What is the Doctrine of Human Sin?
The Doctrines of Grace: How God Saves Sinners—Start to Finish (#3)
Romans 8:1–9; Psalm 51; Genesis 1–2; Psalm 8; Psalm 14; John 3; Canons of Dort III/IV.1–5
Why pause in the middle of a series on grace to talk about sin? Because we can’t know what grace is unless we know what our sins are—just as we can’t know light without darkness, or life without death.
In this third sermon on the doctrines of grace, Dr. Daniel Hyde traces the Bible’s account of humanity in three movements: our glorious creation as image-bearers crowned with glory and honor; our heinous deformation, in which our minds became darkened, our wills hardened, and our affections impure, leaving us dead in our sins and unable even to submit to God; and our absolute need for regeneration—for without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit, sinners are neither willing nor able to return to God. If these words strike you, cry out to God for mercy: “Lord, give me new life.”
Introduction
Tonight, I want to continue meditating with you for the third of five Sundays on the doctrines of God’s amazing grace. We’ll hear at a lot of texts by way of allusion, such as Psalm 51 and Ephesians 4, but let’s turn to Romans 8 quickly and look at a few verses.
There's that glorious conclusion in verse one, after all Paul has been saying up to this point:
“there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. For God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.”
Note the contrast between flesh, meaning our sinfulness or sinful nature, and the Spirit:
“For those who live according to the flesh, the sinful nature set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit. For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law, indeed it cannot. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you.”
So far God’s wonderful words to us tonight. Amen.
As we’ve been thinking the last couple of sermons on the doctrines of grace, it should strike you to see a sermon title, “what is the doctrine of human sin.”
We’ve thought about the great doctrine of God’s grace of predestination or election—that God from all eternity has set his love upon a people for himself.
We’ve seen that wonderful grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he died in a way that was sufficient for the sins of the whole world, or in fact, an infinite number of worlds if God had desired to save every single sinner, and that the one death of Christ was good enough and satisfied all the conditions of God’s justice and righteousness to bring salvation to all.
We’ll go on to see the power of the Holy Spirit, even as we see something here tonight in Romans chapter 8: the Holy Spirit enlivens us, enlightens us, and causes us to be born again or “regenerated.”
And we’ll finally see that God by his grace preserves us and enables us to persevere unto the end in his grace and by faith.
What amazing grace!
But as we’re thinking about grace, right in the middle of it all, as we’re celebrating God's mercy to sinners like us, then we have a sort of “Debbie Downer” thing with sin.
We have to think about sin. Why? Why would we talk about the so-called doctrines of grace and talk about sin? You can’t have grace unless there’s someone for God to be gracious to, right? We can’t know what grace is unless we know what our sins are.
What does it mean that God saves from all eternity, sinners? What does it mean that Jesus Christ died for sinners? What does it mean that the Holy Spirit regenerates sinners? What does it mean that sinners are preserved by grace? We have to define the word “sinner.” We can’t just gloss over it. We have to grasp for ourselves what it means to be a sinner.
It’s the big assumption of all the doctrines of grace—that God saves sinners. We don’t know what light is unless we know what darkness is. Just think about human language. I mean, what would light be to us unless we understood what darkness was or experienced what darkness was?
If we didn’t feel the darkness outside as we walked into this room tonight, or if we turned the lights off right now, it would be very dark. If we didn’t know what that darkness was, and if we didn’t feel and experience the darkness, how would we know what the light was? How would we know that we needed lights? How would we know what it was to have our eyes open to be able to see each other at night, in fact, in the light of these electric illuminating things that we have above us.
So, we can’t know what grace is unless we know what sin is. We can’t know what light is unless we know what darkness is. We can’t know what it means to be alive unless we know what it also means to be dead. We can’t know what it means to be a person who is forgiven unless we know what it is from which we are forgiven or for which we are forgiven.
The doctrines of God’s grace lead us to think about what it is to be humans who sin.
Our Glorious Creation
When we read the Bible, at the very beginning we begin to see our glorious creation. God speaks about making us in his image and in his likeness. There are all those beautiful and powerful descriptions of God making everything— God said let there be light and there was light, God said let there be land and let the seas be gathered, and they were.
But then when God, on that sixth day in Genesis 1:26–27, desired to create humanity and Adam and Eve in particular, God stops and pauses. He doesn’t just speak us into existence, but he has a conversation—“let us make man in our image and after our likeness.”
And then in Genesis 2, there’s this garden bit no one to water it, to tend it, to care after it, to guard it and so forth. God takes dust and molds it into this thing, this sort of figurine, but it's lifeless.
If you’ve ever been in a big city like in Paris or Washington, DC, they have Madame Tussauds. They have all these figures of famous people in world history, but they’re lifeless. They look real. They’re as tall as people, they have clothes like people, they have facial features like people, but they’re not people.
So God breathed into that body and caused it to be a living creature, a living soul. To be in God’s image is to have life, to be like God, sharing life like him.
Psalm 8 describes creation from a different point of view. When the psalmist says, “When I consider how God has made man,” he says, “so what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him.” When he looks up to the stars, he sees the sun, the moon, and the stars at night and considers how God put them all in their place as creation is described in Genesis. What are we human beings, so small, so insignificant compared to these heavenly bodies? Yet Psalm 8 says, in contrast to the stars and the moon and the sun and all the heavenly bodies, we are so insignificant, “yet you have made him”—man, humanity—“a little lower than the heavenly beings.”
Our glorious creation is described as image and likeness of God, the breath of life being given to us, being made just a little bit lower in glory than these heavenly beings that we call angels. In fact, David says in that very psalm that God has “crowned” us, like kings and queens, crowned us “with glory and honor,” so much so that we have dominion of the works of the hands of God. All the things that God has made, he’s given that over to us. He’s “put all things under our feet, sheep, oxen, beasts of the field, birds, fish, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.” Everything is below us, because on this earth we’re the kings and queens, just a bit below the heavenly beings.
That’s how wonderful and glorious we were made to be.
Thus, our minds, wills, and affections—all that it means to have a soul—is what it means to be made in the image of God. We had a saving knowledge of God in the beginning. We knew spiritual things rightly. Our wills, our choices, were righteous, noble, godly, and upright in the beginning. Our affections, those deepest desires that we have, were all pure.
God commands us to love him, which reminds us that from the beginning we were made as human beings to love God, and we were enabled to do so because we were image bearers. We were living creatures with the very life breath of God himself, and we were crowned to be sort of human representations of what God is, as a king and as one with authority and power and majesty on the earth.
What does it mean that we were made in glory in the beginning? It was that we as creatures were made to be, as much as creatures can be, like our creator—just a bit lower than the angels, the heavenly beings. So that’s the height to which God put us. He made us on this pedestal of glory in the beginning.
Our Heinous Deformation
But yet, we know the story. All those things are reversed. God created us in glory, but we by our own sins, by our own choice in Adam, we have become heinously deformed.
The deformation of our minds
The Canons describe it like this: our minds once had a true knowledge of God, rightly knew God, and we knew spiritual things as God intended us to; yet our minds become blinded and dark.
Spiritually speaking it’s like when you wake up in the morning and it’s dark in your room. It’s hard to see, your eyes aren’t yet in focus, you’re a little bit groggy. You know that there’s furniture in your bedroom. You know where the couch is, you know where the table’s at, you know how to go around the corners of walls and so forth to get to the sink, to the shower, the restroom. You have a general knowledge of all the stuff that’s there, but it’s hazy, sort of blinded, dark, and distorted. Our minds have become dark.
The deformation of our wills
Our wills, as opposed to being made as they were upright to choose the good, the right, the noble, the holy, have become perverse. Our wills are now in defiance. Our wills are hardened towards God.
Every human being has a soul and every human being still has a will. Every human being has the ability to choose to worship. It’s just that now after the Fall, our wills choose to worship idols—things of our own making, ideas of our own making. Ultimately, all idolatry is worshiping self in some way.
The deformation of our affections
And our affections that were once pure have become impure. Those deep rooted desires that God implanted in us to love him, to love the things of God, and to love neighbor as ourself have become selfish desires: self-love, self-satisfaction, self-gratification, self-pleasure.
I watched a video this week of somebody who was talking about the freedom to be whatever they wanted themselves to be. And this person identified themselves as a non-binary human being, and this person was free, unfettered, was able to choose his/her reality, to create one’s own reality. And then as that person talked it was very clear what that person was all about. It was loving themselves, satisfying self, gratifying self, living for self, desiring self. That's what it means to have impure affections.
Therefore, because we were made on a high pedestal, just a bit below the angels in glory, we’ve come crashing down. Like the old TV show on Saturday mornings, “from the thrill of victory, to the agony of defeat.” From the heights of glory to the depths of depravity.
We’re conceived in sin, as we read from Psalm 51. Paul describes us as being “children of wrath” (Eph. 2). Therefore, we’re unfit for saving good. We sang from Psalm number 14: “there’s no one good, no not one, there’s no one who seeks after God.” That's how bad off we are as human beings apart from the grace of God.
Dead in sin
Like our friends, our neighbors, and our loved ones. This is what we were once as well: dead in sins.
How many bodies have you ever heard about that were in a grave buried under the earth, covered up, flowers begin to bloom and the grass grows—how many of those bodies have come up? How many of those ancient catacombs throughout Western Europe, in Rome or in Paris, have the bones still there that you can go see? How many bones walked out?
“Dead in sins.” When Paul says dead in sins he means it. Lifeless. As dead as dead can be.
Of course, humanly speaking people are alive and walking around, but we’re walking as dead men, dead women, spiritually speaking.
Slaves of sin
“The one who commits a sin is a slave of sin,” Jesus said. You can't free yourself from that slavery.
Inclined towards evil
Inclined towards those things that God forbids us and inclined towards doing the opposite. Wanting to sin, wanting to live life for ourselves and our own desires, our own loves, our own satisfactions and so forth.
And so Paul tells us in Romans chapter 8, as he’s describing the unspiritual human being in the flesh, whose life is characterized by their own sinful nature—he describes them in very strong ways, doesn't he?
The mind that is set on the flesh (Rom. 8:7), the person whose life is animated by thinking of, desiring, wanting, and trying to figure ways out to serve themselves and satisfy themselves—that person is “hostile to God.” Hostile means fighting against God.
Why? He says the fleshly, sinful mind doesn’t submit to God’s law—love God, love neighbor. The mind in the flesh is hostile to God because it doesn't submit to God. Instead it submits to its own law, itself.
But he says even more than that. Not just are we in this state of heinous deformation, hostile to God, unsubmissive to God and his law. The sinful fleshly mind cannot submit to God. “Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (Rom. 8:8).
That's pretty bad, isn't it? That’s as bad as it possibly can be. It’s not just that people don’t submit to God—they can’t.
Our Absolute Need for Regeneration
And that's why in those Canons of Dort there's this wonderful line that encapsulates several Bible passages and it says,
without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit, sinners neither are willing nor able to return to God, nor reform themselves (3/4.3)
Without the power of the Holy Spirit coming to a sinfully driven person, who’s hostile to God, who doesn’t and can’t submit to God or please God—unless God does something about it, you’re a dead man walking.
Thats why Paul says, “for God has done what the law weakened by the flesh could not do” (Rom. 8:3). God has done for us as a heinously deformed race what we can’t do for ourselves, what we wouldn’t do for ourselves in a million years, if left to ourselves.
We must be miraculously regenerated. Without the grace of the Holy Spirit we can’t reform ourselves, change ourselves, return back to the God who’s made us.
As Jesus describes in John 3: “unless you are born again—from above—you cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Have you been miraculously regenerated? Has God breathed into you the Holy Spirit to give you this new life of being a Christian so that you are able to come to him, submit to him, and please him? Are you no longer hostile to him, but on friendly terms with him?
If you hear what these very harsh words say tonight and they strike you, cry out to God for mercy. Ask him, “Lord give me new life. Amen.”
And the wonder of it is, when you cry out, “Lord give me new life, breathe into me your Holy Spirit, enable me to please you, enable me to submit to you, enable me to want to submit to you”—the amazing truth is that God’s already been at work in your heart. That’s just a recognition of what God has already done; but cry out for mercy! Come to him tonight for his grace.
Conclusion
We can’t talk about the doctrines of grace unless we know what God’s grace does to change us. We can’t know what God’s grace is unless we know what our own guilt is. We can’t know these things and God rightly unless we know ourselves.
Let’s ask God to teach us to know our sins constantly, to know the weakness of our nature, to know our constant dependency upon him, to ask him for the power of the Holy Spirit to renew us daily, so that we might then be agents to bring that good news of God's saving, regenerating grace to other sinners as well.