Dennis Tuuri

His redemption in Christ being placed in heavenly places. From that great crown of creation height, we turn now again to Romans 3:9-19 to consider the depths to which man has fallen in his sin. Please stand for the scripture reading which is found in Romans 3:9-19.

What then are we better than they? Not at all. 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. 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, and the way of peace they have not known.

There is no fear of God before their eyes. Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law that every mouth may be stopped that all the world may become guilty before God.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you again for consideration of who we are and our original created estate, our fallen estate, our redeemed estate, looking forward to our glorious final estate with you in heaven and in the new earth. We thank you Lord God for this text as well as the other texts that help us to understand the fallen world around us and our own fallen hearts as well, recovered in Jesus. Help us Lord God to understand the nature of the battle that we fight today and guide our hands, train us for warfare in the context of our world. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated. We are using the Canons of Dort as a rough guideline for a series of sermons talking about the sovereignty of God and the fall and redemption of man. We’re dealing with the third and fourth heads of doctrine. Let me mention that if you have these booklets and don’t take them home, you take them out of the pews in front of you, please return them in the pews. If you put them with the rest of the stuff on the pews, they will put them in the pew holders. I mean, the holders in the back of the pews. If you leave them on the pew themselves, you’re likely to have them thrown away.

And we put some time and effort into this. Matt D. did. So, please keep these. You can take them home if you like. If we need more, we’ll make more. But we’re dealing now with the third and fourth head of doctrine. Remember that the T in TULIP stands for total depravity. And that’s not the term that comes actually from the Canons of Dort themselves. This was developed later by men to try to remember what the canons taught.

The canons actually refer to this section as the corruption of man, his conversion to God and the manner thereof. And later people changed it into the acronym TULIP. These five heads of doctrine the canons start with God and they talk about God’s free and unconditional election of man and then God sending his Son to make atonement for the elect and then they talk about how this works its way out in the life of people.

So really you can sort of think about it as moving from God and then God’s provision for salvation and how that salvation works in the context of depraved men. So next we call some things to say about evangelism that really sort of happen in the context of this same section, heads the third and fourth heads of doctrine, and then finally perseverance of the saints.

So T stands for total depravity. And that’s what we’ve been talking about last week and then again this week and we’ll talk about it a little more as well. And we’ll move next week into a discussion of how men are converted then. How does God work to bring men to salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ? But today we want to talk about from the heights to the depths and back again. That’s not really accurate, is it?

We just sang about the ascension of Christ. We had this wonderful song that verse 5 says, “Thou hast raised our human nature on the clouds to God’s right hand. There we sit in heavenly places. There with thee in glory stand.” Our citizenship is in heaven. Jesus reigns adored by angels. Man with God is on the throne. Mighty Lord in thine ascension. We by faith behold our own.

So we’re not actually returned back to the original state of Adam. The redeemed state is more glorious than that. In Jesus Christ and his ascension specifically, he now brings humanity into the throne room of God. And so humanity matriculates, graduates. In the old creation, we were under tutelage. We were being taught by angels. Even the law, Hebrews says, was mediated through angels. But now that Jesus has come and brings us through his ascension to heaven, our redeemed state is more glorious than the original Adamic state.

Adam was created immature. We have moved to maturity through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so our estate is actually not from the crown of creation to the depths and then back, but from the crown of creation to horrible depths we read about in Romans 3 and then even higher blessings to us through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ than Adam.

You don’t think about that normally, do you? Well, we can just be like Adam again. No, you know, that’s part of it, but beyond that, you’re part of new humanity. And the ascension, which is today, is the day of Christ’s ascension, the commemoration of it, is the matriculation, the graduation of humanity in Jesus Christ. He brings humanity into the throne room. Man with God is now at the right hand of the Father ruling. And so we now have our citizenship in heavenly places.

Adam didn’t. So things have changed and we can’t appreciate the change unless we understand how far man has fallen.

I’ve got from the crown of creation to sorrow. I always like this song was a song by Pink Floyd called “Sorrow.” And the lyrics read it thus. The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land. Plumes of smoke rise merge into the leaden sky. A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers, but he awakes to a morning with no reason for waking.

And I thought about this as man’s first day outside of the garden. Dreams of a place of green fields and rivers, but he’s not in the garden anymore. He’s thrust into the bramble patch as a place where thorns and thistles abound. He’s in the wasteland because of his sin. He wakes to a morning with no obvious reason for waking. Disappointed. He’s haunted by the memory of a lost paradise.

That’s what man has once he falls in Adam. And all mankind haunted by the memory of a lost paradise in his youth or a dream. He can’t be precise. His sense of knowledge and understanding has fallen. We saw that last week among everything else. Even what he knows he can’t know with the certitude of created man anymore and redeemed man. Fallen man’s knowledge is all twisted. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Was it in his youth? The dream. He’s chained forever to a world that’s departed. It’s not enough. It’s not enough. The memory of paradise.

He’s chained to that. And yet he shall never live in it again. This is the state of fallen man. His blood is frozen and curdled with fright. Fear is of the essence of the fallen man. He is in fear because he knows he’s offended a holy God. His knees have trembled and given way in the night. His hand is weakened at the moment of truth. His steps have faltered. And he talks to the river of lost love and dedication.

And silent replies that swirl invitation flow dark and troubled to an oily sea. A grim intimation of what is to be. There’s an unceasing wind that blows through this night. There’s dust in my eyes that blinds my sight. And a silence that speaks so much louder than words, promises broken.

Now, they wrote that song from a line of Steinbeck, I believe, in Grapes of Wrath. And what they’re talking about is that ecological disaster that we mentioned last week. The previous editor of the whole earth catalog wants the echo, he wants this to happen. We want climate change predictions to come true because man in his rebellion against God hates humanity. So this is really talking about an ecological disaster, but really it is all these echoes of the fall of man in regard to the great sorrow that affects mankind in this fallen estate. Chained forever to a world that’s departed. Images of it, unable to get back to it on his own. That’s the bleak state of fallen man.

Man is totally depraved in all of his senses and all of his actions. It’s twisted. They’re not as bad as they can be. But everything is twisted. Man is totally affected by his fall. And so it is this state that Jesus Christ has come and redeemed us from and created us now as a new creature in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

If you’re reminding ourselves again, if you want to follow along in your little pamphlets, the third and fourth main points of doctrine, article one under these points. Turn to the center. The center’s a blank page. A couple of pages before that. Three pages back is where this starts. And we’ll review, remind ourselves what this said. In article one, it talked about man’s original creation.

I was asked a question last week that I wanted to come back and address this week. In some translations, I’m not sure the one you’re using. We read in the first sentence that man was originally created in the image of God and was furnished in his mind with a true and salutary knowledge. Saving knowledge is what some translations say. These are translations. This was not written in English and the translations can sometimes present a difficulty.

It doesn’t necessarily mean saving knowledge but a salutary knowledge of God. Adam had a saving knowledge. And you talk about pre-fall Adam, you know, man before his fall doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense but that’s not really what they said. And then however, rebelling against God at the devil’s instigation. And we’re going to look at that today. If we look at man’s fall and what happened at that fall, what the devil instigated him to think and do, we gain further understanding of fallen man.

And by his own free will, he deprived himself of these outstanding gifts. He wakes to a world with no reason for waking because all the gifts he’s deprived himself of these things now. And this translation brings out the three-fold aspect of this. Rather, in their place, he brought upon himself blindness, terrible darkness, futility, and distortion of judgment in his mind.

Good translation. Those first set of adjectives refer to man’s intellect, his mind, his ability to understand. What is it described as? He’s blind. He’s got dark, terrible darkness, futility, and distortion of judgment. In his youth or a dream. He can’t be precise. Was it real? Was it not real? What’s going on? We don’t know. No way of knowing. Perversity, defiance, and hardness in his heart and will. So man’s intellect is fallen, his heart has fallen, his will is also affected by the fall.

Remember we said last week that in an Arminian world, a Pelagian world is a political world because it seeks to affect man’s will by changing his education by educating him into obedience. It will never work. Or by changing his moral environment, man can pull himself up by his own bootstraps because his will isn’t fallen. So we have a political world that tries to change the context, the environment, but our problem is right here in our hearts, in our own will.

And finally, impurity in all of his emotions. So this is the fallen state of man. Not only is he like this, but then article two says, these are the kind of seeds that are birthed as well. Children are corrupt. He can only bring forth a corrupt seed. Circumcision was a picture of that, a symbolic picture of that in the Old Testament. There are no generative abilities to bring forth anything better than fallen man.

The guilt of Adam, we talk about original sin. The original guilt that Adam had is transferred to all of his posterity. We’re covenantal beings whether we like it or not. And the head of the race, Adam, his guilt is now ours. So, it’s important that we understand that there is original sin, original guilt, as well as then the actual sins that we commit.

Article three says he’s totally unable. So, total depravity means he’s totally unable to do anything about this. Therefore, all people are conceived in sin. Born children of wrath, that means children under God’s wrath, unfit for any saving good, inclined to evil, dead in their sins, slaves to sin without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit. They are neither willing nor able. We saw two different verses. Not willing, not able, don’t want to, couldn’t if they wanted to, but they never will want to.

They have free will. They will always use the free will to choose against God and for themselves. This is their state. We’re not willing nor able to return to God to reform their distorted nature or even to dispose themselves to such reform. Article four, the inadequacy of the light of nature. There is to be sure a certain light of nature. Glimmerings is in the original language. There’s glimmerings. It’s like phosphorescent decay almost.

There’s a certain light of nature. There’s a certain remembrance of things remaining in man after the fall by virtue of which he retains some notions about God, natural things, and the difference between what is moral and immoral and demonstrates a certain eagerness for virtue and for good outward behavior. But this light of nature is far from enabling man to come to a saving knowledge of God and conversion to him.

So far, in fact, that man does not use it rightly, even in matters of nature and society. Instead, in various ways, he completely distorts this light, whatever its precise character, and suppresses it in unrighteousness. In doing so, he renders himself without excuse before God.

So the standards say that man isn’t completely unable to do some good. Now even his good is tainted by sin because whatever isn’t of faith is sin and it’s not faithful but he still does some good. We could say examples and we all know this but a couple of examples came to mind last night as I was listening to a couple of magazine articles.

Google has this book project where they hoped within ten years or something scanned and digitized every book in the world and created an online virtual library for people to use. And they’ve got a beta site up at books.google.com. And you know, there’s this wonderful part of Moby Dick where this pastor gives a sermon and he talks about the hardness that Jonah had following God’s will instead of his own. So I thought, well, let’s just try this out. I typed in “Jonah Melville hard.”

And boom, immediately page 44 of Moby Dick comes up with this stuff on the other, the part of the book on the sermon. And there it is. I think that what God is doing is the same thing he did with the emergence in Rome of Latin. There was a universal language crumbling and that universal language was God’s preparing the world for the expansion of the gospel. There were road systems that Rome built. Pagan Romans who hated God did good things in providing transportation and roads.

And God was using that work to set up the work of the gospel so that it could go forth quickly into all the world. What’s he doing with the internet? Well, right now, most people are using it for pornography. One website just sold for, I don’t know, nine million dollars, just the name, the website, the URL. So, that’s what it’s being used for. But what will it be used for?

Well, it’s the new information superhighway where you and I can go on the, you know, people that are not. My wife last night was preparing a Sunday school lesson and I went on to be I searched on Leithart Luke chapter 7 and came up with several sermons and homilies by Leithart on Luke 7 and gave great insight to my wife in preparing the lesson. Folks, we are living in tremendous blessings with the internet.

And I think that God is doing the same thing with it that he did with Rome. He’s preparing the way for great reformation revival.

Another story I heard last night was on social business engineering. Listening to an article, a new wave, and I know that some of you are not going to like this when you first hear about it. Social business engineering. So, the idea is that businesses should have as their goal these people say that are doing this and the man who won the Nobel Peace Prize for economics he developed a system of micro borrowing small tiny loans to people to get themselves sustaining incomes.

This same man is now involved in social business engineering and the idea is they’re trying to create business models that are not based totally on profit but rather the company would be seen and evaluated by how well it’s moved people into freedom out of poverty. And these programs are going on in various countries even as we speak.

A little yogurt factory was made where thirty people would be employed and instead of just you know doing their begging in the street for instance twenty thousand beggars in one particular I think Kolkata twenty thousand of those beggars have been turned into merchants. They’re provided food which they go and sell by these micro loans. Then they repay the loans so they can get bigger loans and create little markets.

And out of all these beggars, two thousand have completely stopped begging as a result of what we would call free market. But it isn’t really free market. It’s a market driven by a desire to see man’s well-being helped by business. These people in the third world have had it with politics. Politics is corruption. It’s power manipulation. All this stuff. And the idea of solving poverty and man’s difficulties through politics is going the way of all flesh.

And what they’re looking at instead said is that business can change the world and business companies can be evaluated and have some credit as it were by doing social business engineering. So their profitability you know is not just the bottom line on the spreadsheet it’s how well they’ve helped people.

Now I know that can be go astray like anything else. It’s a double-edged sword but folks it sounds an awful lot like the Ecclesiastes stuff we looked at where the purpose of business in Ecclesiastes is to serve other people, to help them. That’s a good thing. Other people doing it, I suppose, there may be Christians involved. I don’t know. Could be pagans. But people still do some good and that good serves God’s kingdom even while they’re in rebellion to him.

And these are two examples of that. We delight in this fact and we know that this is what God’s word tells us is true. So man is fallen. He’s totally depraved, but he’s not as bad as he could be. He still does some good by the grace of God in the context of the world.

Let me read a few passages that describe man’s fallen estate. Isaiah 64:6 we are all as unclean things, and all of our righteousness here as filthy rags. We all do fade as a leaf, and our iniquities like the wind have taken us away. Mark 7:21. For from within, out of the heart of man proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness.

That’s what ushers forth from the heart of fallen man. We’re told in John 1:13 that those who were born, speaking of the regenerate, they were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. So man’s depravity means he is unable and unwilling to come to salvation. It’s got to be the will of God that causes people to be regenerate. Ephesians 2:2, wherein in times past you walked according to the course you walked rather according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience.

So prior to God doing that effectual work of bringing people to salvation we are in subjection to evil. Ephesians 4:17, this I say therefore testify in the Lord that you henceforth walked not as other Gentiles walk in the vanity of their mind. So how do non-regenerate Gentiles walk in futility of mind? I could go on and on. The verses multiply. There’s all kinds of them in the scriptures.

Jeremiah 17:9 the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked who can know it. So man is left in a state from the crown of creation he’s hit this horrible trough in which he does evil all the time maybe doing some amount of supposed good but even that’s done for his own selfish non-faithful purposes in his sin. So there is a totality of his depravity.

And in Romans 3 back on your outline point number one in Romans 3:9-19. We mentioned this last week, but first of all, all people, total the total depravity means the totality of humanity is fallen. Now, this was something the earliest the youngest school child knew in colonial America. He was trained to learn the alphabet by reciting a series of rhymes. And the first letter A, the rhyme that went with it was in Adam’s fall, we sinned all.

And in Reformation Covenant Church’s confession, we have that in there. We have in Adam’s fall we sinned all. Simple truth and yet a truth that distinguishes this church from many others in the context of Christianity. Didn’t used to. Everyone knew that in Adam’s fall we sinned all. That total depravity affected every person and all of that person.

All men are sinful. All men have original guilt and they also sin themselves. They do things that are wrong but even if they didn’t, they have the original guilt of Adam. Secondly, the totality of man’s essence is involved in total depravity. He’s supposed to be king, prophet, and priest. His will, his knowledge, and his heart. Remember, man is created in righteousness, holiness, knowledge, and dominion. But we read in verse 10 of Romans 3, there is none righteous. No one acts with righteousness or justice relative to his fellow man. Verse 11, there is none who understands knowledge.

There’s none who understands rather. His sense of knowledge has been twisted and darkened as the canons assert. So his righteousness, his knowledge. There is none who seeks after God. That’s holiness. To seek after the things of God first, to commit ourselves to him as holiness. So Romans 3 reminds us that man is fallen in terms of righteousness, holiness, and knowledge. And as a result, he cannot exercise dominion.

He’s turned aside from the path. They have together become unprofitable. So no dominion results from what they’re doing. They’re unprofitable. So man in his essence is fallen. Now in terms of his intellectual capacity, his ability to consecrate things for the holiness of God and his ruling over all things, he’s twisted and fallen in righteousness, holiness, and knowledge and thus dominion.

So the totality of man’s essence is fallen and affected by the fall. All of man’s abilities were changed by Adam’s sin. Fallen man can’t think straight. We think he can, he can’t, he cannot think straight. Also the totality of man’s actions in Romans 3 is talked about there’s none who does good. So his state his essence of who he is and prophet, priest and king or righteousness, holiness and knowledge is his essence and that his actions are totally depraved as well. The totality of man’s actions.

There is none who does good. Know not one. They’re thrown as an empty tomb. And he goes on to say all the bad things they do. They can’t do what’s right and instead they do bad things. Fourth, the totality of man’s future. The way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes. And Ephesians 2 says they’re children of wrath under condemnation and judgment. So apart from the grace of God, all of humanity is headed to hell.

And God then sovereignly chooses some out of that group for his purposes, not based on anything in them, but based in his own love of them in all eternity.

Now let’s turn to Genesis 3:5 and talk some more about this. In Genesis 3:5, we said that this was instigated by the devil is what the canons of Dort say. Genesis 3:5, we read this. This is Satan talking to mankind. This is the fall. This is what brought all this to pass. This is the origin of the thing. And we’ll see the origin of the thing works its way through the thing as well.

For God knows that the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

Now, we’ve talked about this before. There’s a sense in which man will eventually come to determine and discern good and evil, be able to rule. Adam reached out impatiently for ruling. He’s like a two-year-old kid that wants to drive the car. And there’s truth to all of that. But it’s important we understand two aspects of his fall here. First of all, he is promised that he will be like God. So, Adam will be able to replace God as the center of his being with himself, he’ll become God. You see, that’s what he’s tempted to believe. This is the faith he now will assert that I am God.

And secondly, he will specifically perceive, understand, determine what’s good and evil by himself. Adam rejects the law of God, the single law, and decides instead to create his own law by his own standard of what he should do. And he eats the forbidden fruit. He does it to become God. And to achieve this, his basic nature is to determine for himself what he should and shouldn’t do. That’s the heart of fallen man. That’s what ushers forth in all these other texts we’ve been looking at in terms of his depravity.

This is a faith system. Adam believes something and acts on the basis of it. That’s what we get around the New Testament. We’re to believe things and act on the basis of them. Ephesians 1:3-6 credenda agenda. What we’re to believe, what we do. Adam believes something. His faith, his faith is in himself. Now, in his ability to understand things, he has a false faith.

Fallen men hate God. The fallen mind is enmity. The carnal mind, Paul says, is enmity against God. So, fallen man isn’t just, oh, I’m a little sad about things and know I guess I won’t follow God. He is actively hating God. He’s at enmity with him. Why? Because God’s the great competitor at this point. We want to be God. We want to decide what’s right and wrong. And God and his law is something we hate. Spiritual truth because it’s a competition with what we believe now is the center of our faith system.

Our new faith is in ourselves. You know, in Romans 1, we read that they became that they didn’t worship God but man becomes futile in his thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened. And then later in verse 25 they exchange the truth of God for the lie. This is talking about Genesis 3:5. The truth of God is don’t eat from it. It’s good for you not to eat from it. They exchange the truth of God for the lie.

What’s the lie? You can be God and you can determine for yourself what’s right and wrong. And Romans 3 goes on to say, They worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator who is blessed forever. A statement with incredible implications for the world if we understand it. Man has a new faith. He’s got something new that he’s worshiping. Himself and the created world around him is what he worships now.

No longer the God whom he has rejected. He has a new faith system at work. And that faith system will work itself out in horrific consequences. It continues to do that. Faith in oneself is of the essence of fallen man. And determining by oneself what one ought to do. This is of the essence of fallen man.

Now that should cause us to shiver down to our core, the midst of our being because we know that’s what is promulgated in our culture. Faith in yourself, you know, not faith in a God who has given us propositional truths. The Bible is becoming known more and more as just stories that help us to understand that we are to have faith, not in a particular God, a particular savior, but faith. Faith ultimately that we can do things well and the determination of our own ability to decide what’s right and wrong. Instead of somebody else telling us what to do, we’re going to tell us what to do.

That’s who we are in Adam, a false faith. He was promised, you shall be his God. You shall determine for yourself right and wrong. This is the faith that dominates all of fallen man’s life. The underlying presupposition of fallen man’s thinking are these two truths. I’m God. I decide what’s right and what’s wrong. This is a false center. His center is no longer God, but man, a created thing. He’s anthropocentric.

And as a result of this, life is good, not if God’s will is being worked out in the world, but life is good or bad depending on how well I’m accomplishing what I want. Man now sees good as being defined by me getting what I want. Life is good because the center of my being is me. It’s good if I get what I want.

What saddens, sorrows, frustrates, and angers men is not their sin, but it’s the inability to realize their sin. Their sin is an attempt to work out their faith in themselves determining what’s right and wrong. That’s their center. That’s what they want. And so to man, this is what he wants. And his frustration is in not being able to do that. It isn’t his sin that frustrates him. He thinks it is his inability to realize his sin. He wants something. He goes after it in a sinful way. He can’t quite get it. He’s never satisfied.

He can’t realize his goal of his own sinful faith. And this is what frustrates him. Ask yourself, Why are you frustrated? Why do you get angry? Why do you get sad and sorrowful? Isn’t it because you want but you don’t have because you don’t ask a right? This is fallen man.

A fallen man is anti-religion. You know religion. This is be on the outline. He develops from this false faith. He develops a false religion and anti-religion. Religion means to tie together religio ligate ligament to tie a gang together. Religion is what God gives us to tie each other together. Now, I know that religion gets a bad name and all that all that, but at its core, a religion is a thing that ties people together. Fallen man has a hard time doing that because his center is himself, and the created order is subservient to him as God, and he’s going to determine what’s right and what’s wrong.

There was a song by George Harrison, “I me all through the day I mine, my mine, I mine, I mine. All through the night. I’m mine. I’m mine. I mine. I me mine. Everything is self-centered,” Harrison said. And he’s right. This is an accurate depiction of fallen man. “All I can hear, he wrote. I mine. I mine. I mine. Even those tears. I mine. I mine. I mean mind when people cry. Esau cried. Why did he cry? He was sensitive to his needs. He was a sensitive, caring guy. He was sensitive and caring about what he wanted. And it greatly saddened him that he couldn’t get what he wanted anymore having traded it off the inheritance.

So even the tears Harrison says correctly are a reflection of fallen man’s false faith that he’s to be God and his religion becomes totally about himself. It’s an anti-religion. It breaks down social compacts and social relationships. “No one’s frightened of playing it. Everyone’s saying it. Flowing more freely than wine,” Harrison wrote. Good line. Flowing more freely than wine.

The wine that’s supposed to flow in the context of human joy is the communion wine under our using of all wine. That we’re bound together through the communion elements in biblical community, biblical religion. So man is self-aware but he’s self-aware to the end that he wants what he wants in the context of the world.

Now is this how does this work out? Well, friendships fall in man and his friendships it becomes a problem because what friendships are about is kind of reinforcing his own view of himself. It’s a selfish thing ultimately. But friendships eventually prove somewhat demanding. They’re entanglements that come in the context of friendships. While we’re seeking ego gratification as fallen man, we want to be the center. The needs and demands of the others at some point conflicts with our own.

Our conversations and friendships and fallen man’s conversations tend to be autobiographical. You’re waiting for the other guy to stop so you can speak. It’s all I mine. I mine I mine. But they break down because they eventually demand interdependence which is antithetical to fallen man. He doesn’t want to be dependent on a friendship. He wants to be in isolation as God, having a sense of being that needs nothing else outside of himself.

Politics. The great problem with man, his great sorrow is deprivation of what he wants. He can’t get what he wants. And what will he do then? He will attempt to manipulate other people through political action to get what he wants. And so politics becomes a way of controlling and manipulating other people. Deprivation in this false faith and false religion is the great evil.

And we see seek salvation then through legislation that robs others to get what we want. And as a result of this, if we can’t get what the rich man has, we’ll at least make sure he doesn’t have more than us. We want to be. We’re God, after all. Why should anybody have anything more than us? So, we impose social legislation that levels everybody downward.

We don’t like the disparities in our fallen state, and we want to level downward. What makes people unhappy is deprivation of what they want. And what they think as God they are entitled to. Entitlements are at the core of this false religion, this false faith. You shall be as God after all. And we still believe that. Fallen man believed it. We still believe it. And as a result of that, if we’re not experiencing all the blessings of our godliness, there’s something wrong in the environment that has to be changed.

We want to change things around us. We don’t want to change ourselves. We’re God after all. Why should we have to change anything? We want to change the environment and this is what political action begins to become as I said these can be very sensitive people sensitive to their own needs but insensitive to God’s law and requirements. Feelings not law become dominant in such a society. Sensitivity means a finely tuned awareness of our every egocentric feeling and impulse. Quote from R.J. Rushdoony. Let me read it again. Sensitivity now means a finely tuned awareness of our every egocentric feeling and impulse.

Self-pity is sinful self-centeredness. Don’t feel sorry for somebody that’s self-pitying themselves. They are spitting in the face of God when they feel sorry for themselves because they can’t have what they want. That’s fallen man. Self-pity is a reflection of self-centeredness. You’re still focusing on yourself. Whether you’re prideful, lifted up, or where you’re pitying yourself and being brought down, either one, there’s a self-centeredness to it.

There’s an anti-religion. Man moves against bonds. A culture that walks away from Jesus walks away from covenantal bonds. It walks away from marriage. It moves toward living relationships because marriage is a bond. Man who is self-gratifying will resent the very facts of the marriage bond at some point in time. You know, they say that marriage is like taking a bath. After a little while, it’s not so hot anymore.

Well, that’s why because you enter into it for self-gratification or making other people feel good about you. You’re God after all. People should feel good about you. You want to have a wife. You want to have a husband. You get married. But pretty soon, this very fact of this bond begins to really, you don’t like it at all. Billy Joel said, “Some love is just a lie of the heart. The cold remains of what began with a passionate start.” And they may not want it to end, but it’s just a question of when.

That’s a great line. Passionate start, self-gratification. But as that bond whether you formalize it or not in a way it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference as it becomes one in which demands are made upon each other by the other person when you have to live for somebody other than yourself you got two gods trying to coexist in this world now you become cold and aloof. Communication breaks down. You know, there’s a silence that speaks so much louder than words. Of promises broken. Back to Pink. Marriage covenants broken. Marriage promises of serving each other broken. And there’s silence that results from that.

A breakdown of communication and from a passionate start to now coldness at the end of it. And it’s just going to break up because nobody’s submitted themselves to God at the center of their life. Some love, Billy Joel said, is just a lie of the soul, a constant battle for the ultimate state of control. And after you’ve heard lie upon lie, there can hardly be a question of why.

So the other way these things work is you know what you try to do is control the other god so that you’re God. And you do that through deception, through various techniques, abusive techniques we would call them today. And what you’re trying to do is the ultimate battle for control because you can’t have two gods coexisting. They either separate from each other, whether physically or not, eventually should be physical, or they do warfare with each other and try to control one another. That’s what man is in his fallen estate.

So, all ultimately, man is rejecting God in all of these things and a dependence upon God. And he wants God to be dependent upon him. Listen to this poem. What will you do, God, when I die? When I, your pitcher, broken lie. When I, your drink, go stale or dry. I am your garb. The trade you ply, you lose your meaning. Losing me.

That’s what fallen man thinks. He’s insane. He thinks that God needs him. And without him, God will have nothing to work through anymore. So, man is a false faith. It’s an anti-religion because he has at his center a false center. Tikkun olam. The center is shattered. Our job is to repair it. But people don’t want to repair it. What people do with the little bit of fragment of mirror that they’ve got is see the reflection and they think that’s the whole thing because they are now the center.

And the fact that there are many centers walking around is irrelevant to them. They see the reflection in that shattered visage and they think they are God. There’s a false center. Paul Anka, Frank Sinatra, I’ve heard this song being referred to in funerals more often than I care to admit, one recently that I heard of a friend his one of his relatives dying and they played this song by Paul Anka, you know, “I did it my way,” “my way.”

This is the false center of pagan man. He wants to do things his way. Fallen man focuses on themselves. Adam had faith in his ability. Fallen man focuses on himself as the center of things. He wants to do things his own way. He’s the center. He’s replaced God as the center with himself as the center. And until that is reversed, there’ll be no peace. There’ll be no love. There’ll be no community. With himself as the center, everything gets twisted.

The purpose of education becomes self-realization not godly service to God. So you take a good thing like education is to be used for the service of God. That’s why you are homeschooling or sending your kids to King’s Academy or Kurt Bumpert’s tutoring service. You’re doing because you know that education is used for the service of God. Well, fallen man sees himself at the center and education is simply self-realization as a result of that.

The thing asked for with himself. The sinner may be modest. The principle is totally immodest and proud. His own definition of need is the standard of his happiness. And so fallen man has this false center. And as a result of that, he is wrapped up. Fourth, he’s in a restless and observed culture. Culture flows out of cult. Cult isn’t a bad thing. A cult is simply a set of religious practices or worship. And that cult produces culture.

There’s no culture without some cult or center worship center of a faith that results from it. So fallen man has replaced the worship of God as Romans says with the worship of the created order and the worship of himself and that cult produces a twisted and depraved culture. Schaeffer said that man loves the tool but he forgets the purpose of it. So God gives us these wonderful tools. He gives us education as I said so we might serve. He gives us beauty so that we might glorify them.

Man still has a desire for beauty and education and all these things, but he has no end to them anymore. He has no proper end to them. They become an end in and of themselves. And so man’s culture exalts beauty for beauty’s sake. You want to have education just for education’s sake. Create a perpetual student who learns to learn the rest of his life and never really has a focus on what he’s going to do with it.

Beauty is not employed in a culture of submission to service to God. Beauty the end all and be all. Education becomes the end all and be all. Fallen man creates cultures that are twisted and depraved because of his cult, his center, his worship, and his faith is himself. And as a result, he takes those little pieces of shards and gifts around him. The tools God gives him to be unified at the center of serving God.

And instead, he uses these tools to serve himself. And as a result, he produces a culture that has no real goal. It has no ability to use these tools for something beyond himself. It’s a culture of his own being. Now, our culture means we enter into Sabbath rest. We have six days to work and one day to rest. And that’s the way God made it. You know, the communist USSR, French Revolution, both tried to do away with the seven-day week because it’s a reflection of this cycle of six days and one day.

It’s built into the nature of who we are. It’s built into the nature of the universe. The Sabbath didn’t begin with Moses. It began with creation and we can enter into rest on the Lord’s day. Now, you’ve got all kinds of problems, right? You got all kinds of burdens in your life, but God says, “Today you can lay them down. Today, you can rest without feeling guilty. Today, you can stop all the productivity and be guiltless in doing that because God has commanded you to rest this day.”

Now, he ties it to the rest of the week. The commandment to enter into Sabbath rest is tied to production. The that is six days of the week. Fallen man wants to do neither. He doesn’t want to work and he doesn’t want to rest totally. He rejects God as the center. He builds a culture then that has no rest in it ultimately and ultimately productivity is just to bring home the bacon as it were not to exercise dominion in the context of the world serving God.

So both his productive aspect becomes a place of laziness and his resting aspect becomes a day of work. So the Lord’s day is like any other day of the week. Why not? Why have seven days of the week if Sunday is like every other day? And so there’s no distinctive cult to produce a distinctive biblical culture. And as a result, his culture becomes more and more crazy. His culture becomes more and more absurd.

And the kind of art that we can come up with. Man loses the ability to judge by a standard. He determines for himself what’s beautiful, what’s not beautiful. And as a result, he makes judgments a wrong and a miss. His knowledge is affected and he creates a crazy culture. Vos, the rock drip is correct. Fallen man devolves. He moves further and further away from God. This country is devolving. We’re moving away from Lord’s day worship and Lord’s day, six days of creative or creative ability.

And as a result, the culture itself is affected. Total depravity has its effect in the culture that’s produced. We’re still God’s image bearer. We want culture of some sort. We’ll try to produce a culture, but we will not produce a Christian culture. We’ll produce a culture in which all these various tools are used for our own particular purposes. Quoting from Henry Van Til’s book, The Calvinist Concept of Culture, Professor Schaeffer says that a man has fallen in love with his tools, he’s lost the ideal of doing the job at hand, namely finishing the task of being God’s co-laborers for the glory of God.

Furthermore, true culture is constructive, but sin is destructive. Sin creates chaos while true culture creates harmony. And so we have a world today filled with an apostate culture. And finally, point E, this is an abiding reality. What do we mean by that? This is fallen man. This is who we are in Adam. And this is to some extent who we remain in Jesus until the fourth state comes along.

The Bible says that we’re to put off the old man and put on the new man. The Bible says that we have with us the remnants of the Adamic fall. The Bible says that, you know, we can talk about all this stuff and talk about non-Christian men and women, but we better think about the implications for ourselves because everything that I’ve described is how we sin. We sin by kicking God out of the center. We sin by breaking community. We sin by trying to manipulate other people for our well-being.

We sin by seeing ourselves as the center of the universe. We sin by seeing deprivation of what we want as our real source of unhappiness rather than our sinfulness. We sin because we want to attain and realize the sins we want to engage in and we can’t. And as a result, we’re unhappy.

In the Lord’s Prayer, we’re told, well, let me say first of all that Christians struggle with these same sins as pagan man. Christian man is given a new face, a new center, right? Says that godliness with contentment is great gain. We can believe that because the word God is once more our center. We have an effectual religion in Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3. We’re to put on the bond of peace, the unity of the spirit. It means to be retied together through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have a religion that binds us together in the context of community.

We have a restful dominion culture. Those things are not antithetical. That’s the way the work week works. That’s the way the seven-day week works. Our religion ties us together and produces then a restful dominion culture in the context of our world. That’s why Isaiah 58 says, “If you do Sabbath right, I’ll cause you to ride upon the high places of the earth and feed you at the heritage of Jacob, your father. You’re going to rule the other six days because you’ve set this day apart.

You see the goal of it all. You see the glory of it all. You rest to create your work in the next six days of the week.” And we then build a godly culture in the context of our world. This is the day, as I said, when we lay down the burden. Some of you already feel guilty, I hope, about the things that trouble you this last week, the things you’re upset by. But today is the day when that guilt is removed from you when you can say, “Praise God for showing me my sinfulness, and more than that, for the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that I can lay that burden down today.

And I’m not going to pick it back up tomorrow. What I’m going to do tomorrow is replace the center, my selfish center, with a center of serving God and serving those that he brings into my path. You don’t have to work out everything you did wrong in the last thirty years of your life. This is fresh start day. You’re forgiven. You can lay that burden down. Lay it down right now. Lay it down. Confess it to God. Believe he’s forgiven you.

That’s the power that God gives you to walk into the week tomorrow as new dominion men and women. Freed from guilt. Freed from the habits that you’ve developed in the past. Even able to walk with God as your center. Now we can rest without guilt. Our worship forms, our cult, our worship forms a good culture in the context of the world around us. And we have a prayer, a new prayer as part of our new humanity in Christ.

You know, the Lord says in the Lord’s Prayer, this is the model. It says, “Lead us not into temptation. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Well, that’s not a very good translation. Evil is not an abstraction. It’s not some kind of gnostic black cloud that floats around the island and we don’t know what it is and it affects us sometime. No, that’s not evil in the Bible. Evil are the actions of evil men.

And here in this prayer, a better translation would be keep us from the evil one. It’s singular here. Keep us from the evil one. And in part, we’re asking not to be tempted beyond what we’re able. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. We don’t want to become subject to Satan and the evil one by being led into temptation.

But I think that a bigger meaning going on here is that our ultimate problem, remember what we’re trying to put off is the Adamic depraved nature and that’s having ourselves as our center. Oh, we believe the word of Satan. We were made in his image. But the word we believed was I’m God. I can determine what’s right and wrong. I was amazed at a conversation this last week with a young man. Well, don’t you know when you’re doing this? Yeah, I know I’m doing that. Well, why? Well, I don’t feel convicted by it.

Oh, well, you know, you heard preaching here week after week that this is wrong. The Bible says it’s wrong. The Confessions of the Church says it’s wrong. All these, you know, the Westminster Catechism says it’s wrong. Did get into all this conversation, but the idea is that we are all too often the evil one. Me too by deciding for ourselves what’s right and wrong in the context of what we do instead of submitting to the authorities that God has given to us to his word to his standard. That’s who we are. So when we pray keep us from the evil one, I think to a large extent we should be praying keep us from our own sinful tendencies to live as if we’re God where everything’s serving us and to live as if we can determine for ourselves what we should do.

Today God says, “Forget it. That’s all sin.” When you do that, now you’re falling into temptation to be like Adam again. And now you’re walking in the context of a false faith, a false religion that’s destructive of community. A false center, not service now to others, but everybody else and everything serving you. A false faith, a false religion, a false center. And as a result, you produce a horrific culture in the context of your world.

God says no. God says what we should pray. You know, we pray, “Lord, we want this. We want this. We want this. We want this.” And what we’re doing more often than not is saying, “Lord God, give us temptation. Give us the temptation to feel independent of you. Give us what we want. Give us money. Give us power. Give us health. We won’t have to be so dependent.” Calvin says, “God deliberately keeps us in a pretty weak state, most of the time, poor and feebled for the very purpose of keeping us from becoming like Adam again.

He had all the wealth. He had the whole world. He had great help. Those are temptations. Ninety percent of prayers, I think, that I hear are prayers to be led into temptation. The opposite of what God says we should pray. If we understand the Adamic fall that we want to be God, we think we’re God. We want to determine for ourselves what’s right and wrong. We want to determine whether we get this money or that money or this job or that job.

We should be praying, “Lord God, your will be done. Keep us from temptation. Don’t let me win the lottery this week. That’s what Agur prayed in Proverbs 30. He knew himself. If I get too much money, I’m going to be tempted to forget you. If I don’t have enough money, I’m going to be tempted to steal. He prayed accurately. He prayed, “Deliver me from the evil that lies in my own bosom.” We don’t want to pray primarily that the environment be changed.

That’s fallen man, right? He doesn’t think the problem’s in him. The problem is around him. And yet ninety percent of our prayers is Lord God please change our environment. We’re praying like pagans. We’re praying like Adam. What we really want to do in prayer is saying Lord God change me. Help me to attain to that contentment with godliness that you say is great gain. Help me. Don’t go to God in prayer saying please change my wife or please change my husband or please change my child.

I mean to a certain extent that’s okay. But primarily our prayer should be please change me. Help me to be a better servant to my wife. Help me be a better leader to my child, you see, and protect him from the sinfulness of his own heart, playing God with himself and determining for himself what’s right and wrong. Those are the kind of prayers God wants us to pray. God doesn’t want us to pray primarily about changing the environment.

He wants us to pray about changing ourselves. And more often than not, we want to change the environment in a way that will in actuality produce more temptation to us. Fallen man includes us. He needs to pray differently. We need to pray differently. We need to pray that our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. We begin the prayer with removing the center from ourselves back to a center that is God-focused. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. You see, not our will.

And in the context of that, we pray that God would keep us from temptations and deliver us from the evil that lies in our own hearts. May the Lord God grant us to work out the implications of the new center he has given us in the personal work of Jesus that we know we’re here to serve God ultimately and others as well.

Let’s pray. Father, we do pray that as we come forward now, you would help us, Father, to consecrate ourselves anew. Give us the heart of the Lord Jesus Christ who said that he didn’t come to do his own will, but he came to do the will of his father in heaven to complete his work. Help us, Lord God, to be those kind of men and women this week. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.