What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all. We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin, as it is written. There is no one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away. They have together become worthless. There is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves. Their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. 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 so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore, no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law. Rather, through the law, we become conscious of sin. And then, of course, there comes that marvelous text, but now where righteousness from God, apart from the law, has been made known, to which the law and prophets testified, is righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. May God bless to us the reading of his holy word. Dear people of God, called to be saints, I have never spoken to someone who ever considered himself perfect. Everyone knows we are not what we should be. But we disagree on what is wrong. And therefore, we also disagree on what steps we should take to fix ourselves. How we solve a problem is directly related, of course, to what the problem is. And if the problem is the lack of knowledge, then a better education should solve our problem. If the problem is something in our genes, we better get to work on science. If the problem is in the environment, our surroundings, our social context, then we have to work on changing that. Well, the Bible is very direct in saying that our problem is sin. And the word sin means miss the mark. Maybe what we have to do is just teach people to be better shooters. And that should solve our problem. But the problem with missing the mark, missing the standard of God's perfection, is that our missing the mark is contrary to the way we've been created. We are missing the mark because of rebellion. We are missing the mark because of disobedience and alienation from God. And so the solution is to get rid of sin. We have to take it out of our lives. We have to become right with God. And theologians disagree on that. We have discovered, and I'm sure you have through your own experiences, that we cannot just stop sinning one day when we decide we're going to stop sinning. We just find there's in us an inclination to do things that aren't right. It's in us. As we say in our confession, we are inclined by nature to hate God and our neighbor. And can we just change that? Can the Ethiopian change his skin? Can the leopard change its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil. Job 14.4 says, who can bring what is pure from the impure? The answer is no one. You see, the problem is that it's not just that we do bad things from time to time. The problem is that these bad things come from within. That our very nature yet struggles with the pollution of sin And we, in ourselves, do not have the power to correct ourselves. I know we are born as children, dead in sin and trespasses. To understand The need for redemption that is planned in eternity, carried out by the triune God in time, and will be completely fulfilled in eternity will only be understood by us and appreciated by us if we understand how the fall into sin has affected us and continues to affect us. That's why it's at this point in the Canons of Dort. This afternoon, we're going to look at how God created us, then the effect of the fall, and the effect of the fall very particularly on the heart, on the mind, first of all, and then the heart, the will, and then on our emotions, our holiness. And then the third part of the sermon will be on the only way of salvation is from above. It's in Jesus Christ. It is important, as we look at the effects of the fall on us, that we understand the way we are today is not the way we were created. We were created in the image of God. That's a statement over which also theologians disagree. But if you allow scripture to define the terms, to be created in the image of God, because God is spirit, then to be image bearers of him, that means to be spiritual. Ephesians 4.24 defines the image as being created in true righteousness and holiness. And Colossians 3.10 adds to this the idea of a true knowledge. True knowledge of God, righteousness, and holiness. We reflected that about God. And this means we had, in the beginning, an intimate fellowship with God. Our knowledge of God was not only true, not only intellectual, it was spiritual. It was a knowing him as he came to us in truth. It was living. It was, in that sense, experiential. It was personal. Adam and Eve walked and talked with God. We knew God in such a way that we could live in complete harmony with him, nothing hindering that fellowship. He was the object continually of our love, of our actions, of our thoughts. We thought like him. We were righteous like him. We were holy like him. The way we lived was patterned after the harmony in God himself between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our wills were totally wrapped up in his. Following this, the affections and the emotions of man and actions of man in response to God were characterized by this purity and this holiness. We loved God and we enjoyed that perfect fellowship with him. As God was righteous, so we were righteous, so we were holy. We were entirely, completely in tune with God. So we were created with far more than just sinlessness and harmlessness. Those are negative descriptions. Oh, no. Scripture says it was positive. We were created. Righteous. We were created holy. We were created living with a true knowledge of God. Ecclesiastes 7.29 says God made man upright. That's not speaking of posture. That's speaking of the condition of the entire nature. We were not at all neutral. We were totally oriented toward God. That was the whole direction of our heart, of our life. And we always hit the target at that point. There was no sin. It was always perfect. Our perfect fellowship with God, living in righteousness and holiness, is seen that God placed us, according to Genesis 2, in the Garden of Eden, in paradise. Eden stands as a symbol of the epitome of beauty, of perfection, of divine rest, divine fellowship. Ezekiel 36, in describing the spiritual blessings that would attend the gospel age in which we live, says, the land that was desolate has become like the Garden of Eden. Isaiah 51 says, for the Lord will comfort Zion. He will comfort all her waste places, and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord. Joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of rejoicing. In Eden, it was all harmonious and pure and beautiful. And there in Eden, man works for God as a sub-regent. He is to maintain, he is to develop the garden, the creation in righteousness and holiness and complete harmony with God. That is a brief description of the original condition of man. We are made good, we confess, righteous and holy, capable in all things to will agreeably to the will of God. In other words, that's when we had a free will to serve God. And yet we did not fully appreciate our situation. But listening to the voice of the devil, we willfully subjected ourselves to sin, and so to death and the curse. How could something so good become so sinful? And yet humanity has. Now you have to notice, we never, or we rarely speak of the fall. of Adam, or of Adam and Eve, but we usually will refer to it as the fall of man into sin. In Adam, we all sinned. Because we understand the nature of a covenantal relationship, and Adam was our covenant head. When Adam was created in the image of God, he was not created that way just as an individual, but as a representative of all those who would come forth from him. So we can say that we were created in the image of God. We were created with a true knowledge of God, righteousness, and holiness. That's our condition. It was in Adam. But when Adam fell, we all came crashing down with him. That's borne out in Romans 5, 12. Therefore, just as sin entered the world to one man and death through sin, And this way death came to all men because all sinned. And notice also that when the scripture speaks of the effects of our fall, they don't talk simply about the fact that we started making some really bad decisions or really had some bad actions like killing our brother. No, it really, you see, our actions are not really the problem. It's the very nature of man, the mind, the heart, and the emotions. They were corrupted. When we speak of the image of God, we speak of the very nature of man as he was created. So when we speak of the effects of the fall on human nature, we're not just dealing with the actions of man, but the very nature of man. Actions in themselves are simply an expression of what's in us. We're not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners. So we have to consider how have our natures been affected by the fall. In our rebellion against God by our own free will, we deprived ourselves of a mind with a true and most blessed knowledge of our creator and of things spiritual, of a heart and will for righteousness, and of emotions being pure and holy. That's what we confess. I wonder if we understand what we're saying. We deprived ourselves in the fall of the blessing of being an image-bearer. Remember, to be an image-bearer is spiritual. The true knowledge of God, truly righteous, truly holy. In the moment we fell into sin, Our knowledge of God was darkened. We were no longer righteous. We were no longer pure. We no longer were imaging God as we were created to do. Rather, we became imitators and reflectors of the one we followed, the devil. So in the place of knowledge, true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, we brought upon ourselves foolishness, darkness, blindness, futility, distortion of judgment in our minds, perversion, defiance, hardness in our hearts and will, and impurity in all of our emotions. We who had been created in the marvelous beauty of reflecting God now reflected the nature of the evil one. That's a tragedy. Instead of remaining covenant with God, we covenanted, as it were, with the devil. And we became like our father. Now we serve the evil one, our nature reflected him. We believe the lie rather than live in the truth. And that's not putting it too strongly. Is our sinful nature enslaved to sin? the mind of man opposed to the things of God. Do we always will the will of God? Do we always desire precisely what God desires? We can go by experience in this, but we have to consider what the word says as a guide. So those are the three parts we're going to deal with. The mind, the heart, the will, and then the emotions. The mind of man, the capacity to think, to reason, to examine, and to learn, can now be described because of sin as being enveloped in blindness. Terrible darkness, futility, and distortion of judgment. No longer truth and knowledge and wisdom, but the lie, ignorance, and foolishness. In Romans 8, 5 through 8, we read, those who live according to the sinful nature have their minds set on what that nature desires. The mind of sinful man is death. The sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. That's a depressing picture of the condition of humanity. A human nature, which once was free to please God in submission to his will in true knowledge of God, is now enslaved It's what Martin Luther talked about when he talked about the bondage of the will. The will became enslaved to our own passions. On things hostile to God. 1 Corinthians 2.14 says, the man without the spirit does not accept the things that come from the spirit of God for they are foolishness to him and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned." Terrible blindness, isn't it? You look at humanity. They cannot understand, apart from the spirit, the truth. Ephesians 4, 17-19 says, I tell you this and insist on it in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do in the futility of their thinking. The idea is that we still can't do it, you know. That's why he's insisting on it, they don't. Then he says, they are darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity with a continual lust for more. Titus, Paul says, 115, that the sinful mind has been corrupted. The biblical description of the effects of the fall is that we are plunged into darkness of thought to blindness, so much that wisdom is regarded by many as foolishness, and the lie is perceived to be truth. Where we once lived knowing God, We now can barely grasp onto a single aspect of God. And we even suppress what is in the creation. This is by nature. Spiritual things we have difficulty comprehending. When we begin sometimes to see things about God, then by nature we want to suppress these things. That's what Paul is talking about in Romans. We suppress the truth about God. You see, we cannot know God by applying our darkened mind as if by some kind of scientific process. So the spirit of God must illumine our minds and sometimes we resist the light because light can make us very uncomfortable sometimes. It exposes what we don't necessarily want to have exposed. Even Christians, regenerated by the spirit of God, are not suddenly unaffected. as if now all of a sudden their mind was pure light. They still struggle with confusion in thought. Our vision still blurred by sin. We see as through a glass, darkly. Our position with God has changed as believers. And he gives us a new mind by the spirit he sheds light into our hearts, to our minds. And yet, we still struggle, don't we? With thinking the thoughts of God. See, it's affected us extensively. And God is at work in us by his spirit. has also affected our will. We brought upon ourselves perversity, defiance, and hardness in heart and will. In scripture, the heart is the very core of man's existence. It's out of the heart, as the psalmist would say, that are the issues of life. It's the heart that sets the direction in life. The heart that used to be motivated, used to be in the direction of knowing God, of fellowship with God, of being righteous like God, being holy like God, is now inclined in the opposite direction by nature. That's why you can read already in Genesis 6, after you've talked about murder and so on, every inclination of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil all the time. Genesis 8, that the inclination of man's heart is evil from childhood. The psalmist says we are born, or we are conceived and born in sin. Ecclesiastes 9 says the hearts of men are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live. Jeremiah 17, 9. The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. And in Mark 7, Jesus says, from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. Clearly, scripture's description of the heart of man, the whole direction of his life, is that it runs now away from righteousness into simply pleasing itself. The direction of man is hell-bent. Many today I still like to claim that man, if he only wills to change, that if he only sets his mind to it, he can do it. The Bible says otherwise. But this idea of free will, of free choice, is amazingly prevalent yet. So that today there are many people in bondage, to sins and they say, well, they can't help that they were born that way. It's just the way it is. They want to deny at some point that they have given in to that which is evil in the sight of the Lord. All of us were born in sin. That's no excuse for willful indulgence in that which is contrary to God's will. In fact, these people who are in bondage to sin cannot get out of it simply by an exercise of their will. Whereas before we had the free will to do the will of God, we have become enslaved In our human nature, we no longer have a free will to do anything that is righteous and holy and pure. We only have, if you want to call it that, a free will to do that which is not pleasing in the sight of the Lord. That's the whole direction of man. The Bible bears that out. John 8, Jesus says to the Pharisees, you belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desires. Earlier, Jesus said to them, I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. That's the condition of the will after mankind went into covenant with the evil one. 2 Timothy 2 says that the sinful nature has been taken captive by the devil to do his will. So thoroughly has sin permeated our condition that apart from a total reboost, regeneration by the spirit, our wills are enslaved to that direction. which is why people will say, well, that's the way we're born. We're born in this whole direction. We're enslaved and we can't help that. That's the way it goes. And to that part, they're correct. They can't will themselves out of that apart from the spirit. Apart from the spirit, we will continue to find sin attractive. In fact, apart from the Spirit and simply indulging ourselves, we will find that that which used to repulse us can actually become attractive to us. And then, ironically, we use that expression, well, where there's a will, there's a way. If we really want it. What we decide to do, we will do. This is the case when it comes to sin. Because that's the whole bent. of mankind. If we want it, we can do it. That's not the case when it comes to righteousness, to holiness, and to knowing God. Thirdly, sin has affected even man's desires and emotions so that they have become impure. We have learned to love the unholy In fact, many people have an aversion to what is holy. John 3 tells us that by nature, men flee from the light because it exposes their ungodliness. You see, when we grow up, we have this sinful condition, and as kids, we have to be trained in the scriptures. You can't just discipline this out of a child, but we have to train our children not to love their sinful condition. But we often, as children, we love sometimes our fights, our bickering. Not always the results, but sometimes we enjoy indulging ourselves. In fact, sometimes that goes through with us into much later life. We spend much time trying to get rid of the effects of sin without really dealing with the root of the problem. All of us have a sinful nature. And we will struggle with it. as long as we are in this life. We know that. As a leopard cannot change its spots, none of us are able to rid ourselves of the pollution of sin. We who believe in Jesus Christ understand this, that what he did on the cross has removed the guilt of our sin and brought us into a right and everlasting standing with God as if we had never sinned nor been a sinner. We stand before God as true image bearers. But on this life, he has poured out his spirit, and the spirit begins to work in us to sanctify us. But that's a process. I wish it was over today, but it's not. It's a process. The pollution of sin affects everyone. Because in Christ we are granted rebirth by the Spirit through the Word, we are able, as we confess in the Spirit, to make a small beginning in the direction of a true knowledge of God of righteousness and holiness. We are able to, in the spirit, make toddling steps toward sanctification. And when we do, we discover that's not because we had any strength in ourselves, because we had any will in ourselves, that is totally given by the sovereign God. It's he that works in us, both the willing and the doing. We are unable to come to the Father unless it is given from above. We are unable to do any good, but we would continue to indulge the sinful nature and rationalize our sin apart from the Holy Spirit work in our lives. And we've discovered that we who grew up accustomed to evil cannot instantaneously shut that off and simply hit the bullseye. We continue to miss the mark. Only in Jesus Christ, again, are we restored to the image of God. It's His righteousness, His holiness, and His perfect knowledge that is imputed to us so that we can stand before a holy God. It's only in Jesus Christ that we come to know the Father. It's only in Jesus that we are made righteous. It's only in Jesus that we are becoming holy. And it's only in him through the power of the word and spirit that we can even begin to make any pure moves in our lives. It's something we have to confess about ourselves. We confess our inability. We confess we are totally and utterly dependent upon our triune God from beginning to end. Only in submission can we be transformed by the renewing of our minds in Christ. That's why we have to daily begin in prayer, in submission to the word of God, learning to think his thoughts after him. This daily sitting under the teaching of Christ is crucial to our fight against sin. Every day again it has to be creating me a new heart, O God, a new and a clean heart. Bend our wills, O God, to your will. Lord, help me to love what you love because in ourselves we still have this agonizing pull. to go our own way, to speak as we want, to give vent to some of the thoughts that we have inside. You have to understand it will. As an Ethiopian cannot change his skin and as a leopard cannot change his spots because they are part and parcel of their nature, so we cannot change ourselves because sin has become part and parcel of our nature. It is only God who can restore us, make us new, and transform us according to His image. And we must flee to Him for mercy. Every day we must. And He gives us the strength to resist our deceitful hearts. Daily we must be careful that we do not rationalize our sin Daily we must learn to hate our sin and to love holiness. Daily we must learn to flee to Christ because we can only make progress in him. Daily we must pray, thy will be done. Daily we must feed ourselves on God's word so that we are by the spirit transformed and we can take these toddling steps in the way of holiness. It is tough to acknowledge it about ourselves, but we must. There is no reason for boasting in ourselves. Rather, there is every reason to grieve and to continue to grieve at how far we fall short of His glory. And in the gospel, that is present tense. It's not past. You can't change that. We still fall far short. It's a wretched thing to find ourselves at the end of the day sometimes when we've discovered we enjoyed that little bit of gossip. We didn't mind a little bit of slander, a little bit of coveting, a little bit of lusting. A little bit of greed. Sometimes we can even wallow in these things like a pig in the mud. Think of what's ours in Jesus Christ. It's only in him. and as we dwell on him, and as we follow him, that our thinking is changed. It's only in him that the whole direction of our life goes in a new direction. It's only in him when our loves, our desires, are sanctified. And this is why the scripture over and over and over again sets us before as a way of living and calls us to set our minds on the things of Christ, to keep in step with the Holy Spirit. If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is alive in you, he who raised Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who lives in you. And this is why, brothers and sisters, We have an obligation. And this is, in Christ, not an obligation to follow the sinful nature. To live according to it. Because if you live according to the sinful nature, you will die. If you live according to the sinful nature, you'll continue to rationalize your sin, you'll continue to set your directions in line with the sinful nature, you'll continue to live and to love what that nature desires. And that's the way to death. But if you live according to it, you will die. But if by the spirit, you put to death the misdeeds of the body, you will live. We are cold. and complete reliance on the Spirit to devote ourselves to the destruction of the sinful nature within us. We can't do it on our own strength. We cannot do it on our own strength. We can only do that with the power of the Spirit through His Holy Word. The Apostle Paul says, you've died with Christ, now put it to death. God grants victory to those who call upon him. And only in Jesus Christ is there this freedom to begin to follow him as he desires. Amen.