Romans Introduction Part 1 - Depravity

For the next couple of posts or so, I propose to take Paul’s theme and to use it to lightly turn over the soil of some of the elements of Paul’s gospel. The word “gospel” is an olde Englishe one meaning “good news”. Most of us know those jokes that present punch lines involving “the good news and the bad news” – but how many of us stop to wonder – to truly wonder - why the gospel is “good news”? Oh, you might say – “It is good news because Jesus came to save us and He died on the cross for our sins and He rose again and when we believe in Him we are saved.” Yes indeed. But saved from what? “From our sins,” you say, “Our sins are the bad news.” And I say, “Amen.”

Depravity

But we will see when we delve into the first three chapters of Romans what God means when He calls us sinners. Not the weak and watery, man-pleasing pap that is fed to those with itching ears, that wants not to offend the world with the truth, and which has crept gradually and silently into churches under the guise of “seeker sensitivity”. We will spend considerable time on the doctrine of depravity. For some of you it may be uncomfortable, monotonous – even depressing. Three whole chapters on the sinfulness of man! Many weeks of pounding in the same drab, dreary negative nail, blow upon blow! What’s the point? The point is that this is how Jesus, our Lord, explained the gospel to Paul {Galatians 1: 11-24}. It is no use being saved unless you have an understanding and an appreciation of what you have been saved from. It is no use preaching salvation to men unless they are given some sense of their awful and helpless condition, and of their need for that salvation.

[Now let me stop here for a moment and explain that no preacher or teacher, no matter how articulate, no matter how clear, no matter how dynamic – has any power or ability to save anyone. The result doesn’t depend upon the messenger. Only God, by the operation of His Holy Spirit, can actually save. He does this when He puts a new heart within someone, grants them repentance and faith, and opens their eyes to Christ so that they receive Him. But the chief means God uses is the preaching of the gospel by men to men. So we must preach Christ, but only the Holy Spirit can make Him visible to anyone. In this way all the glory is God’s and all the wonder is ours.]

This doctrine of sin has received short shrift in many modern pulpits, including some I've sat under. Though the word itself is still occasionally mentioned – there is little if any communication of what sin is, how God regards it; of how a single act of sin has destroyed and enslaved and corrupted a world full of people and utterly ruined the entire race of men. In today’s churches it is often thought to be too negative – too much of a turn-off – too unappealing to the lost to portray them to themselves as depraved sinners without hope or God in the world, rebellious, resistant and even rejecting His grace and His mercy.

And, for professors of the faith, it has been regarded as failing to appropriate the grace of the gospel, as too backward looking, too negative, to remind churched people in anything but a cursory way of the malevolence within them, from which God has saved them – and which still dwells in them, warring ceaselessly with the spirit. Countless ministers have been deceived into this kind of behaviour, and have become derelict in their duty to present the whole counsel of God. They have succumbed because of the insanely self-contradictory idea that we must make what God says palatable to unbelievers who by nature hate every word that comes from His mouth – or we must make it smooth and agreeable to professors, lest we offend them and they go elsewhere.

So, instead of churches being separated from the world and acting as a light set on a hill they have catered to the world, using worldly means and values to bring worldly people into the church. And what we have used to bring them in we must now outdo in order to keep them in. It is insanity, but churches are striving to make themselves appealing to the world, which is exactly the opposite of what they were established to do. Believers who need building up (make disciples, Jesus commanded) are neglected in favour of keeping the worldly entertained. To cap it all off many preachers have mistakenly oversimplified the nature of God by preaching only His love, and virtually nothing of His holiness. Let us not throw out preaching the love of God, but rather let us add to it the preaching of fallen man’s true peril and the saints’ great need for watchfulness.

Isn’t this what God says? In the one complete and clear explanation of the entire gospel that He has given to us, God spends three whole chapters right off the bat, making sure we understand the lostness, depravity and sin of all humanity – and its utter depths – the enslavement of the human will to sin and self, so that no man anywhere seeks after God. This is the gospel, or rather the beginning of the gospel. It is the place where every soul that ever came in through the narrow gate has had to tread. Oh, there are many who go in by the broad gate that leads to destruction upon the wide way – never having been convicted of their sin and thus never having repented. But if they go in by that gate, never having been warned because we never told them, then they will still perish, but God will require their blood at our hands. If, as we all once did, they race like lemmings towards their own destruction, heedless of the love of God in Christ because they are heedless of their own need for Him, then there is many a preacher and many a saint who will be sorely chastised by His God for not telling them the whole counsel of the Almighty.

Paul spends three chapters on sin, and in the first third of the epistle mentions law 38 times before he ever once mentions the word “love” in Chapter 5. But when Paul brings us in Chapter 8 to the full panoply of God’s love in justifying his elect, it is, of course one of the most triumphal, liberating, exultant, joyful passages in the whole of the Bible. It is like the sun bursting through the darkest clouds:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, "For thy sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. {Romans 8:35-39}

We see that the gospel is presented to men by first letting them know what they are, and only then by making known the mercy and love of God in Christ. Be our sins ever so black, be they ever so depraved – yet the blood of Christ is sufficient to wash us white as snow. In the true Biblical gospel we are given the Misery of man, the Majesty of God and the Mercy of Christ. Or, as D.L. Moody preached – the Ruin (of sin), our Redemption (in Christ) and our Regeneration (by the Holy Spirit)