have free wills that are free to choose good or evil. And that will in the second state will always choose evil. Could be a milder form of evil, not quite as bad as Hitler, but it’s always going to choose evil. So the will is affected by the fall.

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Now I think about it. We’ve said that this has relevance to ourselves, right? We’ve moved away from Calvinism. We’ve turned into an Arminian world. Evangelicalism rejects the five points of Calvin, either some of them or all of them. And really, whether they know it or not, they become kind of semi-Pelagian. Pelagius taught no original sin. Man is a blank slate. We live in a Pelagian world.

You know, Bob Dylan had this great song: “We live in a political world.” And that’s right. We live in a political world where political governors are more and more a part of our life. Why? Because there, they’re Arminians there. They believe that man’s problem is not his will. The problem is his mind or his environment. And if you clean him up and keep away guns or liquor or cigarettes or whatever it is that his passions tend to want, clean up all that stuff, and then you also educate him a whole bunch. You take care of his problem with his fallen intellect and his problem with his fallen passions, and he has this neutral will that then will be kind of able to choose what’s right and he can create a good world.

Then that’s the world we live in today, folks. To accomplish that, you need the civil state providing schools of education to bring your intellect up and the civil state suppressing, you know, various kinds of moral ills. And they, you know, they’re like the soup of the day, soup dour, you know, our culture, right? You know, 30 years ago we tried to have a fairly moral culture, suppressed pornography and stuff. Now that’s all okay, but what’s not okay is alcohol or cigarettes or having children. Now is the other problem because you know this is coming back by the way—I’ll talk about that later. But the point is, we’re totally fallen and if you don’t understand that, then you’re not going to understand why our world stresses so much education and changing your moral environment. That’s salvation. We live in a political world because we live in a Pelagian world.

Movie about that is “The Truman Show.” The Truman Show. This is humanistic Arminian salvation. It wasn’t attacking Christianity. The screenplay was written by a Roman Catholic. It was attacking Christoff. Christoff was the leader of this world. The god—Truman’s god—was an Arminian god who didn’t want to subject himself to Christ and thought that if he just gave Truman the right upbringing, the right environment completely controlled by him, by the state, right—complete Pelagian world, complete political world—then this is salvation and Truman will bring us. He’ll be the new savior.

And of course, God intervenes. There’s an Exodus scene and he breaks out of Egypt. He breaks out of Arminianism. He comes in and he does it in relationship, by the way, to the prayers of his girlfriend who’s outside of the fake world in the real world. And she’s praying. This is how he’s delivered. Wonderful movie. But it’s about this same thing. Truman’s world is a Pelagian world, a political world, a controlled world, because that’s what Arminianism teaches.

So it splits us off from the common fallen Adam. It splits us off from ourselves. The will is subject—is seen as not fallen where our intellect and passions are. Well, man is unable—the Bible says—and unwilling. He cannot and he will not.

Romans, another passage—we’ve talked about this before. 1 Corinthians 2:14, etc. So the scriptures plainly teach this. We’ll get more about this in the next few weeks.

And then there are various limitations on fallen man. Under C of your outline:

He’s blind and deaf to spiritual truth. We won’t look at the passages. But that’s how man is described over and over again. He’s a blind man. He’s a deaf man. Cannot know spiritual truth.

Second, so he can do some good, but he can’t really do real good and he cannot approach God, and his state is described as being blind and deaf.

Secondly, he’s a slave to sin. As I said, he’s not just in a sinful original state of sin. He’s actually enslaved to sin. Jesus says, “I say to you in John 8:34: ‘Whoever commits sin is a slave of sin.’”

Romans 6:20: “When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.”

So he’s saying in your second state, you are a slave to sin. Well, now you’re supposed to consider yourself a slave to righteousness, to do what’s right. The point is the second state is described as being one of being enslaved to sin.

Third, he’s unable to repent or come to Christ. And I’ve got references there for you on that one as well. So this is what fallen man is. This is Total Depravity.

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And in the description in your our handouts, let’s look back real quickly at the Canons again on page—was it 65? So first it describes man’s creation, “but revolting from God by the instigation of the devil, by his own free will he forfeited these excellent gifts and in the place thereof became involved in blindness of mind, horrible darkness, vanity and perverseness of judgment, became wicked, rebellious, and obdurate in heart and will, and impure in his affections.”

So there’s three sections there. It says his mind was darkened, bad judgments, etc. His will is bad, and he is impure in his affections. So in Adam’s fall, we sinned all. This is who we are.

Article Two: “Man after the fall begat children in his own likeness. So man has this state, the second state. And in the second state, the only thing he can do is create more children just like himself. He creates children in his own likeness. The posterity of Adam is just like Adam.

And he says that ‘a corrupt stock produced a corrupt offspring. Hence all the posterity of Adam, Christ only excepted, have derived corruption from their original parent, not by imitation as the Pelagians of old asserted, but by the propagation of a vicious nature.’”

So Pelagius—it’s not because you have a bad nature, but when you come out of the womb you see your parents sinning and therefore you sin. And we say no. We say that we’re one humanity in Adam and that in that humanity, the second state, you come out of the womb kicking and screaming against God. In fact, you’re like that in the womb.

I saw years ago, I saw this thing on sharks. And the particular kind of shark has a couple of sharks in the mom’s womb. And the way the shark has babies is the strongest baby survives. And the strongest baby survives by eating the other shark or sharks in the womb. In the womb, these sharks eat one another. That’s how we are. We’re conceived in sin.

A sexual act is great and good in marriage. Not—that’s not talking about. It’s saying that we’re conceived. Man can only bring forth children just like himself. And he’s in rebellion against God. And he’s got his tongue is an open sepulcher. So those little cute little babies, soon as they grow teeth, you know, that’s who we are in Adam. Okay?

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And so goes on to say: “They’re neither able nor willing to return to God, to return to reform the depravity of their nature or dispose themselves to reformation.”

Article Four: “There remains, however, in man since the fall the glimmerings of natural light.” We’ll talk about that more later. And I won’t go through the refutations, but the first few refutations talk about what I talked about before. They talk about the fact that the Arminians say that man’s problem is that he’s not totally fallen. He’s mostly fallen. He’s fallen in his passions and in his understanding. But his will is not fallen. It’s just affected by these bad things that he does and he sees around him.

All right. So that’s the description of man in his in his second state.

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But let’s return to man in his first state.

Summarizing: Since Adam’s sin, all people by nature are children of wrath under God’s punishment. In this state, men always use their wills to sin. So they have wills, but they always use them to sin. In this state, the Bible says all men are blind. Blind. They are all—they are like walking dead men. Just summarizing here for the kids in their outline. They’re walking dead men, but they’re alive to sin. That’s the second state.

Now, let’s return to Psalm 8 and see man’s created and redeemed state. Because, as we said, when we’re redeemed, we’re made back to like Adam was in a very real sense. Adam could sin. He could do what’s right. We can do what’s right. We can sin.

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Well, Psalm 8 says that man has been made with glory and honor. “What is man?” and Psalm 8 tells us something about man. Man is created to exercise dominion over the world. Man does not—Psalm 8 doesn’t say that man has innate dignity. That’s not the point of Psalm 8. Psalm 8 says man has glory and honor and it ties that specifically to the calling of man to exercise dominion.

So, you know, the Psalm 8 begins: “How excellent is your name in all the earth.” Oh, verse it says, “Oh Lord, our Lord.” Very important, right? The Lord is our Lord. We’re in relationship. And that’s why we can sing these kind of things about him. “How excellent is your name in all the earth, who have set your glory above the heavens.”

Some translators have translated this: You have chanted, you have your glory chanted above the heavens. In other words, in the heavenly throne room, the angels are chanting the glory of God, chanting his praises. And see, if you think about that, you know that we get into the heavenly throne room, and Isaiah—they’re chanting his praises.

And then the next verse: “Out of the mouths of babes and nursing infants, down here on earth, from the great to the low, you’ve ordained strength because of your enemies, that you may silence the enemy and the avenger.”

Well, once more, we have the oft-repeated theme that victory comes from praise and chanting and worship. And the little children they fulfill this, of course, in on the day of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. And the little ones, and this psalm is quoted, etc. So the praise of Jesus is the defeat of God’s enemies. But the point is he’s bringing us down to man, and he says the mouths of babes is not only praising God but having a positive dominion effect in the context of the world. Amazing. Amazing.

So he takes man in his lowly apparent lowly condition and exalts his view of himself. This is very important.

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Last week or two a guy said that we need to go from six billion people on the face of the earth to 1 billion because we’re so harmful to the environment. This is the problem with kids today. By the way, another report came out. You should have one less child because I don’t know if you kids realize you do this or not, but you and your lifestyle and your breathing and the things that you do, you put out all this carbon dioxide, which we used to think was good, but as it turns out, it’s bad. It’s a pollutant. Now the Supreme Court has told us, even though they’re not scientists, and we have to stop doing it. We don’t know why there’s more CO2 in the air. I think maybe because the water, as it gets warmer, releases more. But anyway, you kids, you put out I think in a year or something more pollutants—so-called—than 600 return flights from London to New York.

Now, why they said 600 return flights from London? I don’t understand. Why did they just say 300 round trips? I don’t get that. Anyway, it must be some kind of method to their madness. But anyway, that’s what you kids are. You’re just big polluters. You’re parents, your older parents here, your grandparents—we went through this. We started RCC in the 80s. And you know, we’d go to the mall with four, five, six, seven, eight kids, and people would look at us like we were horrible.

Because back in the 80s, overpopulation was “Jimmy, eat world.” You’re taking too many resources. Dave Matthews: “I eat too much. Drink too much.” No, no, you probably don’t. Well, maybe he does. Some of us do. But man was seen as a consumer of the world. That was bad. We wanted to get rid of children because man is the greatest problem on the face of the earth. And that kind of died off and now it’s coming back with a vengeance. They want to kill off five billion people. Hope they don’t choose us. They want to say don’t have kids anymore because they have a low view of man.

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When I first rededicated my life to Jesus Christ, I went back to Minnesota. I was walking the streets of Minnesota. I didn’t know much. I knew nothing. All I knew is that Christ is Lord. But you know what? I hated my humanity still. And in fact, in God’s grace, he sort of showed me how bad I was. I remember walking down the streets of Minnesota just hating the fact that I was a person. You know, I love the created order. That’s the way the fallen man is. He really hates humanity.

And but God says, “Hey, when you live in a time like ours and there’s not much Christianity about, you’re going to be tempted to think, is some you’re some kind of lowly little thing on the face of the earth and God is not very happy with you.” This psalm says, “Forget that stuff. Understand that God has made you as a glorious, miraculous, empowered being. Your little chance of your children can accomplish more than the praises of the angels in the throne room of God. You see, that is wonderful. This is what we are in that first state and in our redeemed state.”

People are good. Up with people. We want to have a lot of kids. Julian Simon wrote a book years ago to combat this ridiculous myth of overpopulation that was going on. And the book was called “The Ultimate Resource.” Great book, probably in our church library. His point was: Hey, you know, the way progress happens in the world is through having more kids. Man’s the ultimate resource on this planet. Don’t get rid of man because he’s taking too much of the resource of the planet. He’s the best resource this planet has. And he does it observationally as a scientist, but he’s saying the same thing that this psalm says.

We’re the best gift that God gave to this created order. Now, in our fallen state, we can horrible toward it, but we are God’s gift in a sense to the created order. We are to mature it, develop it. We are to exercise dominion over all these creatures.

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I heard a great story. I heard a great—I listened to this magazine article and some of you have heard this. I know at least a couple three of you might have heard this on the radio, you know, at the new Spider-Man movie. They’re running this article about this professor at Lewis and Clark. I think she’s a professor. They call her Spiderwoman. And I get these magazine articles read on tape and I listened to one this last week on Spiderwoman, and it’s long article about this woman how she became involved in research in spiders. This was one of the world authorities on spiders and particularly venomous spiders.

She goes to the bottom of Goodwill stores in Texas, wherever it was, in the basement and finds these very dangerous spiders filled with venom that could kill you, you know, and she does this and milks them and stuff. So anyway, I don’t want to get the whole story, but it’s excellent. Although I was listening to it late at night outside enjoying a glorified air—and as I’m listening to this, I did start to feel like, hope there’s not one of those—because they’re really nasty creatures.

But that’s part of the point I’m trying to make. They are nasty creatures. They are quite—reminding—quite they do bring into mind the depravity so to speak, but the fallen state of nature, so to speak. We, if you hear what they do, you put two mothers in there with two children on their backs, right? Two mother spiders—one will eat the other one. Kill it. Eat it. Chomp it slow. And then adopt the pair of the kids and put them on her back. That’s the way they are. They do all kinds of horrible things.

There’s one country, Sweden or some place, she said, where they estimate there’s like 20 trillion spiders, each eating a tenth of a gram of protein. My wife told me I shouldn’t tell my daughter this. Well, it was too late. If they decided to just eat on humans, the whole country would be gone in three and a half days. That’s how bad spiders can be.

Here’s the deal, though. This woman at Lewis and Clark, what she’s doing is they’re getting rid of the poisonous venom—not by getting rid of spiders, but in Mexico City there’s a research facility that’s developed antibodies to the bite of the brown recluse spider. They’re tracking all these venoms now in scientific ways that they couldn’t before. They got all these varieties they found. They’re doing all this with venom. They’re creating antibodies that will work against most spider venom. And in Mexico City, if you get bit by a brown recluse and you got this big old horrible—appears flesh-eating wound, they inject it with this stuff they’ve come up with and the wound heals within hours or starts to heal within hours in a day. It’s really healing quite well.

So number one: man has been created to exercise dominion over the spiders, and part of that is understanding how to protect ourself from them. We’re removing the curse of the spider bite. But more cool is that these venoms, they’re finding very interesting compounds that, for instance, might be able—I was interested in this—to generate increased insulin production in in diabetics. You know, most medicines we have are herbs that come from plants that have interesting properties.

God has given us a whole pharmaceutical world. The leaves of the trees of God are for the healing of the nations, quite literally. And you know there’s figurative, but quite literally. And he gives us these horrible twisted weird deal things we’re frightened of. Spiders that’ll kill us if we get the wrong one biting us. They hate to bite people by the way, hard. Their biggest problem, you this will make you calm again—their biggest problem was collecting venom and experimenting on humans because they couldn’t get spiders to bite humans till a guy successfully got himself bit by a black widow in the 30s. They thought black widows were harmless. They don’t like to bite people, so don’t worry about it.

But anyway, so they’re doing scientific research now on the venoms to produce medical compounds that’ll be good for us. Now, do you see the value that’s saw in progress? God has made people the ultimate resource to take the wonderful resource of the planet, develop it, mature it, help us to live, you know, with—we’re not frightened of these things—and to actually utilize what God has provided for us for the further well-being of mankind and development of the planet.

Psalm 8 says that’s who we are. We’re this wonderful created thing that God has given. Never think of yourselves as bad ultimately. You’re a wonderful thing made in the image of God.

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Well, Psalm 8 says that, and it says that we have glory and honor. Then I’ve got that. I’ve talked about that a little bit. It says that we have a calling. Our glory and honor is related to our calling to exercise dominion in the context of the earth. And then what is this being made in God’s image?

And on see on the outline, it involves four things. And you’ve heard this from me before. It involves—and the proof texts are there for you in Ephesians and then again in Colossians. And if we take Ephesians and Colossians text together, what it says is that man has restored you to the first state, and what it does is tell us what that first state was about in summary form. And what it tells us is that in your first state and in your redeemed state, you were created with righteousness, holiness, knowledge.

And we would say that the end result of those three gifts that Ephesians and Colossians says that we were created with, that’s a summation of man in his first state and man in his redeemed state: Righteousness, Holiness, and Knowledge. And when we apply those things, we exercise dominion. Okay, that’s who we are. The way we accomplish the wonderful glory that God has in mind for us, what we’re supposed to do. How are we corpus Christi victor?

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We said last week Jesus is Christus Victor. That’s who he is. And we’re conquerors of Christ. Well, how are we conquerors? Well, through reclaiming the image of Adam in the third state, reclaiming the image of the first state. So we’ll be like Psalm 8 says we were created to be—to be these wonderful caretaker, ers of the world. Not caretakers, developers, gardeners, nurturers of the world. How do we do it?

Righteousness. What was my synonym for righteousness just a couple minutes ago? Justice—means conformity to a standard. It—righteousness in Proverbs is wisdom. And wisdom is not in isolation. Wisdom is in relationship to people. Justice primarily involved—yeah, there’s things that you can’t do to yourself, but primarily the laws of God are how to teach us how to interact with people in justice. That’s righteousness.

So a very important aspect, when you go to work tomorrow, of exercising dominion—being Corpus Christi Victor, the body of Christ victorious—is acting out who you were created to be. You’ve been restored to righteousness—means you got to know the law of God. You got to know how to work with people and bring justice to people, relationships, people skills we could call it. Okay, but it’s people skills based on the standard of God’s law.

Managers have an absolute obligation to learn to manage people in the workplace in just ways. That’s what we were created to be like. That’s what God says is essential to our image of being created in his image. Righteousness.

Now, that’s not enough because we’re also created with holiness. What’s holiness? You know, holiness means consecrated, set apart, cut off, and consecrated to something. Okay? Holiness refers to our true biblical piety, our integrity of people, but it focuses on our relationship to God. You know, holiness is kind of about doing—being wholly consecrated at work—to do what we’re doing for God, consecrated to God, in other words.

So it has a vertical dimension. Righteousness has a horizontal dimension to it. So when you go to work tomorrow, you’re called to be Corpus Christus Victor. You’re called to be Psalm 8, wonderful bearers of God, by engaging in right relationships—righteousness and justice with God’s law—and by having consecration of who you are, holiness to God, vertically in the task you’re—I say it to businessmen, but I say it to everybody else as well. This is what all our callings are like. You know, you got a big Bible, lots of stuff to think about. How do you apply it? Well, you apply it by remembering who you are.

What is man? Man is a creature who is can bring justice to relationships. And it can be holy in relationship to God. Righteousness, Holiness, Knowledge.

God wants us to know more about spiders. And we’re doing it. We’re moving ahead. You have to have knowledge of your business—particular business—and how it works and the processes of the earth. And how can you make that paper a little cheaper? How can you be like Walmart? Get rid of the box that people just get ticked off about having to throw away at home off the deodorant. Anyway, Walmart says, “Give us something without the box.” And they have knowledge of what they’re doing. A knowledge that increases efficiency in the workplace because now deodorant costs a couple of cents less because we got rid of the stupid box, which was just advertising. We already knew what we’re going to buy. We went to the store.

Knowledge of spiders to produce benefits. So knowledge of a wide variety of aspects of your business, your vocation, training of children, potty training, whatever it is, increasing knowledge. Ultimately, of course, it’s knowledge of God. Right? I mean, Adam didn’t just know things. He knew God. And that was the great knowledge. And so at King’s Academy, in your home schools, we’re training children of a knowledge of the world in for the purpose of serving God by knowing him through the created order.

Righteousness, Justice with people. Holiness, a commitment, a consecration, a sense of personal piety to God. Increasing knowledge of God’s world, and through God’s world, him. And then we apply the motivational aspect of dominion.

Righteousness, Holiness, Knowledge. And when man is created, he’s created to exercise dominion. Okay? Men have to strive to move forward, not get complacent. That’s all you need. All that’s the wonderful glory of what man is. This is who God created us to be. This is the cool stuff that we get to do. We get to build relationships with people. We get to grow in our holiness before God. We get to have increasing knowledge of the created order and bring this order to glorify God. That’s corpus Christus victor. That’s exercising dominion in this world.

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You know, 1 Corinthians 15 says this is what Jesus came to effect. You know, it’s the chapter about Christ’s resurrection. And we always think about him. That’s okay. That’s a good place to start. But remember, the point of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 is we’re united to him in death and resurrection. So when we read in verse 34—that after this comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father when he puts an end to all rule and authority and power. So he delivers the kingdom to God. When is he going to do that? We’re going to do that with him.

We’ve completed your work of glorifying and filling the earth and bringing it to absolute glory. And we, Christ at our head, will present this world to God the Father. He must reign. You must reign. Psalm 8. You must reign. He reigns, but he reigns in the context of his church until he has put all enemies under his feet. Psalm 14. The unrighteousness of men try to defeat us. But we are more than conquerors. As God comes out of Zion through the worship of the church to make us conquerors.

How? By de righteousness, holiness, knowledge of dominion. We have to reign until all enemies are put under Christ’s feet and our feet. He says later in Romans, he says in the book of Romans, you’re going to crush Satan under your feet. The last enemy will defeat him is death. For he has put all things under his feet. That goes back to Psalm 8. But when he says all things are put under him, it’s evident that he’ll put all things under him as accepted, not God the Father. So he says he’s put all things under the feet of Jesus Christ. That’s a that hearkens back. That refers us back to Psalm 8 and it reminds us that it doesn’t just mean that Jesus is king over everything. We are vice regents, kings and queens under the great King of Kings.

1 Corinthians 15 says, “You were raised up as corpus Christus victor and you will exercise dominion in the name of Christ. You’ve been restored to Psalm 8, the first state of man in the third state of man. And through the proper exercise of righteousness, holiness, knowledge, and dominion, this world will be transformed, go from glory to glory, and beauty to beauty.”

Will you agree with me today?

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And I think this would be a great series—four sermons on work, righteousness in the workplace, holiness in the workplace, knowledge in the workplace, dominion in the workplace. I’ll try to get to that at some point in time.

But can you agree with me today as you come forward with your tithes and offerings—representing your work already, by the way, of course—and consecrating your labors for him, particularly you businessmen, can you agree today to think tomorrow morning about going into your work week: What is man? Ask yourself, what am I? Well, I’m a being that’s been created in righteousness, holiness, knowledge, and dominion. That’s what I’m supposed to do today. I’m supposed to be God’s beautifier in the world through those processes.

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Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the wonderful creation that you have made us to be. Forgive us, Lord God, for our self-loathing, our hatred of man, including ourselves. Father, it is sin of the worst variety. And we pray that you would remove it far from us. Make us again to have a sense of who we are. Thank you for restoring us to a sense of the atonement of Christ that He is indeed Christus Victor. And thank you, Father, for reminding us today that we were created to be and have been redeemed to become corpus Christus Victor as well.

Help us Lord God in each of our callings this week, every person in this room to meditate upon justice and upon consecration and love for you in everything that we do and upon an increasing knowledge of the world and its processes around us and ultimately a knowledge of you. And help us in doing these things to strive to our dominion over the created order you’ve said is our responsibility. Thank you, Father, for this week and for the beautiful work that we are enabled to do in it. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.